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+--- Thread: Aaaand it's gone! (/showthread.php?tid=7415)
Aaaand it's gone! - Dark Jaguar - 3rd October 2022
Stadia! Google Stadia!
...
Whoop! There it goes...
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - A Black Falcon - 6th October 2022
And good riddance. I understand the idea with cloud gaming and there are some reasons why it would be good, such as for people who can't afford a high end console or who want to remotely play games while not at home. However, people who have a good internet connection but can't afford a console? That seems like a somewhat limited market, but Google had way too high hopes for Stadia's success and it of course couldn't match them. And if you are going to have a cloud gaming platform, I would think that some kind of subscription service-based format would be the best choice. But that's not what Google did, they instead had it as a regular 'pay full price for each game' system, except with absolutely zero ownership, not even bits on your local hard drive. People pay for things we have zero actual ownership of all the time, but most of that are for rentals ore subscription services, not full price purchases that aren't actually a purchase, just extremely limited streaming rights for the software.
Of course, the big thing separating games from other media is the interactivity, and that's probably what really doomed Stadia. Local games run better than remote ones, and until someone finds out a way around the speed of light that is an unchangeable fact that makes games harder to completely get rid of locally like they have mostly managed to do to music and movies. Those are exactly the same remote or local, but games are not and can not be exactly the same, there will always be lag unless the servers are very close to the people using them... and at that point, why not just use a local system?
The other theoretical advantage of a cloud system is using additional hardware power to push graphics or tech that would be prohibitively expensive or too large to fit in a home system box... but the problem is you'd still need to have the service provider buy all that hardware themselves and be able to have enough of it for their paying users to be able to USE it, so this theoretical advantage is both hugely expensive for the company running the service and a moving target as technology improves. Google did not, I don't believe, really leverage this, it would have cost them even more money. And given that when you stream a game as video it loses some detail anyway, it would be incredibly difficult to impossible to match a local system with a remote one. Getting potentially more hardware power at the cost of image quality issues and lag is not a good tradeoff for most kinds of games.
And last of course, again streaming turns ownership into zero and completely destroys the concept of being able to ever play a game again in the future once the servers are turned off. This is the fate of most mobile games eventually, but people have higher expectations than that for computer or console games and this is, of course, a very good thing -- making games that people will only be able to play for a very short time then will permanently disappear is HORRIBLE! I, obviously, care a lot about being able to go back through the history of this industry and play old games, and saying that you won't be able to do that, at all, with any game we don't re-release or any game exclusive to a shut down service is the worst thing you can do to a game.
At this point the loss of being able to play games in the future seems somewhat inevitable, as online services are central to a vast number of games and few have any kind of release of server code when their servers get turned off, but every victory in this battle is good and important so overall it's great that Google has failed. Given how iffy their effort was and how everyone expected them to kill Stadia eventually from the beginning since that is what Google does to most of its projects surely helped defeat it, and there will probably eventually be a successful game streaming service even if streaming isn't likely to take over local play anytime soon due to the physical limits of the speed of light and such, but for now at least the "ownership" of the bits on our hard drives survives another day... though agai na lot of those bits are useless without proprietary remote servers so it's a pretty compromised win.
With that said though I spend a lot of time playing online games like those, as opposed to single player games that are mostly on your local system, so what can you do but accept that in the future many games will be sadly unplayable, while hoping that more do have their server info shared before being shut down since being able to play games in the future, and not only the present, is very important.
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - Dark Jaguar - 7th October 2022
Don't forget that many games have essentially no reason at all to be so dependent on online services. They're single player experiences with some sort of online component wedged into them like a piece of lime lovingly hanging off the rim of your toilet. And they're normalized now. Just take a peek at modern game forums, outside of our own, and you'll see kids that GREW UP with this stuff. To them, 9/11 is a piece of history from a naive world that didn't understand Game of Thrones style necessity of evil unto others. A pathetic, WEAK world, you see. One that deserved to be stepped on by "reality". "How, how could anyone EVER think it was okay to let their 13 year old child walk down the road UNSUPERVISED?!" I... digress...
Point is, we're foolish to think a game could ever be supported by just CHARGING the price to buy it. Also, a game that doesn't get regular injections of costumes and other such content is "dead". With THAT mindset, trying to explain that all these grindy unlock systems that require you to spend the better part of month after month dedicated to this one game just to get a frickin' unicorn outfit are frankly ridiculous and outright dystopian, well... it sails like a lead balloon. We may as well complain about the sunset every night. It's baked in. It's immutable reality. We already lost ABF. We're going to die and then no one will remember the before times.
