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When I got Stadia, I set my dad up with it to play Red Dead 2, because he knows nothing of games, and I wasn't buying him a PS4 just to play 1 game. It was grea

When I got Stadia, I set my dad up with it to play Red Dead 2, because he knows nothing of games, and I wasn't buying him a PS4 just to play 1 game. It was great. When he got stuck, I logged in across the country and advanced the story for him, and he took back over. Spectacular product. I told my dad, day 1, "You'd better enjoy this now, because in 2 years, Google will kill this and you'll never be able to play again." I was off by about a year, but I was 100% right. At least they gave me back 100% of my money and game purchase $. Still, standard Google. Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

freedomben 3y ago
You should get your dad a steam deck! It sounds like he would love it. you could (with some setup) even use Steam Link to log in remotely. latency/throughput would obvoiusly be much worse, enough so that you might not be able to do any fast-moving reflex-required scenarios, but it's playable.
- VonGuard 3y ago
  I just cannot rationalize getting him any gaming equipment. He could manage Stadia, juuuust barely. He frequently cannot figure out his cell phone. He is basically a ludite. My mom had to stand there and turn Stadia on on the tablet for him... I was considering Shadow but it's just too complex too.
  - thenipper 3y ago
    GeForce now works pretty well. I use it for gaming while traveling and haven’t had too many issues
    - wishfish 3y ago
      GeForce Now is working great for me. But for this person's dad, it probably wouldn't work well at all. The interface is cluttered with game icons. Which is fine for me. But someone averse to tech would probably find it confusing & overwhelming.
      - solardev 3y ago
        Those icons are just games, aren't they? The first row is "my library". Make him a Steam account with just a few games and he can just launch them directly from that row. Be warned though, Red Dead Redemption is not available on Geforce Now. Maybe someday... they just started integrating Microsoft Game Pass games onto GFN, so maybe RDR is on the backlog there somewhere.
  - solardev 3y ago
    GFN is much simpler in complexity. It's comparable to Stadia, though not QUITE as slick because it still goes through Steam. It is, however, a WHOLE lot easier to use than Shadow. If you get him the desktop app (which is optional) and link it to his accounts and such, from then on he just opens GFN and clicks on the game he wants to play and that's it. No OS or updates or maintenance or anything like that to worry about. Edit: Be warned though, Red Dead Redemption is not available on Geforce Now. Maybe someday... they just started integrating Microsoft Game Pass games onto GFN, so maybe RDR is on the backlog there somewhere.
wccrawford 3y ago
I was really hopeful for Stadia, too, and enjoyed playing on it for a while. But in the end, remoting from my own computer was better and faster. Having you considered something like Parsec to do the same thing with your dad? I think it should do what you need. Steam's own Remote Play Together might do it, too.
- VonGuard 3y ago
  This is all across the US, one coast to another, so these personally run apps probably wouldnt work, right?
  - wccrawford 3y ago
    It's hard to know without trying, but I would guess that it'd at least be good enough to do what you were doing before. I think Parsec is still free for the basics, so the only cost would be your time in setting it up and trying it.
  - branon 3y ago
    Parsec and Steam's remote play feature support both LAN and WAN. Mileage varies, wired LAN is better than wireless LAN is better than WAN. You're correct in the notion that running these types of apps relies on your home Internet connection (along with your hotel connection or wherever you're located). This is almost certainly lower performance, lower quality, and higher latency than gaming from a Google datacenter via Stadia.
    - wccrawford 3y ago
      Across the continent that might be true, but when gaming from my office in town to my house, there was noticeably less lag on Parsec than Stadia. I tried Stadia both at home and work. I used it at home for months before using Parsec instead.
Workaccount2 3y ago
If Google changes leadership to a sensible business person, I'll put serious money into the stock. Google is a megacorporation with powerful IP and virtually unlimited resources. It's time to stop the small start-up mentality of chucking things at the wall to see what sticks. Unify your products/services, assign staff to manage it, commit to your decisions. Offer paid services with support and no user hostile privacy bs. I'm at the point where I just feel this latent contempt when using google products now. I went from a fanboy darling to someone who actively dissuades people from using anything from the company.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  GOOG is approaching its all-time highs today, and up well over 100% over the past five years. In a similar time frame the S&P 500 is up about 50% or so. I hate Google's tendency to cancel products as much as anyone, but as investments go, that tendency doesn't seem to hurt it.
  - eschneider 3y ago
    There's a bit of a tipping point to things like this. It doesn't hurt them until it DOES, and at that point, it's almost impossible for a company to gain trust back.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  if that means turning into microsoft, then no thanks
- feoren 3y ago
