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

DeepOcean

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Yes, Microsoft doesnt have the infrastructure to go full Project XCloud and they are on gaming for much longer than the idiots at Google that made this mess to know that game streaming would require a big structure, so the Gamepass model is a stop-gap method to get people used to go into a subscription service for later, when Microsoft can, really push XCloud hard. Of course, there is an argument to be made that gaming subscription will ever be a profitable model and I hope it cant be profitable.
 

Child of Malkav

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Oh no, a videogame live streaming service has failed. Surely there won't be another one with a different name with better infrastructure helmed by people who learned the lessons from this failure.
Don't kid yourselves. BCI VR "Stadia (with another name)", will be the future. Gaming is dead. Quote this for posterity.
This Stadia disaster is only a setback. One that Microsoft will quickly bounce back off of. With the infinite resources and this time, with experience. Gaming is dead.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
The problem with stadia is that you had to buy the games separately. If you can afford to buy brand new $60 games regularly you can afford to buy a gaming PC. And unlike pretty much every other game streaming service, you can't even bring your own games via steam or anything. You had to acquire everything through the Stadia library.
Service itself was adequate when I tried it during the demo. People who would care about the image quality degradation or latency would -- again -- already have their own gaming PC. OTOH, my experience is probably well above the norm as my connection speeds are far above average and the data center I was connecting to was only a few miles away. Infrastructure was never the issue, it was always content.

Honestly, of all the companies in the best position to roll something like this out it's probably in gaben's favor. Content is king, a steam streaming service would let people stream their already owned games.
 

soulburner

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I tried Stadia recently when I found a demo for Immortals: Fenyx Rising was available there. My observations:

- a fast fiber connection at work: frequent loss of video quality, stuttering, noticeable but bearable input lag
- a not-so-fast LTE connection at home: same as above but with more substantial video quality loss

GeForce Now on the other hand has slightly less frequent loss of video quality and the framerates are generally much more fluid. Don't see any difference in terms of input lag, which makes the whole idea of game streaming pointless.
 

J1M

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Yes, Microsoft doesnt have the infrastructure to go full Project XCloud and they are on gaming for much longer than the idiots at Google that made this mess to know that game streaming would require a big structure, so the Gamepass model is a stop-gap method to get people used to go into a subscription service for later, when Microsoft can, really push XCloud hard. Of course, there is an argument to be made that gaming subscription will ever be a profitable model and I hope it cant be profitable.
Do the people claiming Microsoft doesn't have infrastructure not know what Azure is?
 

commie

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
Its more of a threat in regards to preservstion or community modding.

If gamimg goes streaming your experiences will be very much locked down to what the devs/companies want you to have or do.
Xbox does streaming? What's it called?
XCloud, the one that will replace Gamepass slowly when all the sheep find more convenient to play through stream than downloading it. The ole boiled frog strategy on the works.
There is no reason to discontinue Gamepass. They can and will run Gamepass and XCloud next to eachother.
There are many reasons, as soon as Microsoft have enough of an infrastructure in place, more and more games will be online only with no download option, also, subscription services dont pay developers by units sold but by hours played, so, if gamepass or other subscription services becomes a dominant platform, this will push indie developers to focus on multiplayer games that have the most hours played and who determines the price of the hour is Microsoft. Do you like single player indie game? Hope you start to like multiplayer games to have something to play. I see indie single player games being buried by tons of casual multiplayer games like Fall Guys on those platforms. Also, tons of multiplayer games with grinding to have as much hours played as humanly possible.

The sheep are buying on this consumer friendly bs from Microsoft, only looking short term, they dont know they might get fucked on the long term. It is this way humanity is so fucked, most people see advantage and go running for it like Lemmings without stopping to think for a second if that is truly a good idea and that something might be too good to be true. XCloud is the end game of Microsoft, that is ovbious, there is no reason to keep two systems that canibalize each other, gamepass is just the way to get there and they have no interest of keeping that once the transition is over. I prefer to keep buying my games but if too many people only have gamepass, game developers will feel the pressure to attend that market instead of the traditional model and while you might be able still to buy those games on steam, they were made thinking on milking gamepass.


