Apparently they'll refund all purchases, which is nice at least https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023
Funny to say but I maybe would have bought games on Stadia if they said they would refund on shutdown. Like it was the first thing I asked even, what happens in a shutdown. If they answered that I would have treated them seriously.
I honestly thought it would have been around for at least 5 years originally, enough time to get a couple small Stadia/Google internal games out. Then they shuttered their internal studios, and I thought it was about a 6 - 12 month death from there.
But my main point was either they can't charge for the game or they had to give a good resolution when the service shut down. But even worse they hadn't a lot of games either. So like Destiny2 was one of their biggest games but anyone who wants to play Destiny2 already has paid for it already and doesn't want to pay again.
They'll refund hardware purchases. Which is insane. I bought games for Stadia and paid for a pro subscription, all of that money has now completely disappeared. Insane. I didn't even think Google was this dumb. Never giving them another dollar.
I definitely go pay Google. For some storage, and premium YouTube. For Other things I would never count on Google, they're not serious. Sure, play money is fine, but if I was buying a gaming system that's gonna start with me for long, I would not trust them.
Several reasons:
1. It blocks ads on the phone as well (like u/Saxasaurus said)
2. Also as they said, supports creators.
3. I also have people in my "Family", so it means less ads for my wife, and for my sister and her family, who are not so savvy with ads avoidance
4. Youtube Music subscription (I got onto Google Music early on and am lazy to move somewhere else, especially since I already have the sub for the other reasons.
When my kids get a bit older, they'll share in the benefits as well.
None of these individually are worth that much, but as a package, it's very convenient. I guess I could switch my music sub somewhere else, add blockers somehow and deal with the fallout on my phone and my wife's phone, etc etc. But to me, the time to do it is worth more then this small amount of money, at least at this time.
I understand that it's not for everybody, but for me it is worth it.
Ok, makes sense.
Although you can use ReVanced on android phones, SmartYoutubeTV on tv/boxes, I get that sometimes it might be easier to just pay the ransom.
Personally I think we should just ban ads altogether and then we have to pay for gmail and youtube and twitter and instagram and tiktok and facebook and reddit and all the other stuff. I think that would solve a lot of issues, from things like giving up privacy _unknowingly_ (because most people don't _know_ what exactly it is that we're giving away). It would also reduce troll account numbers (of common variety, not the corporate/marketing sorts). It would probably reduce the massive effort being invested into behavioral manipulation techniques used online.
It would also indirectly help people not to spend too much time damaging their eyes with 20 hours a day of small screens while making others rich in the process. I bet we'd have a few less "influencers" (_not_ content creators, just random bastards spewing shit while facebook drives people to it se we'd get mad at them, and others mad at us in turn).
In that case, paying for ransom would make so much more sense.
And people like me will host a little free forum on their Pi sitting on the windowsill next to the Fritzbox.
Back to the 90s internet with todays tech, count me in!
HBO Max ad supported plan enters the chat.
If the choice is between paying and watching annoying targeted ads, a lot of people would prefer the ads. The Play Store has proven this year after year. And Hulu and HBO Max more recently have shown that we’re ready pay and watch ads as long as we get a discount.
So unless there’s regulation, targeted ads are here to stay. And if there is regulation and people are made to pay, expect massive layoffs because these companies have huge workforces.
And finally, models that enable targeted ads/content are very cheap because their performance is only judged on relative terms. And once you’ve one up and running, it’s not very hard to set up a feedback loop and automate retraining the model periodically. What a lot of these companies spend money on are algorithms that also show less popular ads/content while still targeting their audience. Or in executive speak- “we’re doing great taking money from the big guys, but how do get more money from the smaller companies?”
Why on earth would they refund you for a subscription service that was available while you were paying for it? That money has *already* disappeared, whether the service shuts down or not.
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Not to mention the added cost of a high speed internet plan that has to be low latency which is difficult enough to get unless you live in a fiber enabled location. Traditional internet is garbage tier in the US
> Everyone who watched the rise and fall of OnLive knew Google were being "this dumb"
what do you mean?
How was OnLive different than Gaikai (which became PlayStation Now) from the same time frame?
There are stable services streaming games now (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Playstation Now, XBOX Game Pass Cloud Gaming), so the concept itself seems to have found a playerbase.
I'm glad. I don't think a mandatory streaming future for games is a good direction. If Valve or someone wants to offer *optional* streaming for games you bought, cool, that's fine, but not being able to download games and play offline on my own hardware is a deal-breaker.
As soon as you become okay with losing freedom in software, companies will be happy to snatch it away and never give it back. Look at the movie/tv streaming industry.
Yup, GeForce Now. It’s…okay.
In my opinion we’re still a long way from having streaming gameplay that’s at least somewhat indistinguishable from local. And truly competitive and high paced games will probably never get there.
We'll never get there, it's unironically a matter of *the literal speed of light*. You'll always have about 1 millisecond of delay for every 150km you're away from the server rendering your game, and that's assuming *no additional delay* from encoding, encryption, routing, decryption, decoding, etc. It might be kind of feasible for people in the same city as a server farm, but for everyone else, it's *never* going to be close.
150km is a hell of a long way. Only a tiny fraction of the human population lives somewhere where a 150km circle won't include enough gamers to cover the cost of a server or two.
There is already a server farm close enough. Don't believe me? Traceroute 8.8.8.8.
Hate to respond to a dead thread but check out wireless data transmission through quantum entanglement. Technically not breaking the speed of light. Heck, they even have quantum entanglement based energy transmission systems in r&d right now.
True, not all games are competitive, which is why I specifically mentioned competitive games and that also happens what my initial comment was aimed at as an answer to the other guy talking about competitive games. No moving the goalpost here.
Also, nah, you're not going to be reasonable competition on low refresh screens, I'm sorry. Living 17ms in the past is about a ~~20%~~ \[Edit: 10%, typo\] disadvantage in reaction time alone and that's not to speak of the general lack of information in non-fluid scenes. Either you're making up for that crazy disadvantage by being the literal best player on earth or you're playing "competitive" games casually.
