[Crinus]

> the lack of a long term vision

How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will be filled with anti-consumer garbage that you wont be able to do anything about - not even the files that make up the game are under your control.

I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail exactly because i can imagine all the negative potential it has.

I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.

[krick]

I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client. Games of the future will require more powerful hardware than what you are using now, but even your typical gaming computer of today will be not affordable in the future, simply because it won't be produced for mass market anymore. In effect, all your computations will be run on the platforms owned by someone else. And may be it even will be considered by society and the government to be an obviously sensible safety measure: the same way citizens shouldn't be able to possess nuclear weapons, they shouldn't be able to produce dangerously powerful software on their own, without government monitoring and approval.

Wow, fuck, I seriously scared myself just now.

[wruza]

Before you get too scared, please watch this ads sponsored by Ad, Inc between your corridor transitions. Btw, your game developer didn’t intend that at all, its just for our platform to be profitable.

You can remove it by going premium (tracking not included) for only $RTX3080Ti/year.

[baud147258]

High quality graphics aren't that important to make good games. And any graphical improvement is having diminished returns. The jumps between PS1->PS2 and PS2->PS3 (using console because it's static comparison points, but it applies to PC game too) were noticeable and huge, but now each new generation bring smaller and smaller diminishing returns. And then there's all the games that don't go for cutting-edge graphics.

[koffiezet]

> I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client.

Compute power has become cheaper and cheaper over time. If you just look at the ridiculous powerhouses smartphones have become in a very short time, it is apparent that will not happen.

Also, consoles are pretty damn affordable - certainly compared to how expensive console/pc games are. Major game technology updates are mainly driven by new console generations. You might get some extra resolution or niche technologies on an ultra-highend PC, but the main underlying tech of modern games is still tailored to the current generation of consoles. I own a i7 with a 2080ti - and sure, games might look a bit better than their console versions (if available at all) - the game on my 4k+ desktop PC is still essentially the same that I could run on a $300 PS4.

[loceng]

Ready Player One movie comes to mind; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)

I had similar reaction when initially thinking through such a centralized architecture - and made me understand that a decentralized computational infrastructure ("personal computers") is a necessary failsafe to prevent against pitfalls of such centralization; similar reason as to why I think mesh network technology should potentially be everywhere, however not used as a default network.

These are the systems and failsafes, along with canaries we build into systems, that we need to educate everyone about - so the public can clearly understand and have a document available for them be able to refer to.

[Kaiyou]

Seeing how, imho, the best games of all time were all made in the 1990s, I don't think gaming is all that reliant on powerful hardware.

[StanislavPetrov]

Agree with your point but I'd say 1980s!

[jayparth]

Agree with your point but I'd say {decades in which you were a child}!

[StanislavPetrov]

Childhood nostalgia absolutely plays a role, but in my experience game developers tended to trade quality for graphics as the years advanced. In the 1980s games like Ultima 4 couldn't use graphics as a crutch and thus had to make the games really engrossing. My other grips is the ever-decreasing difficulty of the games. Back in the 1980s most games were difficult (if not very difficult/nearly impossible) to finish. You could play a game back then for months or years and never finish it. There was no internet to search for the answers to problems or riddles you couldn't solve. Games were not designed to be easily completed by virtually anyone who played. I can't remember how many hours I spent playing Zork before I was able to solve all the puzzles and beat that game (let alone Zork II and Zork III).

[wazoox]

I'd say that in the 80s most game concepts were invented, but many suffered from the technical limitations of the time. In the 90s, most of these limitations were gradually lifted. The high point is probably different from game category to game category.

For instance Pac-Man, Tetris, or Galaga are still good fun today. Ditto Super Mario Bros. Flight Simulator II? Sorcery? not so much. There are plenty of 3D games from the early 90s perfectly fun to play, and some IMO like "Thief" haven't been bested in gameplay.

[Kaiyou]

The 80s laid the ground work, the 90s perfected it and from the 00s onwards it was all downhill with a few exceptions here and there.

[Crinus]

Yeah, that is basically the end game i was thinking at with my last moment. I just didn't want to start with this because it'd sound too tinfoil-hatty :-P (and some already told me i am assuming too much :-P).

[skybrian]

Okay but why? When you walk out of a movie theater you don't have anything. Was it still a good movie?

Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price. Rental services make this explicit.

[Crinus]

Games are not movies though many making this connection is probably why many games are awful nowadays as they try to be something they are not. It doesn't surprise me that executives who have no idea about gaming see flashy graphics and associate them with movies.

Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months before i was doing my 9th playthrough of Fallout New Vegas - not long after my 6th playthrough of Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines. All these are games that i have played many times over many years and have benefited tremendously from users having complete control over their computers and the files to mod them and fix them so they become the classics they are today. If anything, just VtmB alone is a great case of how much you can not rely on the official channels for support but also how much the community - thanks to having such control - can address the issues and give the game the attention it deserves. These are games i have played and had fun for years.

Of course these are just the more known ones. I have played (and even fixed myself) and had fun with games that have been forgotten by their own developers for many years now. I actively try to find lesser known and/or lesser well received older games - i spent several days playing something like Excalibur 2555AD, a clunky and mediocre game for most, yet i had fun exploring its weird dungeons and even weirder enemy designs that look like they escaped from some early 90s British comic).

