RIP Stadia (Gylt LIVES)

[scalliano]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63082320

 

In news that will surprise absolutely no one with even a passing interest in games, Stadia is shuttering as of the 18th of January next year. At least they are refunding all purchases as recompense for wasting everyone's time.

 

Actually I'm being unfair - I tried Stadia during the 2-month free Covid lockdown trial and I really hope Gylt gets a release elsewhere, because that game is legit great.

Edited October 1, 2022 by scalliano

[Daytime Waitress]

You mean people don't want to rely on their internet connection to play the games they own are renting whenever they want to? Maybe I'm just too used to spotty connections, but I'm legit astounded that such an enormous company any company could look at that idea and go, "Yes, let's base our entire business platform on it". Maybe a trillion years ago when hard drive space was a cost issue, sure, but today? I legitimately don't understand: where was the appeal or apparent advantage in any of this meant to be?

[Thelokk]

I legit hadn't even heard of this Stadia before. Telling, I guess. 

[Murdoch]

The only thing shocking about this announcement is that it took as long as it did to pull the plug. I hate to be "That Guy" (tm) but game streaming is a fundamentally flawed concept.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

17 minutes ago, Daytime Waitress said:

You mean people don't want to rely on their internet connection to play the games they own are renting whenever they want to? Maybe I'm just too used to spotty connections, but I'm legit astounded that such an enormous company any company could look at that idea and go, "Yes, let's base our entire business platform on it". Maybe a trillion years ago when hard drive space was a cost issue, sure, but today? I legitimately don't understand: where was the appeal or apparent advantage in any of this meant to be?

I could never understand the appeal of this for the life of me. Not once in my life have I ever had wifi that was even remotely suitable for this shit, and I live in a major city in America. Maybe a trillion years from now when we all have wifi cards built into our bodies*, but today? 

 

*

Spoiler

ONE TRILLION YEARS FROM TODAY

 

"Excuse me m'lady, could I....perhaps....borrow your wifi?"

 

"Oh my, is that an antenna in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

 

"Yes m'lady, it's the newest 16' retractable model by GIGABYTE. Would you like to take a gander?"

 

[Biodegradable]

Much like Murdoch, I too am simply surprised it lasted this long. Stadia was an abject failure in every conceivable metric. Whatever decent games it might have had on it, I share Scalliano's sentiment and hope they can get a second wind elsewhere.

[indigotyrian]

This'll never work, not until they invent the ansible, but corporations are going to keep trying because abolishing the current model of video game ownership in favor of streaming means more rent-seeking, more proprietor control, less modding, and less preservation. It's why Google refunded everyone completely -- to not do this would be to burn away whatever little faith gamers and the public have left in cloud gaming (and given the recent tire fire over at Warner Bros. Discovery, faith in streaming in general is evaporating quickly). Google, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon, et al. need people to still believe this is possible, even though it's just physically not.

 

Google failing here is a heavy nail in the coffin but probably not the final one. Luna's still around (inasmuch as anyone is aware of it) and Microsoft and Sony have their offers on tap, too. The extortionate oppressive wasteland that is mobile gaming, filled with dead games you may never get to play ever again (or even for the first time), exploitative business practices, and multitudes of braindead clones that may or may not include malware is, in the eyes of executives, the future, and a single stillborn fetus of a project kept on life support until the point of irrationality won't stop them from trying to birth it again.

[Bauul]

1 hour ago, Daytime Waitress said:

You mean people don't want to rely on their internet connection to play the games they own are renting whenever they want to? Maybe I'm just too used to spotty connections, but I'm legit astounded that such an enormous company any company could look at that idea and go, "Yes, let's base our entire business platform on it".

 

I think there are legitimate uses for cloud gaming. For "try before you buy" it definitely has it's benefits, especially these days when even demos can be tens of gigabytes. It feels like Microsoft and Sony's implementations, as accompaniments to their download-based subscription services, play an understandable role.

 

But Google's concept of needing to both pay a monthly subscription to the service, and pay full price to rent the games, made no logical sense. 

[HorseJockey]

2 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

You mean people don't want to rely on their internet connection to play the games they own are renting whenever they want to? Maybe I'm just too used to spotty connections, but I'm legit astounded that such an enormous company any company could look at that idea and go, "Yes, let's base our entire business platform on it". Maybe a trillion years ago when hard drive space was a cost issue, sure, but today? I legitimately don't understand: where was the appeal or apparent advantage in any of this meant to be?

This all the way. I can count on one hand the times that I have had internet good enough to use a game streaming service. I used Playstation now back in the day, but that was just so I could play Bloodborne as I don't have a ps4. That being said, if someone sneezed near my router the game would disconnect/lag out constantly.

