Google Stadia's E3 Event Reveals New Details For This Linux+Vulkan Gaming Service

[audir8]

If Google can just get the players who play just 1 game every year or less. This is fine, even good, and is maybe only slightly below median when compared to the median gamer. Gaming is more of a luxury in terms of time than movies/music, you don't care as much about time spent on movies or music in the way you might if you start spending more than a few hours/weekend on a game if you have a family. The pricing structure isn't too bad for this once they have 1080p for free (plus cost of game) next year. If they want to start going after the more frequent/casual gamer, then mods, backups, latency, and a potential subscription model start to become more important, and if they want to go after the indies, they'll need to release a public SDK with tools.

Does such a market exist and is it big enough? We're about to find out, but I think yes. Mobile gaming has affected gaming in mostly a bad way, maybe streaming will have a slightly better effect. The AAA games they're starting with isn't all too bad a start.

Edit: To be clear, I think this is a new market, that nobody really addresses right now, not consoles, or other games stores with as much convenience as one click streaming.

[starshipeleven]

stormcrow starshipeleven
You both need to watch the video I linked earlier in the thread. You have more rights as consumers than you know. ToS doesn't stand above the law, and when you buy a game, you don't "rent" it, you buy a "perpetual licence". Don't know what that means? Watch the video. I know it's lengthy, but it's worth it.

I never said it's "rent", and I already saw that video some time ago. Digital distribution of games like Steam isn't "games as a service", it's just a distribution without physical media.

When you buy a game or a movie or a song, it's a perpetual license from that specific media.

Buying a disk does not grant me rights to get the same song or game from anywhere else (higher quality and such) unless it was already part of the contract.

Like for example the UltraViolet thing with Blurays. Oh wait, it's closing down, nevermind. https://teleread.org/2019/02/02/ultr...ovies-with-it/

For games on Steam it's a perpetual license to the specific digital stuff you downloaded, so do your fucking backups, copy the folders around.

In case Steam service dies, all the games you have physically downloaded will remain yours and will still work fine with the client stuck in offline mode. Years ago there was a bug that caused offline mode to fail after 2 weeks, but it's long since fixed. https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-offli...it-more-robust

Unless the games you want to play are actually "games as a service" and do rely on external servers for DRM or other stuff, of course, but that's outside of Steam's control.

[Brisse]

stormcrow starshipeleven
You both need to watch the video I linked earlier in the thread. You have more rights as consumers than you know. ToS doesn't stand above the law, and when you buy a game, you don't "rent" it, you buy a "perpetual licence". Don't know what that means? Watch the video. I know it's lengthy, but it's worth it.

[Aztorius]

There's no point in making drivers again so it will probably use either Mesa's RADV or AMDVLK. The piece of software they are using to """lock""" games to the platform is the Stadia SDK, which according to Google "(...) provides robust APIs for managing games, like saves, multiplayer modes, suspend/resume gameplay and more". So it's basically an equivalent to Steamworks that probably has additional functions related to remote input, not something you couldn't replace.

The service looks like shit, and it's only available in 14 countries initially so it just leaves me wondering if it's gonna sell even less than a normal Linux version. Of course, that won't matter to devs if Google happens to be paying them to put their games on their platform.

I'm really curious about what driver they use (probably open AMDVLK) and also how they achieved to get HDR on Linux while nothing support it yet.

[starshipeleven]

This idea actually goes against many local laws, just saying... believe whatever EULA nonsense you are fed, but many places have laws that specifically say that sort of crap is illegal!

Many places that aren't the USA or EU or neighboring countries.

Even a fucking music tape (you know the music cassettes that existed back in the day VHS was still a thing) that you bought decades ago had such license, where it would allow you to listen PERSONALLY (i.e. not to be broadcasted in a public place or over the radio/TV), and would NOT allow copying.

You didn't buy the songs, but the license to listen from that specific music tape.

This didn't change.

[theriddick]

You don't actually "buy" games even on physical media any longer. You pay a one time fee to "rent" most games, especially on Steam

This idea actually goes against many local laws, just saying... believe whatever EULA nonsense you are fed, but many places have laws that specifically say that sort of crap is illegal!

[stormcrow]

'BUY'... you mean in their cloud where they can pull the plug and give you the middle finger at any time in the future! .... yeah lets prepare the lawsuits now chaps!

You don't actually "buy" games even on physical media any longer. You pay a one time fee to "rent" most games, especially on Steam where I think it's codified in the ToS. Steam/Valve could close up shop tomorrow and the millions of users would have no legal recourse in the US legal system. What you're buying is limited permission to use the game. Up till recently you could depend on the first sale doctrine to resell physical media. But with "activation codes" that are locked to store or game network accounts these days, you don't even have the first sale doctrine to fall back on thanks to copyright law and the UCC (contract law - ToS are considered valid contracts in the US) trumping it so while you could resell the media, you generally can't resell the game activation code once it's used.

With the gaming and mainstream software industry that ship has already sailed. We're just lucky that GOG has been trying to buck that trend in the gaming market.

The only way to keep control over what you own is to strictly use free software, anything else you're just buying into a temporary limited rental. Now, if life were only so simple as all software was free (libre) software...

[theriddick]

I read in an article that 1080p is free but you have to buy the games.

'BUY'... you mean in their cloud where they can pull the plug and give you the middle finger at any time in the future! .... yeah lets prepare the lawsuits now chaps!

[geearf]

This is what I fear the most with game streaming, one day we might end up with not owning any games, only renting the service to play them. Gamers need to support developers who don't offer streaming only games and services like GOG where you truly own what you buy. I am not against game streaming, but we should be very careful it does not dominate the market, it offers whole lot of advantages for people who can't afford powerful gaming computers to run games at 1080p or 4K at Ultra settings and 60 fps, especially for laptop owners where gaming laptops can be very very expensive, but gamers need to be careful because if some developers go cloud only, those should be immediately boycotted.

Since you are not allowed to resell your GOG games, you don't truly own them either. It's not as bad but still...

[moriel5]

this will so suck for most people, even our office 500/50 mbit cable internet has hiccups and is not super amazing for youtube up-streaming, ...

Have you checked your latency? Network speed is not the only important factor, especially for streaming.