None of that stuff would be possible with something like Stadia. All of those would be long gone, broken for all their short lifetime which would end to make space for the newest overhyped release and some of them - like Excalibur 2555AD - would barely exist for more than a few months after their failure.

[Dylan16807]

What percentage of your games do you play more than a year after purchase?

If you could have rented most of your games at a lower price, and then bought the ones you really liked on sale, would you have paid more money total?

[Crinus]

With a few exceptions, pretty much all of them are games i buy at some sale or at recommendation of someone i trust but i find time for actually playing them much later. Many of those games (e.g. VtMB that i mentioned elsewhere) are games i've bought (let alone played) way after their developers ceased to exist.

You probably need to check out the whole "gaming backlog" meme :-P

[Dylan16807]

That doesn't answer the second question I asked, though.

And pretend I asked what percent you continue to play more than a year after starting them.

[glandium]

How many games you play today you'll be able to play in 20 years? I'm delighted that I can play on archive.org the games I played 20 years ago.

[vunie]

> What percentage of your games do you play more than a year after purchase?

Admittedly a very low percentage.

I will say that I definitely spend more than 90% of my time playing games on games that I've bought more than 10 years ago.

To me, games are a way to experience a different life in a different universe that is full with other friends and acquaintances. They are fun worlds that I can visit whenever I want.

That's why stadia (and games that require online connections) are things I can never see myself accepting.

[__david__]

If you approach games this way there are much better deals than Stadia. Microsoft's Game Pass and Sony's PS+ both get you free games for roughly $60 a year (so if you get one full price game out of it you're "breaking even"). They're cheap, but ephemeral (you lose the games when you unsubscribe). Stadia seems expensive and also ephemeral—not the best combo.

[Krasnol]

Almost all of those that I paid for.

I only pirated (it's the 21st century "Demo" for me) the rest. You may see why I wouldn't be interested in Stadia at all.

[AlexandrB]

This is actually the perfect comparison. I can still watch movies from the 1950s on various media. Good luck playing a Stadia exclusive in 2090 in any format. Treating games like a disposable commodity is short-sighted and undermines any claim the medium might have to being an art form.

[fsloth]

I still need to have a big ass corp to maintain the film library. Movies don't just remain watchable automatically. Without fairly large capital investment to storage they would rot away. Actually the analogue to movies is pretty good in this sense - if we had a 'universal game binary' that would 'just work' on the generic 'cloud based game platform' of the future.

But anyway, our future entertainment might be completely hallucinated by AI in an on demand fashion before we get the 'general storage game binary' thingy.

[hayleox]

Even if we imagine some 'universal game binary', games are never going to be portable the way other media is. A movie is basically just a rectangle with some moving pictures accompanying some audio -- it's really easy to create a standard format that any movie can be shoved into. Video games, however, are much more dynamic. Video games require all sorts of complicated input devices – gamepads, joysticks, touchscreens, mice, keyboards, microphones, cameras, accelerometers, infrared sensors, etc etc etc.

You can still play old video games in emulators, but you are usually using an approximation of the original input device. This isn't such a big deal with older, simpler games – playing a SNES game with an Xbox controller is a good enough approximation of the original experience. But newer innovations like the Wiimote, Kinect, VR headsets, etc will make it a lot harder to play games made for them in the future. In 50 years, you'll still be able to boot up Wii Sports in an emulator, sure, but will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?

[fsloth]

"will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?"

I'm betting I could print it and hack something together from some hobby electronics kit if I really wanted to.

But you are absolutely correct. There is a category of games for which the complete experience is unseparably attached to the original substrate.

On the other hand, keyboard and mouse driven games are fairly maintainable accross platform generations.

[skybrian]

This seems like a good argument against buying Stadia exclusives, but also against playing any MMO.

It's a matter of degree, depending on the whims of the market and dedication of the emulator scene. Not all old movies or games are available. Not all art has survived. And apparently the old World of Warcraft is back?

[JohnFen]

> but also against playing any MMO.

MMOs are a case where the game itself inherently requires a serious server in order to work. I don't play MMOs myself, but if I did, I would not be bothered by their server-based nature as there's an obviously inescapable reason for it.

That is not representative of most games.

[Dylan16807]

What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.

[Shank]

> Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread.

This is how you get cheating. Decentralized hosting can work (look at CoD for an example of a highly successful game that used end user systems as servers), but an MMO is probably one of the least trusting environments you can have.

It's not about immediate processing or anything, it's about having a trusted copy of the game state.

Further reading: Latency Compensating Methods in Client/Server In-game Protocol Design and Optimization by Yahn W. Bernier: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...

[JohnFen]

I mean a server that can handle clients at scale. Certainly, it's possible to do this sort of thing in a more decentralized fashion, but the games that I'm aware of don't do this.

[Crinus]

It is indeed sad to see MMOs go though they are a bit special in that they are inherently about their communities. Meridian 59 - the first MMO, at least over the Internet - was opensourced a while ago yet if you connect to it now, it is a shell of its former 90s shelf since most people have moved on.

[odessacubbage]

quite a number of 'dead' mmos still have active and dedicated communities on private servers, smt imagine comes to mind. no stadia exclusive will have that longevity.

