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Comment by throwawayhhakdl | Hacker News Reader

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throwawayhhakdl

Stadia would probably crumble alongside GCP by necessity too, right?

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Stadia will be gone long before 2023.

You're not wrong

Stadia is a brute force attempt to grow GCP revenue

The Stadia pro tier fee is just $9.99/mo. The GPU and CPU you could consume playing a AAA game on that (yes, even on the purported "medium" settings) for just a few hours a day surely far exceeds what it could be sold for wholesale.

They don't have to match what it would be sold for wholesale though, just need to match the marginal cost. A graphics card that can run a AAA game is less than $500, so I don't think they are losing much on $9.99 a month. That's over $100 a year, and if each users plays 3 hours a day you can have 8 users using the same hardware at different times.

Now I don't think they are using consumer hardware, and there are other costs as well, but it seems realistic that they are making money off of it.

That's assuming people play games in well-defined shifts. I find it more likely to have 8 users play between 8pm and 11pm and zero users for the rest of the day.

Time zones are a thing.

Games are latency sensitive and thus region sensitive. Multiplexing opportunities here are poor. Stadia is a terrible idea business-wise as Google has defined it.

I'm on the fence on Stadia - compute hardware prices keep dropping like a rock. What if we see viable $200 gaming rigs in 10 years? But I digress

Google can utilize dark GPU hardware for numerous tasks. For example, YouTube video transcoding, ML, and Cloud batch processing.

> What if we see viable $200 gaming rigs in 10 years?

Games, like websites, seem to expand to fit the available space. Today's smartphones would beat a ten year old mega-powered gaming PC.

Our two positions are not mutually exclusive. The price of even a top-line gaming rig could drop significantly over the next 10-20 years.

Latency is, too, especially in things like first person shooters. Someone in LA doesn't want to be using surplus GPUs in NY for Call of Duty.

Sure, but if they can spot-price other loads on them the rest of the time, I could see it working out.

But they don't, that's the point.

Don't forget weekends vs weekdays.

Don't forget that they're selling the games, too--and some Stadia games are up to $10 more (!) than their non-Stadia counterparts.

(Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

That is a factually incorrect statement. You lose access to any games you claimed for free as a benefit of your Stadia Pro membership if you cancel your membership; you regain access to those games if you renew, but you will not gain access to games that were offered for free during any interval where you were not a subscriber.

You retain access to any game you paid for, _even_ if you paid a discounted rate as a result of being a Stadia Pro member, even if your subscription is canceled.

>That is a factually incorrect statement.

Oh, so if I cancel my Stadia subscription I can still play the games?

TLDR: Yes.

As far as I can tell from [1] the situation is:

* Per-game purchase price.

* There's a free 1080p streaming tier.

* There's a $10/mo 4k streaming tier, which also includes discounts on games and some free games.

* However, you won't be able to convert your Stadia-purchased games into local games or Steam codes.

* And of course you won't be able to close your Stadia/Google account and still keep your games.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-06-06-google-stadia-...

Thanks for the info. I've been considering a new console purchase and had basically ruled out Stadia immediately due to the subscription requirement. This changes things a bit but I still don't like the fact that I can't play something without a connection to the big Google. I suppose this is just what it feels like to be part of a generation falling out of the marketing window.

Will account closure or suspension of other google services result in loss of access like the stories we've seen for Gmail?

> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

What. The. Fuck.

First, they took our physical games and media away. Then they made us subscribe. Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions? I can't even conceive of what the next step will be -- will they charge us for having memories of their IP?

We need to reduce copyright terms and kill this cancer of IP hoarding. The rent-seekers are taking ownership away.

> Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions?

They take away the games you claimed as a Pro subscriber - similar to how PS+ works. If you claim a game on PS+ and quit PS+, you lose those games.

If you buy the game you can keep it and still play it even after you're done subscribing.

You are reacting to a factually incorrect statement. You do not lose access to games you paid for if your Pro subscription is canceled.

Don't forget that they value new ways of spying on users at a non-zero dollar amount, and probably intended to slap ads all over the interface (maybe—maybe—not the games themselves) to make up the difference, or at least were holding that possibility in reserve in case it was needed or they just wanted to kick returns up a notch later (I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in any "decks" used to sell the project internally).

Fair, and that was certainly the YouTube model— years of free video hosting to saturate the market, now preroll and interstitials everywhere with "YouTube Premium" just a click away.

unless all those compute resources are just sitting idle anyway, so why not get something for them, even at a (deep) loss

Because usage degrades hardware?

it's more of a forcing function than anything else.

Stadia was dead before it went live.

By this strategy, which disregard customer confidence completely, considering that Stadia isn't exactly well received, I seriously doubt I will put my money on it getting anywhere.

Stadia runs on the edge, not in their cloud.

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