Google Shutting Down Its Stadia Game Streaming Service

[LoisBrown]

So ultimately i think implying that people on poorer areas would pirate games

[F.Ultra]

You seem to be the one who thinks Google is a charity.

Google does not make projects to "explore" them or to "innovate", everything Google has done, Stadia, G+, has been a bad clone of an existing, better product and the only reason they existed was to get more market dominance. And after they got people dependent on them, they pull the rug from under their userbase because, just like a AAA game studio executive, it wasn't immediately making a billion dollars an hour so therefor it's unprofitable and not worth maintaining. Mind you, this is not normal. Other corporations like Microsoft will support a product for years if not a decade before killing it off, even if nobody uses it.

There is literally zero good intention behind Google's constant failed products which only serve to show how bad they are at planning and investing. And I don't mean "good intention" in a humanitarian way, it's a corporation, they'd sell their grandmother's soul for a nickel. I mean in a corporate way. Genuinely trying something new, something to improve people's lives, something to innovate. Those things already exist, other people made them, and then Google comes along and half-heartedly tries to make a bad knockoff of it and then ruins people's workflows when they kill it off. Google is the Apple of web services.

Google doesn't intend to hurt people personally, but they've done tons of damage. People aren't coming out of this unscathed either. Bear in mind that people will not be getting their save data for their games. They'll get a financial refund, but they just wasted a ton of time and will have to waste more time getting back to where they were in the same game on a different platform now. That didn't have to happen if they just, you know, didn't pull this malicious half-assed stunt to get more people hooked on their infrastructure so they can milk their customers out of more personal data.

This is what pisses me off when people defend Google or are optimistic when they make a new product or programming language (especially the latter). No, it's not an alternative, it's not healthy, they're making another part of our infrastructure that people will naively adopt and use and then Google will drop it and then we have another series of 404 pages and a new COBOL to worry about. Already can't wait to hear how much Go code we're gonna have to clean up in a decade.

Wow that was a huge piece of a straw man you got there. I just wrote that Google invested in ideas and you decided to attack the idea that I said that they did so to explore or innovate. Words I never ever wrote even once. And where on earth did your brain come up with "You seem to be the one who thinks Google is a charity"??

"it wasn't immediately making a billion dollars an hour" - that is not what profitable means, you do realize that every single service that Google have killed was in the red, aka loosing dollars, not making. Microsoft might have kept e.g the Zune alive for years on end but they did that for the single reason that they hoped that they would be able to turn the ship around someday and where willing to bear the initial cost for a few years, just like how Google did with YouTube, they knew that it would be profitable one day so they kept it running even when it was in the red for billions per year for over a decade.

The only way that I can explain your comment is that you have a grief with Google and waited for a comment to post this on and it just happened to be mine, because zero of that you wrote makes any sense as a reply to my comment.

[F.Ultra]

That's why I precisely said HDMI. I used to run DP to my M28U with 4K 144Hz. But it only has 1 DP and now it's occupied by my MacBook Pro.

HDMI 2.1 is pretty much a won't fix at this point. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 . It works wonders on Windows so I'm back to gaming on it.

It's less of a won't fix and more of a can't fix. The HDMI consortium is refusing to license HDMI2.1 to a open source driver.

[cj.wijtmans]

The danger of things like stadia would be that you could never run certain games for yourself but only through the cloud with a subscription.

[Ironmask]

And it turns out Google didn't notify developers or even their own internal teams that Stadia was getting axed.

I hope this is a hard lesson for the entire IT industry to never trust Google to support a product. Then again, I don't think the IT industry was ever told the definition of insanity.

[doomie]

The message i quoted implies " even if that service was available in those regions, people still would pirate the games so they wouldn't use it" which my question is " with what hardware? ".

Stadia had completely stupid strategy with battling against consoles/PC's in wealthy regions that people can buy hardware just fine; even if they are belong to lowest paycheck group. Hell, even that a kid can get a very decent PC that can handle recent AAA's just fine ( no less than 60 fps ) with just mowing lawn for a month or maybe a little bit more than that.

So that is where Stadia chose to compete and ultimately failed. Why would a person living in such region would give up on local gaming when local gaming is easily accessible and superior to cloud gaming in nearly every way?

So ultimately i think implying that people on poorer areas would pirate games anyways is a very dumb thing to imply.

If anything, most common electronic device on such places is Android smartphones. Where as on countries like USA it is Iphone; which is considered as a premium on poor countries due to crazy price difference.

Hm, you're making good sense where you're specifically picturing in your mind, but also missing big swaths of exceptions, as I had a very different growing up experience (and thus don't see all poor people as pure victims, various other popular myths, etc) so hardware can be had sometimes, and in various ways, but can also itself be stolen and etc. I don't think having hardware means you have infrastructure, or can even afford the latest AAA games even if you can run them. And that's in the US. I just mean real life even on a given street is a lot more complicated. Marketing does let a lot through the cracks with generalizations, to say nothing of politics and hype.