[kemitche]

Plenty of platform exclusive games from decades ago are readily available on new platforms today. I'm not sure your argument makes sense, unless you're saying you bought a movie IN the 1950s and are still watching it today.

[JohnFen]

> Was it still a good movie?

Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.

> Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price

It probably depends on what sort of games you enjoy, and why.

I still pull out games that I bought 20 or more years ago and play them, and am very happy that I can do that. I wouldn't pay money for a game if that weren't possible.

You feel differently, and that's fine. Different people have different needs and wants.

[dorgo]

>Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.

Is this not possible with Stadia?

[JohnFen]

Not as far as I can tell. You're streaming the games from Stadia servers. You have no "copy" of them.

[bathtub365]

When buying a game on Stadia is the same price as buying it on other platforms but with the downside of a total loss of control or ability to play offline it becomes less attractive.

[Dylan16807]

"Same price" if you already have a solid computer with a multi-hundred-dollar GPU.

[Lio]

How does Stadia compared with a used PS4 and second hand copy of a game that you can trade in again afterwards?

Also how does it compared price wise to a brand new but leased console?

It’s going to have to be pretty cheap to be competitive I think.

[paulmd]

I'll go a step farther, it only makes sense as part of a "PS Now" like service, where you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a catalog of games. Nobody is paying for locked-in games that only run on Stadia given Google's track record of goldfish-like attentions span on these projects.

If you are just renting hardware then you need to run a local Steam cache (this exists), and allow players to use their existing game catalog. This is basically the "GeForce Now" model.

And yes, you may note that I am referencing other game streaming services. Google is late to this party, and they have nothing unique to offer, nor a particularly compelling business model, nor the trust of their userbase. Stadia is DOA.

If Google wants it to be not-DOA with their current business model, nothing short of a guarantee that if they fold within the next 10 years then they will issue a full and unconditional refund is going to do it. Nobody is going to pay full price for locked-in games on a platform with a track record like Google's.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Sure, if you are the kind of person to sell and buy used games, that will probably be pretty cheap. But that's becoming more niche by the day, even without Stadia. Most game sales are digital downloads from a storefront.

[Lio]

That would imply that the purchasers of these games are not price sensitive and would negate the implied price advantage of Stadia.

[ukyrgf]

You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU. It should support VR, but I imagine when that tech has matured I'll want to pick up another $120 GPU.

[taneq]

You're not "running modern games" at any kind of acceptable frame rate and quality on a 15 year old CPU. And you absolutely aren't running VR on a 15 year old CPU even if you have a 4 year old GPU that technically fits within the minimum requirements.

[ukyrgf]

Nobody said anything about the CPU, I've gone from two cores to quad to now... I dunno, whatever the hell an i7 is. 16? My screens have also gone from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080 to 2560x1080. I just took umbrage with the idea that you need to spend hundreds on your GPU to get good performance. People see the 3-monitor setups and RGB lights and streaming equipment and think that's PC gaming, but it's not.

Games are more efficient than ever today. The worst era was definitely the really lazy Xbox 360 ports at the end of the 00s/early 10s. Those games would turn my GPU into a space heater.

[mrguyorama]

I run VR with an i5 4440 and an RX 580 8gb. The CPU is 6(!) years old and the GPU is about 3. I have no trouble running VR games at 90fps consistently and 1.5-2.0 supersampling. Games like H3VR, VTOL VR, and I still have headroom to transcode video using OBS studio and stream to twitch and save locally. I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.

While a 15 year old CPU is definitely hyperbole, if you bought the most expensive intel cpu 10 years ago, you could probably run VR on it.

[bathtub365]

You likely aren’t running VR on Stadia, either, as it doesn’t support VR.

[Dylan16807]

> You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games.

If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.

[mrguyorama]

If you read the article and the attached twitter threads, stadia's streamed content is not of high visual fidelity.

[nitemice]

I think it really comes down to the kinds of games you play, and the way you like to play them.

If you tend towards single-player, story-based games, like Red Dead etc., then maybe playing through it once and moving on is enough for you. Then again, maybe you'll want to come back to it in 3, 4, 5 years, and hopefully you'll be able to with Stadia, but with a disc/download you definitely should be able to.

On the other hand, if you play multiplayer, "live-service" games, as many are pushing to be these days, then you're already at the mercy of the dev/publisher to keep supporting the game so you can play it in the future. In that case, it become a question of who will give up support first, Google or the developer?

In either case, I think the Xbox Pass-style "all-you-can-eat" model is a better solution. No big, upfront cost for any single game, and you can still go back to something older, as long as it remains supported.

[fsloth]

I'm the kind of consumer who uses games as disposable entertainment. I don't want to come back to witcher 3 in 3,4,5 years. I want to play the game that is the best that year.

When I was a youngling and had time and most critically - there weren't that many games - I liked to return to good games like Baldurs Gate 2 or Fallout from time to time.

Now - pushing 40, have family and career and and an acute sense of mortality (i.e. time has value) - I still like to play games from time to time, but I really have to struggle to complete any game even once.

I sample the latest AAA games and hottest indie things when they come out and are cheap on Steam but I don't really have time to complete them, except only rarely. The only game I've completed after Witcher 3 is In to the breach. I have a huge list of unplayed games in Steam from the last holiday sale waiting to be even installed.

