Google Cloud’s problem is a complete lack of empathy for customers.
A few years back I did a shootout between a number of machine vision APIs, I got all the others running in 15 minutes. Google cloud took two hours and trashed my Python installation.
While there's a special hatred for modern Google in my heart and I think they're the least deserving to be pioneers for cloud gaming, I have to say I really just hate cloud gaming in general. It's truly the most offensive possible form of anti-consumer DRM imaginable.
I'm not even THAT big of a "gimme my DRM-free games" type guy. I buy most games on Steam, because at least if Steam disappears someday, I can find ways to pirate all those games I bought and continue to play them. Consoles are a bit trickier -- I personally buy physical copies if I can (although that increasingly means less and less, with all the patches and DLC that every game receives after launch, meaning you almost never actually own a physical copy of the complete game. And they even removed all the fun instruction manuals!) But at least every console gets hacked eventually and you'll probably have a way to potentially run pirated software on them in the future.
But with cloud gaming, good bloody luck trying to play the games you shelled out $100 for (modern Canadian pricing) in the future. Not to mention I'm sure we'll find situations in the future where games are patched to remove something that became offensive in the past month, like the big exodus of episodes from streaming services during the BLM protests in 2020.
At least the services where you're just streaming from a generic gaming PC to run your Steam games on can make a bit of an argument for itself that you can download the games to your own computer if you want, and that's just another option for playing them. But who knows how long that'll stay that way. It's quite obviously in the corporate interest to make sure no one ever has access to the game's code on their local machine, and they only ever beam frames to your screen, since that would well and truly stop piracy for good.
I actually don't think steaming games are that offensive because it at least matches the ownership model. You have huge binary blobs that you're actively prevented from modifying and dependent on cloud services that will be shut down eventually, specific locked-down consoles that will be discontinued, proprietary GPUs and drivers, and specific platforms that will be obsolete.
You can frame it the opposite way too: "Bro, some billion dollar corporation actually convinced you that it was cool to pay thousands of dollars and spend your own time 'building' a PC and make it part of your identity just to give them free computing and play games you don't even own?"
I don't think "cloud gaming is bad because piracy is good" is really a sustainable model. Without an "above board" push that requires that game licenses come with source and permission to modify so that players can actually maintain them after the original company abandons them they're always going to have a finite lifetime.
Thanks to copyright "ownership" of games has always been a implementation detail defined more by limitations of technology at the time to enforce the copyright than something fundamental. So I get the frustration that game streaming is "making things worse" but it's always been this bad for 99% of people, you're just finally getting hit with something you don't have a workaround for.
Yeah: it also seems to solve the issue of "people insist on the company stopping people from cheating by using modified clients with extra functionality" without turning the world into a DRM-ridden mess, with everyone's computers running random "anti-cheat" agents or slowly moving software into containers. The reality is that a lot of these games are designed more like shared arenas--such as a bowling alley or a skating rink--that you rent to play your game but explicitly don't own or even "tournaments" run by people who (in turn) rented the arena and have hired referees to police the game and make everything "fair", as you are on someone else's property or at someone else's event and so obviously wouldn't have carte blanche rights to modify the arena or control the rules... and so, as you say, game streaming is in some sense more intuitive / correct as it forms a consistent mental model of what is going on with ownership. As much as I would generally prefer to model many of these games like buying a board game--which you then own and can then play as you like with your friends, even if you disagree with the rules as described in the manual or even add/remove/change pieces--that just isn't the experience that these game companies are trying to build with their online matchmaking and the such.
I'm not sure I follow the distinction between Steam going away (and having to pirate your games) and Stadia going away (and having to pirate your games).
Stadia has been a godsend for me, my family and friends. One of the lesser known features of Stadia is that it is similar to Netflix in its account management.
You can have 4 family members and your games will be available to all.
This allows me to share my library with my siblings and close friends. They can play all my games and I can play all their games. This pushed me to play games I would never have explored otherwise. I am lucky to have a high income and guilty of purchasing games on impulse (as my Steam library can attest). For the first time, my "sleeping" games are useful to the people I love.
It also makes "lan" nights very easy. In fact, with Stadia, I had my first such experience in decades. I can play on my phone with a controller, someone else on the living room TV and someone else on a MacBook Air (which is huge as gaming on that platform is simply not a thing without streaming).
Just about anywhere and at anytime without the need to plan anything.
My partner's GPU also died recently and with the current market prices, they had been playing console exclusively. I gave them access to Stadia and they have switched to playing Stadia exclusively.
Even on wi-fi with a group of 4, we are still competitive in shooters and racing games. In fact, other than issues regarding my own network, I have not experienced lag or glitches from Stadia's side of things.
Stadia dying would be a very sad day for my circle of friend and judging by all the 2-4 members groups I see in games, we would not be alone in that.
The side features (outside the core "renting a remote machine to play the game on") related to account management sound like Steam's "family share" and "remote play" respectively.
