Nothing much, that was just me following mental associations.Originally Posted by Brethren
To put actual effort into the topic... I very much want Google to fail in this endeavor. This desire is strong enough that I don't feel like I can provide anything close to objective analysis. That being said, I'll note that when Microsoft entered the fray, they did so in what could be called a respectful manner. The first Xbox was an entirely conventional console, just more powerful than the others. However, Google is trying to compete in the console market, while rejecting the entire concept of a "console" as it's heretofore existed. That's... well, a level of arrogance entirely in keeping with Google's history.
That's not really that arrogant on their part. The concept of console agnostic games is not new (onlive, gaikai, psnow), it's just that the implementation failed miserably. But since Google has datacenters basically in every country in the world, it seems like they might succeed. I'm not saying they will, but from all other companies they have the biggest chance.
That sounds even more arrogant to me. Not only are they disregarding the conventional form of consoles, they're declaring that they will succeed where those three services failed.
Yeah, I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing their goal is to not fail. What a surprise. That's not arrogance, that's just common sense.
And I think somewhere in here, you're missing the entire point of the service. It's not trying to compete against existing consoles, it's trying to devise a strategy where you don't need one to begin with.
...earn all the money.
First of all, this is business. All decisions like that are thoroughly calculated. Either they do have done their analytics right and there's something we don't know, or they have e.g. separate budgets for experiments that may fail. Nobody dives into this stuff just thinking "I'm better than others, so I wont fail". Noone wans to cover that.
What does seem dumb to me though, is that they decided to charge subscription fee and make users pay for games. Maybe it's just for early adopters, they'll pay for everything just to get their hands on new piece of tech. Although gamers aren't much respected customers anyway, maybe they expect them to cave after a short boycott, like in other cases.
About "conventional form of consoles", there's an ongoing talk in the industry about getting rid of the physical console, and the concept's been toyed with for years now. Console manufacturers would love to get rid of the risk and cost of making the hardware; game publishers would love not to pay console manufacturers the fee for every game sold on their system. So we'll either end up with "Xbox" and "PS" subscriptions for game streaming, or even better, with many competing stores, just selling game streaming services for everyone, without the old-fashioned concept of being tied to a game console / system.
But the big problem now is US and the shitty Internet providers. Such services would probably work more smoothly in Europe.
I dont know if this has already been covered, but EA are now putting their games back on steam, so obviously the Origin service hasnt worked out that well for them. Although I imagine that you still need the origin launcher.
Looking at the response so far, it seems like that's exactly what Google did! For instance, the strength of its launch lineup is widely recognized as vital to the success of a console, and yet Google fell short there. With its resources, it could easily have prevented this problem before it became a common criticism; instead, it seems Google did not even anticipate the problem. Keep in mind, however, I am not only a biased observer but a fairly unengaged one, so my impression should not be trusted.
Yeah, I didn't mean to say that it's a new idea. I vaguely remember the hubbub surrounding earlier attempts. However, it seems like every advantage listed comes with a corresponding disadvantage. Instead of the cost of console manufacturing and development, you would have the cost of datacenter construction and maintenance; instead of console publishing fees, you would have (for everyone except platform owners) who-knows-what payment arrangement between the designers and streaming platform owners.About "conventional form of consoles", there's an ongoing talk in the industry about getting rid of the physical console, and the concept's been toyed with for years now. Console manufacturers would love to get rid of the risk and cost of making the hardware; game publishers would love not to pay console manufacturers the fee for every game sold on their system. So we'll either end up with "Xbox" and "PS" subscriptions for game streaming, or even better, with many competing stores, just selling game streaming services for everyone, without the old-fashioned concept of being tied to a game console / system.
I can imagine this concept being more beneficial than harmful to gaming in the long run, but only if multiple viable streaming services come into existence. If no-one succeeds at it (in the near future), I'd be fine with that. If only Google succeeds... that would be the worst scenario out of the three, in my not-at-all-unbiased opinion.
Last edited by Anarchic Fox; 20th Nov 2019 at 15:33.
I've never been a fan of taking more and more actual processing away from the end user's device, and making her/him dependent on some service provider. Quite the opposite, actually. This makes me think of corporate greed mostly, rather than user's convenience.
I mean this depends - for a very extremely casual gamer, who doesn't want to deal with anything, and just play games it might be good, but that provided it's implemented correctly and working as intended, which usually isn't the case with present solutions
But for me personally, the idea is awful - not only am i making myself fully dependent on the service provider, which can discontinue it at own whim, i don't even posess the copy of the game in any tangible form, making it impossible to secure it. And one of the most obvious things - this makes modifying games or extracting data from their assets impossible for these who want to tinker with it, which has always been a huge part of gaming, especially on PC.
I really hope this isn't going to become the most widely accepted and common form of gaming in the future.
Theres is a lot in there that doesn't really add up. You can't tinker with console game assets and actually that aspect of PC gaming really shouldn't be on a game makers radar.
Of course it's supposed to work as intended. And aren't you dependent upon the service provider if your game has DRM anyway?