Given this, I find a disposable cloud game library with reasonable pricing quite enticing. It would be exactly how I use steam - except sans having to download hundreds of gigabytes before I can even go to the main screen.

[ddingus]

There are other ways to watch movies.

When those delivered a sufficiently good quality experience, I stopped going to a theatre.

Control is one part of that. "Let's pause..."

Replay is another. Maybe watch it a few times for whatever reason.

Sharing is another. I still like physical media for this reason.

Games are similar.

Renting a game should cost less than one that can be replayed, shared, etc...

Keeping history is another good reason. I have media and games from times past, and I have the ability to share that experience today. High value.

Gaming and movies today? Definitely moving away from the higher value things, yet pricing often seems the same, or not in line with the lower value proposition.

[developerdylan]

You're making a lot of assumptions with a clear bias there. Just because you don't want this model for games, doesn't mean nobody does. I tried Stadia with Assassin's Creed in the Alpha and it was a wonderfully low bar to entry. I was able to play the new Assassin's Creed on my Macbook. There's a lot of value to that.

[Crinus]

Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with (be it modding, programing, custom patches or whatever). And i do see it through the potential of things going bad because if things go perfect then everything is fine.

I focus on the bad side because i do not want the bad things to happen and i see the bad things way worse than the good things.

[sangnoir]

> Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with

I share your sentiments, but this battle was already lost a decade ago when Steam won - Apple is just twisting the dagger with it's App Store and their unceasing march to turn OS X into an appliance (limiting 'root', and with catalina, what you can put in '/')

[Crinus]

While i'm not a fan of Steam, with it you can still keep the files around and some games are DRM free or rely on a DLL that you can easily replace. See Scott Ross' recent video about Trackmania 2 Nation for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulp99wSUNgk

But personally i prefer GOG where i have hundreds of games (though it isn't the only store i use - any that give me DRM-free games, like Humble Store or GamersGate - is fine) and i keep my own offline copies (including games from stores that have long gone - another reason i dislike DRM schemes and prefer to have control over my files).

[blfr]

I run Linux and LineageOS because I care about controlling my computers and data. But I don't care about games.

They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.

[catalogia]

When I play a game, I sink hours of my finite life into it without any possibility of ever getting that time back. When I "preserve" a game, what does that cost me? Less space on my bookshelf than a typical mass-market paperback novel. Virtually nothing. The cost of preserving a game is far less than the cost of playing it.

Ergo, any game not worth preserving is not worth playing.

[suby]

I'm sure a lot of people feel the same as you, but I very much disagree.

If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc. I don't see how one can claim those mediums are art but games are somehow not.

[ativzzz]

> If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc

They're not, unless you're willing to pay extra for them to be.

Netflix is not preservable, DVDs are.

Spotify is not preservable, CDs/MP3s are.

Most of the stuff we watch/listen to is on non-preservable media, and for the most part, we don't care.

If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

[xg15]

You're aware that DVDs are older than Netflix and MP3s are older than Spotify?

They absolutely used to be preservable until an enormous technological effort was made to make them non-preservable. The amount of people curating their CD (or later MP3) collections showed they cared very much.

> If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

Because it's not clear at all that this option would still exist. From a publisher's perspective, it's vastly preferable to just sell access to your game and keep the actual binary under wraps. So if there is a way how they could realistically do that, I don't think there will be much motivation to also offer the game as standalone software.

Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.

[suby]

My worry is that some games will be distributed exclusively through these streaming services and people will be unable to even obtain a local copy. There's certainly incentive for publishers to do so since it'd eliminate piracy, and perhaps Google will give exclusivity deals to various titles.

Due to this I'm actually kind of hoping for this service to fail to catch on.

[jowsie]

The issue with this is that Netflix/Spotify are pay once monthly, and consume whatever you want whenever you want.

With Stadia, you pay once monthly, and then you pay for the game on top of that cost. The same price you'd pay if you bought the game for any other platform, which also has the benefit of letting you own the game (physical copies, files downloaded to hardware you own).

You're comparing apples to oranges.

[xg15]

> They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.

The people for eho games were a major part of their childhood as well as the profession of game designers would like a word with you.

[gootdude]

I also tested Project Stream, and the vision then made a lot more sense, that you were playing a game with cloud saves that could then be continued on your own hardware. This is the model Microsoft is creating with their xCloud while Stadia is forcing you to pay full price for a game for a diminished experience.

[jillesvangurp]

I pay for Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime. I have no illusions about content being there long term. Something similar for games is missing though arguably it is content that you consume and then discard.

Maybe, consider that it's not about you but about everyone else. I don't have a water cooled led blinking monstrosity hiding under my desk pretending it's a industrial vacuum cleaner. So, any game I play, I'm dealing with lousy framerates, and endless tweaking, etc. I never really invested in owning consoles. And I stopped buying games years ago. But I'd probably play Red Redemption and similar games out of curiosity if only I had something to play it on at a reasonable price.

In other words, Stadia potentially solves a problem for casual gamers like me already used to subscribing to content that might like to try out a few high end games but are not willing to spend gazillions on the latest gear.

Of course Google's execution here is worth criticizing. It looks like they got a giant meh from the gaming industry and are showing off another empty room problem. They need a catalogue and a marketing story around it. Neither is something Google has ever done well. They just don't do the content game very well. Youtube premium/red/or whatever it is called is pretty much dead in the water for the same reason. It's the same failed strategy: build it and they will come.

