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.
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I'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.
And 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.
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If 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.
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AussieEevee Nov 23, 2021
Yeah, that too. Definitely.Stadia 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.
If 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.
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.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.
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I 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?
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IMO, 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.
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Yeah, 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 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.
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It'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
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Yeah, 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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i'm surprised that no one said that but...
i think what killed stadia was youtube, or better saying, youtubers and the gaming media in general.
they straight up LIED about it, no matter how good the service is, if no one knows about it and most people are miss informed on purpose about it.
if you dont watch the google presentation/ads on stadia, you just read the sum ups of it elsewhere, you will be lead to believe that you have to pay for the games AND subscribe to the service to be able to play anything, and if they discontinue the service you lose not only the games but any progress you made on then, and the worst part: you will believe that the input lag make the games unplayable.
stadia had the best input lag of all streaming options, in some cases even better than local gaming with xbox one x, but no one knew about it.
it helps nothing that google promissed a lot of features but failed to comunicate they wouldnt be avaliable day 1.
stadia was attacked by all directions.
people who were afraid of cloud gaming because any cloud exclusive may disappear if the service is shutdown, we cant preserve old games nor apply decensor patches nor pirate anything, and if they discontinue the service we might loss the games we purchased, people said screw that! and didnt want to support it, at least not on stadia, but those same people ignored that microsoft is willing to make cloud exclusive games and they are fine on cloud as long as its only used for testing or streaming games that you already "Own".
xbox fanboys and microsoft fanboys were attacking stadia, playstation fanboys, nintendo fanboys, even dreamcast fanboys, either because they were afraid of losing local gaming, or didnt wanted an new competition for their platform, or just wanted to do clickbait videos and trash talking stadia was the next big thing, the next meme to make to get views.
it helps nothing that google didnt reacted, and he could.
the first year stadia received 120 games as promissed, but only 100 were promissed for the second year, he should have improved the rate of new games instead.
google never bothered to upgrade the servers when the new generation came.
google didnt clear what will happen if they discontinue the servers (other than you being able to download your save files)
and google took to long to implement things like click to play, hell, it didnt take too much effort to market stadia, just show some ads of an game, and make some of the people who see those ads on youtube realzie they are INTERACTIVE ads (much like a lot of simple games make interactive ads, but for triple A games)
if people are afraid of input lag, show to then that they can play it, then when they see for thenselves that its an acceptable experience, you show an logo saying : powered by stadia.
give people a free trial or even better, give then an game for free.
give then the assurance that they will be able to download the game on steam or something like that if google discontinue the service, but imply an minimum number of years were you can be sure it wont happen.
google can even reduce the reach of channels who spread fake news, but i dont think it would be an good idea especially if its leaked that they are doing it, people will acuse then of doing the opposite.
i think google never expected the reception to be that bad, the initial reach to be that bad, and then stake holders pressured then to kill the service, wich ironically is the reason why they are in this situation to begin with, they killed too many services.
hell, i was one of the few people who cared about googleplus, and how the hell they cant manage the security of an text based service, they cant pay for a few people to send text to host on their servers and show to other people who want to read then, but they can stream triple A games?
sure earning 30% of an 60 dollars sale make then much more money than trying to run ads on a failing social network and earning fractions of cents per user, but something isnt adding up imho.
i think what killed stadia was youtube, or better saying, youtubers and the gaming media in general.
they straight up LIED about it, no matter how good the service is, if no one knows about it and most people are miss informed on purpose about it.
if you dont watch the google presentation/ads on stadia, you just read the sum ups of it elsewhere, you will be lead to believe that you have to pay for the games AND subscribe to the service to be able to play anything, and if they discontinue the service you lose not only the games but any progress you made on then, and the worst part: you will believe that the input lag make the games unplayable.
stadia had the best input lag of all streaming options, in some cases even better than local gaming with xbox one x, but no one knew about it.
it helps nothing that google promissed a lot of features but failed to comunicate they wouldnt be avaliable day 1.
stadia was attacked by all directions.
people who were afraid of cloud gaming because any cloud exclusive may disappear if the service is shutdown, we cant preserve old games nor apply decensor patches nor pirate anything, and if they discontinue the service we might loss the games we purchased, people said screw that! and didnt want to support it, at least not on stadia, but those same people ignored that microsoft is willing to make cloud exclusive games and they are fine on cloud as long as its only used for testing or streaming games that you already "Own".