Unless...
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - A Black Falcon - 8th October 2022
Yeah, you're pretty much right there.
On a note very related to this thread, Blizzard released Overwatch 2 a couple of days ago. It is based on the first game, but with a bunch of balance changes. It's mostly great, just like the original was, other than one key change that is really, really bad, namely going down to 5v5 and having only one tank class character per team. It does get rid of the loot boxes and replace them with a battle pass system, though, so there's that. It's also free to play now.
But for those who like tank class characters, just play the first game since they are so similar, right?
Well, no. You can't. As far as their serverss are concerned Blizzard erased Overwatch 1 from existence and turned it into Overwatch 2, the original game is gone now. All copies of Overwatch patched themselves into being Overwatch 2. Of course, Overwatch 2 is basically just a big patch for Overwatch, but it's just different enough that what Blizzard did is pretty obnoxious. I like Overwatch but not a lot of Blizzard's decisions here.
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - Dark Jaguar - 11th October 2022
ABF, Activision-Blizzard are an evil company full of rampant sexual abuse that actively support China's expansionist policies. This is not an exaggeration. Every word I just used is true.
Is it any wonder, in the face of that, that they have not only INVENTED a mechanic specifically designed to prey on gambling addicts, but have now bloated the sequalspantion to that biggest of cash cows in their... crown... (Mixed simile sorry there) with every manner of exploitative unlock system invented since then? Is it any wonder they've FORCED it onto players? Is it any wonder at all that they are actively removing your rights regarding map content from past games that once embraced it (Warcraft III) or are gutting modes that didn't hurt them in the slightest and would have been both easy and cheap to simply keep in the code (local LAN play from Diablo II) simply (near as I can tell) to force players into their matchmaking system geared towards the particular dark pattern of forcing people into matches with players that buy all their microtransaction content as a form of advertising? That they've forced old offline games to be online-only such as their arcade collection of mildly enhanced SNES games?
We didn't know better when that very first sparkling pony came with a ridiculously bloated price tag back in World of Warcraft, bringing a practice from "free to play" into the "recurring fee" supported MMO space. There is no excuse any more. ABF, Activision Blizzard are not just part of the problem, they're innovators in the field. They are a bad corporation and the sooner you accept that and ditch them the better. They are not your friends. It will absolutely not get better. It will get worse. The line must be drawn here Picard reference blah blah blah.
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - Dark Jaguar - 12th October 2022
https://kotaku.com/activision-blizzard-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-1849650622
And again. It never ends. Also, Silicon Knight's leadership was also abusive and corrupt. There's no point denying it any more after that failed spiritual successor collapsed due to.. let me read this here.... CHILD PORNOGRAPHY?! Oh dear dear dear....
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - A Black Falcon - 14th October 2022
Yes, Activision-Blizzard is a pretty awful company... that makes many of the best games ever. Overwatch was a fantastic game and Overwatch 2 is more of the same, so it's great. Their RTSes are my favorite games ever of course, and the Diablo games are great as well (Diablo 2 particularly). I loved the old, pre-WoW Blizzard a lot more than the company that it became after that games' massive success, but they are still one of the better developers around when it comes to making great games. Considering their talent loss and constant scandals I don't know if they will be able to keep it up, but it IS true.
... Again, everything I have seen says that the problems at Blizzard mostly started after the company massively expanded post-WoW. As someone who never liked WoW much that just gives me one more reason to dislike that game, I think.
I will also say, I'm kind of hoping Microsoft succeeds at buying Acti-Bklizz because while MS has had some of its own sexual harassment scandals, they are nothing like Activision's, the company seems to have at least some ethics. Getting rid of Bobby Kotick and co. would be an improvement and I hope Microsoft, if or when they take over, can turn the company around corporate culture-wise.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:https://kotaku.com/activision-blizzard-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-1849650622That's different, as far as I know that was one person and nobody else knew. It's certainly bad but it's not like Acti-Blizz.
And again. It never ends. Also, Silicon Knight's leadership was also abusive and corrupt. There's no point denying it any more after that failed spiritual successor collapsed due to.. let me read this here.... CHILD PORNOGRAPHY?! Oh dear dear dear....
RE: Aaaand it's gone! - Dark Jaguar - 17th October 2022
And in exchange, all we have to do is allow MS to take one more step towards owning the whole video game market. Monopolies aren't a binary. They're a gradual process.