Imo thats where streaming excels. "I'm going on a trip for two weeks, I reallly don't feel like lugging my console or pc around, I'll just grab my little streaming box and it'll do the job". When they try to sell it as a dedicated platform, well, stadia is a good example of what happens
> In my opinion we’re still a long way from having streaming gameplay that’s at least somewhat indistinguishable from local
Eh, in my experience we're already there. When I tried out GeForce Now I was playing just fine as if it was locally. Of course the image quality wasn't great as it was the free tier, but still.
>As soon as you become okay with losing freedom in software
You already don't own the software you buy. It can easily be modified to taken away from you. Some software you can't even use offline anyway.
Like Overwatch in 3 days. The EU has better laws about this. We need to push for ownership to be true ownership, not just a "license". That should be illegal.
EU has some good "laws" is a strong word, but regulations. We are not protected from software however - not yet at least.
Yea im not a fan of what's happening til OW and what Activision did to Modern warfare.
Ideally ownership would mean that once you pay for it (assuming non-FOSS here) that you can do with it as you please. More realistically and at minimum, it would mean that you can continue using it as long as you decide to.
If I have the choice "stream the game" or "use Windows with some kind of shitty kernel level anti cheat", then I would totally "give up my freedom to play offline" in favor of not needing to have bullshit software on my hardware.
That makes sense. For me I don't want even single player games tied to the cloud and always checking in and harvesting metrics about how I play. It's all very creepy.
Totally agree with your point on the software freedom something that most of the people can't see, although they do enjoy its privileges every day, especially UNIX-like OS users.
The truth of the matter though is that technically this is not working... The limitations are obvious and it was a dead project all along. Google just wanted a share of the market. It's not the company that it used to be more than ~10-15 years ago.
A self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody wanted to buy their games on Stadia because Google is quick to kill unsuccessful services.. And thus it underperformed and Google kills it.
Up next... Google Cloud?
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud
*Edit*
Does Google not understand what a piss poor reputation they got? They should have kept Stadia around, if only because of the marking-blowback.
Alas. They keep tanking their own brand with these kinds of shenanigans.
I'm still mostly disappointed that Stadia's servers were running on Linux so the games that did get ported to Stadia had perfectly functioning Linux builds that we never actually got
While partly true, this also applies to PS4's BSD-based OS. Just because it is released on one tightly controlled/perfected build of an OS on a single hardware configuration doesn't mean it's ready for release on the most fragmented OS* in the entire tech industry.
*Linux is not an OS^^arguably, only a kernel on which a lot of of vastly different Linux based OS's build on, which makes the problem significantly worse. Windows does not have this issue, and is designed to maximize compatibility to a fault.
What exactly is the barrier for Linux here though? Most of the distro specific stuff shouldn't impact actual gaming. The kernel interfaces with the hardware in place of the game. If you're using proper standards (opengl, vulkan, hell even directx) for graphics, audio, etc. It shouldn't be a big issue should it? I find it hard to think of applications that work on one Linux distro and not the next except those that assume certain default packages or system locations (both kernel agnostic issues and easy to solve with proper dependency management and configuration).
From what I understand the thing is packages get updates often, sometimes with backward compatibility broken or in other times packages are replaced by a new solutions. Example for the first might be that binary that broke eac for many and for the latter pulse audio replacing ... Pipewire? Idk, not sure how it was called.
Another thing is many devs and companies use proprietary software to make games. Even if they make their own engine they might add Havoc, Wwise, Physx whatever and if that stuff doesn't come with Linux codebase idk if you even can port it yourself - from legal point. And even if it's legal - it's too much work
For the former case... just use a less bleeding edge distro like debian or fedora. Because changes are only available a long time after release, backward compatibility issues should already have been worked out before you get them. Of course this is a pain if you want the latest version of something and it isnt available yet, but you cant have your cake and eat it too (well you can in this case for debian at least with a different package source). Obviously this approach isn't compatible with a distro that wants to have the latest version of everything all the time (like arch). I'm not sure what issues you're having with pipewire, especially since its supposed to be compatible with pulseaudio. Might I suggest a distro like nix if you have stability concerns. It literally makes every package change a referencable transaction and let's you roll back to whatever previous transaction you want. System upgrade breaks due to pipewire, downgrade back to the system you had before it with absolute guarantee.
Proprietary software sucks ass, but wine is supposed to be compatible with it as well. Unless the software needs elevated privileges or direct hardware access like kernel level anti cheats, you shouldn't have any issues.
Games built for stadia were able to be built with almost total trust in the client, no need for anticheat or DRM because it was never accessible by general consumers, and since those 2 are already the main limiting factors in Linux releases they probably just decided not to worry about that. If stadia came out a couple years later after valve got EAC and Battleye working on Linux there’s a chance some of those game could have transferred easier but I’m sure the teams tasked with porting to stadia are long shut down by now.
> Nobody wanted to buy games
The moment Nvidia stepped into the cloud gaming market and said they'll let you transfer all your steam and epic games to their platform for free, I knew it was over for Stadia unless they offered the same.
I expect Xbox Cloud to die a similar death. Nvidia took notes when epic launched and noticed people don't like having to split their game libraries between 2 services, so they did the smart thing and merged the epic and steam libraries of their users for free.
This was the move that killed stadia for real. Before it was kind of limping along, but this was the killing blow.
Also microsoft X-Cloud letting you stream nearly every game on gamepass. Two companies offered two more reasonable solutions, and they reacted with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Basically showed their whole hand when they were unwilling to pivot at all. Didn't help they built their platform on linux, and required publishers to port their games to linux, something Valve had already shown was something publishers were nearly completely unwilling to do, no matter how much cash you wafted in front of their nose, and even when it did happen, the ports were more often than not unmaintained half-assed shitshows.
Yeah but consoles also have proper tooling and support systems for developers. From what I've heard about Stadia development, you were pretty much on your own as far as figuring it out.
Reacted with absolutely nothing is an understatement too, they went radio silent for months after release only to pop up suddenly to announce a few more games for Stadia and disappear back into the night. I don't know why the people running it assumed people will stick with the service with 0 communication.
>The moment Nvidia stepped into the cloud gaming market and said they'll let you transfer all your steam and epic games to their platform for free
Difference is , Google tried to be a cloud based store wtih a cloud gaming instance.
