Nothing could have saved Google Stadia from Google with the way they managed it from the very beginning. It launched not just without any of the special features that cloud gaming could have...
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Nothing could have saved Google Stadia from Google with the way they managed it from the very beginning.
It launched not just without any of the special features that cloud gaming could have enabled like easy save state sharing, direct streaming to YouTube, and being able to jump into a game demo from a link on a search result, but also without some basic social features people expect these days like easy screenshot and gameplay recording sharing. They then updated and added features at a glacial pace and IIRC, most of the special cloud gaming features never got released.
Edit: As pointed out below, I am incorrect about these features never getting released. Easy screenshot/recording sharing, save state sharing, and streaming to YouTube did start getting added about a year after launch. However, by this time, most people had already written off Stadia. Playing a game from search results, the one of these features that in my opinion could have had the biggest impact on Stadia's success, was not released until August of 2022. Barely two months before Stadia's shut down was announced.
They also did a terrible job marketing the pricing structure. It seemed that nobody who didn't follow Stadia closely understood that you could just buy a game without having to pay for the premium subscription. All they had to do was run a marketing campaign about how Stadia has nearly no upfront cost of entry like every console has and you didn't even need anything more then a mediocre PC.
And finally, Google seemed to give up on developing their own games for the platform almost immediately. They were supposed to show off what's possible in games with the scalability of the cloud but they never came to fruition. If Google can't bother to show off what its platform is capable of, why would anyone else.
IMO, Google Stadia had the potential to be something special but it never stood a change with Google's slapdash approach to developing products. It was treated like someone's weekend project that accidentally got more attention than they planned on.
Also, just as an aside, the features this article mentions are kinda technically possible anyway without Stadia. Maybe not as seamless but probably enough for the average gamer. Crowd choice exists as a Twitch integration, save state sharing can probably be done by just sharing the save files, and nearly everyone has Discord these days and that has built in screen sharing.
I think trust is another huge factor in Stadia's failure. I have only anecdotal evidence but I know a lot of people, myself included, that wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because of Google's...
I think trust is another huge factor in Stadia's failure. I have only anecdotal evidence but I know a lot of people, myself included, that wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because of Google's penchant for dropping anything that isn't an instant breakout success. I am never going to be an early adopter of Google's services that I rely on having access to long term.
Google Reader shutting down in 2013 was when the veil was lifted for me. Before that, I naively thought Google were one of the good guys, after that I realized they were just like every other...
Google Reader shutting down in 2013 was when the veil was lifted for me. Before that, I naively thought Google were one of the good guys, after that I realized they were just like every other company. I can't remember the last time I was enthusiastic about something they announced, but back in the day when they released stuff like Wave (remember that? lol), Buzz, Google Code, Android or even Chrome it was pretty amazing.
I got a Google Stadia controller and Chromecast as part of a deal when I was buying, I think, a phone way back just before Stadia launched. I thought it would be awesome if they could figure out...
I got a Google Stadia controller and Chromecast as part of a deal when I was buying, I think, a phone way back just before Stadia launched. I thought it would be awesome if they could figure out the potential issue with input lag. After all, every button press was being sent to a server not in your house for processing, so every millisecond was critical.
Shockingly, they did it. The input lag was practically non-existent, at least for me. And when they started supporting existing Chromecast devices, I suddenly had two TVs I could stream games to. Eventually you wouldn't need a Chromecast at all.
Honestly, I started to prefer the Chromecast for gaming whenever a game was supported by it. However, a lack of trust in Google is precisely why I paid for a monthly subscription and only played the "free" games the came with it. I was unsure what would happen to any purchased games if Google decided to pull the plug eventually, which became a bigger fear as they stopped investing in their own game development.
Ultimately they pulled the plug, and while I think it was a fairly rare instance of them going above and beyond to compensate people, it wasn't shocking to me. It was simply disappointing. And it validated my decision to never buy games from them directly.
Certainly better education in how you could use the Stadia with little to no upfront or monthly cost would have been great. But I think that gamers can be a rather discerning crowd. Like you, my own experience and what I've heard of others was primarily that no one trusted Google enough to invest deeply or long-term in the ecosystem because of the looming threat of it going away suddenly. And that's exactly what happened. Even though Google could have easily made up for any losses with its other cash cows without breaking a sweat, Google has an unfortunate tendency to give everything a set amount of time to become profitable on its own. And either you need to be bringing customers into the Google ecosystem as a whole (like Gmail or Maps) or you need to be generating enough revenue to sustain your own existence (like Reader or Domains). It's sad, really
Yea I think the Google might have avoided this was if they had offered digital downloads of any games you bought as an assurance that you wouldn't lose your games and then made that assurance a...
Yea I think the Google might have avoided this was if they had offered digital downloads of any games you bought as an assurance that you wouldn't lose your games and then made that assurance a heavy part of their marketing.
It would have helped if they had used a different brand under their control like YouTube instead. It would have made much more sense if Stadia was a YT product anyways as streaming is a heavy push of theirs.
I think a better avenue for success would be to have done what GeForce Now did: offer access to games you own on other popular game aggregators as long as you pay a monthly fee. The two products...
I think a better avenue for success would be to have done what GeForce Now did: offer access to games you own on other popular game aggregators as long as you pay a monthly fee.
The two products are so similar in my mind. I don't know if GeForce Now got rid of their custom hardware requirement, but they both offered you a chance to play games running on their top tier hardware, streamed right to your TV, for a monthly fee.
In fact, for GeForce Now it's a requirement to be a subscriber and there's no option to buy direct. Imagine if Google let you choose to buy games direct so you didn't need a subscription or you could pay a monthly fee and get access to any Stadia supported games you owned on eg Steam or you could do both.
The reason they didn't pursue that path seems simple: even before it launched they probably had signed its death certificate. I doubt even a modicum of effort went into making stadia successful after the initial launch. What a shame, because honestly the hardware execution was so damn good considering the (eventually) low entry cost.
I do wonder how Google will solve this problem. They're now stuck in a pit where launching any new services (outside of additions to existing platforms like YouTube) will garner extreme...
I do wonder how Google will solve this problem. They're now stuck in a pit where launching any new services (outside of additions to existing platforms like YouTube) will garner extreme skepticism.
(if I was in charge of fixing this, my idea would be to simply prop up any new unsuccessful launch for 10 years, to try and remedy the reputation)
Yea I think owning up to their past mistakes is the very first baby step. I think they would need to offer, up front, solutions to what happens if their scuttle the service. Whether that's a...
Yea I think owning up to their past mistakes is the very first baby step. I think they would need to offer, up front, solutions to what happens if their scuttle the service. Whether that's a guarantee of X years of support or ability to download your data and self host a service or something else. I think making the service interoperable with 3rd party services would be huge, with some sort of guarantee that you're not just going to make the API proprietary some point in the future (not sure how you'd do that.)
In Stadia's case, I wonder if more people would have taken a chance on it if they had known that all hardware and software purchases would be refunded in the event of a shutdown. That was a...
In Stadia's case, I wonder if more people would have taken a chance on it if they had known that all hardware and software purchases would be refunded in the event of a shutdown. That was a surprisingly generous severance package.
The way you're talking about it makes it sound more like Vudu but for games. If that's actually how it was then I'm honestly kind of sad that I never got on board. Their advertising for Stadia...
The way you're talking about it makes it sound more like Vudu but for games. If that's actually how it was then I'm honestly kind of sad that I never got on board. Their advertising for Stadia just made it seem like there was a barrier to entry similar to buying a Playstation or Xbox (only cheaper) which is not what I was looking for. All of the advertisements and buzz I saw was to buy their Stadia kit with a chromecast and a dedicated controller, then a monthly subscription to play games. I already have that on my PC with Gamepass, my Switch with Nintendo Online, and my Xbox One with Gamepass (that I never turn on). They basically made their audience only people who don't already have gaming capable hardware.
