Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for consumers who buy into googles promises and even a bit for the google engineers who may be out of work soon.
The failure was around tech. We are not there yet. Speed of light is what needs to be overcome in order for this kind of service to be viable. Until then no amount of money, business development, marketing, brand reputation will ever make this viable.
Using the (discontinued) Steam remote dongle over wireless device to put a game from my computer in one room to a TV in the living room about 5-10 yards away introduced noticeable latency to a game. Obviously things like Stadia are a lot worse. There is only so much that can be done with this kind of technology. I think people are more tolerant of it for specific use cases like being able to play any game you want on a hotel internet connection while you're traveling for work, but given how affordable hardware is it doesn't really make sense as a home entertainment service except for the third world, which was not their target market anyway.
The speed of light delay actually wasn't the main issue. It was only a small part of the total latency.
Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue.
Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds.
They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.
I've played like 400 hours of endgame destiny on it during the pandemic, it's fine. The criticism that you need to be near a major city may be valid, I don't know because I'm near a major city. The wifi latency is a bigger factor than the rest.
The technical side was initially plagued by lag in games that were ill suited for it but this has consistently approved.
I think the real failing is what you stated - biz dev and brand reputation.
Read the other replies and you will see folks say "There were no games" or "The selection was limited." Why in the world would a major game company hesitate to invest in google and google services? Well, if you have a reputation of killing off your services like the grim reaper, I imagine that would come up in an executive risk assessment.
Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Consider Microsoft's reputation in the late mid to late 90's on slashdot and other forums compared to their reputation today. It took a lot of work but possible.
Googles going to have to put down the scythe though.
> Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work.
To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly.
I remember a poster proudly announcing that they will announce one year in advance when they plan to shut down a service on GCS.
Maybe they should look what happens when a company like HP announces end of support for OpenVMS 5 - 10 years in advance (as just an example pulled out of my ass with some Wikipedia backing the statement up) there's a lot of wailing and howling amongst their enterprise customers.
Those are the timescales big shops think in when it comes to their strategic IT decisions.
Frankly, I don't see Google ever satisfying such requirements backed by iron clad guarantees.
> To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly.
I disagree. It is much easier to regain trust with enterprise customers than with end users.
Enterprise costumers have contracts and lawyers on retainer. Google can draft a contract which binds them to performing a service. They can write in penalties with bite which shows to their enterprise customers that they mean it.
That is assuming that they really want to.
On the other hand this trick doesn't work with end users. They don't have lawyers to evaluate such an offer, and they have lot less of a chance of successfully suing google even if they would have favourable contracts.
Or transferred to the strategy department to decide what the next in thing is so they can build multiple versions of it, seeing as they are now bored of messaging.
It's less of a migration and more of a rebranding. The same service has gone by the name Chat > Hangouts > Chat but has been pretty consistent through each step.
Depends on the people. In the Stadia case there were people hired to build first party games in Montreal and some of the skills needed for that don’t have a natural place to go elsewhere inside of Google. I don’t know this for sure, but I expect many of those people were given a package and had to find new employers. People with transferable skills were moved onto other teams at Google depending on who needed those skills - effectively they were broken up for parts. And of course the enterprise service is still there and some of the people are still needed to keep it going.
My impression is that Google has actually changed how new initiatives are funded from the exec layer, such that there’s less likelihood of completely overlapping products being created, such as a new messaging service. I could be wrong about that, and even if I’m right it might change again in the future, but at least for now I’d be surprised to see a new messaging service get launched.
I do feel bad for people who bought into it too. On the other hand they did not care about further normalizing not owning and running software themselves despite the negative influences streaming would have. Like excluding or monetizing and profiting from user content etc.
Perhaps it is not their responsibility but I guess they accepted the risk in the first place. I don't think Google will kill the service anytime soon though and this rumor is probably wrong. Won't get too many new users with them around either.
If the rumor is false, well it sounds like something google would do, and consumers will hesitate to buy into it and businesses definitely won't. I've read and written my fair share of executive summaries before - I imagine this would make its way into it.
I wouldn't call Stadia a joke. It does in fact work quite well. But it's not really positioned to compete with the other first-party console alternatives, nor does it have compelling features that make it a better choice than products let you DIY an experience (e.g. Parsec + self-hosted gaming rig, Steam Remote Play, GeForce Now, GPU-accelerated VDI as a service like Shadow...).
For a while Google was literally giving away Stadia controllers, a Chromecast device to support using it with a TV, and games for free. Every power user/gamer type person I know that took them up on it fooled around with it, agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
People like myself have been pointing out that they had no legitimate audience for years and no one listened. Zombie organization made a decision years ago and was the walking dead.
It is a joke regardless of "technical" quality because it has been completely obvious from the first announcement that the only problem Stadia tackles is making your game depend on Google, relying on their traditional long-term loyalty to their own services and products.
Did you try Xbox Cloud gaming? Cause I live in a pretty small town in Eastern Europe and it works flawlessly. Does Microsoft doing something better or Stadia was just that bad?
I've used xbox cloud gaming before. The lag made it hard to use, but I appreciate having a way to 'test out a game' before downloading 50-70 gb of install media. For that purpose, if nothing else, its a win.
The big difference, I think, for why google is made fun of for stadia but few people throw rocks at Microsoft is the game selection. Microsoft does not kill off their projects willy-nilly so game manufacturers, I assume, feel better about crawling into their bed than googles.
Yeah I gave it an honest shot when they sent out free Stadia Premiere Editions (controller + Chromecast Ultra) and committed myself to playing through Superhot: Mind Control Delete.
And let me tell you, the only reason I was able to finish it is because the entire gimmick of that game is that when you're not moving, time doesn't move forward. So I could just wait out the regular lag spikes that happened every single play session. I would never choose to play a game like that.
I live in a moderately-sized city in Canada (~250,000 people?)
That's the difference, there simply wasn't any point investing in Stadia, because, well, this. There was no value to achivements, generated media, friend circles or god-forbid buying games because we knew it was going to be cancelled.
What kind of gaming platform randomly bans high profile game devs. because an automated Youtube bot told them to? A bad joke of one.
> It does in fact work quite well.
Didn't they fake high res video streams by up scaling bad renders? Haven't used it but as far as I understand there was quite a bit of overpromising and underdelivering going on.
> other first-party console alternatives,
Their competition would be GeForce Now from NVIDIA. Which not only is still a thing but also predates Stadia by several years.
> agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
So did the free trial run out? Where the games crap? Have you ever asked them why they decided that it wasn't worth using?
Google's auto-ban/content moderation issues are a separate issue from the tech, which is fine. I never noticed issues with resolution or rendering, and haven't heard complaints about it from friends who tried it. We all ended up abandoning Stadia due to there being better options elsewhere, not because Stadia itself (aside from game selection perhaps) was bad.
> and haven't heard complaints about it from friends who tried it.
You mean the same friends that "just stopped using it"? There is something weird about the combination of purely positive feedback and everyone you know dropping it.
There's nothing weird about it all, and I'm confused as to why you chose to nitpick at that statement in particular.
That particular statement was with regard to suggested technical issues surrounding graphics. My friends and I generally found the play experience to be unobjectionable. My very statement explains that we all abandoned the product in favor of alternatives that provided a superior experience in one way or the other, not necessarily related to play experience. I for one prefer the versatility that a general low-latency desktop session via Parsec provides. Another friend that's deeply invested in the Xbox ecosystem preferred to use Microsoft's competing game streaming offering.
Customers are paying for a service not just tech. Google makes some great tech demos, but seemingly has no idea what to do after that. They are really bad at providing services for money and auto-ban, game selection etc are all symptoms of the same issue.
You know, in this case I don’t think Stadia was a joke. I think it was a completely sincere effort to compete with a new kind of “console” in the game industry. They had hired a gaming industry executive to lead the effort, started several in-house game dev projects, and starting negotiating streaming exclusives with many studios (much to the annoyance of people who owned games on GeForce Now who had them removed). I even encountered paid social media marketer trying to generate hype for the service.
But like everything Google these days, they made some poor initial choices, didn’t take in any customer feedback, dug in instead of pivoting, then slashed and burned when it failed to become a billion dollar business overnight.
Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.
> Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.
No need. Sony and Microsoft have their own (quite good) tech for this.
Sony's actually been in the game streaming game for nearly a decade. PS Now launched in 2014. I haven't used it personally, but I hear it's great.
Microsoft xCloud has been available for almost two years, in preview for a year before that. I got home once and found my wife playing Dragon Age II. I sat and watched for a little, then she quit the game, and only then did I discover she had been streaming it. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea that it was being streamed. Truly impressive tech.
I have not used Sony’s game streaming. I have used Xcloud and it is technically the weakest compared to Stadia and Nvidia. I find there are a lot of compression artifacts and that the quality tends to degrade over an hour or 2. I have used it on several different gigabit connections and devices. Latency has always been good. I suspect issues with the data center Xbox hardware/software, not the connection to Azure.
> You know, in this case I don’t think Stadia was a joke. I think it was a completely sincere effort to compete with a new kind of “console” in the game industry.
I agree! They really gave Console as a Service a shot. But back in the day when it was launching, my take was that the "new console" part of it was secondary. The core goal would have been to get a foot in the game streaming market for their Android TV / Cast platform.
> dug in instead of pivoting
If this rumour is true, maybe that's exactly what's happening. They've proven that the experience is good enough for people to play games on it, and even pay for the privilege. So it's technically sound (depending on geography).
Gamers aren't going to play through the entire new Skyrim on Stadia, Google knows that. But what about Gamers (in the right geographical location) watching a Youtube video on their smart TV being served an ad? That ad for the new Skyrim has a "Play demo now" button, no download required, instant gameplay. Now that's an expensive ad if I've ever seen one.
Google is actually reviving a product they had left fallow for like 10 years. They acquired Feedburner like 15 years ago and stopped updating it almost immediately, but the other day it suddenly had Material UI applied.
I avoided checking Stadia out in the first place as I thought they'd end up shutting it down after prior experiences. This seems a difficult branding loop to break, but does them no favors.
It really doesn't! The common responses you hear in these types of threads include "I didn't even try it; because I knew it would get killed." And of course, this results in lower turnout, and eventual death of the offering. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.
So what's Google to even do?
* They could burn money and keep the offering afloat to "prove" they are serious (seems to be the case with Stadia).
* They can pivot/transition the offering (see Google Glass).
* Or they can use new offerings for R&D (and in some cases, like that of Stadia, be paid for that R&D), and then fold that technology/data somewhere else (see Wave) - this seems like the path most taken.
If we remember Google's core competencies, the revolving door of offerings as feeder into their larger services makes sense on paper, but I do agree that it's hurting consumer confidence and there is a hidden cost to that.
What should the consumer to do? Donate their money and time to the service in the hope that this time will be different? (not to mention that Stadias pricing was pretty bad)
So yes, it's Google's turn to show commitment and keep their services running. Plus, the possible loss with keeping Stadia up should also be weighted against this cementing their reputation.
> So yes, it's Google's turn to show commitment and keep their services running. Plus, the possible loss with keeping Stadia up should also be weighted against this cementing their reputation.
Agreed. The ball is in Google's court. Consumers should (and clearly do) cast a vote of "no confidence" with their wallet.
Google seems to shut down services mostly on the basis of adoption being too low. For its scale, tens of millions of users could mean a failure.
However, those services could be profitable, just at a smaller scale. They could keep them around and exploit them without too much investments. This is what other large companies do, they won't break the experience for their customers because they value them.
Maybe Google's problem is that as a company they are set up to run products of google-scale. They could start a subsidiary company that gets all of the "too small for google" products, keeping them alive build customer trust and maybe even turn a profit
They can’t! Their monorepo, build system and internal deployment infrastructure makes it technically and legally very expensive, thus politically impossible. It’s so much easier to just shut down anything not making enough insert metric instead of spinning it off.
Disclaimer: haven’t ever worked at Google, so just guessing
Selling games directly on Stadia might just be the wrong business model.
Selling access to a machine on demand seems much more appealing.
GeForce NOW, despite initial problems with publishers, will always leave you with the option of moving to a different service or building your own machine to run the games you own.
They could offer something you can't get anywhere else that would force consumers to come.
I mean game exclusives, not technology.
In the end it's all about games
The problem is that Stadia isn't a scrappy startup. Google has over a hundred billion in cash, so this really just seems like a fun side-project for them. Microsoft spent $2.5 billion just to purchase a single game. I'd be surprised if Google spent even 10% of that on Stadia. Very few people are going to be interested in gaming on the cloud just to play some lightweight indie games. If Google paid the big bucks to get AAA Stadia exclusives, then more people would be interested and everyone would know that it's something that they're actually committed to.
If they were serious about Stadia, Google should have worked to provide experiences only Stadia could allow. That was one tagline of SG&E before it was canned a mere 18 months in - clear failure on Google's part because you can't develop a game that fast.
As for what could have gone differently - cut deals with smart TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app on the TV, making it easy for millions to try it out.
Instead, the Stadia app wasn't even on the Chromecast initially. (OK, memory vague here but I remember having to fiddle around and after upgrading from the Chromecast that came with the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle to Google TV with Chromecast or whatever they were calling it, it was still a while before the Stadia app was there or left beta).
I also thought Google should have done a sports game tie-in, or perhaps F1 racing, to essentially let viewers replay something they just watched. Kind of a live replay, where YOU control the offense/defense/car. Say you're watching a soccer match and team X scores. During a break, advertise Stadia's version of FIFA, click a button and replay the scoring play where you control one of the teams. Can you also score, or can you defend??
Yes this would be complicated licensing and software between TV ads, game maker, license holders, etc. but it would have showcased an advantage Stadia had over traditional consoles/pc gamers - immediacy, play right on your TV in response to something you just watched. Brady just score a touchdown - can you do it to, or play defense and stop it (pick up Stadia controller, click some buttons or whatever and get dropped into that scenario, ready to play)??
I think this would have had insane appeal among sports fans, building excitement, etc. But no, Stadia just crapped itself and cancelled their in-house studio and basically tread water for the rest of the time.
They’re past the point of it being “hidden”. At this point Google cancel culture is a popular meme for consumers. That’s a major reason many people refuse to even try Stadia. Due to their history with consumer product cancellations, everyone just assumes a cancellation is around the corner.
Other companies like Amazon and Sony are also no stranger to product cancellations. The major difference is that when Amazon or Sony cancels a product, they will refund early adopters the cost of the product. Google isn’t willing to do that.
The fact that Google has shut down so many services I used in the past, combined with the concept of game ownership being tied to the service is what kept me from ever even exploring it.
Yeah, I hear ya, better read the agreements you sign.
But I just can’t convince myself to pay full price for a game when it’s restricted to a platform like stadia.
I guess I’m a hypocrite because I own steam games and plenty of movies on my Apple TV. I feel like steam is a little different because I’m installing them on my own machine? (I know they can take the games away) I know I can’t trust Apple to not take my movies away but I think the likelihood that my Apple TV library won’t be accessible for the next 20 years is pretty low.
Google in particular disappoints me often. They haven’t created a great money generating product since search/ads which is the evergreen money tree which funds all other experiments.