  There is literally no incentive for a giant corporation to put anyone competent at the helm. That's a backward understanding of the situation. CEOs don't exist to enrich corporations; corporations exist to enrich CEOs. Anyone who had the power to appoint someone competent has no motivation to do so: they can also appoint their buddies, who can continue to parasitize the effectiveness of the company for their own gain. Why would they make some rando CEO? They literally do not care about the long-term success of the company as a whole, they only care about the portion of it that they can drain of blood in the short-term. Any company with any level of "excess competence" is immediately swarmed by Business Caste parasites (via a takeover or several other means) and that excess competence is drained off into their pockets. In fact laying off support departments and canceling products and reneging on promises is one of the easiest ways to suck out value from the company into the C-layer in the short term. Who cares if the company flounders and fails? They just spread their locust wings and find a new host.
Vicinity9635 3y ago
>Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever. Apple is the only one even in that market, really. Everybody else is so focused on getting each "segment" of the market they miss the whole picture. Apple wants to slather you in Apple devices so thoroughly you don't need anyone else's electronics, and if you do it all works really well together. Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.
- taeric 3y ago
  Sony is the company that I feel somehow misses this the most. Possibly Microsoft. The lack of integration that Playstations and XBoxes have with anything is rather surprising. Could be as simple as volume control on the TV. Or automatically turn on the TV. Nothing fancy. But nothing exists.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    Get a Sony TV and you can fully control the Playstation with the remote. It handles TV on/off signals and autoconfigures HDR/Display settings. The whole bit.
    - monkpit 3y ago
      Isn’t this just HDMI-CEC? I don’t think it requires Sony hardware but I could be wrong.
      - taeric 3y ago
        I'll have to try a newer device, then. Pleasantly surprised to hear that my view is just outdated. :D
      - tracker1 3y ago
        This has been my experience, though some aspects of CEC are hit or miss, especially depending on the TV, AVR and other device(s). I use an NVidia Shield TV with an AVR in my main living space, and a couple others in different rooms. For CEC, some remotes/devices work for everything, others not so much, others still are hit and miss for say volume control, etc.
ortusdux 3y ago
I just tried out Nivida's alternative - Geforce Now - this weekend and I am quite impressed. There is a free version where you que up, otherwise its $10/mo or $20/mo if you want 4k and a dedicated 4080. The main selling point to me is that you can sync Steam, Gog, Epic, Ubisoft, or EA accounts and play any of your purchased games that are compatible. You can play in the browser, via a dedicated program, or with one of their Shield TV boxes. The latter would run ~$150 + controllers or mouse/keyboard, so that is part of the way to a PS4.
- solardev 3y ago
  FYI, GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade). The Shield is a luxury version that does basically the same thing with more horsepower. I imagine you can use any similar device (like an old Android phone or an old laptop) for the same purposes... if it can stream Netflix, it can run Geforce Now. The main downside of GFN is that it's a publisher opt-in, and many games aren't available on it . But for the games in its catalog, it works REALLY well -- so much so that I much prefer it to the dedicated gaming desktop I used to have, because it's so much quieter and cheaper (both in terms of an upfront hardware purchase and in electricity costs, between the GPU itself and needing to cool down the room). There are also services like shadow.tech and AirGPU that let you run virtual Windows boxes with a GPU, cheaper than you'd get from AWS or GCP, but able to run any game you want.
  - binkHN 3y ago
    > ...GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade). How is the latency in this configuration? I thought the main reason Google used the Wi-Fi built into the Stadia controllers was to get around this.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I wouldn't want to play a shooter on it, but (say) Baldur's Gate 3 co-op with Xbox controllers worked great. Latency wasn't an issue. I think the Bluetooth latency is going to be less than the wifi latency (Chromecast has no ethernet port) plus the roundtrip to the Nvidia servers anyway. (edit: Chromecast with Google TV, that is. Chromecast Ultra, a different device, does have ethernet) I've also used GeForce Now on a hardwired gigabit fiber connection on my desktop, and even then I wouldn't consider the latency suitable for competitive first-person shooters. But it worked great for most other genres of games. Basically anything will work fine where a software cursor is used (where you don't update frames until a hover or a click), as opposed to a crosshaired 3D game that requires constant frame redraws on every mouse motion (shooters). That's just me though... as a lifelong PC gamer, many actual consoles + smart TVs (especially when they're not in gaming mode) also have unacceptable latency to me, but I think millions of people wouldn't even notice. It's worth a shot, especially if you can just hook up an existing computer to your TV (via HDMI or whatever) and get a feel for it that way. The Stadia controller thing over wifi thing was always bullshit. I had their controllers and it was never noticeably better or worse than a standard Xbox controller wirelessly connected to GeForce Now. And once Stadia died they enabled Bluetooth on it and it still works fine. shrug* Stadia's marketing made a lot of questionable, and sometimes demonstrably false, claims.
joshmn 3y ago