Could happen. This is the 'big dog' version of mobile gaming...where grindy trash to sell gem boxes is replaced with grindy trash to sell subscriptions.
 

Infinitron

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https://www.wired.com/story/google-stadia-games-entertainment-collapse/

How Google's Grand Plan to Make Its Own Games Fell Apart
The tech giant hired 150 game developers for Stadia Games and Entertainment, only to lay them all off. Sources say it never gave the studios a chance.

games_stadia_1131586303.jpg

Google announced that it would make first-party games for Stadia in March of 2019. Less than two years later, that dream has collapsed.PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

IN MARCH 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to tell gamers what he owed them. He wasn’t a big gamer, he admitted. Google, though, was indebted to games. Games were the entry point for countless Googlers into computer science. Games like chess and Go helped train Google’s DeepMind AI. Gaming-like simulations let Waymo test safe transit systems for its self-driving cars. Now, Pichai said, Google would launch Stadia, a gaming platform built on the company’s cloud infrastructure. Not only that, but Google announced that it would produce its own exclusive titles for the service. It was officially in the business not just of distributing video games but creating them.

There was just one problem. Google is a tech company, not a content company. And while Stadia launched in November 2019 with third-party games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Destiny 2—and would eventually add dozens to its roster—Google’s own Stadia games never materialized. Earlier this month, Google announced it was closing Stadia Games and Entertainment, and laying off the 150 game developers it hired to make first-party games for Stadia just a year or two after hiring them. Many of those who lost their jobs still don’t have clarity on why. But sources familiar with Stadia’s operations believe that after pouring tens of millions of dollars into two game studios, Google couldn’t stomach the expensive and complicated creative process necessary to build high-caliber video games—especially considering Stadia’s unremarkable subscription numbers.

“I question how much the execs above Stadia leadership understand what they got into—the commitments made and overcommitments and the inability to keep those commitments,” says one current Stadia employee.

Stadia itself lives on as a cloud gaming platform, one of many: Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and other tech giants are similarly leveraging their massive data centers for cloud gaming. But Google’s failure with Stadia Games and Entertainment reflects tech giants’ broad inability to foster game development processes in environments optimized for optimization. After throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at Jeff Bezos’ mandate to “win at games,” Amazon’s Amazon Game Studios suffered repeated embarrassment with canceled, even unreleased first-party titles. Behemoth organizations that have found success producing games did so through acquisitions rather than building from scratch; Microsoft, for example, has snapped up over a dozen studios, including Mojang (Minecraft) and Bethesda (Fallout, Doom). Google thought it was different.

Four current and former Stadia employees speaking with WIRED say that despite Google’s substantial investment and hiring spree, it never could wrap its head around game development. The tech company, so good at making services, simply wasn’t set up to nourish the chaotic, multidisciplinary circus that is making games.

IN 2018, GOOGLE hired Phil Harrison, a former executive at both Sony and Microsoft, to lead its Stadia division. “Definitely someone who knows the difference between RPGs and NPCs,” joked Pichai, introducing Harrison on stage at GDC a year later. Harrison’s aspirations were enormous: super-powerful data centers delivering blockbuster games at lightning-fast speed to devices everywhere, particularly to people who traditionally didn’t have access to gaming PCs and consoles. For $10 a month, gamers could stream select video games to phones and tablets connected to Wi-Fi. Infrastructure. Performance. Design. Scale. 4K, 1080p. Google was built for this.

From the GDC stage, Harrison enthused that Google had already shipped Stadia hardware to over 100 studios and over 1,000 “creatives.” He would go on to announce the formation of Stadia Games and Entertainment, “which will build experiences specifically designed for Stadia.” It would be months until Google would actually hire the bulk of its game devs.

Prior to the GDC announcement, Google had already made a splashy hire in Jade Raymond, the founder of Ubisoft Toronto. Harrison would later scoop up senior developers, designers, and producers from Ubisoft and Electronic Arts. And in December 2019, Google acquired the Montreal-based game studio Typhoon Studios, known for Journey to the Savage Planet, and absorbed dozens of its employees onto Stadia. Stadia Games and Entertainment would exist across two studios, one in Montreal and one in Los Angeles. Raymond would oversee both.