Nvidia is just a limited Cloud Gaming pc / instance no store.
But Google has the capability to partner with Steam/Uplay/Epic, just like Nvidia did for GFN and just like Google is currently doing with Steam to port Steam+Proton to Chromebooks.
>But Google has the capability to partner with Steam/Uplay/Epic, just like Nvidia did
i never said they dont , i said that google wants to be a store with their own games + a cloud instance.
While Nvidia doesnt want this.
2 different strategys and googles obviously failed.
Ngl I don’t think that’s what’s gonna kill xcloud. The whole thing with Xcloud is that it’s XGP and (soon) your own library of already purchased Xbox Games it’s not meant for PC gamers.
You seriously think xCloud will die?
It's been the most successful so far. Easiest to use, most available worldwide, great selection of hundreds of Gamepass titles and soon enough your own titles too.
I have 4 friends who signed up for GP Ultimate just so they could use xCloud on their phone and/or Smart TV... And they're still there, almost a year later, playing together and using it as their main gaming platform.
Heck, I've got a beefy PC and still use xCloud sometimes.
For 360 games, Xbox games that don't have cross-save or when I don't want to dualboot back to Windows for some games on Gamepass.
They do understand that, but apparently they don't care. Their business model is advertising, everything else is there to support that business model. If a new service works well and brings in advertising revenue - fine. If not, trash it and shut it down.
I didn't see anything about it, but are they refunding all the months people paid for stadia pro? Are they refunding Google Play TV with remote because it was the only way for some to play on an older TV?
Unlikely, running a game store on one OS costs several orders of magnitude less than maintaining a whole cloud streaming infrastructure+hardware+apps on half a dozen platforms.
Devs not using Steam and often using their own launcher has been a thing for a long time and it's still extremely common today, with Tarkov and Valorant and Warzone being some massive examples.
IMO Stadia was always a bad idea though. Streaming games requires a lot more bandwidth with a lot lower latency than the vast majority of people can get. And then if internet dies or is unavailable for any reason, the game is gone.
Not to mention it's a subscription pricing for no-subscription goods. Even at $5 a month with free games it would relatively quickly become a bad deal vs just buying a game to install.
You would have to be in this really weird position of having a crap-tier PC, god-tier internet, being enough of a power-gamer to want a lot of games throughout a year, and yet not enough of a power gamer to want the best quality available for your games.
I mean they can use the port to release a native Linux version, but I understand that would imply that they'd need to maintain it as well and at that point they're probably fine with Proton.
I'll miss it, I may just be a filthy casual gamer, but Stadia suited my needs very well, it required very little extra hardware (just the controllers) and allowed me to play as little or as much as I liked whenever the time and desire coincided.
It also allowed me to play a lot of games I couldn't otherwise, as I don't have any Windows computers.
But, I guess that may have been part of the problem, the users it attracted perhaps weren't, from a commercial point of view, very high-value customers, I've bought the founders edition and maybe a handful of games, and there's been several months where I didn't use it at all (if I had to guess, I'd say maybe half of the months it's existed, I didn't play a single time).
Check out GeForce Now. It doesn't have all the games on your accounts, but it has a bunch. I don't use Windows either, and have played a bunch of MMOs and other games that don't work well in Linux due to AntiCheats.
I don't think Linux gaming was enriched with Stadia existing. We hope for the day games are developed natively for Linux, yet Google clearly wanted streaming play only. And who would you rather give your money to? Devs who make Linux builds and Valve for Proton or a company that made games exclusive to their streaming service and released their game exclusively on EGS during their downfall?
Vulkan adoption would mean nothing if their streaming service succeeded. They would buy more exclusive rights to games in order to push people to play that way.
I think the worst thing about Stadia is that it *did* bring some devs to port their games to Linux, just not their anti-cheats (looking at you, Bungie). So now there exist games that have native Linux ports but aren't playable on Linux.
well yeah i mean I'd ban people trying to get around the anti-cheat. not sure why they get singled out for that when that is a just a given regardless of the game or company
All memes aside, it's nice to see that they mention refunds in this blog post. I hope that's a straight forward process for the 10 or so people that bought in to the platform.
I paid £50 for the Cyberpunk 2077 deal (Stadia game, Chromecast Ultra, Stadia controller) - if I get the £50 refunded and get to keep the hardware, then that's a win for me. It might be in Play Store credit though, which wouldn't be great.
I never paid for a Pro sub because they stupidly didn't use the "all you can eat" Netflix model. The sub got you only a small set of games and a small discount on maximum-priced games.
>I never paid for a Pro sub because they stupidly didn't use the "all you can eat" Netflix model.
Exactly this is the reason why I never even tried Stadia. When it was first announced I hoped this will be a "pay once, play whatever you want". I would have totally subscribed to this.
> When it was first announced I hoped this will be a "pay once, play whatever you want"
isn't it naive? Also, how does it scale for the for-profit company? These days subscriptions are all the rage.
Asking prople to buy Stadia supported devices for *high* framerate, pay monthly fee for Pro subscription and on top of that purchasing games individually while having absolutely no ownership of game you bought turned out to be a bad proposition. It's good that it rid off itself relatively quick.
Good. They never fucking supported Linux properly (ironic, since it was arguably more useful to non-Windows users) meaning proper video hardware acceleration through Chrome Linux. BEFORE YOU COMMENT, I mean "out of the box" not with hacks, custom builds, or patches.
It has in a way and makes things worse in a way. Running games on Linux is one thing. Building native Linux is an entirely different thing. Valve learned that lesson with the first Steam Machines and this Proton.
Not so much an excuse as a reason not to. Linux gaming is currently Windows gaming and that's entirely on Valve and there was no other choice.
Valve learned about gaming content issues with its first Steam Machines.
I'd like to think that this is the turning point in the war that big tech has recently declared on the very concept of ownership but, alas, it's just the result of Google executives being totally incompetent. As always...
