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by fooey 2055 days ago
I would suggest the "community" of developers not trusting Google long term with anything is a major reason Stadia has been basically DOA.

It's a big gamble to port a game to Stadia, and risk customers being mad at you, when Google inevitably pulls the plug

2 comments

I just don't see the value in Stadia over buying a console. The only use case seems to be for someone too poor to afford a console, but that someone has enough money to buy a full price video game on Stadia.
People who want to game on their phones on the bus, in the car, waiting in line at the pharmacy etc.

people who aren’t serious enough to buy a gaming PC or a console but still want to play a games occasionally.

People who want to keep their lives simpler by converging to fewer devices

I am sure there are many more

The kinds of games they're pushing don't match up with those use-cases though.

Doesn't matter how flashy Stadia is, you're hardly going to get past the loading screen on AC Odessey/whatever before you run out of time.

Save $X00? I'm an occasional gamer, so it's a bit hard to justify a console, but for the 1-2 games per year I want to play Stadia is great.

Put another way: if Stadia has the games you want (big if now, but improving over time) why shell out for a console?

Well, if you want to play video games in your living room and you don't want your computer to be in there, a console is very convenient.
Stadia would like you to play from a Chromecast to your TV in that situation.
Particularly when Google are requiring you to port to a completely different stack to the one basically all games are written.
Wow, I didn't realize that Stadia games are running on Debian and Vulcan. https://stadia.dev/about/ That is a hard sell that you have to (likely) port your game to a completely different OS and graphics API for a presumably small customer base.
There's a large number of games that use premade engines (eg. Unity, Unreal). As long as the engine supports Linux and Vulkan (I believe both Unity and Unreal do), there's no real issue in supporting that platform.