Support NeoGAF

[Killjoy-NL]

Microsoft came out and directly said they were their competition, not Playstation. While the "hardcore" gamers that frequent GAF were never the target audience, it's not always easy to predict what the casual might do. If they played their cards right, Stadia could have been a success which would be a big blow for us here. Despite their pretty decent tech, almost every other decision they made was terrible so thankfuly we dodged that bullet, but it really could have gone the other way.

Fair enough.

I do agree they could've been serious competition for GamePass, but ultimately it would run into the same issues as MS runs into with GP.
There's a good reason why Sony never put PS Now on the forefront.

 

[justiceiro]

These dumbfucks are the one making decisions that will the shape the future of the gaming market, btw.

 

[ReyBrujo]

Did people really take it seriously though?

Just like the Virtual Boy, it was bad because the technology wasn't there still. However the future is gaas, like it or not, and Microsoft and Sony were worried that they had incorrectly assessed the situation and that Google, somehow, had found the sweet spot between latency and quality.

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Just like the Virtual Boy, it was bad because the technology wasn't there still. However the future is gaas, like it or not,

This I don't necessarily disagree with, but streaming-services as a proper alternative to traditional gaming is going to be a pipe dream for the foreseeable future.

 

[Skifi28]

Fair enough.

I do agree they could've been serious competition for GamePass, but ultimately it would run into the same issues as MS runs into with GP.
There's a good reason why Sony never put PS Now on the forefront.

I think their biggest strength could have been Youtube integration, leveraging the billions that use it. Imagine if every single gaming-related video had a button on the side you could press and you could immediately start playing yourself with no loading on whatever device you're on, that'd be pretty scary but for whatever reason they fucked it up.

 

[Sentenza]

Bit of a sidenote, but while people over the last few years kept commenting on "How hard it is to enter in this industry as an outsider", I can't help but being impressed by how sloppy and out of touch these attempts have been.

Google, Amazon, Apple... All managed to spend massive amounts in setting up studios or infrastructures to establish realities that... No one ever felt any desire for.
Amazon in particular spent hundreds of millions to create studios that were dismantled few years later without releasing a single title.
How can you start with all the money in the world and still be so bad this?

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Bit of a sidenote, but while people over the last few years kept commenting on "How hard it is to enter in this industry as an outsider", I can't help but being impressed by how sloppy and out of touch these attempts have been.

Google, Amazon, Apple... All managed to spend massive amounts in setting up studios or infrastructures to establish realities that... No one ever felt any desire for.

Apple have been very successful with the AppStore on iPhone on iPad for smaller/cheaper games.

That hasn’t translated to good AppStore sales on Mac for AAA though, look at how poorly the Resident Evil games sold.

 

[Zacfoldor]

I was too. Screw artifactin latencyin streamin. It's for those who accept a lower standard.

You were meant to raise the standards not lower them!

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Amazon in particular spent hundreds of millions to create studios that were dismantled few years later without releasing a single title.
How can you start with all the money in the world and still be so bad this?

Brand loyalty, especially for Nintendo and PlayStation, is huge.

Phil Spencer’s lamenting about losing the worst possibly generation wasn’t just a poor excuse, people really became locked into the PS ecosystem with PS4.

Switch 2 being backwards compatible with Switch’s digital library is a masterstroke too.

 

[Digital-Aftertaste]

With the direction Nvidia has gone with their frame generation we can hope to be avoiding game streaming as a norm for another few years.

 

[ReyBrujo]

With the direction Nvidia has gone with their frame generation we can hope to be avoiding game streaming as a norm for another few years.

You sure about that? Because Nvidia is also the one running GeForce Now which is probably the best gaming streaming service right now.

 

[Black_Stride]

If the Stadia was a traditional home console with "cloud power" as its gimmick, it would probably still exist.

Looking at its specs it would probably be holding its own with PS5 and XSX.
They would need to be making loses on the hardware but atleast it would still exist.
Making it purely cloud was dumb.

 

[Idleyes]

 

[Saber]

vibes

 

[Aguero9320]

I'm sure they were, if Stadia had managed to get a foothold they'd have been way ahead of the game. Now the field is wide open. Geforce Now is fantastic technology, but if Microsoft can combine something like that with Gamepass... If you have half decent internet (and you're not a "competitive gamer") there's no need to own specific hardware any more, and in five years there will be even less reason. Bring it on.

 

[onQ123]

Yes they was worried about, Google , Amazon & Apple coming in but it ended up being Facebook covering the most ground .

