Snow Cone Capone posted:

No it didn't

Blotto_Otter posted:

Extremely strong entry in the "completely unhelpful but technically correct" genre of posts

Snow Cone Capone posted:

Nobody who owned a WiiU (lol) bought a Switch specifically for BOTW.

Andrast posted:

Nobody owns or has ever owned a Wii U so it's effectively exlusive

Frohike999 posted:

I really get why it doesn't make sense for people that game a lot, but to me the tech is interesting enough that I'd like to try it out. I really don't get why people feel so strongly about this one way or the other.

Tired Moritz posted:

Because we hate the rich

Blotto_Otter posted:

Kanos posted:

Because of this:


To elaborate, there's a very viscerally negative response to the Stadia and a gleeful desire to see it crash and burn for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that the big name video game industry is in an atrociously terrible place now with regards to rampant, unchecked capitalism. On the miraculous off-chance Stadia doesn't join the Google Graveyard, it represents another crack in the wall of any form of consumer power or control over the end product that the notoriously horrible AAA game companies will notice and try to exploit as ruthlessly as they possibly can, just like they've ruthlessly exploited every other anti-customer trend the industry has scented like vultures around carrion.

Frohike999 posted:

Fair enough, I don't really buy into the need for physical ownership of a game but I get it. I guess I currently play mostly budget/indie games currently anyway despite how AAA game companies are right now, so I'm guessing that's not going to change for me. If those same games don't come to Stadia because Google has a deal with the big game companies I'll likely get bored of it anyway.

Thanks for actually giving a reasonable response here.

Snow Cone Capone posted:

Also, to keep Scott Pilgrim as an example - if you bought it before it was delisted, you can still play it. However, Stadia's market plan is restrictive enough that I don't think it would be impossible to see Sony or MS or Valve tighten their grip and declare "actually even if you bought the game you can't play it anymore" somehow. All-digital distribution just makes it way, way too easy for people other than yourself to decide how/when/where you can use the software you legally own.

Snow Cone Capone posted:

However, Stadia's market plan is restrictive enough that I don't think it would be impossible to see Sony or MS or Valve tighten their grip and declare "actually even if you bought the game you can't play it anymore" somehow. All-digital distribution just makes it way, way too easy for people other than yourself to decide how/when/where you can use the software you legally own.

Whalley posted:

For a really recent example of this, Microsoft just took down all their books. If you bought anything from their ebook library or their ebookstore, you don't have it any more. It's not a case of "oh but you can have it without DRM" - it's just gone.

They issued refunds to people who requested them, but they weren't mandated to do that. This could easily happen with Stadia.

Andrast posted:

Nobody owns or has ever owned a Wii U so it's effectively exlusive

Pablo Nergigante posted:

I still own a Wii U

Blotto_Otter posted:

That will happen with Stadia, and on a much shorter timescale than we currently see digital download shops closing down. Services like the Wii Shop Channel stayed up for years after the system was no longer on sale in part because digital download storefronts are not that expensive to maintain. Streaming services are considerably more expensive to maintain, so the financial incentive to delist games or close down services will be much greater than on a digital download storefront. The inflection point at which the cost to maintain the servers for a game is greater than the revenue being made from game sales is going to come much, much earlier for a streaming service than for a download service.

Snow Cone Capone posted:

The difference is that the Wii Shop still lets you access and download content you already paid for before it closed. In Microsoft's case, even books you already have in your device's local storage will no longer work, due to the DRM. Stadia could go either way and it would be a huge difference.

Illusive gently caress Man posted:

what if stadia has a secret purpose? we all get inexpensive high def gaming for a few years and then a fully trained deepmind starts taking everyone out with sick headshots and qte knife kills.

Barudak posted:

Uh stadia streaming implicitly means theres no local copy so i dont know what you think you could possibly own.

Sandepande posted:

So far I haven't felt too horrible about this, but partially because so far I have unlimited access to all the (digital) titles I've ever paid for - if (or when) that changes, I may get miffed. Who knows, maybe Valve will start requiring a separate subscription to get that unlimited access, and free accounts are saddled with a download cap... But crap service means that customers go elsewhere, and I'm pretty certain that there's not a shortage of companies willing to provide something more worthwhile.

Or not.

Maybe I'll stick to tabletop rpgs.

Kanos posted:

Unfortunately, the idealistic operation of the free market - where someone offering garbage services or products is ousted by someone offering a better one - doesn't actually work at all in most cases in real life due to the realities of entrenched capital, monopolization, and the sheer levels of investment competition in some of these fields take to even get off the ground. If Stadia somehow takes over gaming and everyone falls over themselves to sign deals with Google to make money and consolidates Stadia's position and power in the market, Plucky Startup B isn't going to come out with a viable alternative because Google has infinite resources and connections in place to simply swat any potential competition with no effort. For an extra fun real-life example of this in real-life action, read about what happens whenever anyone tries to compete with entrenched telecom companies in the U.S. - either they get priced out of the market by entrenched interests or the telecom monopolies use their wealth and power to motivate legislatures and courts to stamp out the nuisance.

Also, even if competition manages to come into being as a response to lovely practices and service in an entrenched market, the new competition typically isn't free of its own problems(because it likely had to do some lovely stuff to get to the point of being able to compete in that market in the first place!) and almost never ends up pulling the window back to the not-lovely place it was at before. See the practice of console companies charging for their online multiplayer; once it became en vogue, note that everyone jumped on the bandwagon because it was free money and now there's no alternative if you want to play multiplayer video games on a console. Some of the services may offer add-ons to the subscription that make it more palatable(PSN+ games, XBox game pass, etc) but the point remains that you're now being charged for a fundamental function of your console that used to be free and since everyone is now doing it it's never going back to being free because there's no incentive.

OxMan posted:

Whatever happened to the games people owned on OnLive after it shut down? Same thing right, just gone forever?

quote:

During a Reddit AMA today, Stadia's director of product, Andrey Doronichev, said this is a question that the team gets a lot. And he understands how people might be afraid to move to the cloud.

"I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary," he said. "I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days "

Doronichev went on to say that movies, photos, and documents have all generally moved to the cloud, and that has generally gone well. The same can be true for games, he said.

"The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great! Games are no different. Eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too and we'll feel great about it," Doronichev said. "We've been investing a ton in tech, infrastructure and partnerships over the past few years. Nothing in life is certain, but we’re committed to making Stadia a success."

Doronichev added that Google Stadia will support the "Takeout" feature from day one. This allows players to download the metadata of their games, including game saves. However, games themselves cannot be downloaded, so if Stadia shuts down, players may not be able to access their games.

"Of course, it’s OK to doubt my words," Doronichev said. "There's nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't. But what we can do is to launch the service and continue investing in it for years to come. Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos. That’s exactly what we’re committed to."

Kerning Chameleon posted:

Don't worry about losing your games guys, Stadia's director has it all well in hand:

quote:

To be clear, Stadia Pro is not “Netflix for Games” like some people have mentioned

Fallom posted:

Woah I thought they cancelled this thing

Blotto_Otter posted:

https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1158754601543319561

Can't wait to find out that, after several months of additional consideration and development, Stadia's business plan still doesn't make a lick of sense

Super Jay Mann posted:

Why does this exist again?

Not even being snarky, months and months of information and I'm still not sure what it is Google is actually selling.