I'm more interesting in an app that I can run on my TV (or through a Fire Stick, Chromecast etc) and stream my game library there with any controller I have at home. I already have Xbox controllers, I have Steam controllers, I have Switch controllers. Please stop making me buy more controllers to be a gamer! NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is currently the best out there, but I just spent ~10 minutes messing with it on my phone and it was not a pleasant experience. The interface was very difficult to get all of my accounts linked (Steam, Epic and Ubisoft) and then when I hit play my phone just hard reset. I have a gaming PC personally, so it offers little benefit over using Moonlight to stream my games to my television.
If Valve ever gets into this space with the Steam Link app they will dominate the landscape. It seems like they're the only ones interested in being hardware agnostic. If a company can convince me that upgrading my videocard isn't worth my money, then I'll gladly put that money to a monthly subscription.
Stadia was really well done, it's unfortunate that it was pretty much doomed to the Google graveyard since it launched due to all the mismanagement. It was very much like Vudu in that you had your...
Stadia was really well done, it's unfortunate that it was pretty much doomed to the Google graveyard since it launched due to all the mismanagement.
It was very much like Vudu in that you had your library of games that you purchased through the Stadia store, which you could play for free any time at 1080p on any supported device (Chromecast, web browser, Android app, and so on). To play on the Chromecast you were locked into Google's proprietary Stadia controller which connected directly to Stadia's servers over Wifi to reduce input lag, but when playing over a web browser or on an Android device you could use any wired or bluetooth controller.
You could optionally pay a monthly subscription of $9.99 USD which would give you a few additional perks:
The ability to claim a selection of free games every month that would remain a part of your library for as long as you subscribed. If you stopped your subscription and resumed later you'd still have the backlog of free games you claimed, but any games that were offered during months that your subscription lapsed would not be claimable (very similar to Microsoft's Games with Gold offering).
The ability to play at 4K with HDR for games that supported it.
Most people didn't realize that the monthly fee was optional and that you could play the games you owned for free. They thought you had to pay full price to purchase your games and pay $9.99/mo to play them, where if you stopped paying for the monthly subscription you lost access to the games you bought, but that's not how it worked at all. It was basically a free cloud-based console.
Thankfully when they shut it down Google actually refunded every dollar spent through the Stadia store on games, DLC, and even hardware, so in the end I was out exactly zero dollars and got a couple Chromecast Ultras and pretty nice bluetooth gamepads for free.
I could be mistaken but I'm fairly sure it was never the case that you had to subscribe to play games that you purchased--the subscription was always for access to the premium features (I think it...
I could be mistaken but I'm fairly sure it was never the case that you had to subscribe to play games that you purchased--the subscription was always for access to the premium features (I think it launched with one game free for subscribers and a promise of more to come). I just don't think it was communicated clearly to the public--journalists just reported the bare minimum information that there was a subscription fee and you had to buy your games at full price and the rest of the internet went mad about it before the service even opened up which only further spread the misinformation.
To be fair to those who misunderstood — I’ve only recently wandered back into console gaming after more than a decade on PC, and the fact that I can’t play online (even if I own the hardware and...
To be fair to those who misunderstood — I’ve only recently wandered back into console gaming after more than a decade on PC, and the fact that I can’t play online (even if I own the hardware and bought the game and have a home internet connection) without paying a subscription to Nintendo on top, that’s bonkers to me.
So given that seems to be the norm for online access for console gaming, I’m not at all surprised that people jumped to that conclusion when a console-in-the-cloud service opened up.
Honestly the Nintendo sub is maybe the worst example of "I have to pay to play online?? Are you kidding me" - it's much cheaper than the other services to get a sub, but on top of that, Nintendo...
Honestly the Nintendo sub is maybe the worst example of "I have to pay to play online?? Are you kidding me" - it's much cheaper than the other services to get a sub, but on top of that, Nintendo has the family plan available, it's very easy to add/remove people and Nintendo encourages getting it and sharing it with friends. I'm on one such family plan and it works out to under $5 USD per person a year - for online play and the NSO game library stuff that comes with it. For the premium NSO version it's basically twice that.
Consoles can charge for these services though, because they have control over the system. On PC you have so many piracy options, hell even for always-online MMO games like WoW you have people running private servers. And increasingly the console services are leaning on game libraries, not the online service. Which some PC stores also offer (Humble for example with their Humble Choice subscription). The consoles also offer services you don't really get on PC clients, the party chat and such on Xbox is much nicer than Steam in my experience and Steam is the best you get on PC without going to something purpose made for communication like Discord (in which case you could just use that for console gaming too).
Nintendo arguably provides fewer services like that, since their community stuff is so limited, but that's by design. Many gamers don't care/don't appreciate it, but as a parent, Nintendo is the only system I think you can reasonably trust can stay a child friendly experience because they work to keep it that way.
I'm not familiar with Vudu so I can't speak to that comparison. Stadia had a free tier that let you stream games you purchased on Stadia at 1080p. Note that it was NOT like how I understand...
I'm not familiar with Vudu so I can't speak to that comparison.
Stadia had a free tier that let you stream games you purchased on Stadia at 1080p. Note that it was NOT like how I understand Nvidia's thing to work - you could not play games you purchased through other stores on Stadia. You had to buy the Stadia version from Stadia.
All you needed to use the free tier was a game you purchased on Stadia and a computer with a compatible web browser or the Stadia app on your phone/tablet or a Chromecast for your TV or a TV that could run the Stadia app natively. The controller situation was a bit confusing - IIRC, at launch it didn't work with mouse/keyboard on PC and if you were playing on your TV with a Chromecast then you needed a Stadia controller. You could use any controller if you were playing on a computer or phone/tablet but the Stadia controller had this cool feature where you could plug any USB controller into the USB port on the Stadia controller and Stadia would recognize the second controller.
The Stadia subscription enabled 4k streaming and I think enabled higher fps but I can't remember for sure and I can't find a reliable source now. You also got some free games regularly and discounts on purchasing games on Stadia.
Honestly the killer was... having to use Stadia. People already have a reticence about PC launchers. Since they've come into existence some have already folded, closed down (like Gamestop's...
Honestly the killer was... having to use Stadia.
People already have a reticence about PC launchers. Since they've come into existence some have already folded, closed down (like Gamestop's store), or transferred over to a new version (like EA going from Origin to EA Play). With Steam, many games wouldn't be playable if Steam died; with GOG you can download every game's launcher DRM free (the only thing that would be affected is multiplayer if GOG shut down).
But Stadia? Nobody ever expected Google to continue supporting the service bc they have a long history of shutting down services. And without Stadia being online the games are completely unplayable (which is why they gave refunds, barely anybody bought Stadia games anyway and they didn't want to be stuck in a legal quagmire).
I'm not super interested in cloud streaming but I've used xCloud as part of Game Pass. That makes more sense to me bc you aren't buying a streaming version of a game that isn't playable when the service dies... you're just subscribing to a service. While I prefer owning my games, you can never actually own a cloud based game so I refuse to ever pay specifically for one (they have them on Switch too, like KH and Control, and I'll never buy them).
For that reason, at least in my eyes, Stadia killed itself before it even launched. I think if it was just a subscription service with no game purchases it would have been more successful. The problem is they wanted to hit a more casual market who would just buy individual games and play them with the free tier... those people aren't playing enough games to bring Stadia enough business and the premium subscription looked lame compared to Game Pass and other options like Nvidia for heavy gamers who actually care about streaming (which in the end is a really small group across all ppatforms).
I think you're right about Stadia having no appeal to people who already have a solution for their gaming needs but one thing that continuously surprised me over Stadia's lifetime was just how...
I think you're right about Stadia having no appeal to people who already have a solution for their gaming needs but one thing that continuously surprised me over Stadia's lifetime was just how many people actually DO want exactly what Stadia provided. It didn't do anything for me but the prospect of minimal to no hassle access to games that you can pick up and play at any time across several devices was very appealing to some people.
This most commonly seemed to be parents (mostly dads) of young children who either don't have the capital for a console/gaming PC or they don't want one because they don't want to have to deal with keeping it safe from the child. They appreciated being able to take advantage of any spare minutes of free time and Stadia, having virtually no loading times, made it easy for them. Being able to instantly pick up the same game whether they were at a computer, TV, or on a mobile device dovetailed perfectly with their lifestyle. Unfortunately for them, this is obviously not a large enough market to support a product like Stadia.