[cmcd]

Unless I misunderstand their model is not like the companies you mention since you still have to buy the games. Imagine paying monthly for Netflix and still having to pay full price for every movie you watch without owning it.

[Crinus]

The problem is that it is about "me" (and others who think like me) because what everyone else does also affects what i get to experience myself thanks to market forces. In other words, if everyone goes Stadia (or a Stadia-lookalike) then the market (both for software but also - and most importantly - for hardware) will vanish. At best it will only be available for very high prices, just for the rich few, but i'm not rich so that wouldn't mean anything to me.

[washadjeffmad]

Don't get region blindness, here. Also, never forget the power of open source and self hosting. If a model like Stadia works for other, there's no reason not to put it work for yourself.

I can already stream my Windows gaming container on my KVM Linux host with VFIO to my smartphone with BT connected controller. I could also do the same with just a RasPi running the SteamLink service. This isn't new or novel (I remember Stadia's concept being done multiple times before), but it is possible.

The only real danger to this is proprietary platform dependence. More people being able to game when and where they want isn't bad, but we can't rely on Valve forever to make sure there's not another GFWL-type uprising.

[Crinus]

I am not talking about technical matters here (and FWIW Stadia is based on Linux), i am talking about control. Games that i stream from my own PC to my own handheld (or whatever) are still under my control, so that is perfectly fine. Games that i - wont, but just for the sake of argument - stream from Stadia are under Google's control which is not fine.

Proprietary platform dependence isn't much of an issue when you can hack around that platform. A win32 game using directx on my own PC is way more preferable than a Linux game using Vulkan on someone else's cloud server.

[Bartweiss]

I suppose the importance of "lost when the project closes" depends on the lifespan of the project.

Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play. Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running, and games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible. Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds. When it comes to something like a music library, "buy don't rent" makes a lot of sense to me, but the lifespan of software and particularly games tends to be finite even when you do own them.

Now, I totally grant that Stadia will probably have 10% the lifespan of Flash or PowerPC architecture. But lots of people avoided a string of ephemeral music-streaming services and finally bought in with Spotify or Google Play Music. Lots of people avoided ebooks, but are finally starting to come around. So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does. (Along with picking up all the users who are only interested in one or two AAA titles to begin with.)

I share the rest of your concerns though, so that sort of worries me more. Streaming games may be what finally enables the death of free/independent modding, DRM-cracking, tracker disabling, and offline play after years of battles with publishers trying to push them directly.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play.

If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy!

> Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running

What doesn't work in Virtualbox? Luckily, games from the 90's generally don't need GPU acceleration. I'm also continuously amazed by how much just works in modern Windows.

> games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible.

There you have a point. Although even then, you can use VMWare + some unlocker tools to install Snow Leopard, and from there use Rosetta. Qemu is also supposed to be pretty good these days, although I've never tried it. Alternately, it's not that difficult to track down old Mac hardware.

> Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds.

Huh?

The Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, Playstation, and all Gameboy models have damn-near perfect emulators. Identical to console down to the pixel, for every game.

Dolphin isn't quite take-a-microscope-to-the-screen accurate, but it will run the vast majority of the Gamecube and Wii's library such that you won't notice a difference.

The N64 and PS2 lack great emulators, but what's available is still very good. Some niche titles will exhibit glitches or refuse to run, but most stuff works well enough.

The Wii U and PS360 don't have such good emulators yet, but that's because those consoles are relatively recent. RPCS3 and Cemu are making great progress, and can already run a handful of large titles without problems, such as Persona 5 and BotW.

The original Xbox lacks a usable emulator, which sucks. Luckily, this isn't the norm.

Emulator developers have done amazing work, and the result is that most of gaming history is fully open to your exploration. Games will never be quite as plug and play as music files, but they aren't that labor-intensive to get working either.

[choward]

> If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy!

What if it depends on the page it was originally hosted on? https://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e...

[Wowfunhappy]

If your game depends on an online component, and the online component disappears, yeah, you won't be able to run the game unless that missing piece can be recreated somehow (as Flashpoint is doing).

This is exactly the problem with making games rely on external servers in order to start, as Stadia does (for entirely different reasons).

[Crinus]

AFAIK Flashpoint (or some other Flash preservation project) use an embedded server with an embedder browser to make these games work. Most of them were single player or relied on simple common (among game hosters) APIs that are easy to replicate.

[SXX]

> Qemu is also supposed to be pretty good these days, although I've never tried

I obviously can't say about every game out there, but in my limited experience it's really quite decent.

[throwaway2048]

http://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint

This is an excellent effort to preserve old browser plugin games.

[Crinus]

There are people who try to archive Flash and Shockwave games and if anything, this is a good example of trying to fix something after the bad situation has already happened: the best time was when things were new. But better now than never.

PowerPC and 86k macs can be run under emulation so not everything is lost. Similar for games for DOS and ancient Windows versions, though from my personal experience 99.9% of old games will work on Windows 10 with some tweaks and/or wrappers (like dgVoodoo2, dxwnd, otvdm, etc and of course user made patches). It is extremely rare that i find an old game i cannot get to run.

