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Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will

Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will vary drastically by the amount they play and how computationally demanding it is. I just don’t see it being feasible without personalized cost. Looking forward to paying minimum cost for minimum graphics too.

mav3rick 8y ago
"Serious" gamers can still buy consoles. This is not a zero sum market.
- tcd 8y ago
  Everyone copied Apple when they removed the headphone jack, whose to say consoles in the traditional sense will still be around in 20 years? Microsoft/Sony are NOT going to sit back and let Google win here. Expect replies from them (especially with Microsoft's Azure). The streaming services of gaming is coming.
  - islanderfun 8y ago
    Microsoft already has project xCloud in the works. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-gaming-with-you-at-the-center/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-g...
  - steeleduncan 8y ago
    Sony launched Playstation Now 5 years ago. This is not a particularly new idea.
  - kllrnohj 8y ago
    > The streaming services of gaming is coming. It's already failed multiple times. OnLive tried & failed. Nvidia's has been in beta for years. Sony has one. Everyone in this area has tried this. Nobody has seen what could be described as "success", and the cost models so far have been ludicrous. Turns out renting Xeons and Radeon MI Instincts in a professionally staffed, maintained datacenter is way, way more expensive than a handful of consumer chips in a box in the living room with nobody on-call to monitor it. The GPU here looks to be basically a slightly cut-down AMD MI25. That'd make a single GPU in this stradia cloud gaming service costs more than 10 xbox one x's. How do you make that price-competitive here?
    - puzzle 8y ago
      Yeah, if you know where to look, they left clues about using MI25 hardware. (I haven't been an employee for years, this all unfolded afterwards and, ironically, it is just one search away.) I'm sure they got bulk/promotional pricing from AMD, plus they're very good at both running hardware with low overhead and packing it efficiently.
      - kllrnohj 8y ago
        > plus they're very good at both running hardware with low overhead and packing it efficiently. You can't really pack the hardware here since it's latency sensitive. It's straight dedicated resources to an array of VMs. Dedicated CPU cache, even, hence the odd 9.5MB L2+L3 number. Bulk pricing only gets you so far here. You're still talking gear that's categorically way more expensive than similar performance consumer parts. Not to mention all the other costs in play - data center, power, IT staff, etc... Making this price-competitive is a big problem
        puzzle 8y ago
        You can't do time slicing, no, but you can definitely reduce time to first frame in many ways. If you don't do that, you need to provision even more hardware. Packing is also part of the capacity planning phases of a service. The other costs (power, people, etc.) are amortized over Google's array of services. Last but not least, it would be very dumb of them not to run batch workloads on these machines when the gaming service is idle. I bet $1000 these puppies run under Borg.
  - toephu2 8y ago
    Not really, the Samsung Galaxy S10 still has a headphone jack. And Samsung being the largest Android device manufacturer, makes a big counter point.
- gsich 8y ago
  >"serious" >consoles better join the PC Masterrace.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Your point being? People can still buy DVDs and yet the movie and tv industry is being completely changed by Netflix.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Three million people still use Netflix to rent DVDs.
    - b_tterc_p 8y ago
      ... and yet the movie and tv industry is being completely changed by Netflix streaming
    - chipperyman573 8y ago
      In 2015 there were still 2.1 million AOL dialup subscribers. Many people probably just don't realize they're still subscribed. https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/08/technology/aol-dial-up/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/08/technology/aol-dial-up/
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Barely. Games that don't require an Internet connection and constant updates are a relic of a bygone gaming era.
ubercore 8y ago
I'm not so sure. To play devil's advocate, this may make games cheaper even without ads. Developers want to not worry about disparate hardware, Google wants you in their ecosystem. Buying google devices, using google services, etc. Content creators want this for better interaction with fans.
- fileeditview 8y ago
  I would not be surprised if Google injected some ads into the games as soon as their service reached critical mass and thus killing immersion. Maybe I'm super negative here but I don't see any pros to this development. Today's games are already dumbed down and steered towards profits only. The only games I play these days are indie games made by 1 person up to a handful of people. We really don't need more but we need better. (This applies to many other areas too)
- ehsankia 8y ago
  I don't understand the arguments being made above. Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    I don’t think this is true. It assumes people are economically rational and trying to optimize fun per dollar. But people already should be valuing their time and yet they don’t. If developers must now guarantee players not just try their game but play it for x hours to make a profit, I don’t think they will be pushing for shorter better games.
  - Jwarder 8y ago
    > Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. I'm not sure about that. Currently tons of people pay monthly for grindy MMO games. Expanding that sort of revenue scheme to single player games would encourage devs to create more Skinner boxes to keep players "engaged" over the long run.
ssully 8y ago
I disagree. The natural business model will be a mix between subscription services and free to play games with micro transactions. Microsoft (and others like EA) is already moving in that direction with game pass (monthly subscription gets you all first party games plus partner games). The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past winter. It worked well and was impressive, but I have a good internet connection with a 1TB cap. I have friends with much worse speeds and harsher caps and I am not sure if this would be viable for them. I am more concerned about 'physical' gaming being phased out. I doubt Stadia will do this soon, but I like building a new computer every 4 years for playing games. Maybes it's something I won't actually miss(like how I don't miss CDs for music), but it remains to be seen.
- fileeditview 8y ago
  F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing that could happen to gaming.
  - ssully 8y ago
    While I am not a fan of many F2P games, their popularity and impact are undeniable. The trap that you should avoid falling into is assuming that's the only way games can thrive. F2P games are huge and dominate the conversation, but I think indie games are the best they have ever been. My favorite game last year was Into The Breach, and by all accounts it sold well in the same market that Fortnite dominated in. Games are evolving in weird ways, but it's in a multifacted and diverse way.
    - chipperyman573 8y ago
      Into the breach was a great game, but it is unlikely to have sold as well if it wasn't for FTL's success.
      - ssully 8y ago
        FTL was a Kickstarted game from devs with zero pedigree (to my knowledge) and it was also a indie hit. While I agree Into The Breach owes some success to the devs being established now, but I don't think you negate my point about this being a time where games of all types can thrive.
jfindley 8y ago
I'm struggling to understand how fewer casual gamers buying consoles would impact indie developers. Could you expand on your point? Indie developers don't get a cut of console sales, but they do care about how many people buy/play their games, and if this widens the market it seems like it'd be a win for them to me.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Most indie games are short. If money is allocated to content producers based on play time, I would bet that most would earn less than a typical indie game purchase price per user. That’s just speculation mind you. Things like Stardew Valley would probably do even better.
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    Nowhere did it say it's per MB or hour or whatever. Yet it's the top comment here. It's just fear mongering and hearsay on your part when most likely it will be a fixed monthly price.
fixermark 8y ago
Probably a subscription service like Google's other media-content-house offerings (Play Music and YouTube).
toastking 8y ago
The cost will change per game, so it could be that game's cost is associated with how much compute they need. I think it will probably be a monthly subscription based on the gym membership model. Most people won't use it a lot and they'll make all their money on them.
itronitron 8y ago
I agree, and I'll add that many gamers care a lot about their privacy which conflicts with Google's core business model. Also, this will fail miserably if Google thinks it can continue with its current attitude toward user support, so there is hope.
devit 8y ago
There's the major difference that you can't "pirate" a single-player game that is only available remotely, and that you can access such games remotely from any hardware. So it could result in a renaissance of the classic AAA 3D single-player games, perhaps.
- rasz 8y ago
  You already cant pirate current generation of console games.
  - ulucs 8y ago
    Nope, Switch piracy exists thanks to Nvidia
    - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
      And what about the other 2 consoles? What are you contributing exactly with your boorish "Nope"?
      - ulucs 8y ago
        Writing "ps4 piracy" and "xbox one piracy" into google is a whole lot shorter than your comment. Then again, it doesn't give karma like a cool retort would.
danso 8y ago
I think undoubtedly, I would bet on the longevity of a streaming service from Valve or Amazon more than I would one from Google. But Google's past history of killing free side services doesn't offer the most relevant precedence. This is a service into a mainstream (and growing) industry that gels with Google's strengths, particularly scalability and AI. YouTube Premium/TV would be better precedent, though the jury is still out on those. I think there's still a difference, though, in that YT+/TV entered a market with already dominant leaders (traditional cable, Netflix, free YouTube). If Stadia can satisfactorily mitigate the problems inherent to streaming, and get it out before Microsoft's rumored Xbox development, it will be in a prominent position in a new field for gaming.
tanilama 8y ago
I think your worry is overblown. This is going to be an alternative for some types of games. And quite on the contrary I think it would awesome for indies, since they tends to be pretty short. And it is much easier for them to gain consumers, if they went viral over streaming, many of which are, like horror games.
diminoten 8y ago
