Google Shutting Down Its Stadia Game Streaming Service

[Dehir]

Shame but at the same time kind of expected.

At the moment everything going around the world affects for sure. Google probably is just preparing for future. Meaning every global market where to sell the stadia product are heading inflation/stagflation meaning even less sales. Not mention cost increases via european energy crunch wich will affer energy prices around the globe for sure too.

[zxy_thf]

It's very obvious to me there is no gamers in the whole department of Stadia -- at least for the people who have a say.

Gamers are screaming for 10s of ms extra latency, while Stadia wants adding hundreds more in the name of "Cloud Gaming". What a brilliant idea.
For a concrete product, can't they just collaborate with DeepMind and Paradox to make better AIs for SLGs, which is not sensitive to latency.

[Quackdoc]

It's very obvious to me there is no gamers in the whole department of Stadia -- at least for the people who have a say.

Gamers are screaming for 10s of ms extra latency, while Stadia wants adding hundreds more in the name of "Cloud Gaming". What a brilliant idea.
For a concrete product, can't they just collaborate with DeepMind and Paradox to make better AIs for SLGs, which is not sensitive to latency.

it's not that much of an issue, plenty of people enjoy playing on xbox cloud streaming and GFnow. and I haven't heard much bad about luna personally. stadia was just a bad option compared to it's competitors, cloud streaming itself is a wanted service by many

[caligula]

I would add that even with a 100 mbps internet, which I think is still decent for first world countries, the moment you use more than 3-4 devices at home or do some other bandwidth heavy stuff like synchronizing cloud storage, you immediately run out of bandwidth and even light websites crawl and barely load.

Your modem has QoS features, right?

[xinthose]

what if you bought a bunch of games on there? you will be out of your money?

[renkin]

it's not that much of an issue, plenty of people enjoy playing on xbox cloud streaming and GFnow. and I haven't heard much bad about luna personally. stadia was just a bad option compared to it's competitors, cloud streaming itself is a wanted service by many

Not just that. Stadia came out too early. They were also delusionally optimistic about ISPs being less greedy. People have been bringing up concerns over datacaps and throttling. Stadia/Google says that ISPs will evolve to fit the needs of the people LOL. I had a free month trial, but I wasn't even able to take advantage of it because of Xfinity and their aggressive datacaps and overage rates.

what if you bought a bunch of games on there? you will be out of your money?

Says in the article that everyone will get a refund including hardware and DLC purchases

[Mahboi]

Huh, never would've thought. I expected that if Stadia didn't reach its usermass goals, they would simply power down part of the servers.

It's the first time in awhile that I see a "cloud x" version of something die down.

Oh well, I prefer ownership in all cases. Even though technically Steam ownership is "ownership as long as Steam is not bankrupt and lets you download", that's been true for almost 20 years now. I consider that ownership enough. I don't pay twice or regularly.

[kylew77]

I've said it before and I will say it again: streaming services can't get past the speed of light. Electricity in Ethernet cables or light in fiber optic cables travels at the speed of light. Streaming a fast past game is going to have latency. The further the cloud gaming DC is from your house the higher the latency. Sure if you live in New York or Chicago or one of the cities where they have these big DCs you might get decent results but if you live 1,000 miles from the closest DC your going to have lag. It is as simple as that. Even if you are but one mile from the DC lag is going to be higher than the 2ft HDMI cable running from the console/computer to the TV/monitor. The thing is gamers know this too because most PC build instructions say to put the GPU in the PCIe slot closest to the CPU for lower latency and lag, in that case we are talking about mear inches but the gamer knows that electricity travels at the speed of light so the closer the GPU and CPU are physically the better the performance.

[Dukenukemx]

Cloud gaming will never have a future. The only reason corporations even considered it was because of reoccurring revenue. That and whoever came up with it has never played games or worked in networking. Gamers don't like input lag and you'll never fix it due to speed of light.... err electricity. If Google can't make it work then it will never work. Not that Google had the right idea where you had to buy the games and pay for 4k. This should work like Netflix where you pay a monthly fee and have access to all the games. Even that doesn't work since nobody wants any amount of input lag. If cloud gaming didn't take off during COVID, along with PS5 and GPU pricing and shortages then it has no future.

[doomie]

It's very obvious to me there is no gamers in the whole department of Stadia -- at least for the people who have a say.

Gamers are screaming for 10s of ms extra latency, while Stadia wants adding hundreds more in the name of "Cloud Gaming". What a brilliant idea.
For a concrete product, can't they just collaborate with DeepMind and Paradox to make better AIs for SLGs, which is not sensitive to latency.

And it was never about anything but control. The same google pretend to care about "climate change," but remote gaming is inefficient. They want default control over, in order to effectively gatekeep, more of the entire concept of electronic gaming; sort of the same way that in a free market system you have default control of your own funding capability. I know they marketed the idea of "easier access" but that's marketing, since the total setup would have to have been a small fraction of their + ISP pricing to actually make "access" an argument, even if latency and resulting market size weren't such obvious problems. inb4 someone writes a novel telling me that it actually worked on a 56k modem but my attitude is holding back the progress of humanity because I don't want to pay a sub fee for oxygen. Just own nothing (let them own everything) and be happy already. It's not a conspiracy, it's just a really bad deal. Gamers apparently agreed and so they're ending it. TBH it was DOA and google is only now signing the cert. Non-story IMO