Google gives up on new products far too often and far too easily. They seem to forget, or never learned, that unwavering persistence is a powerful foundation for building a product line. Apple didn’t give up on iCloud after the disaster that was MobileMe, they rebuilt it and kept on going.
I suspect they'll just refund all users that complain.
Adoption of stadia was sufficiently small that Google will pay the full refund cost just to prevent PR damage or lawsuit losses (and take the loss themselves, because the game developer isn't going to want to give a refund).
> I suspect they'll just refund all users that complain.
Problem is, it's Google. Who are you going to complain to, and where? You'll be lucky if there's even a way to submit a complaint, much less one that gets read by a human. I suppose you could use the good old Tell HN technique!
That is how all of this works. If Valve went out of business then you wouldn't have any legal right or way to get the games you purchased on Steam. If Amazon shut down Prime Video then you couldn't watch the movies you purchased on it. This is not a unique problem to Google Stadia.
Many/most Steam games use Steam servers to authenticate ownership. It's a store, but it's also a DRM provider. Many games would require cracking to keep working.
Can you be more specific or offer any evidence? That Valve offers DRM through Steam is unambiguously true. Here's their developer document on it: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Any game using Steamworks behaves this way, which is a pretty massive chunk of them. Ubisoft uses their own DRM which is an entirely different system.
I think what you may be saying is the behavior if you open a Steamworks game while Steam is opened, it just executes as normal. Any authentication or nonsense happens in the background. Try opening a Steamworks game with steam closed, it will force steam to open and login before the game can be played.
You can test this. Delete steam, restart your computer and launch a title.
You'll get a message about steam.dll missing or being unable to authenticate.
You can also sign out of steam, unplug from the internet and try to launch - and again, you won't be able to except this time steam will launch and tell you to login.
That's always just been a wishful statement of intent with no legal backing. Valve might be unable or unwilling to actually follow through on that urban legend if they do ever shut down for some reason.
Yes but if Steam shut down you’d have no way to get to the installers again and you’d be left crossing your fingers the machine you installed them on doesn’t die.
Think it through. Of cause you cant get the games files if the provider goes offline. You can make a backup of any of your games in steam, which will make it possible to install it again offline on other machines.
I don't see too much of a difference other than Steam has more proven longevity - even if the developers that sold games on Steam don't. I can still download Dungeons of Dreadmor from Steam even though the company appears to have disappeared in 2016.
Hacks already exist to make the games not check the servers, and only stop working after new Steam updates. If Steam were to never update again it seems likely the hacked dlls would work forever.
Not very much - many of those game files actually have Steam Runtime or Steam executables blended in. It is not a strong DRM - but you are still going to need to look for cracked copies if Steam went down.
That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear.
Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential hacking and mods). If I want permanence I get a DRM free downloadable game from GoG.
>Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission
Simply not true. There is really no arguments here. You can run most games directly from the game files without steam. In the cases were you can't you would have issues with DRM in all other venues of purchase.
It may look like that from the outside because you can go to the Steam library directory and double click a game executable directly, but this will still start the Steam runtime and do a DRM check. You can run a game in 'offline mode' for up to two weeks before another online DRM check is required though.
You're not describing how Steam is meant to work, but rather how things are likely to play out for a lot of titles if Steam ever shuts down. Yes, if Steam shuts down, any game that (due to technical requirements) requires Steam to be up will be left unusable, and the customers will be left with pretty much no recourse. Not because legally they're not entitled to the products they paid for, but because it would be impractical to enforce such a right.
> [long list of things you can obtain/do via Steam] are referred to in this Agreement as "Content and Services;" the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.
There is zero legal entitlement to any given subscription in this agreement. The fact that they call it a "subscription", and that this is the "Subscriber Agreement" is not by accident. Rather, they explicitly reserve the right to cancel your "rights to access and/or use" their offers (aka subscriptions).
I mean, no? Just no. Kindle doesn't sell you permanent irrevocable licenses and neither does steam, nor origin etc. They've each been revoked in the past and it's demonstrably true. Their TOS is clear and trivial to read. They all grant personal, limited, non-transferable, revocable and non-exclusive licenses.
You may be able to crack the downloaded steam game files to get them to run. But that's lateral to steam and irrelevant to discussion. if you're going to run cracked files skip steam and go to piratebay.
It also helps that Steamworks DRM is trivially bypassed. All it takes are a couple of replacement DLL files in the games directory and it runs normally (minus multiplayer support, of course).
This isn't even a sketchy crack thing, it's an open source tool. Look up Goldberg emulator.
Legally you may be right (probably depends on the country, idk) but it’s still an ethically shitty move and would make me think twice about doing business with Google in the future, even though I personally am not affected.
Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing.
Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve never been one to own an impressive gaming rig and dealing with a tiny bit of lag to avoid spending $3000 on a solid rig would be totally worth it.
Maybe valve should add a Stadia-like service in the future to allow you to play the game on their machines and stream it back when you want to.
>>Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that
GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved it for the last year or so when my computer couldn't run cyberpunk 2077 and I didn't want to sell kidney for a rtx card :)
Geforce Now was probably the most consumer-friendly version of game streaming possible and every game publisher shat their pants and blocked it. Hell, even some indie developers blocked it. From a user perspective it's equivalent to renting an EC2 instance and installing Parsec and Steam on it, just automated. But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.
The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.
The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!
The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:
* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)
* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games
The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.
[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.
AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.
>> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.
You still bought the game, you're just running elsewhere. They're worried about ports - they want to sell you that sweet android/iOS port of their game. That's why they block the games.
> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.
nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.
It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
> Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.
> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.
> GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes … You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now.
XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.
A game streaming service is a solution to a different problem, not yours. It's much more reliable to control the performance by running it locally and tweaking the graphical fidelity than by running it remotely and adding unpredictable network performance as a factor. Instead, game streaming is meant to solve the problem of playing a game on a system that could never ever hope to run it, or to play it away from one's main system.
>>Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering.
And this is the #1 problem with stadia - it's a completely different platform, it's as far away from Windows as PS5/Xbox are. You can't just run Stadia version of games on your PC, even if you could download them. GeForce NOW is a much better product, because it runs normal Windows executables(just in the cloud).
You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone.
And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms).
Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you're almost certainly better off just buying it outright at $800, than paying google $10 dollars a month for 5 years for vaporware. Plus at the end of it, you likely still have a perfectly functional computer, more than capable of handling basic mail/web/videos, or serving content (I have machines going back 18 years sitting on the dirt in my basement serving content).
you can buy a decent system that runs the games better than stadia under $1k. you need 6600xt ($330), 16MB ram ($50), virtually any cpu ($150), motherboard $120, SSD - $80. That leaves you >250 for case, keyboard and mouse.
That's absolutely false under US law[1]. Once you have a legal copy, you are free to run the software without a license, including making additional copies for archival or as necessary to use it (for example, copying the program from disk to memory for execution).
The anti-circumvention statutes mean DRM complicates matters, but you definitely have a legal right to the game files themselves. For what it's worth, I believe that a competent lawyer could successfully argue that disabling DRM is an "adaptation" that's an "essential step in the utilization of the computer program." Get the case in front of Judge Alsup or some other computer literate judge and the argument would probably even prevail.
Once you download an MP3, you should protect it as you'd protect anything else you purchased instead of expecting that it would be available to re-download indefinitely.
Oh, my bad, it was from iTunes from ten years ago, not Amazon. I found the support email. (I still have the mp3s)
"""
Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Support!
My name is Dianne, and I'm sorry to hear that you have been unable to redownload the album "Rachmaninov: Complete Piano Concertos", on your new computer. I can certainly understand how this could be disappointing for you, please be assured that I'm happy to help.
Unfortunately, this item is no longer in the iTunes Store, and only items that are currently available can be redownloaded.
If the content provider no longer offers these purchases on the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBookstore, your content will not be available for you to download again.
However, if you still have this album on the original computer, you can certainly transfer it to you new computer. You can do this in several ways. See the following article for how to transfer iTunes Store purchases using Home Sharing, an external drive, an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, or iPod), the Windows Migration Assistant, and CDs/DVDs:
"""
In addition to what everyone else who has replied said, Valve (or at least a support rep, so this doesn't carry as much weight as Gabe Newell himself saying it, but it was at least someone speaking in an official capacity) has said that in the event that the Steam service has to be discontinued, "measures are in place to ensure that that all users continue to have access to their Steam games".
At least I can rest assured that pretty much anything that's been put on Steam has a cracked version out there, and if one day Valve disappears and I lose my entire library, I'll just go pirate whatever I want to play again.
Good luck doing that for a game that consumers were only ever sent frames of. If/when there's a streaming-exclusive game, it'll be conclusively lost to time when the company stops letting people play it.
Versions of this have been going on for years now. MMOs and multiplayer-focused titles die all the time, often with no way for players to access any of the content in those games. There might be a few exceptions where an extremely devoted fanbase reverse engineers the server code and runs instances of it, but that is hardly the rule.
This is the tragedy of game development. I heard the other day that copies of Anthem are selling for a penny at GameStop. When EA abandons that game (any day now), all of the work of those programmers, artists, and everyone else will basically be lost. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, gone.
> Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally [...]
The obvious difference is that games downloaded from steam are on your machine and are yours to keep forever - if Valve goes bankrupt you can still have copies(whether they would launch or not is a different question, but I'm sure someone would find a technical solution). When Stadia shuts down that's it, the games are gone, because you can't make an offline copies of them.
That’s not really as true as you say, I remember in the mid-00s when I had trouble with the internet at home, that I couldn’t play offline games without logging in to steam.
There was a “remember password” option, but the session would still expire.
There would have to be some effort to unlink those games from the auth services.
Also, yes, but I mean you could find a solution I'm sure. As long as you have the copies a solution would be found - just like I can play my PS1 games without owning a PS1. With Stadia there aren't any copies to speak of. Once the servers go down that's it.
If you have to download a pirate's crack to play a game, you may as well download a pirate version of the game in the first place. I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios.
Steam is a DRM system with good branding, that gamers treat as special because it comes from Valve. Anecdotally, a lot of gamers believe and trust that Valve would free their games of DRM if Valve ever went out of business or otherwise shut down Steam. Of course this isn't true, they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own (which is the vast majority of the games on Steam) and whatever informal promises Gabe made years aren't worth a damn. Nevertheless, this sort of mistaken expectation affords Valve/Steam a lot of good will they really don't deserve.
His point is highlighting that even if you pay for it you don’t actually own the game. In this weird market you only own the game if you pirate it.
Ip laws are the worst and terrible for the market. Especially the media companies that just recharge you for for the same content just to watch it on a different medium.
> In this weird market you only own the game if you pirate it.
That's a really good way of putting it, I'm gonna steal that (irony unintended). It's totally true - when you purchase software or services it's conditional. You have some voucher that can be redeemed at the discretion of the provider, and there are always many ways (EULA violation, company goes away) that the voucher can be negated.
But when you steal something you aren't beholden to anyone. You actually "own" that piece of software in a way more concrete way. Yes, someone could pursue legal charges and force you to remove it, but it's a totally separate system vs the built-in contract between customer/ service.
>>His point is highlighting that even if you pay for it you don’t actually own the game
In the EU at least, you absolutely own the copy and are free to do with it as you please though, including making more copies for your own safekeeping. There are other comments in this thread pointing out that even in US with its crazy laws you also have this right, although I cannot comment on that personally.
That's like saying that if you're watching a blu ray rip of your own purchased disc, it isn't the same product you bought. Technically correct, but it's completely legal to rip your own discs(at least in the EU, can't comment on other countries).
My issue with "just download a crack" is that I have to spend time hunting down the crack, and I can't be sure the crack won't include malware, or won't introduce bugs which only appear later in the game. The last of these has happened to me on multiple occasions. A cracked game is no longer the product I bought.
By contrast, when I buy a game on GOG, I get a product that is DRM Free and will work forever—and because it's the product I actually purchased, I receive some minimal level of assurance from the retailer.
I would feel somewhat differently if there was a single "universal" crack that worked on all Steam games, or even which worked on 95% of Steam games and failed in a predictable way on the remaining 5%. This is the case for iTunes TV Shows, and so I have no problem paying for those, because I can run them through some software and I know the DRM will get stripped correctly every time with no quality loss. I'm not aware of any such software for Steam games.
You are correct of course. My point is that if Steam would disappear, a technological solution would appear to play your games. Just like even once every single PS1 on the planet turns into dust, we can still play PS1 games by other means. With stadia, this will never happen because you can't get a copy of a Stadia game I'm the first place.
I just question how much that matters in practice. In both cases, you can theoretically replace the game you bought with a pirated copy.
All PS1 games have been archived, yes, because the method of ripping a PS1 game is consistent across every title, and the total number of games released was relatively small. That's not the case with PC games today, and I think it's virtually inevitable that a lot of indie games released exclusively on Steam will eventually be lost to time. As will many of the indie games released without DRM on itch.io—but at least any game you downloaded from itch.io will be playable forever.
You can argue cloud gaming is even worse. Maybe so, but at least it provides a lot of extra utility, since you can play on low-end devices. Steam provides automatic updates, that's kind of nice I guess, but not in the same class as running Assassin's Creed on your phone†. (Even then, I personally wouldn't pay full price for a game I can only run on someone else's servers, but I understand why someone else might.)
I don't like Steam.
† In theory. I've always found cloud gaming has too much latency for me. But in theory, if it worked perfectly—which perhaps it never will—the promise is nuts.
You seem to be saying (and be certain of) that in the EU, were Steam to be discontinued, it'd be completely legal for you to download a crack to bypass the DRM for the game you were previously licensed to play through Valve's platform. Is this established as a matter of law? Could you share any links on the topic?
If it wouldn't be legal, then downloading the crack to the game you paid to play through Steam but can't anymore would presumably be just as illegal as pirating the whole game to begin with. Did you really purchase the game or just an indefinite (but not necessarily eternal) license to play it?
They're completely fungible, and the "damage" to the manufacturer, even a potentially contrived "piracy is theft" argument doesn't hold up. You already bought the game, the developer got paid as much as they would have if the service stayed up. Just because the service provider shuts down doesn't change those facts.
The two scenarios I'm comparing (and finding not much difference between) are:
> You "buy" the game from Stadia, it's taken from you, so now you pirate the game.
> You "buy" the game from Steam, it's taken from you, so now you download the pirate's crack to the game.
In either case, the original developer received compensation so I don't think you should feel any moral obligations to anybody. Morally they're equivalent, the only real difference is whether you have the gamefiles already downloaded or not. In both cases you need to dip into the shadier side of the net to get the game you "bought" to run.
Yeah I think I can agree with that. The two scenarios you posted are equal in my mind. I was thinking more about a scenario where you bought a game from steam, then used a pirate crack to play it, vs a scenario where you didn't buy a game, just pirated it. Those two aren't the same - obviously.
I don't disagree, but there are other reasons to like Steam. I like Steam because they heavily invest into Linux support, even for games that are not theirs. I understand that they're not doing this out of altruism, they have several business-level reasons, but they happen to align with my interests and that's really all I can ask for in a for-profit company.
