Google Stadia May Not Be Long for This World | Hacker News Reader

Google Stadia May Not Be Long for This World

gizmodo.com

31 pointsCharlesW27 comments

Really glad I didn’t buy any titles on the platform, which I presume will be non-transferable when this folds.

The glory days of cloud gaming, for me, were when i was a beta subscriber to GeForce Now and I could play all my Steam and Blizzard Games at high graphics. Slowly the picking got slimmer and slimmer, and then Nvidia started charging.

My dream is to pay $5 a month to play my existing games on a decent computer without having to buy one. Given the heavyweights who have tried and failed to provide this, I’m guessing that it’s not going to happen any time soon, or at all. The more likely future is platform-specific, siloed.

$5 a month doesn’t seem like it would work out economically with the price of GPUs. Why not buy a powerful computer and finance it?

GPU’s are overpriced due to demand. If they are utilised more efficiently in cloud then it’s cheaper.

Personally gaming sounds so expensive considering you’re just burning time. Probably cheaper than clubbing or travelling tho.

Gaming is one of the cheaper hobbies out there.

I’m currently nomadic and a gaming laptop would be over current carrying capacity; I much prefer Mac OS and Apple build quality; and gaming components are crazy expensive. I might get a PlayStation or an Xbox at some point though

I'm sure you've considered it already but a Steam Deck might be up your alley.

Have you tried buying a GPU in the past 2 years? If you can buy one 50% higher than MSRP, you're getting a deal. Most are going for much higher, if you can even find them in stock.

Yes exactly. So I’m not sure how a company can change $5 a month, with their own overhead and profit margin, and still make money.

I'm glad I did! I paid $20 to try a game I wanted to try, and got a free Chromecast ultra+controller from the deal. The Chromecast I use daily, and the controller apparently has Linux drivers as a plug-in.

> My dream is to pay $5 a month to play my existing games on a decent computer without having to buy one.

It's more than $5, but what you're looking for ("cloud" gaming PC without walled garden) exists. You can rent a VM with GPU, for example from Paperspace [1], and install a remote desktop app that optimizes for latency, for example Parsec [2].

In the past there was the french company Shadow [3] that offered gaming-ready Windows VMs, but they filed for bancruptcy in 2021, not sure about their current status.

Not affiliated with them, but I tried both (Shadow before their bancruptcy, Paperspace+Parsec maybe a year ago) and both worked okay. A bit too much latency for my taste so I stopped using it, but with better connection speed and lower distance to the data center it might be acceptable.

[1] https://www.paperspace.com/

[2] https://parsec.app/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow.tech

I really like the idea of using my huge steam and gog game libraries, but 0.45/h for the lowest configuration is way too expensive. I use stadia, bought some games, play a lot (hundreds of hours) and I like it, simply I'll not buy more games. I like the service, not expensive at all and ideal for my not competitive game habits. I will not be happy if the service will die.

Whenever I'm excited by the prospect a new Google product, I remind myself that I am not Google's customer but their uncompensated QA team.

Google's customers are finance, government, retail, defense, healthcare, entertainment, manufacturing, etc. We are a small, disorganized slice of of that pie, and products like Stadia aren't meant to succeed as much as collect data for as long as they need to understand whether there's a market to make.

Anyway, if you're interested in creating your own Stadia, you can do so with things you've probably had at home for years: a device like a Raspi or smartphone with a utility like ReLive or SteamLink installed, a home computer to host the games, and a VPN to your home network.

I tried Stadia briefly as part of a free trial. I'm probably not considered a casual gamer, but even for casual gamers, I don't think they would tolerate the latency. It was awful.

Unpredictable and high latency with an interface taps into some very primitive anger (monkey smash) that I can't quite explain, and when you're trying to enjoy a game, it destroys the experience.

Annecdotally, I had the opposite experience, no lag, great graphics, was super impressed, too bad it did not have the games I like to play otherwise would have been subscribed.

Setup and closeness to their datacenters might be it. (I used a laptop on wifi, after which decent x86 openwrt router, fiber optic connection, ping to stadia.google.com is ~10ms on wifi, 7ms on cable)

Edit: just opened it up again, destiny is still running great

A lot of hate in these comments but I recently played Far Cry 6 on stadia and had a lovely experience. Much cheaper than buying the whole game (I unsubscribed after I finished which was within a months time) and I appreciated being able to play at a higher resolution than my laptop could. Not much worse latency than the lag I had to occasionally deal with playing the game locally (though I'm in europe in a place with quite good internet).

I'm one of the idiotic early adopters, but I can read the writings on wall. I did violate my own rule not to invest in Google's ecosystem!

Did anyone really expect it would last?

It's a Google project.

It's been a self fulfilling prophecy for several years now. If you use any Google product, expect it to be added to the Google Graveyard[0] when you least expect it.

[0]:https://killedbygoogle.com

Which is why most of my Android hobby coding is anyway either Java or C++, they will outlast Android's fate no matter what, otherwise it is mobile Web.

I am Jack's compete lack of surprise.

Official Google statement:

We announced our intentions of helping publishers and partners deliver games directly to gamers last year, and have been working toward that. The first manifestation has been our partnership with AT&T who is offering Batman: Arkham Knight available to their customers for free.

While we won't be commenting on any rumors or speculation regarding other industry partners, we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022. With 200+ titles currently available, we expect to have another 100+ games added to the platform this year, and currently have 50 games available to claim in Stadia Pro.

We... expect? Not a "almost certainly"? Stadia as a consumer product is dying, if not dead.

And for business as well, Stadia doesn't offer anything significant as Cloud infrastructure for game developers like Amazon and Microsoft products do.

Re: Bungie

> Talks between Google and Bungie made "considerable" headway, according to a person familiar with the plans. Sony, which owns PlayStation, announced this week that it would acquire Bungie for $3.6 billion. While Bungie said it would continue to support Stadia, insiders did not know if the merger would affect plans between Google and Bungie. Sony has a deal with Microsoft to support its cloud gaming service. A spokesperson for Bungie did not respond to a request for comment.

As somebody who bought a Steam Link and tried to use it to stream games over a cat6 local network, the idea that Stadia would ever be successful was kind of laughable.

I've had people on Reddit and on here trying to convince me Google were able to beat and zero latency. In other words that they discovered faster than light communication.

Spoiler alert: they didn't.

When you're playing online games, MMOs for example, you still incur the cost of latency to the server, games tend to hide that in various ways.

Google servers are much closer if not in the same datacenter as the game servers... network latency between them is negligible

So, (local input -> network delay -> reply / do graphics locally) == (local input -> network delay -> remote processing -> reply with h264 video). As such it's not going to affect things as much as local steam play which also works pretty well on local lan.

Made by Google🄬

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