[Shepardus]

41 minutes ago, Bauul said:

But Google's concept of needing to both pay a monthly subscription to the service, and pay full price to rent the games, made no logical sense. 

They've had a free tier since 2020, the pro subscription gives you some extra features such as 4K resolution, some free games similar to PS Plus, and discounts on other games.

 

I tried Stadia for a bit because I was gifted a Stadia controller and a Pro subscription with it, and frankly it worked surprisingly well, and my internet connection isn't anything spectacular either. Not having to download dozens of gigabytes before starting a game is my favorite part of it. My biggest complaint is just that I wasn't interested in the games available on the platform.

[indigotyrian]

52 minutes ago, Bauul said:

 

I think there are legitimate uses for cloud gaming. For "try before you buy" it definitely has it's benefits, especially these days when even demos can be tens of gigabytes. It feels like Microsoft and Sony's implementations, as accompaniments to their download-based subscription services, play an understandable role.

 

Multi-gigabyte downloads in the era of gigabit downstream wideband cable aren't as scary as they once were. Granted, not everybody has that kind of connection, but it occurs to me that if somebody's connection is slow enough that a multi-gigabyte download for a simple game demo is too big of an ask, then they probably don't have the quality, stable connection required for cloud gaming to begin with.

[Worm318]

I was skeptical when they initially promoted this with mainstream AAA titles like Doom (2016) and Assassins Creeds because network latency and stability was obviously going to be an issue as soon as the game required real-time reactions even if it was slow-paced.

 

Even with "unexpected pause reliant" games like turn-based games this kind of service is in a weird position. On a moment I thought it could have made beautiful graphics and animations accesible to mobile games and, on the same time, solve the issue of losing players two or three years into these games life-cycle because they increased their system requirements and size considerably as the updated increased the game content... but then a good internet connection is required anyways to play comfortably which is not the case in most wireless networks that these devices can access to and if you have good wifi then you probably can afford a proper device I guess

[Redneckerz]

I have a friend who praised this to high heavens. But thing is, the concept does not work. The hardware wasn't upgraded aswell on the server side so it was more difficult to keep 4K60 up.

 

Would love a devkit though with Stadia hardware.

[Dragonfly]

If nothing else, Stadia gave us a good generic USB controller that is ergonomic in design, looks pretty good, and is seemingly very durable. I bought one preowned about 2 years ago and it's my go to controller for certain games or emulation on PC.

 

There will be a demographic who are sad to see stadia go, but they are a very niche set of people to be sure. That said, they can always go to Nvidia GeForce Now... until they inevitably follow google's footsteps. 😅

[Graf Zahl]

What I find strange is that one thing was never mentioned in the whole story about game streaming:

 

No matter how much bandwidth you got, you'll never eliminate the lag.

All the data on the internet will travel at the speed of light at most, so even if you assume you got a perfect internet with no internal delays or hiccups you got to have the server very close by.

 

Light travels at ~300'000 km/s, which means that for a round trip to the server each 150km of distance would add 1 ms of lag - which it impossible to eliminate.

And we all know how sensitive gamers tend to be towards lag...

 

[DeathWolf1982]

Didn't stadia had a fire hazard like some consoles did. 

[ChopBlock223]

I feel bad for gamedevs who didn't get to find this out until now. Burger Becky was working on a game which was scheduled to launch November 1st, now they're all gonna have to find a publisher to invest into adapting the game to a conventional machine.

Google are shitty, as usual.

[Dragonfly]

20 minutes ago, DeathWolf1982 said:

Didn't stadia had a fire hazard like some consoles did. 

 

????

[ChopBlock223]

36 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Light travels at ~300'000 km/s, which means that for a round trip to the server each 150km of distance would add 1 ms of lag - which it impossible to eliminate.

And we all know how sensitive gamers tend to be towards lag...

You could theoretically get around that problem with coverage, but to just get coverage for urban areas in the US alone you'd be looking at enormous infrastructure developments, thousands upon thousands of the machines themselves, and then it'd still be for nought because some people only have half decent internet anyway. Reliable global coverage is halfways towards a Dyson Sphere in terms of logistical requirements.

[Graf Zahl]

Indeed. But let's not forget that while for a multiplayer game with a real computer at your disposal you can somewhat counter the lag with prediction code, but with a pure video stream you can't. There is no way the local machine can compensate for the lag because all it got is image data. You'd indeed need some monstrous infrastructure to reduce this to bearable amounts.

 

 

[Gez]

1 hour ago, ChopBlock223 said:

You could theoretically get around that problem with coverage, but to just get coverage for urban areas in the US alone you'd be looking at enormous infrastructure developments, thousands upon thousands of the machines themselves, and then it'd still be for nought because some people only have half decent internet anyway. Reliable global coverage is halfways towards a Dyson Sphere in terms of logistical requirements.

