Be Excellent To Each Other

a) I posted this just over a year ago (top of the previous page):

Unless it goes free tomorrow, with all that shit they talked about before launch, y'know, you're watching a YouTube video about a game, or an advertisement for a game and it has a 'PLAY NOW' button next to it and 10 seconds later you're playing the game? Unless that stuff comes really soon, Stadia is dead. If it isn't already.

And that links into (b) which is basically that Google told a fuckload of lies about what Stadia was and what it would do, and I made the mistake of believing some of their horseshit.

I said right from the start that if it's just another OnLive it'll fail. That's what it turned out to be, and it did.

Some not exactly edifying details now starting to come out of Google and how they lied to and mistreated the Stadia team and devs.

If you think about it, the dev cycle for a single game these days is three years plus, the people who joined Stadia thought they'd at least get to make one game, and many uprooted their lives based on an assurance they'd get to do so. Also Phil Harrison blatantly lied to them a mere week before them then being told the plug was being pulled.

https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-pr ... 1846281384

Full refunds for all hardware and software though. That's pretty awesome

He's right!

It lasted longer than I was expecting it to, in fairness.

Another plot filled in the Google Graveyard.

That is, yeah, but not telling your game devs isn’t…

Apparently there's quite a lot of this going on, seems Google didn't give anyone advance notice of it, including their own staff.

Also some worry about the games that were Stadia exclusives simply disappearing forever.

Plus the 17 people who did use the service heavily face seeing all their progress in games like RDR2, Cyberpunk 2077 and suchlike being lost.

To this day I don't know anyone who went anywhere near Stadia, and I'm very much a nerdy videogamer who moves in nerdy videogamer circles.

It's the ultimate iteration of an answer to a question no one was asking.

Also has Phil Harrison ever been involved with anything that wasn't a total fuck-up?

So that's it, now officially turned off. It's got its plot in the Google Graveyard and it lasted a little over three years.

I have an upgraded 100GB Google account and I'm sure they sent me something at some point basically offering me free Stadia, and even at that price I wasn't interested.

Forumy boi takes the point on this one.

I wouldn't mind one of the controllers now they've implemented Bluetooth support in them.

1 forumy boi

I wonder how much money was sunk into it (I'd reckon, quite a lot) and if any of the technology will be reused or repurposed somehow.

It seems like such a promising idea but one that'd be hard/expensive/not worth the hassle to make into reality, and that's kind of a shame.

Game streaming works pretty well now, but even despite having fibre to our house and all that I think it's still a somewhat degraded experience compared to games running locally. This just failed because the pricing structure seemingly took no account of this fact. That and a piss poor games catalogue.

One thing you can't knock Google for is their refund policy, whereby everyone gets all their money back and gets to keep any hardware, such as the controller, which as TheVision points out, actually makes quite a nice Bluetooth controller for other stuff, and Google didn't have to enable that.

If you look back at the the history of this thread I was initially persuaded to change my mind a bit when the talk about the cool promised unique tech started, like you're watching a video of a game demo on YouTube, you press a button and 10 seconds later you're playing the demo on Stadia, but none of that stuff ever happened.

So all we were left with is a sub-optimal gaming experience, with a limited games catalogue that was also very expensive, and largely comprised of stuff that'd been on existing platforms for months or years anyway. (Plus once details of the pricing structure started to emerge, we were all like, 'Dafuq? No one's going to go for that', again all documented in this thread.)

Also it had loads of technical issues out of the gate, which in fairness Google did get on top of within a few weeks and months, but as the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

It all smacks to me of a big tech company that just didn't really understand the space it was getting into, which is exactly what's happened with Amazon and their forays into the world of videogames.

I mean, sheesh, if you can't make a success of a streaming gaming platform when everyone's stuck in their houses during a global pandemic and it's almost impossible to buy gaming traditional consoles and graphics cards, you know you gone done fucked up.

Mate, I'm getting the feeling you're not a fan of Stadia

Mate, I'm getting the feeling you're thinking that you were the only one that wasn't a fan of Stadia

Stadia was shit, game streaming works well though, I've used it on game pass quite a bit.

The Stadia tech was very impressive, but the pricing model was appalling. Where's the sales pitch in paying more money, for old games, that only work well on great internet, and you don't even remotely own?

It needed to be a 'Netflix Of Games' and the second it failed on that count, it was doomed. (I appreciate there's a whole lot of work and licensing involved to achieve that, but didn't anyone think about that early on?) Add in the superb GamePass offering on XBox/PC, along with the XBox Cloud thingy that came along as an ADDITION to their top-tier option, not being the whole thing. (Plus all the cool stuff they promised early on, and then they killed off their own development studios, so they would never have any cool exclusive IP.) And there were/are the equivalents on PS4/PS5 too as well.

So yeah, nice tech, shite implementation as as service, with a pricing model thought up by a crackhead on the arse end of a 48 hour rock-smoking bender.

But do you like it?

I'm ambivalent.