> If you have to download a pirate's crack to play a game, you may as well download a pirate version of the game in the first place. I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios
You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.
You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.
> "..they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own.."
Both Gabe Newell, the founder/owner of Steam/Vale, and the official support response is now to state that they would provide means for users to continue to have access to their games should Steam shut down. Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.
When game companies go out of business, Steam will remove their product from the store, but continue enabling users who already purchased it access to it, and I expect this independence/guarantee of of access is part of their normal licensing. There is also already 'offline mode' for Steam, and setting the expiration of this mode to e.g. 100 years would be trivial from their side.
In the case of first party games owned by Valve, they may earnestly intend to do as they say, and consequently aren't lying when they say it. Nevertheless, such promises about what will happen when the company is departing are worth approximately jack shit. Whether it's Gabe (or his heirs) later deciding to sell the company or creditors carving up the company after it fails, there are many scenarios in which those earnest promises will fall through. Notch once promised to eventually open source Minecraft. Maybe he wasn't lying when he said it, he might have earnestly meant it. But that went straight out the window when Microsoft wrote him a big fat check.
In the case of third party games with DRM on Steam: Valve doesn't have a license to distribute those games without DRM, so they're effectively promising to become a pirate software distributor. They have the technical means to do this, but not the legal right. They're almost certainly self-deluding if not lying outright when they promise to do this. I lean towards flagrantly lying; they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising but they're promising it anyway. And if they're willing to lie about this, I think you should reevaluate their promises respecting first party games as well.
Such a term would be poison to most game developers, particularly in the early days of Steam when it had nothing more than a handful of first party games. Before Steam achieved market dominance, how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?
Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.
It seems reasonable for developers (as I’m not a developer) as Steam was just selling licenses.
It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.
So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.
> how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?
Present it as a feature?
“In the event of the dissolution of Steam/Valve, we will endeavour to do everything reasonable to ensure that previously purchased licenses to your content keep working for subscribers in the absence of the Steam platform.”
Just because they try to keep it working doesn’t mean they have to make it DRM free (e.g. copyable between all computers without any checks).
> Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.
If they shutdown due to bankruptcy (which seems unlikely at the moment, but could change, without much notice since they're private and don't have required public reporting), there may not be anything to collect or anyone to compell to fulfill the promise.
Steam’s DRM “just works” and that’s why gamers don’t complain much about it. Also it’s the best way to play games under Linux.
I have a few hundreds games in steam and while maybe one day I may lose access to all of them it’s a risk I am willing to take because:
- I don’t think it will happen anytime soon because it’s a money making machine. The biggest risk for me is Microsoft acquiring it and stopping any work on Linux related stuff (I have been using steam solely on Linux for the past 7+ years)
- Even if I lose access to the library, Steam will have done a better job that I could. I know for sure that I lost the media for the first steam-enabled games I bought but I can still play them.
If they do this, they're probably hoping that developers of the games themselves will hand out free Steam keys to their now-angry customer base. More than likely this would happen for several titles, and they're probably counting on it.
Corporations may be comprised of humans, but the corporation itself is not human. This is particularly true for large corporations with a lot of organizational complexity, like Google. They are forms of artificial intelligence, but instead of running on silicon they run on the organizational chart. Corporations are capable of doing things that no individual human in the organization personally agrees with but go along with anyway because of the way the organization is structured and enforces compliance with itself. Even the executives at the top, who may believe they're in charge, are ultimately components in the machine whose perspective and insight into the true workings of the machine are filtered by the machine itself.
Don't expect human decency from a corporation, because corporations aren't humans. They're alien intelligence constructed out of humans, but that humanity is not inherited.
I believe Valve has promised to unlock all games purchased through their platform in the event that they go out of business. Whether they stick to that is another story, but it should happen for at least some games.
They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.
Plus, the most likely thing to happen to Valve is a MS acquisition.
They have a backup option built into the Steam client, so you're free to do that anytime. Offcourse, there's no guarantees with multiplayer games or always-on DRM as that's always been the case with publishers who choose to go down that route.
I hope Valve isn't acquired by Microsoft. Gabe left Microsoft to found Valve so as long as he's around I can't ever see that happening.
Is it known who will helm Valve if Gabe decides to leave? Plagman has been a big name there with the recent SteamOS platform development but I'm not sure who the actual second-in-command would be.
>They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.
This is true, but also this is all new. Sooner than later there will be a case of a 20 year old company who licenses media that burns their customer base. It's inevitable.
If Stadia is shut down, they should offer activation keys for each user's purchased games on Epic, GOG, Xbox, GeForce Now or Steam. Or where ever, really, it doesn't matter.
They almost certainly can't. If I remember correctly the "we can just release an unlock patch" comment was back when Steam was just that really annoying thing Valve forced you install to play Counter-Strike. The moment they started including third-party games was the moment that no longer became available. DMCA 1201 is very very clear that you cannot unlock other people's games for any reason, even a legal one.
If google were going out of business I'd agree with you, but they're not. As a business they have plenty of money. What they're (possibly) doing is shutting this service to save some money. I suspect they'll refund or at least credit the relatively small number of people who purchased games on the service.
It was always an odd setup to sell something for a fixed fee that potentially has an endless cost to deliver. Google have always been vague about how to square that circle. They could have sold fixed term or rolling licences but chose not to. I suspect had Stadia game sales reached a certain threshold they'd have done something like that but it's not something you want to talk about with a new system.
The Google play would have been to track user gameplay. That's currently a large number of user-hours that Google is blind to, given they have no offering in the dedicated console space.
... that said, I'd expect the margins were far lower / cost was higher than what Google was used to, and they financially decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Suspect that the service saw poor growth or even shrinkage of users. Costs were fixed to rising and nobody provided an answer on how to address. So google cut it.
I doubt they'll credit anyone. Why would they? You purchased a license to play a game through their service. Their service is no longer there. I haven't gone through any terms of service for Stadia but I can't imagine that they aren't covered for this.
They can put what they want in the TOS but they are selling to consumers in jurisdictions around the world and if it stops working so soon then they were clearly 'selling' something that wasn't fit for purpose. They could have sold it time limited or laid out their limitations if they wanted to protect themselves but they didn't.
I used the service and as a techie knew it wasn't really sustainable but the average consumer buying in good faith wasn't warned that their purchase might be so short lived. Might have been hidden in the TOS but that won't cut the mustard in many jurisdictions and will be an expensive battle.
I suspect they made a small amount of sales and it'll be cheaper and easier for them to credit than fight.
I'm not so convinced. Maybe in the EU, but that would be it, certainly I think in the US you'd be fucked for sure. It might be cheaper in the short term to pay out vs the worst case scenario of fighting this, but they may never even get sued, the case may get thrown out if they do, it may be in their interest to protect that precedent on TOS and fight it in court, etc.
I'm not saying Google won't pay out, but I just think there's a lot of reasons why they might not.
Well, the smaller the number of purchases the less impactful the negative marketing effects. The larger the purchases, the higher the financial impact on Google.
Further, Google exited this market. Do they really care about marketing to these people anymore? Their main revenue is non-consensual tracking, it's not like being mad at Google is going to matter unless you really go out of your way because of it.
Something something EU consumer protection law, stuff needs 2 year warranty, and if it breaks in that time you either have to replace or refund the customers. Doubly so if you knew the product wouldn't last 2 years.
Not sure if the German Gewährleistung applies to video games, but if it does you might be able to wield that since not being able to play the game anymore definitely is a major defect.
Are you sure about that? It rather seems like the opposite, just like for buying/renting anything. You absolutely do have a legal right to compensation, but if a company goes bankrupt you might only get it in part and you will have to sue to get it.
I agree with you that their TOS and all the contracts say 'we leave the business you lose your content'. They are within their legal right to do that.
However is it the right thing to do? Will it damage their reputation to do that?
If they wanted to dodge that beating they'd offer steam/epic/xbox/ps5/switch keys to their customers to claim. Any game their customer bought is probably over a year old at this point and they can cut a deal with the publishers to get deeply discounted keys and eat the costs.
I strongly suspect just to avoid backlash they'll refund people.
But technically when you buy a game you're not really buying a game anymore, there's no physical item purchased.
You're merely purchasing a temporary non-transferable license to use it.
Back in the '90s if I gave you a Game boy game, it now belonged to you. I guess if I started a company renting them out Nintendo could sue me for copyright infringement though.
Now when I download a game, I'm merely permitted temporary usage. I can't give it to you
Though it would be a total scumbag move not to compensate people whatsoever it might be a "good" scorched earth tactic. It ensures consumers will probably think even harder before adopting such a service. Meaning it will be even harder for competitors to succeed where Google themselves failed. Then again you will need to be sure never wanting to return to that particular market....
> Back in the '90s if I gave you a Game boy game, it now belonged to you.
Fip side is that if you lost the cartridge or it broke you had to buy it again. Granted, that almost never happened.
What we need is a portable digital license. Like a card we can store in a sort of internet wallet and present to storefronts to get access to a game. That way publishers wouldn’t be able to bully customers to the extent they currently do.
No way the gaming community would be opposed to such a thing.
didn't we already have that for certain games? I remember when I bought WoW in 2010 it came with a code. If I wanted to reinstall the game I would put in the same code, this was before battle.net client.
Other big tech platforms have chosen to do full refunds when they shutdown. I'm thinking in particular of Microsoft- when they shut down their eBooks division, they issued a full refund for all their books and when they shut down Kinect fitness* they gave on platform credit for paid workouts.
I do wish that a major government would pass a law to this effect- if you advertise something as "buy", "purchase", or "own" then you need to have and execute on a plan to ensure access in perpetuity, even if you go out of business.
* XBox fitness remains the best product I've ever used that didn't make it in the market.
I had already tried Stadia with Cyberpunk, which was a great experience and better than the console launch of the game.
So I actually preordered 2 copies of the Baldurs Gate 3, as I wanted to play with my wife who does not have a gaming computer. I figured $50 gamble was better than a $1,000 computer investment. There was an early access component to the game, which is why I preordered instead of waiting for final release prior to purchase.
Played Cyberpunk on Stadia as well, mostly just to try the service out. Not a bad experience, honestly. Stadia had the technical stuff pretty nailed from day 1. It was just the business model that was out of whack.
I'm old enough to not play the latest thing when it comes out so the answer to the Preorder? question for me is always a firm No. Many games are flops, have tech issues or look like I might like them but then have an annoying (to me) thing which is evident after release. Then you can check reviews and game play vids to see what its like.
I'm not the person you asked but I've used stadia as my main gaming "platform" over the last couple years. That they were going to shut it down was obvious from the beginning, people in here bragging about that prediction are fools.
It's still by far the best game streaming setup for what I want. I spent about $100 figuring I'd get a year or two out of it and it would be worth it for that. It was. If it continues through the end of the year I'll have gotten a lot more than I expected to.
When they shut it down I will probably just stop playing video games again until a similarly simple and effective service pops up, probably years from now or possibly never.
It IS going to shut down by the end of the autumn.
I mean it 'was' a streaming platform [0] as I already outlined from the future and called it, since it failed to get anyone using it back then, even in the pandemic and lockdowns and is still struggling today.
That’s why I used Geforce Now instead where you don’t have to buy the game again if it’s in your steam library. I hope game devs will release all Stadia exclusives to GFN after this change because the library is a bit lacking.
Exactly. The value proposition, for me, of geforce now vs stadia is completely different. Plus I can play games both offline and stream through geforce now.
I would think it would be trivial for them to pay to let another service transfer the licenses. Of course, this would benefit potential future competitors' market share. So I guess they think it would be better to screw their customers?
My guess is that they're gonna. Google is starting to get a reputation for this, and this would be an ESPECIALLY egregious example. Nobody would ever buy a digital good from them again if they didn't do some version of this (lots of people are skittish about it already, but this would make it so much worse).
I don't think it's "trivial" though. They probably have to do some negotiation with both Steam as well as each individual publisher of games on the service.
Yeah, if Google were to abandon the licenses then it would mean they'd just be giving up on gaming indefinitely. I don't see them doing that as all the big tech companies want to control the family room.
They're probably just going to rebrand it as "Chrome Games" and have people play in their browsers or any supported devices.
I think Google already has a reputation for shutting things down prematurely, not just on HN but with consumers more generally. And I think that reputation is a big part of the reason why Stadia flopped. People knew this would happen so they never bought in, causing this to happen. A sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, but this outcome was very obvious from the start.
Yeah, but they don't have to make it worse! If they do the right thing here and transfer the licenses somehow, it's way more likely that whatever their next thing is is going to go down smoother. If they don't do the right thing here, they're never going to be able to launch anything like it ever again. That must carry some weight. You'd hope, at least.
License transfer is the (relatively) trivial part. Porting stadia-exclusive games to another platform (PC) would be the slightly trickier part, whos effort would differ for each game.
This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry.
If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stopped trying to cover their shortcomings with political virtue signalling.
Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.
lol yes, the uh "traditional" approach is just... discover market, deliver product, profit. This "new" strategy of "deliver product, lose money, shut product down" seems like it may not work well long term.
That only plays out if you offer anything to customers once the competitors are gone. Also: there’s still PlayStation, Xbox and even Apple Arcade doing perfectly fine in this space
Looks like overall Apple subscriptions have solid growth. [0]
I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization.
I have arcade through their Apple One subscription and uh I think sometimes my family tries to buy a game and it’s free so that’s nice?
But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
> Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.
They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take.
How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former.
Edit:
To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions.
Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important:
- Iterate on the user experience
- Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc..
- Fix bugs, keep it running
- Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
- Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
Nobody understands where oil comes from. Anyone who did would have drilled there already and would be a new letter in FAANG (maybe MANGA instead now that FB -> Meta?).
Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.
Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).
In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.
Hindsight is not all it is though. Plenty of people here, myself included, were calling that the need to rebuy games (compared to MS's all in one sub model, or nvidia letting you use your existing licenses), combined with Google's track record with lacking commitment to its services were fatal flaws to Google's value proposition.
The reply was that Spotify and Netflix worked, but all music streaming services have basically the same selection these days, and movies are deemed more disposable than games as seen by the rise of people rotating subscriptions as movie video streaming fragments, so they were never perfect indicators. The one worry was that Google would buy its way in with exclusives and introductory pricing a la Epic, but Google's pride probably prevented that.
The other issue is that search makes A LOT of money. Even if they find oil, it’s such a small amount compared to search that it doesn’t seem to move the needle internally.
If you look at the opportunity cost of supporting a small side business va building a bigger business.. you drop the small thing. Google engineering is expensive and they have a somewhat polished brand that they don’t want to muddle with a bunch of “non winners”.
Amazon has the opposite problem. They build everything and have to find a way to scale their internal orgs to handle lots of tiny side revenue streams. I signed up for a magazine subscription through Amazon and they had a website redesign that accidentally (?) removed the management portal link for a few weeks. They do so much they can’t even stay internally consistent.
Right, that's why for example it made sense from Google's perspective to kill things like Google reader because that doesn't really move the needle.