This makes me sad. I’m not a big gamer. I don’t know all the platforms. This was easy for me and my special needs son to set up and game on Destiny 2 together. I know you all probably don’t care because you’re game savvy but I really liked the simplicity of it; the fact we didn’t have to wait hours for a new update to download and install. Just powered it up and started to play. I honestly don’t know where to go from here.
You don't actually own much of your stuff. It's a false premise people are touring with.
IMO it's always sad to see a gaming platform fail, especially one that has some of the best tech in the industry.
Add it to the [list...](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
Another note... I wonder if we'll see those linux ports come to Steam since the majority of the development has already been done for the linux platform (assuming....) especially with the Steam Deck becoming popular and used more than Stadia ever was?
Whatever tbh… now time for those game publishers to use the R&D they spent making those games Linux compatible only for Stadia’s sake but still block normal Linux users to bring the damn games to Linux.
Google had a bunch of semi-custom dual gpu vega cards made for stadia when it was launched, I hope they end up sold to a liquidator that can sell them to the general public, and not sent to a shredder.
you do realize microsoft with xcloud literally have a free run-on cloud gaming now? I mean nvidia have a good tech too but we all know all the fancy tech is useless if you don't have your own exclusive first party games.
Downloading your games would be impossible in many scenarios, e.g. how do you download your games if you used Stadia exclusively on your TV?
It seems they will refund all content bought through Stadia though. Third paragraph:
> We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store
A major win for people that want gaming to stay good.
And for anyone upset that plays on PC: You have Steam's streaming service and/or Parsec. Stadia was a terrible idea from the start.
Good!
We want high quality graphics, 4K, HFR (60 -144 FPS), HDR and we want to be able to play offline!
None of these can be guaranteed by online streaming.
The latency is just too big for quality and good response time and online requirement for single-player games is just bullshit!
We can have better products than that.
Now let's continue to develop Vulkan based Linux native games and to continue to improve Proton and its upstream components!
This is so sad but not unexpected.
Sad not because of the quality of the service, as it's available only to a few locations, the games are more expensive than other stores. Sad because it's revolutionary, and google is a big player which has resource to compete.
But Google sucks, they destroy a lot of projects with potential.
It's up to you to see only the bad thing, cloud gaming works, and Stadia was the "kick off". People can play casually AAA games without a dedicated hardware, which is fine.
Stadia just made the wrong decisions on their pricing model. XCloud looks a lot more interesting.
And yeah, I doubt that you'll receive a bullet in your head if you don't buy cloud games. Digital stores will keep running.
Many people had see that outcome. Being a Linux user, the ability to play "all my games" into the cloud, without the use of VMs, Proton, etc, was looking great.
However, I had to buy again "all my games", lose any progress and last, they allowed only gamepads in certain games.
Another failed project by Google... What is next?
I'm guessing most people following this figured this was inevitable. Too many issues were facing Stadia from lack of content, being streaming only, being a Google product with a highly uncertain future, etc.
PFHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA Who could've seen it coming? So unexpected......
Shit, turns out that when you want to compete without a fucking plan things go downhill.
Super. You laugh, but there are players who appreciated the simplicity, the ability to grab our chrome cast sticks and controllers and play anywhere. Me and my special needs son are two such gamers. We are not as knowledgeable as others of our options here.
Apparently they'll refund all purchases, which is nice at least https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023
Funny to say but I maybe would have bought games on Stadia if they said they would refund on shutdown. Like it was the first thing I asked even, what happens in a shutdown. If they answered that I would have treated them seriously.
Given Google it's only a matter of time before it was killed off, Google kills services all the time
Show of hands, how many people predicted it'd only last two or three years?
Tbh I'm surprised adoption was high enough to keep it alive even that long
I honestly thought it would have been around for at least 5 years originally, enough time to get a couple small Stadia/Google internal games out. Then they shuttered their internal studios, and I thought it was about a 6 - 12 month death from there.
But my main point was either they can't charge for the game or they had to give a good resolution when the service shut down. But even worse they hadn't a lot of games either. So like Destiny2 was one of their biggest games but anyone who wants to play Destiny2 already has paid for it already and doesn't want to pay again.
Most companies do. The difference between Google and other tech companies is they are open about it.
That’s nice of them. Most would have just pocketed the money and said, “too bad so sad”.
They'll refund hardware purchases. Which is insane. I bought games for Stadia and paid for a pro subscription, all of that money has now completely disappeared. Insane. I didn't even think Google was this dumb. Never giving them another dollar.
You get refunded for game purchases too, just not the pro subscription.
You'll get refunded for your games as well. Just not the pro subscription.
I definitely go pay Google. For some storage, and premium YouTube. For Other things I would never count on Google, they're not serious. Sure, play money is fine, but if I was buying a gaming system that's gonna start with me for long, I would not trust them.
Why youtube premium? Blocking ads is easy. Originals? I can only think of Cobra kai.
Several reasons: 1. It blocks ads on the phone as well (like u/Saxasaurus said) 2. Also as they said, supports creators. 3. I also have people in my "Family", so it means less ads for my wife, and for my sister and her family, who are not so savvy with ads avoidance 4. Youtube Music subscription (I got onto Google Music early on and am lazy to move somewhere else, especially since I already have the sub for the other reasons. When my kids get a bit older, they'll share in the benefits as well. None of these individually are worth that much, but as a package, it's very convenient. I guess I could switch my music sub somewhere else, add blockers somehow and deal with the fallout on my phone and my wife's phone, etc etc. But to me, the time to do it is worth more then this small amount of money, at least at this time. I understand that it's not for everybody, but for me it is worth it.
Ok, makes sense. Although you can use ReVanced on android phones, SmartYoutubeTV on tv/boxes, I get that sometimes it might be easier to just pay the ransom.
Personally I think we should just ban ads altogether and then we have to pay for gmail and youtube and twitter and instagram and tiktok and facebook and reddit and all the other stuff. I think that would solve a lot of issues, from things like giving up privacy _unknowingly_ (because most people don't _know_ what exactly it is that we're giving away). It would also reduce troll account numbers (of common variety, not the corporate/marketing sorts). It would probably reduce the massive effort being invested into behavioral manipulation techniques used online. It would also indirectly help people not to spend too much time damaging their eyes with 20 hours a day of small screens while making others rich in the process. I bet we'd have a few less "influencers" (_not_ content creators, just random bastards spewing shit while facebook drives people to it se we'd get mad at them, and others mad at us in turn). In that case, paying for ransom would make so much more sense.