[Bartweiss]

Yes, this is all true. I didn't mean to imply those things can't be salvaged, or that I think the lifespan of frameworks and hardware justifies switching to a system of "you lose all your games forever as soon as we aren't profitable". Outside of Flash games with no remaining hosts and console games with no known cartridges, there isn't much which is 100% lost. And the best works in an environment are most likely to endure, so most notable games are at least playable for somebody.

Rather, my concern is that lots of people already view games as having a "lifespan", and if they trust a streaming service to endure for a decade that might be accepted as "how long games last anyway".

[Lev1a]

> So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does.

Which means your (full price) "rental(s)" and the subscription fees for Stadia are gone right out the window.

Then when you want to play one of those games again you'll have to subscribe to the next GaaS and most likely buy... sorry rent that game again probably for full retail price. Rinse and repeat.

GaaS to me is an utterly nonsensical cash grab and as others ITT have mentioned a solution looking for a problem.

[JohnFen]

> So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does.

Considering that I still play games that I bought over 20 years ago, it would take at least 20 years for a streaming service to be able to convince me of this.

[Bartweiss]

That's true for me too, I dug out Starship Titanic not long ago, but it raises another concern. If streaming games catch on widely enough, the holdouts become a niche market. I don't foresee that happening to games in general, but certain genres could see streaming-only releases.

In particular, online FPS games have high requirements and many already have "fixed" lifespans because matchmaking relies on the publisher's servers. Given how many excellent games have switched to community hosting after they were abandoned by the publisher, that'd be a real shame.

[JohnFen]

> I don't foresee that happening to games in general

To be honest, I feel like this has already happened to computer games in general. Online and/or phone-home requirements pushed me out of large segments of the games market years ago.

[SXX]

> and games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible

Personally I played games for Mac OS 9 without any problem in standard QEMU+libvirt and performance was decent on my i7 4771.

[BinaryIdiot]

> How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term")

But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_. With their Project Stream beta they gave everyone a free copy of the game directly from the developer.

This assumption just doesn't make sense to me, especially for such a larger company.

> when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time)

Does it happen all the time? Granted they shut down _free_ things quite a lot but things you pay for? It's significantly rarer and even in those cases they give you a large amount of time before it gets shut down.

> I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail exactly because i can imagine all the negative potential it has.

Do you want PS Now to fail? xCloud? I really don't understand the polarization here. It seems like so many _want_ it to fail because of _theoretical_ issues. It's so bizarre.

Why not, you know, just let it compete on its own merits?

> I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.

You already do not have this freedom. Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you already don't have it, I don't understand why this would be taken out only on Stadia.

[aylmao]

> You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.

You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.

> Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you already don't have it, I don't understand why this would be taken out only on Stadia.

Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.

Even for heavily DRM-d content, it's just a matter of technical skill and people with the will to crack a game to catch up to the techniques used to keep it locked. With streaming there wouldn't be anything to crack. You simply don't have the game, period.

[BinaryIdiot]

> You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.

I'm not banking on anything here I'm just saying, because of their history, it's a more likely scenario. Both cases are complete guesses either way.

> Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.

It's just theoretical. I don't know if it's happened to many, if any, physical games. But the issue does exist today with digital games and most of the complaints are regarding theoretical Stadia downsides.

Digital game purchasing is huge; I don't think there is much if any distinction between what Stadia is able to do and what all the other game companies are able to do.

[Crinus]

> I don't think there is much if any distinction between what Stadia is able to do and what all the other game companies are able to do.

Stadia is able to make a game completely change and/or disappear whereas other game companies that put the game executable and data on your computer (either by some automated method like Steam or by you manually downloading it like GOG/Humble Store/GamersGate/etc) cannot do that because you can copy the files and preserve the game. Even if you specifically cannot do it, someone else will do it.

As i mentioned above, see Konami and P.T. for an example.

[jotm]

Yeah,they will just disappear. You may be able to get save games, maybe. OnLive (which was great, btw) just went poof, gone.

[Crinus]

> But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.

But you don't actually know that :-P. You are assuming goodwill, i am assuming badwill. Between the two, the former is nice to have, but the latter is something i'd really want to avoid. So i am focusing on the latter one as i'd rather avoid the negative.

(and all that ignoring other issues, e.g. the version that they may decide to give out is inferior to the original version)

> Does it happen all the time?

Yes, even successful services get shut down all the time - even for reasons that would logically make no sense to an outsider (e.g. internal politics). I have seen way too many software stores (for games mostly) disappear to trust any (and not just indie stuff, e.g. Stardock developed Impulse - where i used to have an account - which was later bought by GameStop only to be shut down a few years later - losing my stuff with it).

Google's services even more so, they still do shut down paid stuff.

> Do you want PS Now to fail? xCloud? I really don't understand the polarization here.

AFAIK PS Now (i don't know about xCloud but i guess the same) are about games that you can also play in the console itself, it doesn't replace the console. My issue is with not having control over the game files so that i can keep my own copy in case things disappear.

Though FWIW i am not into consoles at all, exactly because of those restrictions they have. But, at least AFAIK, despite the restrictions it still is possible to preserve console games (see Konami's P.T. which if it was done with Stadia now it'd be gone forever).

> It seems like so many _want_ it to fail because of _theoretical_ issues. It's so bizarre.

The problem here is that you can only stop something while it is being at a theoretical level because after that it'd be too late.

> Why not, you know, just let it compete on its own merits?