The problem with Steam family share is that it's so limited. You can't have two users playing different games from the same library online at the same time which is ridiculous. So there's no way for your brother to play your Call of Duty while you play CS:GO. Even if you're playing an offline game you have to explictly switch to offline mode or else the person sharing gets kicked. Even consoles handle it better with 2 users being allowed to at the very least 2 different games working if not the same game. Granted, Steam family library allows more account links but it's way more limited.
I'm not sure what Stadia's limits are but I can imagine that being a pro if more than one user can use the library at the same time.
> I'm not sure what Stadia's limits are but I can imagine that being a pro if more than one user can use the library at the same time.
I wrote 4 in my previous comment but it turns out that the limit it actually 6 (4 was the limit for the number of controllers on the same device, so split screen in other words).
You can play all their games and they can play all of yours. At the same time. (Edit: there is also something called "Ubisoft+ on Stadia" which gives you the entire Ubisoft catalog for rent for a monthly fee. I am not sure how this interact with the family sharing.)
The limit is that if you are playing "Game A", your family member cannot unless another family member has also purchased it. So you could say it counts the number of licenses purchased and makes them all available to everyone.
If the limit for "Game A" is reached, clicking on it will propose you to buy the game for yourself or kick one of the players (I have not tried it, I hope it asks for the consent of the person playing).
The exception being what they call Stadia Pro games, which are free games offered to people who are on the paid membership. Those there's no limit as long as everyone has claimed them with their pro accounts. However I think it's important to say that the Stadia Pro games are available to the entire family even if the individuals are not on the pro membership, in which case it also counts the free licenses claimed.
It's also important to say that every player gets their own instance of the game. So if I buy "ExampleMMORPG" and my sibling starts the game, they don't see my characters. They get to create their own and have their own character limit.
You can also turn off sharing for certain games. So if you are binging "ExampleMMORPG" and you don't want anyone else to keep you from playing, you can make sure your spot is reserved. Or if you play a violent game and don't want you kids from playing, you can. Which reminds me that this is all connected to Google Family's child account features. So you can limit the amount of time played per day, the age rating of games, etc. You can also set privacy settings for child account, stopping them from being able to join or create groups, enter voice chat, etc.
They will and I can only see it going to being shutdown. With the many PC gamers, Xbox and PlayStation gamers not even realising it existed in the first place.
The problem is the pricing model. All of their competitors work on a subscription model that comes with a pre-existing library of games, while stadia requires you to pay full box-price for all the games you play. If it weren't such a rip-off it'd be more popular, it performs very well at this point.
The difference is Geforce Now works with your existing Steam library. You don't need to re-buy games you already known, and if the service shuts down the games are still yours to keep and play on your own hardware. If I spend hundreds on dollars on Stadia games today, is there any guarantee that I'll still be able to play them a month from now?
On top of that, it is clear from Google talks at game developer related conferences that they really don't have any idea how to talk to game developers.
Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft talk about how their technologies empower game developers to make and ship games.
Google talks mostly about Play Store KPIs, they just don't get it.
Anyone who does any gaming at all will know that for regular non-mobile gaming it's all Playstation, Xbox and Steam (PC). Few platforms will ever beat these three. Microsoft has their own cloud gaming service which is already available on Xbox and I doubt anyone else can compete against Microsoft in this space given their experience and platform advantage. Publishers are already signing deals with Microsoft to host their own cloud gaming experiences. But GeForce Now is never going to take off, gamers don't care and most don't even know it exists. Sony can't even compete against Microsoft at this point as they're too far behind and they're arguably the top console platform right now so the barrier of entry is amazingly high.
Stadia succeeding on it's own is just a bonus and I'm sure Google would like it to. But the real purpose for Stadia long-term is for Google to build out a cloud gaming capability on Google Cloud and sign major publishers to compete against Microsoft. Then when they have enough cloud gaming revenues coming in they can quietly sunset Stadia. This is all about keeping parity with Microsoft's cloud Azure the second the leading platform after Amazon Web Services. Amazon also has a games division with a similar purpose to lose money for a long time on cloud games from it's own studios as a way to build capability.
This is a very nuanced take, which is rare for Stadia threads which are just about Google bashing. I completely agree with your view on how this is meant to play out.
22 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] threadA few years back I did a shootout between a number of machine vision APIs, I got all the others running in 15 minutes. Google cloud took two hours and trashed my Python installation.
I don't see how this is possible. What happened?
I'm not even THAT big of a "gimme my DRM-free games" type guy. I buy most games on Steam, because at least if Steam disappears someday, I can find ways to pirate all those games I bought and continue to play them. Consoles are a bit trickier -- I personally buy physical copies if I can (although that increasingly means less and less, with all the patches and DLC that every game receives after launch, meaning you almost never actually own a physical copy of the complete game. And they even removed all the fun instruction manuals!) But at least every console gets hacked eventually and you'll probably have a way to potentially run pirated software on them in the future.
But with cloud gaming, good bloody luck trying to play the games you shelled out $100 for (modern Canadian pricing) in the future. Not to mention I'm sure we'll find situations in the future where games are patched to remove something that became offensive in the past month, like the big exodus of episodes from streaming services during the BLM protests in 2020.