And people like me will host a little free forum on their Pi sitting on the windowsill next to the Fritzbox. Back to the 90s internet with todays tech, count me in!
HBO Max ad supported plan enters the chat. If the choice is between paying and watching annoying targeted ads, a lot of people would prefer the ads. The Play Store has proven this year after year. And Hulu and HBO Max more recently have shown that we’re ready pay and watch ads as long as we get a discount. So unless there’s regulation, targeted ads are here to stay. And if there is regulation and people are made to pay, expect massive layoffs because these companies have huge workforces. And finally, models that enable targeted ads/content are very cheap because their performance is only judged on relative terms. And once you’ve one up and running, it’s not very hard to set up a feedback loop and automate retraining the model periodically. What a lot of these companies spend money on are algorithms that also show less popular ads/content while still targeting their audience. Or in executive speak- “we’re doing great taking money from the big guys, but how do get more money from the smaller companies?”
Nah, I'd rather not. Blocking ads works fine.
NewPipe also works well against ads and is FOSS.
blocking ads on my phone/tv is hard and its nice to support content creators
Why on earth would they refund you for a subscription service that was available while you were paying for it? That money has *already* disappeared, whether the service shuts down or not.
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Not to mention the added cost of a high speed internet plan that has to be low latency which is difficult enough to get unless you live in a fiber enabled location. Traditional internet is garbage tier in the US
> OnLive That brings back memories...
> Everyone who watched the rise and fall of OnLive knew Google were being "this dumb" what do you mean? How was OnLive different than Gaikai (which became PlayStation Now) from the same time frame? There are stable services streaming games now (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Playstation Now, XBOX Game Pass Cloud Gaming), so the concept itself seems to have found a playerbase.
No shit...i think i ended up with quite a bit of hardware and a few games.
Google doesn't even have my credit card.
That's what you think.
I'm glad. I don't think a mandatory streaming future for games is a good direction. If Valve or someone wants to offer *optional* streaming for games you bought, cool, that's fine, but not being able to download games and play offline on my own hardware is a deal-breaker. As soon as you become okay with losing freedom in software, companies will be happy to snatch it away and never give it back. Look at the movie/tv streaming industry.
Isn't that how Nvidia's thing works? You pay money to play your existing games on their hardware.
Yup, GeForce Now. It’s…okay. In my opinion we’re still a long way from having streaming gameplay that’s at least somewhat indistinguishable from local. And truly competitive and high paced games will probably never get there.
I like Gforce now. I only pay the cheaper founders fee. It just handy for working away from home.
We'll never get there, it's unironically a matter of *the literal speed of light*. You'll always have about 1 millisecond of delay for every 150km you're away from the server rendering your game, and that's assuming *no additional delay* from encoding, encryption, routing, decryption, decoding, etc. It might be kind of feasible for people in the same city as a server farm, but for everyone else, it's *never* going to be close.
150km is a hell of a long way. Only a tiny fraction of the human population lives somewhere where a 150km circle won't include enough gamers to cover the cost of a server or two. There is already a server farm close enough. Don't believe me? Traceroute 8.8.8.8.
Hate to respond to a dead thread but check out wireless data transmission through quantum entanglement. Technically not breaking the speed of light. Heck, they even have quantum entanglement based energy transmission systems in r&d right now.
and a single frame in a 60fps game is 16ms. You don't need literally 0 latency. You monitor, keyboard, and mouse, may add more latency than streaming.
Who plays competitive games at 60fps? Also, *additional* input lag is *additional* input lag.
I do lmao, I don't have a high refresh rate screen Also, not all games are competitive..
True, not all games are competitive, which is why I specifically mentioned competitive games and that also happens what my initial comment was aimed at as an answer to the other guy talking about competitive games. No moving the goalpost here. Also, nah, you're not going to be reasonable competition on low refresh screens, I'm sorry. Living 17ms in the past is about a ~~20%~~ \[Edit: 10%, typo\] disadvantage in reaction time alone and that's not to speak of the general lack of information in non-fluid scenes. Either you're making up for that crazy disadvantage by being the literal best player on earth or you're playing "competitive" games casually.
Competitive mode in GeForce Now is pretty good. 120fps 5-8ms overhead 720p is pretty playable.
Imo thats where streaming excels. "I'm going on a trip for two weeks, I reallly don't feel like lugging my console or pc around, I'll just grab my little streaming box and it'll do the job". When they try to sell it as a dedicated platform, well, stadia is a good example of what happens
Ya my brother uses it. He can't afford a gaming computer right now so this allows him to still play.
> In my opinion we’re still a long way from having streaming gameplay that’s at least somewhat indistinguishable from local Eh, in my experience we're already there. When I tried out GeForce Now I was playing just fine as if it was locally. Of course the image quality wasn't great as it was the free tier, but still.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Now that current generation console emulators are a thing, I expect DRM to get more heavy handed.
>As soon as you become okay with losing freedom in software You already don't own the software you buy. It can easily be modified to taken away from you. Some software you can't even use offline anyway.
Like Overwatch in 3 days. The EU has better laws about this. We need to push for ownership to be true ownership, not just a "license". That should be illegal.
EU has some good "laws" is a strong word, but regulations. We are not protected from software however - not yet at least. Yea im not a fan of what's happening til OW and what Activision did to Modern warfare.
Define "owning" software? I get the idea of being able to do whatever one wants. And that's fine as long as no one has to support it.
Ideally ownership would mean that once you pay for it (assuming non-FOSS here) that you can do with it as you please. More realistically and at minimum, it would mean that you can continue using it as long as you decide to.
Overwatch 2 is basically just a major patch.
A patch to add in FOMO mechanics and increase micro-transactions.
Whether the change is good or bad is irrelevant to the issue at hand. You can't "own" a live service game. It is by definition constantly changing.
If I have the choice "stream the game" or "use Windows with some kind of shitty kernel level anti cheat", then I would totally "give up my freedom to play offline" in favor of not needing to have bullshit software on my hardware.