In an October 2019 blog post announcing the Montreal studio, Raymond enthused that Stadia Games and Entertainment would develop “exclusive, original content across a diverse portfolio of games all in your favorite genres.” Stadia wouldn’t just revolutionize game platforms; it would revolutionize game development, she wrote. Raymond announced the Los Angeles studio the following March, hiring Sony vet Shannon Studstill to run it. (Raymond did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

By that point Google had already spent years developing Stadia’s underlying service, which launched on November 19, 2019. Two sources say that Google’s first mistake was syncopating Stadia’s development and Stadia Games and Entertainment’s existence. Hiring game developers significantly later signaled Google’s priorities early on, which, two sources say, contributed to a breakdown in trust between Google’s technologists, located in Mountain View, and its two game studios.

“Google is really an engineering and technology business,” says one source currently with Stadia. “Making content—it requires types of roles that don’t typically exist at Google.”

From the start, the high-level game devs Google had brought on board hit barrier after barrier trying to flesh out their teams. Google’s famously long and involved hiring process can take six to nine months. And it took time for Google to broaden its hiring standards to accommodate skill sets necessary for game development rather than its traditional fields. The goal was to bring in 2,000 people over five years to work on developing games for Stadia, two sources say.
GOOGLE IS A highly structured company, dependent on highly structured processes. Game development, on the other hand, is organic. It’s messy, and it happens simultaneously across a multitude of disciplines using countless different software. Three sources said Google created roadblocks on the very fundamentals of game-making, like withholding permission to use certain game development software (security issues, apparently).

Making hyper-polished games worthy of Google’s revolutionary Stadia would take three to five years, two sources say, making it impossible for the service to launch with first-party titles. Instead, Stadia debuted with a handful of established AAA games including Final Fantasy XV, NBA 2K20, Wolfenstein: YoungBlood. The response was tepid, both externally and internally. WIRED’s six-out-of-10 review of Stadia found that the streaming service’s latency hindered Mortal Kombat 11, a fighting game dependent on twitch reflexes and lightning-fast inputs. Accessibility to a broad range of devices came at the cost of quality, even with a fiber connection directly plugged into a router. Stadia employees shared the concern that the technology felt like a beta at launch. It could have used more testing in different conditions and on different devices, one source says. Stadia has not revealed subscription numbers, but two sources say they did not meet internal expectations in 2020.

The lack of first-party games at launch was a missed promotional opportunity as well; studios associated with Sony or Microsoft often debut anticipated titles alongside next-generation consoles to create a virtuous circle of hype. But four sources say Stadia’s game development process felt stapled on, an awkward appendage to the core streaming technology effort. Developers were told to design prototypes that showcased Stadia technology like Google’s cloud computing capacity or State Share, which lets players replay or share sections of games crystallized in video clips and screenshots. “For a long time, the mandate for games included requirements to espouse the Stadia-specific mentality, so, like, taking advantage of features meant specifically for Stadia,” says one current Stadia employee. They add that long-term projects were designed to highlight Stadia tech as well. They felt Google wasn’t funding games to sell games; it was funding games to sell Stadia.

Eventually, Stadia Games and Entertainment teams got the software and people it needed to gain momentum prototyping Stadia games. The allure of a Google-sized paycheck and an exit ramp from the crunch-fueled hamster wheel was enough to draw a critical mass of developers to Stadia Games and Entertainment. Artists, producers, audio experts, programmers had been brought on with the promise of making one-of-a-kind games for a revolutionary software—and, many believed, without the threat of layoffs hanging like the sword of Damocles, as is too often the case at traditional game companies. Teams were exploring what Google games could look like, how to best to tap into the power of Google’s massive data centers and showcase cloud gaming. Then, Covid-19 struck.

In April 2020—a month after the Los Angeles studio was announced—Google implemented a hiring freeze. “Now is the time to significantly slow down the pace of hiring,” Pichai said in an internal message, “while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas where users and businesses rely on Google for ongoing support, and where our growth is critical to their success.” Gaming, according to four sources, was not one of those “strategic areas.”

