It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show.
This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.
> Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product:
> We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :)
> The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great! Games are no different. Eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too and we'll feel great about it.
> [..]
> Of course, it’s ok to doubt my words. Theres nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't. But what we can do is to launch the service and continue investing in it for years to come. Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos. That’s exactly what we’re committed to.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/hi_im_andrey...
(I've been holding onto this bookmark for a while)
A sort of VC fund with an investment size of one, yourself.
To prevent the company from being too disloyal we have golden parachutes.
However, as someone who worked in one of those fields, it’s draining when over half of your leaders are trend hoppers. They get up on stage frequently and talk about how excited they are, and how it’s a long journey ahead. And then as soon as the industry takes a slight downturn they all leave in unison.
Some of the leaders are truly passionate about the field and they’re still around. It’s very clear who is who from the way they act towards the employees.
The experience taught me to avoid hype industries unless I’m willing to make money the number one goal in my life, which is harder than I thought, since life has plenty of things more enjoyable than money.
The real question is, why is the market so inefficient at sifting through bad employees, especially near the top of the ladder? The fact that this exec has been able to jump from one dumpster fire to another, often with a promotion, tells me that there’s something broken about the way senior execs are hired.
>Former Director of Product at Google AR/VR.
>Former Head of Mobile, Group PM at YouTube.
Ouch.
In a more perfect world, when this resume hits the hiring committee's desk, they read it and think "this leadership role is too important to fill with someone who's never managed a downturn."
Hopefully when the current owners age out the new leadership will continue as it is.
There are plenty of companies who already run or could run a competitor to steam, and slowly they could eat their lunch. Epic Game Store bought exclusives and gives away coupons to bolster their market share. IF everyone starts burning cash for market share, Valve will have to figure out a new way to compete.
Until then its sort of business like normal.
I know some TED level influencer had some story about basically everything in mail order catalogs from 100 year ago is still for sale somewhere today, so maybe it's wrong, or maybe software is just more prone to vanishing.
So I would imagine if Steam did go under, they would all be clamouring to help users transition to their platforms.
Stadia was never marketed much and always had a tiny library with no cross play. The moment Nvidia stepped up, Stadia was dead.
All I could think during the entire pandemic was how Google should be showing off how easy it is to play games on Stadia. Lower the initial barrier to entry just a smidge and it could have been as simple as texting a link to your family groupchat and then you're all playing a game together in your browser. Even grandparents can figure out how to click a link in an email to open a webpage.
I think Uplay works similarly, and you can cross play and cross save with your sub on any device.
Microsoft GamePass is moving towards a similar direction, where your sub lets you cross play and save between PC, Xbox, cloud, and Android (via the cloud).
I dunno why Google never bothered doing that. Stadia tech wise is actually really impressive and comparable to nvidia's offering, with much better UX, but they just gave up almost immediately after launch. What a missed opportunity :(
It's like they had a team of awesome engineers who built the thing but... no gamers? Like it just seemed that nobody at Google, on or off the Stadia team, actually wanted it to grow beyond tech demo status. Their library is still laughably small, years later, and only very very few games offer crossplay.
Killing of stadia only reaffirms peoples fear to use google products. This includes GCP.
I'm glad to be forever cautious with Google's new products, they've burnt me a few times the past 15 years.
To be fair, most gamers I’ve talked to don’t even know what Stadia IS.
By definition, gamers play games. To do that, they almost always own a console or gaming pc to do so. As a result, they have no need for Stadia in the first place.
You have casual gamers, that are perfectly happy playing natively on their phones or laptops at low settings.
Then you have “serious” gamers, that tend to be happy spending hundreds of dollars to make sure they have up to date hardware to get the most of their games (and thus, likely won’t be happy with the latency or game selection of Stadia).
Somewhere in between is a market of people that say “gee, I really want to play Destiny, at full graphics, and I’m ok with a little latency, but I can’t or don’t want to buy a better PC or $500 box for it”.
I’m sure that market exists, but it’s gotta be rather small in the best of circumstances, right?
IMO they need to fix the internal corporate culture and move it away from short-term OKR goals and promotions based on launching new stuff and a bit more towards helping to maintain and grow existing projects.
Those people don't exist in any significant numbers.
Every self-identifying gamer (me included) knew this service was DoA.
When I think about it, my family still has photographs from 70 years ago sitting around in family albums.
Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.
My wife literally has track of zero printed / film photographs she ever took. She's got zero clue where they might be. Not even "shoe box somewhere" :->
Whereas, I have all my photos of last 20 years (since I first took a digital shot) chronologically sorted in folders by year then event (e.g. "Photos/2022/HalifaxTrip2022") on my NAS. It's barely any effort to organize in that way (no fancy tagging or sorting, just year and event, or generic yearly photos /photos/2022/2022_Photos as catchall), yet Typically it takes me seconds to minutes to find some obscure photo somebody remembers or wants, and near instantly for big events like trips, birthdays etc.
It's all about how much one treasures those photos / how obsessive compulsive one is :-). There's certainly ways to manage digital photo libraries, whether manually like I do, or automagically like Apple or Google do.
(we also print albums through Costco of fun trips etc. Nothing about digital prevents that)
To be fair though, When it comes to discussion about cloud and gaming though, it's an utterly disingenuous comparison. I fully and permanently own and control my digital photos in an universal format and can switch and back them up from provider to provider seamlessly. This is empathically triply not the case for stadia games.
The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.
As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.
The difference is that photos are conveniently took from my phone and that MP3 files are conveniently downloaded from a certain major Video Streaming website by a company with a name that is a reference to math. Every time I listen to those MP3s I make sure to watch some ads somewhere first.
Also, I get DVDs from the public library and use Handbrake to convert them so I can stream them on the living room TV from my NAS. When returning the DVDs, I, of course, I email the video files back to the library.
It amazes me that this persists, it is such a bad sales tactic. If the person you're dealing with isn't a sucker, now you've destroyed trust. (You've destroyed it later with the sucker, when they realize what happened. Hope one sale was enough for you.)
Some number of people will read that and say "it's safe, I knew they would assuage my concerns" that wouldn't otherwise if they just said "well, you might lose you games in that case.". Those are the people being targeted.
And by those people I include you and me, but for different things. It's impossible to be completely objective and rational all the time, and I'm sure you can come up with just as many instances as I where hope overrode reason for a while. Statements like these are specifically to keep us around when we fall into that category.
I am slowly moving all my customers/clients away from Google Analytics, mostly to Matomo. Couldn’t be happier. Some clients can also diversify their ad spending to other platforms. Google needs to start feeling what “customer service” means, for now it has none.
It gives you access to a library of additional games you don't have to buy.
And if they need more market segmentation, then offer an additional premium monthly fee that gets you early access to upcoming AAA games or some other similar value add like that.
It's just weird they decided to make some games unlimited and some for purchase. Maybe that was the best deal they could negotiate with the publishers, who knows.
Everyone on HN predicted this, and the only way I would have ever trusted Stadia would be with a CEO-level promise of refunding all purchases if they shut down within 10 years.
That's honestly the magic of Nvidia's streaming service. You're paying for the streaming, not the game. You then link your Steam account and play. So if Nvidia's streaming service shuts down, I still have the games I paid for in steam. It's genius, and the only way I'd ever consider paying for cloud gaming. While I don't like the Xbox game pass method, as you own nothing, at least you're renting and not buying, so you're not technically losing anything if you leave or they shut down.
It was utterly shocking that Google did not copy Nvidia's streaming games bough on other stores idea, especially with so many people are fearful of a Google shutdown.
It's also a mystery to me why Valve hasn't done what Nvidia did. Presumably they will at some point. Unless they don't want to risk other cloud providers from pulling their games from steam.
Betting on steam worked out thus far. I really like how nvidia solved this problem. Elegant solution.
it's just a small bit of hex editing away from being steamless
They wanted the lock in. They did it for profit margin. Because people like the Director of Product the GP mentions hops from one role to the next its all short term nonsense.
Assuming the rumor about Stadia is true, then in hindsight, this is directly tarnishing the reputation of those other products. Every canceled product does, but it's strange to see it in writing. Although I wouldn't give this comment much weight, it's clearly dodging the answer.
Why can't everything be licensed directly from the right owner of a game so that the license of a game can be transferred from one streaming service to another?
If you read this - run. Or ignore everything that comes after as it's filled with lies.
If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stopped trying to cover their shortcomings with political virtue signalling.
(I agree with you, if that's not clear: it didn't even create/define the market or take in any way significantly away from the incumbent.)