The biggest issue with that approach is that they're burning customer goodwill, and that affects their odds down the line of getting customer acceptance. Stadia is just another project in a long line of cancelled projects that leaves customers screwed over and less willing to use Google products in the future.
Your point about Amazon is pretty interesting, IMHO I think that's why in the long term Amazon will keep on beating GCP in the cloud space. Amazon having such a large set of offerings is that it makes their cloud offering particularly compelling, especially considering they seem to keep old services alive and have relatively stable interfaces. Their offerings might not be as polished as GCP's, and some of them are laughably awful, but at least I feel confident that Amazon won't change the API or deprecate/retire the service.
What? The streaming games market started way before Google (OnLive, Sony, etc.) and now it's mostly Nvidia and Microsoft. Google entered late, never invested much in it, never advertised much... they just totally botched the execution and their competitors got all the players. Nvidia's service is getting better all the time.
In this case, I think that's a good thing in the long run. This entire class of game streaming product is as anti-customer as it's possible to be. It's basically the wet dream of DRM control freaks in the industry.
If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
That being said, the user experience of Stadia is so much cleaner, GEforce now has much jank in linking accounts, staring up your instance, checking if a game you might buy is even supported, and then deciding the storefront to get it from if it is.
But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.
Yeah, I'm always very skeptical of new Google services. I use GSuite and Chromebooks, but I know those are heavily used internally at Google and I believe that they'll continue to invest in those. But every other service, nah.
Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it.
I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.
Exactly. Lol I'm just imagining a company trying to use their chat services. "OK guys sorry, I know we just did this three weeks ago, but they've launched a new chat service and are deprecating the old one. Yeah, again. What's new? Uh... there's a new logo this time. And you can install it as a progressive web app."
I didn't trust it, but we tried https://hire.google.com/ because of this belief in GSuite products being stable. It was a great product. Had to move to Greenhouse.
> This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry.
I can't really understand how people can trust google domains.
Domains are transferrable. If a registrar goes belly-up you can always and easily transfer the domains out to a new registrar, and if the old registrar doesn't want to release the domain the TLD registry can and will intervene on your side.
Yeah I just noticed Amazon Drive is going away. No more uploads after 2023 January, no more access for non-photo/video files some time toward end of 2023.
Years ago I got tired of the mess that was Google Picasa and transferred all photos, videos, and most important docs to Amazon Drive. Now I need to find yet another service.
It seems when it comes to cloud storage, you best bet is going with a company who's main product is cloud storage, and not just an afterthought or value-add like it was for Amazon.
Or build your own NAS is you have the time and experience.
I’ve been pretty happy with my NAS choice (knock on wood).
I spent about $1000 on a synology and drives and that’s given me 10 years of 10TB so it’s actually pretty cost effective too. Cheaper than Dropbox or OneDrive.
I only wish there was some community disk swap program that would be good for reliable off sites. I looked into storj but you have to share like 100mb or something to make enough to pay for 1mb.
Amazon had a short period where they offered unlimited storage… and a few people took advantage of it too much so they stopped that. The product never really took off as a value add (too many other services).
Amazon is also known to kill products but only ones no one uses.
Listen sir, cloud storage is forever, it frees you from having to worry about the details of having to store your files like you would have to with physical storage. Just upload once and they'll be there forever. Pinky swear.
Exactly, technically I don't think shareholders much care about where the revenue comes from. Killing off product that don't make a profit within a year launch might actually be what shareholders want.
We tend to forget that modern shareholders don't care much about which companies their money is invested in, it's just a stock with some numbers in a spreadsheet making the difference between investing in Google vs. Exxon.
I don't know, I'm not sure that's sustainable in the long term. They need to branch out, even if it's just to find new places to put ads-- like in streaming games. But they never fully commit. Strong hyped launch, not follow through. Google has more than enough resources that they should have been able to get major game publishers to sign on to allow owners of their games on l, say, Steam to freely game access on Stadia. Heck even a very minor player like GOG was able to do this in a limited way! Linked my steam account to GOG and was able to get free Gog copies of about a dozen games I already owned on steam that way.
But it seems like Google put practically zero effort into growing Stadia into having a respectable library at all. It looks like they gave up almost immediately and the last few years have been the inevitable stagnation into the graveyard.
Note that most of the GOG free license games are games which GOG, or their parent company CD Projekt, had a stake in, either as developer, publisher or porter
Maps, Voice, and Docs, seem to be here to stay. Not sure about anything else. Except Search, of course, I suppose they won't close that down any time soon.
Voice doesn't seem too well. It had no new features in a long while, and some essential features, like connecting to third party voice number, still require logging into old website... I use it daily but I worry that it will be gone any time.
I've been idly looking at migrating my stuff away from voice, but it's problematic because some 2FA stuff is on the underlying phone number because various stuff refused to accept Google Voice numbers due to it being a SIP number... and not everything will allow you to just disable 2FA while you're doing the switch, some stuff wants to always be tied to a functional phone number.
Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number.
(if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
I don’t think voice is as sure as you say it is. They has a push recently to kick off low traffic users. I’m concerned about my voice number personally.
I think it is a valuable lesson for me ( and a loss ).
I got Cyberpunk on it ( at the time rationale was, I don't want to build a new PC so this is an acceptable trade-off ). Google name lent it some credibility and, admittedly, it was actually pretty impressive from technology point of view. It does help that the game was buggy as hell and made me lose interest early on.
That said, the fact that they are treating paying users this way makes stare in disbelief. How can they possibly get away with it? And, more importantly, the question quickly becomes 'to what extent ca I trust other platforms?'.
This is why I still buy games on bluray for my consoles. I have the gamepass for xbox and psplus premium for PS5, but I'd like at least to be able to resell stuff, if I need...
Are you serious? They bought the game, now they don't have the game. They didn't rent it.
Google still exists, and has plenty of money to make all Stadia customers whole by buying them a retail copy of all of the games. But they choose not to because they are greedy.
Note: I am not a Stadia customer because I figured this would happen.
It's a service isn't it? You play it online. You got to play it. Not sure what makes you think I can't be serious about that? If I want to play a game I don't care if I 'buy' it or rent it - I care about the playing.
They asked what they got from it - they got to play the game. Wasn't that the point?
Because Google is taking away their ability to play the game they paid for. Stadia sells copies of games ($60 a pop), and offers subscriptions for additional money for higher video quality and access to a smaller library of games. The people who purchased titles from Google are having those titles taken away from them.
I still play my copies of Diablo 2 and Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction that I bought on launch day, in checks wikipedia 2000 and 2001 respectively. On Single Player, with Plugy.
I think they were worth the price I paid for them.
> Q: If the Stadia service is discontinued, do we know what (if anything) will happen with game purchases?
> Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product:
> We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :)
> The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great! Games are no different. Eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too and we'll feel great about it.
> [..]
> Of course, it’s ok to doubt my words. Theres nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't. But what we can do is to launch the service and continue investing in it for years to come. Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos. That’s exactly what we’re committed to.
He did. And before that he was in AR/VR. I know a few execs who have done similar hops: jumping from one hype space to the next in the hopes that one of them disrupts the whole industry and they get launched up in their career.
A sort of VC fund with an investment size of one, yourself.
I see what you’re saying and I respect it. You have to take care of yourself first.
However, as someone who worked in one of those fields, it’s draining when over half of your leaders are trend hoppers. They get up on stage frequently and talk about how excited they are, and how it’s a long journey ahead. And then as soon as the industry takes a slight downturn they all leave in unison.
Some of the leaders are truly passionate about the field and they’re still around. It’s very clear who is who from the way they act towards the employees.
The experience taught me to avoid hype industries unless I’m willing to make money the number one goal in my life, which is harder than I thought, since life has plenty of things more enjoyable than money.
It's not about company loyalty, it's about whether you actually believe in any of this tech. And you're supposed to, when you're a director with PR duties.
Until someone looks in that employee's wake and sees one dumpster fire after another and the employee being the common denominator. These people aren't just jumping from hype space to hype space, they are torching each of those projects to extract short term gains to the detriment of the teams under them.
Appreciate the sentiment, but if any employee does indeed have a track record like that, its on the company for hiring someone like that in the first place.
The real question is, why is the market so inefficient at sifting through bad employees, especially near the top of the ladder? The fact that this exec has been able to jump from one dumpster fire to another, often with a promotion, tells me that there’s something broken about the way senior execs are hired.
I wish I could figure out the secret handshake that gets you hired to one prominent, presumably high-paid, spitballin' and chattin' and "idea person" role after another, despite a track record of apparent mediocrity in actual results. Seems like it'd be really fun and—plainly—not very hard work.
At that level I think it's just more sales than substance. Many people are great salespeople without realizing it, I think this contributes to the phenomenon of failing upward.
> You might run everything you touch into the ground, but hey who cares?
In a more perfect world, when this resume hits the hiring committee's desk, they read it and think "this leadership role is too important to fill with someone who's never managed a downturn."
You know why I keep buying stuff on Steam? This is why... It is putting all the eggs in single basket, but at least it is the sturdiest and oldest basket.
valve is worried about being made irrelevant by Epic Game Store, by whatever facebook uses to distribute games, by amazon, etc.
There are plenty of companies who already run or could run a competitor to steam, and slowly they could eat their lunch. Epic Game Store bought exclusives and gives away coupons to bolster their market share. IF everyone starts burning cash for market share, Valve will have to figure out a new way to compete.
With Steam you can basically make your own personal Stadia with the steam link app, no need to re-buy any games again and no need to rely on anyone else's cloud services (as long as you have a decent connection and PC)
I saw something the other day that really struck home on this: for any given software technology you encounter, your best estimate is that it's halfway through its useful lifetime.
I know some TED level influencer had some story about basically everything in mail order catalogs from 100 year ago is still for sale somewhere today, so maybe it's wrong, or maybe software is just more prone to vanishing.
Stadia has crossplay on several games now, though I absolutely agree their marketing has been an embarrassment.
All I could think during the entire pandemic was how Google should be showing off how easy it is to play games on Stadia. Lower the initial barrier to entry just a smidge and it could have been as simple as texting a link to your family groupchat and then you're all playing a game together in your browser. Even grandparents can figure out how to click a link in an email to open a webpage.
Maybe better said as 'several games provided on stadia have crossplay'. I wonder if there is a better model of a user buying a license for a game, specifically a non-'live service' style game, and being able to use that on any platform that they provide the game for. I find myself buying two copies of more than a few games these days. Mostly picking it up on a more mobile platform like the switch after buying it on the pc.
I've seen this model work, primarily on digital tabletop games and their DLCs. Like you might have to buy the base game on each platform (which is usually pretty cheap) but then all the expansion packs are tied to your game account and work anywhere.
I think Uplay works similarly, and you can cross play and cross save with your sub on any device.
Microsoft GamePass is moving towards a similar direction, where your sub lets you cross play and save between PC, Xbox, cloud, and Android (via the cloud).
I dunno why Google never bothered doing that. Stadia tech wise is actually really impressive and comparable to nvidia's offering, with much better UX, but they just gave up almost immediately after launch. What a missed opportunity :(
Yeah, that was always the dream, but I don't know how they botched the execution so hard. All the technology for that was already there, especially with their controllers and Google TV, but they just never finished connecting the dots. Why? It beats me. They got 80% of the way there and then just... stopped caring?
It's like they had a team of awesome engineers who built the thing but... no gamers? Like it just seemed that nobody at Google, on or off the Stadia team, actually wanted it to grow beyond tech demo status. Their library is still laughably small, years later, and only very very few games offer crossplay.
Google could have side-stepped this by offering a Game Pass-style all-you-can-eat subscription service instead of full-price games. While I'll be bummed if one of those subscription services goes away, I won't feel as if something I own is being taken away from me.
Agree, I thought this was supposed to be a netflix of gaming. The other problem is Xbox and PS both have cloud offerings like this and are better options
I have definitely avoided Stadia because I wanted to give it some 5 years to see if it wouldn't be another dead Google project. I really didn't want to be right but here we are...
I'm glad to be forever cautious with Google's new products, they've burnt me a few times the past 15 years.
They don't really have a reputation of that, except on forums like hn, which is not indicative of the broader market. Even among gamers, this reputation of Google doesn't exist.
To be fair, most gamers I’ve talked to don’t even know what Stadia IS.
By definition, gamers play games. To do that, they almost always own a console or gaming pc to do so. As a result, they have no need for Stadia in the first place.
This is why I think things like Stadia are targeting a very small market.
You have casual gamers, that are perfectly happy playing natively on their phones or laptops at low settings.
Then you have “serious” gamers, that tend to be happy spending hundreds of dollars to make sure they have up to date hardware to get the most of their games (and thus, likely won’t be happy with the latency or game selection of Stadia).
Somewhere in between is a market of people that say “gee, I really want to play Destiny, at full graphics, and I’m ok with a little latency, but I can’t or don’t want to buy a better PC or $500 box for it”.
I’m sure that market exists, but it’s gotta be rather small in the best of circumstances, right?
Exactly. Google has such a strong reputation for killing products now that I’m just now willing to invest in anything they create any more.
IMO they need to fix the internal corporate culture and move it away from short-term OKR goals and promotions based on launching new stuff and a bit more towards helping to maintain and grow existing projects.
Console gamers already have consoles to play games on. PC gamers already have PCs to play games on. The Gen Z generation play games on their mobile phones. What happened is that Google thought there were huge amounts of people out there that so badly wanted to play games, but couldn't because they can't afford the hardware, that they would flock to Stadia as their first gaming platform.
Those people don't exist in any significant numbers.
Every self-identifying gamer (me included) knew this service was DoA.
Right but that's partially technology and partially habits.
My wife literally has track of zero printed / film photographs she ever took. She's got zero clue where they might be. Not even "shoe box somewhere" :->
Whereas, I have all my photos of last 20 years (since I first took a digital shot) chronologically sorted in folders by year then event (e.g. "Photos/2022/HalifaxTrip2022") on my NAS. It's barely any effort to organize in that way (no fancy tagging or sorting, just year and event, or generic yearly photos /photos/2022/2022_Photos as catchall), yet Typically it takes me seconds to minutes to find some obscure photo somebody remembers or wants, and near instantly for big events like trips, birthdays etc.
It's all about how much one treasures those photos / how obsessive compulsive one is :-). There's certainly ways to manage digital photo libraries, whether manually like I do, or automagically like Apple or Google do.
(we also print albums through Costco of fun trips etc. Nothing about digital prevents that)
To be fair though, When it comes to discussion about cloud and gaming though, it's an utterly disingenuous comparison. I fully and permanently own and control my digital photos in an universal format and can switch and back them up from provider to provider seamlessly. This is empathically triply not the case for stadia games.
> Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.
The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.
As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.
Well, I still print photos and I still listen to MP3 files.
The difference is that photos are conveniently took from my phone and that MP3 files are conveniently downloaded from a certain major Video Streaming website by a company with a name that is a reference to math. Every time I listen to those MP3s I make sure to watch some ads somewhere first.
Also, I get DVDs from the public library and use Handbrake to convert them so I can stream them on the living room TV from my NAS. When returning the DVDs, I, of course, I email the video files back to the library.