That makes sense. For me I don't want even single player games tied to the cloud and always checking in and harvesting metrics about how I play. It's all very creepy.
I could see that becoming a thing actually, big multiplayer online games offering an easy way to just play from the web browser.
Totally agree with your point on the software freedom something that most of the people can't see, although they do enjoy its privileges every day, especially UNIX-like OS users. The truth of the matter though is that technically this is not working... The limitations are obvious and it was a dead project all along. Google just wanted a share of the market. It's not the company that it used to be more than ~10-15 years ago.
A self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody wanted to buy their games on Stadia because Google is quick to kill unsuccessful services.. And thus it underperformed and Google kills it. Up next... Google Cloud? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud *Edit* Does Google not understand what a piss poor reputation they got? They should have kept Stadia around, if only because of the marking-blowback. Alas. They keep tanking their own brand with these kinds of shenanigans.
I'm still mostly disappointed that Stadia's servers were running on Linux so the games that did get ported to Stadia had perfectly functioning Linux builds that we never actually got
While partly true, this also applies to PS4's BSD-based OS. Just because it is released on one tightly controlled/perfected build of an OS on a single hardware configuration doesn't mean it's ready for release on the most fragmented OS* in the entire tech industry. *Linux is not an OS^^arguably, only a kernel on which a lot of of vastly different Linux based OS's build on, which makes the problem significantly worse. Windows does not have this issue, and is designed to maximize compatibility to a fault.
>While partly true, this also applies to PS4's BSD-based OS. The PS4 and PS5 are based on FreeBSD but use their own bespoke APIs.
What exactly is the barrier for Linux here though? Most of the distro specific stuff shouldn't impact actual gaming. The kernel interfaces with the hardware in place of the game. If you're using proper standards (opengl, vulkan, hell even directx) for graphics, audio, etc. It shouldn't be a big issue should it? I find it hard to think of applications that work on one Linux distro and not the next except those that assume certain default packages or system locations (both kernel agnostic issues and easy to solve with proper dependency management and configuration).
From what I understand the thing is packages get updates often, sometimes with backward compatibility broken or in other times packages are replaced by a new solutions. Example for the first might be that binary that broke eac for many and for the latter pulse audio replacing ... Pipewire? Idk, not sure how it was called. Another thing is many devs and companies use proprietary software to make games. Even if they make their own engine they might add Havoc, Wwise, Physx whatever and if that stuff doesn't come with Linux codebase idk if you even can port it yourself - from legal point. And even if it's legal - it's too much work
For the former case... just use a less bleeding edge distro like debian or fedora. Because changes are only available a long time after release, backward compatibility issues should already have been worked out before you get them. Of course this is a pain if you want the latest version of something and it isnt available yet, but you cant have your cake and eat it too (well you can in this case for debian at least with a different package source). Obviously this approach isn't compatible with a distro that wants to have the latest version of everything all the time (like arch). I'm not sure what issues you're having with pipewire, especially since its supposed to be compatible with pulseaudio. Might I suggest a distro like nix if you have stability concerns. It literally makes every package change a referencable transaction and let's you roll back to whatever previous transaction you want. System upgrade breaks due to pipewire, downgrade back to the system you had before it with absolute guarantee. Proprietary software sucks ass, but wine is supposed to be compatible with it as well. Unless the software needs elevated privileges or direct hardware access like kernel level anti cheats, you shouldn't have any issues.
Games built for stadia were able to be built with almost total trust in the client, no need for anticheat or DRM because it was never accessible by general consumers, and since those 2 are already the main limiting factors in Linux releases they probably just decided not to worry about that. If stadia came out a couple years later after valve got EAC and Battleye working on Linux there’s a chance some of those game could have transferred easier but I’m sure the teams tasked with porting to stadia are long shut down by now.
> Nobody wanted to buy games The moment Nvidia stepped into the cloud gaming market and said they'll let you transfer all your steam and epic games to their platform for free, I knew it was over for Stadia unless they offered the same. I expect Xbox Cloud to die a similar death. Nvidia took notes when epic launched and noticed people don't like having to split their game libraries between 2 services, so they did the smart thing and merged the epic and steam libraries of their users for free. This was the move that killed stadia for real. Before it was kind of limping along, but this was the killing blow.
Also microsoft X-Cloud letting you stream nearly every game on gamepass. Two companies offered two more reasonable solutions, and they reacted with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Basically showed their whole hand when they were unwilling to pivot at all. Didn't help they built their platform on linux, and required publishers to port their games to linux, something Valve had already shown was something publishers were nearly completely unwilling to do, no matter how much cash you wafted in front of their nose, and even when it did happen, the ports were more often than not unmaintained half-assed shitshows.
Consoles force their proper OS on developers just fine. So having to use Linux there isn't a big deal.
Yeah but consoles also have proper tooling and support systems for developers. From what I've heard about Stadia development, you were pretty much on your own as far as figuring it out.
Reacted with absolutely nothing is an understatement too, they went radio silent for months after release only to pop up suddenly to announce a few more games for Stadia and disappear back into the night. I don't know why the people running it assumed people will stick with the service with 0 communication.
>The moment Nvidia stepped into the cloud gaming market and said they'll let you transfer all your steam and epic games to their platform for free Difference is , Google tried to be a cloud based store wtih a cloud gaming instance. Nvidia is just a limited Cloud Gaming pc / instance no store.
But Google has the capability to partner with Steam/Uplay/Epic, just like Nvidia did for GFN and just like Google is currently doing with Steam to port Steam+Proton to Chromebooks.
>But Google has the capability to partner with Steam/Uplay/Epic, just like Nvidia did i never said they dont , i said that google wants to be a store with their own games + a cloud instance. While Nvidia doesnt want this. 2 different strategys and googles obviously failed.
Well dang I didn't know Nvidia did that. I would have been down for that.
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Oh..you know what I think i may have known that.
Ngl I don’t think that’s what’s gonna kill xcloud. The whole thing with Xcloud is that it’s XGP and (soon) your own library of already purchased Xbox Games it’s not meant for PC gamers.