Edit: I suggest reading this comment from further down for a perspective from one of these Stadia fans.
I'm actually a dad of a young child so I get that. The problem is if I want to play like that on Stadia I have to buy individual overpriced games and ONLY play them on the cloud (which personally...
This most commonly seemed to be parents (mostly dads) of young children who either don't have the capital for a console/gaming PC or they don't want one because they don't want to have to deal with keeping it safe from the child. They appreciated being able to take advantage of any spare minutes of free time and Stadia, having virtually no loading times, made it easy for them. Being able to instantly pick up the same game whether they were at a computer, TV, or on a mobile device dovetailed perfectly with their lifestyle. Unfortunately for them, this is obviously not a large enough market to support a product like Stadia.
I'm actually a dad of a young child so I get that. The problem is if I want to play like that on Stadia I have to buy individual overpriced games and ONLY play them on the cloud (which personally I'm not a huge fan of as mentioned).
So the question is: why do that over getting Game Pass, where I can play a downloaded copy on PC, stream on tons of devices via xCloud (in my case mainly my phone), or play/stream on Xbox if I choose to get one (I did)... which all supports the same settings/saves/achievements/friend list over the cloud...?
I think the ONLY reason would be that IF you paid for Stadia Pro, you got 4k streaming. xCloud still doesn't support 4k streaming unlike Stadia did, unlike GeForce Now does. It's still the most popular cloud streaming service though. I think that indicates what I originally figured would be true before Stadia launched - that the people who are playing on the cloud are largely not going to care about 4k gaming, especially since you wouldn't even be able to take advantage of it/notice it on many devices... which is probably one of many reasond why Stadia Pro had a hard time getting subscribers, and why Xbox continues to ignore 4k streaming. It requires a lot more horsepower for very little gain.
This, like a lot of google's belief's/behaviors really seems to come from an out of touch mindset. They didn't develop anything because...why would you? It's not like every other AAA developer is...
And finally, Google seemed to give up on developing their own games for the platform almost immediately. They were supposed to show off what's possible in games with the scalability of the cloud but they never came to fruition. If Google can't bother to show off what its platform is capable of, why would anyone else.
This, like a lot of google's belief's/behaviors really seems to come from an out of touch mindset. They didn't develop anything because...why would you? It's not like every other AAA developer is totally incompetent(at least not in this area). There just isn't a massive use case for these things outside of simple stuff like hosting matches in large multiplayer situations. You can already generate a world that's larger than any person will reasonably explore on much cheaper/easier to use hardware, and it still doesn't solve the problem of actually populating that world with reasonable content. To this day games that try to generate content based on rules tend to feel empty or boring, while games that spend the time to have a bunch of people work on each mission do better.
Likewise their understanding of what kind of internet the US has seemed optimistic at best, and caused a major issue for their product. If you're the kind of person who has really good internet, you probably also have a really nice computer. Not 1 to 1, but a large majority of the gaming population that has great internet already has an expensive machine. Those that don't, probably don't have great internet, and so stadia is a mess. Worse the popular casual genres' like FPS, feel atrocious in their environment, and it didn't help they were throwing bullshit marketinhg terms around like predictive latency or something like that.
Stadia was a product without a major use case. It does have a future (as does all "you never own it you only rent it" subscription services), but google's approach was laughably bad, and I think the things they claimed were advantages to their system were mostly made up justifications for it.
I somewhat agree but I think there was still some potential there. Maybe not for just making huge worlds or large multiplayer lobbies but for making an experience more immersive by reducing...
There just isn't a massive use case for these things
I somewhat agree but I think there was still some potential there. Maybe not for just making huge worlds or large multiplayer lobbies but for making an experience more immersive by reducing loading times or enhancing an environment's density by adding more ambient characters/scenery. I don't know, to be honest. I think the aspect of game streaming that has the most potential to enhance the current gaming experience is in how there is no download or install time. Marketing people should be salivating at the thought that they can reduce the time between a person seeing an advertisement and then trying the product to just minutes or seconds. It astounds me that Google, an advertising company, wasn't ready to capitalize on that. They could have implemented a way for a Stadia player to invite a friend to join them for a couple rounds in a game as a free trial.
Likewise their understanding of what kind of internet the US has seemed optimistic at best, and caused a major issue for their product.
This I 100% agree with. I live in the suburbs of a large US city with probably above average internet and when I tried Stadia I almost always had noticeable input lag and very noticeable video compression. The Stadia subreddit was full of people saying that it was flawless so either I had a bad experience or I'm just more sensitive to lag and compression. I assume it's most likely the latter. Not to mention data caps are a thing and streaming 4k or even 1080p video for hours is going to add up. On second thought, people already do this with video streaming sites so maybe it doesn't use as much data as I'm thinking.
Since I haven't mentioned it yet, I just want to state that I don't/didn't consider myself a Stadia "fan." I followed it out of curiosity because I thought the technology was interesting. I was part of the Project Stream (Stadia beta) test and honestly, at the time, I was very impressed with its capabilities compared to other game streaming options that were out at the time. The lag and compression were always there but not at a level that I expected. I think that if Google had come out of the gate guns blazing with Stadia then they could have actually shaken up the market since nobody else at the time had a game streaming product that was even close to viable. Of course, being Google, they dragged their feet and gave competitors a chance to catch up and surpass them. Fortunately for me, I was already very familiar with Google's product graveyard and game streaming isn't something I need anyway since I already have a good gaming PC so I just watched the Stadia spectacle unfold from the sidelines.
Lag is the main reason why I never bothered with any game streaming service. If I get noticable lag when playing on my Local network, what confidence would I have when that "signal" is being...
Lag is the main reason why I never bothered with any game streaming service. If I get noticable lag when playing on my Local network, what confidence would I have when that "signal" is being bounced between a half dozen more computers? Not to mention that all of their advertisements show people playing on wireless devices like cellphones where the WiFi is going to introduce significant lag - you can't forget that most people use the crappy routers their ISP provides them that only just barely functions.
I had to hard wire my chromecast into my network in order to get usable gameplay. Even with a wired connection, there were certain games with noticeable enough input lag that it made it difficult...
I had to hard wire my chromecast into my network in order to get usable gameplay. Even with a wired connection, there were certain games with noticeable enough input lag that it made it difficult to play. So I don't think you're alone there.
I will say though, I did enjoy Stadia for the time that I had it. I ended up living someplace where I didn't have to deal with data caps, and I already didn't have a console so it ended up being an easy $10 a month for me. Especially with all the free games I would get every month, I rarely purchased a game. And when Stadia shut down I got all that money back anyways which was super cool.
I haven't tried any other cloud gaming services, so I don't have anything to compare Stadia to. I now have an Xbox Series X, so I don't really need to game over the cloud, but it seems that Microsoft also provides some sort of cloud gaming service I would like to try.
I had never thought about this, but it's a great point. Of all the "value adds" or whatever systems like stadia has, that should be a huge one.
Marketing people should be salivating at the thought that they can reduce the time between a person seeing an advertisement and then trying the product to just minutes or seconds. It astounds me that Google, an advertising company, wasn't ready to capitalize on that.
I had never thought about this, but it's a great point. Of all the "value adds" or whatever systems like stadia has, that should be a huge one.
See, I'm in the camp of people who had a great gaming PC and massive existing library already. I also already knew Google's penchant for killing off products way sooner than anyone would hope. I...
See, I'm in the camp of people who had a great gaming PC and massive existing library already. I also already knew Google's penchant for killing off products way sooner than anyone would hope.
I was still excited for Stadia - if it was market disruption then that's good. If it was even just a great platform for some games, that's also good.
And honestly, it's the MMOs (or other always online games with large sizes) that made me most excited about it. I love playing MMOs but downloading them is genuinely a massive barrier to entry for me. It's the same reason I don't play a lot of modern games - anything over 20GB is just a lot of space to use up on one game that I might not play all the time. Plus the download time is huge, and getting to skip that because it's updating somewhere else is a huge bonus.
It's legitimately the only reason I'm upset Stadia isn't a thing though - they didn't handle it well at all, and I did try to get into it.
