Stadia looks to be very limited at launch and not just the amount of games

That said, I don’t understand why they would need a mobile app to be involved in any of this, and it’s just making me even more wary of the whole thing with regards to spying on the users. I’m going back from "I might consider it if..." to a big fat no.

The need for a mobile device is most likely because they integrate this into the app store (or similar) somehow, where most of the paid-for software is. It is the least of the inconveniences imo. I don't see how a service like this will succeed when there was a big uproar against "always online" games few years back. This is even worse in my opinion.

I remember when Steam Machines came out and we're a commercial failure, as predicted. The thing is, some argued, it was never really a commercial venture in the first place. Valve was playing "long game" of corporate maneuvering and we normal people didn't couldn't see their plans.

I must idly wonder if perhaps this is the same with Google. The technologies (and tools and training) developed may have more practical and profitable applications in other business endeavors. Stadia may just be a way to recover some R&D costs and be nice PR to show off new tech.

Thoughts?

Google can only make the service successful with new gamers. People who don't play today. But they mainly rely on classic AAA titles. Of which, however, they also offer only a few. That will be extremely hard against Steam. I think Valve is going to take a look at that now and try to draw his conclusions from Google's mistakes. However, Google has extreme financial resources. They can run such a service for a long time in the red and burn hundreds of millions without it really hurting them.


Last edited by 1xok on 16 November 2019 at 6:38 pm UTC

For a service like Stadia, family sharing is the type of thing I would want ironed out before launch.

Stadia's code of conduct (http://g.co/stadia/conduct isn't available as of the time of this post, but I would like to see it, particularly if Stadia has or will have integrated chat. I don't watch Markiplier, but as I understand it, some of his viewers recently had their accounts suspended for spamming emoticons (with his blessing) in his YouTube chat.

Given that Stadia currently doesn't feature ads in the UI (based on what I've seen of it), I am interested to know what cut of game sales Google receives. I am also curious to see the degree to which Stadia will be integrated with YouTube. Most conjecture I have seen has been focused on whether Stadia is targeted at the console market or the PC market (or both), but it may prove to be as much of a salvo against Twitch (encourage and facilitate Stadia users to stream gameplay on YouTube, and encourage and facilitate YouTube views such as having a Stadia overlay which accesses relevant game-related YouTube content).
"Twitch Continues to Dominate Live Streaming with Its Second Biggest Quarter to Date" (2019 July)
"More People Are Streaming on Twitch but YouTube Is the Platform of Choice for Mobile Game Streamers" (2019 Feb)

Chrome already dominates the browser market, but I'm not enthusiastic about Stadia essentially promoting the Chrome (and wider Google) ecosystem. It increasingly feels to me like the Internet is Google's world, we just live in it. While I do not deny the investment Google has in open source and the code contributions it has made, that Google uses Linux and other open-source software to advance its holdings is of little comfort to me, just as Microsoft having more (identifiable) employees actively contributing to open-source projects on GitHub than any other company (dating back to at least 2016) is of little comfort to me.


Last edited by vector on 16 November 2019 at 8:31 pm UTC

Sounds smart to me.
Instead of a "Big Bang", they do an incremental implementation of their new service.

Nothing wrong with that.

They start with a small user base and optimize it while they are bringing new features and get more customers on it.
The early adopters give feedback and you learn from that while making your product bigger - that´s how you do it.

Looks like another project for the Google Graveyard, I just can't see any game streaming service working unless the US's internet infrastructure is severely overhauled.

Stadia: BUY our games, so we can invalidate them later on...

Really not sure what their thinking, they need to make public announcements on exactly how they will handle the bought games license when their service is unavailable or shutdown! avoiding the topic is going to REALLY hurt stadia down the line!

Also it would be nice if they made the streaming service OPTIONAL, so the games you bought you could choose to install locally on either a windows/mac/linux machine, for local play (obviously syncing online each time except when in offline mode).

THAT would make the service MUCH MUCH more attractive IMO, say you only want to use their streaming service when out of the house on your mobile or laptop, but when your home you want to play it locally off your main machine.. makes sense to me....

Something tells me Valve is going to beat them to the punch on this one!