“If the company was OK putting us on a hiring freeze, they were also OK with damaging our ability to build content,” says one source. “The studio was not yet fully formed and ready to produce games. That put on the brakes, and was a statement. We interpreted it as a lack of commitment from Google to make content.”

GOOGLE IS NOT the first tech giant to run into these difficulties. Amazon followed a similar arc. In 2020, WIRED investigated the enormous challenges Jeff Bezos’s empire has faced producing first-party games in its Amazon Game Studios. Like Google, Amazon hired the best of the best: trusted developers like Far Cry 2’s Clint Hocking, System Shock 2’s Ian Vogel, EverQuest’s John Smedley, and Portal’s Kim Swift, many of whom were excited about the stability and relatively higher paychecks associated with the tech giant. Amazon’s goal, according to several sources, was to make a billion-dollar franchise that would help advertise the company’s cloud technology, proprietary game engine, and Twitch streaming service.

The approach, sources say, was hubristic. Amazon wanted to “win at games,” developing several AAA games simultaneously despite its nonexistent track record in the industry. Amazon Game Studios head Mike Frazzini has no prior professional experience in games. High expectations combined with Amazon idiosyncrasies—an obsession with in-house software, for example, and a fixation on measuring success with data—has led to failure after failure. Amazon has cancelled at least three of its games: Project Nova, Breakaway, and Crucible, the last of which was canceled just five months after release.

AAA game development can cost between $100 million and $200 million. Successes like Blizzard’s Overwatch come from the ashes of failures, like the company’s scrapped massively multiplayer online role-playing game Titan. Product design at big tech companies may not always be straightforward, but game design is a resource- and money-intensive labyrinth.

“I think it’s a lack of understanding of the process,” says one source who works at Stadia. “It seemed there were executive-level people not fully grasping how to navigate through a space that is highly creative, cross-disciplinary.”

Throughout Google’s hiring freeze, game developers felt thwarted in accomplishing their goals. Prototypes were being developed without full resources; the studios weren’t working at full capacity. When performance review time came, three sources say, Google judged game developers against benchmarks created for UX or visual designers. There isn’t a number associated with “fun-to-play,” or a process-based workflow for generating creativity. Veteran game developers lobbied for their work culture as much as they could. Over time, Google seemed to soften. Developers got the tools they needed, the appropriate reviews processes. But not the headcount. Frustration persisted.

On January 27, 2021, Harrison emailed Stadia employees sharing the year’s “high-level platform budget and investment envelope.” In a rallying cry, Harrison maintained that Google has the best game-streaming technology. Also, he said, Stadia Games and Entertainment had made “great progress building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong line up of Stadia exclusive games.” He didn’t confirm the division’s budget at the time, but said it would come soon, as it would “inform the SG&E strategy and 2021 OKRs,” or “objectives and key results,” a goal framework used by Google.

Five days later, Harrison would gather Stadia Games and Entertainment employees into a short stream to let them know Stadia Games and Entertainment was shutting down. Google was ending its efforts to create games before it had gotten one out the door. Google would help them through it, he said; people with relevant skill sets might find new employment at the tech giant.

Sources say they weren’t shocked, but it was a jarring twist so soon after Harrison praised the “great progress” Stadia Games and Entertainment had made. (Jade Raymond retweeted an article by Kotaku breaking the news of that email, but later un-retweeted.) Publicly, Harrison emphasized Stadia’s focus on helping outside game developers and publishers use Stadia. “We’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games,” wrote Harrison in a blog post. Raymond, whom two sources described as a brilliant visionary, was leaving Google for greener pastures.

Sources say they felt Harrison was, at best, not transparent throughout their employment with Google. They didn’t know how Stadia was landing with gamers. They didn’t understand why Google was shutting down first-party game development. And finally, they weren’t sure whether Google was ever really invested in making AAA games, or knew what it took. At worst, they think, Harrison misled them. Several Stadia Games and Entertainment employees, disillusioned with the games industry, are staying on with Google. Others are doing some soul-searching.

