What initially seemed like a really promising idea, to give you gaming on any device and wherever you are has turned into something of a let-down overall.
This will no doubt get me some flak from Stadia stans, but let's keep in mind I was originally totally sold on the idea of Stadia. I have a Founders pack and I used it almost daily for quite some time. That time quickly lessened, and eventually became none at all. I can't imagine I am alone in that either.
At the two year point, what did Google do to celebrate Stadia? Close to nothing. On Reddit the Stadia team went over some numbers we already knew like the amount of games available and a few that added special Stadia features. There was also a sale on their store, along with a reasonable discount on the Stadia Premiere Edition (£19.99, down from £69.99), which you can easily put down to them wanting to get rid of stock since it comes with their older Chromecast Ultra. On the subject of the future, they only gave some vagueness:
- Continuing feature experiments with the goal of making it easier for players to get into games and try Stadia for themselves. We’re still learning from input provided by our community and appreciate all the constructive feedback we receive from you!
- Expanding all categories of games content - not just more games overall, but new types of games that we’ve heard players ask for, including genres like online action games, open world titles, plus free games, trials and demos.
- Bringing Stadia to more devices and making it easier to access, purchase, and play games by yourself or with friends.
No player numbers, no sales numbers, absolutely no show of strength.
Barely any effort to mark two years, unless you count talking very briefly to six (yes, a whole six) customers who picked up the Founders pack. Really pushing the boat out there!
It's hard to be excited or even just a bit interested in a service that Google don't seem to know what to do with. It reportedly missed all their user goals by hundreds of thousands, and they shut down Stadia Games & Entertainment before even giving it any time in the spotlight at all. We were supposed to get first-party games that took advantage of the cloud, to do things you couldn't really do locally and we're likely to never see anything like that on Stadia.
The huge problem is that NVIDIA GeForce NOW and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming both completely destroy it when it comes to price vs value. Even though GeForce NOW still feels a bit too disconnected, since it relies on whatever launchers games use and all the logins that come with it and Microsoft need to improve the latency / input quality of their offering, Stadia will basically never match up to either on overall value. You've also got Netflix expanding into cloud gaming, and Amazon with Luna. The sharks are circling and Stadia is bleeding in the middle.
When thinking on how Stadia operates, it just really doesn't make sense, especially now with the hot competition. Full price per-game to basically rent your games from Google, with an additional extra monthly sub on top to get 4K and access to a few games per month if you keep that subscription up, to completely disappear if they do shut down the consumer store side of things. When elsewhere you can either pay monthly to access your existing games (GeForce NOW), or pay monthly to access a big library (Xbox / Luna). At least with the other options, you either still have local access or you know you're paying for a more Netflix-like model.
Even Stadia as a service for bigger games has been left in the dust often, with some games leaving patches out for weeks and multiple games released locked to 30FPS. Even developers that are on it don't seem to care enough. Google don't even put Stadia at the front of anything they do, like how their newer Chromecast with Google TV took nearly a year to support Stadia.
Specifically when thinking about the Linux desktop, some original thoughts were that since Stadia was using Debian Linux and the Vulkan API, that we might see some cross-over of ports but that never really materialised either. The majority ended up just sticking to the Stadia ecosystem.
Where does Stadia go from here? Well, we already know they're marketing their tech as a white-label solution to studios outside of the Stadia Store, so that will likely pull in some companies but eventually I do expect the consumer side of Stadia itself to die-off.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: KimyrielleQuoting: STiATI'd happily pay valve 12 bucks a month if I could use it to play my whole library without the hassle of nvidia.
That is honestly the only way I can see cloud gaming to become a desirable thing - as an premium add-on service to stream the games you already own anyway. That way, you can play games on your PC when at home, and on your tablet/phone when travelling. Best of both worlds.
But other than that, I have no desire to rent my games, or have to rely on a service that might or might not close shop tomorrow morning. Or clog my bandwidth with multiple GB per hour just to stream a game that my PC can easily run locally.
