Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud and Stadia could have done the same for game streaming -- any new platform needs it's Super Mario Brothers that makes you rethink what games can be, otherwise players will ignore it.
Isn’t that just Niantic? They spun out of G and made Ingress and Pokemon Go
This with Google's background in long term investments.
And to come back to my point, many of the talks I was referring to, were in the context of Android games and Stadia, most still available online.
I'd contrast that to Meta which has been through various waves of scathing criticism and often comes across as responsive, for instance they've listened a lot to devs about weaknesses in the Quest platform.
Systems of standardized evaluation inevitably get captured by the masters of self-presentation who, in our culture, are narcissists and psychopaths.
The person who is stuck at the bottom will be humble but as you go up systems like that filter for morally worse people. You might as well try summoning demons.
And yet towards the end Stadia had a plethora of games from multiple big name studios (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar) and a ton of indie games.
Where Google screwed up with Stadia was expecting it to hit big immediately, being a bit slow with games, not talking enough about it and the games that were actually on it, not advertising what their shutdown plan is.
The vast vast vast majority of Stadia negative commentary was about how Google will shut it down, and "there are no games". The second point wasn't true for the majority of the platform's existence, but nobody bothered to check because they were afraid of Google killing it. If everyone knew Google will reimburse all game purchases, and they advertised stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, EA's latest hits, and they managed to bring in the big studios a bit earlier (when I started using it about a year in, RDR2 was the only big game I cared about; GTA V would have been massive to have too), it would have been a massive hit. A lot of people would game casually on a basically-no-hardware-required platform.
To this day Xbox Cloud Gaming isn't close, performance and UX wise. GeForce Now is good performance wise, but UX is meh. Stadia was a golden opportunity for Google but they just blew it.
Go search for last edition of Stadia developer conference, where something like Proton for Stadia was announced, alongside the acknowledgement it wasn't working as expected.
Ubisoft's whole catalogue going all the way back to Black Flag, RDR2, EA's latest titles (FIFA, Star Wars), Cyberpunk, and tons of indie games (I had Premium, every month I got ~2 new indie games; by the end I had something like 50+ games).
What do you mean by this?
Wargaming it though there is no such thing as a "128GB world" from the player's perspective and for a long time high-end games have used many tricks to shoehorn huge worlds into small boxes such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_San_Andreas
which was released for the PS2 with just 36MB of RAM! A "128GB world" that is cheaply developed could probably be crunched into a 8GB world that looks good enough with an expensive development process (you need much more out of your systems programmers and artists.) To make something that's truly a different experience you need a "2TB world" shoehorned into a 128GB world which would be an expensive proposition.
I don't think Google could have talked any game dev shop capable of that sort of thing into doing it, it was something Google was going to have to do itself. They could have afforded it. And they could have entirely changed people's expectations about games.
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/accelerator-optimized-...
A system with, say, 8 large GPUs could easily generate graphics for 24 or more players and support a complex world as in: something like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
where you can walk through all the doors. A single SMP computer (kinda like couch multiplayer but with multiple screens attached) would run the whole thing which would put a limit on the player count, I can't see it exceeding 100 but the selling point would be the complexity of the world. If anybody could build a gaming cluster that could scale up to more players it would be Google.
And Google was already pouring money into Stadia on the infra side, hell they could have bought a whole studio to make games tailored for Stadia.
Then they didn't.
As a bystander, Stadia looked to me as the most egregious dropping of the ball, in a field where reputation is worth so much.
Only it actually worked (unlike Microsoft's poor excuse of an attempt at the time, it's finally decent), and it was cheaper and with better UX than GeForce Now. For a few years it was unquestionably the best.
Some credit is due to some Googlers: there are those that get it. Most people have no idea how close to outright failure the Play Store was, and to be honest one of my lasting regrets was not taking advantage of the situation to kill it. It is entirely on the action of those few Googlers that the Play Store turned into a remotely viable target for games, but once the beast was big enough the marketing analytics droids moved in and took over everything entirely. Today the Play Store is run with the same mentality you would run a casino.
They mostly talk about PlayStore analytics and marketing approaches, seldom about game technology or design.