For your dad: I was a Stadia fan until I tried GeForce NOW and some of the "cloud gaming hardware services" (hardware, not platform). They were superior products, and did mostly the same thing. GeForce NOW is particularly slick, but their catalog is limited at the publisher level. I've found Boosteroid to be a great value while not being as limited. I play on an Nvidia Shield most of the time with a Pro Controller for Switch.
- nomel 3y ago
  I use ShadowPC. Steam, with Big Screen, makes it console enough. At least until you want to play an EA game.
mmanfrin 3y ago
> Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever. Getting worse too. The Pixel Watch was atrocious on launch, required 6 hours of updates, battery life on my first walk on cell coverage dropped me 80% in an hour. Google does not know how to make a good product.
binkHN 3y ago
Strongly concur on Stadia—a product way ahead of its time. As for the Google ecosystem, I don’t have everything Google—I more often go for best-of-breed—but, for the Google things I do have, I love how well they work together. A bit of happiness is taking a photo on my Pixel phone—and then instantly inserting it into a Google Doc right after logging into my ChromeOS device.
- preommr 3y ago
  > a product way ahead of its time Ahead of it's time? The gaming industry is the biggest entertainment sector - millenials that grew up playing video games have the highest amount of disposable income. The market exists. The technology and networking also works. Streaming has been well established for movies and television, the past few years has put a dramatic emphasis on remote work and distributed collaboration. Stadias' timing was fine, it's Google that dropped the ball.
- solardev 3y ago
  Stadia was not ahead of its time. It was a latecomer to a growing field that Google dipped its feet into, but never fully committed to. I'm pointing this out not to be pedantic, but to illustrate just how thoroughly Google dropped the ball on it. In 2010 OnLive was launched to the public, creating the first version of a public Stadia-like service. It worked the same way; you opened a browser or an app and you could play a game that you bought on it (I think back then it was a subscription model? can't remember) Around the same time, Gaikai and Sony partnered up to create the predecessor to Playstation Now streaming. Then Nvidia entered the game in 2012, right around the time they started adding hardware-accelerated video encoding to their GPUs, launching Nvidia Grid with some partners. By 2017, Grid evolved into GeForce Now and could play the user's entire Steam library (unlike today, back then ALL games were available, not just ones opted-into by the publisher). Stadia didn't come around until 2019, nearly a decade after OnLive. Google being Google, they didn't want to do what Nvidia did (make existing games playable), but instead created their own architecture that was easier to launch and easier to use, but required users to re-purchase existing titles, usually without cross-saves and cross-plays. (Edit: It also required devs to spend time and money porting the game to Stadia's platform, vs a one-click opt-in for GeForce Now). So it sat in its own little bubble, away from the entire rest of the PC ecosystem (which was Steam and/or Games for Windows back then). It also had inferior graphics compared to Nvidia's cards (notably lacking raytracing, ultrawide, etc.) and Google flat-out lied about its capabilities (like Orcs Must Die 3 games being made a Stadia exclusive at launch because "only the cloud" could run it smoothly, except it came out on Steam a year later and was just fine). They did some minimal barebones marketing targeting casuals. Fast forward a few years and they just completely abandoned it, while GeForce Now continues to grow, gaining EA, Ubi, and now Activision Blizzard games as official partners. Amazon has Luna, Microsoft has xCloud (or whatever it's called now), Playstation has PSNow (or whatever it's called now), Shadow, Boosteroid, AirGPU etc. are all alive. Google didn't invent game streaming. They didn't perfect it. They launched a slightly more polished experience that was significantly more expensive, had terrible sales compared to Steam and its 3rd-party resellers, and and gave up on it in its adolescence. There was nothing "ahead of its time" about it, it was just another could-have-been that Google toyed with and never seriously invested into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming#History
bluSCALE4 3y ago
The sad part is that Google and Google usually works great via 1st or 3rd party at first but then Google does something to get in its own way. I think the Moto Droid was peak Google in terms of ability to do whatever the hell you wanted.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever. I get frustrated as much as anyone about Google's product shit show, but I don't agree with this. I own a Pixel, a Pixelbook that I loved and was a great dev machine when running the Linux container (of course, "In September 2022, Google canceled future generations of the product and dissolved the team working on it."), and Nest Home that I got as a sort of door prize at some event. They all worked together really well, e.g. unlocking/syncing the Pixelbook with my phone, or when I say "Hey Google" both the phone and Nest Home initially acknowledge but only one (in most cases the Nest Home) responds, which is what I want.
- solardev 3y ago
  I guess you missed that generation where they were trying to transition the Google Wifi product into the Nest lineup, while Google Home was still in its adolescence. That one device needed the Google Home app to set up initially, the Nest app to configure day to day, and Google Wifi for advanced legacy settings and port forwarding and such. Three apps for one device? Was a real WTF moment for me... Router aside, some of my other devices would end up in Google Home, others in the Nest app. Eventually I got tired of the bullshit and switched to the much cheaper & simpler Wyze ecosystem and never had an issue again.

