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Google is closing down its Stadia cloud streaming service.

GigaBowser

GigaBowser

The bear of bad news
Captain Toad said:
Quite the Nostradamus there. We all thought it would be a massive success.
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Quite the spin from my personal beer holder

Stadia has been on the market for over 1000 days and I started the the thread 1 day before it closed down.

833599.jpg
 
TheThreadsThatBindUs

TheThreadsThatBindUs

Member
Ribi said:
Great now everyone will jump to luna...
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Yep... all seven of em!...

Melfice7 said:
Nothing of value for gamers has been lost
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Quezacolt said:
And nothing of value was lost

death note wtf GIF
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Not true at all.

Stadia customers will not get a refund for any games they bought. So not only do they lose the money they paid for the games, they can't even play the games anymore.

If anything, this whole experience will be a scathing indictment on streaming services selling full-priced games. As a business model, that is now stone-cold dead. Customers will not be fooled after this debacle.

Stadia should have considered a streaming game rental service business model, where gamers pay a small sum to rent a game for 3-5 days, or a 30-day rolling subscription for the big MP games. That may have generated more revenue for them overall even will a small userbase.
 
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Quezacolt

Quezacolt

Member
TheThreadsThatBindUs said:
Not true at all.

Stadia customers will not get a refund for any games they bought. So not only do they lose the money they paid for the games, they can't even play the games anymore.

If anything, this whole experience will be a scathing indictment on streaming services selling full-priced games. As a business model, that is now stone-cold dead. Customers will not be fooled after this debacle.
Click to expand...
We all talked about that before, how streaming isn't good, how when the service eventually goes out youmlose everything, because nothing was ever yours to begin with, and yet, there were still people saying this was the future of gaming and the second coming of christ.

Sucks that they lost their money, but i hope this does become a cautionary tale for gamers and publishers.
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
TheThreadsThatBindUs said:
Stadia customers will not get a refund for any games they bought. So not only do they lose the money they paid for the games, they can't even play the games anymore.
Click to expand...
This is literally the opposite of what Google promises in their press release. All hardware purchases made directly through the Google store will be refunded. All game and DLC purchases (since Stadia launched) will be refunded. It seems the only thing they're not refunding is Stadia Pro membership fees.
 
TheThreadsThatBindUs

TheThreadsThatBindUs

Member
Quezacolt said:
We all talked about that before, how streaming isn't good, how when the service eventually goes out youmlose everything, because nothing was ever yours to begin with, and yet, there were still people saying this was the future of gaming and the second coming of christ.

Sucks that they lost their money, but i hope this does become a cautionary tale for gamers and publishers.
Click to expand...

As a final nail in the coffin, I'd love to see someone pursue a class action against Google for this practice.

I think litigating the practice of selling full-priced games on a service, where the sold games evaporate when the servers are switched off, would be very interesting to follow.

I'd love to see how the courts might address a situation like that and if the practice of selling service content as products can be defensible legally.

Edit:

Didn't catch that they're actually refunding the bought games too. Makes sense, as I'm guessing they wouldn't want it tested in the courts if they attempted not refunding the games.

This whole project was basically a huge money sink for Google.
 
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TheThreadsThatBindUs

TheThreadsThatBindUs

Member
jshackles said:
This is literally the opposite of what Google promises in their press release. All hardware purchases made directly through the Google store will be refunded. All game and DLC purchases (since Stadia launched) will be refunded. It seems the only thing they're not refunding is Stadia Pro membership fees.
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Ah, my bad. I didn't catch that.

Thanks for the correction.
 
TheMan

TheMan

Member
What a joke from start to finish. They barely even tried and then they failed. Honestly I have no idea why they even bothered with this

I need to hear the behind the scenes tel all. Is Phil Harrison incompetent or was he hamstrung?
 
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SportsFan581

SportsFan581

Member
TheThreadsThatBindUs said:
As a final nail in the coffin, I'd love to see someone pursue a class action against Google for this practice.

I think litigating the practice of selling full-priced games on a service, where the sold games evaporate when the servers are switched off, would be very interesting to follow.