Why are you sky-is-falling this announcement? Where in their release did they say anything about per-MB or ad based business models? Did they say anything at all about personalized costs in general? No, they didn't, and every single thing you've suggested about their gaming platform is also true about every other streaming platform, and yet none, literally none, of those platforms have tried any of the things you're complaining about. You basically just made up a bunch of things to complain about because nothing in the actual release was objectionable. Yours is not a helpful way to react, my friend, though it is a popular one.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  I mean, I’ll give you that nothing is confirmed, but nobody has made this work yet. It’s mostly tech testing, so current business models aren’t a good metric. I’m open to debate about how this could be priced, but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent. I would invite you to come up with an alternative business model for serving people who like to play high end graphics games for many hours a day.
  - diminoten 8y ago
    > but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent. Why are you this comfortable? Netflix, YouTube TV, Twitch, Sling, Amazon Prime Video -- basically all streaming services offer flat rates, not per-MB ones. Further, all existing game library services tout unlimited gaming as a primary selling point! That's the primary reason you opt into Gamefly or Nvidia Shield, at least according to their own marketing. And this offering is not for high-end gamers. It's taking the benefits high-end gamers get for their investment into their hardware, and making it available to the millions of more casual gamers. This isn't for high-end gamers, so creating a business model for them using Stadia makes no sense. Finally, you're not thinking of this at the right layer if you're thinking in terms of things like s3, ec2, lambda, etc.. This is the product that's built on top of those, and the single price problem has been present for hundreds of years. It's a solved one, just ask any current MMO or hell, any clothing manufacturer. You're basically saying that an XL t-shirt is going to cost the same as a S t-shirt, despite tens of thousands of examples to the contrary.
bitL 8y ago
The whole gaming industry is positioning itself for cloud-only streaming in the next 10 years. With 5G+ everywhere, reduced latencies, nearby datacenters full of specialized GPUs, many gaming studios plan to release streaming games only at some point, cutting off local players completely (it makes a perfect business sense, collecting regular monthly rent for gaming). Unless there is some regulatory pressure, the only way to play AAA games in the future will be via streaming, local computers will be pretty dumb latency-optimized streaming machines. Not sure how would that affect game developers though as there won't be any attractive way to programming for young people; before, making an own game was quite an attraction to jump into programming and a motivation to study hard.
everdrive 8y ago
Make some backup copies of those roms now, I guess.
- rhacker 8y ago
  This is my main concern.
everdrive 8y ago
I think my concern about this wholly depends on if it completely takes over the business model. I really want to own my games. But, I don't mind if alternate streaming models exist, just if they become seriously required.
clb4mf 8y ago
Grindy games like classic WoW? Sign me right up.
scottie_m 8y ago
It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib, and especially when it’s something they made in-house. Add to that streaming games; problematic for the (by far) most popular two genres: huge multiplayer shooters, and sports. I see almost no chance of this succeeding long-term, and I’d put the odds of it going EOL within 5 years at over 80%. These huge companies will keep throwing money at streaming because they see gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’ve seen no indication that they have a plan without giant question marks before the “profit” step. Look at YouTube, something Google acquired in 2006, is dominant in its space, and still doesn’t make them money. Yet somehow games, which are more finicky and reliant on universally good internet connections is going to work for them? This is trend-chasing, once again without any real new ideas to overcome existing challenges.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib. It's apparently deeply tied to YouTube, and particularly to help provide an onramp for more (often ad-opportunity-generating) gaming content on YouTube a service that is both an ad-platform and the venue for at least two distinct revenue generating premium services (the older of which is ad free) that Google has not strangled in the crib.
- fwip 8y ago
  5 years is about as long as a console generation usually lasts, and this has less of a buy-in cost than either PC or console gaming. If it runs for 4 years and makes money, that's a success for Google. It doesn't need to be permanent to be useful.
013a 8y ago
There's so much that this will hurt in the gaming industry. Some of my thoughts: 1. As subscription services take over, the upfront revenue game studios see will drop. This is just simple math: Xbox Game Pass costs $10/month, which means its the total cost of a AAA game over 6 months. In a traditional model, many gamers would expect to buy, lets say, 2 AAA games per year. In this new model, I can play as many as I want. And even if I only play 1 or 2 every year, I'm almost definitely going to be "dabbling" in the collection for other games I may want to play, ESPECIALLY if they're instant-on like Stadia. Even if they pay-out to studios based on some metric derived from time spent in game, there's no way studios will get the same level of income as they did before. (note: this is exactly why Spotify is having such a hard time, and why they're branching out beyond music. royalties abstracted behind a subscription service suck for the bottom line) 2. So upfront revenue drops. How do studios make that up? In-game transactions. They're already huge, and they'll just keep getting bigger. 