Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.)

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com