“I saw that the only way this could work is if Google accepts that we take it step-by-step,” says one source. “If Google is really interested in carving its place in this market, then it would be fine with losing money at the beginning to establish their presence.” Two sources say Google should have followed in Microsoft’s path and focused on acquiring studios rather than trying to start from scratch.

It is miraculous that successful large-scale games get made at all, anywhere. A big-budget game can be beautiful, but does the “jump” feel good? It can piece into a popular genre, but is it too same-y? Does the plot make sense? Are the characters balanced? And, most of all, is it fun? There is no potion to drizzle into the fizzing cauldron of game development to produce a hit; it takes all kinds of people channeling their personal inspiration into one multitudinous commodity. It’s crazed and human. That’s the alchemy that tech giants still can’t solve for.

Correction Friday 2/26/2021 2:57 pm ET: This story initially said that Microsoft had acquired the game studio 343 Industries; it instead established it after separating with Bungie, the original developer of the Halo franchise.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.videogameschronicle.com...vage-planet-2-a-multiplayer-project-and-more/

Stadia was working on Savage Planet 2, a multiplayer project and more
THIS MONTH’S DECISION TO END INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT RESULTED IN DOZENS OF CANCELLATIONS, SOURCES SAY

Google‘s Stadia team cancelled dozens of projects and third-party licensing deals as part of its shift away from video game production in recent months, people with knowledge of its plans told VGC.

The Google cloud gaming division cancelled a multiplayer game led by a former Assassin’s Creed creative, a sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet and backed out of proposals for Hideo Kojima (Death Stranding) and Yu Suzuki (Outrun) to create exclusive games for Stadia, the sources said.

In a statement published on February 1, the company said that this year it would be refocusing on offering its technology and platform tools to external partners. This would see the company close all its internal Stadia game development teams, it said.

Among its numerous third-party licensing agreements, Stadia had been working with music game firm Harmonix on an original title that is virtually complete, people with knowledge of its plans said.

While the Harmonix game could yet release for Stadia, some sources said that complications around music licensing for Stadia’s Pro service had caused significant disruption behind the scenes, even before Google’s announcement this month.

In a response to this story, Harmonix CEO Steve Janiak denied the company’s unannounced Stadia game had been cancelled, or that it had experienced issues related to music licensing, but said it would release the title for other platforms if necessary.

“While Google has shifted its strategy, we remain incredibly excited about what we’ve been working on for Stadia and if the project isn’t released for Stadia we will take it to other platforms,” he told VGC.

The Kojima Productions project is understood to have been positioned as an episodic horror game. Sources indicated that the Japanese studio was keen to innovate in the cloud gaming space, but the deal was ultimately blocked by Stadia GM Phil Harrison last year.

This is possibly the project designer Hideo Kojima was referring to last summer, when he told a Japanese publication he had recently seen a “major” project cancelled. “I’m pretty pissed, but that’s the games industry for you,” he said.

Kojima Productions did not offer a response to this story.

Internally, Stadia’s decision to close its first-party game development teams saw several projects cancelled at various stages of development.

VGC was told that the team formerly known as Typhoon – which Google purchased last year – had been in full production on a sequel to the co-op adventure game Journey to the Savage Planet.

The sequel was to be far grander in scale and feature fully animated cut-scenes. Its development team found out the project was cancelled along with the public announcement this month, VGC was told.

Another Stadia team, led by former Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate producer Francois Pelland, had been working on a multiplayer action game codenamed Frontier. The team also found out about its cancellation this month, sources said.

A new Bloomberg report details the missteps that led to this month’s closure of Stadia’s internal development teams. According to the publication’s sources, the amount of money Google was willing to spend to attract titles to Stadia “came as a shock” to developers.

Phil Harrison’s team courted big-name publishers like Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., shelling out “tens of millions of dollars” to get games like Red Dead Redemption II on Stadia, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
 

Lutte

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Microsoft, for example, has snapped up over a dozen studios, including Mojang (Minecraft) and Bethesda (Fallout, Doom)
ah the two games that come to my mind when thinking of bethesda -- fallout and doom.
Modern TES like Skyrim is like masturbation. People do it but don't admit doing it. Ya just don't talk about your last masturbation session in good company.
 