At least with Apple you know the service is gonna hang around for awhile, even if it doesn’t set the world alight.
I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-...
But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take.
How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former.
Edit:
To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions.
Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important:
- Iterate on the user experience
- Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc..
- Fix bugs, keep it running
- Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
- Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.
Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).
In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.
The reply was that Spotify and Netflix worked, but all music streaming services have basically the same selection these days, and movies are deemed more disposable than games as seen by the rise of people rotating subscriptions as movie video streaming fragments, so they were never perfect indicators. The one worry was that Google would buy its way in with exclusives and introductory pricing a la Epic, but Google's pride probably prevented that.
If you look at the opportunity cost of supporting a small side business va building a bigger business.. you drop the small thing. Google engineering is expensive and they have a somewhat polished brand that they don’t want to muddle with a bunch of “non winners”.
Amazon has the opposite problem. They build everything and have to find a way to scale their internal orgs to handle lots of tiny side revenue streams. I signed up for a magazine subscription through Amazon and they had a website redesign that accidentally (?) removed the management portal link for a few weeks. They do so much they can’t even stay internally consistent.
The biggest issue with that approach is that they're burning customer goodwill, and that affects their odds down the line of getting customer acceptance. Stadia is just another project in a long line of cancelled projects that leaves customers screwed over and less willing to use Google products in the future.
Your point about Amazon is pretty interesting, IMHO I think that's why in the long term Amazon will keep on beating GCP in the cloud space. Amazon having such a large set of offerings is that it makes their cloud offering particularly compelling, especially considering they seem to keep old services alive and have relatively stable interfaces. Their offerings might not be as polished as GCP's, and some of them are laughably awful, but at least I feel confident that Amazon won't change the API or deprecate/retire the service.
If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
And if Geforce Now goes under I retain all my games, because it’s all linked to Steam and Epic.
But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.
Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it.
I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.
In other words... they built a chat app inside their chat app.
Can’t say google workspaces is better.
I can't really understand how people can trust google domains.
Years ago I got tired of the mess that was Google Picasa and transferred all photos, videos, and most important docs to Amazon Drive. Now I need to find yet another service.
Or build your own NAS is you have the time and experience.
I spent about $1000 on a synology and drives and that’s given me 10 years of 10TB so it’s actually pretty cost effective too. Cheaper than Dropbox or OneDrive.
I only wish there was some community disk swap program that would be good for reliable off sites. I looked into storj but you have to share like 100mb or something to make enough to pay for 1mb.
Amazon is also known to kill products but only ones no one uses.
You could argue bezos was a genius in this regard by religiously avoiding disclosing to wall street his true margins.
We tend to forget that modern shareholders don't care much about which companies their money is invested in, it's just a stock with some numbers in a spreadsheet making the difference between investing in Google vs. Exxon.
But it seems like Google put practically zero effort into growing Stadia into having a respectable library at all. It looks like they gave up almost immediately and the last few years have been the inevitable stagnation into the graveyard.
Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number.
(if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
Stadia owes them a retail copy of the games they purchased.
no games were actually purchased, so customers are free to take their complaints and do exactly nothing with them.
(yes, this is egregious)
But I just can’t convince myself to pay full price for a game when it’s restricted to a platform like stadia.
I guess I’m a hypocrite because I own steam games and plenty of movies on my Apple TV. I feel like steam is a little different because I’m installing them on my own machine? (I know they can take the games away) I know I can’t trust Apple to not take my movies away but I think the likelihood that my Apple TV library won’t be accessible for the next 20 years is pretty low.
Google in particular disappoints me often. They haven’t created a great money generating product since search/ads which is the evergreen money tree which funds all other experiments.
Google gives up on new products far too often and far too easily. They seem to forget, or never learned, that unwavering persistence is a powerful foundation for building a product line. Apple didn’t give up on iCloud after the disaster that was MobileMe, they rebuilt it and kept on going.
Adoption of stadia was sufficiently small that Google will pay the full refund cost just to prevent PR damage or lawsuit losses (and take the loss themselves, because the game developer isn't going to want to give a refund).
Problem is, it's Google. Who are you going to complain to, and where? You'll be lucky if there's even a way to submit a complaint, much less one that gets read by a human. I suppose you could use the good old Tell HN technique!
Not true. Maybe if you mainly play ubisoft tiles.
And here's a list of games which are sold through Steam but which nonetheless do not use Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
Why would such a list be necessary if games sold through Steam that used Steam DRM were the minority?