3. So what, micro transactions (mtx) are the "new normal". Well, the top 5% of games can afford that decreased upfront revenue by making it up in mtx (think: Fortnite, Apex Legends, CoD). The trailing 95% can't (think: Indie titles). 4. Beyond that, you can bet your bottom dollar that Stadia will pay out tons to the AAA studios just to get their names on the platform, given that Google has no first party studios to speak of. Assassins Creed gets enough upfront revenue to make it worth their while, meanwhile the next indie darling is left out to dry, further balkanizing the gaming industry 5. Switching gears: A massive number of software engineers in the industry entered it because of gaming. Games, even back in the 90s, were such a clear application and value of computers that it was obvious, even to children, that they'd be something huge. It inspired a generation, to not only play, but to mod and even make their own. Now, we're moving that all off into the cloud, hidden from the next generation. Google wants you to own a Chromebook and consume their products, not understand how they work. 6. Speaking of modding: Its literally the source of the world's most popular games. Battle Royale? You can trace its roots back to mods for ARMA and Minecraft. MOBA? Dota, a mod for warcraft. Creativity happens in environments that large corporations can't recreate, and traditionally a great platform has been starting with a base game, a great game, that some studio created, then exerting your creativity on top of that platform. It benefited everyone, including large AAA studios who could then copy your idea and make millions. Yeah, good luck modding on a blackboxed server a hundred miles away. 7. But fine. I guess we're moving into the future and this is part of it. Except, there are millions, even BILLIONS, of people around the world without the internet capability to even join this service. Google tried to help solve this with Fiber, and gave up. Its fucking hard. They'd rather do easy, cool things, like cloud gaming. Modern consoles are bad enough; my brother, who lives just an hour outside of a top 10 US city, recently told me that he downloaded Fortnite on Xbox for the kids. It took a week of 24/7 downloading. Most games drop with day 1 patches in the dozens of gigabytes, even if you buy the disk in-stores. The sheer arrogance of Google, to get up on stage and claim this service is gaming for EVERYONE, the apex of accessibility, is disgusting to me. They're stuck so far up their own ass they've become the ouroboros. 8. Well, streaming games have taken over the world. Let's say you want to compete with Google on this streaming game front. All of the top three cloud providers now want to get into game streaming. So, no way can you compete on cost there with them; they own the data centers and give their game streaming divisions nice fat discounts. They all have the pockets to design nice custom silicon with AMD specialized for the task. And, oh by the way, all the latest games are now optimized for this silicon (whether its the custom AMD chips in the PS4, or XB1, or whatever cloud streaming service we're talking about, they're all custom). You're stuck with off-the-shelf cards. Ha! Nvidia won't let you deploy their cards in a datacenter [1], because they ALSO want in on this big cash pile they've all convinced themselves exist. So, basically, good luck. The world has balkanized, and penetrating it becomes harder every year. I hate this. I hate it so much. The only saving grace is that it is inevitable that this will fail to realize the results Google wants, and they'll pull the plug. And maybe the rest of the industry is smart enough to recognize how short-sighted a streaming-first/subscription-first strategy is, for literally everyone involved except the people who rent the metal. I want to go back to the 2000s. This new world sucks. [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/239994/nvidia-forbids-geforce-driver-deployment-in-data-centers https://www.techpowerup.com/239994/nvidia-forbids-geforce-dr...
ghobs91 8y ago
Why on earth would it be pay per hour or per MB? Does Netflix charge that way? How about Spotify? Time has shown that the best revenue model for these kinds of services is finding a monthly price, or multiple tiers of a monthly price, that adequately cover the costs incurred from heavy users and light users alike.
- mlinsey 8y ago
  For end users, I agree. It’s also interesting to consider how content providers will be paid: per user who plays, per user-hour, a flat catalog fee, etc., and what downstream effects this will have on games.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Netflix and Spotify’s cost structure are different. Streaming content is cheap. Rendering a high end video game can get pricey because you need GPU time. There’s a lot of other considerations too. Like, a lot of people will pause a stream and let it sit for a few hours. That’s fine. What if people want to leave a game running for a few hours? The computational burden is still high.
  - changchuming 8y ago
    I participated in the beta and I think they resolved this by setting a time out, and you get disconnected after some time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tclover 8y ago
It's awesome, I can finally use Linux everywhere! Hell yeah, count me in
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Why would they charge per hour or per megabyte? That reduces stickiness. Much more likely is that they'll just get a cut of the game developers' sales, just like the game console vendors do. They'll set the cut so that the net profit pencils out over the long term.

