Google reveal Stadia will only have 12 games available at launch, more later in the year

Everyone's their own of course, but I'm surprised how many people state no interest at all in Red Dead Redemption 2.

I'd be interested to play it, but it does seem to be one of the less popular titles among tuxers. However, I won't pay significant money for Windows games. Stadia value would be even lower to me and I don't expect "Stadia store" prices to be in line with what I have in mind. I'll stick with my backlog. Which for some reason keeps growing. :D

Everyone's their own of course, but I'm surprised how many people state no interest at all in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The big AAA games (which are all action games, shooters, or action RPGs) get disproportionate media attention. Sure, they are big, but if we add together all the small niches that are ignored it also becomes huge. Or in other words, a lot of people are interested in that but not the actual majority.

Also, we have a biased sample here. People that are super interested in running such games are, on average, less likely to play games on Linux.

Everyone's their own of course, but I'm surprised how many people state no interest at all in Red Dead Redemption 2.

For me it's mostly that westerns aren't really my thing. They're okay, but not something I want to get really immersed in.

By the same token, Assassin's Creed has fun mechanics, but the Ancient Greek setting ain't doing it for me.

So they ported Red Dead Redemption 2...

Maybe they're just using something like Proton with the games Vulkan renderer for this title.

It's nice to see more games come out with Vulkan renderer as an option, although I do wish it was the default api.

I know it's not they're "style" because Google wants everyone to move to the cloud, but in a couple years time (or sooner) they could have a large enough library that they could release an actual console that can compete against Sony and Microsoft. But who knows though.


Last edited by chimpy on 12 November 2019 at 2:19 pm UTC

We are not the target for Stadia, and it's not going to replace or fight against PC market. It's more against console war. Parents can buy a cheap console to their son, that they can cancel when they want. And children can play in house, in granparents house or in a vacations trip. This is the target of this Stadia. Doesnt matter you can buy a PC with the cost of it. This target doesn't want a pc or waste a big amount of cash. They want just something as a service.

That's a much smaller selection than I'd have expected. With all the money and manpower Google can (and probably did) throw at this project, I'd have expected them making sort of a bigger splash for release, when they're guaranteed to get a lot of media attention. If they don't expand this meager offering really fast, Stadia will vanish into the dark really fast.

They do have twice the number of games planned by the end of the year. If they keep adding more high-profile titles every few weeks, I could see it becoming competitive with services like PlayStation Plus in a reasonable amount of time.

We are not the target for Stadia, and it's not going to replace or fight against PC market. It's more against console war.

This.
Google literally says at their store:
"Stadia - Games, without a console or downloads"
(In German, it's "Stadia – Spiele ganz ohne Konsole" - it doesn't talk about the downloads part.)
I've seen it called a "virtual console", which seems to fit well.

Everyone's their own of course, but I'm surprised how many people state no interest at all in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Granted, the game is being advertised like there is no tomorrow. But this not automatically translates into interest. Don't know for others, but I personally absolutely loathe and despise shooters and am not into westerns in general, either games or movies (being a space-themed sucker since "Space Rangers"). I think, the last western shooter I had played was Gun.Smoke for Dendy (Famicom). I hated it. :D

Other than that, my opinion on Stadia™ has not changed a bit with this huge "revelation". A very weak game set: no games interest me (most I have not even heard of, thanks to only tracking DRM-free Linux-native games).

When taking total cost of ownership into account, I do hope a library of Stadia games proves to be an accessible luxury for people who have heretofore been priced out of the market.

I would argue such a person doesn't exist. Since regional pricing has largely went away, and we frequently see the meme of "1 eur=1 usd" (not for the pound though, for some reason they can convert the dollar to pounds), games became very pricy for "eastern europeans". Whereas in the good old days you could easily get even the most overhyped games for what would be ~20 EUR, nowadays the launch price for such games are closer to 50-60 EUR (not to mention the expansion/DLC fest games that easily go to 100-200 EURs in the first year of their release).

This does not mean, however, that "cloud gaming" is coming. If you want to run it with gigabyte internet, you need quite beefy rig/router, which complicates the cost of Stadia, not to mention the internet bill. My computer for example couldn't run a gigabyte connection too well since i do not have an ssd. Then there is the fact that this offers you nothing except the promise you won't have to buy a console/pc (which is again, not too lucrative for the hidden costs of internet bill/hardware).

I think there is nothing in it, only the inane desire of the industry of total content control and the elimination of the so-called "pirates".

... and we frequently see the meme of "1 eur=1 usd" (not for the pound though, for some reason they can convert the dollar to pounds), ...