The best part is how he just completely avoided actually answering the question. They simply refused to ever give a clear answer. Because they know the answer, and we know the answer, and it's all bad for them. Rather than engineer a system where the answer could be more positive, they stick their fingers in their ears (the most charitable interpretation).
I don’t understand why he didn’t just respond that your games will be gone. Or at least “in the worst case, your games might be gone”. People aren’t stupid, they know exactly what the evasive answer means, so why evade at all?
It amazes me that this persists, it is such a bad sales tactic. If the person you're dealing with isn't a sucker, now you've destroyed trust. (You've destroyed it later with the sucker, when they realize what happened. Hope one sale was enough for you.)
Because then no one has an exact quote they can point at where he says your games will be gone. It's obvious to most readers, but you can't simply say "he said X" and link to it/screenshot it, only say that he was evasive.
PR guys aren't paid to tell the truth, they're paid to say whatever is convenient for the company. Lying straight to your face is one of their core skills.
Not being explicit gives wiggle room for people to let their hopes override their logic when interpreting how it will work.
Some number of people will read that and say "it's safe, I knew they would assuage my concerns" that wouldn't otherwise if they just said "well, you might lose you games in that case.". Those are the people being targeted.
And by those people I include you and me, but for different things. It's impossible to be completely objective and rational all the time, and I'm sure you can come up with just as many instances as I where hope overrode reason for a while. Statements like these are specifically to keep us around when we fall into that category.
It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to which the (supposed; bullshit) answer is 'not likely'. Someone might - on rational analysis - know what it means, and still come away with a better impression than if they said it outright.
I am slowly moving all my customers/clients away from Google Analytics, mostly to Matomo. Couldn’t be happier. Some clients can also diversify their ad spending to other platforms. Google needs to start feeling what “customer service” means, for now it has none.
I didn’t even realize Stadia required you to actually buy games. I assumed the whole point of streaming is you pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to content. The business gets a cashflow it can securitize and sell on Wall St., and the customer gets unlimited content access, everyone’s happy. Really weird that Stadia required you to (also?) buy each game you wanted to play. If not for that, they never would have had to answer difficult questions like this.
Interesting. I wonder why not just have a monthly fee for unlimited streaming, and no other costs to play. No purchasing of games or anything like that.
And if they need more market segmentation, then offer an additional premium monthly fee that gets you early access to upcoming AAA games or some other similar value add like that.
It's just weird they decided to make some games unlimited and some for purchase. Maybe that was the best deal they could negotiate with the publishers, who knows.
The top reply to this is excellent.
It's ignorant to compare cloud gaming, where you NEED the cloud to play that game license, to docs/photos etc.. where you can download them if the cloud service shuts down.
Everyone on HN predicted this, and the only way I would have ever trusted Stadia would be with a CEO-level promise of refunding all purchases if they shut down within 10 years.
That's honestly the magic of Nvidia's streaming service. You're paying for the streaming, not the game. You then link your Steam account and play. So if Nvidia's streaming service shuts down, I still have the games I paid for in steam. It's genius, and the only way I'd ever consider paying for cloud gaming. While I don't like the Xbox game pass method, as you own nothing, at least you're renting and not buying, so you're not technically losing anything if you leave or they shut down.
It was utterly shocking that Google did not copy Nvidia's streaming games bough on other stores idea, especially with so many people are fearful of a Google shutdown.
It's also a mystery to me why Valve hasn't done what Nvidia did. Presumably they will at some point. Unless they don't want to risk other cloud providers from pulling their games from steam.
I would have to buy some TB of additional storage to have the whole library on my machine.
This might also be a plus for steam.
For the hex editing, I would have to ask around on the internet, which would maybe also be a solution to storing everything locally
> It was utterly shocking that Google did not copy Nvidia's streaming games
They wanted the lock in. They did it for profit margin. Because people like the Director of Product the GP mentions hops from one role to the next its all short term nonsense.
> Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos.
Assuming the rumor about Stadia is true, then in hindsight, this is directly tarnishing the reputation of those other products. Every canceled product does, but it's strange to see it in writing. Although I wouldn't give this comment much weight, it's clearly dodging the answer.
>Theres nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't
Why can't everything be licensed directly from the right owner of a game so that the license of a game can be transferred from one streaming service to another?
So what? What are they going to do - start using Bing and only watching videos on Vimeo and Nebula? Google can keep doing this for eternity as long as it doesn't result in people getting ads served from someone else.
It should have been "netflix for games". If it were, it would have been hugely successful.
As it was released, I had zero interest in Stadia for all the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. And I am the perfect target consumer for Stadia. I have a large monthly budget for games, I travel enough that it makes sense to have a portable gaming platform, and I embrace tech early. Even with all this, I had zero interest in Stadia simply because it was a Google product that I knew would be canceled.
But so what if it's canceled if you played some cool games for $10/month.
I wouldn't care if Netflix was canceled. I would just watch my movies elsewhere.
I absolutely buy that Stadia might be getting shut down, but I really don't think the underlying tech is going anywhere. Google wants to white-label the service as Google Stream or something similar - they've done this already with T-Mobile[0].
If I had to guess, they'll shut down Stadia as a platform but keep the tech alive, rebrand, give everyone new URLs to play the games they've already purchased. Kinda similar to how they migrated everyone's songs/purchases from Google Play Music to Youtube Music when they shut down GPM.
yeah, perhaps. It's just a guess - but I think the marginal cost of giving people links (that they would probably use much less than the usual stadia service) would be cheap considering the overall hit to Google's reputation. I could see it being justified from an accounting perspective, and I already think they're going to keep the underlying tech active albeit in a different form. So it wouldn't bee too operationally intensive, afaik.
I've been saying this is exactly and the only sort of thing blockchain might be able to solve. Absolutely prove you bought a thing. Only question is how to get another service to care to respect that.
Maybe prove Y% of your X purchase went to the rights holder. So you can only be charged for Z-Y to get that same thing from another service.
> This right here is why I couldn't give less of a shit about google's C++ replacement.
I think programming languages are a bit different. (Assuming they're not encumbered by patents / trademarks / copyright the way Java was/is.)
If Google decides to bail on Carbon, any design work, published implementations, etc. remain accessible for others to use or build upon.
If Google were to abandon Carbon, the main risk I see is that Google would not longer contribute to Carbon's refinement and implementation. So maybe that would reduce the odds of Carbon reaching critical mass, but it wouldn't flat out prevent people from legally continuing to use it.
All good points, I've just been burnt too many times. Same reason I never pre order or beta a game, etc.
Google has gone beyond destroying my goodwill to the point I actively despise them. I loved chrome at first. Same with gmail, google voice, youtube shit even google maps. All started good all now garbage. Same with Facebook and Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Uber, Doordash.
"The source also claims that there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down."
There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again.
But there are some games that are digital only and I fear the next generation of games will be like Xbox. You buy a physical that does nothing more than connect to a server that downloads the game.
Perhaps legally allowing backups of games you purchased would help.
>Perhaps legally allowing backups of games you purchased would help
as great as that would be, the corporate-run governments of the world would see that as tantamount to legalising video game piracy, one of the few (if not, the only) media that have actually succeeded in making online piracy difficult
It would be difficult from a security perspective, but if they provided their own flash drives for backing up games it could be the best for consumers and the manufacturers.
Nearly all software produced currently ships out with the assumption that updates can easily be pushed out. As a concrete example, twenty years from now I don't want to play the original Mario Kart 8 that shipped when the switch was released, I would want to play the Mario Kart 8 that has double the levels that they are currently slowly dropping over the next year. The ideal situation would be an ability to write that information back to the card.
Couple that with another law that enforces consumers ability to roll back updates to any previous version they desire and you're fully protected with the ability to play your games essentially forever
I have this pipe dream that the digital markets act forces consoles to either allow sideloading and lose basically all of the profits on their ecosystems, or remove digital markets entirely and go back to physical games only.
>There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again.
The problem is that there really isn't a way to legislate it. The content is tied to the service (either the platform service like the Switch, or the game service itself), and if the servers aren't running, you're done. No backup is going to help you. And there's piracy. I do not see any governments creating legislating to force publishers (or platform (e.g. Steam) or console manufacturers) to remove anti-piracy measures.
Mandate keeping the servers open. Or to put it another way, mandate that purchases which were advertised and sold as purchases of content (not "licenses", as the wink and nod legal fiction the industry likes to fall back on when questioned) remain fit for purpose, or the buyer is entitled to a full refund.
Then let the industry figure out the technical details. Most of these services amount to a bog standard download of encrypted files. There is absolutely nothing about this that requires any more than the most basic infrastructure anybody reading this could set up.
Alternatively, we force them to describe these time boxed, locked down, lacking basic consumer rights things we're purchasing as the rentals they actually are.
Awful idea. Great way to permanently move all content services to subscription based as nobody in their right mind would ever commit to keeping up servers for the rest of eternity for every game or movie they create.
You didn't read the rest of the comment. I'm not talking about things like multiplayer games, I'm talking about things like being able to download the stuff you purchased (purchased, not "licensed") in perpetuity, or at least for a reasonably long period of time, rather than just when the company gets bored.
That is not an unreasonable ask, especially considering the high degree of control society grants them over these products when they are sold. That grant should come with some responsibilities.
>I'm not talking about things like multiplayer games
What is and isn't a 'multiplayer game' isn't so clear cut. Neither is the reason why 'multiplayer games' should be exempt from this.
But let's leave that aside, the problem is that there isn't a simple, clear-cut legislation to fix this. Instead you would need to create a big regulatory and enforcement framework, along with a technical framework defined and built by the publishers .. and even then it isn't so clear-cut that this is enough. And yes, all this would raise the barrier of entry for indie developers who now would need the equivalent of 'regulatory approval' to release their games.
Given that this would take an enormous amount of effort to pass, only to satisfy a small number of video game aficionados, it's hard to see why any government would expand the effort and political capital to do it.
I believe the threat of legislation by itself may do the trick, without the need to actually get into the process. Do you remember how the ESRB was formed? There was a governmental push as a result of complaints about videogame content, with the government vowing to form a legislative solution unless the industry regulated itself.
As it turns out, they got together and came up with their own ratings system, and it was largely a success.
Again, my criteria for success is that digital content should not be arbitrarily removed from the purchaser. That's it. However we get there is an implementation detail. The hypothetical indie could shove the files on an S3 bucket and call it a day. The hypothetical multibillion-dollar mega corp could push an update to their console which redirects all download links to an absolutely basic file store of some kind that the console would work with.
I think you are missing the unintended consequences of mandating servers stay open if games are purchased. The way to avoid that permanent liability is to just get rid of purchases and force all games into a subscription.
> And there's piracy. I do not see any governments creating legislating to force publishers (or platform (e.g. Steam) or console manufacturers) to remove anti-piracy measures.
Decriminalization of piracy so people can support themselves would be a good start, but I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
No need for laws, all the digital game stores are going to migrate their users to game subscription services regardless. It's much more clear legally speaking that you walk away from a subscription service with nothing, and it lets platforms drop support for problematic content. Nobody wants to be responsible for your digital library.
Stadia has provided an excellent game night for me and my remote friend (who is on a Mac) this year and we've had a blast, we mostly play little party games as nither of us our big gamers, but it makes for an excellent night,i've bought a couple of games on it that i've yet to even get too and plan to buy some more and enjoy the odd hour or two in the evenings. Stadia removes all fraction and means I don't need to install/update or have gaming hardware.
The service is great. Despite it not being popular. It would be an absolute disaster for me if the service were to close.
No where near as good and as stable as Stadia, also the monthly fee is a pain.
With Stadia you can just buy the game and then play when you want, I don't think there is anything else like that.
Is performance better now? I was in the beta when there wasn't a limited selection of games and my friend used the free version once it came out of beta about a year and a half ago.
It's been my main gaming platform the last 2 years and I'd describe it as more than serviceable. They do a bunch of free demos now - I think WaveTale is free for the next 24hrs you can try it out yourself. The subscription is optional.
Its performance is unparalleled among cloud gaming services at the moment with the updates over the past year or so, Stadia is now a blurry, poorly upscaled mess in comparison, often locked at 30-45fps for certain titles while GFN is pushing real 4K at 120FPS with full ray tracing etc without breaking a sweat.
It will routinely outperform a local series x (nevermind a PS5) given the right conditions, but that’s subject to your ISP, location, and probably not running CP2077 at maxed out ultra RTX graphics settings just yet.
That’s likely just Google burning cash to attract users though. Unsustainable.
The cloud time is the expensive part and most of the purchase price is likely going to go to the publisher. How many hours of gameplay before they’ve lost money on your purchase?
Not tried GamePass as it's expensive and a subscription service unlike Stadia, I used Geforce now before and it wasn't very good. My friend reports Stadia works far better for them when compared to Geforce now which is not as well optomised / laggy etc. I think it might require a stronger connection that what she has, where as Stadia works flawlessly.
Not sure if game pass is better but the price would put me off a little bit, because we only play for a few hours every couple of weeks.
I think the distance to the datacentre is a huge element in the lagginess, so I doubt we can declare one service better than another with only anecdata.
I mostly agree. I'm a "gamer" but not a very serious/avid one. Stadia has been great for casual play and a few of the family/kids games that I play along with my little ones. They have a blast. I also enjoy the cross-platform nature of it. Using a Chromecast is great on the huge projector and then sometimes more casual play on a computer (via the browser) since some games I prefer to play not on a huge screen and with a mouse/keyboard instead of their Stadia Controller.
I haven't bought many titles, personally, so if it is disappeared, I wouldn't be terribly upset. Annoyed, yes.
And it would probably cause me to go hunt around a bit more at Xbox Cloud gaming (Which I have also tried and looks promising with a nice but small library of titles) and I have yet to check out GeForce Now but have heard good things there, too.
Their mistake was assuming the American telecoms would actually deliver real 5G in any reasonable amount of time. Maybe they should've tested it in the Korean market.
Even with fiber (or hell, LAN), game streaming is still very much inferior to a local experience for many games. The only market they can capture is casual users that still want to play AAA console games, when most of the casual audience is on phones.
At $60-$80 dollar per game, it's not too far to just buy an Xbox Series S for $300. Plus Game Pass is a great way to find a game you enjoy without investing time into research or money into trying a bunch of games.
Which was a stupid bet given the problems things like OnLive had.
They also had that bald dude out there doing tone def interviews talking like everyone has internet like the bay area and if they didn't then those customers didn't matter.
There should probably be more regulations to protect both the users and the environment from hardware that becomes e-waste the moment a cloud service shuts down.
But as for the software side, it's pretty much down to users to realise they they don't 'own' any digital content unless it's completely DRM free and not reliant on somebody else's servers. Stadia was always high-risk and quite likely to fail, but how many years can you guarantee that something like Steam or iTunes will remain up for?
(And even if the servers remain up for many decades to come, you could potentially lose access to all your 'purchases' for other reasons... perhaps your near-future social credit score will drop below the required threshold for continued access?)
Google has a bunch of great products, but most of their consumer facing success are driven by data collection and ads. Even if it's just a rumor, I don't see any evidence that Google is able to run successful products that requires actual support to paying users.