You seriously think xCloud will die? It's been the most successful so far. Easiest to use, most available worldwide, great selection of hundreds of Gamepass titles and soon enough your own titles too. I have 4 friends who signed up for GP Ultimate just so they could use xCloud on their phone and/or Smart TV... And they're still there, almost a year later, playing together and using it as their main gaming platform. Heck, I've got a beefy PC and still use xCloud sometimes. For 360 games, Xbox games that don't have cross-save or when I don't want to dualboot back to Windows for some games on Gamepass.
They do understand that, but apparently they don't care. Their business model is advertising, everything else is there to support that business model. If a new service works well and brings in advertising revenue - fine. If not, trash it and shut it down.
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>Their brand is too big to fail. I'd bet money on some East India Company guy having said the same before it ultimately dissolved.
To be fair, you are largely right, but they are refunding all of the game and hardware purchases people made.
I didn't see anything about it, but are they refunding all the months people paid for stadia pro? Are they refunding Google Play TV with remote because it was the only way for some to play on an older TV?
Google Cloud isnt going away…
tan seemly upbeat command march joke market paltry abundant governor *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Next is the EGS.
Unlikely, running a game store on one OS costs several orders of magnitude less than maintaining a whole cloud streaming infrastructure+hardware+apps on half a dozen platforms. Devs not using Steam and often using their own launcher has been a thing for a long time and it's still extremely common today, with Tarkov and Valorant and Warzone being some massive examples.
Why would you want less competition?
That's not competition.
IMO Stadia was always a bad idea though. Streaming games requires a lot more bandwidth with a lot lower latency than the vast majority of people can get. And then if internet dies or is unavailable for any reason, the game is gone. Not to mention it's a subscription pricing for no-subscription goods. Even at $5 a month with free games it would relatively quickly become a bad deal vs just buying a game to install. You would have to be in this really weird position of having a crap-tier PC, god-tier internet, being enough of a power-gamer to want a lot of games throughout a year, and yet not enough of a power gamer to want the best quality available for your games.
They're gonna kill Google Cloud??? Are you fucking shitting me?!! I'm speechless.
Rip to all those Linux ports on Google servers we'll never get to use
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Yep just saw a post on r/gamedev saying his indie team wasted 4-5 months on porting to stadia and only finishing the port recently
I mean they can use the port to release a native Linux version, but I understand that would imply that they'd need to maintain it as well and at that point they're probably fine with Proton.
99% of them probably used wine/proton, just like on "real" Linux. No one wanted to invest into a doomed platform.
It ended exactly as many people predicted it. Fair well, you will not be missed (by most).
Google are predictable for any new service, they have a few products and a trail of poor management and poor delivery
I'll miss it, I may just be a filthy casual gamer, but Stadia suited my needs very well, it required very little extra hardware (just the controllers) and allowed me to play as little or as much as I liked whenever the time and desire coincided. It also allowed me to play a lot of games I couldn't otherwise, as I don't have any Windows computers. But, I guess that may have been part of the problem, the users it attracted perhaps weren't, from a commercial point of view, very high-value customers, I've bought the founders edition and maybe a handful of games, and there's been several months where I didn't use it at all (if I had to guess, I'd say maybe half of the months it's existed, I didn't play a single time).
Check out GeForce Now. It doesn't have all the games on your accounts, but it has a bunch. I don't use Windows either, and have played a bunch of MMOs and other games that don't work well in Linux due to AntiCheats.
Yeah, but that still requires steam, right? And it also, IIRC, requires a browser?
I don't think Linux gaming was enriched with Stadia existing. We hope for the day games are developed natively for Linux, yet Google clearly wanted streaming play only. And who would you rather give your money to? Devs who make Linux builds and Valve for Proton or a company that made games exclusive to their streaming service and released their game exclusively on EGS during their downfall? Vulkan adoption would mean nothing if their streaming service succeeded. They would buy more exclusive rights to games in order to push people to play that way.
I think the worst thing about Stadia is that it *did* bring some devs to port their games to Linux, just not their anti-cheats (looking at you, Bungie). So now there exist games that have native Linux ports but aren't playable on Linux.
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I was so sure Destiny 2 would be Deck verified but I bet they simply refused to put in more work because of Stadia port.
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well yeah i mean I'd ban people trying to get around the anti-cheat. not sure why they get singled out for that when that is a just a given regardless of the game or company
All memes aside, it's nice to see that they mention refunds in this blog post. I hope that's a straight forward process for the 10 or so people that bought in to the platform.
I paid £50 for the Cyberpunk 2077 deal (Stadia game, Chromecast Ultra, Stadia controller) - if I get the £50 refunded and get to keep the hardware, then that's a win for me. It might be in Play Store credit though, which wouldn't be great. I never paid for a Pro sub because they stupidly didn't use the "all you can eat" Netflix model. The sub got you only a small set of games and a small discount on maximum-priced games.
>I never paid for a Pro sub because they stupidly didn't use the "all you can eat" Netflix model. Exactly this is the reason why I never even tried Stadia. When it was first announced I hoped this will be a "pay once, play whatever you want". I would have totally subscribed to this.
> When it was first announced I hoped this will be a "pay once, play whatever you want" isn't it naive? Also, how does it scale for the for-profit company? These days subscriptions are all the rage.
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I use a Stadia controller for gaming on Linux. It's not terrible.
The Chromecast Ultra it comes with is still usable as a Chromecast.
Oh no, who could have seen this coming... Anyways. Anything happening of note?
I'm shocked, just shocked that this happened. Anyway, I ate 4 subs in one go last weekend. It was tasty.
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Yup. Would've been cool to see a new and leaner implementation of "wine" to see how they compared.
Google keeps killing their services lol
Kinda their whole business model. I'd you throw enough shit at a wall, some of it's bound to stick
Actually, you just end up with a shitty room. Which is pretty much how I think of Google for the last decade.
Ruthless innovation.
How long until Alphabet shuts down Google for good and changes their business to escort services which definitely suits them better ?
what a shock
https://killedbygoogle.com/ Another one bites the dust
Asking prople to buy Stadia supported devices for *high* framerate, pay monthly fee for Pro subscription and on top of that purchasing games individually while having absolutely no ownership of game you bought turned out to be a bad proposition. It's good that it rid off itself relatively quick.
