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Comment by hmage | Hacker News Reader

Google had to solve same problem any new traditional gaming console has to solve -- get publishers interested in creating for that console.

Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.

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Architecturally, are Google's Stadia servers substantially different from a standard PC?

AFAIK they run Linux, so porting games over isn't necessarily "free"

They run linux and use Vulkan for rendering, so this is a potentially large port burden to force on devs.

Potentially, but there's only one distro and only one set of hardware, so there's waaaay less QA than an actual Linux port.

Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.

Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.

Google isn't the company I would lodge this complaint at. They contribute a lot of code back as well.

Google is a company large enough that you can always find fringes that contradict their main philosophies a business model within the same company. They do not contribute proportionally to their revenue nearly as much as the other FAANG companies.

Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.

If anyone is going to compete with Microsoft, of all companies, I'd expect it to be Google.

Except Microsoft is investing heavily in first party games, buying loads of studios and letting them retain a lot of independence. They’re approaching the streaming service as an extension of the Xbox experience. It’s a much more robust strategy all around

And not forcing studios to rewrite their games from scratch to a snowflake platform.

Porting a game to Linux and Vulkan does not require rewriting it from scratch.

It does because 99% of the game studios don't care about Linux, nor are that much into Vulkan, unless they are targeting Android or Switch.

The graphics backend is really not such a big cost for most games, especially with existing cross-platform engines. Also the grahics APIs are really not that different as they all model the same GPUs. DirectX vs. OpenGL had some annoying things but most of them are only a problem when you have to translate and can't modify the calling code at all. DirectX 12 vs. Vulkan is even less of a difference.

How many Android and Switch games get published on GNU/Linux? Yep, it boils down to it.

Let's cool it with the hyperbole, okay?

There are many reasons Android and Switch games don't get ported to Linux; having to rewrite the game from scratch is not one of them.

Which proves the point that even when games happen to be natively written against a Linux userland, with native support for Vulkan, it isn't economically viable to sell them on GNU/Linux.

What's the alternative? Run Stadia on Windows?

That is exactly what Microsoft is doing.

But there's no reason Google couldn't have done these things! They just... didn't.

> and letting them retain a lot of independence

Except they misteriously stop releasing Linux versions of their games.

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