Tacgnol

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I just hope the beast stubbed its toe bad enough to not cast its shadow around here again any time soon.

Someone will mysteriously have the same idea again in a few years, apparently learning nothing from the previous attempts.

Whether it's the hubris of thinking they've solved all the previous problems and can do better, or just ignorance of the failed attempts, I really don't know.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
I just hope the beast stubbed its toe bad enough to not cast its shadow around here again any time soon.

Someone will mysteriously have the same idea again in a few years, apparently learning nothing from the previous attempts.

Whether it's the hubris of thinking they've solved all the previous problems and can do better, or just ignorance of the failed attempts, I really don't know.

I'd imagine it's a big pie-chart somewhere containing the revenue generated from each tech related field, Google execs almost have to sacrifice their careers until enough bodies have bridged the gulf. Even going from 0%->10% would be enough to get them to the top.

Best case scenario gaming crashes hard and people go back to playing with pogs and bits of string so they can waste their lives trying to ruin that instead.
 

Tacgnol

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
I just hope the beast stubbed its toe bad enough to not cast its shadow around here again any time soon.

Someone will mysteriously have the same idea again in a few years, apparently learning nothing from the previous attempts.

Whether it's the hubris of thinking they've solved all the previous problems and can do better, or just ignorance of the failed attempts, I really don't know.

I'd imagine it's a big pie-chart somewhere containing the revenue generated from each tech related field, Google execs almost have to sacrifice their careers until enough bodies have bridged the gulf. Even going from 0%->10% would be enough to get them to the top.

Best case scenario gaming crashes hard and people go back to playing with pogs and bits of string so they can waste their lives trying to ruin that instead.

Google doesn't really care about gambling with potentially doomed projects. It's just pocket money to them at the end of the day.

The revenue from a potentially great idea is probably worth the losses from the failed ones.
 

tritosine2k

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I just hope the beast stubbed its toe bad enough to not cast its shadow around here again any time soon.

Someone will mysteriously have the same idea again in a few years, apparently learning nothing from the previous attempts.

Whether it's the hubris of thinking they've solved all the previous problems and can do better, or just ignorance of the failed attempts, I really don't know.
https://www.gamesradar.com/were-abl...ssible-tomorrow-inside-epics-unreal-engine-5/
It's kind of a scam," smiles CEO and founder Tim Sweeney, "because while we're predicting the future, we're actually secretly building it in the background so that our predictions are right."
(...)

"But also, I think we can take a wider view of what games could be in the future," Sweeney adds. "Now we have this idea of installing a game, which means downloading every byte of the game from the Internet and putting it on your machine. You know, those boundaries can change over time. Perhaps only part of the game can actually be on your particular machine at any one time."


He points to the nascent rise of cloud gaming, where the idea is that the entire game lives in the server, thereby invalidating concerns about data size and footprint. "We're just going to have to watch the way the games evolve over time, and they may be more flexible in the future than they are now. Every previous console generation was limited by the expectation that some people don't have Internet, and have to be able to play the game off of a physical disc, right? If that expectation fades away, I think you have entirely new possibilities."

as far stadia goes:
 

Ismaul

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Ya just don't talk about your last masturbation session in good company.
So the other day I was watching porn y'know, dick out and at the ready, one hand on the mouse one hand on the trigger as is proper for a gentleman of the 21st century.

I'm watching this girl get pounded by three guys in every orifice, hot and gross at the same time as it always is, and I'm getting close. The action is good, my mind is in the game, and I've got tissues ready. And so it happens.

It's coming out, no stopping it now. The video I'm watching switches to some guy's ass trying to readjust his position, and I'm right here dick in hand, spraying it like there's no tomorrow while at the same time thinking "No! please! no homo", but nothing can be done about it.

I'm sure you can relate.
 

J1M

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I wonder which project Jade Raymond will get cancelled next.

Awfully nice of Jason and Andy to leave the blame at the feet of Phil Harrison in their articles instead of the Google CEO or the VP in charge of the game studios.
 