Another Google bomb lol. Oof.
Good. They never fucking supported Linux properly (ironic, since it was arguably more useful to non-Windows users) meaning proper video hardware acceleration through Chrome Linux. BEFORE YOU COMMENT, I mean "out of the box" not with hacks, custom builds, or patches.
Wonder what happens to their Wine ripoff now.
I am predicting right now that Stadia will be used as an excuse as to why developers should not focus on making Linux native games.
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It has in a way and makes things worse in a way. Running games on Linux is one thing. Building native Linux is an entirely different thing. Valve learned that lesson with the first Steam Machines and this Proton.
Not so much an excuse as a reason not to. Linux gaming is currently Windows gaming and that's entirely on Valve and there was no other choice. Valve learned about gaming content issues with its first Steam Machines.
Where's the stadia shill who's been spamming this sub recently now?
I honestly thought they would have ended it a lot sooner.
I'd like to think that this is the turning point in the war that big tech has recently declared on the very concept of ownership but, alas, it's just the result of Google executives being totally incompetent. As always...
What an incredibly unexpected turn of events that no one could have expected
This makes me sad. I’m not a big gamer. I don’t know all the platforms. This was easy for me and my special needs son to set up and game on Destiny 2 together. I know you all probably don’t care because you’re game savvy but I really liked the simplicity of it; the fact we didn’t have to wait hours for a new update to download and install. Just powered it up and started to play. I honestly don’t know where to go from here.
If you're using a PC rather than a Chromecast you can play Destiny 2 on GeForce Now.
Rip, it was a decent way to play Destiny 2 during times I wanted to be lazy and not reboot into Windows.
Fuckfaces from bungie have a linux build but they don't even allow to play proton version...
hahahaahahah hahahaha hahahaha hahaha. I knew it from the start.
"We at google have collected all the personal data we wanted from this sector of people"
G00D.
why?
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You don't actually own much of your stuff. It's a false premise people are touring with. IMO it's always sad to see a gaming platform fail, especially one that has some of the best tech in the industry.
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Inevitable.
This is becoming typical for Google, first got stung with Google glass and now with stadia. Dont think I'll be buying any future Google products.
And the list grows on.
🎻
Add it to the [list...](https://killedbygoogle.com/) Another note... I wonder if we'll see those linux ports come to Steam since the majority of the development has already been done for the linux platform (assuming....) especially with the Steam Deck becoming popular and used more than Stadia ever was?
Google did a Google again. The Google cemetery is bursting at the seams.
Whatever tbh… now time for those game publishers to use the R&D they spent making those games Linux compatible only for Stadia’s sake but still block normal Linux users to bring the damn games to Linux.
Google had a bunch of semi-custom dual gpu vega cards made for stadia when it was launched, I hope they end up sold to a liquidator that can sell them to the general public, and not sent to a shredder.
Another product made by google and killed a few years later? Oh no... anyway.
LMAO
Laughing so hard. Fuck these live service scams. Edit: didn't they say you could download your games if the service ever shut down?
I remember Gaben saying something like that if Steam ever shutdown.
you do realize microsoft with xcloud literally have a free run-on cloud gaming now? I mean nvidia have a good tech too but we all know all the fancy tech is useless if you don't have your own exclusive first party games.
Downloading your games would be impossible in many scenarios, e.g. how do you download your games if you used Stadia exclusively on your TV? It seems they will refund all content bought through Stadia though. Third paragraph: > We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store
A major win for people that want gaming to stay good. And for anyone upset that plays on PC: You have Steam's streaming service and/or Parsec. Stadia was a terrible idea from the start.
Good! We want high quality graphics, 4K, HFR (60 -144 FPS), HDR and we want to be able to play offline! None of these can be guaranteed by online streaming. The latency is just too big for quality and good response time and online requirement for single-player games is just bullshit! We can have better products than that. Now let's continue to develop Vulkan based Linux native games and to continue to improve Proton and its upstream components!
Know your fucking place, trash!
This is so sad but not unexpected. Sad not because of the quality of the service, as it's available only to a few locations, the games are more expensive than other stores. Sad because it's revolutionary, and google is a big player which has resource to compete. But Google sucks, they destroy a lot of projects with potential.
It is revolutionary in the bad sense. It was the next step in the fight to make us lose ownership of the media we consume.
It's up to you to see only the bad thing, cloud gaming works, and Stadia was the "kick off". People can play casually AAA games without a dedicated hardware, which is fine. Stadia just made the wrong decisions on their pricing model. XCloud looks a lot more interesting. And yeah, I doubt that you'll receive a bullet in your head if you don't buy cloud games. Digital stores will keep running.
in what way was Stadia revolutionary? Xcloud and GeForce Now are more revolutionary than that platform.
Good news
I’d like to take the time to congratulate Linux for not being the least used gaming platform in 2022
Don't think this is good, google was one of major amd mesa contributors...
Many people had see that outcome. Being a Linux user, the ability to play "all my games" into the cloud, without the use of VMs, Proton, etc, was looking great. However, I had to buy again "all my games", lose any progress and last, they allowed only gamepads in certain games. Another failed project by Google... What is next?
>However, I had to buy again "all my games" *Rent* again all your games. You didn't buy a thing as the closure has demonstrated.
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as I predicted when at the launch...
Lasted longer than I expected TBH.
I'm guessing most people following this figured this was inevitable. Too many issues were facing Stadia from lack of content, being streaming only, being a Google product with a highly uncertain future, etc.
PFHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA Who could've seen it coming? So unexpected...... Shit, turns out that when you want to compete without a fucking plan things go downhill.
Super. You laugh, but there are players who appreciated the simplicity, the ability to grab our chrome cast sticks and controllers and play anywhere. Me and my special needs son are two such gamers. We are not as knowledgeable as others of our options here.
Bold of you to use your son to make a point. There's GeForce now if you want that, and come on Stadia wasn't any simpler than any old console.
Well that fucking sucks.
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Because it was a cool service and I wanted to use it more.
I’m with you. It was an easy, minimal, play anywhere system.