While inevitable, I am impressed they are refunding all purchases, including hardware. That can't be cheap.
If they consistently take this approach for other cancellations, it could change the the common view from:
"why use this? They're just going to shut it down in a few years anyway"
to:
"oh neat, Google's experimenting with something new. Let me try it out. If it doesn't work out, they'll take care of me."
Can we get those back, Google? Not just our data, but the profits and improvements you made from it?
"Free" in the age of adtech comes at a high price. The sad part is most people don't care they're getting the short end of the stick.
Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say, gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around shifting sands like that.
Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.
So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra months of service on a second line) even to migrate off "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a business.
Hrm. I have an "eclectic" mix of native Steam games, non-Steam games (added to my Steam library) and some emulators. I can't imagine those will be available, thanks for this info.
>it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
I certainly like this.
Do you use it with your TV? Do you need a Shield too for the controller?
It works perfectly for non Steam games and usually works better for Steam games as well.
I would recommend a wireless keyboard and mouse to launch the games or if you just want to use a controller to launch your games the Playnight launcher.
If there was some new Google paid service that I cared about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in a couple years.
Google hasn’t remained the same company through its history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a radical departure from their past.
Maybe Google is realizing they can’t keep being this cold company forever.
Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn’t get me to trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse. It would have to be done a few more times.
Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the cheaper option.
It's not like Google has a good rep in that community already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube, and especially in its gaming community, complains about YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively to move over to YT.
On that note, some commentary from /v/:
>even the shut down lagged by monthsLots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me were portability (playing my games at max settings while traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops, etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home, but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks like using less battery life / hard drive space / time updating / etc than the native alternative.
In other words, if I have the choice between playing the same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going to pick the latter.
2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years" into broad public consciousness
3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try again
4. Maybe it's relatively not that much money. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two people who'd ever even heard of Stadia
IPOed at $522.20, now down to $8.76. Took $1.4b in investment, now worth $265m.
With this, next time there's a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"
Yeah, seriously.
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.
Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally" for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).
I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.
And now I'm getting a 50€ refund?
Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.
Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.
Sometimes I forget that was ever a thing!
Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem your ISP sent you when you first got service.
These sorts of EULA arrangements are essentially the foundation of almost all modern media consumption - if anything Stadia is on better ground than most since it's not just a DRM layer like Steam or iTunes. If Steam disappears, I have a bunch of entirely playable game files on my computer that I can't use. When Stadia shuts down, you have a client for nothing. You're not paying $60 to own a copy of a game, you're paying $60 for an unlimited term license to play the game on Stadia's servers. Legally, it feels odd to claim in court that that should be the same as a purchase of the game in some other method. If Google had turned off Stadia, but transferred everyone's purchases to Steam or EGS, that wouldn't be providing the same service you purchased from Stadia.
For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a neighborhood of 500 houses.
Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency. Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the USA).
I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).
This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.
Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.
Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.
It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games
Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry making these streaming products are adults with real lives who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore players
Not only that, but a lot of AAA games nowadays have super long animations, tons of post-processing slapped on the tail end of the rendering engine, etc, so you end up with 300+ ms from "button pressed" to "something happens"
My understanding is that Stadia and most other game streaming providers run PC games which are developed with the assumption of precise mouse/keyboard inputs where there’s no assistance.
- They are not refunding the 'pro' subscription charges
- They are not refunding hardware purchases made from 3rd parties
The first is a bit sus, the second does make sense unfortunately.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-offici...
If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.
Here's one that showed their work: https://allstadia.com/how-many-users-does-google-stadia-have
Ironically I will probably use my refund to buy a steam deck.
XCloud and GeForce Now are the two that come to mind. There are others.