[Ken_At_EM]

You’re of course entirely correct.

Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing.

Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve never been one to own an impressive gaming rig and dealing with a tiny bit of lag to avoid spending $3000 on a solid rig would be totally worth it.

Maybe valve should add a Stadia-like service in the future to allow you to play the game on their machines and stream it back when you want to.

[NikolaNovak]

>>Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that

GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved it for the last year or so when my computer couldn't run cyberpunk 2077 and I didn't want to sell kidney for a rtx card :)

[kmeisthax]

Geforce Now was probably the most consumer-friendly version of game streaming possible and every game publisher shat their pants and blocked it. Hell, even some indie developers blocked it. From a user perspective it's equivalent to renting an EC2 instance and installing Parsec and Steam on it, just automated. But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.

The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!

The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:

* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)

* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games

The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.

[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.

AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.

[ascagnel_]

> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.

[kmeisthax]

This seems like a distinction without a difference. Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.

It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?

[ascagnel_]

> Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.

> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?

The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.

[bigmattystyles]

>> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

You still bought the game, you're just running elsewhere. They're worried about ports - they want to sell you that sweet android/iOS port of their game. That's why they block the games.

[anjbe]

> GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes … You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now.

XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.

[horsawlarway]

Gaming rigs don't cost 3k.

You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone.

And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms).

Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you're almost certainly better off just buying it outright at $800, than paying google $10 dollars a month for 5 years for vaporware. Plus at the end of it, you likely still have a perfectly functional computer, more than capable of handling basic mail/web/videos, or serving content (I have machines going back 18 years sitting on the dirt in my basement serving content).

[mminer237]

Plus you can play more than the ~100 games Google's hand-picked to play on their platform.

[xxs]

you can buy a decent system that runs the games better than stadia under $1k. you need 6600xt ($330), 16MB ram ($50), virtually any cpu ($150), motherboard $120, SSD - $80. That leaves you >250 for case, keyboard and mouse.

[MauranKilom]

> 16MB ram ($50)

An amusing typo :)

[barbazoo]

No one would ever need that much RAM.

[xxs]

true that

[gambiting]

>>Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering.

And this is the #1 problem with stadia - it's a completely different platform, it's as far away from Windows as PS5/Xbox are. You can't just run Stadia version of games on your PC, even if you could download them. GeForce NOW is a much better product, because it runs normal Windows executables(just in the cloud).

[fluoridation]

A game streaming service is a solution to a different problem, not yours. It's much more reliable to control the performance by running it locally and tweaking the graphical fidelity than by running it remotely and adding unpredictable network performance as a factor. Instead, game streaming is meant to solve the problem of playing a game on a system that could never ever hope to run it, or to play it away from one's main system.