Because its own merits are

> You already do not have this freedom. Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely.

...no? The majority of the games i have are DRM free from GOG, Itch.io, Humble Store, GamersGate and i have manually downloaded them on my own storage and update them if i deem the update necessary (at least GOG does publish changelogs after each update). They are completely under my control. Though even with my Steam library (which is also large mainly because at the past i wasn't thinking too much about these issues, though i do try to keep offline copies whenever possible) i still have control over the files themselves - it is how i install mods and custom patches for otherwise broken (yet entertaining - see VtMB before it was released on GOG) games.

[larnmar]

Doesn’t sound that bad. Most of the games I’ve ever bought, I theoretically could but practically couldn’t play right now if I felt like it — I might still have the disc/cartridge somewhere but the old console won’t plug into a new TV or else I’d need to find some ancient computer hardware.

[jcranberry]

Movies still come out on disc even though netflix and streaming services in general have been very successful. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be the same with games.

[xemdetia]

Movies are an easy example: Do you want to watch the original ending of Return of the Jedi, the special edition ending, the revised ending post-prequels, the 4:3 edition or the widescreen edition? There are plenty of reasons to want to keep a copy of the version of the experience you enjoyed and want to experience again.

[benhurmarcel]

In that example, I'd wager most people wouldn't care which version it is.

[rchaud]

Movies still come out on disc because they're good stocking stuffers for the holidays, and you can carve out a pretty good margin selling box sets of film anthologies.

Plus Blu-rays can be sold globally. What's available in one country's Netflix often doesn't line up with what's available in a different country. Plus, a good chunk of the US movie-watching population does not have reliable broadband access.

[skohan]

Game developers would have more to gain from a streaming-only model:

1. It's expensive to develop for multiple platforms. If you can get people to buy into streaming, you theoretically have only one hardware target.

2. Streaming is more effective at enforcing DRM for games. You can make a recording of a movie you're playing on Netflix, but games would require remote execution which can't be copied.

[dorgo]

>but games would require remote execution which can't be copied.

Next HN headline: Machine Learning algorithm reverse engineers a Stadia game.

[jcranberry]

I think there has been some reverse engineering of simple game engines through ML already actually.

[Jyaif]

> i can imagine all the negative potential it has

But you fail to imagine all the positive potential. Terabyte-sized games with 0 download time, more interactions between players, better graphics, no more cheating, no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games), and better utilized HW (which is good for your wallet and the environment), and obviously you can play wherever you want.

Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

[vocatus_gate]

> Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

So, so wrong.

1. Much of the world has heavy-handed data caps. Those aren't going away any time soon. Streaming two ways eats into that quickly.

2. Input latency is real, and super annoying. And it's not just that there's latency; that you can get used to. It's that there's highly unpredictable latency which is super frustrating when playing anything but turn-based games. And at that point, why not just run it browser-based and be done with it?

3. Packet loss. Packet loss doesn't matter on streaming video because you can just wait for the server to re-send it, or just buffer till you get far enough ahead. On games, real-time response is critical, and there's no tolerance for waiting to "catch up on the stream."

The Internet will never be a good streaming platform for real-time gaming, not without some serious protocol upgrades. Everyone focuses on Netflix like it's remotely the same; it's not. Netflix is one-way, loss-is-okay, and latency (round-trip time for the packets, NOT the same as bandwidth) doesn't matter. Gaming is exactly opposite.

Without proper end-to-end QoS or dedicated circuits ($$$) Google Stadia will fail just like every other games streaming platform before it.

[Crinus]

Honestly, these aren't issues that would block something like Stadia, the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen.

These issues will be solved. The loss of control is not something that can be solved though and is IMO a much bigger issue.

[friendlybus]

You can't solve the input latency problem. You could move the input code into a super low quality game that runs on the thin client and validate the actions on the server. You could remap the high res streamed data onto the low res game client. But then you are just moving the lag from input to the updating the game world.

If you could solve the latency problem, multiplayer games wouldn't suck so much. Even super local servers with 22ms ping are one and a half frames of game rendering late for the round trip.

[account42]

> the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen

If that happens it will just be another big negative impact of Stadia.

[bathtub365]

Is download time a significant factor for people with the types of connections that will have a good experience on Stadia? It’s my understanding that downloading a large game in a timely fashion and streaming it are both bandwidth-intensive. As for “terabyte-sized games” are there any of those on the market, or even on the horizon? At some point it’s either outside of the budget of most games to produce that many assets, or the 1080p/upscaled to 4K experiences that Stadia provides won’t make use of extremely high resolution textures.

[Macha]

We're not at terabyte yet, but 80-100gb is becoming increasingly common. Even the crash remakes are coming in at 30gb, and that wasn't that High budget a title.

[bathtub365]

Google recommends a 35mbit/sec connection for 4K Stadia streaming and they say it uses 20GB/hr of data[1]. Even at your high example of 100GB, that’s just 5 hours of streaming. I understand that the idea is to optimise for instant play but it seems silly to download enough data to cover the entire contents of the game potentially multiple times over a play through. Platforms like Steam, Battle.net, and consoles already allow developers to post staged installs where players can start playing a game before all assets have been downloaded. Stadia continues to look like a solution in search of a problem, where that solution comes with a lot of tradeoffs that I find hard to swallow. 100GB is also only 10% of 1TB, and I find it hard to come up with a concrete use for the other 900GB.

