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Penny Arcade - Comic - Stadioid
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Stadioid
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Stadia is trying to tap into a new market that Google thinks is underserved - people who have high speed internet but, for whatever reason, can't have a console. I suspect that niche is smaller than Google thinks, but admittedly the low buy-in price will probably lure in a lot of casual gamers, who are kind of the ideal market for this anyways - they'll pay the monthly subscription and not use up too much power/bandwidth.
As for whether Stadia itself will be successful, only time will tell. My money is on Sony/Microsoft, as Google has a history of abandoning projects that aren't immediately successful and both have existing infrastructure and libraries to leverage their own streaming services, but Stadia is the kick in the ass they needed to actually start pushing their own pitiful streaming initiatives.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Imagine all the bullshit around Youtube, only now it's happening to what games you can play. The clickbait, the beefs, the drama, the waves of demonetizations, people who've built their livelihoods on the platform suddenly losing them, the media smear pieces, Google's ham fisted over reactions.
You think Google will be happy with Stadia just being this little thing with a few games? They're going to court as many people as they can to turn it into a "utility" for Games, and once they've achieved market dominance and locked it down due to the effect of large networks, then they fuck players, they fuck devs, they fuck streamers, they fuck everyone. They fuck everyone forever. Same as they've done with every other product.
I've seen too many Youtubers be turned into neurotic, anxious messes of human beings chasing Youtube's opaque algorithm to wish it on my worst enemy. Much less game devs I ostensibly like.
Either that, or they decide it's not successful enough and cancel it, and you can say goodbye to all the games you bought on it.
It's one or the other. There is no good outcome to this.
I think maybe you've been missing what Stadia is:
So if you don't usually play a game more than once, Stadia isn't for you.
I own a high-end PC and a PS4 and I will probably still get a few games on Stadia (like baldur's gate and some strategy games, probably). Why? Traveling and portability:
- I want to play games on my mac on the bus.
- I want to play games on my mac at the airport and in hotel rooms when I travel.
- I want to play pc games at a friend's house without lugging around my pc.
- I want to play games when my girlfriend is using the TV (which also doubles as my computer screen).
re: speeds - I honestly think all the naysayers would be shocked at how solid the experience is, from what I've seen. I don't think it's going to be, like, the best way to play Tekken or something, but for the majority of games I reckon it'll be hardly noticeable that you're over the wire.
re: gaming laptops - At this point I've given up on Apple ever getting its shit together wrt gaming on a mac, and I'm never going back to trying Asus/Razer/etc bullshit gaming laptops that break after 6 months.
re: google experiments - Yeah, I am definitely going to be cautious not to go in too hard in case this goes way of the dodo. I'll buy a few games and see how it goes after a year or so.
re: owning games - I'm meh on this. AFAICT I'll be owning my stadia games as much as I own my steam games, so whatever. It'd be sweet if they could figure out a download-your-game thing like GOG does.
re: caps - I feel like this is just another step into the future. Like, netflix and spotify are things that have the same problem at a smaller scale. I think streaming games is just another, larger form of this. If anything, I hope this puts pressure on the ding-dong ISPs like comcast to get their ish together. (I don't have a cap, but if I did I'd prob just stick to steam until my internet situation improves)
That might be an adequate comparison, if Valve had a history of abandoning steam every few years and telling everyone to switch to their new steam service.
I mean, I bought steam games when steam was only out for a couple of months. (orange box IIRC?) /shrug
Like I said elsewhere, I'll probably just cautiously buy a few games for a while and see how things pan out.
Alternatively if they added a "download-your-game" option then I'd feel pretty comfortable, too. (not sure if that's a Hard Thing or something).
Just let all your friends know via Meebo Talk Allo Hangouts Hangouts Chat!
They're called MMOs. And they're quite popular.
Powers &8^]
Not really the same thing at all.
Here we're talking about the exact same games you can buy outside of Stadia, and still have access to when they stop supporting the platform or you cancel it. The only thing that makes it go away is if the developer takes down the servers, or required an additional fee to play.