I don't buy games with DRM, that's why I only use GOG. And aside of it, if you have a local copy of the game data, the DRM can potentially be cracked. With full streaming no such option even exists. Everything adds up perfectly in what I said.
Guess it must do if you say it does then.
I mean aside of the console games bit you mentioned. I've been talking in terms of PCs more than anything, and hypothesising about possible adoption of such business model in the PC ecosystem rather than just consoles.
Well it doesn't really make sense for PCs since they are generally the power behind the game. You'd only use a streaming game service if you were essentially using the PC as a screen.
Why even talk about this in the context of the PC gaming world, which tends towards machines that are custom built for power? The point of Stadia is you don't need a £1000 computer to play games, you can use your 50 inch 4K Smart TV for it.
Extracting data and assets from games is breaking their EULA, and modding has been largely ignored by big publishers, absent in AAA games for quite some time now. If you want to learn making stuff, you get one of the free engines available, buy tutorials, asset packs, go to schools, etc. For majority of gamers this doesn't matter, as yeah, they just want to play games.
Just remember that EULAs often include several unenforcable clauses depending on your local laws. These clauses are almost always added so the publisher can attempt to pursue legal action if something notable does happen. In this situation they will likely try to pursue legal action citing the EULA, even if the section being violated is not legally enforcable in the region, and they may be able to settle a case that would have fallen apart in court if the defendant doesn't think they have enough resources to fight it. In the US there's always the arbitration and jurisdiction clauses to push things more in favour of the publisher, with them being able to select a jurisdiction and arbiter who will be favourable to them.
As far as extracting data/assets from a product, there may still be grounds for a Fair Use defense if it is done as a learning experience and not for any kind of profit. But a publisher is very unlikely to go after someone tinkering with a (non-multiplayer) game in their home for personal use. They're far more concerned with people either developing anti-DRM measures or acquiring assets for use in anything being distributed to other people.
Saying this you're literally questioning the point of creating things like fan missions for the very game series this forum is about. I don't know about tendencies concerning latest AAA games, simply because i rarely play them, bar few ones, but PC modding scene has always been a significamt aspect of gaming on IBM PCs. And i don't mean this in the context of "just learning to make stuff from ground up" as you mentioned, and i know that you don't need to start with modding if you want to acquire this knowledge, but this is not my point. Are you trying to say that you support banning game mods because they might possibly infringe on some EULA's clauses (aside of the fact it isn't always bound to do so, depending on the type and complexity of the mod and specific EULA)?
This seems to not have ever been really solved, it's been and still remains a grey area, as you can read here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_(v...status_of_mods
Besides, who said that forbidding modding in EULAs if a good practice and we shouldn't question or oppose it?
And EULA trying to ban and penalise game modding is IMO an awful EULA.
I'm not impying any of the ridiculous conclusions you've drawn above. I'm simply saying that modding is largely irrelevant, in the big picture. It was a talent pool back in the day, but that's not how you get to the industry now.
Ah I see. I wasn't talking about mods as the gateway to be employed by game dev studios though. My point while discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Stadia was just modding for the sake of it and playing modded games. Yeah, I think there was a big misunderstanding between us, nevermind then.
Geforce Now properly launched, and it's been quite the mess. They ended up adding the unsupported games feature back in after user demand, only to remove it again. They've only announced the special 'founders pricing' - a 3 months free trial followed by $5/mo for the rest of the year (but if you cancel at any time, you lose that rate, and instead it goes to an as yet unannounced rate). Now, here's the real kicker - it seems they didn't work out their publisher deals well enough, so games are disappearing from the service left and right. Capcom, Konami, Square Enix, Bethesda (minus Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Quake II RTX for whatever reason), EA, Rockstar - all of their games disappeared, largely without warning, one publisher at a time. Now, as you can imagine, games from those publishers are the main reason to use the service - playing new AAA games on a potato was the main appeal. Not only that, but people were purchasing games with the expectation that they could play them on Geforce Now, only to have those games unexpectedly vanish from the service a couple days later. Now, to be fair, some of these games may be returning - Namco Bandai was removed then added back. They claim things will stabilize more once the founders' trial period is over, but it remains to be seen whether the end result will be a service worth using. For me, I was looking forward to playing Doom Eternal and Resident Evil 3, so we'll see if they make it back to the service. At least they've pledged support for Cyberpunk.
Google Stadia is shutting down on Jan 18th next year. That's hardly a surprise, I suppose, since I haven't heard that name in a long time, and I don't know anyone who has actually tried that thing.
I would have been interested to see how well it works in practice (now I guess it's too late) to be honest, and I'm quite surprised that Stadia turned out to be such a failure, but I'm also sort of glad that it never really took off. I would have hated to see someone like Google have such a significant role in gaming. Apparently Google is refunding all Stadia purchases to the customers though, so fair play to them.
Stadia was always "Maybe this time will be different" but without any credible reason to expect it to be different.
And that's both as a game streaming service and as a Google product.
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