1: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9607891?hl=en&ref_t...

[Crinus]

I do not fail to imagine the positive potential, i just consider it totally insignificant to the negative potential it has. None of those you mentioned is worth giving up control over the games you are paying for and your computing environment.

[falcolas]

Instead you have TB sized streaming.

Instead, you have carefully controlled and moderated interactions between players. LAN parties and internet cafe's would just not be possible.

Cheating will still occur, just at different levels. And I have to ask, why is cheating in a single player offline game bad in the first place? Cheating was built into many past games.

Piracy I'll give you, but I firmly disagree that it will lead to more or better games. It will just pad the pockets of the gaming studios more.

Instead you get to play on wifi only. No cell phones (not fast enough). Nowhere with data caps. Nowhere that isn't near to a Google data center.

[delfinom]

>Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

Modding keeps many PC games going for years. This just means most games will be dead after a few months of launch.

>better utilized HW (which is good for your wallet and the environment)

What koolaid are you drinking? Subscription services can cost you more over the long term than just buying. Tech isn't changing so fast anymore and the same goes for gaming. You can absolutely use the same setup for the last 6 years without any change other than wanting something new to get off on having.

>better graphics,

Why? Google is right now hardfocused on removing all visual fidelity because they need to compress fames as much as possible. The US has near permanent third world grade internet and it's not going to change anytime soon as long as 3 ISPs own most of the residential service. Wireless offering such as "5G" and Elon's pixie dust are only going to be make slight dents in the lack of high speed service.

[imtringued]

>no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games)

That doesn't make any sense. Where is that money supposed to come from? People who aren't buying your games are not your customers so denying service to them does nothing for your bottom line.

[kec]

All that plus an extra 20ms of input lag on top of whatever your tv already gives you because speed of light is a thing....

[ddingus]

Or not.

There are lots of fun games and other activities.

That's what I have ended up doing as gaming continues to get more hostile.

[Ninn]

>I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device

It's almost like you fully ignored the previous comments.. A lot of people may want to do exactly that, and are less bothered by other aspects, which you may appreciate and prioritise?

[mrlala]

>when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time)

What service has Google shut down that you paid for?

>deactivate your account (which also happens all the time)

When has Google randomly deactivated your account without compensation for something that you paid for?

You are making some gigantic leaps of internet logic here to be honest.. no one is going to deny they have an interesting record on projects, but I find it astounding you are comparing 100% freely created google products to a service which you are paying for.

>I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.

I sure hope you don't use Steam!

[guitarbill]

Chromecast Audio, Nexus, Nest? Even the Pixel, their "flagship" phone, has only gotten 3 years of updates, ending this year [0]. That, and just look at the YouTube debacle and how they treat creators. Fool me once...

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/rip-og-pixel-google-...

[mrlala]

Nothing you listed there means you can't still use it, so your argument is wrong.

[smileybarry]

> What service has Google shut down that you paid for?

Google Play Music will soon get replaced by the arguably worse YouTube Music, so that. I paid for GPM for years and when the YT Music switch happened and they announced my uploads and library won't get migrated for a while (with uploads maybe not at all), I left for Spotify. Not to mention how much worse YT Music is compared to GP Music.

> I sure hope you don't use Steam!

Steam has existed for the past 17 years, and Gabe Newell has gone on record saying that if Steam ever shut down they would look into unlocking all protected games. Even if that turns out to be impossible I still trust Valve in their industry way more than I trust Google in an industry they just entered.

Nowadays a great deal of Steam games don't even use Steam's DRM features and will run happily without Steam, or with a stub "steam_api.dll".

Steam doesn't take away any control over its games from me. You can mod any part of your game and still run it. Hell, you can turn off updates for any game and still run it via Steam (not breaking DRM if it uses it).

[kingbirdy]

Stadia doesn't prevent you from owning your own hardware, nor will it. It's just another option for people who can't afford to own hardware.

[smnrchrds]

Imagine if we had this conversation 10 years ago:

- I don't like streaming services, because content can disappear/the quality is lower/...

- Streaming doesn't prevent you from owning your own DVDs/BDs, nor will it

And now in 2019, there are so many films and tv shows only released through streaming services, and never sold on disks.

[kingbirdy]

Those are products that only exist on streaming platforms, though - as far as I know, Netflix hasn't negotiated any deals to have movies go from cinemas to Netflix and not get a physical release at all. Even some of Netflix's properties have physical releases, such as Stranger Things. So there's still just as much or more physical media available as there would be without streaming platforms.

[CivilianZero]

This is patently false. Most "streaming only" tv shows do get dvd/blue-ray releases. But this is a bad-faith argument anyway, imagine all the times this has been said about new formats of any kind. Streaming is an option and does not prevent people from owning things and it isn't hurting you so maybe just let the people who want to stream things...stream them?

[rchaud]

The films and shows that are "streaming-only" in 2019 are the equivalent of "straight-to-DVD" in the 00s.

Besides marquee projects like House of Cards, Fleabag etc, the vast majority of original programming on these networks are badly made formulaic pap with actors no-one's ever heard of. Were it not for the recommendation algorithm (and the removal of the user reviews), I doubt anybody would bother watching them.