Kind of a cheaty way to put it. EUR prices include VAT, USD prices do not.

Stadia can be summed up with this quote:
MacOS User: What did it cost to play games on Linux?
Linux user: Everything

Also the whole "We are not the target audience and it will not affect PC platform" is a load of rubbish. Gylt, a third party game, is already exclusive to Stadia, and you are naive if you think Google would not love to burn regular way to play games to the ground and build more Stadias on top of them. It may not happen in five years or ten, but I'd wager that will be the end goal.


Last edited by Linuxwarper on 14 November 2019 at 12:11 am UTC

German computer magazine c't has asked people to play games on PCs without telling them they were streamed - and the people didn't even realize. Furthermore, every online game has the same communication lines to cross...

Specialized gaming PCs, or a cheap laptop? Connected with how fast internet? Using a high-quality gaming-oriented router, or the cheap crappy one that your ISP provides? Were these avid gamers, or more casual? What kind of games were they playing? :)

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that there are a lot of variables in this scenario, and a lot of ways to make it look good, where in reality the average consumer might not be able to get the same experience. But hey, maybe I'm wrong and it actually works fine even in less-than-optimal situations. Cool. I'm not interested either way, so it doesn't matter to me. It just seems strange they'd focus entirely on games where any latency would potentially be highly noticeable and don't have any games where a few milliseconds of latency wouldn't really affect the experience. :S:

Specialized gaming PCs, or a cheap laptop? Connected with how fast internet? Using a high-quality gaming-oriented router, or the cheap crappy one that your ISP provides? Were these avid gamers, or more casual? What kind of games were they playing? :)

I don't think I can answer all your questions from the article. But some. They tested a mediocre laptop and a gaming PC, e.g. with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. They used a 1000 fps camera (Sony RX100M6) to measure the time from mouse click to change on the screen, locally and with a streaming service.
They measured 25 to 40 ms locally on the gaming PC and 70 to 100 ms on the notebook. The streaming services added: Parsec/Paperspace 5 to 60 ms, Parsec/Amazon 15 to 50 ms, Shadow 10 to 90 ms. (Worst was Liquidsky, 80 to 270).

The perfect time for cloud gaming is when you are not home where your gaming rig is, but is visiting someone with a lot of bandwidth and only brought your laptop. I don't think stadia will be perfect at launch, but I hope it will help improve the cloud gaming experience. I also think LAN-parties would be a lot more convenient if they provided the bandwidth required for streaming and you only needed to bring a laptop, rather than a good gaming PC.

For me the ideal cloud gaming service would integrate with the steam cloud so I could continue where I left off at home.

I don't think I can answer all your questions from the article. But some. They tested a mediocre laptop and a gaming PC, e.g. with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. They used a 1000 fps camera (Sony RX100M6) to measure the time from mouse click to change on the screen, locally and with a streaming service.
They measured 25 to 40 ms locally on the gaming PC and 70 to 100 ms on the notebook. The streaming services added: Parsec/Paperspace 5 to 60 ms, Parsec/Amazon 15 to 50 ms, Shadow 10 to 90 ms. (Worst was Liquidsky, 80 to 270).

Thanks for the summary, as I can't read German. :) That is interesting, maybe it'll work fine after all. Guess we'll see when more people get their hands on it to review it.

We are not the target for Stadia, and it's not going to replace or fight against PC market. It's more against console war.

This.
Google literally says at their store:
"Stadia - Games, without a console or downloads"
(In German, it's "Stadia – Spiele ganz ohne Konsole" - it doesn't talk about the downloads part.)
I've seen it called a "virtual console", which seems to fit well.

Without downloads?! What is this, play-by-post?

Without downloads?! What is this, play-by-post?

My first Steam game was Skyrim. When I had installed it from DVD, Steam insisted on downloading such a huge "patch" that I couldn't play the game this evening. (I wasn't aware automatic downloads can be disabled.) I had a full DVD and all I needed to play, but still couldn't.
I guess that's what they're talking about. In the end, probably more data crosses the line than with a preinstalled game, so it doesn't help people with "data plan".

What a waste of time, having to pay for the service, having to connect using your phone. I hate trying to stream via Wireless it don't work out properly for me, hence why I prefer to be fully wired in. Why release Stadia if it ain't even finished? It's like trying to bury a corpse when the hole is not big enough for the coffin. OK so maybe just maybe they wanted to show off what they have built already, but I can see loads of bug reporting on the horizon. I'm happy with Steam at least I know it works on whatever Linux OS I choose and if there is a problem with a game I know that Steam will fix the problem straight away.