Just a side thought, not being able to try games really is an issue. Also forced updates changing what you paid for. Hard not to look back and yearn...

[Michael_S]

You seem to be the one who thinks Google is a charity.

Google does not make projects to "explore" them or to "innovate", everything Google has done, Stadia, G+, has been a bad clone of an existing, better product and the only reason they existed was to get more market dominance. And after they got people dependent on them, they pull the rug from under their userbase because, just like a AAA game studio executive, it wasn't immediately making a billion dollars an hour so therefor it's unprofitable and not worth maintaining. Mind you, this is not normal. Other corporations like Microsoft will support a product for years if not a decade before killing it off, even if nobody uses it.

There is literally zero good intention behind Google's constant failed products which only serve to show how bad they are at planning and investing. And I don't mean "good intention" in a humanitarian way, it's a corporation, they'd sell their grandmother's soul for a nickel. I mean in a corporate way. Genuinely trying something new, something to improve people's lives, something to innovate. Those things already exist, other people made them, and then Google comes along and half-heartedly tries to make a bad knockoff of it and then ruins people's workflows when they kill it off. Google is the Apple of web services.

Google doesn't intend to hurt people personally, but they've done tons of damage. People aren't coming out of this unscathed either. Bear in mind that people will not be getting their save data for their games. They'll get a financial refund, but they just wasted a ton of time and will have to waste more time getting back to where they were in the same game on a different platform now. That didn't have to happen if they just, you know, didn't pull this malicious half-assed stunt to get more people hooked on their infrastructure so they can milk their customers out of more personal data.

This is what pisses me off when people defend Google or are optimistic when they make a new product or programming language (especially the latter). No, it's not an alternative, it's not healthy, they're making another part of our infrastructure that people will naively adopt and use and then Google will drop it and then we have another series of 404 pages and a new COBOL to worry about. Already can't wait to hear how much Go code we're gonna have to clean up in a decade.

Side note: the one place where Microsoft stopped supporting products and backwards compatibility is Windows Mobile/Phone, and that's why it died in the market. Early adopters and developers and partners kept getting screwed, so they stopped caring.

[Michael_S]

But why? What if internet is cut off, or simply you can now afford fast Graphics Card? Then Stadia offer pales in comparison what you can have in your own home without signing up to any EULA and paying regularly for your ability to play games.
I would NEVER consider renting through Internet the ability to use my GPU as I wish.

Because I can use any cheap PC to game instead of something fast. $400 box or even $200 used box plus $15 a month takes a long time to reach the price of a not-suck gaming rig. And when the streaming service upgrades it's hardware, I get that without having to pay an up front $250+ GPU investment.

And I can quit when I want, change services, rejoin. I don't game often enough to pay every month.

But again, I didn't plan on trying Stadia until it was five years old. If I was going to go this way, I'd try GeForce Now or something.

[Leopard]

Friendly reminder that you wouldn't steal a car (maybe), or commit genocide (I hope) but that downloading movies online is not stealing or genocide just because a bunch of lawyers and people with poor trade ethics say so.

The message i quoted implies " even if that service was available in those regions, people still would pirate the games so they wouldn't use it" which my question is " with what hardware? ".

Stadia had completely stupid strategy with battling against consoles/PC's in wealthy regions that people can buy hardware just fine; even if they are belong to lowest paycheck group. Hell, even that a kid can get a very decent PC that can handle recent AAA's just fine ( no less than 60 fps ) with just mowing lawn for a month or maybe a little bit more than that.

So that is where Stadia chose to compete and ultimately failed. Why would a person living in such region would give up on local gaming when local gaming is easily accessible and superior to cloud gaming in nearly every way?

So ultimately i think implying that people on poorer areas would pirate games anyways is a very dumb thing to imply.

If anything, most common electronic device on such places is Android smartphones. Where as on countries like USA it is Iphone; which is considered as a premium on poor countries due to crazy price difference.

[birdie]

Here's something positive:

"While Stadia will shut down on January 18th, 2023, we're happy to share that we're currently working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect," Ubisoft senior corporate communications manager Jessica Roache told The Verge. "We'll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date." Google has already shut down the Stadia store, so if you were thinking of buying an Ubisoft game, getting a refund, then gaining access to the PC version for free, you're out of luck. Ubisoft hasn't revealed when it will offer Stadia players access to their games on Ubisoft Connect. It also hasn't confirmed whether Stadians will be able to transfer their save data over to PC. That said, the Ubisoft+ subscription service includes a cloud save feature, so hopefully the company can figure out a way to maintain players' progress if they switch to a PC version.