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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

Google will provide you with downloads your data for a lot of their projects: https://takeout.google.com/

But for stadia, where the game licenses, executables, and probably save games probably can't be exported legally, how does one provide a migration paths once Google inevitably says "servers are shutting down in three months. You will lose access to everything on that date. We will give you a month free or something that in no way makes up for the service shutting down and you losing everything"

Well, what will happen when Google Play Music (or Spotify or Apple Music's subscription store or...) inevitably announces a shutdown in 3 months?

Spotify's been running strong for like 13 years, GPM is about to turn 10, etc. None of those people have been bitten yet, and there's literally hundreds of millions of them.

Google Play Music/Spotify/Apple Music is next to free to run, it's basically just a CDN on their end. There's almost no user data that didn't come from user machines originally.

Stadia has all the user data on the backend, _and_ is expensive to run since all the processing happens on their end too.

Reading spotify's most recent filing, there was an increase in its compute costs of ~25 million dollars in 3Q2019 when compared to 3Q2018, mentioned in a footnote. In other words, a compute cost increase of $100 million a year was a footnote. That was an increase of about 1.5% of their gross operating income. The full hosting costs are not public, but we're easily talking hundreds of millions a quarter. Practically free?

So, an increase of about $1/yr/user? Including I'm sure all of the money they're wasting training half baked ML models? Yeah, that's pretty damn close to free.

Now compare that to stadia which'll probably be dedicating high CPU and GPU to each logged in user, in addition to the low latency video compression hardware they're pretty much guaranteed to have?

Google Play Music IS shutting down. Anyday now ... probably in a year max.

They say they won't until YouTube music has feature parity but I don't believe it.

I may sound bitter ...

> Google Play Music IS shutting down

Well, sort of. But relevant to the original question posed: are users of GPM losing their suscribed content? No.

Depends if the catalogs are the same or not (currently not) and if they allow to upload your music on YTM (currently not).

I think the GDPR makes it illegal to not allow exporting save games. Resolving that conflict would be Google's problem.

That would be fine under GDPR actually.

Why do you think article 20 doesn't apply here?

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Except when it doesnt work and there is no way to report it/contact someone. Takeout was never able to return my YT comments.

Sure but how would that work for Stadia?

With Stadia, this concept probably relates more to game saves more so than games. [0] It's just your data—finding something that can use the data is another story.

That's beside the point, though—my reply, it's parent and it's grandparent were discussing Google products generally, not Stadia specifically.

[0] I realize that Takeout doesn't support Stadia. Though, for two different Stadia titles (Destiny 2's "cross-play" and NBA2K20's "MyPlayer"), I was prompted to log into a publisher account where my data could be linked/stored or something.

That would be true if you're thinking of Stadia as a subscription to get access to an all you can eat buffet of games (ie Netflix for games) but that's not the primary model proposed. The primary Stadia purchase model is that you buy games on Stadia and then get "free" unlimited streaming of them. In that case if they were to shutdown the user has to get something back, preferably the game...

> In that case if they were to shutdown the user has to get something back, preferably the game...

Legally or ethically?

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