Still a great shame about Stadia. Really cool technology that never had a chance to reach its potential. Killed too soon!
Stadia itself seemed doomed to me from day one, and I pushed back multiple times to avoid getting involved working on it because I didn't want to get dragged in. (I did work for a bit on the component that did the video receiving for Stadia streams inside the Chromecast; taking what another team did and heavily optimizing it and refactoring it etc.)
In any case, my cynicism was confirmed and the project killed -- but the worst thing is that in the round of layoffs last year they seemed to let go many (most?) of the people still working on it or heavily associated with it, instead of transferring them off to other teams like Google normally would. Kind of nasty.
Geforce now just let's you play games you already own (with some limitations based on publisher deals, developer support FWIU etc). And it's just as good as stadia was in terms of user experience IMHO having used both.
GeForce Now runs essentially normal Windows VMs with GPU passthrough to some of their beefier multiuser cards and a custom remote desktop mechanism. There's no special porting involved, it's essentially the same setup, but extra optimised, as what people setup themselves using various cloud providers.
Thus GeForce Now has close to zero porting burden and could just attach Windows Steam client integration.
Stadia didn't have that - I have no idea how it was actually implemented, but someone mentioned that Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 was "the PC version, no porting".
Except the Stadia version is the otherwise unreleased Linux port of the game, using Vulkan for rendering (unlike DirectX on normal PC release). It had to use a custom input, sound, etc implementation for whatever interfaces Stadia provided.
FWIW, AFAIK that build also worked on normal Linux with X11 so long as you had Vulkan drivers.
But yes, the big hurdle was that Stadia required a Linux binary, possibly also required Vulkan. Every game they wanted to add had to be effectively ported.
GeForce Now has Windows and various game stores as hard dependencies, which feels like in theory optimizing for the short term and limits how smooth the user experience can be made. But in practice it works fine, and the reduced overhead for individual games maybe is better at least for medium term too.
Meanwhile on Linux, everything breaks every time the distribution is updated. Because they're now using the right XYZ framework and every single app should be ported.
Yeah, although it seemed like the original goal was to make it a sort of “Netflix for games” subscription service where you’d get the games for free so long as you kept paying your $10/month or whatever. Apple has been trying to do a similar thing with their Apple Arcade. Unfortunately the included games were mostly “B” titles, with the exception of PUBG, so you still needed to pay to purchase the good stuff.
I was looking at prices for a new gaming laptop, and realised that it was perhaps 4 or 5 or more years of subscription fees, and that I could just use a lightweight X1 instead. Perfect
The goal, of course, is to make game running server shareable between different clients, right? But there already was a service to share your own idling PC with internet players. And unlike Google's servers it can be used to play locally by its owner.
But the biggest issue with the whole game streaming is the economy. What's more profitable for publishers and stores, to sell access to games which run on your hardware, or sell the copies of the games and let the players handle hardware cost themselves? The obvious answer leads for remote play services to live off the niche of people who would like to play games but can't afford to invest into hardware. If you compare the cost of a game console with the cost of games you'll understand there can't be a lot of people in this category.
TL;DR Remote play is doomed to stay on the fringes due to the economy and physics.
From the users' perspective, the only selling point of cloud gaming is that they don't have to buy/maintain/upgrade/carry a large gaming computer. It's not game distribution - which is a solved problem by the various stores and piracy, and into which they're already invested and have existing game libraries.
What the users want would be to have a gaming PC in the cloud - same experience as their own gaming PC but without the cost of ownership/maintenance and burden of physically having the machine and moving it. They can install their existing games no matter where they're from (including piracy) - if they work on a local machine, they'd work on this.
The problem is that limits the rent-seeking potential considerably; the max price you can charge is about the same as a cloud GPU instance (since that's all it really is), you can't enforce lock-in (the user can trivially migrate to a competitor or back to local gaming - the experience is the same as swapping physical machines) and you can't become a middleman in game distribution.
Why, they did take off. There are several active remote play services in different countries. As I said, those are serving niche audience and there's no demand for them to grow any further.
> What the users want would be to have a gaming PC in the cloud - same experience as their own gaming PC but without the cost of ownership/maintenance and burden of physically having the machine and moving it.
I agree, but this is technically unachievable. Local connection will always have more hassle free bandwidth than a remote one. So, what happens in reality, the users trade the cost of their gaming PC ownership/maintenance (which is pretty affordable in case of game consoles) for cost of maintaining high speed and high reliability internet connection.