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Comment by notimetorelax | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it very similar to Steam?

I think the primary worry is that A. Google has a long history of shutting down products that seems erratic. and B. the economics of this seem precarious, thus pushing on A.

Where Steam has proven to be very profitable and Valve has a longer track record, and this is their primary business.

Tell me a mainstream (for Google scale) service that shut down. Offline Trips, Reader, Inbox, etc do not count. A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough. If bigger things shut down they either have a replacement or they are Google+. And no one complained when that was shut down.

Also Stadia has a subscription basis. Cloud gaming is just too important to let Microsoft win. Just like cloud in general.

Regarding the primary business argument. This is exactly what they are hedging against. Google knows ad revenue can‘t grow forever. Regulation might be coming. Cloud and stuff like this will have to take more and more of the load.

> Offline Trips, Reader, Inbox, etc do not count. A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough.

What if Stadia under-performs their financial expectations? What if it under-performs those expectations for 2-4 years?

I'm not certain that Google will shut-down Stadia in that time-frame, but I'm absolutely not certain that it will also be running at that point.

I'm extremely confident that Valve won't shut down Steam in that time-frame, though.

What if Google takes away enough revenue with Stadia? Then Valve may no be able to keep Steam up in the time frame.

> A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough.

Are you taking it as self-evident that Stadia will have more than a couple million users?

> Also Stadia has a subscription basis.

So did fiber.

Fiber is still serving customers. Not sure what you're referring to.

I believe he's referring to something like this: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

I believe there is a pretty big untapped market of gamers that are more than casual mobile gamers but not enough so to buy their own hardware. 120.- a year means you‘d have to play for 20 years until you reach the cost of top line gaming hardware. And a subscription doesn‘t depreciate.

Fiber is different I think because of shitty regulation that favors incumbents and the insane cost of financing a physical network.

Not quite. I can play steam games offline, I can share them with my friends/family and the most important part being - steam's platform has been reliable with top notch support since 90s while Google hasn't gotten that even in 2019.

You can only play them offline as long as it can check in to Steam every few days. If (once) Steam is turned off, it will no longer be able to do that.

> If (once) Steam is turned off

Big if, and if Steam doesn't provide an alternative method or change their DRM before turning off.

Something unprecedented for Steam over 20+ years, but not so for Google.

Pretty sure he was referring to exiting the Steam application; not Steam as a service being shut down. I might be wrong though.

Steam, one day, will disappear. Not tomorrow, but perhaps 100 years from now. On that day, you will no longer be able to download or even play those games for more than a few days.

Will I be alive to care?

owning things means that people then inherit things when you die

The cynical reply to this is also "Will I be alive to care?".

A more realistic reply might be "will any humans even be alive to inherit my game library?" or "will anyone even be able to run any of my games on the hardware and software available 100 years from now?"

That's a sad response. Video game preservation efforts are ongoing for games older than the NES right now, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case in the future for the current generation of consoles.

This is only true for games using Steamworks DRM (which, granted, is most modern games). Other games you can just run them from their folder.

Can Stadia be offline?

Nope. Depends on a fast, reliable, low-packet-loss network connection at all times. The game is running on a cloud instance and being streamed to you chromecast.

Steam is Valve's only business, if Steam shuts down that mean whole company is in trouble or about to go bankrupt or bought out.

Google can shutdown Stadia because VP changed or Director got promoted to another part of business and nobody is there to sell this product internally - which means it gets shut down.

I can play NES games from 35 years ago despite the fact that Nintendo has ceased manufacturing the console and publishing the games.

As soon as Steam decides to shut down (and it will one day, be it tomorrow, or 30 years from now, those games are no longer playable).

Nothing lasts forever.

Except Valve could issue a final update that disables the DRM Check, and the game is still playable locally, right? More likely than Stadia developing a local client to sync game content/licenses to.

Valve doesn’t have the right to do this. They have an agreement with publishers that they will supply it.

Is there any sort of survivability clause in that agreement? Genuinely asking - not directly familiar with it.

They actually do have the right to do this and a technical implementation. Essentially they've escrowed enough cash to run the drm for many years in the future even if they went out of business so they keep their agreements and their customers happy.

Also, having worked in game sales, it turns out that buying "drm free unlocks of long tail" games is not expensive. How do you think things like PS Plus Free Games works? Essentially game devs book revenue now for possibl future revenue lost. It's a smart trade for most games unless that game is say skyrim.

Do you have a source for where Valve have the rights to remove DRM on third party games?

Also, PS Plus games are still DRM'ed, and you only have access as long as your subscription is valid.

That's not true. Not all games on Steam have the DRM requirement.

Valve already promise that in the unlikely event the were to shutdown, they would cancel DRM on their platform game to become DRM free

Doesn't that also apply to Netflix? If Netflix shuts down (and there is a real chance of that), what will happen? People will lose all those TV shows and Movies forever.

Yeah, but Netflix doesn't ask you for more money to see a movie on their platform. Whereas you do have to buy your own games on Stadia.

Maybe, but that wasn't the original argument I replied to.

To your argument I would say that Stadia is not the "Netflix for games". So I don't see why you expect to pay $10 and play any game you want like Netflix does.

If steam shuts down some cracker/hacker will find a way to disable the drm.

Almost every game has a pirated version in some torrent site.

The difference is that 90% if not more of Valve’s income is from Steam, so unless they feel like killing their company they won’t turn it off.

If Steam truly shuts down, I doubt it will even take a full day before there's a conveniently-packaged crack that disables the DRM, with links spammed everywhere.

Steam was launched in 2003...

Not at all? You can (indeed, have to) download your purchases from Steam. Many of which are DRM free. Valve has also said they'll remove Valve DRM from the games that use it in the unlikely event they shut down.

There are, in other words, obvious contingency plans.

With this, the game you "own" lives and runs solely on Google's servers. If they decide to shut those servers down, you're fucked.

But good thing Google isn't known for suddenly EOLing popular products, right?

DRM doesn't matter for most video games, only servers matter. If steam shuts down you won't be able to play most games regardless of DRM.

I don’t think “most” games are multiplayer only

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