Google is now testing YouTube Playables, before Stadia's corpse is cold | Hacker News Reader

Google is now testing YouTube Playables, before Stadia's corpse is cold

appleinsider.com

36 pointscpeterso22 comments

"There is a chance Google won't launch this product. But if it does, like many other half-baked ideas from the company, we expect it will join Google's ever-expanding graveyard soon after launch."

Like Stadia, developers and gamers will be reluctant to invest in the ecosystem because Google cannot be bothered to maintain anything that does not make as much revenue as search and ads.

It's hard to make the case the this is different than Stadia even.

I could see it being interesting if it's just games you can run completely in the client you can publish, where you can collect revenue through ads like a YouTube video.

> It's hard to make the case the this is different than Stadia even.

Availability in YouTube (an app almost everyone has) is a big differentiator.

It would also be a big deal if you could play games through YouTube Playables that didn't have to be specifically adapted to that platform. Like if they could just stream any Windows game, that would be a big deal.

You don't need a special app to stream games. Whether they originate on PC, Playstation, or Xbox, all the major streaming services can stream directly to a browser tab. Right now, for example, you can play hundreds of Steam games from the GeForce Now website without downloading any apps. Or Xbox Cloud Streaming.

I'm sure it wouldn't have been a big lift to integrate Stadia into YouTube, Google just didn't care enough to do anything about it.

Stadia was the worst in terms of compatibility. They required devs to go through special effort to port games over (instead of integrating directly with Steam like Geforce Now does, or streaming Windows itself like Shadow does). And you'd have to rebuy all the games on Stadia even if you already had it on a different platform. And there was no crossplay and usually no cross progression. It was dead for arrival for any serious gamer and way too expensive, plus terribly marketed, for any casual gamer.

But the underlying tech was decent. It was only recently surpassed, in terms of quality and performance, by GeForce Now. And even now the integration still isn't as seamless; in GFN you still go through Steam, whereas in Stadia the game just launches straight in.

Maybe a rebrand and repositioning into YouTube, combined with marketing or subscription sharing with paid YouTube or Google One, could bring it back to life... we'll see.

At this point, even Google is at a strong disadvantage compared to Nvidia's first party access to new RTX cards (for raytracing) and excellent AI features (upsampling, frame sampling, noise cancelation, etc.) Not sure if they can still catch up. More importantly, not sure if they care to...

Lack of YouTube integration is what I felt weird about Stadia. Having YouTube is a big advantage.

> Google cannot be bothered to maintain anything that does not make as much revenue as search and ads

I think Google would be happy to maintain such a product. Their problem is that they have no idea how to build it. They haven't created a single highly-profitable product since the launch of AdWords more than 20 years ago.

They've spent hundreds of billions on thousands of products, and they couldn't build a single one that actually took off. Think about that. It's truly incredible how incompetent they are as a company.

(Obviously YouTube and some other products are successful, but YouTube was an acquisition and nothing is wildly profitable like ads are.)

To gain the confidence of gamers, Google would have needed to maintain Stadia for a long time, even if it cost them money. They'd also likely need an on demand subscription program more desirable than Xbox Game Pass or the higher tiers of Playstation Plus.

Xbox didn't succeed in the long term because the gaming market embraced it or because it made lots of profit for Microsoft. It succeeded because Microsoft was willing to lose lots of money on it for a long time to be able to compete with the perennial market leader (Playstation). Even now, Microsoft is willing to spend enormous sums of money and deal with hostile regulatory agencies to buy game development companies so they can keep the Xbox brand competitive.

Maybe I am too old to have a valid opinion on games, but I saw a unique oportunity for stadia to become a universal anticheat engine.

Since the game CLIENT couldn't be tampered with by the customer, gamers were unable to execute the worst (best) cheats: injection. The gamers could still use reflection cheats, but with added latency.

During the life of Stadia I wasn't aware of any attempt of Google to capitalize on this advantage. Imagine playing Call of Duty or PUBG in a cheat free platform. Simply mind blowing.

biggest problem with playing call of duty on a stadia would be the additional lag.

I found that I wasn't able to enjoy my stadia beyond puzzle games. And I have pretty decent internet. There were periods of a few minutes when I would feel things were working great and then I would suddenly get a slight, barely noticable lag when steering a vehicle or aiming a weapon.

Was always just enough to be infuriating. I can't see COD players enjoying that.

This throws game modding out the window if it becomes mainstream. Many games thrive purely off of their modding communities - especially older titles.

It throws out the traditional way of doing modding, there are still ways of making it work.

Unlikely to get your nude skyrim follower mods though.

Until the developer decides to not publish mods.

And besides, maybe I like nude Skyrim follower mods. Who is anyone to stop that?

Mods extend the life of games, which means you aren't buying new games. I've don't think mods will ever be part of the cloud gaming scene. Cloud is the ultimate DRM. Need people to buy the new version of the game, even if it is worse? Remove old game from servers so they can't play it anymore.

Modding is fun, no doubt about it. I enjoy the absurd weapons and revamped textures when I play with trusted friends.

But if I had to choose between having mods or having a guaranteed cheat-free game, I know which one I'd choose and I suspect I'd be in the majority.

The overlap of modding and multiplayer is small and usually for coop-ish games where cheating isn't a big deal. Most big modding scenes are for single-player games.

the problem is that the kind of games that warrant anticheat also can't cope with the increased delay (nor predictive inputs).

>> Google cannot be bothered to maintain anything that does not make as much revenue as search and ads

> I think Google would be happy to maintain such a product. Their problem is that they have no idea how to build it. They haven't created a single highly-profitable product since the launch of AdWords more than 20 years ago.

They just sold one of these products (Google Domains). What makes you think they'd want to keep another one?

With Stadia Google fully refunded both games and hardware so I don't really understand what people give them crap for.

As long as I get my money back I'm good which in the Stadia case left consumers very well off. I got to play like 500 bucks worth of games for free. If they continue with that policy they can ship me as much abandonware as they want. They even unlocked the controller earlier this year.

Yeah, kudos to Google for how they handled that. Classy!

But you can't count on that to happen. It's a huge risk to invest into a game ecosystem that hasn't already proven itself. Even gaming companies (Epic, GOG) struggle to gain that kind of trust, much less Google with their poor history.

You're forgetting about the developers who were actively working on games for the platform. They were left holding the bag...

What does Stadia have to do with this?

From the article, this isn't about streaming games, it isn't about physical controllers, this isn't related to Stadia in any way at all.

It seems to just be small puzzle type games etc, like games you would play on Facebook.

If YouTube thinks it might be able to have a "games" tab, I mean why not? Or if YouTube Kids comes with age-appropriate games?

I'm baffled by why the article assumes it's necessarily going to bad, without even having tried it. I mean, with that attitude, why ever build anything new at all?

I understand the pessimism since Stadia is just the last on a list of Google products that some people came to love, and then one day it died.

They seem to be competing with Facebook, Google Play Arcade, Apple Arcade, Netflix Games, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com