Daemongar

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Weird how they went about this. I'd always assumed that if one were to start out with cloud based gaming, if you started small and grew it over time eventually the technology necessary make this format more viable would arrive at some point in the near future - that is, emerging tech in reducing latency or a custom thin client the integrates with the service to improve performance. You keep the service going to continually improve. Think Google just spent crazy Google money with little vision. Reminds me of Microsoft moving into mobile phones for some reason.
 

abija

Prophet
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May 21, 2011
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To bring in games like Red Dead, Google spent astronomical sums (tens of millions *each*)...
Just to reiterate the absurdity of this thing: Sources say Google spent tens of millions of dollars -- the budgets of some major games -- PER Stadia port.
I thought that's normal for games like RDR? And games with low budget that make it big aren't quite the norm, more like lottery winners.
Reads like fake outrage, a lot of barking to let them know what pockets to line...
 
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Tacgnol

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Weird how they went about this. I'd always assumed that if one were to start out with cloud based gaming, if you started small and grew it over time eventually the technology necessary make this format more viable would arrive at some point in the near future - that is, emerging tech in reducing latency or a custom thin client the integrates with the service to improve performance. You keep the service going to continually improve. Think Google just spent crazy Google money with little vision. Reminds me of Microsoft moving into mobile phones for some reason.

The big corps have the money to gamble on these sorts of projects. If they fail, they lose a bit of pocket money, but a big success could propel them into the stratosphere.

Google in particular is pretty infamous for the amount of failed projects they back and develop in the hope of one being successful. In fairness, it seems to be a valid strategy.
 

Ravielsk

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Feb 20, 2021
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Weird how they went about this. I'd always assumed that if one were to start out with cloud based gaming, if you started small and grew it over time eventually the technology necessary make this format more viable would arrive at some point in the near future - that is, emerging tech in reducing latency or a custom thin client the integrates with the service to improve performance. You keep the service going to continually improve. Think Google just spent crazy Google money with little vision. Reminds me of Microsoft moving into mobile phones for some reason.

Because there is no good way to start small with streaming anything. Just video streaming requires a fairly massive servers to get that compressed video to anyone at a reasonable speed(why do you think Youtube alternatives struggle so much with getting of the ground) and streaming an entire PC or games requires even bigger servers, mainly because there you cannot cheat by bunching together X amount of server racks or throttling traffic/server usage to get the best performance. You need at least a dedicated GPU, CPU and RAM so when you are offering 4k 60fps streaming you need as a bare minimum the EQUIVALENT of a RTX2080, a core i9 and 32gb of ram. So if your server has say something like 1tb of ram, something like 270 cores and 32 RTX level graphics processors then that server is hardcapped at servicing 32 customers at any given time. So just to offer such a service in one of the bigger american cities to say around 5000-10000 customers is a hefty investments that requires a lot of people to pay for subscription to be profitable. The equation changes slightly when you target lower standard such as 1080p 60fps but its not like it cuts the initial investment and maintenance costs by 90%.
Streaming just video on the other hand lets you use that same hypothetical server to service thousands of customers as sending 500mb of HD video of the net means the server wont hear from you for the next 10-20 minutes and can keep sending data packets to other customers.


The sheep are buying on this consumer friendly bs from Microsoft, only looking short term, they dont know they might get fucked on the long term.
The sheep are not the only factor in this equation what is really important here are the publishers because here is the thing: If you switch to a 100% streaming model its effectively as if your company got bought out by Microsoft only without giving you a cent in return for that buy out. So if your entire catalog runs exclusively(or mostly) on Xcloud you have effectively 0 control over it. If Microsoft were to decide that they will be taking a 70% cut there is nothing you can do about it as the existence of your product is entirely dependent on their streaming "service". This is perhaps why everyone was so reluctant to support Stadia, they knew that if Google makes it big with Stadia it will screw them before it screws the sheeple. This is also why the success of streaming is not entirely dependent on customers but on publishers because if EA or Ubisoft (wisely) decide not to publish their stuff on Xcloud then it will struggle to gain any major foothold either way.
I am sure some retarded indies will take the bait, the same way they took it with G2A, but what the big fish will do is what will really decide how it will shake out.
 

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