Stadia does makes sort of sense as an idea to try, in that it exists in a space where Android, GCP and YouTube intersects. It's entertainment, you could bring it to Android phones potentially and utilize Google infrastructure. Still it seems a bit far of from what Google can do.
I have no proof but I called it on day one. This never stood a chance. It made no sense. They could've saved billions of dollars by just talking to me for 5 minutes, a gamer.
Hopefully one of those team members/memberettes can go on to implement some standard protocols like client side caldav and carddav on Android since, you know, Google is so open.
I mean, buying games at full retail price that you can only use on their service is not very appealing to me... I hope they'll give out Steam codes or something to folks that did.
> The source also claims that there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down.
This is precisely why I didn't try Stadia. I never expected anything more from Google.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] thread* Death
* Taxes
* Google shutting down services
Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for consumers who buy into googles promises and even a bit for the google engineers who may be out of work soon.
I don't see anything wrong with the premise of the service or even from what I understand the technical execution.
Seems like the failure was around business development, marketing, community management, and brand reputation.
I haven't followed to closely though so other would know better than me.
To be fair that's normally the case for Google.
Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue.
Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds.
They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.
You will own nothing and be happy. Great.
I think the real failing is what you stated - biz dev and brand reputation.
Read the other replies and you will see folks say "There were no games" or "The selection was limited." Why in the world would a major game company hesitate to invest in google and google services? Well, if you have a reputation of killing off your services like the grim reaper, I imagine that would come up in an executive risk assessment.
Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Consider Microsoft's reputation in the late mid to late 90's on slashdot and other forums compared to their reputation today. It took a lot of work but possible.
Googles going to have to put down the scythe though.
Every time they take a decision like this one, they are making the hole deeper.
To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly.
I remember a poster proudly announcing that they will announce one year in advance when they plan to shut down a service on GCS.
Maybe they should look what happens when a company like HP announces end of support for OpenVMS 5 - 10 years in advance (as just an example pulled out of my ass with some Wikipedia backing the statement up) there's a lot of wailing and howling amongst their enterprise customers.
Those are the timescales big shops think in when it comes to their strategic IT decisions.
Frankly, I don't see Google ever satisfying such requirements backed by iron clad guarantees.
I disagree. It is much easier to regain trust with enterprise customers than with end users.
Enterprise costumers have contracts and lawyers on retainer. Google can draft a contract which binds them to performing a service. They can write in penalties with bite which shows to their enterprise customers that they mean it.
That is assuming that they really want to.
On the other hand this trick doesn't work with end users. They don't have lawyers to evaluate such an offer, and they have lot less of a chance of successfully suing google even if they would have favourable contracts.
The offering is a bit limited but there are several really good games that are worth buying.
I am now pretty reluctant to pay to keep any games though with this rumour alive.
My impression is that Google has actually changed how new initiatives are funded from the exec layer, such that there’s less likelihood of completely overlapping products being created, such as a new messaging service. I could be wrong about that, and even if I’m right it might change again in the future, but at least for now I’d be surprised to see a new messaging service get launched.
Can I interest you in a sixth, incompatible rewrite of Google Wallet instead that will only launch in India while you make Google Pay 7.0 ?
Perhaps it is not their responsibility but I guess they accepted the risk in the first place. I don't think Google will kill the service anytime soon though and this rumor is probably wrong. Won't get too many new users with them around either.
If the rumor is true, the service is killed off.
If the rumor is false, well it sounds like something google would do, and consumers will hesitate to buy into it and businesses definitely won't. I've read and written my fair share of executive summaries before - I imagine this would make its way into it.
For a while Google was literally giving away Stadia controllers, a Chromecast device to support using it with a TV, and games for free. Every power user/gamer type person I know that took them up on it fooled around with it, agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
The big difference, I think, for why google is made fun of for stadia but few people throw rocks at Microsoft is the game selection. Microsoft does not kill off their projects willy-nilly so game manufacturers, I assume, feel better about crawling into their bed than googles.
And let me tell you, the only reason I was able to finish it is because the entire gimmick of that game is that when you're not moving, time doesn't move forward. So I could just wait out the regular lag spikes that happened every single play session. I would never choose to play a game like that.
I live in a moderately-sized city in Canada (~250,000 people?)
That's the difference, there simply wasn't any point investing in Stadia, because, well, this. There was no value to achivements, generated media, friend circles or god-forbid buying games because we knew it was going to be cancelled.
What kind of gaming platform randomly bans high profile game devs. because an automated Youtube bot told them to? A bad joke of one.
> It does in fact work quite well.
Didn't they fake high res video streams by up scaling bad renders? Haven't used it but as far as I understand there was quite a bit of overpromising and underdelivering going on.
> other first-party console alternatives,
Their competition would be GeForce Now from NVIDIA. Which not only is still a thing but also predates Stadia by several years.
> agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
So did the free trial run out? Where the games crap? Have you ever asked them why they decided that it wasn't worth using?
You mean the same friends that "just stopped using it"? There is something weird about the combination of purely positive feedback and everyone you know dropping it.
That particular statement was with regard to suggested technical issues surrounding graphics. My friends and I generally found the play experience to be unobjectionable. My very statement explains that we all abandoned the product in favor of alternatives that provided a superior experience in one way or the other, not necessarily related to play experience. I for one prefer the versatility that a general low-latency desktop session via Parsec provides. Another friend that's deeply invested in the Xbox ecosystem preferred to use Microsoft's competing game streaming offering.
Which is why Stadia is a bad joke.
But like everything Google these days, they made some poor initial choices, didn’t take in any customer feedback, dug in instead of pivoting, then slashed and burned when it failed to become a billion dollar business overnight.
Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.
No need. Sony and Microsoft have their own (quite good) tech for this.
Sony's actually been in the game streaming game for nearly a decade. PS Now launched in 2014. I haven't used it personally, but I hear it's great.
Microsoft xCloud has been available for almost two years, in preview for a year before that. I got home once and found my wife playing Dragon Age II. I sat and watched for a little, then she quit the game, and only then did I discover she had been streaming it. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea that it was being streamed. Truly impressive tech.
I agree! They really gave Console as a Service a shot. But back in the day when it was launching, my take was that the "new console" part of it was secondary. The core goal would have been to get a foot in the game streaming market for their Android TV / Cast platform.
> dug in instead of pivoting
If this rumour is true, maybe that's exactly what's happening. They've proven that the experience is good enough for people to play games on it, and even pay for the privilege. So it's technically sound (depending on geography).
Gamers aren't going to play through the entire new Skyrim on Stadia, Google knows that. But what about Gamers (in the right geographical location) watching a Youtube video on their smart TV being served an ad? That ad for the new Skyrim has a "Play demo now" button, no download required, instant gameplay. Now that's an expensive ad if I've ever seen one.
So what's Google to even do?
* They could burn money and keep the offering afloat to "prove" they are serious (seems to be the case with Stadia).
* They can pivot/transition the offering (see Google Glass).
* Or they can use new offerings for R&D (and in some cases, like that of Stadia, be paid for that R&D), and then fold that technology/data somewhere else (see Wave) - this seems like the path most taken.
If we remember Google's core competencies, the revolving door of offerings as feeder into their larger services makes sense on paper, but I do agree that it's hurting consumer confidence and there is a hidden cost to that.
So yes, it's Google's turn to show commitment and keep their services running. Plus, the possible loss with keeping Stadia up should also be weighted against this cementing their reputation.
Agreed. The ball is in Google's court. Consumers should (and clearly do) cast a vote of "no confidence" with their wallet.
Don't use cloud streaming services and purchase your copies if you don't believe in cloud streaming services. It is as simple as that.
However, those services could be profitable, just at a smaller scale. They could keep them around and exploit them without too much investments. This is what other large companies do, they won't break the experience for their customers because they value them.
Google has another approach.
Disclaimer: haven’t ever worked at Google, so just guessing
Selling access to a machine on demand seems much more appealing.
GeForce NOW, despite initial problems with publishers, will always leave you with the option of moving to a different service or building your own machine to run the games you own.
Spin off non-core companies as soon as humanly possible with some investment and simply be a (majority) investor in them instead.
If they were serious about Stadia, Google should have worked to provide experiences only Stadia could allow. That was one tagline of SG&E before it was canned a mere 18 months in - clear failure on Google's part because you can't develop a game that fast.
As for what could have gone differently - cut deals with smart TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app on the TV, making it easy for millions to try it out.
Instead, the Stadia app wasn't even on the Chromecast initially. (OK, memory vague here but I remember having to fiddle around and after upgrading from the Chromecast that came with the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle to Google TV with Chromecast or whatever they were calling it, it was still a while before the Stadia app was there or left beta).
I also thought Google should have done a sports game tie-in, or perhaps F1 racing, to essentially let viewers replay something they just watched. Kind of a live replay, where YOU control the offense/defense/car. Say you're watching a soccer match and team X scores. During a break, advertise Stadia's version of FIFA, click a button and replay the scoring play where you control one of the teams. Can you also score, or can you defend??
Yes this would be complicated licensing and software between TV ads, game maker, license holders, etc. but it would have showcased an advantage Stadia had over traditional consoles/pc gamers - immediacy, play right on your TV in response to something you just watched. Brady just score a touchdown - can you do it to, or play defense and stop it (pick up Stadia controller, click some buttons or whatever and get dropped into that scenario, ready to play)??
I think this would have had insane appeal among sports fans, building excitement, etc. But no, Stadia just crapped itself and cancelled their in-house studio and basically tread water for the rest of the time.
Other companies like Amazon and Sony are also no stranger to product cancellations. The major difference is that when Amazon or Sony cancels a product, they will refund early adopters the cost of the product. Google isn’t willing to do that.
After that, they need to think very carefully before starting anything new, and if they do, commit to it.
It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show.
This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.
Stadia owes them a retail copy of the games they purchased.
no games were actually purchased, so customers are free to take their complaints and do exactly nothing with them.
(yes, this is egregious)
But I just can’t convince myself to pay full price for a game when it’s restricted to a platform like stadia.
I guess I’m a hypocrite because I own steam games and plenty of movies on my Apple TV. I feel like steam is a little different because I’m installing them on my own machine? (I know they can take the games away) I know I can’t trust Apple to not take my movies away but I think the likelihood that my Apple TV library won’t be accessible for the next 20 years is pretty low.
Google in particular disappoints me often. They haven’t created a great money generating product since search/ads which is the evergreen money tree which funds all other experiments.
Google gives up on new products far too often and far too easily. They seem to forget, or never learned, that unwavering persistence is a powerful foundation for building a product line. Apple didn’t give up on iCloud after the disaster that was MobileMe, they rebuilt it and kept on going.
Adoption of stadia was sufficiently small that Google will pay the full refund cost just to prevent PR damage or lawsuit losses (and take the loss themselves, because the game developer isn't going to want to give a refund).
Problem is, it's Google. Who are you going to complain to, and where? You'll be lucky if there's even a way to submit a complaint, much less one that gets read by a human. I suppose you could use the good old Tell HN technique!
Not true. Maybe if you mainly play ubisoft tiles.
And here's a list of games which are sold through Steam but which nonetheless do not use Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
Why would such a list be necessary if games sold through Steam that used Steam DRM were the minority?
I think what you may be saying is the behavior if you open a Steamworks game while Steam is opened, it just executes as normal. Any authentication or nonsense happens in the background. Try opening a Steamworks game with steam closed, it will force steam to open and login before the game can be played.
You'll get a message about steam.dll missing or being unable to authenticate.
You can also sign out of steam, unplug from the internet and try to launch - and again, you won't be able to except this time steam will launch and tell you to login.
There's this family sharing thing though, where you can share your Steam library between 5 accounts and up to 10 computers:
https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing
I don't see too much of a difference other than Steam has more proven longevity - even if the developers that sold games on Steam don't. I can still download Dungeons of Dreadmor from Steam even though the company appears to have disappeared in 2016.
That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear.
Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential hacking and mods). If I want permanence I get a DRM free downloadable game from GoG.
Simply not true. There is really no arguments here. You can run most games directly from the game files without steam. In the cases were you can't you would have issues with DRM in all other venues of purchase.
No, Steam sells permanent licenses.
I don't know where you're getting this from.
To quote from https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/:
> [long list of things you can obtain/do via Steam] are referred to in this Agreement as "Content and Services;" the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.
There is zero legal entitlement to any given subscription in this agreement. The fact that they call it a "subscription", and that this is the "Subscriber Agreement" is not by accident. Rather, they explicitly reserve the right to cancel your "rights to access and/or use" their offers (aka subscriptions).
I mean, no? Just no. Kindle doesn't sell you permanent irrevocable licenses and neither does steam, nor origin etc. They've each been revoked in the past and it's demonstrably true. Their TOS is clear and trivial to read. They all grant personal, limited, non-transferable, revocable and non-exclusive licenses.
You may be able to crack the downloaded steam game files to get them to run. But that's lateral to steam and irrelevant to discussion. if you're going to run cracked files skip steam and go to piratebay.
In fact I remember reading from a community representative that there are plans for this in place (not the best source but whatever https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...)
This isn't even a sketchy crack thing, it's an open source tool. Look up Goldberg emulator.
Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing.
Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve never been one to own an impressive gaming rig and dealing with a tiny bit of lag to avoid spending $3000 on a solid rig would be totally worth it.
Maybe valve should add a Stadia-like service in the future to allow you to play the game on their machines and stream it back when you want to.
GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved it for the last year or so when my computer couldn't run cyberpunk 2077 and I didn't want to sell kidney for a rtx card :)
The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.
The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!
The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:
* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)
* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games
The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.
[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.
AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.
You still bought the game, you're just running elsewhere. They're worried about ports - they want to sell you that sweet android/iOS port of their game. That's why they block the games.
nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.
It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.
XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.
And this is the #1 problem with stadia - it's a completely different platform, it's as far away from Windows as PS5/Xbox are. You can't just run Stadia version of games on your PC, even if you could download them. GeForce NOW is a much better product, because it runs normal Windows executables(just in the cloud).
You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone.
And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms).
Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you're almost certainly better off just buying it outright at $800, than paying google $10 dollars a month for 5 years for vaporware. Plus at the end of it, you likely still have a perfectly functional computer, more than capable of handling basic mail/web/videos, or serving content (I have machines going back 18 years sitting on the dirt in my basement serving content).
An amusing typo :)
The anti-circumvention statutes mean DRM complicates matters, but you definitely have a legal right to the game files themselves. For what it's worth, I believe that a competent lawyer could successfully argue that disabling DRM is an "adaptation" that's an "essential step in the utilization of the computer program." Get the case in front of Judge Alsup or some other computer literate judge and the argument would probably even prevail.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
""" Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Support!
My name is Dianne, and I'm sorry to hear that you have been unable to redownload the album "Rachmaninov: Complete Piano Concertos", on your new computer. I can certainly understand how this could be disappointing for you, please be assured that I'm happy to help.
Unfortunately, this item is no longer in the iTunes Store, and only items that are currently available can be redownloaded.
If the content provider no longer offers these purchases on the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBookstore, your content will not be available for you to download again.