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/who-would-have-thought-that-out-of-the-big-threats-apple-google-amazon-disney-etc-waiting-in-the-shadows-that-it-would-be-facebook.1679173/

 

[Jaybe]

If the Stadia was a traditional home console with "cloud power" as its gimmick, it would probably still exist.

Looking at its specs it would probably be holding its own with PS5 and XSX.
They would need to be making loses on the hardware but atleast it would still exist.
Making it purely cloud was dumb.

I was thinking that even if they made Stadia a PC store front as well that purchases would live on and provide an alternate way to play, it would have had more value and likely be around today.

 

[Aenima]

Aparently google was also terrified of Stadia, thats why they killed it as fast as possible.

 

[Black_Stride]

Hahahahaha.


Soulja Phil:

Dont act like I didnt teach Stadia everything he knows.​

He copied my Power of Cloud​

Word for word​

Bar for bar​

 

[Kronark]

I'm not convinced this will ever be a more efficient way to do business at this stage.

I'm in the IT sector and cloud solutions can be really good for temporarily scaling your capacity up or rapid growth but any time I've looked at costs deeply over 5 years for stable business needs it's always been significantly cheaper to buy / host stuff yourself or at the very least find local co-location hosting. That makes sense to me because with cloud services you're adding in a middleman and that middleman wants a profit cut. Of course it would cost more.

All these cloud gaming services are essentially the same thing, rent seeking middlemen telling you this is the future and to pay up.

In theory if your gaming needs were similar to the cloud situations above (Temporary or rapid scale) it might be cheaper but no one really games like that. Most people game in the evening / weekends creating peak server loads during these windows and there's no optimal way to balance users out because these aren't queued tasks, they're live tasks. You can't even cycle gamers by region / timezone to account for this inefficiency because datacenter latency is a key component of the puzzle. So for the average gamer who games in a normal pattern or sustained way this doesn't make much sense. Rapid scaling might be a benefit in some tournament or meetup capacity but then you run into the infrastructure problem of bandwidth and different physical limitations. Temporary scaling works for ultra casual gamers who might game here or there every other week and in theory these people could balance out but what % of gaming revenue are we even talking about at that point? I think this is where the executive bias comes in to this decision making. Some execs might game casually once every 2-3 weeks, have great major city fiber internet, and act like everyone lives like that. It's just out of touch.

You can see this type of shit hampering services like GeForce now where there are potential queue times and max session length limits even for the top tier premium plans because if they tried to have hardware to actually meet the demand this shit doesn't economically pan out.

 

[Fat Frog]

Fat Frog your time is now.

Ha ha ha, i deserved it.

Google did several huge mistakes:

- Weird business model at launch.
- Linux instead of windows (imagine the load of quick and easy ports with windows... with Linux, Google was forced to pay publishers for custom ports and then they didn't care about due to low sales).

The potential with click to play via youtube was huge though...

The potential...

Google are dumbasses. (but thanks for the free game sessions and free Chromecast/controllers...suckers)

 

[mckmas8808]

At 1:16:27, during the Xbox Two + One Podcast with Shpeshal Nick, Rand al Thor 19 says that he and Jez Corden "knew for a fact that Microsoft and Sony were terrified of Google coming in and Stadia."

Shpeshal Nick also corroborates the rumor, but he says that he only heard about Microsoft being terrified of it, not Sony. Rand responds by claiming that, according to the leaked Sony documents from the Insomniac hack, Sony was expecting more Stadia subscribers around the world than PlayStation console owners.

If Playstation execs really thought this.........then WOW!!!! Who and why would really someone really thing Google Stadia would have over 100 million subs?

 

[rm082e]

As someone who lives in a fly over state, I've tried GeForce Now and PS Now - both were unplayable. I'm pretty sure in both cases my data was traveling to another city 250+ miles away. With PS Now, the lag was so bad the game stopped functioning and I got an error screen saying my connection wasn't good enough. I was on 500mb cable at the time. GeForce Now sucked less, but was also unplayable. I never tried Stadia.

It seems like unless you're in the same city as the server farm, you're going to have a terrible experience. I just don't think the cost of players getting their hands on local hardware is a big enough hurdle to justify all the cost and drawbacks of Cloud. Not for 95% of players anyway.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

The fear was real, at least coming from Microsoft. Stadia and Luna never had a chance, though, and were mismanaged by the usual big tech knownothings from the start. The stories I could tell you about Luna, man.