You’re right that it didn’t launch with those features, but all of those features did come to the service. And I highly doubt that any of those would have made a difference. It worked the exact...
It launched … without any of the special features that cloud gaming could have enabled like easy save state sharing, direct streaming to YouTube, and being able to jump into a game demo from a link on a search result
You’re right that it didn’t launch with those features, but all of those features did come to the service. And I highly doubt that any of those would have made a difference.
but also without … easy screenshot and gameplay recording sharing.
It worked the exact same as Xbox or Playstation, not sure what you’re talking about. That was a day-one feature.
After some searches I see that you are correct. I admit that when Stadia seemed to be stagnant for several months I stopped following as closely and these features started getting added over a...
You’re right that it didn’t launch with those features, but all of those features did come to the service. And I highly doubt that any of those would have made a difference.
After some searches I see that you are correct. I admit that when Stadia seemed to be stagnant for several months I stopped following as closely and these features started getting added over a year after the launch with the playing from search results only getting added in August of 2022, barely two months before Stadia was shut down. I agree that save state sharing and streaming to YouTube wouldn't have saved Stadia but I do think that if playing from search results had been there from the beginning or at least been added quickly it could have made a difference. It could have been a huge attention grabber for Stadia.
It worked the exact same as Xbox or Playstation, not sure what you’re talking about. That was a day-one feature.
Here is an article from 9to5google from November of 2020 (about a year after Stadia's launch) about Stadia getting the ability to share screenshots and clips from the Stadia app. From the article:
By long-pressing the Capture button on the Stadia Controller, you can easily save a video of the last 30 seconds of your gameplay. Now you can share your Stadia screenshots and clips with others as easily as sharing a link.
Since launch, the only ways to share clips of Stadia gameplay were to either download your 30-second clips from the Stadia web app and rehost them on YouTube, or just record your screen the old fashioned way.
and here is a r/stadia thread from November 2019 that I found by Google searching "stadia screenshot sharing at launch" and clicking the top result. The thread has several people talking about how there was no easy or straightforward way to share or export screenshots or clips from Stadia. By sheer coincidence this thread also has a couple comments by me from back then.
As for Xbox (barely used a PS4), it's been a long time since I used my Xbox One but I distinctly remember it having some kind of clip editor that allowed me to edit gameplay clips and then upload to some kind of Xbox gallery on my Microsoft account. That's far and away much better than Stadia's launch offering.
Honestly they make a solid point. I’ve never had much interest in game streaming, but BG3 really does seem to be the perfect game for it. Latency doesn’t really matter, it’s got a huge install...
Honestly they make a solid point. I’ve never had much interest in game streaming, but BG3 really does seem to be the perfect game for it. Latency doesn’t really matter, it’s got a huge install size and it’s fairly difficult to run at high graphics settings.
Game streaming has also improved greatly over the past few years. I use sunshine/moonlight to play games on my home pc when I'm traveling now. As long as I'm somewhere than can maintain 40mbs or...
Game streaming has also improved greatly over the past few years. I use sunshine/moonlight to play games on my home pc when I'm traveling now. As long as I'm somewhere than can maintain 40mbs or better it's a smooth experience.
I probably wouldnt try to play any competitive shooters through it, but otherwise I'm sold on game streaming. It's sad that stadia is lost. It seemed like a great option for people that don't have all the hardware to run this stuff locally. Maybe another service can come around to replace it. Nvidias weird gamestream service on the Shield was cool until their firmware updates made it impossible for the shield to stay connected to 5Ghz wifi.
Stadia had better streaming at launch than its competitors have today. I’m hoping the alternatives can figure it out. I’d really like to see PlayStation at least try, their current service is...
Game streaming has also improved greatly over the past few years.
Stadia had better streaming at launch than its competitors have today.
I’m hoping the alternatives can figure it out. I’d really like to see PlayStation at least try, their current service is pretty pathetic.
I was traveling when BG3 launched. Being one of the few "must play" games I've anticipated over the past few years, I looked at ways to play without my PC. It's available on GeForce Now, and if...
I was traveling when BG3 launched. Being one of the few "must play" games I've anticipated over the past few years, I looked at ways to play without my PC. It's available on GeForce Now, and if you link your steam account to it it is available (not all games are available, the developer has to enable it to qualify. You may have to purchase some games separately).
I went ahead and spent the $10 (though there is a free tier available) and it worked super well. I wasn't even on top end internet and it was VERY close to flawless. That being said I was on a small 1080p laptop screen so other than a light "softness", it was difficult to see any flaws, so take that for what it's worth. There was no perceptable lag.
That being said, out of curiosity I checked out Cyberpunk and the issues there were what you would expect. It was borderline unplayable for me. So yeah, like the article suggests, a turn based RPG is pretty much perfect for streaming. If I travel again I would consider signing up for it to play on my downtime at my destination.
With Moonlight game streaming, and Sunshine on the backend, it's possible to get the experience to be as good as, if not better than any cloud service I've tried to date. You need a powerful,...
With Moonlight game streaming, and Sunshine on the backend, it's possible to get the experience to be as good as, if not better than any cloud service I've tried to date. You need a powerful, always on PC at home (or a way to remotely turn on your PC). You need a fast and stable home internet connect as well as the remote connection. If your PC crashes while you're remote, you're not likely to be able to fix it.
OP made a good choice trying it out on the free tier of GeForce NOW while he was traveling. He bought it on Steam, and was able to play in on his gaming PC when he was back home. It cost OP nothing, and required very little planning ahead.
I have a less than ideal setup for streaming with my PC (it's connected to WiFi on a router that is a fair distance away). I suspected streaming a game across country in such a fashion would yield...
I have a less than ideal setup for streaming with my PC (it's connected to WiFi on a router that is a fair distance away). I suspected streaming a game across country in such a fashion would yield less than a enjoyable experience. Could be wrong though.
Disclaimer up front: I'm one of the 12 or so Stadia fans in the world (yes, we exist!). I was sold on the concept after participating in the Project Stream test, so I preordered the "Founders Kit"...
Disclaimer up front: I'm one of the 12 or so Stadia fans in the world (yes, we exist!). I was sold on the concept after participating in the Project Stream test, so I preordered the "Founders Kit" hardware bundle as soon as it was available. I loved playing on Stadia from the start up until the last hour the service was online, and I happily maintained a Pro subscription the whole time.
Stadia made it easy for me to get back into gaming after a 5+ year break. I didn't have to worry about building a computer, configuring drivers, tweaking settings, managing storage space, and keeping games updated. Stadia abstracted all that away so that all I had to do was press play and get in the game, and it worked brilliantly.
From a fan's perspective, Stadia's biggest problem (aside from the ever-growing Google Graveyard) was Google's lack of understanding. Google didn't understand the gaming industry, didn't understand what gamers wanted, didn't understand what aspects of Stadia users found most attractive, and certainly didn't understand how to market those aspects.
The confusion and conflicting impressions in this thread is a great example of what a poor job Google did telling us what Stadia was:
That the service itself was free, and let you play any games you purchased on the platform without a subscription.
That you didn't need to buy the hardware, you could play with keyboard+mouse or a controller connected with USB.
That the Pro subscription gave you higher streaming quality, discounted games, and a constantly expanding library of games you could play for no extra charge as long as you kept your subscription (I discovered so many cool indie games through that!).
That you didn't necessarily need a crazy-fast internet connection to have a good experience on Stadia. I played a ton over my phone's mobile data and it worked just fine.
Stadia was never really going to attract the dedicated gamers who already had the latest consoles and/or GPUs and an extensive library of games on another platform. But it was a great fit for more casual gamers or those who had fallen out of gaming as life got in the way. There was a whole "Stadia Dadia" movement of dads (and moms) who were able to rediscover their love of gaming through the convenience offered by Stadia.
I always knew that Stadia wasn't likely to be around long-term, and I'm sad that things turned out the way they did. But I don't regret a single hour (or dollar) I spent on Stadia. And when they (generously) refunded all hardware and software purchases made over the course of 3+ years, I used my sizable "Stadia Stimulus" to purchase a Steam Deck and a crap-ton of games (including a number of great indie titles I'd discovered in the Stadia Pro rotation). The Steam Deck is in many ways as convenient (or even more convenient) than Stadia was, and it's of course got a much larger library. I now love gaming on my Steam Deck (and Baldur's Gate 3 runs pretty well on it!) - but I probably wouldn't have bothered with it if Stadia hadn't reminded me how much I enjoyed gaming.
