Vapourware Google Stadia - "a game streaming service for everyone"

[Fedora Master]

They can try pushing something consumers inherently do not want that doesn't really work as it should till they turn blue, it's not gonna change the results markedly.

"Hardcore" gamers on forums like this don't want it. I'm far from convinced the average gamer doesn't.

You can peddle all kinds of shit to the average idiot but those people aren't dedicated customers. They'll try it out, realize it's bad (without quite being able to articulate why, because they're idiots) and then drop it after a few months.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

They can try pushing something consumers inherently do not want that doesn't really work as it should till they turn blue, it's not gonna change the results markedly.

"Hardcore" gamers on forums like this don't want it. I'm far from convinced the average gamer doesn't.

Yeah, that is hard one. I think the vast majority are mobile gamers. And I think mobile means casual as in, flappy bird. Most people don't want to play an intensive game casually, its just not how its done if you think about it.
For that reason alone, Cloud streaming isn't needed for the largest part of the market. With that said its difficult to say where its really needed. It just doesn't make sense.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

They're not successful because the service being offered is shit. It's like saying video streaming can't be successful prior to netflix becoming popular.

OnLive, GaiKai, Stadia, PlayStation Now, GeForce Now, Project xCloud...

How many more do you need before noticing a trend?

And yet, none of them offered a good service. You realize there were plenty of services that attempted to do what Netflix did prior to it, right? They just had a poor selection + the technology wasn't there yet. The technology for game streaming wasn't there until very recently, now we just need a company capable of providing a good library.


Oh hey, what's the name of that major corporation that offers a massive game library for a monthly fee? You know, the same one that also offers a massive cloud computing service? The same one that has been going around buying up game development studios?
oh right, Microsoft. I'm sure they're not interested in this at all.
what's that? Microsoft has been quietly testing a streaming version of their gamepass? Wow!
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/20/...dows-10-pc-app-game-streaming-service-preview

 

[Dexter]

Project xCloud

And from a year ago:

If anything, people should be more afraid of Microsoft trying something abysmally stupid again with their next "console cycle".

Rusty's big revelation:

oh right, Microsoft. I'm sure they're not interested in this at all.
what's that? Microsoft has been quietly testing a streaming version of their gamepass? Wow!

I'm sure this is going to end totally different than SONY and Google's attempt though.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Project xCloud

And from a year ago:

If anything, people should be more afraid of Microsoft trying something abysmally stupid again with their next "console cycle".

oh right, Microsoft. I'm sure they're not interested in this at all.
what's that? Microsoft has been quietly testing a streaming version of their gamepass? Wow!

I'm sure this is going to end totally different than SONY and Google's attempt though.

Maybe if you ask nicely they'll include all 4 VR games

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Project xCloud

And from a year ago:

If anything, people should be more afraid of Microsoft trying something abysmally stupid again with their next "console cycle".

oh right, Microsoft. I'm sure they're not interested in this at all.
what's that? Microsoft has been quietly testing a streaming version of their gamepass? Wow!

I'm sure this is going to end totally different than SONY and Google's attempt though.

Maybe if you ask nicely they'll include all 4 VR games

Wait, theres Alyx, Skyrim, Archies Shooting Experience...what was the fourth?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Project xCloud

And from a year ago:

If anything, people should be more afraid of Microsoft trying something abysmally stupid again with their next "console cycle".

oh right, Microsoft. I'm sure they're not interested in this at all.
what's that? Microsoft has been quietly testing a streaming version of their gamepass? Wow!

I'm sure this is going to end totally different than SONY and Google's attempt though.

Maybe if you ask nicely they'll include all 4 VR games

Wait, theres Alyx, Skyrim, Archies Shooting Experience...what was the fourth?

VR chat of course

 

[Dexter]

Maybe if you ask nicely they'll include all 4 VR games

It would indeed be very depressing if VR was in the state the "Cloud Gaming" industry is in if I was an advocate for it, with near to no customers, enthusiasm for or interest by anyone.

