Google Stadia

[edyzmedieval]

https://www.gamesradar.com/google-stadia-release-date-price-games-controller/

Full on, on-demand game streaming - think of it like watching YouTube vids on your games but you can immediately jump to play by yourself. Highly ambitious but also very complicated to pull off.

Thoughts on this?

[Csargo]

It's interesting definitely, and Google has the resources and technology to pull it off or at least should. I wonder what the price will be, what they'll be able to offer games wise, and things like that.

[Husar]

It CAN be useful for some people/games, but if publishers get their wish of this fully replacing game sales, you can say goodbye to playing old games, goodbye to modding games and so on. Plus the image quality is probably quite a bit below locally calculated images due to the compression that needs to be used.And then there is pricing of course. Surely they can get the hardware cheaper since they buy huge quantities, but they do essentially need more or less the same hardware that you would need at home.
Surely they can use it more efficiently since not everyone plays at the same time (someone can play on the same hardware in the morning and someone else in the evening), but that only works within the same region since if they give you hardware on the other side of the planet, you will have considerable lag. This also means that for big releases they will need a lot of surplus hardware or some people will get performance issues or a notification that the game isn't available in the first days. Given how most huge corporations often have performance issues in the first days, it's probably more economical to let some people lag or not have access for a few days than have lots of surplus that you only need on 20 days a year. For your usual server you can probably just get some cloud server capacities from Amazon or whoever, but I doubt these types of capacities come with powerful GPUs for gaming.

And of course it shifts ownership and control away from the consumer to the corporation. When they remove your SP game because not enough people play it anymore to be economical (in the sense that they have to have storage space for it everywhere), it's gone. You can't back it up, you can't crack it and you can't program your own dedicated servers for it, if you want it back you either have to hope retail still exists or you have to program it anew yourself. Or maybe hope for a GOG streaming service, but that may never take off due to low customer numbers.

So uhm, I think if you're the casual type who just wants to play once in a while on your tablet and who only plays the latest AAA games anyway, this might be good, depending on the cost. I just personally hope it won't replace retail entirely because I do play or revisit somewhat older games quite a bit in between newer ones, discover new exciting mods for them, etc. To some extent I think the indie market will stick to the old model due to lower sales numbers though, it might just be the AAA market that moves more to streaming because large publishers want to extinguish all illegal copying, it removes all cheating from their MP-focused games, etc. In these cases the major drawback that is left is the lower image quality, but that might go away once networks become faster. After all, most MP-games are "dead" anyway once the servers are turned off.

[Husar]

There is also a side that I didn't think about yet: How these new models could change gameplay itself.
One game developer (made Diablo apparently) has this to say:
https://twitter.com/davidbrevik/status/1110239294264737792

I'm very worried about the future of the gaming market. All of these services where developers get paid by the minute are going to have radical impacts on design motivations and predatory practices. If you thought Free-to-play was bad, you haven't seen anything yet.

[...]

There is no way to stop this. These changes are coming. When mega-companies like Google and Apple are making this a corporate initiative, gaming is going change forever.

https://twitter.com/davidbrevik/status/1110329147790770176

Spotify had a profound impact on the music industry.

Imagine a world where authors didn't sell books, but you subscribed to a service and they got paid a penny by the page read instead.

It would change everything.

Someone on a forum (in German so I won't link it) made the counter argument that too much grind wouldn't work because a flatrate model would make people switch to something more fun to play more rapidly since the other game would be readily available. That also makes some sense, but I guess in general we would have to see what flatrate models would do for diversity in gaming, etc.

I still see it as more of a threat/bad development than an improvement or chance. There's also the problem that paying for a lot of subscriptions means having a lot of fixed monthly costs and removing them also means that you basically lose a hobby or part thereof completely (unlike when you own things and can still use them without paying for usage rights, energy costs excluded).

[edyzmedieval]

While in essence it's a great idea, there's significant technological changes to this. The subscription model works great for the consumer in terms of music - in terms of gaming, not that much. Keep in mind that not everyone has super fast internet and to be fair, I like to play my games offline as well.

[Husar]

While in essence it's a great idea, there's significant technological changes to this. The subscription model works great for the consumer in terms of music - in terms of gaming, not that much. Keep in mind that not everyone has super fast internet and to be fair, I like to play my games offline as well.

Absolutely, I once had an issue with an internet provider change and needed to use the neighbors' WiFi for a few weeks. Without games being available offline, those weeks would have been terrible. I could play online games somewhat decently, but streaming entire games would not have worked at all. Internet outages are also far more common than electricity outages here. You just sort of give away more and more control to corporations. I find that acceptable in some areas that are not so dear to me, like TV and movies, but not for gaming in general as you say.
I can see how some casual gamers wouldn't care though, as long as it always has the latest Call of Duty or FIFA.

[edyzmedieval]

I'm curious how Steam would work out. If they go to a subscription model to access your own account... please no.

[Husar]

I'm curious how Steam would work out. If they go to a subscription model to access your own account... please no.

I don't think they could do that without more or less going out of business immediately. More likely, a subscription model would start with a limited selection of existing and new games, and maybe get subscription-exclusive titles after a while. So more of a slow transition that lets people keep the old games they bought. That would still be a subscription model where you download the game to your computer though I guess. Streaming is a step further from that still. EA currently run their subscription model in addition to the traditional sales model.
As a niche consumer who only plays a game from EA once in 5 years or so, I still find the idea of subscription-only quite terrible though and I'd rather skip the one game I like than pay monthly for games I don't want. Yes, I might try a game that looks bad and actually like it once in a while with a subscription, but that's probably still not worth the cost, plus my time is too limited for the games I know I like already. :shrug:

[bauuubass]

My friend was super hyped about this and I was kinda interested too, but then I read somewhere that it is only gonna come to select countries, so living in a small country in Europe, what are the chances that we're gonna see it :D and with all possible problems and (supposed) high prices I'm starting to think it's for the best.

[Xantan]

I mean, as long as you have a very good internet connection, you should be fine to go with it. But the computing requirements for this are immense.

[Csargo]

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2

Well it's not looking good...