So with my longer-than-I'd-anticipated backstory out of the way,
Would Baldur's Gate 3 have saved Stadia? As much as I loved Stadia, no, I don't believe any single title could have saved it from Google's poor management and shortsightedness. We saw a small surge of new users join up when Cyberpunk launched and it became pretty clear that the best way to enjoy that without breaking the bank was on Stadia, but Google didn't really do anything to capitalize on that. I don't think it would have been any different with BG3. I did play the BG3 beta while it was on Stadia and it was fine (impressive for a pre-release game, even), but there wasn't really much buzz about it even within the Stadia community. I highly doubt that BG3 would have provided the sort of sustained surge which Stadia needed to prove its worth to Google.
The 12 of us loyal Stadians gave Stadia way more of a chance than Google ever did.
The only way to save Google Stadia would have been to not make it a choice between streaming and downloads. If Google launched Stadia as a game download store with an optional subscription...
The only way to save Google Stadia would have been to not make it a choice between streaming and downloads.
If Google launched Stadia as a game download store with an optional subscription offering to stream your purchases instead of downloading them, I think it would have been better received.
Instead they launched a service that provides an objectively worse experience than what existing players already get from their current hardware and storefronts. As a PC user, there was no reason for me to invest in Stadia's ecosystem because I could spend that same $60 on Steam and get the same game only with more features and better performance. They had to rely almost entirely on "new" gamers who were both not already invested in a hardware ecosystem and who felt that the convenience and lower up front cost of streaming is worth the added lag and reduced featureset.
Streaming games should be positioned as a value add to an existing ecosystem, not try to replace real hardware altogether.
This is off topic. Is Baldur's Gate 3 a game that can be appreciated by someone with no D&D experience whatsoever? In comparison to the first game, is it easier or more difficult in that regard?
This is off topic.
Is Baldur's Gate 3 a game that can be appreciated by someone with no D&D experience whatsoever? In comparison to the first game, is it easier or more difficult in that regard?
It is 100% more approachable than the first game. And it’s a new story so you don’t need to know anything. It’s based on the fifth edition of the d&d rule set which is the most modern and much...
It is 100% more approachable than the first game. And it’s a new story so you don’t need to know anything.
It’s based on the fifth edition of the d&d rule set which is the most modern and much more streamlined than the second edition (Baldurs Gate 1 and 2), additionally I find that since the combat is turn based, it becomes a lot more clear what’s actually happening.
Imo, if you like fantasy, RPGs with a strong emphasis on dialogue and turn based combat this is 100% a game you would enjoy.
I have no DnD experience, but I am familiar with dice rolls, stat-based check, etc from just playing games my whole life, so this game was not hard at all for me to get into. Did you play divinity...
I have no DnD experience, but I am familiar with dice rolls, stat-based check, etc from just playing games my whole life, so this game was not hard at all for me to get into.
Did you play divinity or dragon age or mass effect? If you liked the play of those games, you would likely enjoy baldur's gate.
If you haven't played those, are you a fan of fallout or elder scrolls? I would be willing to compare the world in BG to the world of tamriel in regards to depth and world-building. The turn based combat reminds me a little of playing fallout using VATS.
Would recommend the game as someone who has not played any tabletop RPGs.
I have a little D&D experience from trying to play in the past and giving up because I didn't like the effort of keeping track of all the numbers and character sheets and stuff. I'm playing...
I have a little D&D experience from trying to play in the past and giving up because I didn't like the effort of keeping track of all the numbers and character sheets and stuff.
I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my partner and I'm having a decent amount of fun with it so far. All the "paperwork" is taken care of by the game, and I just get to pick actions and do fun stuff in the environment.
Nothing could have saved Google Stadia from Google with the way they managed it from the very beginning.
It launched not just without any of the special features that cloud gaming could have enabled like easy save state sharing, direct streaming to YouTube, and being able to jump into a game demo from a link on a search result, but also without some basic social features people expect these days like easy screenshot and gameplay recording sharing. They then updated and added features at a glacial pace and IIRC, most of the special cloud gaming features never got released.
Edit: As pointed out below, I am incorrect about these features never getting released. Easy screenshot/recording sharing, save state sharing, and streaming to YouTube did start getting added about a year after launch. However, by this time, most people had already written off Stadia. Playing a game from search results, the one of these features that in my opinion could have had the biggest impact on Stadia's success, was not released until August of 2022. Barely two months before Stadia's shut down was announced.
They also did a terrible job marketing the pricing structure. It seemed that nobody who didn't follow Stadia closely understood that you could just buy a game without having to pay for the premium subscription. All they had to do was run a marketing campaign about how Stadia has nearly no upfront cost of entry like every console has and you didn't even need anything more then a mediocre PC.
And finally, Google seemed to give up on developing their own games for the platform almost immediately. They were supposed to show off what's possible in games with the scalability of the cloud but they never came to fruition. If Google can't bother to show off what its platform is capable of, why would anyone else.
IMO, Google Stadia had the potential to be something special but it never stood a change with Google's slapdash approach to developing products. It was treated like someone's weekend project that accidentally got more attention than they planned on.
Also, just as an aside, the features this article mentions are kinda technically possible anyway without Stadia. Maybe not as seamless but probably enough for the average gamer. Crowd choice exists as a Twitch integration, save state sharing can probably be done by just sharing the save files, and nearly everyone has Discord these days and that has built in screen sharing.
I think trust is another huge factor in Stadia's failure. I have only anecdotal evidence but I know a lot of people, myself included, that wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because of Google's penchant for dropping anything that isn't an instant breakout success. I am never going to be an early adopter of Google's services that I rely on having access to long term.
Google Reader shutting down in 2013 was when the veil was lifted for me. Before that, I naively thought Google were one of the good guys, after that I realized they were just like every other company. I can't remember the last time I was enthusiastic about something they announced, but back in the day when they released stuff like Wave (remember that? lol), Buzz, Google Code, Android or even Chrome it was pretty amazing.
I got a Google Stadia controller and Chromecast as part of a deal when I was buying, I think, a phone way back just before Stadia launched. I thought it would be awesome if they could figure out the potential issue with input lag. After all, every button press was being sent to a server not in your house for processing, so every millisecond was critical.
Shockingly, they did it. The input lag was practically non-existent, at least for me. And when they started supporting existing Chromecast devices, I suddenly had two TVs I could stream games to. Eventually you wouldn't need a Chromecast at all.
Honestly, I started to prefer the Chromecast for gaming whenever a game was supported by it. However, a lack of trust in Google is precisely why I paid for a monthly subscription and only played the "free" games the came with it. I was unsure what would happen to any purchased games if Google decided to pull the plug eventually, which became a bigger fear as they stopped investing in their own game development.
Ultimately they pulled the plug, and while I think it was a fairly rare instance of them going above and beyond to compensate people, it wasn't shocking to me. It was simply disappointing. And it validated my decision to never buy games from them directly.
Certainly better education in how you could use the Stadia with little to no upfront or monthly cost would have been great. But I think that gamers can be a rather discerning crowd. Like you, my own experience and what I've heard of others was primarily that no one trusted Google enough to invest deeply or long-term in the ecosystem because of the looming threat of it going away suddenly. And that's exactly what happened. Even though Google could have easily made up for any losses with its other cash cows without breaking a sweat, Google has an unfortunate tendency to give everything a set amount of time to become profitable on its own. And either you need to be bringing customers into the Google ecosystem as a whole (like Gmail or Maps) or you need to be generating enough revenue to sustain your own existence (like Reader or Domains). It's sad, really
Yea I think the Google might have avoided this was if they had offered digital downloads of any games you bought as an assurance that you wouldn't lose your games and then made that assurance a heavy part of their marketing.
It would have helped if they had used a different brand under their control like YouTube instead. It would have made much more sense if Stadia was a YT product anyways as streaming is a heavy push of theirs.