Luckily that's not the case and I still have lots of stuff to play and look forward to while you can continue to cry and act butthurt about it while it continues to grow: https://www.vrgamerankings.com/top-100-most-wanted-pc-vr-games

Unlike "Hey this game is pretty cool, but I wish I could Stream it as a Live video from a computer on a server farm somewhere, so I have more compression artifacts and input lag!" a "I put on this gizmo and am in the game!" is and will remain very compelling, especially after people get to actually experience it instead of talking out of their ass about it.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

VR makes people sick. It can't be fixed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality_sickness
VR is not VR. A motion tracking headset is not VR and feels wierd and disconcerting.
VR is at least forty years of development away from being marketable to the general public. I think thats optimistic.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Wait. There's millions of VR headset users. But the milestone revenue currently are games that made more than 1 million dollars. How expensive are VR games on average? If its 60 bucks a pop.... thats 16k+ sales to reach 1 million.

IS EVERYONE ELSE ON VR CHAT??

Ah, but it went from 0 to 1% in 4 years! That's like infinite exponential growth!

enthusiasm for or interest by anyone.

The only people who are enthusiastic about it are consoletards and would-be consoletards who only care about "muh immershun". And those who can't accept they fell for yet another marketing gimmick and keep trying to motivate their purchase by going apeshit whenever someone doesn't agree that this is the next best thing.

"I put on this gizmo and am in the game!"

Do you get payed more than 50 cents for these posts? Because really, I don't think they're even worth that.
In the game. LMAO. See that you don't get sued by EA.

 

[tritosine2k]

Cloud gaming will be more akin to minecraft and dedicated servers than easily denigrated framebuffer streaming and it's easy to see if you blow up voxel resolution the average client cannot keep up, while with remote rendering the cost is amortized so its definitely on the cards in coming years.

As for VR I'll spare the denigration, BTW "VR" - s very own brony wunderkid Palmer did that left and right to justify reinventing this retrograde bricksize planardisplay agenda.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Dexter]

Heh

 

[Jarpie]

Heh

How long did Stadia live? a year? New record for google?

 

[racofer]

Heh

How long did Stadia live? a year? New record for google?

Who could have imagined it would fail? Preposterous!

 

[Child of Malkav]

Stadia and VR are the future, unfortunately. Even if Stadia fails it will be another service with another name.
With the constant push of games as a service, drm, online only connection and the advent of this VR crap, yeah, gaming is done. You''ll come home from work, connect with the VR headset to an online library of games you don't own and proceed to do gymnastics while telling yourself you're playing a game.

 

[Bester]

Did you know that Amazon is launching its own Stadia too?

They are definitely the future. But only when technology solves the lag. Maybe in 50 years? Not now.

 

[AdamReith]

You need a high spec hardware component client side to do the decoding of the video data anyway, the whole thing is just retarded and only makes sense to the fuckers who want the ultimate in DRM.

In the meantime I can imagine people losing interest in what passes for a "game" on these services.

 

[Dexter]

I think Take Two's CEO also makes a good point regarding "Cloud Gaming", although I don't share his opinion regarding VR since the use-case seems immediately obvious and there are a lot of people that want it: https://www.protocol.com/take-two-strauss-zelnick

The success of gaming generally has clearly attracted a new group of competitors to this business: the large global technology companies. Let's start with Google Stadia and cloud gaming. As a third party-publisher, everyone wants your content on their platforms, and you get to pick and choose which models work for you. What's your overall perspective on Google's entry into this business specifically with Stadia and then cloud gaming more generally?

Any new distribution vehicle that offers high-quality, efficiency and a reasonable price is good for our business because broader distribution is always better in the entertainment business.