xbox fanboys and microsoft fanboys were attacking stadia, playstation fanboys, nintendo fanboys, even dreamcast fanboys, either because they were afraid of losing local gaming, or didnt wanted an new competition for their platform, or just wanted to do clickbait videos and trash talking stadia was the next big thing, the next meme to make to get views.
it helps nothing that google didnt reacted, and he could.
the first year stadia received 120 games as promissed, but only 100 were promissed for the second year, he should have improved the rate of new games instead.
google never bothered to upgrade the servers when the new generation came.
google didnt clear what will happen if they discontinue the servers (other than you being able to download your save files)
and google took to long to implement things like click to play, hell, it didnt take too much effort to market stadia, just show some ads of an game, and make some of the people who see those ads on youtube realzie they are INTERACTIVE ads (much like a lot of simple games make interactive ads, but for triple A games)
if people are afraid of input lag, show to then that they can play it, then when they see for thenselves that its an acceptable experience, you show an logo saying : powered by stadia.
give people a free trial or even better, give then an game for free.
give then the assurance that they will be able to download the game on steam or something like that if google discontinue the service, but imply an minimum number of years were you can be sure it wont happen.
google can even reduce the reach of channels who spread fake news, but i dont think it would be an good idea especially if its leaked that they are doing it, people will acuse then of doing the opposite.
i think google never expected the reception to be that bad, the initial reach to be that bad, and then stake holders pressured then to kill the service, wich ironically is the reason why they are in this situation to begin with, they killed too many services.
hell, i was one of the few people who cared about googleplus, and how the hell they cant manage the security of an text based service, they cant pay for a few people to send text to host on their servers and show to other people who want to read then, but they can stream triple A games?
sure earning 30% of an 60 dollars sale make then much more money than trying to run ads on a failing social network and earning fractions of cents per user, but something isnt adding up imho.
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Don't know what you are all on about onlive is where it's at..... Oh wait it died just like all the gaming streaming sites will or it fragment just like streaming TV Netflix used to have everything now there are exclusives and you need multiple subscriptions to see everything
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Don't know what you are all on about onlive is where it's at..... Oh wait it died just like all the gaming streaming sites will or it fragment just like streaming TV Netflix used to have everything now there are exclusives and you need multiple subscriptions to see everything
Yeah. On one hand, monopolies are definitely bad. On the other hand, I went from a £6.99 Netflix sub to:
Netflix family: £9.99
NowTV + Sports package: around £25 in total, per month
Disney: £7.99
Prime: £7.99
And of course, my cabled TV connection, which includes my 300mb internet and a landline I never use: £70
Like, yeah, monopolies are really, really bad (just look at Microsoft), but how much would Netflix have had to put up their prices, per month, before people complained? Because even taking out NowTV, if they'd DOUBLED their prices, it would still be cheaper for the consumer than dealing with Netflix+Disney+Prime.
That said, before streaming services existed, I paid Virgin for their "Everything" package and it was just over £100 a month, which included Sky Sport and Sky Movies, and was therefore much cheaper than all this multiple-streaming-service juggling!
And don't even get me started on my £16.99/month spotify family plan.
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Yeah. On one hand, monopolies are definitely bad. On the other hand, I went from a £6.99 Netflix sub to:
Netflix family: £9.99
NowTV + Sports package: around £25 in total, per month
Disney: £7.99
Prime: £7.99
My solution to that problem: rotation. View stuff on one. Cancel, subscribe to the next and view there, cancel and so on until I'm back at number 1. Won't work for your sports stuff, but hey, if you want that, you're bound to get cheated.
Also, glass fibre internet now and cable tv: cancelled.
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Don't know what you are all on about onlive is where it's at..... Oh wait it died just like all the gaming streaming sites will or it fragment just like streaming TV Netflix used to have everything now there are exclusives and you need multiple subscriptions to see everything
Yeah. On one hand, monopolies are definitely bad. On the other hand, I went from a £6.99 Netflix sub to:
Netflix family: £9.99
NowTV + Sports package: around £25 in total, per month
Disney: £7.99
Prime: £7.99
And of course, my cabled TV connection, which includes my 300mb internet and a landline I never use: £70
Like, yeah, monopolies are really, really bad (just look at Microsoft), but how much would Netflix have had to put up their prices, per month, before people complained? Because even taking out NowTV, if they'd DOUBLED their prices, it would still be cheaper for the consumer than dealing with Netflix+Disney+Prime.