I think what you may be saying is the behavior if you open a Steamworks game while Steam is opened, it just executes as normal. Any authentication or nonsense happens in the background. Try opening a Steamworks game with steam closed, it will force steam to open and login before the game can be played.
You'll get a message about steam.dll missing or being unable to authenticate.
You can also sign out of steam, unplug from the internet and try to launch - and again, you won't be able to except this time steam will launch and tell you to login.
There's this family sharing thing though, where you can share your Steam library between 5 accounts and up to 10 computers:
I don't see too much of a difference other than Steam has more proven longevity - even if the developers that sold games on Steam don't. I can still download Dungeons of Dreadmor from Steam even though the company appears to have disappeared in 2016.
That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear.
Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential hacking and mods). If I want permanence I get a DRM free downloadable game from GoG.
Simply not true. There is really no arguments here. You can run most games directly from the game files without steam. In the cases were you can't you would have issues with DRM in all other venues of purchase.
No, Steam sells permanent licenses.
I don't know where you're getting this from.
To quote from https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/:
> [long list of things you can obtain/do via Steam] are referred to in this Agreement as "Content and Services;" the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.
There is zero legal entitlement to any given subscription in this agreement. The fact that they call it a "subscription", and that this is the "Subscriber Agreement" is not by accident. Rather, they explicitly reserve the right to cancel your "rights to access and/or use" their offers (aka subscriptions).
I mean, no? Just no. Kindle doesn't sell you permanent irrevocable licenses and neither does steam, nor origin etc. They've each been revoked in the past and it's demonstrably true. Their TOS is clear and trivial to read. They all grant personal, limited, non-transferable, revocable and non-exclusive licenses.
You may be able to crack the downloaded steam game files to get them to run. But that's lateral to steam and irrelevant to discussion. if you're going to run cracked files skip steam and go to piratebay.
In fact I remember reading from a community representative that there are plans for this in place (not the best source but whatever https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...)
This isn't even a sketchy crack thing, it's an open source tool. Look up Goldberg emulator.
Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing.
Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve never been one to own an impressive gaming rig and dealing with a tiny bit of lag to avoid spending $3000 on a solid rig would be totally worth it.
Maybe valve should add a Stadia-like service in the future to allow you to play the game on their machines and stream it back when you want to.
GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved it for the last year or so when my computer couldn't run cyberpunk 2077 and I didn't want to sell kidney for a rtx card :)
The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.
The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!
The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:
* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)
* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games
The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.
[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.
AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.
You still bought the game, you're just running elsewhere. They're worried about ports - they want to sell you that sweet android/iOS port of their game. That's why they block the games.
nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.
It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.
XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.
And this is the #1 problem with stadia - it's a completely different platform, it's as far away from Windows as PS5/Xbox are. You can't just run Stadia version of games on your PC, even if you could download them. GeForce NOW is a much better product, because it runs normal Windows executables(just in the cloud).
You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone.
And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms).
Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you're almost certainly better off just buying it outright at $800, than paying google $10 dollars a month for 5 years for vaporware. Plus at the end of it, you likely still have a perfectly functional computer, more than capable of handling basic mail/web/videos, or serving content (I have machines going back 18 years sitting on the dirt in my basement serving content).
An amusing typo :)
The anti-circumvention statutes mean DRM complicates matters, but you definitely have a legal right to the game files themselves. For what it's worth, I believe that a competent lawyer could successfully argue that disabling DRM is an "adaptation" that's an "essential step in the utilization of the computer program." Get the case in front of Judge Alsup or some other computer literate judge and the argument would probably even prevail.
""" Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Support!
My name is Dianne, and I'm sorry to hear that you have been unable to redownload the album "Rachmaninov: Complete Piano Concertos", on your new computer. I can certainly understand how this could be disappointing for you, please be assured that I'm happy to help.
Unfortunately, this item is no longer in the iTunes Store, and only items that are currently available can be redownloaded.
If the content provider no longer offers these purchases on the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBookstore, your content will not be available for you to download again.
However, if you still have this album on the original computer, you can certainly transfer it to you new computer. You can do this in several ways. See the following article for how to transfer iTunes Store purchases using Home Sharing, an external drive, an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, or iPod), the Windows Migration Assistant, and CDs/DVDs: """
Good luck doing that for a game that consumers were only ever sent frames of. If/when there's a streaming-exclusive game, it'll be conclusively lost to time when the company stops letting people play it.