I think a better avenue for success would be to have done what GeForce Now did: offer access to games you own on other popular game aggregators as long as you pay a monthly fee.
The two products are so similar in my mind. I don't know if GeForce Now got rid of their custom hardware requirement, but they both offered you a chance to play games running on their top tier hardware, streamed right to your TV, for a monthly fee.
In fact, for GeForce Now it's a requirement to be a subscriber and there's no option to buy direct. Imagine if Google let you choose to buy games direct so you didn't need a subscription or you could pay a monthly fee and get access to any Stadia supported games you owned on eg Steam or you could do both.
The reason they didn't pursue that path seems simple: even before it launched they probably had signed its death certificate. I doubt even a modicum of effort went into making stadia successful after the initial launch. What a shame, because honestly the hardware execution was so damn good considering the (eventually) low entry cost.
I do wonder how Google will solve this problem. They're now stuck in a pit where launching any new services (outside of additions to existing platforms like YouTube) will garner extreme skepticism.
(if I was in charge of fixing this, my idea would be to simply prop up any new unsuccessful launch for 10 years, to try and remedy the reputation)
Yea I think owning up to their past mistakes is the very first baby step. I think they would need to offer, up front, solutions to what happens if their scuttle the service. Whether that's a guarantee of X years of support or ability to download your data and self host a service or something else. I think making the service interoperable with 3rd party services would be huge, with some sort of guarantee that you're not just going to make the API proprietary some point in the future (not sure how you'd do that.)
In Stadia's case, I wonder if more people would have taken a chance on it if they had known that all hardware and software purchases would be refunded in the event of a shutdown. That was a surprisingly generous severance package.
Hmm maybe but losing access to that software probably would have still been a deal breaker for me.
The way you're talking about it makes it sound more like Vudu but for games. If that's actually how it was then I'm honestly kind of sad that I never got on board. Their advertising for Stadia just made it seem like there was a barrier to entry similar to buying a Playstation or Xbox (only cheaper) which is not what I was looking for. All of the advertisements and buzz I saw was to buy their Stadia kit with a chromecast and a dedicated controller, then a monthly subscription to play games. I already have that on my PC with Gamepass, my Switch with Nintendo Online, and my Xbox One with Gamepass (that I never turn on). They basically made their audience only people who don't already have gaming capable hardware.
I'm more interesting in an app that I can run on my TV (or through a Fire Stick, Chromecast etc) and stream my game library there with any controller I have at home. I already have Xbox controllers, I have Steam controllers, I have Switch controllers. Please stop making me buy more controllers to be a gamer! NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is currently the best out there, but I just spent ~10 minutes messing with it on my phone and it was not a pleasant experience. The interface was very difficult to get all of my accounts linked (Steam, Epic and Ubisoft) and then when I hit play my phone just hard reset. I have a gaming PC personally, so it offers little benefit over using Moonlight to stream my games to my television.
If Valve ever gets into this space with the Steam Link app they will dominate the landscape. It seems like they're the only ones interested in being hardware agnostic. If a company can convince me that upgrading my videocard isn't worth my money, then I'll gladly put that money to a monthly subscription.
Stadia was really well done, it's unfortunate that it was pretty much doomed to the Google graveyard since it launched due to all the mismanagement.
It was very much like Vudu in that you had your library of games that you purchased through the Stadia store, which you could play for free any time at 1080p on any supported device (Chromecast, web browser, Android app, and so on). To play on the Chromecast you were locked into Google's proprietary Stadia controller which connected directly to Stadia's servers over Wifi to reduce input lag, but when playing over a web browser or on an Android device you could use any wired or bluetooth controller.
You could optionally pay a monthly subscription of $9.99 USD which would give you a few additional perks:
Most people didn't realize that the monthly fee was optional and that you could play the games you owned for free. They thought you had to pay full price to purchase your games and pay $9.99/mo to play them, where if you stopped paying for the monthly subscription you lost access to the games you bought, but that's not how it worked at all. It was basically a free cloud-based console.
Thankfully when they shut it down Google actually refunded every dollar spent through the Stadia store on games, DLC, and even hardware, so in the end I was out exactly zero dollars and got a couple Chromecast Ultras and pretty nice bluetooth gamepads for free.
I'm pretty sure I've read multiple articles affirming just that. Maybe that was initially the case?
I could be mistaken but I'm fairly sure it was never the case that you had to subscribe to play games that you purchased--the subscription was always for access to the premium features (I think it launched with one game free for subscribers and a promise of more to come). I just don't think it was communicated clearly to the public--journalists just reported the bare minimum information that there was a subscription fee and you had to buy your games at full price and the rest of the internet went mad about it before the service even opened up which only further spread the misinformation.
To be fair to those who misunderstood — I’ve only recently wandered back into console gaming after more than a decade on PC, and the fact that I can’t play online (even if I own the hardware and bought the game and have a home internet connection) without paying a subscription to Nintendo on top, that’s bonkers to me.
So given that seems to be the norm for online access for console gaming, I’m not at all surprised that people jumped to that conclusion when a console-in-the-cloud service opened up.
Honestly the Nintendo sub is maybe the worst example of "I have to pay to play online?? Are you kidding me" - it's much cheaper than the other services to get a sub, but on top of that, Nintendo has the family plan available, it's very easy to add/remove people and Nintendo encourages getting it and sharing it with friends. I'm on one such family plan and it works out to under $5 USD per person a year - for online play and the NSO game library stuff that comes with it. For the premium NSO version it's basically twice that.
Consoles can charge for these services though, because they have control over the system. On PC you have so many piracy options, hell even for always-online MMO games like WoW you have people running private servers. And increasingly the console services are leaning on game libraries, not the online service. Which some PC stores also offer (Humble for example with their Humble Choice subscription). The consoles also offer services you don't really get on PC clients, the party chat and such on Xbox is much nicer than Steam in my experience and Steam is the best you get on PC without going to something purpose made for communication like Discord (in which case you could just use that for console gaming too).
Nintendo arguably provides fewer services like that, since their community stuff is so limited, but that's by design. Many gamers don't care/don't appreciate it, but as a parent, Nintendo is the only system I think you can reasonably trust can stay a child friendly experience because they work to keep it that way.
I'm not familiar with Vudu so I can't speak to that comparison.
Stadia had a free tier that let you stream games you purchased on Stadia at 1080p. Note that it was NOT like how I understand Nvidia's thing to work - you could not play games you purchased through other stores on Stadia. You had to buy the Stadia version from Stadia.
All you needed to use the free tier was a game you purchased on Stadia and a computer with a compatible web browser or the Stadia app on your phone/tablet or a Chromecast for your TV or a TV that could run the Stadia app natively. The controller situation was a bit confusing - IIRC, at launch it didn't work with mouse/keyboard on PC and if you were playing on your TV with a Chromecast then you needed a Stadia controller. You could use any controller if you were playing on a computer or phone/tablet but the Stadia controller had this cool feature where you could plug any USB controller into the USB port on the Stadia controller and Stadia would recognize the second controller.
The Stadia subscription enabled 4k streaming and I think enabled higher fps but I can't remember for sure and I can't find a reliable source now. You also got some free games regularly and discounts on purchasing games on Stadia.
Honestly the killer was... having to use Stadia.
People already have a reticence about PC launchers. Since they've come into existence some have already folded, closed down (like Gamestop's store), or transferred over to a new version (like EA going from Origin to EA Play). With Steam, many games wouldn't be playable if Steam died; with GOG you can download every game's launcher DRM free (the only thing that would be affected is multiplayer if GOG shut down).
But Stadia? Nobody ever expected Google to continue supporting the service bc they have a long history of shutting down services. And without Stadia being online the games are completely unplayable (which is why they gave refunds, barely anybody bought Stadia games anyway and they didn't want to be stuck in a legal quagmire).
I'm not super interested in cloud streaming but I've used xCloud as part of Game Pass. That makes more sense to me bc you aren't buying a streaming version of a game that isn't playable when the service dies... you're just subscribing to a service. While I prefer owning my games, you can never actually own a cloud based game so I refuse to ever pay specifically for one (they have them on Switch too, like KH and Control, and I'll never buy them).