mav3rick 8y ago

"Serious" gamers can still buy consoles. This is not a zero sum market.

tcd 8y ago
Everyone copied Apple when they removed the headphone jack, whose to say consoles in the traditional sense will still be around in 20 years? Microsoft/Sony are NOT going to sit back and let Google win here. Expect replies from them (especially with Microsoft's Azure). The streaming services of gaming is coming.
- islanderfun 8y ago
  Microsoft already has project xCloud in the works. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-gaming-with-you-at-the-center/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-g...
- steeleduncan 8y ago
  Sony launched Playstation Now 5 years ago. This is not a particularly new idea.
- kllrnohj 8y ago
  > The streaming services of gaming is coming. It's already failed multiple times. OnLive tried & failed. Nvidia's has been in beta for years. Sony has one. Everyone in this area has tried this. Nobody has seen what could be described as "success", and the cost models so far have been ludicrous. Turns out renting Xeons and Radeon MI Instincts in a professionally staffed, maintained datacenter is way, way more expensive than a handful of consumer chips in a box in the living room with nobody on-call to monitor it. The GPU here looks to be basically a slightly cut-down AMD MI25. That'd make a single GPU in this stradia cloud gaming service costs more than 10 xbox one x's. How do you make that price-competitive here?
  - puzzle 8y ago
    Yeah, if you know where to look, they left clues about using MI25 hardware. (I haven't been an employee for years, this all unfolded afterwards and, ironically, it is just one search away.) I'm sure they got bulk/promotional pricing from AMD, plus they're very good at both running hardware with low overhead and packing it efficiently.
    - kllrnohj 8y ago
      > plus they're very good at both running hardware with low overhead and packing it efficiently. You can't really pack the hardware here since it's latency sensitive. It's straight dedicated resources to an array of VMs. Dedicated CPU cache, even, hence the odd 9.5MB L2+L3 number. Bulk pricing only gets you so far here. You're still talking gear that's categorically way more expensive than similar performance consumer parts. Not to mention all the other costs in play - data center, power, IT staff, etc... Making this price-competitive is a big problem
      - puzzle 8y ago
        You can't do time slicing, no, but you can definitely reduce time to first frame in many ways. If you don't do that, you need to provision even more hardware. Packing is also part of the capacity planning phases of a service. The other costs (power, people, etc.) are amortized over Google's array of services. Last but not least, it would be very dumb of them not to run batch workloads on these machines when the gaming service is idle. I bet $1000 these puppies run under Borg.
- toephu2 8y ago
  Not really, the Samsung Galaxy S10 still has a headphone jack. And Samsung being the largest Android device manufacturer, makes a big counter point.
gsich 8y ago
>"serious" >consoles better join the PC Masterrace.
b_tterc_p 8y ago
Your point being? People can still buy DVDs and yet the movie and tv industry is being completely changed by Netflix.
- snaky 8y ago
  Three million people still use Netflix to rent DVDs.
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    ... and yet the movie and tv industry is being completely changed by Netflix streaming
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    In 2015 there were still 2.1 million AOL dialup subscribers. Many people probably just don't realize they're still subscribed. https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/08/technology/aol-dial-up/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/08/technology/aol-dial-up/
beenBoutIT 8y ago
Barely. Games that don't require an Internet connection and constant updates are a relic of a bygone gaming era.

ubercore 8y ago

I'm not so sure. To play devil's advocate, this may make games cheaper even without ads. Developers want to not worry about disparate hardware, Google wants you in their ecosystem. Buying google devices, using google services, etc. Content creators want this for better interaction with fans.

fileeditview 8y ago
I would not be surprised if Google injected some ads into the games as soon as their service reached critical mass and thus killing immersion. Maybe I'm super negative here but I don't see any pros to this development. Today's games are already dumbed down and steered towards profits only. The only games I play these days are indie games made by 1 person up to a handful of people. We really don't need more but we need better. (This applies to many other areas too)
ehsankia 8y ago
I don't understand the arguments being made above. Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  I don’t think this is true. It assumes people are economically rational and trying to optimize fun per dollar. But people already should be valuing their time and yet they don’t. If developers must now guarantee players not just try their game but play it for x hours to make a profit, I don’t think they will be pushing for shorter better games.
- Jwarder 8y ago
  > Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. I'm not sure about that. Currently tons of people pay monthly for grindy MMO games. Expanding that sort of revenue scheme to single player games would encourage devs to create more Skinner boxes to keep players "engaged" over the long run.

