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Comment by Matl | Hacker News Reader

> I am happy that Stadia is gone

Yes, everything that I don't personally like shouldn't exist because there's no way it could work for someone if it doesn't work for me, right?

I am not a fan of cloud gaming, but Stadia as a service wasn't bad. As for owning games, you don't own your Steam games either, unfortunately.

As glad as I am for Valve supporting Linux, the real practical difference between Steam and Stadia is that Valve has proven it will keep it around. But in terms of ownership there's hardly a difference.

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> As for owning games, you don't own your Steam games either, unfortunately.

But I can keep my Steam games’ executables and run them without Steam, either as-is (many games are DRM-free) or with a fake Steam API DLL.

Come this January, all Stadia games will be lost.

Stadia did two things for me that were invaluable:

* It was my primary console for about 18 months until I finally got a new xbox. worked almost flawlessly until the last few months, when Google's divestment in the platform began to show up in its performance.

* It eliminated cheaters, which were a huge problem in the PC version of the game I play the most (Destiny 2).

I'm bummed they're shutting down Stadia though its not world-ending for me. But I'm really not sure GFN or similar is going to work well for me on that second point, and I don't even own a PC to play those games natively. I do have an xbox now to play on, but I still do log into Stadia when i'm traveling or in another room and don't feel like coaxing my wife off the tv in the living room.

I said it before, A lot of people on here will happily argue that they want to own their games (Which I want too!), while also rejoicing that cloud gaming is increasing narrowing to fewer and fewer companies. Licensing is getting increasingly harder, and I'm worried at some point we'll be left with a monopoly and it'll be too late. There's a lot of money in being the last man standing, and if one company holds all the licensing and economies of scale, then that leaves the consumer experience to the goodwill of whoever dug themselves into the deepest hole.

> the real practical difference between Steam and Stadia is that Valve has proven it will keep it around

How about being able to run the game on hardware that I own? On stadia I have to rent hardware from a single vendor, while on steam I can run it on my own hardware or rent hardware from cloud vendors to run my game.

Hey now, let's leave the strawmen in the fields shall we?

Except it was terrible. Not only was it by a company whose profit center is pure evil, but if it would of taken off it wasn't inconceivable games could of been developed exclusively for the tech. It would make DRM, anti-cheat and a whole host of other things a lot easier.

There are many of us who do not want to see that future ever, where the only way to play game is to stream it.

My argument is that a service like Steam is itself a form of DRM, be it not as draconian.

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