For that reason, at least in my eyes, Stadia killed itself before it even launched. I think if it was just a subscription service with no game purchases it would have been more successful. The problem is they wanted to hit a more casual market who would just buy individual games and play them with the free tier... those people aren't playing enough games to bring Stadia enough business and the premium subscription looked lame compared to Game Pass and other options like Nvidia for heavy gamers who actually care about streaming (which in the end is a really small group across all ppatforms).
I think you're right about Stadia having no appeal to people who already have a solution for their gaming needs but one thing that continuously surprised me over Stadia's lifetime was just how many people actually DO want exactly what Stadia provided. It didn't do anything for me but the prospect of minimal to no hassle access to games that you can pick up and play at any time across several devices was very appealing to some people.
This most commonly seemed to be parents (mostly dads) of young children who either don't have the capital for a console/gaming PC or they don't want one because they don't want to have to deal with keeping it safe from the child. They appreciated being able to take advantage of any spare minutes of free time and Stadia, having virtually no loading times, made it easy for them. Being able to instantly pick up the same game whether they were at a computer, TV, or on a mobile device dovetailed perfectly with their lifestyle. Unfortunately for them, this is obviously not a large enough market to support a product like Stadia.
Edit: I suggest reading this comment from further down for a perspective from one of these Stadia fans.
I'm actually a dad of a young child so I get that. The problem is if I want to play like that on Stadia I have to buy individual overpriced games and ONLY play them on the cloud (which personally I'm not a huge fan of as mentioned).
So the question is: why do that over getting Game Pass, where I can play a downloaded copy on PC, stream on tons of devices via xCloud (in my case mainly my phone), or play/stream on Xbox if I choose to get one (I did)... which all supports the same settings/saves/achievements/friend list over the cloud...?
I think the ONLY reason would be that IF you paid for Stadia Pro, you got 4k streaming. xCloud still doesn't support 4k streaming unlike Stadia did, unlike GeForce Now does. It's still the most popular cloud streaming service though. I think that indicates what I originally figured would be true before Stadia launched - that the people who are playing on the cloud are largely not going to care about 4k gaming, especially since you wouldn't even be able to take advantage of it/notice it on many devices... which is probably one of many reasond why Stadia Pro had a hard time getting subscribers, and why Xbox continues to ignore 4k streaming. It requires a lot more horsepower for very little gain.
This, like a lot of google's belief's/behaviors really seems to come from an out of touch mindset. They didn't develop anything because...why would you? It's not like every other AAA developer is totally incompetent(at least not in this area). There just isn't a massive use case for these things outside of simple stuff like hosting matches in large multiplayer situations. You can already generate a world that's larger than any person will reasonably explore on much cheaper/easier to use hardware, and it still doesn't solve the problem of actually populating that world with reasonable content. To this day games that try to generate content based on rules tend to feel empty or boring, while games that spend the time to have a bunch of people work on each mission do better.
Likewise their understanding of what kind of internet the US has seemed optimistic at best, and caused a major issue for their product. If you're the kind of person who has really good internet, you probably also have a really nice computer. Not 1 to 1, but a large majority of the gaming population that has great internet already has an expensive machine. Those that don't, probably don't have great internet, and so stadia is a mess. Worse the popular casual genres' like FPS, feel atrocious in their environment, and it didn't help they were throwing bullshit marketinhg terms around like predictive latency or something like that.
Stadia was a product without a major use case. It does have a future (as does all "you never own it you only rent it" subscription services), but google's approach was laughably bad, and I think the things they claimed were advantages to their system were mostly made up justifications for it.
I somewhat agree but I think there was still some potential there. Maybe not for just making huge worlds or large multiplayer lobbies but for making an experience more immersive by reducing loading times or enhancing an environment's density by adding more ambient characters/scenery. I don't know, to be honest. I think the aspect of game streaming that has the most potential to enhance the current gaming experience is in how there is no download or install time. Marketing people should be salivating at the thought that they can reduce the time between a person seeing an advertisement and then trying the product to just minutes or seconds. It astounds me that Google, an advertising company, wasn't ready to capitalize on that. They could have implemented a way for a Stadia player to invite a friend to join them for a couple rounds in a game as a free trial.
This I 100% agree with. I live in the suburbs of a large US city with probably above average internet and when I tried Stadia I almost always had noticeable input lag and very noticeable video compression. The Stadia subreddit was full of people saying that it was flawless so either I had a bad experience or I'm just more sensitive to lag and compression. I assume it's most likely the latter. Not to mention data caps are a thing and streaming 4k or even 1080p video for hours is going to add up. On second thought, people already do this with video streaming sites so maybe it doesn't use as much data as I'm thinking.
Since I haven't mentioned it yet, I just want to state that I don't/didn't consider myself a Stadia "fan." I followed it out of curiosity because I thought the technology was interesting. I was part of the Project Stream (Stadia beta) test and honestly, at the time, I was very impressed with its capabilities compared to other game streaming options that were out at the time. The lag and compression were always there but not at a level that I expected. I think that if Google had come out of the gate guns blazing with Stadia then they could have actually shaken up the market since nobody else at the time had a game streaming product that was even close to viable. Of course, being Google, they dragged their feet and gave competitors a chance to catch up and surpass them. Fortunately for me, I was already very familiar with Google's product graveyard and game streaming isn't something I need anyway since I already have a good gaming PC so I just watched the Stadia spectacle unfold from the sidelines.
Lag is the main reason why I never bothered with any game streaming service. If I get noticable lag when playing on my Local network, what confidence would I have when that "signal" is being bounced between a half dozen more computers? Not to mention that all of their advertisements show people playing on wireless devices like cellphones where the WiFi is going to introduce significant lag - you can't forget that most people use the crappy routers their ISP provides them that only just barely functions.
I had to hard wire my chromecast into my network in order to get usable gameplay. Even with a wired connection, there were certain games with noticeable enough input lag that it made it difficult to play. So I don't think you're alone there.
I will say though, I did enjoy Stadia for the time that I had it. I ended up living someplace where I didn't have to deal with data caps, and I already didn't have a console so it ended up being an easy $10 a month for me. Especially with all the free games I would get every month, I rarely purchased a game. And when Stadia shut down I got all that money back anyways which was super cool.
I haven't tried any other cloud gaming services, so I don't have anything to compare Stadia to. I now have an Xbox Series X, so I don't really need to game over the cloud, but it seems that Microsoft also provides some sort of cloud gaming service I would like to try.
I had never thought about this, but it's a great point. Of all the "value adds" or whatever systems like stadia has, that should be a huge one.
See, I'm in the camp of people who had a great gaming PC and massive existing library already. I also already knew Google's penchant for killing off products way sooner than anyone would hope.
I was still excited for Stadia - if it was market disruption then that's good. If it was even just a great platform for some games, that's also good.
And honestly, it's the MMOs (or other always online games with large sizes) that made me most excited about it. I love playing MMOs but downloading them is genuinely a massive barrier to entry for me. It's the same reason I don't play a lot of modern games - anything over 20GB is just a lot of space to use up on one game that I might not play all the time. Plus the download time is huge, and getting to skip that because it's updating somewhere else is a huge bonus.
It's legitimately the only reason I'm upset Stadia isn't a thing though - they didn't handle it well at all, and I did try to get into it.
You’re right that it didn’t launch with those features, but all of those features did come to the service. And I highly doubt that any of those would have made a difference.
It worked the exact same as Xbox or Playstation, not sure what you’re talking about. That was a day-one feature.
After some searches I see that you are correct. I admit that when Stadia seemed to be stagnant for several months I stopped following as closely and these features started getting added over a year after the launch with the playing from search results only getting added in August of 2022, barely two months before Stadia was shut down. I agree that save state sharing and streaming to YouTube wouldn't have saved Stadia but I do think that if playing from search results had been there from the beginning or at least been added quickly it could have made a difference. It could have been a huge attention grabber for Stadia.