ssully 8y ago

I disagree. The natural business model will be a mix between subscription services and free to play games with micro transactions. Microsoft (and others like EA) is already moving in that direction with game pass (monthly subscription gets you all first party games plus partner games). The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past winter. It worked well and was impressive, but I have a good internet connection with a 1TB cap. I have friends with much worse speeds and harsher caps and I am not sure if this would be viable for them. I am more concerned about 'physical' gaming being phased out. I doubt Stadia will do this soon, but I like building a new computer every 4 years for playing games. Maybes it's something I won't actually miss(like how I don't miss CDs for music), but it remains to be seen.

fileeditview 8y ago
F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing that could happen to gaming.
- ssully 8y ago
  While I am not a fan of many F2P games, their popularity and impact are undeniable. The trap that you should avoid falling into is assuming that's the only way games can thrive. F2P games are huge and dominate the conversation, but I think indie games are the best they have ever been. My favorite game last year was Into The Breach, and by all accounts it sold well in the same market that Fortnite dominated in. Games are evolving in weird ways, but it's in a multifacted and diverse way.
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    Into the breach was a great game, but it is unlikely to have sold as well if it wasn't for FTL's success.
    - ssully 8y ago
      FTL was a Kickstarted game from devs with zero pedigree (to my knowledge) and it was also a indie hit. While I agree Into The Breach owes some success to the devs being established now, but I don't think you negate my point about this being a time where games of all types can thrive.

jfindley 8y ago

I'm struggling to understand how fewer casual gamers buying consoles would impact indie developers. Could you expand on your point? Indie developers don't get a cut of console sales, but they do care about how many people buy/play their games, and if this widens the market it seems like it'd be a win for them to me.

b_tterc_p 8y ago
Most indie games are short. If money is allocated to content producers based on play time, I would bet that most would earn less than a typical indie game purchase price per user. That’s just speculation mind you. Things like Stardew Valley would probably do even better.
- mav3rick 8y ago
  Nowhere did it say it's per MB or hour or whatever. Yet it's the top comment here. It's just fear mongering and hearsay on your part when most likely it will be a fixed monthly price.

fixermark 8y ago

Probably a subscription service like Google's other media-content-house offerings (Play Music and YouTube).

toastking 8y ago

The cost will change per game, so it could be that game's cost is associated with how much compute they need. I think it will probably be a monthly subscription based on the gym membership model. Most people won't use it a lot and they'll make all their money on them.

itronitron 8y ago

I agree, and I'll add that many gamers care a lot about their privacy which conflicts with Google's core business model. Also, this will fail miserably if Google thinks it can continue with its current attitude toward user support, so there is hope.

devit 8y ago

There's the major difference that you can't "pirate" a single-player game that is only available remotely, and that you can access such games remotely from any hardware. So it could result in a renaissance of the classic AAA 3D single-player games, perhaps.

rasz 8y ago
You already cant pirate current generation of console games.
- ulucs 8y ago
  Nope, Switch piracy exists thanks to Nvidia
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    And what about the other 2 consoles? What are you contributing exactly with your boorish "Nope"?
    - ulucs 8y ago
      Writing "ps4 piracy" and "xbox one piracy" into google is a whole lot shorter than your comment. Then again, it doesn't give karma like a cool retort would.

danso 8y ago

I think undoubtedly, I would bet on the longevity of a streaming service from Valve or Amazon more than I would one from Google. But Google's past history of killing free side services doesn't offer the most relevant precedence. This is a service into a mainstream (and growing) industry that gels with Google's strengths, particularly scalability and AI. YouTube Premium/TV would be better precedent, though the jury is still out on those. I think there's still a difference, though, in that YT+/TV entered a market with already dominant leaders (traditional cable, Netflix, free YouTube). If Stadia can satisfactorily mitigate the problems inherent to streaming, and get it out before Microsoft's rumored Xbox development, it will be in a prominent position in a new field for gaming.

tanilama 8y ago

I think your worry is overblown. This is going to be an alternative for some types of games. And quite on the contrary I think it would awesome for indies, since they tends to be pretty short. And it is much easier for them to gain consumers, if they went viral over streaming, many of which are, like horror games.

diminoten 8y ago

Why are you sky-is-falling this announcement? Where in their release did they say anything about per-MB or ad based business models? Did they say anything at all about personalized costs in general? No, they didn't, and every single thing you've suggested about their gaming platform is also true about every other streaming platform, and yet none, literally none, of those platforms have tried any of the things you're complaining about. You basically just made up a bunch of things to complain about because nothing in the actual release was objectionable. Yours is not a helpful way to react, my friend, though it is a popular one.