freedomben 3y ago

You should get your dad a steam deck! It sounds like he would love it. you could (with some setup) even use Steam Link to log in remotely. latency/throughput would obvoiusly be much worse, enough so that you might not be able to do any fast-moving reflex-required scenarios, but it's playable.

VonGuard 3y ago
I just cannot rationalize getting him any gaming equipment. He could manage Stadia, juuuust barely. He frequently cannot figure out his cell phone. He is basically a ludite. My mom had to stand there and turn Stadia on on the tablet for him... I was considering Shadow but it's just too complex too.
- thenipper 3y ago
  GeForce now works pretty well. I use it for gaming while traveling and haven’t had too many issues
  - wishfish 3y ago
    GeForce Now is working great for me. But for this person's dad, it probably wouldn't work well at all. The interface is cluttered with game icons. Which is fine for me. But someone averse to tech would probably find it confusing & overwhelming.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Those icons are just games, aren't they? The first row is "my library". Make him a Steam account with just a few games and he can just launch them directly from that row. Be warned though, Red Dead Redemption is not available on Geforce Now. Maybe someday... they just started integrating Microsoft Game Pass games onto GFN, so maybe RDR is on the backlog there somewhere.
- solardev 3y ago
  GFN is much simpler in complexity. It's comparable to Stadia, though not QUITE as slick because it still goes through Steam. It is, however, a WHOLE lot easier to use than Shadow. If you get him the desktop app (which is optional) and link it to his accounts and such, from then on he just opens GFN and clicks on the game he wants to play and that's it. No OS or updates or maintenance or anything like that to worry about. Edit: Be warned though, Red Dead Redemption is not available on Geforce Now. Maybe someday... they just started integrating Microsoft Game Pass games onto GFN, so maybe RDR is on the backlog there somewhere.

wccrawford 3y ago

I was really hopeful for Stadia, too, and enjoyed playing on it for a while. But in the end, remoting from my own computer was better and faster. Having you considered something like Parsec to do the same thing with your dad? I think it should do what you need. Steam's own Remote Play Together might do it, too.