However, if you still have this album on the original computer, you can certainly transfer it to you new computer. You can do this in several ways. See the following article for how to transfer iTunes Store purchases using Home Sharing, an external drive, an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, or iPod), the Windows Migration Assistant, and CDs/DVDs: """
Good luck doing that for a game that consumers were only ever sent frames of. If/when there's a streaming-exclusive game, it'll be conclusively lost to time when the company stops letting people play it.
This is the tragedy of game development. I heard the other day that copies of Anthem are selling for a penny at GameStop. When EA abandons that game (any day now), all of the work of those programmers, artists, and everyone else will basically be lost. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, gone.
Meanwhile, here is what Steam's subscriber agreement says https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/english/
> Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally [...]
There was a “remember password” option, but the session would still expire.
There would have to be some effort to unlink those games from the auth services.
Also, yes, but I mean you could find a solution I'm sure. As long as you have the copies a solution would be found - just like I can play my PS1 games without owning a PS1. With Stadia there aren't any copies to speak of. Once the servers go down that's it.
Steam is a DRM system with good branding, that gamers treat as special because it comes from Valve. Anecdotally, a lot of gamers believe and trust that Valve would free their games of DRM if Valve ever went out of business or otherwise shut down Steam. Of course this isn't true, they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own (which is the vast majority of the games on Steam) and whatever informal promises Gabe made years aren't worth a damn. Nevertheless, this sort of mistaken expectation affords Valve/Steam a lot of good will they really don't deserve.
In one you paid for the product, in other you didn't.
I'd think that's a pretty substantial difference?
Ip laws are the worst and terrible for the market. Especially the media companies that just recharge you for for the same content just to watch it on a different medium.
That's a really good way of putting it, I'm gonna steal that (irony unintended). It's totally true - when you purchase software or services it's conditional. You have some voucher that can be redeemed at the discretion of the provider, and there are always many ways (EULA violation, company goes away) that the voucher can be negated.
But when you steal something you aren't beholden to anyone. You actually "own" that piece of software in a way more concrete way. Yes, someone could pursue legal charges and force you to remove it, but it's a totally separate system vs the built-in contract between customer/ service.
In the EU at least, you absolutely own the copy and are free to do with it as you please though, including making more copies for your own safekeeping. There are other comments in this thread pointing out that even in US with its crazy laws you also have this right, although I cannot comment on that personally.
My issue with "just download a crack" is that I have to spend time hunting down the crack, and I can't be sure the crack won't include malware, or won't introduce bugs which only appear later in the game. The last of these has happened to me on multiple occasions. A cracked game is no longer the product I bought.
By contrast, when I buy a game on GOG, I get a product that is DRM Free and will work forever—and because it's the product I actually purchased, I receive some minimal level of assurance from the retailer.
I would feel somewhat differently if there was a single "universal" crack that worked on all Steam games, or even which worked on 95% of Steam games and failed in a predictable way on the remaining 5%. This is the case for iTunes TV Shows, and so I have no problem paying for those, because I can run them through some software and I know the DRM will get stripped correctly every time with no quality loss. I'm not aware of any such software for Steam games.
All PS1 games have been archived, yes, because the method of ripping a PS1 game is consistent across every title, and the total number of games released was relatively small. That's not the case with PC games today, and I think it's virtually inevitable that a lot of indie games released exclusively on Steam will eventually be lost to time. As will many of the indie games released without DRM on itch.io—but at least any game you downloaded from itch.io will be playable forever.
You can argue cloud gaming is even worse. Maybe so, but at least it provides a lot of extra utility, since you can play on low-end devices. Steam provides automatic updates, that's kind of nice I guess, but not in the same class as running Assassin's Creed on your phone†. (Even then, I personally wouldn't pay full price for a game I can only run on someone else's servers, but I understand why someone else might.)
I don't like Steam.
† In theory. I've always found cloud gaming has too much latency for me. But in theory, if it worked perfectly—which perhaps it never will—the promise is nuts.
If it wouldn't be legal, then downloading the crack to the game you paid to play through Steam but can't anymore would presumably be just as illegal as pirating the whole game to begin with. Did you really purchase the game or just an indefinite (but not necessarily eternal) license to play it?
> You "buy" the game from Stadia, it's taken from you, so now you pirate the game.
> You "buy" the game from Steam, it's taken from you, so now you download the pirate's crack to the game.
In either case, the original developer received compensation so I don't think you should feel any moral obligations to anybody. Morally they're equivalent, the only real difference is whether you have the gamefiles already downloaded or not. In both cases you need to dip into the shadier side of the net to get the game you "bought" to run.
You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.
You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.
Both Gabe Newell, the founder/owner of Steam/Vale, and the official support response is now to state that they would provide means for users to continue to have access to their games should Steam shut down. Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.
When game companies go out of business, Steam will remove their product from the store, but continue enabling users who already purchased it access to it, and I expect this independence/guarantee of of access is part of their normal licensing. There is also already 'offline mode' for Steam, and setting the expiration of this mode to e.g. 100 years would be trivial from their side.
In the case of third party games with DRM on Steam: Valve doesn't have a license to distribute those games without DRM, so they're effectively promising to become a pirate software distributor. They have the technical means to do this, but not the legal right. They're almost certainly self-deluding if not lying outright when they promise to do this. I lean towards flagrantly lying; they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising but they're promising it anyway. And if they're willing to lie about this, I think you should reevaluate their promises respecting first party games as well.
Do they not? Did you read the terms for publishing a game on Steam?
I didn’t, but it’s within reason it contains a provision for just this eventuality.
Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.
It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.
So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.
Present it as a feature?
“In the event of the dissolution of Steam/Valve, we will endeavour to do everything reasonable to ensure that previously purchased licenses to your content keep working for subscribers in the absence of the Steam platform.”
Just because they try to keep it working doesn’t mean they have to make it DRM free (e.g. copyable between all computers without any checks).
If they shutdown due to bankruptcy (which seems unlikely at the moment, but could change, without much notice since they're private and don't have required public reporting), there may not be anything to collect or anyone to compell to fulfill the promise.
I have a few hundreds games in steam and while maybe one day I may lose access to all of them it’s a risk I am willing to take because:
- I don’t think it will happen anytime soon because it’s a money making machine. The biggest risk for me is Microsoft acquiring it and stopping any work on Linux related stuff (I have been using steam solely on Linux for the past 7+ years)
- Even if I lose access to the library, Steam will have done a better job that I could. I know for sure that I lost the media for the first steam-enabled games I bought but I can still play them.
those are rookie numbers, a couple months of humble bundle and your library can be full of shit you'll never play
To say this project failed and everyone is just out of luck would really shows what kind of company Alphabet/Google really is.
Don't expect human decency from a corporation, because corporations aren't humans. They're alien intelligence constructed out of humans, but that humanity is not inherited.
related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain
They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.
Plus, the most likely thing to happen to Valve is a MS acquisition.
Is it known who will helm Valve if Gabe decides to leave? Plagman has been a big name there with the recent SteamOS platform development but I'm not sure who the actual second-in-command would be.
This is true, but also this is all new. Sooner than later there will be a case of a 20 year old company who licenses media that burns their customer base. It's inevitable.
It was always an odd setup to sell something for a fixed fee that potentially has an endless cost to deliver. Google have always been vague about how to square that circle. They could have sold fixed term or rolling licences but chose not to. I suspect had Stadia game sales reached a certain threshold they'd have done something like that but it's not something you want to talk about with a new system.
... that said, I'd expect the margins were far lower / cost was higher than what Google was used to, and they financially decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
I used the service and as a techie knew it wasn't really sustainable but the average consumer buying in good faith wasn't warned that their purchase might be so short lived. Might have been hidden in the TOS but that won't cut the mustard in many jurisdictions and will be an expensive battle.
I suspect they made a small amount of sales and it'll be cheaper and easier for them to credit than fight.
I'm not saying Google won't pay out, but I just think there's a lot of reasons why they might not.
Might sound crazy but the 100m would be more effective to the brand than spending 100m on marketing.
Further, Google exited this market. Do they really care about marketing to these people anymore? Their main revenue is non-consensual tracking, it's not like being mad at Google is going to matter unless you really go out of your way because of it.
I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.
It’s important to save the offline installers too. I keep a rather large external for my GOG library.
However is it the right thing to do? Will it damage their reputation to do that?
If they wanted to dodge that beating they'd offer steam/epic/xbox/ps5/switch keys to their customers to claim. Any game their customer bought is probably over a year old at this point and they can cut a deal with the publishers to get deeply discounted keys and eat the costs.
But technically when you buy a game you're not really buying a game anymore, there's no physical item purchased.
You're merely purchasing a temporary non-transferable license to use it.
Back in the '90s if I gave you a Game boy game, it now belonged to you. I guess if I started a company renting them out Nintendo could sue me for copyright infringement though.
Now when I download a game, I'm merely permitted temporary usage. I can't give it to you
> Back in the '90s if I gave you a Game boy game, it now belonged to you.
Fip side is that if you lost the cartridge or it broke you had to buy it again. Granted, that almost never happened.
The few that used the service maybe. Most people have never heard of it.
No way the gaming community would be opposed to such a thing.
I’d be willing to pay a game developer a premium for a universal license that works on all platforms. Steam, Switch, Stadia, etc for example.
I bet they’d make more revenue this way than from the people who just rebuy the game multiple times.
I do wish that a major government would pass a law to this effect- if you advertise something as "buy", "purchase", or "own" then you need to have and execute on a plan to ensure access in perpetuity, even if you go out of business.
* XBox fitness remains the best product I've ever used that didn't make it in the market.
It's still by far the best game streaming setup for what I want. I spent about $100 figuring I'd get a year or two out of it and it would be worth it for that. It was. If it continues through the end of the year I'll have gotten a lot more than I expected to.
When they shut it down I will probably just stop playing video games again until a similarly simple and effective service pops up, probably years from now or possibly never.
Xbox Cloud Gaming https://www.xbox.com/en-US/play
GeForce Now https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/
PlayStation Plus https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps-plus/getting-started/#p...
I mean it 'was' a streaming platform [0] as I already outlined from the future and called it, since it failed to get anyone using it back then, even in the pandemic and lockdowns and is still struggling today.
So it was expected and very unsurprising really.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202
You'll have to pry my Stadia controller from my cold, dead hands.
(Granted, it's all a rumor so far)
I don't think it's "trivial" though. They probably have to do some negotiation with both Steam as well as each individual publisher of games on the service.
They're probably just going to rebrand it as "Chrome Games" and have people play in their browsers or any supported devices.
If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stopped trying to cover their shortcomings with political virtue signalling.
(I agree with you, if that's not clear: it didn't even create/define the market or take in any way significantly away from the incumbent.)
At least with Apple you know the service is gonna hang around for awhile, even if it doesn’t set the world alight.
I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-...
But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take.
How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former.
Edit:
To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions.
Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important:
- Iterate on the user experience
- Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc..
- Fix bugs, keep it running
- Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
- Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.
Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).
In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.
The reply was that Spotify and Netflix worked, but all music streaming services have basically the same selection these days, and movies are deemed more disposable than games as seen by the rise of people rotating subscriptions as movie video streaming fragments, so they were never perfect indicators. The one worry was that Google would buy its way in with exclusives and introductory pricing a la Epic, but Google's pride probably prevented that.
If you look at the opportunity cost of supporting a small side business va building a bigger business.. you drop the small thing. Google engineering is expensive and they have a somewhat polished brand that they don’t want to muddle with a bunch of “non winners”.
Amazon has the opposite problem. They build everything and have to find a way to scale their internal orgs to handle lots of tiny side revenue streams. I signed up for a magazine subscription through Amazon and they had a website redesign that accidentally (?) removed the management portal link for a few weeks. They do so much they can’t even stay internally consistent.
The biggest issue with that approach is that they're burning customer goodwill, and that affects their odds down the line of getting customer acceptance. Stadia is just another project in a long line of cancelled projects that leaves customers screwed over and less willing to use Google products in the future.
Your point about Amazon is pretty interesting, IMHO I think that's why in the long term Amazon will keep on beating GCP in the cloud space. Amazon having such a large set of offerings is that it makes their cloud offering particularly compelling, especially considering they seem to keep old services alive and have relatively stable interfaces. Their offerings might not be as polished as GCP's, and some of them are laughably awful, but at least I feel confident that Amazon won't change the API or deprecate/retire the service.
If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
And if Geforce Now goes under I retain all my games, because it’s all linked to Steam and Epic.
But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.
Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it.
I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.
In other words... they built a chat app inside their chat app.
Can’t say google workspaces is better.
I can't really understand how people can trust google domains.
Years ago I got tired of the mess that was Google Picasa and transferred all photos, videos, and most important docs to Amazon Drive. Now I need to find yet another service.
Or build your own NAS is you have the time and experience.
I spent about $1000 on a synology and drives and that’s given me 10 years of 10TB so it’s actually pretty cost effective too. Cheaper than Dropbox or OneDrive.
I only wish there was some community disk swap program that would be good for reliable off sites. I looked into storj but you have to share like 100mb or something to make enough to pay for 1mb.
Amazon is also known to kill products but only ones no one uses.
You could argue bezos was a genius in this regard by religiously avoiding disclosing to wall street his true margins.
We tend to forget that modern shareholders don't care much about which companies their money is invested in, it's just a stock with some numbers in a spreadsheet making the difference between investing in Google vs. Exxon.
But it seems like Google put practically zero effort into growing Stadia into having a respectable library at all. It looks like they gave up almost immediately and the last few years have been the inevitable stagnation into the graveyard.
Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number.
(if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
https://xkcd.com/488/
I got Cyberpunk on it ( at the time rationale was, I don't want to build a new PC so this is an acceptable trade-off ). Google name lent it some credibility and, admittedly, it was actually pretty impressive from technology point of view. It does help that the game was buggy as hell and made me lose interest early on.
That said, the fact that they are treating paying users this way makes stare in disbelief. How can they possibly get away with it? And, more importantly, the question quickly becomes 'to what extent ca I trust other platforms?'.
Well they got to play the games? Not sure what you'd want to show? Like high-scores?
Google still exists, and has plenty of money to make all Stadia customers whole by buying them a retail copy of all of the games. But they choose not to because they are greedy.
Note: I am not a Stadia customer because I figured this would happen.
It's a service isn't it? You play it online. You got to play it. Not sure what makes you think I can't be serious about that? If I want to play a game I don't care if I 'buy' it or rent it - I care about the playing.
They asked what they got from it - they got to play the game. Wasn't that the point?
I think they were worth the price I paid for them.
> Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product:
> We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :)
> The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great! Games are no different. Eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too and we'll feel great about it.
> [..]
> Of course, it’s ok to doubt my words. Theres nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't. But what we can do is to launch the service and continue investing in it for years to come. Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos. That’s exactly what we’re committed to.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/hi_im_andrey...
(I've been holding onto this bookmark for a while)
A sort of VC fund with an investment size of one, yourself.
To prevent the company from being too disloyal we have golden parachutes.
However, as someone who worked in one of those fields, it’s draining when over half of your leaders are trend hoppers. They get up on stage frequently and talk about how excited they are, and how it’s a long journey ahead. And then as soon as the industry takes a slight downturn they all leave in unison.