That said, there was all this hype for years about VR, and I wasn't very compelled by that. Thankfully, as a result, we didn't waste any money on it. Equally, there was an enormous amount of hype around movement to the cloud for interactive entertainment distribution. There were some parties who were saying there are 130 [million] to 140 million current-gen consoles out there. There are billions of PCs out there. You know, if you can make in a frictionless way console video games available to everyone who has a PC or a tablet or a phone, then your market size automatically would be 20x just mathematically.

Of course that doesn't make any sense at all. Because the implication is you are super interested in video games but you were just unwilling to buy a console. I mean, I'm sure there were people like that, but if they are so interested that they want to pay $60 or $70 for a front-line title, it's hard for me to believe they were unwilling to spend $250 on a console to be able to do it ever in their life.

The second problem is you still have to get into the hands of the consumer. They're beholden to whatever technology exists wherever they live. You may be out on the cloud, but if they're on a phone line, they won't be able to avail themselves of what you're distributing.

So I suspect it will not be transformative. I'm speaking against my own interests, right? We're supposed to paint this picture of nirvana; however, I just don't think it's nirvana. Nirvana is making great hits, and then people will find them.

We've sold 135 million units of Grand Theft Auto V, 32 million units of Red Dead Redemption. I wish I could tell you that there will come a point where various cloud gaming services will mean those numbers are doubled or tripled, but I don't really see it.

The presupposition with the "Cloud Gaming" crowd, aside from wanting to impose DRM that cannot be bypassed on everyone from the corporate side, is that there's some sort of huge "untapped market" just sitting out there that they could get to become these "hardcore gamers" that pay them monthly for games or buy games Exclusively from their platform overnight. Somehow these people apparently have always existed and were interested in their AAA games, but despite all this latent interest somehow never got around to purchase a console or PC in their life, because they've always been waiting for a dongle they can stick into their TV so they can start playing the latest AAA games for dozens of hours lagging across their TV streamed from some server. It's the same kind of thought process that somehow makes them believe that Suburban black women with 3 kids will suddenly start playing Battlefield or develop an interest in Star Wars if they only change enough of the characters and story around to "represent" them, and obviously the source material will not suffer from the changes and none of their already existing established audience will be alienated by them whatsoever.

 

[Bester]

You need a high spec hardware component client side to do the decoding of the video data anyway

Oh yeah, do you have a high spec hardware to watch movies?
Only encoding is difficult, decoding is not.

 

[AdamReith]

You need a high spec hardware component client side to do the decoding of the video data anyway

Oh yeah, do you have a high spec hardware to watch movies?
Only encoding is difficult, decoding is not.

Anything that can decode h264 can also run open xcom. What more could people need?

 

[Bester]

You should email guys at Ubisoft to close up shop, because apparently nobody needs Assassin's Creed and such.

 

[DalekFlay]

They are definitely the future. But only when technology solves the lag. Maybe in 50 years? Not now.

Most tech bloggers and whatnot actually said Stadia worked well enough, believe it or not. That's not the same as it working well enough for actual gamers of course, but for the average Joe hopping around in Assassin's Creed for an hour or so after work? Maybe. The thing that made every reviewer and forum poster lash Stadia was its business model. If Amazon uses its money and connections to launch with a Netflix style slate of games for one monthly price, it'll be interesting to see if any kind of different result occurs.

I do think that Xbox launching a $299 next-gen console with a phone style payment plan really makes Stadia and its ilk seem pointless though.

 

[J1M]

The killer app for Stadia is allowing people to play games at work. Ideally with some sort of cross-play cloud saves so they can continue with real hardware at home.

If they are unwilling to push that angle it will fail.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think the problem with Stadia is that the market for it isn't as big as was originally thought.
If you can afford to pay for a monthly video game streaming service and regularly buy $60 titles, you can afford to just buy a gaming PC(or console.) At first I thought this would be like GamePass except with included game streaming, but it's not -- you still have to buy the games individually. So exactly who is this service appealing to?