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PayPalStadia, Google's Linux-powered game streaming service continues to grow with more games. Let's start this week off with a roundup and some behind the scenes info.
Firstly, Stadia now has more games live on the service as across the weekend SteamWorld Dig 2 and SteamWorld Quest launched and both are available for anyone with Stadia Pro. In addition, SteamWorld Dig and SteamWorld Heist will be launching on Stadia on March 10th.
Croteam's Serious Sam Collection also now has a release date of March 3rd, which Google did a small interview for with the Chief Creative Officer Davor Hunski on the Stadia community.
If you somehow missed it, Baldur's Gate 3 which is coming to Stadia also had a gameplay reveal that you can see in the below video:
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As far as we know, it's not coming to the Linux desktop officially but it will be on Steam. Not a surprise though, since it's Larian Studios who took a long time to get Divinity: Original Sin on Linux with the Enhanced Edition but then never gave us the second one.
When it comes to porting games to Stadia, I did speak to Image & Form Games (SteamWorld). It was expected by some, that having a Linux desktop build would make it easier to port to Stadia since Stadia is Debian Linux and the Vulkan API. However, turns out it doesn't help as much as you might think. They said:
All in all, we didn't save too much time from having a Linux build, most of the system work is dependent on the platform. For example, achievements, save data handling, input handling, etc is specific for the Stadia platform and it doesn't really matter too much which OS is running in the background. The biggest single chunk of work was porting the game to Vulkan, which took a bit over a month. We also spent some time to fine-tune and tweak the games to have minimal input delay and to run as smoothly as possible.
So there you have it. Interesting to know at least.
Google did say they were getting around 120 games on Stadia this year, and it seems more are slowly now starting to trickle in. On that subject, not all developers are impressed with what Google had to offer them. In an article on Business Insider, they cite multiple unnamed developers mentioning there was barely any financial incentive offered and some also mentioned how Google has a habit of killing projects. So clearly Stadia still has a lot to prove.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
I still don't get it, why Google can't increase their list of potentially supported games by integrating their SDK with Wine as a fallback until they get more native Linux Vulkan games. They must have some reason why they didn't do it.
Last edited by Shmerl on 3 March 2020 at 6:58 pm UTC
Last edited by Shmerl on 3 March 2020 at 6:58 pm UTC
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QuoteIn an article on Business Insider, they cite multiple unnamed developers mentioning there was barely any financial incentive offered and some also mentioned how Google has a habit of killing projects. So clearly Stadia still has a lot to prove.
Quote from the Business Insider article:
QuoteIt's a statement we heard echoed by several prominent indie developers and two publishing executives we spoke with for this piece.
The article at Business Insider is pure clickbait!
What does "several" mean? It means that there was more than 1 developer. More than 1 can also be 2. Without absolute numbers or names this is no representative statement! What are 2, 3 or maybe 10 indie developers if there are hundreds and thousands of them out there? And what are "two" Publishing Executives when there are certainly hundreds of them?
The headline attracts you ... and in the article there are half-baked statements which are pushed to the general statement. Clickbait!
Here also a youtuber has brought the whole thing well to the point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJnKdm6BKWA
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: ShmerlI still don't get it, why Google can increase their list of potentially supported games by integrating their SDK with Wine as a fallback until they get more native Linux Vulkan games. They must have some reason why they didn't do it.
because having an version for linux, is not enough.
they need to run the game with an acceptable input lag, and they cant do that with wine.
plus, wine give then no Q/A, if you see the list of games that run on protondb, you will see a lot of false positives (games that lack some features such as cutscenes, but still were classified as platinum) compare that list with valve's white list, valve list is quite smaller.
another thing to consider is that google already tried to support wine in the past, looks like they came to the conclusion that it was not worth it.
valve could have tried this from the beggining, but its an bad option, looks like they are trying it as an last ressource since their plan A failed (steam machines).
google on the other hand, tried supporting wine, tried NaCl, tried supporting standards like vulkan, webGL, webGL2, web assembly, and now as an last atempt: streaming.
if wine was an solution, they wouldnt have to stream anything.
to make an game stream-able, you need an better performance than native, since the game will suffer from input-lag you have to compensate it somehow, meaning, if you were directly at the servers you would get an better performance than native, but since you arent you get the delay from sending the input and receiving the output.
that said, running games on wine is not an option, neither for Q/A that all the features will be there, nor from input lag point of view, nor from the cost of streaming (both sending the data over the wire and having the compute power to process millions of players anyway)
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Quoting: KuJoQuoteIn an article on Business Insider, they cite multiple unnamed developers mentioning there was barely any financial incentive offered and some also mentioned how Google has a habit of killing projects. So clearly Stadia still has a lot to prove.
Quote from the Business Insider article:
QuoteIt's a statement we heard echoed by several prominent indie developers and two publishing executives we spoke with for this piece.
The article at Business Insider is pure clickbait!
What does "several" mean? It means that there was more than 1 developer. More than 1 can also be 2. Without absolute numbers or names this is no representative statement! What are 2, 3 or maybe 10 indie developers if there are hundreds and thousands of them out there? And what are "two" Publishing Executives when there are certainly hundreds of them?
The headline attracts you ... and in the article there are half-baked statements which are pushed to the general statement. Clickbait!
Here also a youtuber has brought the whole thing well to the point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJnKdm6BKWA
i agree, there are millions of indie developers, and a dozen of triple A developers.
what would google do?
throw millions of dollars each indie developer?
or, throw millions of dollars at a few dozen triple a developers, and a fez hundreds at a few indie ones?
of course they would say there is not much incentive, unless they have an exclusivity deal, their opinion dont count.
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Quoting: elmapulanother thing to consider is that google already tried to support wine in the past, looks like they came to the conclusion that it was not worth it.
When was it exactly and do you have some sources about how it failed?
Quoting: elmapulif wine was an solution, they wouldnt have to stream anything.
Streaming vs local is completely orthogonal to Wine vs native. You can have all combinations.
Last edited by Shmerl on 3 March 2020 at 7:00 pm UTC
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Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: elmapulanother thing to consider is that google already tried to support wine in the past, looks like they came to the conclusion that it was not worth it.
When was it exactly and do you have some sources about how it failed?
Quoting: elmapulif wine was an solution, they wouldnt have to stream anything.
Streaming vs local is completely orthogonal to Wine vs native. You can have all combinations.
i cant remember if it was that, or something else:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/02/google-intoxicates-linux-users-with-wine-improvements/
but i heard google was helping years ago, and since then, never heard it again.
as for it failed, well, valve is the one doing proton and stuff, while google gave up on this strategy to focus on streaming...
google tried to support wine, webGL, webgl2, web assembly, and while those had an moderate sucess, gaming and many professional softwares are still windows exclusives, so instead of investing in solutions like wine to make more games run on chromeOS or try to expand the chromeOS marketshare litle by little, they are trying to sell the idea that on the cloud, developers can sell games to up to 2 billions of persons (wich is much easier to sell than chromeOS that has an little market that didnt move too much and the seling point of then is the low price.
it seems to be easier to make the games run on cloud then stream then to chromebooks to sell more chromeOS devices than make then run on chromeOS while try to get marketshare for it at the same time...
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