VonGuard 3y ago
This is all across the US, one coast to another, so these personally run apps probably wouldnt work, right?
- wccrawford 3y ago
  It's hard to know without trying, but I would guess that it'd at least be good enough to do what you were doing before. I think Parsec is still free for the basics, so the only cost would be your time in setting it up and trying it.
- branon 3y ago
  Parsec and Steam's remote play feature support both LAN and WAN. Mileage varies, wired LAN is better than wireless LAN is better than WAN. You're correct in the notion that running these types of apps relies on your home Internet connection (along with your hotel connection or wherever you're located). This is almost certainly lower performance, lower quality, and higher latency than gaming from a Google datacenter via Stadia.
  - wccrawford 3y ago
    Across the continent that might be true, but when gaming from my office in town to my house, there was noticeably less lag on Parsec than Stadia. I tried Stadia both at home and work. I used it at home for months before using Parsec instead.

Workaccount2 3y ago

If Google changes leadership to a sensible business person, I'll put serious money into the stock. Google is a megacorporation with powerful IP and virtually unlimited resources. It's time to stop the small start-up mentality of chucking things at the wall to see what sticks. Unify your products/services, assign staff to manage it, commit to your decisions. Offer paid services with support and no user hostile privacy bs. I'm at the point where I just feel this latent contempt when using google products now. I went from a fanboy darling to someone who actively dissuades people from using anything from the company.

compiler-guy 3y ago
GOOG is approaching its all-time highs today, and up well over 100% over the past five years. In a similar time frame the S&P 500 is up about 50% or so. I hate Google's tendency to cancel products as much as anyone, but as investments go, that tendency doesn't seem to hurt it.
- eschneider 3y ago
  There's a bit of a tipping point to things like this. It doesn't hurt them until it DOES, and at that point, it's almost impossible for a company to gain trust back.
willsmith72 3y ago
if that means turning into microsoft, then no thanks
feoren 3y ago
There is literally no incentive for a giant corporation to put anyone competent at the helm. That's a backward understanding of the situation. CEOs don't exist to enrich corporations; corporations exist to enrich CEOs. Anyone who had the power to appoint someone competent has no motivation to do so: they can also appoint their buddies, who can continue to parasitize the effectiveness of the company for their own gain. Why would they make some rando CEO? They literally do not care about the long-term success of the company as a whole, they only care about the portion of it that they can drain of blood in the short-term. Any company with any level of "excess competence" is immediately swarmed by Business Caste parasites (via a takeover or several other means) and that excess competence is drained off into their pockets. In fact laying off support departments and canceling products and reneging on promises is one of the easiest ways to suck out value from the company into the C-layer in the short term. Who cares if the company flounders and fails? They just spread their locust wings and find a new host.

Vicinity9635 3y ago

>Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever. Apple is the only one even in that market, really. Everybody else is so focused on getting each "segment" of the market they miss the whole picture. Apple wants to slather you in Apple devices so thoroughly you don't need anyone else's electronics, and if you do it all works really well together. Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.

taeric 3y ago
Sony is the company that I feel somehow misses this the most. Possibly Microsoft. The lack of integration that Playstations and XBoxes have with anything is rather surprising. Could be as simple as volume control on the TV. Or automatically turn on the TV. Nothing fancy. But nothing exists.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Get a Sony TV and you can fully control the Playstation with the remote. It handles TV on/off signals and autoconfigures HDR/Display settings. The whole bit.
  - monkpit 3y ago
    Isn’t this just HDMI-CEC? I don’t think it requires Sony hardware but I could be wrong.
    - taeric 3y ago
      I'll have to try a newer device, then. Pleasantly surprised to hear that my view is just outdated. :D
    - tracker1 3y ago
      This has been my experience, though some aspects of CEC are hit or miss, especially depending on the TV, AVR and other device(s). I use an NVidia Shield TV with an AVR in my main living space, and a couple others in different rooms. For CEC, some remotes/devices work for everything, others not so much, others still are hit and miss for say volume control, etc.