This is the tragedy of game development. I heard the other day that copies of Anthem are selling for a penny at GameStop. When EA abandons that game (any day now), all of the work of those programmers, artists, and everyone else will basically be lost. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, gone.
Meanwhile, here is what Steam's subscriber agreement says https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/english/
> Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally [...]
There was a “remember password” option, but the session would still expire.
There would have to be some effort to unlink those games from the auth services.
Also, yes, but I mean you could find a solution I'm sure. As long as you have the copies a solution would be found - just like I can play my PS1 games without owning a PS1. With Stadia there aren't any copies to speak of. Once the servers go down that's it.
Steam is a DRM system with good branding, that gamers treat as special because it comes from Valve. Anecdotally, a lot of gamers believe and trust that Valve would free their games of DRM if Valve ever went out of business or otherwise shut down Steam. Of course this isn't true, they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own (which is the vast majority of the games on Steam) and whatever informal promises Gabe made years aren't worth a damn. Nevertheless, this sort of mistaken expectation affords Valve/Steam a lot of good will they really don't deserve.
In one you paid for the product, in other you didn't.
I'd think that's a pretty substantial difference?
Ip laws are the worst and terrible for the market. Especially the media companies that just recharge you for for the same content just to watch it on a different medium.
That's a really good way of putting it, I'm gonna steal that (irony unintended). It's totally true - when you purchase software or services it's conditional. You have some voucher that can be redeemed at the discretion of the provider, and there are always many ways (EULA violation, company goes away) that the voucher can be negated.
But when you steal something you aren't beholden to anyone. You actually "own" that piece of software in a way more concrete way. Yes, someone could pursue legal charges and force you to remove it, but it's a totally separate system vs the built-in contract between customer/ service.
In the EU at least, you absolutely own the copy and are free to do with it as you please though, including making more copies for your own safekeeping. There are other comments in this thread pointing out that even in US with its crazy laws you also have this right, although I cannot comment on that personally.
My issue with "just download a crack" is that I have to spend time hunting down the crack, and I can't be sure the crack won't include malware, or won't introduce bugs which only appear later in the game. The last of these has happened to me on multiple occasions. A cracked game is no longer the product I bought.
By contrast, when I buy a game on GOG, I get a product that is DRM Free and will work forever—and because it's the product I actually purchased, I receive some minimal level of assurance from the retailer.
I would feel somewhat differently if there was a single "universal" crack that worked on all Steam games, or even which worked on 95% of Steam games and failed in a predictable way on the remaining 5%. This is the case for iTunes TV Shows, and so I have no problem paying for those, because I can run them through some software and I know the DRM will get stripped correctly every time with no quality loss. I'm not aware of any such software for Steam games.
All PS1 games have been archived, yes, because the method of ripping a PS1 game is consistent across every title, and the total number of games released was relatively small. That's not the case with PC games today, and I think it's virtually inevitable that a lot of indie games released exclusively on Steam will eventually be lost to time. As will many of the indie games released without DRM on itch.io—but at least any game you downloaded from itch.io will be playable forever.
You can argue cloud gaming is even worse. Maybe so, but at least it provides a lot of extra utility, since you can play on low-end devices. Steam provides automatic updates, that's kind of nice I guess, but not in the same class as running Assassin's Creed on your phone†. (Even then, I personally wouldn't pay full price for a game I can only run on someone else's servers, but I understand why someone else might.)
I don't like Steam.
† In theory. I've always found cloud gaming has too much latency for me. But in theory, if it worked perfectly—which perhaps it never will—the promise is nuts.
If it wouldn't be legal, then downloading the crack to the game you paid to play through Steam but can't anymore would presumably be just as illegal as pirating the whole game to begin with. Did you really purchase the game or just an indefinite (but not necessarily eternal) license to play it?
> You "buy" the game from Stadia, it's taken from you, so now you pirate the game.
> You "buy" the game from Steam, it's taken from you, so now you download the pirate's crack to the game.
In either case, the original developer received compensation so I don't think you should feel any moral obligations to anybody. Morally they're equivalent, the only real difference is whether you have the gamefiles already downloaded or not. In both cases you need to dip into the shadier side of the net to get the game you "bought" to run.