b_tterc_p 8y ago
I mean, I’ll give you that nothing is confirmed, but nobody has made this work yet. It’s mostly tech testing, so current business models aren’t a good metric. I’m open to debate about how this could be priced, but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent. I would invite you to come up with an alternative business model for serving people who like to play high end graphics games for many hours a day.
- diminoten 8y ago
  > but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent. Why are you this comfortable? Netflix, YouTube TV, Twitch, Sling, Amazon Prime Video -- basically all streaming services offer flat rates, not per-MB ones. Further, all existing game library services tout unlimited gaming as a primary selling point! That's the primary reason you opt into Gamefly or Nvidia Shield, at least according to their own marketing. And this offering is not for high-end gamers. It's taking the benefits high-end gamers get for their investment into their hardware, and making it available to the millions of more casual gamers. This isn't for high-end gamers, so creating a business model for them using Stadia makes no sense. Finally, you're not thinking of this at the right layer if you're thinking in terms of things like s3, ec2, lambda, etc.. This is the product that's built on top of those, and the single price problem has been present for hundreds of years. It's a solved one, just ask any current MMO or hell, any clothing manufacturer. You're basically saying that an XL t-shirt is going to cost the same as a S t-shirt, despite tens of thousands of examples to the contrary.

bitL 8y ago

The whole gaming industry is positioning itself for cloud-only streaming in the next 10 years. With 5G+ everywhere, reduced latencies, nearby datacenters full of specialized GPUs, many gaming studios plan to release streaming games only at some point, cutting off local players completely (it makes a perfect business sense, collecting regular monthly rent for gaming). Unless there is some regulatory pressure, the only way to play AAA games in the future will be via streaming, local computers will be pretty dumb latency-optimized streaming machines. Not sure how would that affect game developers though as there won't be any attractive way to programming for young people; before, making an own game was quite an attraction to jump into programming and a motivation to study hard.

everdrive 8y ago

Make some backup copies of those roms now, I guess.

rhacker 8y ago
This is my main concern.

everdrive 8y ago

I think my concern about this wholly depends on if it completely takes over the business model. I really want to own my games. But, I don't mind if alternate streaming models exist, just if they become seriously required.

clb4mf 8y ago

Grindy games like classic WoW? Sign me right up.

scottie_m 8y ago

It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib, and especially when it’s something they made in-house. Add to that streaming games; problematic for the (by far) most popular two genres: huge multiplayer shooters, and sports. I see almost no chance of this succeeding long-term, and I’d put the odds of it going EOL within 5 years at over 80%. These huge companies will keep throwing money at streaming because they see gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’ve seen no indication that they have a plan without giant question marks before the “profit” step. Look at YouTube, something Google acquired in 2006, is dominant in its space, and still doesn’t make them money. Yet somehow games, which are more finicky and reliant on universally good internet connections is going to work for them? This is trend-chasing, once again without any real new ideas to overcome existing challenges.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib. It's apparently deeply tied to YouTube, and particularly to help provide an onramp for more (often ad-opportunity-generating) gaming content on YouTube a service that is both an ad-platform and the venue for at least two distinct revenue generating premium services (the older of which is ad free) that Google has not strangled in the crib.
fwip 8y ago
5 years is about as long as a console generation usually lasts, and this has less of a buy-in cost than either PC or console gaming. If it runs for 4 years and makes money, that's a success for Google. It doesn't need to be permanent to be useful.

