6th October 2022, 10:33 PM
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.
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.