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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 wi

by 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...

ajacksified 8y ago
You hit every single point I tried to make to my friend about half an hour ago. On one hand, I'm terrified that all of this will come to pass; on the other, if this is like any of Google's other projects, it's going to evaporate in two years anyways. Whatever happened to OnLive?
- 013a 8y ago
  It wasn't the right time for OnLive. The tech wasn't there, in networking infrastructure (the internet), compute infrastructure (DC tech), or hardware (graphics cards). To that last point; it is impossible to understate how fundamentally important Nvidia's Pascal architecture has been to the development of both gaming and AI. In my mind, its the most important computing chipset invented in the 2010s, and belongs among the "world's greatest" chips next to the Intel Core architecture, Apple's A-series, Pentium, and the 8086. It put Nvidia, quite literally, 5 years ahead of the competition almost overnight; AMD is still catching up, three years later, to the perf-per-dollar and perf-per-watt of the GTX 1080. That chipset, and the cards that were made with it (GTX 1080/1080Ti namely) were the first indication that DC rendering with a stream-to-client architecture was actually possible for video gaming. Before that it was hard to make an economic case for it. OnLive was purchased by Sony, and its easy to conclude that they repurposed their tech for their Playstation Now service. So it lives on.
mav3rick 8y ago
This is such a parochial and short-sighted view. Let's block new technology because "game studios will die". Businesses need to adapt. And if people still like games that don't rely on microtransactions or multiplayer, studios will make them. There is a place for both. Also, to point 7. guess what billions of people can't afford a console or an expensive PC rig. Yet, in developing countries data is already very cheap if not free. So, this DEFINITELY is a big step closer to unlocking games for them.
- 013a 8y ago
  Do you really think data is delivered to people in those countries in any sort of latency that would make a service like this remotely enjoyable to use? A massive number of people in the US don't even have internet that could support something like Stadia, let alone developing countries. By comparison, shipping "edge devices" (aka, uh, COMPUTERS) running an 845 Snapdragon or Tegra (like the Switch) is cheap and getting cheaper. What makes more sense: asking someone in a developing country to pay $200 one time for a general purpose computer useful for everything including 1080p gaming, or $10/month in addition to, uh guess what, some computing device they'd already have to own to access Stadia. The adage goes: never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes barrelling down the highway. I mean, the follow up is usually "but never forget the latency", though in this case that doesn't apply. Point being: the internet isn't the answer to everything, but if the only tool Google has ever known is a hammer then every problem is going to look like a nail.

by 013a 8y ago

ajacksified 8y ago

You hit every single point I tried to make to my friend about half an hour ago. On one hand, I'm terrified that all of this will come to pass; on the other, if this is like any of Google's other projects, it's going to evaporate in two years anyways. Whatever happened to OnLive?

013a 8y ago
It wasn't the right time for OnLive. The tech wasn't there, in networking infrastructure (the internet), compute infrastructure (DC tech), or hardware (graphics cards). To that last point; it is impossible to understate how fundamentally important Nvidia's Pascal architecture has been to the development of both gaming and AI. In my mind, its the most important computing chipset invented in the 2010s, and belongs among the "world's greatest" chips next to the Intel Core architecture, Apple's A-series, Pentium, and the 8086. It put Nvidia, quite literally, 5 years ahead of the competition almost overnight; AMD is still catching up, three years later, to the perf-per-dollar and perf-per-watt of the GTX 1080. That chipset, and the cards that were made with it (GTX 1080/1080Ti namely) were the first indication that DC rendering with a stream-to-client architecture was actually possible for video gaming. Before that it was hard to make an economic case for it. OnLive was purchased by Sony, and its easy to conclude that they repurposed their tech for their Playstation Now service. So it lives on.

mav3rick 8y ago

This is such a parochial and short-sighted view. Let's block new technology because "game studios will die". Businesses need to adapt. And if people still like games that don't rely on microtransactions or multiplayer, studios will make them. There is a place for both. Also, to point 7. guess what billions of people can't afford a console or an expensive PC rig. Yet, in developing countries data is already very cheap if not free. So, this DEFINITELY is a big step closer to unlocking games for them.

013a 8y ago
Do you really think data is delivered to people in those countries in any sort of latency that would make a service like this remotely enjoyable to use? A massive number of people in the US don't even have internet that could support something like Stadia, let alone developing countries. By comparison, shipping "edge devices" (aka, uh, COMPUTERS) running an 845 Snapdragon or Tegra (like the Switch) is cheap and getting cheaper. What makes more sense: asking someone in a developing country to pay $200 one time for a general purpose computer useful for everything including 1080p gaming, or $10/month in addition to, uh guess what, some computing device they'd already have to own to access Stadia. The adage goes: never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes barrelling down the highway. I mean, the follow up is usually "but never forget the latency", though in this case that doesn't apply. Point being: the internet isn't the answer to everything, but if the only tool Google has ever known is a hammer then every problem is going to look like a nail.