You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.
You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.
Both Gabe Newell, the founder/owner of Steam/Vale, and the official support response is now to state that they would provide means for users to continue to have access to their games should Steam shut down. Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.
When game companies go out of business, Steam will remove their product from the store, but continue enabling users who already purchased it access to it, and I expect this independence/guarantee of of access is part of their normal licensing. There is also already 'offline mode' for Steam, and setting the expiration of this mode to e.g. 100 years would be trivial from their side.
In the case of third party games with DRM on Steam: Valve doesn't have a license to distribute those games without DRM, so they're effectively promising to become a pirate software distributor. They have the technical means to do this, but not the legal right. They're almost certainly self-deluding if not lying outright when they promise to do this. I lean towards flagrantly lying; they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising but they're promising it anyway. And if they're willing to lie about this, I think you should reevaluate their promises respecting first party games as well.
Do they not? Did you read the terms for publishing a game on Steam?
I didn’t, but it’s within reason it contains a provision for just this eventuality.
Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.
It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.
So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.
Present it as a feature?
“In the event of the dissolution of Steam/Valve, we will endeavour to do everything reasonable to ensure that previously purchased licenses to your content keep working for subscribers in the absence of the Steam platform.”
Just because they try to keep it working doesn’t mean they have to make it DRM free (e.g. copyable between all computers without any checks).
If they shutdown due to bankruptcy (which seems unlikely at the moment, but could change, without much notice since they're private and don't have required public reporting), there may not be anything to collect or anyone to compell to fulfill the promise.
I have a few hundreds games in steam and while maybe one day I may lose access to all of them it’s a risk I am willing to take because:
- I don’t think it will happen anytime soon because it’s a money making machine. The biggest risk for me is Microsoft acquiring it and stopping any work on Linux related stuff (I have been using steam solely on Linux for the past 7+ years)
- Even if I lose access to the library, Steam will have done a better job that I could. I know for sure that I lost the media for the first steam-enabled games I bought but I can still play them.
those are rookie numbers, a couple months of humble bundle and your library can be full of shit you'll never play
To say this project failed and everyone is just out of luck would really shows what kind of company Alphabet/Google really is.
Don't expect human decency from a corporation, because corporations aren't humans. They're alien intelligence constructed out of humans, but that humanity is not inherited.
They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.
Plus, the most likely thing to happen to Valve is a MS acquisition.
Is it known who will helm Valve if Gabe decides to leave? Plagman has been a big name there with the recent SteamOS platform development but I'm not sure who the actual second-in-command would be.
This is true, but also this is all new. Sooner than later there will be a case of a 20 year old company who licenses media that burns their customer base. It's inevitable.
It was always an odd setup to sell something for a fixed fee that potentially has an endless cost to deliver. Google have always been vague about how to square that circle. They could have sold fixed term or rolling licences but chose not to. I suspect had Stadia game sales reached a certain threshold they'd have done something like that but it's not something you want to talk about with a new system.
... that said, I'd expect the margins were far lower / cost was higher than what Google was used to, and they financially decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
I used the service and as a techie knew it wasn't really sustainable but the average consumer buying in good faith wasn't warned that their purchase might be so short lived. Might have been hidden in the TOS but that won't cut the mustard in many jurisdictions and will be an expensive battle.
I suspect they made a small amount of sales and it'll be cheaper and easier for them to credit than fight.
I'm not saying Google won't pay out, but I just think there's a lot of reasons why they might not.
Might sound crazy but the 100m would be more effective to the brand than spending 100m on marketing.
Further, Google exited this market. Do they really care about marketing to these people anymore? Their main revenue is non-consensual tracking, it's not like being mad at Google is going to matter unless you really go out of your way because of it.
I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.
It’s important to save the offline installers too. I keep a rather large external for my GOG library.
However is it the right thing to do? Will it damage their reputation to do that?
If they wanted to dodge that beating they'd offer steam/epic/xbox/ps5/switch keys to their customers to claim. Any game their customer bought is probably over a year old at this point and they can cut a deal with the publishers to get deeply discounted keys and eat the costs.
But technically when you buy a game you're not really buying a game anymore, there's no physical item purchased.
You're merely purchasing a temporary non-transferable license to use it.
Back in the '90s if I gave you a Game boy game, it now belonged to you. I guess if I started a company renting them out Nintendo could sue me for copyright infringement though.
