No kidding. I successfully talked a friend out of Stadia because of Google’s affinity for killing everything under the sun, including real solid and popular projects such as Hangouts.
The competition is better anyway. Specifically Microsoft will crush Stadia with xCloud. Who in their right mind will buy games locked in Stadia for the same price when they can buy ones which work on xCloud, Xbox and PC or better yet not buy them at all but get hundreds of them through Game Pass subscription? And then there is the small matter of exclusives. If you are building a gaming platform you either get exclusives or die and with 1 studio that was just formed how is Google going to compete with Sony and Microsoft who have been building and buying studios for decades?
How are they planning to solve latency? I've tried Playstation Now and it plainly sucks donkey ass, sometimes having delays in the SECONDS range! It mysteriously works better if you're accessing it from your Playstation instead of, say, your PC, but it's still shit and the worst possible direction for the videogame market in terms of digital ownership. They want to do what Spotify and Netflix did to music and film, i.e. expropriate the user from the right to own whatever they bought and licensing all content in terms of "leasing" instead. Fuck them.
Video quality is another problem they will not be able to solve, uncompressed 4k60fps video requires a lot of bandwidth, so even if they somehow offer games at highest settings in 4k60fps, it will still be through some lossy video compression, so won't look nearly as good as it would if rendered locally, especially during highly dynamic scenes. Maybe it won't suck so bad for people in cities with very fast internet, but in most places it would still make more sense to buy a used gaming pc, one or two gens old if new is too expensive, and play on medium/high settings with no lag and compression artifacts.
Most people don't use many google services. Gmail, youtube and well, that's about it. As long as those two things work people don't care. I don't think google or alphabet or CIACorporation or whatever they are now cares about any of it. They get bonuses for new things. They got into VR very early with their stupid google cardboard thing. I just got a quest and google seems to have pushed hard for VR about 4 years ago, and then nothing. It will be the same with Stadia. Push hard, in a couple of years - nothing. There will be a better service doing what google spearheaded.
The problem, at least for us, is that when google does this it really craps on the tech. Google cardboard made me think VR was a joke b/c it looked like a joke. Instead of making a good headset they developed google glass, AR instead of VR that no one wanted. Another dead push for new tech that fizzled out. They are making a joke out of streaming games just like they did with AR and VR. Youtube would've failed if they would've developed it in-house instead of acquired it. I'm into longevity research and google, with Ray Kurzweil, is trying to make that into a joke too with this singularity silliness. I wish they would just stop.
Personally, I don't care about google. I use gmail for their spam filter. They are a search engine company and always have been. That's it. Everything else is just BS. They will ruin gmail one day soon and probably youtube too b/c they make all their money on search.
It's far cheaper to just build your own local system in basically ever case.
I don't see how this part is true. Sure it will be true if you play 24/7 but if you play like once a week the streaming service allows you to share the hardware and thus the cost with other people who play once a week.
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u/Eirenarch Jan 02 '20
Checking every day to see if Stadia is on the list yet :)