I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

I didn't expect it to last, Google has this bad habit of killing off anything they cant monetize with adds, hard to sell ads when almost noone wants your product and sees it as nothing but another google plus.

I never saw it taking off. It was always lacking.

Apparently they're refunding all hardware and game purchases (at full price I assume)? I wonder how much that's going to cost.

TheMobRules wrote on 2022-09-30, 06:27:

Apparently they're refunding all hardware and game purchases (at full price I assume)? I wonder how much that's going to cost.

Not much, because hardly anyone used it. 😁

Relying on Google in any way is like building your house on sand. How many times must old proverbs be relearned?

Good riddance. A world where Stadia succeeds is a world where we have even less property rights concerning hardware and software than the illusion of ownership we're already left with. I'm sure someone will pull it off at some point, but I'm glad Google failing pushed off that future another 5-10 years.

At least they are refunding, I can think of a variety of other small launches that died on the vine.

I wonder if monthly service fees stay with google
(Considering the differences in plan the pay as you go might get more of the costs back to the user)

Big Pink wrote on 2022-09-30, 12:00:

Relying on Google in any way is like building your house on sand. How many times must old proverbs be relearned?

After I lost my "purchase" of Monkey Island 2 SE on the iPad back when Disney acquired Lucasfilm, I hardly buy games as digital downloads. With the Switch for example I purely stick to cards/physical releases... Plus retro games of course. They can never take those away from us. 😁

I didn't know that Stadia was still around.

lti wrote on 2022-10-01, 15:51:

I didn't know that Stadia was still around.

If stadia was going to succeed it would have had no better opportunity than the pandemic.

So yeah, bad concept and better competition

Never used streaming services. It even further takes away the illusion of actually owning the software I bought (no data files to tinker with on device I own).

rmay635703 wrote on 2022-10-01, 15:53:

lti wrote on 2022-10-01, 15:51:

I didn't know that Stadia was still around.

If stadia was going to succeed it would have had no better opportunity than the pandemic.

So yeah, bad concept and better competition

Wasn't either of these things ..it was Google itself that killed Stadia ..ever notice just how little marketing and ads there were for it or just how few 1st party google gaming studios there were developing for it ?

Google pushed it for perhaps 3 months if we are being generous and then .. nothing but radio silence from them about it.

Google killed Stadia but not actually supporting it or marketing it or shit even keeping the few studios they had for it alive.

I can actually think of perhaps only two other companies that could provide a platform for streaming than Google and thats Microsoft and Amazon so we can exclude the better competition side of things as there are really only three companies that could do it on the scale required and own the hardware needed and I wouldn't say either MS or Amazon are better here.

The concept also wasn't terrible . .nVidia has much the same thing and IIRC even there you still need to have at least purchased the games to be able to stream them, the execution of the concept was ...the horrible part and in typical Google fashion they ballsed it up.

(I guess Cloudflare could but I dont know if they have the infrastructure required for such a huge service)

Seemed natural:

While Google may have failed miserably, I'm more worried about Microsoft and Sony succeeding with theirs (honestly though it'll probably just be MS that succeeds). People seem to be a little more interested in Xcloud and PS Now and I'm worried that we may still be looking towards a dark future. Hopefully that turns out to be wrong and I'm just being doom and gloom.

With Stadia failing from a company as big as Google, maybe it'll spook people enough to prevent streaming ever taking the mainstream. IDK, only time can tell.

Don't forget Nintendo. They're already doing some cloud'ing with some Switch games, powered by Win7 clusters.

Stadia was already DOA from announcement, and early reception being poor because it showed way too much bubbled development in fiber-spoiled environments to make it a feasible console alternative with today's (and tomorrow's) infrastructure. OnLive history repeats.

And then there's the google service lock-in.... They don't care if you're a developer for a Stadia game as if they lock your Gmail, they'll lock you out of everything. It's happened to Terraria, having their stadia version cancelled as a result - which seems a bit silly to technically exist for a well optimized, small game with low sysreq that playing it on Stadia would mean downloading 190 whole terrarias a minute minimum.

One can only hope developers can release their Stadia exclusives elsewhere to make up for this.

leileilol wrote on 2022-10-02, 02:26:

OnLive history repeats.

Yeah, I was about to say... When Stadia showed up I was so confused why Google was trying to do what OnLive did. I honestly have no idea how these multi-national multi-billion-dollar corporations even work these days...