Now when I download a game, I'm merely permitted temporary usage. I can't give it to you
> Back in the '90s if I gave you a Game boy game, it now belonged to you.
Fip side is that if you lost the cartridge or it broke you had to buy it again. Granted, that almost never happened.
The few that used the service maybe. Most people have never heard of it.
No way the gaming community would be opposed to such a thing.
I’d be willing to pay a game developer a premium for a universal license that works on all platforms. Steam, Switch, Stadia, etc for example.
I bet they’d make more revenue this way than from the people who just rebuy the game multiple times.
I do wish that a major government would pass a law to this effect- if you advertise something as "buy", "purchase", or "own" then you need to have and execute on a plan to ensure access in perpetuity, even if you go out of business.
* XBox fitness remains the best product I've ever used that didn't make it in the market.
If I had to guess, they'll shut down Stadia as a platform but keep the tech alive, rebrand, give everyone new URLs to play the games they've already purchased. Kinda similar to how they migrated everyone's songs/purchases from Google Play Music to Youtube Music when they shut down GPM.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/21/22738550/arkham-knight-g...
Call my cynical. But I don't see this happening.
(Granted, it's all a rumor so far)
I don't think it's "trivial" though. They probably have to do some negotiation with both Steam as well as each individual publisher of games on the service.
They're probably just going to rebrand it as "Chrome Games" and have people play in their browsers or any supported devices.
All they do is build hype and cancel without any trace even when things are successful.
I'm convinced they only kept search and gmail for ads and tracking.
I think programming languages are a bit different. (Assuming they're not encumbered by patents / trademarks / copyright the way Java was/is.)
If Google decides to bail on Carbon, any design work, published implementations, etc. remain accessible for others to use or build upon.
If Google were to abandon Carbon, the main risk I see is that Google would not longer contribute to Carbon's refinement and implementation. So maybe that would reduce the odds of Carbon reaching critical mass, but it wouldn't flat out prevent people from legally continuing to use it.
Google has gone beyond destroying my goodwill to the point I actively despise them. I loved chrome at first. Same with gmail, google voice, youtube shit even google maps. All started good all now garbage. Same with Facebook and Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Uber, Doordash.
Burn me once shame on me...
It's still by far the best game streaming setup for what I want. I spent about $100 figuring I'd get a year or two out of it and it would be worth it for that. It was. If it continues through the end of the year I'll have gotten a lot more than I expected to.
When they shut it down I will probably just stop playing video games again until a similarly simple and effective service pops up, probably years from now or possibly never.
Xbox Cloud Gaming https://www.xbox.com/en-US/play
GeForce Now https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/
PlayStation Plus https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps-plus/getting-started/#p...
I got Cyberpunk on it ( at the time rationale was, I don't want to build a new PC so this is an acceptable trade-off ). Google name lent it some credibility and, admittedly, it was actually pretty impressive from technology point of view. It does help that the game was buggy as hell and made me lose interest early on.
That said, the fact that they are treating paying users this way makes stare in disbelief. How can they possibly get away with it? And, more importantly, the question quickly becomes 'to what extent ca I trust other platforms?'.
I mean it 'was' a streaming platform [0] as I already outlined from the future and called it, since it failed to get anyone using it back then, even in the pandemic and lockdowns and is still struggling today.
So it was expected and very unsurprising really.
Well they got to play the games? Not sure what you'd want to show? Like high-scores?
Google still exists, and has plenty of money to make all Stadia customers whole by buying them a retail copy of all of the games. But they choose not to because they are greedy.
Note: I am not a Stadia customer because I figured this would happen.
It's a service isn't it? You play it online. You got to play it. Not sure what makes you think I can't be serious about that? If I want to play a game I don't care if I 'buy' it or rent it - I care about the playing.
They asked what they got from it - they got to play the game. Wasn't that the point?
I think they were worth the price I paid for them.
As it was released, I had zero interest in Stadia for all the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. And I am the perfect target consumer for Stadia. I have a large monthly budget for games, I travel enough that it makes sense to have a portable gaming platform, and I embrace tech early. Even with all this, I had zero interest in Stadia simply because it was a Google product that I knew would be canceled.
You'll have to pry my Stadia controller from my cold, dead hands.
Maybe prove Y% of your X purchase went to the rights holder. So you can only be charged for Z-Y to get that same thing from another service.