It should be noted that apart from the "free" games you get as part of the paid Stadia bundle (e.g. Destiny 2), you can drop back to the basic (unpaid) tier of Stadia and still have access to them. You just lose the access to the "free with Stadia" games they add, and any DLC you buy for the bundled games (e.g. Destiny 2 DLC).
The larger worry is Google cancelling the entire thing. In that case, unless they really get generous and give you some cash, you lose all the stuff you bought - online games, offline games, multiplayer games, singleplayer games, etc. It'd be like steam closing down only worse because at least many steam games don't actually require steam to be running.
Anyone supporting stadia and the likes is actively ruining gaming and consumer's right for gamers.
Just being pedantic here, but "Not really the same thing at all" is a stretch. MMO was not a perfect analogy but it is roughly close. I can buy a bunch of cosmetic items in WoW and your statement of "you lose all the stuff you bought [if it shuts down]" still remains true. The whole "losing all your investment" piece is equally true if Steam, Stadia, the Apple store, or an MMO shuts down, assuming you spend equal amounts of money in all [1].
I think the frightening thing about stadia for a lot of people is the feeling that games are taking another step towards not being something they own. But, yeah, since they're not doing the "netflix of games" [2], it doesn't seem to be another step so much as doing the same thing that steam, PSN, and co have been doing for years. In fact AFAICT stadia is basically the PC version of PSN and PS+ except you can run it in chrome [3]. The only thing special about stadia's case is that google has a history of deprecating products. That's a valid reason for concern - and like I mention above, will make me cautious - but I don't think stadia is some special snowflake of evil intentions.
1: Which you can roughly do, minus the fact that steam's store is much larger than the others.
2: Which, ironically, is already a thing vis-a-vis gamepass, ea's thing, ubisoft premium or whatever, etc.
3: Which, btw, I'm sad nobody is as excited about how fucking cool that is. Like, removing the $1000 barrier to entry to PC gaming is so fucking rad. I'm equally excited not to pay that every few years as I am excited that underprivileged kids get to play awesome games.
I think losing an entire library of games would sting much more than losing my ability to play one MMO. Sure, if it's a sub-based MMO there's no telling how much money has been tossed at the game over the years, but I've always felt like I get my money's worth on a monthly basis just by playing the game. I wouldn't feel like they cheated me on the sub money when the time comes to shut the servers down. As for cosmetic items, I think I can count on one hand the number of those I've bought, so no biggie there for me.
But hey, nothing lasts forever. My apartment could burn down tonight and I would be bummed that I lost all my NES, SNES, N64, GCN, PS1, PS2, Wii, and Switch games. Plus all the other stuff I own. You just never know what could happen.
-Tycho Brahe
That's exactly why I prefer digital gaming. If I dust off (literally) an old game, the chances are pretty slim that (1) I can find it (2) it will be in any condition to and (3) it will function with my current computer.
Though honestly, with the library I've built through Humble Bundles and sales, the chances of going back to old games beyond a select few is also slim. And I can tell ahead of time which games will be more replayable. So I could definitely see buying the games I know I will want to revisit and using something like Stadia to play adventure games, walking sims, etc. The games you play through once for the experience and then move on.
My main reservation with Stadia besides it being from Google is that the price gap between "computer good enough to play most games" and "bare minimum to run Stadia" doesn't actually seem that big. I can't see myself purchasing a computer for under $400 in any circumstance, and a $700 computer can run most stuff good enough for me.
Yeah, you get it. And on top of that, you lose games that were costing the publishers zero dollars to keep working. That's why it's not really the same thing at all. We're not just talking about MMOs that cost ongoing money to keep alive every month. People get that there are bills to pay and there's no such thing as a free lunch.
No, we're also talking your offline singleplayer game that doesn't get patches anymore, too. All of them. That you could have just bought elsewhere and would still be fine. Even though you playing them locally (rather than through Stadia) wouldn't cost Google a cent after they (inevitably) shut down the service.
I'm pretty sure the average consumer is perfectly aware of Google's abandoned projects. Because they forced everyone on youtube to integrate their youtube account with Google+, and then dropped it. It's hard to advertise their practice of abandoning projects louder or harder than that.
