Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

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Your post makes sense if the only travel you do is your 2-week vacation you get every year while always returning to a permanent living fixture, like a house you own. Or if you just don't mind owning a bunch of appliances.

I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.

Also, even when you're at the beach all day every day, you still come back to a place to sleep where you might enjoy some gaming or Netflix. And if you are living there for weeks, you'll find that you don't need to visit the beach every single day to enjoy your time there. It's nice to merely do something you love in a place you love. :)

I'm generally happy with the few games I have on my Macbook Pro. But even on a $2000 two-year-old machine, I have to play almost everything at minimal gfx settings and I have limited SSD space. Even a game like Civilization 5 becomes a stuttering mess. I don't see the need to dismiss Stadia without trying it.

> I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.

But that's the rub innit? The only people who are going to be really interested in this product are the hypermobile, and I don't know about your experience with mobile internet, but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in decent quality going. With remote gaming, you're now adding controller input to that datastream, outbound, and then rendering those actions and transmitting back to the device to enable anything remotely approaching a good gaming experience seems like science fiction.

The people who will be most interested in this are those without a "home" setup, and the less "home" you have, the more appealing, but also seems like it would in turn be the most frustrating experience to try and use. Which is sort of what this piece is getting at:

- Gamers don't want it, because we already have our libraries and such tuned to existing platforms and devices

- Casual gamers may want it, but they're already spoiled for choice in a massive mobile market, where games just happen on their already very powerful phones

This puts Stadia in an awkward position of in theory being the worst of both worlds: the limitations of console, with the network requirements only high tier residential internet can deliver, over devices with limited network capability.

> but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in decent quality going

You'd be surprised how better internet can be outside of USA. My LTE can probably keep up four 4K streams going.

Considering I couldn't even stream steam games from my PC to my tablet at enough of a speed to make games like Destiny playable, let alone enjoyable, you'll have to forgive my skepticism.

you hit the nail on the head. I'm a digital nomad who can't afford lugging a heavy gaming PC around. I have a nice 15 inch mbp (descent at running cities skylines) and an ipad (my notebook replacement) and would love to use stadia!

only problem is it only works in north america and I'm in southeast asia right now.

Because xyz-as-a-service is anti-consumer. Unless you've been under a rock the past decade, there are many flaws with the model when it comes to consumers. It's great for business. Terrible for the user. As-a-service puts the consumer at the mercy of a company. Along with their privacy data. Steam at least is setup in a way where if they were to end, the games you have can be downloaded and unlocked. Just make sure to back it up. Stadia isn't setup for anything like that at all. If google put Reader out to pasture, something that cost them jack-dick-all to keep running, something as expensive to maintain as Stadia when it flops... "Oh, sorry, it didn't work out. Sucks for all of you."

Just because you can't see how a trap will be sprung, doesn't mean the trap doesn't exist. This will bite people in the ass a year or two down the road. Then everyone will cry, "How could this happen? We need legislation to protect us!" No, you just need to be quit being a baby and start being an adult and understand that minor comfort and convenience can come at a heavy cost.

I'm torn. Xbox game pass for PC is one of the greatest things to happen to gaming. Ps now let me play red dead 1 before #2 came out. EA access is great if you just want to play battlefield or Fifa for a month (those games don't typically last longer than that for me). But I also love my 500+ steam games. If these services keep getting better they'll definitely take over, though. Outer Worlds on Xbox pass comes to mind. You can beat that in a month for $1 right now and never think about paying retail price.

Okay, but that's a little different. Stadia, you have to buy the game retail.

Ps now (I have a ps4), 10 bucks a month to play how many different games when the hell ever I want. It totally works out for me because I normally don't care about most games after 10 hours of gameplay. I don't want to buy a game for $60 bucks and not actually have it. Generally, I don't buy a game until it's down to like $30, because I don't have to play anything immediately. At 32, I'm over the whole "ER MY GOD, I have to play this game right meow!"

Stadia Pro for $10 a month gets you a selection of games I believe. But it really is in it's infancy, and not very good. We'll just have to see if google throttles it before it can mature like most other things they do.

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