This is the thing that baffles me the most. You pay the full price for games you don't even own? At least with Steam there's the possibility of downloading your library in case Steam ever goes away for whatever reason.

The other thing is - they must, must be playing the multi-year long game here. Infrastructure around the world just isn't ready for game streaming.

Having said that, from what I hear GeForce Now is giving people a FAR better experience than Stadia.

Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out? I never got the impression anyone was dying to get their hands on it. They could have given it another year of polish at least and nobody would have complained, surely?

I'd love to hear Google's internal rationale for why they thought this pricing model was a good idea.

"At least with Steam there's the possibility of downloading your library in case Steam ever goes away for whatever reason."

Most games on Steam require activation through Steam servers, so unlikely. Also in case Steam went under, there would most likely be legal issues at play, preventing Steam from issuing any sort of no DRM fix.

Cracking the steam DRM seems like a case of dropping a dll

Yep, Pretty much everything on steam has a crack. You can't do this with streamed games.

The Steam DRM doesn't appear to be too terribly difficult to crack, considering there are so many cracks of steam games out there.

A few possible reasons:

1. You can't foresee competition, why give up early.

2. It's a big market, worth a shot even if it fails.

3. Someone thought the project would be good for their promotion. This happens more frequently than you might think :)

You’re probably right, but worth a shot even if it fails is a terrible reason. Not only will they screw over their customers, but they’ll get even more of a reputation for doing so than they have already.

If you keep on moving fast and breaking things, people who don’t like it when you break their stuff are going to think twice about trusting you.

Item 3.... Google's promotion process is heavily biased towards launching of new products

>Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out?

The reason for that is as you say, they're playing the long game here. They know it won't make money, not today, not next year, not in 3 years. But in 10 years it could make billions. And getting actual user data and feedback early while you're building the architecture is probably worth a lot.

>At least with Steam there's the possibility of downloading your library in case Steam ever goes away for whatever reason.

It's also much cheaper in most case. In average I paid less than 5$ per game on Steam (and that include many full price games).

I agree with most of what you say.

One thing: some pockets of the world do have good enough internet already, and they are only going to multiply.

Even with the most amazing internet, there is nothing less reliable than a network.

I've traveled in so many countries, and the ones with the best fiber in the world can't guaranty a stable ping for the entire day.

This is what makes so many online games frustrating. I played MOBAs for a long time, and there is nothing more irritating than losing because you didn't get an information at the right time.

Now a non multiplayer game is not real time, so you can put mitigation measures in place, but it can't fix everything, especially for games where the rhythm is important: plateformers, FPS, racing games, etc.

We put up with it in multi-players game because there is no alternative.

But are you going to tolerate than sometimes, randomly, you are going to die because the network had a spike in ping when playing Mario or Cod when you could play comfortably on your TV locally ?

Remember the joke: videos games don't make kids violent. The lag does.

Oh, I was mostly interested in Stadia (but never played it), when I was looking to play some single player games that my local machine couldn't handle.

I wouldn't mind the occasional bad lag nearly as much as in a competitive multiplayer fast-reactions game.

I guess you don't intend to play dark soul :)

I can play that on the Nintendo Switch in my hand. No need for the extra graphics power.

I was thinking of eg XCOM 2.

Yeah turn by turn is a perfect use case.

It doesn't have to be that way either. Nvidia is offering a service which streams games you've already purchased off Steam et el. If their service shuts down you still get to keep your games.

Nvidia is already having issues with major publishers pulling games saying they don't have a license to install and use them that way. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

I fail to see how it should be any different legally. If I pick up my pc and put it in a datacenter and stream the video output that would be perfectly fine.

In this case the game is already installed on the image/server belonging to Nvidia. Perhaps hundreds or thousands of times. And I suppose they did pay for those copies and the argument is that it's like you are just borrowing their PC to play a game. But I think the counter-argument is that this is more in the realms of "performance" similar to how you can't just buy a music CD and play it in a bar for an audience.

I have no idea what the legal ramifications really are, but I don't think there's anything morally wrong with the service they are providing. If companies really believed in the whole "selling a license" thing more of them would be willing to provide cross-platform copies for free once you own one instead of grabbing another sale.

I would _have_ to imagine that if this were the case, they would issue full refunds. It'd be inviting some class action cases and it's almost certainly a drop in the bucket for them anyway.

Why full refunds? People have used the games. At most they'd offer partial refunds, and those could be much lower than what people hope for.

There is precedent: Microsoft issued full refunds for everyone that had bought digital books from them when they shut the store down last year.

It's even worse than that. Even if they add a download option, you can't be sure if any of your games will run on your hardware.

As a developer, you have an additional burden of testing on and optimizing for Google's hardware, which are apparently different from consumer hardware.