013a 8y ago

There's so much that this will hurt in the gaming industry. Some of my thoughts: 1. As subscription services take over, the upfront revenue game studios see will drop. This is just simple math: Xbox Game Pass costs $10/month, which means its the total cost of a AAA game over 6 months. In a traditional model, many gamers would expect to buy, lets say, 2 AAA games per year. In this new model, I can play as many as I want. And even if I only play 1 or 2 every year, I'm almost definitely going to be "dabbling" in the collection for other games I may want to play, ESPECIALLY if they're instant-on like Stadia. Even if they pay-out to studios based on some metric derived from time spent in game, there's no way studios will get the same level of income as they did before. (note: this is exactly why Spotify is having such a hard time, and why they're branching out beyond music. royalties abstracted behind a subscription service suck for the bottom line) 2. So upfront revenue drops. How do studios make that up? In-game transactions. They're already huge, and they'll just keep getting bigger. 3. So what, micro transactions (mtx) are the "new normal". Well, the top 5% of games can afford that decreased upfront revenue by making it up in mtx (think: Fortnite, Apex Legends, CoD). The trailing 95% can't (think: Indie titles). 4. Beyond that, you can bet your bottom dollar that Stadia will pay out tons to the AAA studios just to get their names on the platform, given that Google has no first party studios to speak of. Assassins Creed gets enough upfront revenue to make it worth their while, meanwhile the next indie darling is left out to dry, further balkanizing the gaming industry 5. Switching gears: A massive number of software engineers in the industry entered it because of gaming. Games, even back in the 90s, were such a clear application and value of computers that it was obvious, even to children, that they'd be something huge. It inspired a generation, to not only play, but to mod and even make their own. Now, we're moving that all off into the cloud, hidden from the next generation. Google wants you to own a Chromebook and consume their products, not understand how they work. 6. Speaking of modding: Its literally the source of the world's most popular games. Battle Royale? You can trace its roots back to mods for ARMA and Minecraft. MOBA? Dota, a mod for warcraft. Creativity happens in environments that large corporations can't recreate, and traditionally a great platform has been starting with a base game, a great game, that some studio created, then exerting your creativity on top of that platform. It benefited everyone, including large AAA studios who could then copy your idea and make millions. Yeah, good luck modding on a blackboxed server a hundred miles away. 7. But fine. I guess we're moving into the future and this is part of it. Except, there are millions, even BILLIONS, of people around the world without the internet capability to even join this service. Google tried to help solve this with Fiber, and gave up. Its fucking hard. They'd rather do easy, cool things, like cloud gaming. Modern consoles are bad enough; my brother, who lives just an hour outside of a top 10 US city, recently told me that he downloaded Fortnite on Xbox for the kids. It took a week of 24/7 downloading. Most games drop with day 1 patches in the dozens of gigabytes, even if you buy the disk in-stores. The sheer arrogance of Google, to get up on stage and claim this service is gaming for EVERYONE, the apex of accessibility, is disgusting to me. They're stuck so far up their own ass they've become the ouroboros. 8. Well, streaming games have taken over the world. Let's say you want to compete with Google on this streaming game front. All of the top three cloud providers now want to get into game streaming. So, no way can you compete on cost there with them; they own the data centers and give their game streaming divisions nice fat discounts. They all have the pockets to design nice custom silicon with AMD specialized for the task. And, oh by the way, all the latest games are now optimized for this silicon (whether its the custom AMD chips in the PS4, or XB1, or whatever cloud streaming service we're talking about, they're all custom). You're stuck with off-the-shelf cards. Ha! Nvidia won't let you deploy their cards in a datacenter [1], because they ALSO want in on this big cash pile they've all convinced themselves exist. So, basically, good luck. The world has balkanized, and penetrating it becomes harder every year. I hate this. I hate it so much. The only saving grace is that it is inevitable that this will fail to realize the results Google wants, and they'll pull the plug. And maybe the rest of the industry is smart enough to recognize how short-sighted a streaming-first/subscription-first strategy is, for literally everyone involved except the people who rent the metal. I want to go back to the 2000s. This new world sucks. [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/239994/nvidia-forbids-geforce-driver-deployment-in-data-centers https://www.techpowerup.com/239994/nvidia-forbids-geforce-dr...

ghobs91 8y ago

Why on earth would it be pay per hour or per MB? Does Netflix charge that way? How about Spotify? Time has shown that the best revenue model for these kinds of services is finding a monthly price, or multiple tiers of a monthly price, that adequately cover the costs incurred from heavy users and light users alike.

mlinsey 8y ago
For end users, I agree. It’s also interesting to consider how content providers will be paid: per user who plays, per user-hour, a flat catalog fee, etc., and what downstream effects this will have on games.
b_tterc_p 8y ago
Netflix and Spotify’s cost structure are different. Streaming content is cheap. Rendering a high end video game can get pricey because you need GPU time. There’s a lot of other considerations too. Like, a lot of people will pause a stream and let it sit for a few hours. That’s fine. What if people want to leave a game running for a few hours? The computational burden is still high.
- changchuming 8y ago
  I participated in the beta and I think they resolved this by setting a time out, and you get disconnected after some time.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tclover 8y ago

It's awesome, I can finally use Linux everywhere! Hell yeah, count me in

lern_too_spel 8y ago

Why would they charge per hour or per megabyte? That reduces stickiness. Much more likely is that they'll just get a cut of the game developers' sales, just like the game console vendors do. They'll set the cut so that the net profit pencils out over the long term.