Some of the leaders are truly passionate about the field and they’re still around. It’s very clear who is who from the way they act towards the employees.
The experience taught me to avoid hype industries unless I’m willing to make money the number one goal in my life, which is harder than I thought, since life has plenty of things more enjoyable than money.
The real question is, why is the market so inefficient at sifting through bad employees, especially near the top of the ladder? The fact that this exec has been able to jump from one dumpster fire to another, often with a promotion, tells me that there’s something broken about the way senior execs are hired.
>Former Director of Product at Google AR/VR.
>Former Head of Mobile, Group PM at YouTube.
Ouch.
In a more perfect world, when this resume hits the hiring committee's desk, they read it and think "this leadership role is too important to fill with someone who's never managed a downturn."
Hopefully when the current owners age out the new leadership will continue as it is.
There are plenty of companies who already run or could run a competitor to steam, and slowly they could eat their lunch. Epic Game Store bought exclusives and gives away coupons to bolster their market share. IF everyone starts burning cash for market share, Valve will have to figure out a new way to compete.
Until then its sort of business like normal.
I know some TED level influencer had some story about basically everything in mail order catalogs from 100 year ago is still for sale somewhere today, so maybe it's wrong, or maybe software is just more prone to vanishing.
So I would imagine if Steam did go under, they would all be clamouring to help users transition to their platforms.
Stadia was never marketed much and always had a tiny library with no cross play. The moment Nvidia stepped up, Stadia was dead.
All I could think during the entire pandemic was how Google should be showing off how easy it is to play games on Stadia. Lower the initial barrier to entry just a smidge and it could have been as simple as texting a link to your family groupchat and then you're all playing a game together in your browser. Even grandparents can figure out how to click a link in an email to open a webpage.
I think Uplay works similarly, and you can cross play and cross save with your sub on any device.
Microsoft GamePass is moving towards a similar direction, where your sub lets you cross play and save between PC, Xbox, cloud, and Android (via the cloud).
I dunno why Google never bothered doing that. Stadia tech wise is actually really impressive and comparable to nvidia's offering, with much better UX, but they just gave up almost immediately after launch. What a missed opportunity :(
It's like they had a team of awesome engineers who built the thing but... no gamers? Like it just seemed that nobody at Google, on or off the Stadia team, actually wanted it to grow beyond tech demo status. Their library is still laughably small, years later, and only very very few games offer crossplay.
Killing of stadia only reaffirms peoples fear to use google products. This includes GCP.
I'm glad to be forever cautious with Google's new products, they've burnt me a few times the past 15 years.
To be fair, most gamers I’ve talked to don’t even know what Stadia IS.
By definition, gamers play games. To do that, they almost always own a console or gaming pc to do so. As a result, they have no need for Stadia in the first place.
You have casual gamers, that are perfectly happy playing natively on their phones or laptops at low settings.
Then you have “serious” gamers, that tend to be happy spending hundreds of dollars to make sure they have up to date hardware to get the most of their games (and thus, likely won’t be happy with the latency or game selection of Stadia).
Somewhere in between is a market of people that say “gee, I really want to play Destiny, at full graphics, and I’m ok with a little latency, but I can’t or don’t want to buy a better PC or $500 box for it”.
I’m sure that market exists, but it’s gotta be rather small in the best of circumstances, right?
IMO they need to fix the internal corporate culture and move it away from short-term OKR goals and promotions based on launching new stuff and a bit more towards helping to maintain and grow existing projects.
Those people don't exist in any significant numbers.
Every self-identifying gamer (me included) knew this service was DoA.
When I think about it, my family still has photographs from 70 years ago sitting around in family albums.
Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.
My wife literally has track of zero printed / film photographs she ever took. She's got zero clue where they might be. Not even "shoe box somewhere" :->
Whereas, I have all my photos of last 20 years (since I first took a digital shot) chronologically sorted in folders by year then event (e.g. "Photos/2022/HalifaxTrip2022") on my NAS. It's barely any effort to organize in that way (no fancy tagging or sorting, just year and event, or generic yearly photos /photos/2022/2022_Photos as catchall), yet Typically it takes me seconds to minutes to find some obscure photo somebody remembers or wants, and near instantly for big events like trips, birthdays etc.
It's all about how much one treasures those photos / how obsessive compulsive one is :-). There's certainly ways to manage digital photo libraries, whether manually like I do, or automagically like Apple or Google do.
(we also print albums through Costco of fun trips etc. Nothing about digital prevents that)
To be fair though, When it comes to discussion about cloud and gaming though, it's an utterly disingenuous comparison. I fully and permanently own and control my digital photos in an universal format and can switch and back them up from provider to provider seamlessly. This is empathically triply not the case for stadia games.
The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.
As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.
The difference is that photos are conveniently took from my phone and that MP3 files are conveniently downloaded from a certain major Video Streaming website by a company with a name that is a reference to math. Every time I listen to those MP3s I make sure to watch some ads somewhere first.
Also, I get DVDs from the public library and use Handbrake to convert them so I can stream them on the living room TV from my NAS. When returning the DVDs, I, of course, I email the video files back to the library.
It amazes me that this persists, it is such a bad sales tactic. If the person you're dealing with isn't a sucker, now you've destroyed trust. (You've destroyed it later with the sucker, when they realize what happened. Hope one sale was enough for you.)
Some number of people will read that and say "it's safe, I knew they would assuage my concerns" that wouldn't otherwise if they just said "well, you might lose you games in that case.". Those are the people being targeted.
And by those people I include you and me, but for different things. It's impossible to be completely objective and rational all the time, and I'm sure you can come up with just as many instances as I where hope overrode reason for a while. Statements like these are specifically to keep us around when we fall into that category.
I am slowly moving all my customers/clients away from Google Analytics, mostly to Matomo. Couldn’t be happier. Some clients can also diversify their ad spending to other platforms. Google needs to start feeling what “customer service” means, for now it has none.
It gives you access to a library of additional games you don't have to buy.
And if they need more market segmentation, then offer an additional premium monthly fee that gets you early access to upcoming AAA games or some other similar value add like that.
It's just weird they decided to make some games unlimited and some for purchase. Maybe that was the best deal they could negotiate with the publishers, who knows.
Everyone on HN predicted this, and the only way I would have ever trusted Stadia would be with a CEO-level promise of refunding all purchases if they shut down within 10 years.
That's honestly the magic of Nvidia's streaming service. You're paying for the streaming, not the game. You then link your Steam account and play. So if Nvidia's streaming service shuts down, I still have the games I paid for in steam. It's genius, and the only way I'd ever consider paying for cloud gaming. While I don't like the Xbox game pass method, as you own nothing, at least you're renting and not buying, so you're not technically losing anything if you leave or they shut down.
It was utterly shocking that Google did not copy Nvidia's streaming games bough on other stores idea, especially with so many people are fearful of a Google shutdown.
It's also a mystery to me why Valve hasn't done what Nvidia did. Presumably they will at some point. Unless they don't want to risk other cloud providers from pulling their games from steam.
Betting on steam worked out thus far. I really like how nvidia solved this problem. Elegant solution.
it's just a small bit of hex editing away from being steamless
They wanted the lock in. They did it for profit margin. Because people like the Director of Product the GP mentions hops from one role to the next its all short term nonsense.
Assuming the rumor about Stadia is true, then in hindsight, this is directly tarnishing the reputation of those other products. Every canceled product does, but it's strange to see it in writing. Although I wouldn't give this comment much weight, it's clearly dodging the answer.
Why can't everything be licensed directly from the right owner of a game so that the license of a game can be transferred from one streaming service to another?
If you read this - run. Or ignore everything that comes after as it's filled with lies.
As it was released, I had zero interest in Stadia for all the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. And I am the perfect target consumer for Stadia. I have a large monthly budget for games, I travel enough that it makes sense to have a portable gaming platform, and I embrace tech early. Even with all this, I had zero interest in Stadia simply because it was a Google product that I knew would be canceled.
If I had to guess, they'll shut down Stadia as a platform but keep the tech alive, rebrand, give everyone new URLs to play the games they've already purchased. Kinda similar to how they migrated everyone's songs/purchases from Google Play Music to Youtube Music when they shut down GPM.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/21/22738550/arkham-knight-g...
Call my cynical. But I don't see this happening.
Maybe prove Y% of your X purchase went to the rights holder. So you can only be charged for Z-Y to get that same thing from another service.
All they do is build hype and cancel without any trace even when things are successful.
I'm convinced they only kept search and gmail for ads and tracking.
I think programming languages are a bit different. (Assuming they're not encumbered by patents / trademarks / copyright the way Java was/is.)
If Google decides to bail on Carbon, any design work, published implementations, etc. remain accessible for others to use or build upon.
If Google were to abandon Carbon, the main risk I see is that Google would not longer contribute to Carbon's refinement and implementation. So maybe that would reduce the odds of Carbon reaching critical mass, but it wouldn't flat out prevent people from legally continuing to use it.
Google has gone beyond destroying my goodwill to the point I actively despise them. I loved chrome at first. Same with gmail, google voice, youtube shit even google maps. All started good all now garbage. Same with Facebook and Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Uber, Doordash.
Burn me once shame on me...
There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again.
But there are some games that are digital only and I fear the next generation of games will be like Xbox. You buy a physical that does nothing more than connect to a server that downloads the game.
Perhaps legally allowing backups of games you purchased would help.
as great as that would be, the corporate-run governments of the world would see that as tantamount to legalising video game piracy, one of the few (if not, the only) media that have actually succeeded in making online piracy difficult
Nearly all software produced currently ships out with the assumption that updates can easily be pushed out. As a concrete example, twenty years from now I don't want to play the original Mario Kart 8 that shipped when the switch was released, I would want to play the Mario Kart 8 that has double the levels that they are currently slowly dropping over the next year. The ideal situation would be an ability to write that information back to the card.
Couple that with another law that enforces consumers ability to roll back updates to any previous version they desire and you're fully protected with the ability to play your games essentially forever
Be careful what you wish for. You don't want them to have a dead man's switch on your physical copy.
The problem is that there really isn't a way to legislate it. The content is tied to the service (either the platform service like the Switch, or the game service itself), and if the servers aren't running, you're done. No backup is going to help you. And there's piracy. I do not see any governments creating legislating to force publishers (or platform (e.g. Steam) or console manufacturers) to remove anti-piracy measures.
Then let the industry figure out the technical details. Most of these services amount to a bog standard download of encrypted files. There is absolutely nothing about this that requires any more than the most basic infrastructure anybody reading this could set up.
Alternatively, we force them to describe these time boxed, locked down, lacking basic consumer rights things we're purchasing as the rentals they actually are.
Awful idea. Great way to permanently move all content services to subscription based as nobody in their right mind would ever commit to keeping up servers for the rest of eternity for every game or movie they create.
That is not an unreasonable ask, especially considering the high degree of control society grants them over these products when they are sold. That grant should come with some responsibilities.
What is and isn't a 'multiplayer game' isn't so clear cut. Neither is the reason why 'multiplayer games' should be exempt from this.
But let's leave that aside, the problem is that there isn't a simple, clear-cut legislation to fix this. Instead you would need to create a big regulatory and enforcement framework, along with a technical framework defined and built by the publishers .. and even then it isn't so clear-cut that this is enough. And yes, all this would raise the barrier of entry for indie developers who now would need the equivalent of 'regulatory approval' to release their games.
Given that this would take an enormous amount of effort to pass, only to satisfy a small number of video game aficionados, it's hard to see why any government would expand the effort and political capital to do it.
As it turns out, they got together and came up with their own ratings system, and it was largely a success.
Again, my criteria for success is that digital content should not be arbitrarily removed from the purchaser. That's it. However we get there is an implementation detail. The hypothetical indie could shove the files on an S3 bucket and call it a day. The hypothetical multibillion-dollar mega corp could push an update to their console which redirects all download links to an absolutely basic file store of some kind that the console would work with.
Decriminalization of piracy so people can support themselves would be a good start, but I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
Stadia has provided an excellent game night for me and my remote friend (who is on a Mac) this year and we've had a blast, we mostly play little party games as nither of us our big gamers, but it makes for an excellent night,i've bought a couple of games on it that i've yet to even get too and plan to buy some more and enjoy the odd hour or two in the evenings. Stadia removes all fraction and means I don't need to install/update or have gaming hardware.
The service is great. Despite it not being popular. It would be an absolute disaster for me if the service were to close.
No where near as good and as stable as Stadia, also the monthly fee is a pain. With Stadia you can just buy the game and then play when you want, I don't think there is anything else like that.
https://youtu.be/B1bIGi1yjC8
It will routinely outperform a local series x (nevermind a PS5) given the right conditions, but that’s subject to your ISP, location, and probably not running CP2077 at maxed out ultra RTX graphics settings just yet.
Will give it another try.
The cloud time is the expensive part and most of the purchase price is likely going to go to the publisher. How many hours of gameplay before they’ve lost money on your purchase?
Not sure if game pass is better but the price would put me off a little bit, because we only play for a few hours every couple of weeks.
unfortunately there's not enough of you guys, Stadia was targeting the latter crowd but as you can see, they've failed.
I haven't bought many titles, personally, so if it is disappeared, I wouldn't be terribly upset. Annoyed, yes.
And it would probably cause me to go hunt around a bit more at Xbox Cloud gaming (Which I have also tried and looks promising with a nice but small library of titles) and I have yet to check out GeForce Now but have heard good things there, too.
I don’t like the idea of never owning games but I could accept it as someone who essentially never buys them otherwise.
But I expected this to happen and I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle of getting accustomed to a service and watching it get shut down.
5G = easy streaming everything everywhere
Their mistake was assuming the American telecoms would actually deliver real 5G in any reasonable amount of time. Maybe they should've tested it in the Korean market.
At $60-$80 dollar per game, it's not too far to just buy an Xbox Series S for $300. Plus Game Pass is a great way to find a game you enjoy without investing time into research or money into trying a bunch of games.
They also had that bald dude out there doing tone def interviews talking like everyone has internet like the bay area and if they didn't then those customers didn't matter.
Like, expensive and bad? I had better internet in my paremts' summer hut than in Palo Alto.
But as for the software side, it's pretty much down to users to realise they they don't 'own' any digital content unless it's completely DRM free and not reliant on somebody else's servers. Stadia was always high-risk and quite likely to fail, but how many years can you guarantee that something like Steam or iTunes will remain up for?
(And even if the servers remain up for many decades to come, you could potentially lose access to all your 'purchases' for other reasons... perhaps your near-future social credit score will drop below the required threshold for continued access?)
Google has a bunch of great products, but most of their consumer facing success are driven by data collection and ads. Even if it's just a rumor, I don't see any evidence that Google is able to run successful products that requires actual support to paying users.
Stadia does makes sort of sense as an idea to try, in that it exists in a space where Android, GCP and YouTube intersects. It's entertainment, you could bring it to Android phones potentially and utilize Google infrastructure. Still it seems a bit far of from what Google can do.
This is precisely why I didn't try Stadia. I never expected anything more from Google.