Here is an article from 9to5google from November of 2020 (about a year after Stadia's launch) about Stadia getting the ability to share screenshots and clips from the Stadia app. From the article:
and here is a r/stadia thread from November 2019 that I found by Google searching "stadia screenshot sharing at launch" and clicking the top result. The thread has several people talking about how there was no easy or straightforward way to share or export screenshots or clips from Stadia. By sheer coincidence this thread also has a couple comments by me from back then.
As for Xbox (barely used a PS4), it's been a long time since I used my Xbox One but I distinctly remember it having some kind of clip editor that allowed me to edit gameplay clips and then upload to some kind of Xbox gallery on my Microsoft account. That's far and away much better than Stadia's launch offering.
Huh, you’re right. I didn’t recall that. They did add sharing functionality, but yeah, that should’ve been available from the beginning.
Honestly they make a solid point. I’ve never had much interest in game streaming, but BG3 really does seem to be the perfect game for it. Latency doesn’t really matter, it’s got a huge install size and it’s fairly difficult to run at high graphics settings.
Game streaming has also improved greatly over the past few years. I use sunshine/moonlight to play games on my home pc when I'm traveling now. As long as I'm somewhere than can maintain 40mbs or better it's a smooth experience.
I probably wouldnt try to play any competitive shooters through it, but otherwise I'm sold on game streaming. It's sad that stadia is lost. It seemed like a great option for people that don't have all the hardware to run this stuff locally. Maybe another service can come around to replace it. Nvidias weird gamestream service on the Shield was cool until their firmware updates made it impossible for the shield to stay connected to 5Ghz wifi.
Stadia had better streaming at launch than its competitors have today.
I’m hoping the alternatives can figure it out. I’d really like to see PlayStation at least try, their current service is pretty pathetic.
I was traveling when BG3 launched. Being one of the few "must play" games I've anticipated over the past few years, I looked at ways to play without my PC. It's available on GeForce Now, and if you link your steam account to it it is available (not all games are available, the developer has to enable it to qualify. You may have to purchase some games separately).
I went ahead and spent the $10 (though there is a free tier available) and it worked super well. I wasn't even on top end internet and it was VERY close to flawless. That being said I was on a small 1080p laptop screen so other than a light "softness", it was difficult to see any flaws, so take that for what it's worth. There was no perceptable lag.
That being said, out of curiosity I checked out Cyberpunk and the issues there were what you would expect. It was borderline unplayable for me. So yeah, like the article suggests, a turn based RPG is pretty much perfect for streaming. If I travel again I would consider signing up for it to play on my downtime at my destination.
Can't you run it off your main computer thru steam?
Not OP.
In my experience, streaming a game directly from my own computer is a vastly inferior experience than simply using a cloud service.
With Moonlight game streaming, and Sunshine on the backend, it's possible to get the experience to be as good as, if not better than any cloud service I've tried to date. You need a powerful, always on PC at home (or a way to remotely turn on your PC). You need a fast and stable home internet connect as well as the remote connection. If your PC crashes while you're remote, you're not likely to be able to fix it.
OP made a good choice trying it out on the free tier of GeForce NOW while he was traveling. He bought it on Steam, and was able to play in on his gaming PC when he was back home. It cost OP nothing, and required very little planning ahead.
I have a less than ideal setup for streaming with my PC (it's connected to WiFi on a router that is a fair distance away). I suspected streaming a game across country in such a fashion would yield less than a enjoyable experience. Could be wrong though.
Disclaimer up front: I'm one of the 12 or so Stadia fans in the world (yes, we exist!). I was sold on the concept after participating in the Project Stream test, so I preordered the "Founders Kit" hardware bundle as soon as it was available. I loved playing on Stadia from the start up until the last hour the service was online, and I happily maintained a Pro subscription the whole time.
Stadia made it easy for me to get back into gaming after a 5+ year break. I didn't have to worry about building a computer, configuring drivers, tweaking settings, managing storage space, and keeping games updated. Stadia abstracted all that away so that all I had to do was press play and get in the game, and it worked brilliantly.
From a fan's perspective, Stadia's biggest problem (aside from the ever-growing Google Graveyard) was Google's lack of understanding. Google didn't understand the gaming industry, didn't understand what gamers wanted, didn't understand what aspects of Stadia users found most attractive, and certainly didn't understand how to market those aspects.
The confusion and conflicting impressions in this thread is a great example of what a poor job Google did telling us what Stadia was:
Stadia was never really going to attract the dedicated gamers who already had the latest consoles and/or GPUs and an extensive library of games on another platform. But it was a great fit for more casual gamers or those who had fallen out of gaming as life got in the way. There was a whole "Stadia Dadia" movement of dads (and moms) who were able to rediscover their love of gaming through the convenience offered by Stadia.
I always knew that Stadia wasn't likely to be around long-term, and I'm sad that things turned out the way they did. But I don't regret a single hour (or dollar) I spent on Stadia. And when they (generously) refunded all hardware and software purchases made over the course of 3+ years, I used my sizable "Stadia Stimulus" to purchase a Steam Deck and a crap-ton of games (including a number of great indie titles I'd discovered in the Stadia Pro rotation). The Steam Deck is in many ways as convenient (or even more convenient) than Stadia was, and it's of course got a much larger library. I now love gaming on my Steam Deck (and Baldur's Gate 3 runs pretty well on it!) - but I probably wouldn't have bothered with it if Stadia hadn't reminded me how much I enjoyed gaming.
So with my longer-than-I'd-anticipated backstory out of the way,
Would Baldur's Gate 3 have saved Stadia? As much as I loved Stadia, no, I don't believe any single title could have saved it from Google's poor management and shortsightedness. We saw a small surge of new users join up when Cyberpunk launched and it became pretty clear that the best way to enjoy that without breaking the bank was on Stadia, but Google didn't really do anything to capitalize on that. I don't think it would have been any different with BG3. I did play the BG3 beta while it was on Stadia and it was fine (impressive for a pre-release game, even), but there wasn't really much buzz about it even within the Stadia community. I highly doubt that BG3 would have provided the sort of sustained surge which Stadia needed to prove its worth to Google.
The 12 of us loyal Stadians gave Stadia way more of a chance than Google ever did.
The only way to save Google Stadia would have been to not make it a choice between streaming and downloads.
If Google launched Stadia as a game download store with an optional subscription offering to stream your purchases instead of downloading them, I think it would have been better received.
Instead they launched a service that provides an objectively worse experience than what existing players already get from their current hardware and storefronts. As a PC user, there was no reason for me to invest in Stadia's ecosystem because I could spend that same $60 on Steam and get the same game only with more features and better performance. They had to rely almost entirely on "new" gamers who were both not already invested in a hardware ecosystem and who felt that the convenience and lower up front cost of streaming is worth the added lag and reduced featureset.
Streaming games should be positioned as a value add to an existing ecosystem, not try to replace real hardware altogether.
This is off topic.
Is Baldur's Gate 3 a game that can be appreciated by someone with no D&D experience whatsoever? In comparison to the first game, is it easier or more difficult in that regard?
It is 100% more approachable than the first game. And it’s a new story so you don’t need to know anything.
It’s based on the fifth edition of the d&d rule set which is the most modern and much more streamlined than the second edition (Baldurs Gate 1 and 2), additionally I find that since the combat is turn based, it becomes a lot more clear what’s actually happening.
Imo, if you like fantasy, RPGs with a strong emphasis on dialogue and turn based combat this is 100% a game you would enjoy.
I have no DnD experience, but I am familiar with dice rolls, stat-based check, etc from just playing games my whole life, so this game was not hard at all for me to get into.
Did you play divinity or dragon age or mass effect? If you liked the play of those games, you would likely enjoy baldur's gate.
If you haven't played those, are you a fan of fallout or elder scrolls? I would be willing to compare the world in BG to the world of tamriel in regards to depth and world-building. The turn based combat reminds me a little of playing fallout using VATS.
Would recommend the game as someone who has not played any tabletop RPGs.
I have a little D&D experience from trying to play in the past and giving up because I didn't like the effort of keeping track of all the numbers and character sheets and stuff.
I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my partner and I'm having a decent amount of fun with it so far. All the "paperwork" is taken care of by the game, and I just get to pick actions and do fun stuff in the environment.
This recent topic might help you out. It's not exactly the same question as yours, but it's close.