ortusdux 3y ago

I just tried out Nivida's alternative - Geforce Now - this weekend and I am quite impressed. There is a free version where you que up, otherwise its $10/mo or $20/mo if you want 4k and a dedicated 4080. The main selling point to me is that you can sync Steam, Gog, Epic, Ubisoft, or EA accounts and play any of your purchased games that are compatible. You can play in the browser, via a dedicated program, or with one of their Shield TV boxes. The latter would run ~$150 + controllers or mouse/keyboard, so that is part of the way to a PS4.

solardev 3y ago
FYI, GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade). The Shield is a luxury version that does basically the same thing with more horsepower. I imagine you can use any similar device (like an old Android phone or an old laptop) for the same purposes... if it can stream Netflix, it can run Geforce Now. The main downside of GFN is that it's a publisher opt-in, and many games aren't available on it . But for the games in its catalog, it works REALLY well -- so much so that I much prefer it to the dedicated gaming desktop I used to have, because it's so much quieter and cheaper (both in terms of an upfront hardware purchase and in electricity costs, between the GPU itself and needing to cool down the room). There are also services like shadow.tech and AirGPU that let you run virtual Windows boxes with a GPU, cheaper than you'd get from AWS or GCP, but able to run any game you want.
- binkHN 3y ago
  > ...GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade). How is the latency in this configuration? I thought the main reason Google used the Wi-Fi built into the Stadia controllers was to get around this.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I wouldn't want to play a shooter on it, but (say) Baldur's Gate 3 co-op with Xbox controllers worked great. Latency wasn't an issue. I think the Bluetooth latency is going to be less than the wifi latency (Chromecast has no ethernet port) plus the roundtrip to the Nvidia servers anyway. (edit: Chromecast with Google TV, that is. Chromecast Ultra, a different device, does have ethernet) I've also used GeForce Now on a hardwired gigabit fiber connection on my desktop, and even then I wouldn't consider the latency suitable for competitive first-person shooters. But it worked great for most other genres of games. Basically anything will work fine where a software cursor is used (where you don't update frames until a hover or a click), as opposed to a crosshaired 3D game that requires constant frame redraws on every mouse motion (shooters). That's just me though... as a lifelong PC gamer, many actual consoles + smart TVs (especially when they're not in gaming mode) also have unacceptable latency to me, but I think millions of people wouldn't even notice. It's worth a shot, especially if you can just hook up an existing computer to your TV (via HDMI or whatever) and get a feel for it that way. The Stadia controller thing over wifi thing was always bullshit. I had their controllers and it was never noticeably better or worse than a standard Xbox controller wirelessly connected to GeForce Now. And once Stadia died they enabled Bluetooth on it and it still works fine. shrug* Stadia's marketing made a lot of questionable, and sometimes demonstrably false, claims.

joshmn 3y ago

For your dad: I was a Stadia fan until I tried GeForce NOW and some of the "cloud gaming hardware services" (hardware, not platform). They were superior products, and did mostly the same thing. GeForce NOW is particularly slick, but their catalog is limited at the publisher level. I've found Boosteroid to be a great value while not being as limited. I play on an Nvidia Shield most of the time with a Pro Controller for Switch.

nomel 3y ago
I use ShadowPC. Steam, with Big Screen, makes it console enough. At least until you want to play an EA game.

mmanfrin 3y ago

> Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever. Getting worse too. The Pixel Watch was atrocious on launch, required 6 hours of updates, battery life on my first walk on cell coverage dropped me 80% in an hour. Google does not know how to make a good product.

binkHN 3y ago

Strongly concur on Stadia—a product way ahead of its time. As for the Google ecosystem, I don’t have everything Google—I more often go for best-of-breed—but, for the Google things I do have, I love how well they work together. A bit of happiness is taking a photo on my Pixel phone—and then instantly inserting it into a Google Doc right after logging into my ChromeOS device.