At least the services where you're just streaming from a generic gaming PC to run your Steam games on can make a bit of an argument for itself that you can download the games to your own computer if you want, and that's just another option for playing them. But who knows how long that'll stay that way. It's quite obviously in the corporate interest to make sure no one ever has access to the game's code on their local machine, and they only ever beam frames to your screen, since that would well and truly stop piracy for good.
You can frame it the opposite way too: "Bro, some billion dollar corporation actually convinced you that it was cool to pay thousands of dollars and spend your own time 'building' a PC and make it part of your identity just to give them free computing and play games you don't even own?"
I don't think "cloud gaming is bad because piracy is good" is really a sustainable model. Without an "above board" push that requires that game licenses come with source and permission to modify so that players can actually maintain them after the original company abandons them they're always going to have a finite lifetime.
Thanks to copyright "ownership" of games has always been a implementation detail defined more by limitations of technology at the time to enforce the copyright than something fundamental. So I get the frustration that game streaming is "making things worse" but it's always been this bad for 99% of people, you're just finally getting hit with something you don't have a workaround for.
So you wind up paying for some of the most expensive internet in the world, plus full price games.
No thanks. I'll buy a cheaper internet package and use the savings to buy my own hardware
Stadia has been a godsend for me, my family and friends. One of the lesser known features of Stadia is that it is similar to Netflix in its account management.
You can have 4 family members and your games will be available to all.
This allows me to share my library with my siblings and close friends. They can play all my games and I can play all their games. This pushed me to play games I would never have explored otherwise. I am lucky to have a high income and guilty of purchasing games on impulse (as my Steam library can attest). For the first time, my "sleeping" games are useful to the people I love.
It also makes "lan" nights very easy. In fact, with Stadia, I had my first such experience in decades. I can play on my phone with a controller, someone else on the living room TV and someone else on a MacBook Air (which is huge as gaming on that platform is simply not a thing without streaming).
Just about anywhere and at anytime without the need to plan anything.
My partner's GPU also died recently and with the current market prices, they had been playing console exclusively. I gave them access to Stadia and they have switched to playing Stadia exclusively.
Even on wi-fi with a group of 4, we are still competitive in shooters and racing games. In fact, other than issues regarding my own network, I have not experienced lag or glitches from Stadia's side of things.
Stadia dying would be a very sad day for my circle of friend and judging by all the 2-4 members groups I see in games, we would not be alone in that.
I'm not sure what Stadia's limits are but I can imagine that being a pro if more than one user can use the library at the same time.
I wrote 4 in my previous comment but it turns out that the limit it actually 6 (4 was the limit for the number of controllers on the same device, so split screen in other words).
You can play all their games and they can play all of yours. At the same time. (Edit: there is also something called "Ubisoft+ on Stadia" which gives you the entire Ubisoft catalog for rent for a monthly fee. I am not sure how this interact with the family sharing.)
The limit is that if you are playing "Game A", your family member cannot unless another family member has also purchased it. So you could say it counts the number of licenses purchased and makes them all available to everyone.
If the limit for "Game A" is reached, clicking on it will propose you to buy the game for yourself or kick one of the players (I have not tried it, I hope it asks for the consent of the person playing).
The exception being what they call Stadia Pro games, which are free games offered to people who are on the paid membership. Those there's no limit as long as everyone has claimed them with their pro accounts. However I think it's important to say that the Stadia Pro games are available to the entire family even if the individuals are not on the pro membership, in which case it also counts the free licenses claimed.
It's also important to say that every player gets their own instance of the game. So if I buy "ExampleMMORPG" and my sibling starts the game, they don't see my characters. They get to create their own and have their own character limit.
You can also turn off sharing for certain games. So if you are binging "ExampleMMORPG" and you don't want anyone else to keep you from playing, you can make sure your spot is reserved. Or if you play a violent game and don't want you kids from playing, you can. Which reminds me that this is all connected to Google Family's child account features. So you can limit the amount of time played per day, the age rating of games, etc. You can also set privacy settings for child account, stopping them from being able to join or create groups, enter voice chat, etc.
About stadia, the uncertain future (it's a Google product) and the fact your games can't be played outside stadia make it look like a risky bet.
That being said, you're right, the stadia pricing model is quite unappealing.
Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft talk about how their technologies empower game developers to make and ship games.
Google talks mostly about Play Store KPIs, they just don't get it.
Stadia succeeding on it's own is just a bonus and I'm sure Google would like it to. But the real purpose for Stadia long-term is for Google to build out a cloud gaming capability on Google Cloud and sign major publishers to compete against Microsoft. Then when they have enough cloud gaming revenues coming in they can quietly sunset Stadia. This is all about keeping parity with Microsoft's cloud Azure the second the leading platform after Amazon Web Services. Amazon also has a games division with a similar purpose to lose money for a long time on cloud games from it's own studios as a way to build capability.