I'd love to see how the courts might address a situation like that and if the practice of selling service content as products can be defensible legally.
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Unlikely with the refunds, but yeah I don't like the idea of making one-time purchases that are associated with recurring costs. Better for cloud streaming to be offered as a recurring service with games being true digital purchases that can be utilized outside the cloud service (or just included as a library with the service). At that point, if the service closes you've only lost access to the service itself and not your content.

I'm not sure how much legal standing there would be, a lot of what ifs. What if steam closed shop, or epic, or playstation or xbox you could say the same thing about your digital purchases. What if Apple suddenly took the digital music store offline, etc.
 
Kenneth Haight

Kenneth Haight

Gold Member
CeeJay said:
Easy to rip that comment with hindsight but, Google Should have been better competition. It's not Phill's fault that Google messed it up out of the gate.
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That’s like saying book shops should have been better competition with Amazon. Google is a billion dollar company, that was attempting to compete with Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. They released a platform where you have to pay a monthly subscription fee AND pay for any games you want to own on top of that.

So if you stop paying the subscription. You lose the games that you paid potentially £50 - £60 a pop for. It’s really not hard to understand why this business model was not going to last. Gamepass and dare I say it even PS plus’ different tiers now offer way better value just at a base level. RIP Stadia, at least you tried…. Well you didn’t really.
 
M

M16

Member
It's not so much that stadia was a failure or not. A few years ago Google execs gave the cloud division an ultimatum that in a few years they had to pass azure or aws in marketshare or they were going to pull their funding. This is ultimately what's happening.
 
T

Three

Member
GhostOfTsu said:
Yep, Onlive is dead, PS Now is dead, Stadia is dead but Google and Amazon are the real competitors in the gaming industry, not Playstation or Nintendo 😬

Some people still repeat that horseshit in acquisitions threads 🙄
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Nah, now they pretend that Nintendo and Sony are the true competitors again so that they are 3rd.
 
newtypepilot

newtypepilot

Member
TheThreadsThatBindUs said:
Yep... all seven of em!...




Not true at all.

Stadia customers will not get a refund for any games they bought. So not only do they lose the money they paid for the games, they can't even play the games anymore.

If anything, this whole experience will be a scathing indictment on streaming services selling full-priced games. As a business model, that is now stone-cold dead. Customers will not be fooled after this debacle.

Stadia should have considered a streaming game rental service business model, where gamers pay a small sum to rent a game for 3-5 days, or a 30-day rolling subscription for the big MP games. That may have generated more revenue for them overall even will a small userbase.
Click to expand...
no sympathy for anyone who actually paid for this. This was heavily criticized before it was even launched for its terrible business model that provides no value to the customer. It's essentially paying a subscription for the privilege of paying full price to rent games.
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
I wonder what will happen to Hello Engineer, Gylt, Pac-Man Tunnel Battle, Outcasters, and probably a few other games I'm missing that are all currently Stadia exclusives.
 
SportsFan581

SportsFan581

Member
Sosokrates said:
XSX has 13.5gb and ps5 probably the same available for games.
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I'm taking it that the Stadia blades have some kind of OS in place as well, makes it hard to make a distinction like that. A good chance that the Stadia blades have split memory pools as well, which could be more limiting since the total number isn't that large (you might only be looking at 8GB HBM2 + 8GB DDR here).
 
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Paltheos

Paltheos

Member
Lttp but it's always worth saying:

'Google and abandoning ambitious, highly publicized projects - Name a more iconic duo.'
 
RoadHazard

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Sosokrates said:
We don't know, though it being on servers it could be different.
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I'm pretty sure it doesn't just run the game straight on the hardware with zero OS overhead.

And does it have any kind of system UI you can access? I've never used it, but that would use up some more memory if so.

But sure, games might have access to a bit more memory than on the consoles. Just not the full 16GB.
 
Sosokrates

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
RoadHazard said:
I'm pretty sure it doesn't just run the game straight on the hardware with zero OS overhead.

And does it have any kind of system UI you can access? I've never used it, but that would use up some more memory if so.

But sure, games might have access to a bit more memory than on the consoles. Just not the full 16GB.
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Who knows, it's dead anyway now so it won't be having any advantages.
 
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