At this point it's becoming simpler to just rent gaming machines to people. Imagine some sort of PlayBox U or whatever that comes preinstalled with a few terabytes of games. But you don't own it, you just rent it from Sotensoft or whatever. Every few months, you can bring it to the shop and exchange it for the newest model -- that may not actually be, technically, a new model, just one with new preinstalled, but it may also be a hardware upgrade. If you do damage the machine or try to tinker with it, you have to pay for it, and it gets expensive then, but just renting it would be affordable.

[Koko Ricky]

12 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

You mean people don't want to rely on their internet connection to play the games they own are renting whenever they want to? Maybe I'm just too used to spotty connections, but I'm legit astounded that such an enormous company any company could look at that idea and go, "Yes, let's base our entire business platform on it". Maybe a trillion years ago when hard drive space was a cost issue, sure, but today? I legitimately don't understand: where was the appeal or apparent advantage in any of this meant to be?

 

I can imagine a world where everyone has an extremely stable high-speed connection, and can play ray-traced games at 4k 60fps minimum, with some data being on the user's hard drive and the rest streaming. We'll be there at some point but it was a bit premature to test that out in a 4G/5G world. 

[Kinsie]

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

What I find strange is that one thing was never mentioned in the whole story about game streaming:

 

No matter how much bandwidth you got, you'll never eliminate the lag.

All the data on the internet will travel at the speed of light at most, so even if you assume you got a perfect internet with no internal delays or hiccups you got to have the server very close by.

 

Light travels at ~300'000 km/s, which means that for a round trip to the server each 150km of distance would add 1 ms of lag - which it impossible to eliminate.

And we all know how sensitive gamers tend to be towards lag...

  

This is one reason why Game Streaming by itself struggles to work. As an additional optional feature alongside other, locally downloaded functionality, it can be useful at times. I occasionally use Xbox Cloud Streaming (which comes as part of a wider set of mostly-downloaded services in Game Pass) when I want to play Microsoft Flight Simulator but don't feel like filling my entire hard drive, and it works pretty well even on my turn-of-the-millennium cable connection due to the luck of having servers in my country. I wanna say Playstation Plus has a similar accompaniment that also works pretty well?

 

3 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

If nothing else, Stadia gave us a good generic USB controller that is ergonomic in design, looks pretty good, and is seemingly very durable. I bought one preowned about 2 years ago and it's my go to controller for certain games or emulation on PC.

Hopefully they enable Bluetooth support for the Stadia controllers before they stack the chairs. I believe it's in the hardware but yet to be enabled in a firmware update?

 

2 hours ago, DeathWolf1982 said:

Didn't stadia had a fire hazard like some consoles did. 

 

2 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

 

????

I think I remember hearing something about the Chromecasts they sent out to subscribers having cooling issues. But that was a whole pandemic ago...

 

2 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

I feel bad for gamedevs who didn't get to find this out until now. Burger Becky was working on a game which was scheduled to launch November 1st, now they're all gonna have to find a publisher to invest into adapting the game to a conventional machine.

Google are shitty, as usual.

Not the only dev left out in the cold.

 

 

Supposedly, Stadia's own engineers were told just a few minutes before the rest of the world:

[scalliano]

Two words: PHIL HARRISON.

 

Not surprising that devs are being screwed. The problem is, it's not just a case of chucking the game on Steam - unlike other streaming services, Stadia is an actual platform with bespoke hardware and an OS just like a conventional console, so games have to be ported to and from it.

 

It was only amatter of time before the stories started coming out about how badly Google screwed it up, not that we didn't know already.

[Quasar]

Stadia is based on pure standard x64 Linux servers, with a Google SDK API. Vulkan is used for rendering. There is nothing bespoke other than the SDK functions and those are quite simple and well-documented.

[scalliano]

I stand corrected.

 

Still not confident that the exclusive games will show up elsewhere.

[Caffeine Freak]

9 hours ago, Kinsie said:

Not the only dev left out in the cold.

 

Their biggest mistake was developing for Stadia to begin with, when a) Google has a long, dismal track record of their flashy new projects dying a quiet, painful death, and b) it's been patently obvious for at least two years that Stadia was doomed to follow this same trajectory.

 

Still feel bad for them, though.

[Kinsie]

7 hours ago, scalliano said:

I stand corrected.

 

Still not confident that the exclusive games will show up elsewhere.

At least some of them want to: Q-Games is looking for a publisher for a non-Stadia version of Pixeljunk Raiders.

[Eurisko]

It was Doomed from the off. Gamers LOVE the internet but gamers never want to completely rely on it. 
 

Thats what the revolt of the Xbox One “Always on” from 2013 was all about. 

[SYS]

Death is the satisfaction of desire.