Quoting: STiATAnd ye, not an option for competitive players, but for casuals like me good enough. If I had something like that I would not have bought a new gaming PC. That's a lot of month until it pays off buying my own gaming rig.
Honestly, the save-on-hardware argument doesn't hold much merit, particularly not for more casual players that don't need (multiple) high-end GPUs. Unless you really use your PC for gaming ONLY and can argue not to need a PC at all anymore when streaming games, the difference in price between a pure office PC and a casual gaming PC is actually pretty marginal.
This is actually why I still fail to understand the economics of game-streaming. Casual players don't save enough on the hardware to make the streaming subscription the cheaper choice in the long run, and hardcore players typically don't want any extra lag when playing games, so they will have to buy high-end hardware anyway.
If you buy games on a DRM platform as Steam you basically agree by their AGB that you only rent them.
Even not needing multiple high-end GPUs. My current PC cost ~2000 Euros. In a rate of a gaming rig, which should be about 5 years, that's about 400 Euros a year. Paying 12 bucks a month would still be cheaper. I may be a casual player, but that does not necessarily mean I do not like new titles.
I see cloud streaming not as a replacement to buying my games, it's a replacement of buying a gaming rig. And ye, that could be a lot more efficient to me, and even profitable to Valve.
Quoting: STiATIf you buy games on a DRM platform as Steam you basically agree by their AGB that you only rent them.I've seen this argued, and I've seen the opposite argued, and I really don't think that is actually the case. A really convincing argument might change my mind, but the bare statement does not.
AussieEevee Nov 23, 2021
Quoting: GuestYeah, that too. Definitely.Quoting: AussieEeveeStadia is one of those things that never made sense to me. The biggest problem is that it requires a stable internet with a low ping. Not all of us have that. And the second being that we never actually have access to the games we purchase through it.
....and no data caps on the internet connection are useful as well.
Quoting: STiATIf you buy games on a DRM platform as Steam you basically agree by their AGB that you only rent them.You don't rent them. You license them. Huge difference :) And that is technically true of any game, even those from GoG.
QuoteEven not needing multiple high-end GPUs. My current PC cost ~2000 Euros. In a rate of a gaming rig, which should be about 5 years, that's about 400 Euros a year. Paying 12 bucks a month would still be cheaper. I may be a casual player, but that does not necessarily mean I do not like new titles.The thing is that cloud streaming has far far far too many downsides.
I see cloud streaming not as a replacement to buying my games, it's a replacement of buying a gaming rig. And ye, that could be a lot more efficient to me, and even profitable to Valve.
In addition to what I wrote above, if your internet goes out for whatever reason, you lose your entire library. If my internet goes out, I just switch Steam to offline mode and only lose a handful of games (Such as GTA V... What is going on, Rockstar?!), and MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV. I can still play most other games in my Steam Library. (Getting back into Half-Life 2 recently)
AFAIK, you still have to buy games on Stadia... you just never have access to the files.
Quoting: t3gI forgot Stafia existed. There was a real circle jerk from the GOL team that it was Linux gaming but it wasn’t. A locked down server only experience and developers didn’t use that Vulkan experience in being games to Linux.
Either you don't know what a circle jerk is, or you perhaps just don't know what a circle is. The core GOL team is just Liam, who has covered both positive and extremely negative articles on Stadia, around just one a week, throughout its life. That's a pretty small circle.
Even if you include the contributing editors, the only one who has really expressed an opinion on Stadia, is me. And I didn't (and still don't generally) like it.
I guess you just don't like news you don't agree with?
Quoting: RandomizedKirbyTree47IMO, they would have done a lot better if they clearly advertised from day 1 that you don't need a subscription. The fact that so many people were confused about the cost lead to fewer customers buying in initially, and that led to a loss of AAA publishers porting their games.