That said, before streaming services existed, I paid Virgin for their "Everything" package and it was just over £100 a month, which included Sky Sport and Sky Movies, and was therefore much cheaper than all this multiple-streaming-service juggling!
And don't even get me started on my £16.99/month spotify family plan.
there is no such a thing as pay cheap get everything.
for example, in my country, if i count air tv and cable tv, we had 100 animes broacasted in total across 3~5 decades, there are 10.000 animes on my anime list alone (not to mention its an incomplete list, it dont have the indie non official touhou animes for instance), crunchroll dont have everything, but at least it has 700 animes any given month.
if you think USA is the only country who make movies, series and cartoons, then sure, cable tv had everything, but last time i checked shows like round6 were not made by usa.
(not to mention things like censorship in animes that aired on cable, those still exist on streaming services but it isnt as bad as it was in the past thanks to piracy that helped keeps thing in check or at least inform the public)
one thing that people forgot is that the more money we put into the entertainment industry, the more shows they are capable of doing with an better techinical quality.
that is, as long as we dont help creating monopolies either in distribution or production.
an netflix monopoly would never be good, even if they promissed it would be cheaper and keep their promisses, they would be the ones deciding what shows get produced or not, what shows get an second seasson or not.
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Bugger me, you'd think Google would be able to push out an ultra-product to rule them all given how much money they're sitting on.
Nevertheless, love to see it. Not fond of the direction Stadia was going, pushing "cloud gaming as the future"
Nevertheless, love to see it. Not fond of the direction Stadia was going, pushing "cloud gaming as the future"
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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.Well, GOL is whatever I make of it ;)
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.
Silly stuff aside, I consider anything played on Linux to be Linux Gaming. If you're booting up Linux to do it, then it's all fair game. I do wish people could move past arguing on that, it's another stupid thing that other platforms just don't care about. People just want to play games and for some reason lots of Linux people like to argue about what is and isn't for us, it's tiring. So...you do you :)
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Pains me to say this, but I agree. Google went wrong something a few years ago and never fully recovered imho...Absolutely. A lot of people attribute it to the hiring of their first true CFO in 2015 who immediately set about to making sure Google runs like any other dollars and cents business, which is indeed likely better for their bottom line, but the magic definitely ended at that point. They've pretty much shut down or spun off all of their moonshot ventures and ambitious projects, Stadia soon to join them....
At this point, I think anyone would be absolutely crazy to commit money to any retail Google service short of an Android phone. Who can trust Google to back or iterate upon anything they do anymore?
Last edited by iiari on 23 November 2021 at 4:17 pm UTC
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for example, in my country, if i count air tv and cable tv, we had 100 animes broacasted in total across 3~5 decades, there are 10.000 animes on my anime list alone (not to mention its an incomplete list, it dont have the indie non official touhou animes for instance), crunchroll dont have everything, but at least it has 700 animes any given month.
This is a really good point, tbh, and re-enforces why monopolies are bad - if they control what content you watch, you're severely restricted as a focused client of that service. But while dealing with multiple streaming services feels bad, they're still actually really cheap compared to what we used to pay for scheduled television, and they allow a huge degree of control over what you watch.
My primary gripe is really just finding content sometimes. And a minor gripe about how different services look different. And handle end-of-show credits. And how quickly they stream the next episode before I can find the remote control to turn off auto-stream. So frustrating.
Okay, so a few gripes. Still better than a monopoly though.
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Lots of good discussion here. I still believe at some point cloud gaming or some hybrid of it will be the way a substantial portion of gamers will game, whether it's mobile, console, or PC, and even likely even the majority of gamers eventually. My daughters love Stadia and don't know or care whether its in the cloud or on their PC. I'm a big user of Microsoft Flight Simulator and much of that title's graphics goodness is streamed.
I think it's become clear, though, that'll it'll take someone to have more of a Netflix style "all you can eat" model than a Valve style "buy your game" model for it to work, with only likely Valve themselves with their own hypothetical future streaming service that will likely to be able to get away with that, if only because of everyone's existing library.
Last edited by iiari on 23 November 2021 at 4:29 pm UTC
I think it's become clear, though, that'll it'll take someone to have more of a Netflix style "all you can eat" model than a Valve style "buy your game" model for it to work, with only likely Valve themselves with their own hypothetical future streaming service that will likely to be able to get away with that, if only because of everyone's existing library.
Last edited by iiari on 23 November 2021 at 4:29 pm UTC
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