Hacker News Reader

Comment by sithadmin | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call Stadia a joke. It does in fact work quite well. But it's not really positioned to compete with the other first-party console alternatives, nor does it have compelling features that make it a better choice than products let you DIY an experience (e.g. Parsec + self-hosted gaming rig, Steam Remote Play, GeForce Now, GPU-accelerated VDI as a service like Shadow...).

For a while Google was literally giving away Stadia controllers, a Chromecast device to support using it with a TV, and games for free. Every power user/gamer type person I know that took them up on it fooled around with it, agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.

View on HN

> I wouldn't call Stadia a joke

What kind of gaming platform randomly bans high profile game devs. because an automated Youtube bot told them to? A bad joke of one.

> It does in fact work quite well.

Didn't they fake high res video streams by up scaling bad renders? Haven't used it but as far as I understand there was quite a bit of overpromising and underdelivering going on.

> other first-party console alternatives,

Their competition would be GeForce Now from NVIDIA. Which not only is still a thing but also predates Stadia by several years.

> agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.

So did the free trial run out? Where the games crap? Have you ever asked them why they decided that it wasn't worth using?

Google's auto-ban/content moderation issues are a separate issue from the tech, which is fine. I never noticed issues with resolution or rendering, and haven't heard complaints about it from friends who tried it. We all ended up abandoning Stadia due to there being better options elsewhere, not because Stadia itself (aside from game selection perhaps) was bad.

Customers are paying for a service not just tech. Google makes some great tech demos, but seemingly has no idea what to do after that. They are really bad at providing services for money and auto-ban, game selection etc are all symptoms of the same issue.

Which is why Stadia is a bad joke.

> and haven't heard complaints about it from friends who tried it.

You mean the same friends that "just stopped using it"? There is something weird about the combination of purely positive feedback and everyone you know dropping it.

There's nothing weird about it all, and I'm confused as to why you chose to nitpick at that statement in particular.

That particular statement was with regard to suggested technical issues surrounding graphics. My friends and I generally found the play experience to be unobjectionable. My very statement explains that we all abandoned the product in favor of alternatives that provided a superior experience in one way or the other, not necessarily related to play experience. I for one prefer the versatility that a general low-latency desktop session via Parsec provides. Another friend that's deeply invested in the Xbox ecosystem preferred to use Microsoft's competing game streaming offering.

It is a joke regardless of "technical" quality because it has been completely obvious from the first announcement that the only problem Stadia tackles is making your game depend on Google, relying on their traditional long-term loyalty to their own services and products.

Stadia works quite well if you live in a big city adjacent to their data centers. It’s pretty ass otherwise.

Yeah I gave it an honest shot when they sent out free Stadia Premiere Editions (controller + Chromecast Ultra) and committed myself to playing through Superhot: Mind Control Delete.

And let me tell you, the only reason I was able to finish it is because the entire gimmick of that game is that when you're not moving, time doesn't move forward. So I could just wait out the regular lag spikes that happened every single play session. I would never choose to play a game like that.

I live in a moderately-sized city in Canada (~250,000 people?)

Did you try Xbox Cloud gaming? Cause I live in a pretty small town in Eastern Europe and it works flawlessly. Does Microsoft doing something better or Stadia was just that bad?

I've used xbox cloud gaming before. The lag made it hard to use, but I appreciate having a way to 'test out a game' before downloading 50-70 gb of install media. For that purpose, if nothing else, its a win.

The big difference, I think, for why google is made fun of for stadia but few people throw rocks at Microsoft is the game selection. Microsoft does not kill off their projects willy-nilly so game manufacturers, I assume, feel better about crawling into their bed than googles.

Because even small towns in eastern Europe still have better internet than most part of US or Germany

"and then pretty much never invested it again."

That's the difference, there simply wasn't any point investing in Stadia, because, well, this. There was no value to achivements, generated media, friend circles or god-forbid buying games because we knew it was going to be cancelled.

People like myself have been pointing out that they had no legitimate audience for years and no one listened. Zombie organization made a decision years ago and was the walking dead.

The business model, specifically, is a joke. Did they talk to anyone before launch about it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com