Sad Australian internet noises.
> don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.
Or, or, do buy the gaming rig, because it will still work and you’ll still have the games 3 years after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing.
If owning games forever is important for you, then buy the hardcopy. For me, being able to play games now on the devices I already own is a huge win.
I guess people who play chess or soccer are "curators" and "collectors" considering how old those "game" concepts are?
Some people may only see video games as a replacement for popcorn movies, a vapid session of watching characters talk about meaningless things and occasionally press a button or two as an illusion of interactivity with something.
But some of us get attached when there's something actually -good- out of it and time memorable beyond the technology used to build it. Thoughtful set of rules that allow a person to either challenge themselves or others. Some of us will always continue to play Starcraft, Counter Strike, Street Fighter or arcade shmups. They don't need a "revision" much like Chess doesn't need to be modified into a game that isn't Chess and soccer doesn't need to become handegg.
Stadia is to gaming what MTV is to music.
Please let others enjoy games the way they like to, also.
I mostly play the same three or four games and have for about a decade. Stuff like KSP and ARMA where save state and modding are extremely important.
I keep going back to these games:
- Knights of the Old Republic (2003)
- Jade Empire (2005)
- Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
- Game Dev Tycoon (2012)
- Long Live The Queen (2012)
- Banished (2014)
Source?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/04/17/nearly-37-o...
>Nearly 37% Of All Registered Steam Games Have Never Been Played
Steam's most played games list tend to change very slowly over time, with a few slots occasionally taken by mediocre "throw away" titles that people consume once and then forget after a few months : https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ In the current month's list, almost all the games most launched on steam are games that are old and have high replay value. Counter Strike, Dota, PUBG, GTA5, PoE, Rocket League.
Outside of steam, one of the most played game of the world is League of Legends. It currently has a 115 million monthly player count, and a 50 millions peak daily logins. Yes, that little competitive PC game has seen more people playing it than the playstation 4 has seen buyers in its lifetime.
The best selling game console by the way only ever saw a few of its titles ever reaching a large player base : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video.... This is known as the Wii's tragedy. The best selling console in the world, but games barely ever sold on it, with people mostly sticking to a few Nintendo's first party games. You could say it's a tiny subgroup that kept financing literally every other games on the platform.
People tend to stick to a few game they consider worth their value and replay them. The people who keep buying new things over and over at $60+ and forget about them after they're ""done"" are a minority among gamers. They're a very attractive archetype for game developers as they tend to be a failsafe for when their games just can't appeal beyond very superficial characteristics but they're not the majority of gamers by far. Most games sold on the market don't sell that many millions and it's always the same group who keeps buying the new shiny thing. The average AAA game tries hard to become an experience akin to movies with their many cutscenes, dialogue and visuals because devs are trying to get the attention of that guy who just keeps buying new shit over and over and throws it away once done.
And that's without counting "casual" type of gamers who also tend to focus on their one or two game and forget about the rest. Of the casuals, the wealthier types who are willing to spend irrationally are what every single mobile game developers wish they had, because the ''whale'' archetype will spend countless grands on just the one game they always play. All the ""free"" video games that have paid for options rely on these people who show extreme loyalty toward the one game. The modern incarnation of Counter Strike subsists from people willing to keep spending insane money just to get a skin that says that they spent hundreds or grands on something that doesn't even give them a competitive advantage.
There is literally no way Google shuts down Stadia and doesn't refund people their money and let them export their save files (you can already do the latter). So no, the worst worst case is that you got to play on Stadia for free and if you really want the game again you can use that money to buy it somewhere else.
( Didgeridont? BTW amazing stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG9ZX1FS20A )
Self-owned gaming rig also nets you backwards compatibility.
I have used Stadia and have been impressed by its relatively seamless "drop in and play" capability.
I'm a happy Stadia user and I'd love for this to be the case, but I think it's incredibly unrealistic. If Stadia shuts down we'll be lucky to get 3 months warning, let alone refunds.
I am worried about Google's ability to actually execute and make this successful, however (And that does give me hesitancy to buying some of the games that are on there, because they aren't transferrable to somewhere else if Stadia is shut down).
For one, with this in-house studio model, they haven't even shipped a single game yet and they're pulling the plug on the approach. That just seems like giving up before they've even tried. But Ok...
As others have said, the single biggest issue with Stadia is not that it doesn't work wonderfully (it does), it is the extremely limited catalog of games available that needs to be addressed. If they can successfully address that, then they really do have a pretty sweet offering that will be tough to beat.
If you can't reach more than one country, why would anyone want to develop for it?
Totally feel for you, but similar to anything that requires a decent internet connection, NZ and AUS get left in the dust
Stadia is in a bunch of countries and rolling out to more. It's almost as though it's a new product and didn't immediately launch at global scale.
The sarcasm does not add anything to your comment.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Or just pay $150 for a second-hand graphics card that is one or two generations behind current models but was top-end at its age, and put it to a basic desktop PC.
Travelling would have been an interesting use (although not interesting enough to buy games a second time), but, well, not a great past year for that.
Yea, I can't imagine that playing AAA (or even indie) games designed for full sized screens is going to translate well on a phone sized screen.
Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.
Apples to Oranges IMO. Stadia is a PC game streaming service, not a physical game console. Google doesn't own the PC game platform, they're just facilitating it.
If Google had never attempted a game studio and launched Stadia as a standalone platform (as it will now be), no one would have said "ok but it's a bad sign that Google isn't getting into the game development business"
> Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.
Probably true. I wish it were a standalone company also, but it's not.
Throwing money at a first party studio was a sign of investment and dedication, though. Had they thrown the money at something else - like developer outreach - sure, that would have been fine. I don't see that as the likely alternate reality had they chosen not to open a studio.
There's zero chance I'm ever going to give Google any support in trying to take over the gaming industry. The best thing they can do is kill Stadia, considering how anti-consumer it is.
> The company plans to begin offering its Stadia tech to publishers, opening up the possibility for Stadia to become the streaming tech for other video game companies.
This alone scares the fuck out of me.
The only thing stopping me from spending more money on games is the fact that I expect it to just evaporate one day and take the games I "bought" with it. Moving to a licensing arrangement to let me play the games I already own/could retain even if Stadia goes away, would help a lot in this regard.
Source?
I know a lot of people, some with children, who have enough income to drop $60 on a game every month without batting an eyelash. Busy people are often a great target market.
These people are mostly Switch players, so Stadia is a perfect upgrade for them.
Busy people are a great market if you have a product that can save them time. Stadia is not that.
Stadia is an upgrade to nothing, as in having Stadia is better than having no way to play games. But an upgrade to a dedicated games console?
Strictly console-wise Stadia is an upgrade to those last-gen consoles. But they really need to get more games on the service because that's what people are there for.
It's also more convenient to just use the screen in front of me (TV, phone, tablet, laptop) than to find my Switch and boot it up.
Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for Stadia to shine, but I'd guess that the HN crowd skews towards that.
If you're an old gamer who wants to play newer games but doesn't have a ton of time and don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.
The game library does leave a lot to be desired, no question about that. But this decision seems to be the right move to mitigate that by giving developers better access to getting their games on Stadia rather than Google trying to be both the platform and the content.