That definitely played a bigger than anything else! I'd like to remind you guys how if I was not reading GoL and if Liam didn't correct me on that, I still would be thinking that you require a subscription to Stadia to access your games.
And that only because of a badly worded front page in French (and maybe other languages) that made you think you would need a subscription.
You can also add to that the ABYSMAL marketing campaign for Stadia. Outside of computer news or some gaming publication, Stadia has been basically unheard of. The average people never heard of Stadia.
Quoting: scaineYeah, that was a thoroughly weird take on how I covered Stadia. I wrote about it in the same way I write about any new thing here. I covered it with initial impressions, new games coming to it and major updates to it, often in a round-up with multiple things so I wasn't writing individually about every little thing.Quoting: t3gI forgot Stafia existed. There was a real circle jerk from the GOL team that it was Linux gaming but it wasn’t. A locked down server only experience and developers didn’t use that Vulkan experience in being games to Linux.
Either you don't know what a circle jerk is, or you perhaps just don't know what a circle is. The core GOL team is just Liam, who has covered both positive and extremely negative articles on Stadia, around just one a week, throughout its life. That's a pretty small circle.
Even if you include the contributing editors, the only one who has really expressed an opinion on Stadia, is me. And I didn't (and still don't generally) like it.
I guess you just don't like news you don't agree with?
Think I only actually "reviewed" two games on it too (Orcs Must Die! 3 and Embr.
Hardly circle jerk? I also covered a lawsuit on it, the Terraria debacle, them shutting their development studios and so on. As for the comment on it being Linux gaming: if you game, and it's on Linux, it's Linux gaming. I thought we settled this a long time ago, guess there's still many elitists lurking about.
Quoting: kuhpunktIt's on sale at the moment for 22,22€ https://store.google.com/product/stadia_premiere_edition?hl=de&utm_medium=affiliate_publisher&utm_source=CJ&utm_campaign=GS5347859&utm_content=dr&CJPID=2795768&CJAID=14506529
It is however not in stock - at least not here.
Not sure if it's a 'getting rid of stock' move or just because of the global chip shortage
Quoting: Liam DaweAs for the comment on it being Linux gaming: if you game, and it's on Linux, it's Linux gaming. I thought we settled this a long time ago, guess there's still many elitists lurking about.
It's not gaming on linux, it's gaming on stadia because unlike on steam, your purchase won't be counting as a linux-sale. Capitalism is democracy where money is your vote.
Call me elitist all you want, but for me Gaming on Linux (GOL) is if it runs on my Linux rig. Heck, I would consider Android games on my Phone more GOL then Stadia.
I (and I guess many others) was hoping Stadia would be the push for Linux Gaming on the desktop, because in the backend they said to run Linux (Do we know if this is 100% the case?). Now we have games on Stadia with no Linux support outside of Stadia. Bummer.
Quoting: gabberI (and I guess many others) was hoping Stadia would be the push for Linux Gaming on the desktop, because in the backend they said to run Linux (Do we know if this is 100% the case?). Now we have games on Stadia with no Linux support outside of Stadia. Bummer.
stadia runs on linux, if stadia was good enough to act as an replacement for local gaming for most people, then they would consider using only it, and sundely an chromebook or linux desktop would seem like an viable option.
when you computer break or you going to buy an new one, you can pay for the most expensive ones to game on it, or just buy an cheaper computer and stream all the way.
if more people started using linux as an result of it, then some companies would start to offer the stadia offline option, aka, native linux gaming.
Quoting: Liam DaweYeah, that was a thoroughly weird take on how I covered Stadia. I wrote about it in the same way I write about any new thing here. I covered it with initial impressions, new games coming to it and major updates to it, often in a round-up with multiple things so I wasn't writing individually about every little thing.I never used Stadia, never liked the idea of it.
I do read the GoL articles about it, and I do like that GoL covers that aspect of gaming too. Thank you for that!
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