Also, I totally disagree about local gaming hardware being prices out of the marketplace, and it's entirely incomparable to industrial cloud use cases. The benefits of the cloud for industry is that it adapts almost effortlessly to demand, and you pay for what you use. You don't get saddled with expensive hardware to handle peek demand, only to have it sit fallow 90% of the time. Hell, it's even great for prototyping web services since you can stand up and tear down instances easy as pie.
Fact of the matter is, that's not the use case for gaming. It's especially not the case when enduring classics and evergreen titles, and the hardware to run them, keeps getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. Look at how well the poor little underpowered Switch is doing up against Playstation. We're hitting a point of diminishing returns when it comes to how much hardware power contributes to the quality of the holistic gaming experience.
It's the enthusiast, trying to keep up with the latest and greatest yearly franchise installments or Gaming as a Service titles, and all the social media integration, that might be most tempted to save money on hardware to run the latest and greatest on Stadia. But they are also the most likely to be educated about the pitfalls of trusting Google.
And I'm not sold on that being relevant (though moot), as "the average consumer" just buys a console.
That might just indicate Google is only targeting ads for Stadia at people they think might buy it.
How big a market do you think "playing video games on a bus with wi-fi able to support multiple people streaming video games" is?
There's not even good internet in most of Seattle.
1. I thought it was obvious, but let me be more clear: I was just sharing some examples of the types of situations I personally would use something like stadia. It was partly a counterpoint to the naysayers who are mainly interested in gaming via their static (and expensive) machines/consoles. I was not attempting to justify its existence by defining all the markets and their relevance.
2. I was actually talking about wifi hotspot from my phone, not bus wifi. I'm posting from the bus in question right now with 25mbps from my phone and it has no caps. I don't expect to play 4k or anything but I'm tentatively optimistic I could get 20-30m of some strategy games in when I'm bored.
3. Sorry about the Seattle internet, that sucks.
What makes it really sad is that the people who wrote this strip and most of the people who read it know better by now through the example of age. You're in your forties, you've got a career and a family. Are you preening over fucking ps1 save files in your evenings off? Were you even doing that in your 30's? How about 2 fucking days after you completed it? Name one thing you've ever done on a video game that you went back and referenced later in your life at some point like it was a photo from your childhood or a W-2 form.
The only reason people don't already use Stadia is that it hasn't existed yet. And I don't think it's going to destroy current models.
It just pisses me off that every time something nice comes along, people go through this process of thinking, "Oh! Yeah, that could be cool! But of course there's still BLUUUUUUUUUUUGH ALL THAT OTHER OLD SHIT THAT IM SO LOYAL TO. BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH I'M GOING TO GO COMPLAIN ON THE INTERNET BECAUSE I'M SPOILED AND XENOPHOBIC BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH."
All I can say is that I think if you interviewed 100 random people on a street, maybe 10 of them would remember integrating a youtube account with Google+.
I disagree that this suggests that there isn't a use case here for gaming. Being able to stream a game in a browser means you're essentially only paying for the software. No matter how cheap the hardware is you will pay a hardware cost + software cost, versus a cloud which is just software cost.
I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say. Yes, in the current market the average consumer just buys a console. They gravitate toward the console because of the easy user experience and cheaper price. Is it strange to think that consumers wouldn't be attracted to a platform where they don't need to deal with the console to play the game?
I think it's pretty obvious that Google hasn't started advertising outside of early adopter circles yet. When they decide to start advertising plenty of people outside of the tech-journalism circles will learn about Stadia and remain blissfully ignorant of Google's history with abandoned projects. But to my other point...even if people did know about Google's abandoned projects, would it matter? I think most people really need consistent access to their e-mail accounts. I would say they need their e-mail more than they need their games, and gmail has enormous market share. Google Drive has enormous market share. People use google products consistently in spite of a history of abandoned projects. Also most of the abandoned projects had some level of support, work around, or still exist for users who paid for them.
This sounds like a reasonable rebutal to valid concerns.
The "BLUUUUUUUUUGH"s were a nice touch.
-Tycho Brahe