preommr 3y ago
> a product way ahead of its time Ahead of it's time? The gaming industry is the biggest entertainment sector - millenials that grew up playing video games have the highest amount of disposable income. The market exists. The technology and networking also works. Streaming has been well established for movies and television, the past few years has put a dramatic emphasis on remote work and distributed collaboration. Stadias' timing was fine, it's Google that dropped the ball.
solardev 3y ago
Stadia was not ahead of its time. It was a latecomer to a growing field that Google dipped its feet into, but never fully committed to. I'm pointing this out not to be pedantic, but to illustrate just how thoroughly Google dropped the ball on it. In 2010 OnLive was launched to the public, creating the first version of a public Stadia-like service. It worked the same way; you opened a browser or an app and you could play a game that you bought on it (I think back then it was a subscription model? can't remember) Around the same time, Gaikai and Sony partnered up to create the predecessor to Playstation Now streaming. Then Nvidia entered the game in 2012, right around the time they started adding hardware-accelerated video encoding to their GPUs, launching Nvidia Grid with some partners. By 2017, Grid evolved into GeForce Now and could play the user's entire Steam library (unlike today, back then ALL games were available, not just ones opted-into by the publisher). Stadia didn't come around until 2019, nearly a decade after OnLive. Google being Google, they didn't want to do what Nvidia did (make existing games playable), but instead created their own architecture that was easier to launch and easier to use, but required users to re-purchase existing titles, usually without cross-saves and cross-plays. (Edit: It also required devs to spend time and money porting the game to Stadia's platform, vs a one-click opt-in for GeForce Now). So it sat in its own little bubble, away from the entire rest of the PC ecosystem (which was Steam and/or Games for Windows back then). It also had inferior graphics compared to Nvidia's cards (notably lacking raytracing, ultrawide, etc.) and Google flat-out lied about its capabilities (like Orcs Must Die 3 games being made a Stadia exclusive at launch because "only the cloud" could run it smoothly, except it came out on Steam a year later and was just fine). They did some minimal barebones marketing targeting casuals. Fast forward a few years and they just completely abandoned it, while GeForce Now continues to grow, gaining EA, Ubi, and now Activision Blizzard games as official partners. Amazon has Luna, Microsoft has xCloud (or whatever it's called now), Playstation has PSNow (or whatever it's called now), Shadow, Boosteroid, AirGPU etc. are all alive. Google didn't invent game streaming. They didn't perfect it. They launched a slightly more polished experience that was significantly more expensive, had terrible sales compared to Steam and its 3rd-party resellers, and and gave up on it in its adolescence. There was nothing "ahead of its time" about it, it was just another could-have-been that Google toyed with and never seriously invested into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming#History

bluSCALE4 3y ago

The sad part is that Google and Google usually works great via 1st or 3rd party at first but then Google does something to get in its own way. I think the Moto Droid was peak Google in terms of ability to do whatever the hell you wanted.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

> Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever. I get frustrated as much as anyone about Google's product shit show, but I don't agree with this. I own a Pixel, a Pixelbook that I loved and was a great dev machine when running the Linux container (of course, "In September 2022, Google canceled future generations of the product and dissolved the team working on it."), and Nest Home that I got as a sort of door prize at some event. They all worked together really well, e.g. unlocking/syncing the Pixelbook with my phone, or when I say "Hey Google" both the phone and Nest Home initially acknowledge but only one (in most cases the Nest Home) responds, which is what I want.

solardev 3y ago
I guess you missed that generation where they were trying to transition the Google Wifi product into the Nest lineup, while Google Home was still in its adolescence. That one device needed the Google Home app to set up initially, the Nest app to configure day to day, and Google Wifi for advanced legacy settings and port forwarding and such. Three apps for one device? Was a real WTF moment for me... Router aside, some of my other devices would end up in Google Home, others in the Nest app. Eventually I got tired of the bullshit and switched to the much cheaper & simpler Wyze ecosystem and never had an issue again.