Last edited by TheRiddick on 17 November 2019 at 3:01 am UTC

Well, I can see doing a gradual approach. But it actually makes me unable to buy their service--I don't own a cell phone so I can't use their app to buy anything. Mind you, I can't claim it lost them a sale because there was no way I was going for this anyway.

oh, no, here we go again.

i got when the government of my country (and many others) said it would use free software and the project to promote linux.
if failed, the distro chosen by oems sucked most of the time, most people replaced the default distro with an pirated version of windows and the name, linux, was burned by the bad experiences that people had with those crapy distros.

i got excited with netbooks (one laptop per children) thinking linux would finally take off
if failed

i got excited with android
its a sucess, but it dont matter from an gamer point of view (gatcha "isnt" gaming) , from the desktop point of view (as the games, many productivy apps didnt came to linux desktop) and many peopl consider android more closed than windows.
i got excited with chromeOS...
it didnt run regular linux softwares for years, and it couldnt get mainstream adoption.

i got excited with when valve anounced the steam machines,they delayed... i got my hype frozen to the point that i got anxienty problems, steam machines floped, failed to gain traction.
i got excite with might n9 and that it was coming to linux, floped (bad game)
i got excite with yooka laylee, floped (bad game)
i got excite with Blood Stained, linux version canceled (and the game is good, sigh, i'm soo excited for the game i cant play)
i got excite with we happy feel, linux version canceled and looks like the game was bad
not to mention, street fighter 5, witcher 3, darksiders...
i got excited with HTML5...
most of the flash aplications (and games) didnt got ported and lets be honest, triple A games wont be ported, google failed once with NaCl, and trying to push webGl, webGL2, webAssembly, didnt solved this issue


i got excited with stadia,come on!

I can't agree to this. Which project is already at 100% at the beginning? Has Wine offered everything it can today from day 1? Has the first car already driven 200 km/h? Were the OS smartphones as functional from the start as they are today?

If I trust you to develop the whole thing into a working service with many features, then that's Google. Especially since, in contrast to the above mentioned projects, the upcoming functions are known and there is an approximate roadmap for them.

I prefer a working start with still missing functions at the beginning rather than a chaos with errors, disconnections and login problems etc. pp. as one has already experienced with other starts.

Beta or not - you will be able to play RDR2 at the start. With Proton and GTA V it wasn't like that.

My Founders Edition comes at the end of November. And I'm looking forward to it.

Sorry, but this Stadia Bashing is annoying!

oh, no, here we go again.

i got when the government of my country (and many others) said it would use free software and the project to promote linux.
if failed, the distro chosen by oems sucked most of the time, most people replaced the default distro with an pirated version of windows and the name, linux, was burned by the bad experiences that people had with those crapy distros.

i got excited with netbooks (one laptop per children) thinking linux would finally take off
if failed

i got excited with android
its a sucess, but it dont matter from an gamer point of view (gatcha "isnt" gaming) , from the desktop point of view (as the games, many productivy apps didnt came to linux desktop) and many peopl consider android more closed than windows.
i got excited with chromeOS...
it didnt run regular linux softwares for years, and it couldnt get mainstream adoption.

i got excited with when valve anounced the steam machines,they delayed... i got my hype frozen to the point that i got anxienty problems, steam machines floped, failed to gain traction.
i got excite with might n9 and that it was coming to linux, floped (bad game)
i got excite with yooka laylee, floped (bad game)
i got excite with Blood Stained, linux version canceled (and the game is good, sigh, i'm soo excited for the game i cant play)
i got excite with we happy feel, linux version canceled and looks like the game was bad
not to mention, street fighter 5, witcher 3, darksiders...
i got excited with HTML5...
most of the flash aplications (and games) didnt got ported and lets be honest, triple A games wont be ported, google failed once with NaCl, and trying to push webGl, webGL2, webAssembly, didnt solved this issue


i got excited with stadia,come on!

So you're saying we can use you getting excited as a sign to know we shouldn't get excited?

I have a colleague doing the XBox streaming beta - and a few things stand out: this technology is very smooth, the latency being negligeble even on a 4G connection. He has used his controller and connected it to various phones and android devices, saying you get high-grade desktop graphics running without issues on cheap devices. It sounds like the target audience will not be desktop devices - so in my mind it doesn't really make sense to compare this with the current desktop market, or the linux market for that matter.

It would be interesting if Stadia expands this to a wider market of android devices, because AFAIK it only targets the Pixel phone ?

stadia is owned by google, and they have a lot of money to do it correctly first time. That is have features people want.

People saying they need to start at steam alpha version level of features are kinda silly. Same goes for EPIC store, lots of money but minimal spent on app and features... These are not companies that really care about the users or value of their service.....

All of this doesn't really matter. I personally don't care how many games are there on start, on what devices it will run or if there are some missing social-media features.

Google claims, they can create a new way of playing games by finally making streaming playable. If they really achieve low latency with high image quality, so it's console-like experience - fantastic! Other features, games and support for hardware will follow it they prove it's valid.
But if they don't get latency and quality right, it doesn't matter if they have 10000 games running on everything, connected to social media and your toaster, when it all sucks.

So... Latency and quality is key, everything else comes second.

Playable titles at start raised up to 22:
-> https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/1196244423006277632?s=20

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Attack on Titan: Final Battle 2
Destiny 2: The Collection (included in Stadia Pro)
Farming Simulator 2019
Final Fantasy XV
Football Manager 2020
GRID
Gylt
Just Dance 2020
Kine
Metro Exodus
Mortal Kombat 11
NBA 2K20
Rage 2
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Red Dead Redemption 2
Samurai Shodown (included in Stadia Pro)
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Thumper
Tomb Raider
Trials Rising
Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Given the high price of entry for the Founder and Premier Editions it's a bit laughable really.

The Founders Edition includes:

1x Chromecast Ultra (approx. 80 Euro)
-> https://store.google.com/de/product/chromecast_ultra
1x Stadia Controller (approx. 70 Euro)
-> https://store.google.com/de/product/stadia_controller

Alone with the hardware one would have a price of 150€. There are the three months Stadia Pro, the limited edition of the controller and the Buddy Pass for three months Stadia Pro and the possibility to reserve your player name early is not included yet.

For this content a bundle price of 129€ is really not expensive.

Excuse me, but if something is a little laughable, then it is this statement.

BTW "... founder ...":
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/founder_1
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/founder?s=t


Last edited by KuJo on 18 November 2019 at 12:23 pm UTC

Given the high price of entry for the Founder and Premier Editions it's a bit laughable really.

The Founders Edition includes:

1x Chromecast Ultra (approx. 80 Euro)
-> https://store.google.com/de/product/chromecast_ultra
1x Stadia Controller (approx. 70 Euro)
-> https://store.google.com/de/product/stadia_controller

Alone with the hardware one would have a price of 150€. There are the three months Stadia Pro, the limited edition of the controller and the Buddy Pass for three months Stadia Pro and the possibility to reserve your player name early is not included yet.

For this content a bundle price of 129€ is really not expensive.

Excuse me, but if something is a little laughable, then it is this statement.

Seems you missed my point completely, my entire point was on the game lineup and feature list, not what you get in the box. Regardless of the hardware, you had no choice on getting them to access it right away.

My guess is that this service is primarily aimed at the mobile market and getting things in place on the ground floor for the much ballyhooed 5g network---a sort of Steam for the mobile market.

Personally, the whole thing leaves me deeply unimpressed. Essentially Stadia players are paying for the privilege of being data generating machines for Google. I'm simply not prepared to pay a monthly fee just to pay yet more money buying/leasing games solely to generate data for Google to sell to advertisers.

If Google wants my data, I will gladly share it with them for a small fee. In the case of Stadia, they can give me the games and controller in exchange for the data I then generate playing those games. Otherwise, like Gmail, Google docs, and the rest of it, Google can just piss off.


Last edited by Nanobang on 18 November 2019 at 1:39 pm UTC

The big German PC-Gaming magazine Gamestar has tested Stadia,
and they are very positively surprised from the gaming experience.
I thought they could be biased against it, as PC stakeholder so to say - but no.

Now I'm waiting what Liam has to say about it.

Edit:

And heise.de a very reputable source.
They also report a very positive first experience.


Last edited by sub on 18 November 2019 at 9:43 pm UTC

Interesting take on Stadia in this twitter feed:
twitter feed on Stadia, by @mcclure111

Interesting take on Stadia in this twitter feed:
twitter feed on Stadia, by @mcclure111

That is actually quite interesting.
And I do get the feeling that Google is institutionally kind of like that--they build technologies first, and then figure out if anyone wants it or if there's a way of making money from it. But I think Google actually sees it as a strategy--like, they've got the money to do a bunch of that kind of stuff and fail a bunch of times, and it may be worth it as long as when a few of them succeed, they succeed big, which will tend to be the case with visionary tech. For that matter, they're so big it would almost be worth their time to make a bunch of cool tech that never makes them a dime, just for the morale boost from employees feeling like they're still a cool company that does cool things rather than an old school fuddy-duddy like IBM.