Oh, because Google Stadia was such a roaring success, I'm sure that Netflix will totally not turn that into a sinking ship either.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Stadia failed because of their business model. Xbox cloud gaming is working fine. If Netflix can offer a good catalog at no additional cost, it will become mainstream in no time.
it will become mainstream in no time.
And that's when they'll raise prices.
Exactly. Just like XCG.
Stadia was amazing, google couldn't fucking wrap their head around the fact they needed to package it with other things. Why I. The flying fuck they didn't have a storage + stadia + YouTube + music plan k have NO fucking idea but if they did it would have been a roaring success
Anyone that used it can tell you the service was immaculate - they just would never stick to a fucking plan or properly advertise it.
Google doesn't understand products that don't 'change the world'. There are no decent successes to them, there's YouTube, then there's Google play music, even though the second is good it doesn't get widespread acclaim so it's garbage to them.
YouTube music is amazing - if it had mir podcasts, it would be my goto player for everything. I can get real weird music on YT music I can find anywhere else
Google play music was better imho, had everything, better interface, none of the annoying youtube-ness, it literally just worked.
And when yt music came out many of the files were at terrible quality because they were basically reencodes of uploads instead of official releases.
My library went from sounding beautiful to painful to the ears overnight. It's gotten better but I havent forgotten, that's a dick move.
Stadia was really good. I'd prefer to pay a bit more to avoid the vendor lock-in and have some portability, but what they offered was fairly priced.
In fact the only reason I stopped using Stadia - or any cloud gaming for that matter - is that I like to build and have my own machine and was fortunate to be able to afford one.
IIRC, you had to buy the games to play them. A subscription service would work much better
That was the perfect thing about stadia - there was no subscription needed. You bought the game. You could play the game. That was it. No need to have monthly fees, you just got to play the games you owned.
Which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for a cloud gaming platform.
If you don’t own the hardware the game is stored in, you don’t own the game. Which was shown when they closed stadia down and everyone lost all of their games.
Google has gone ahead and provided full refunds to all, encompassing not only the game costs but also expenses related to controllers, stadia devices, and purchased games. Developers of the few online games that have been available on stadia, have implemented a cost-free method for transferring accounts.
Not excusing the fiasco that Google Stadia was, but credit where credit's due.
They're one of the very few companies that even could afford to do that, and they didn't have to. I think people who invested into Stadia lucked out that it was Google and not some other company.
I would be reluctant to sign up for a similar clone service unless you also get a key to another store.
We didn't luck out it was Google, if it had been a small startup I wouldn't have trusted buying any games for it, neither would many others.
So again, you didn’t actually own the game. You just bought a license to play it on Google’s servers.
Sure give them credit for doing the bare minimum and refunding people. But if you don’t own whatever the game is stored on, you don’t own the game.
Yes but we got refunded and some publishers even gave licenses on other platforms for their games even though it was refunded
One of the selling points of cloud gaming is exactly to be able to play it right after purchasing it without all that hassle. No more downloads, installs, game and driver updates, and hardware limitations.
We don't have that much control over steam games either. Whether the game is in our storage or not doesn't matter at all. Being able to play it it's what matters.
Which is why a game streaming service makes sense.
But that’s all it is. A service. You don’t own anything about it. You pay a few bucks a month and get to play games without having the hassle of having a console or pc.
Cloud gaming makes sense and I’m not arguing against that. But not from an ownership perspective. Cloud gaming is gaming as a service in its purest form. A subscription system is perfect for that.
We have never owned any creative work, we are granted the rights to use a copy. It's always been this way.
Owning was never the important part, it's about being able to play/use/enjoy it.
Didn't you need to pay a sub to access Stadia & purchase the game on top of that? Or was that just for a more premium tier of Stadia.
Like buying expansions to WoW, pay for the expansions & pay the sub to play the game.
The cyberpunk fiasco was a perfect time to have pushed it, too bad they didn't try to ride the waves of being the best place to play one of the most anticipated games of the decade (I know it was a disastrous launch, but the hype leading up to it for years was on a whole other dimension).
No, you buy the game you play it for free. You sub if you want to receive free games every month or have some premium features like hdr or 4k.
Anyone remember OnLive?
I just still don't get how you avoid the problem of physics causing latency that just isn't great for gaming.
I think it’s about getting more subscribers and then canceling it like google.
If you've got a decent enough connection, it's honestly not as detrimental as you might think. I played on Stadia from its launch day up until it closed earlier this year. I was able to fairly consistently place top of the scoreboard in my cross-platform PVP matches in Destiny 2, during both the skill-based and connection-based matchmaking metas. I think I'm something like 500+ miles from the closest Google datacenter, too.
In Europe good connected homes (basically cities) can have a ping of 10-20 ms. Most people won't notice mich of a lav when they casually play on their couch.
Yeah was getting 3ms for stadia. GeForceNow is 15ms right now. During game play there is absolutely no fealing of lag at all. The only way to notice it is to move a mouse in cricles in the menus, where very slight ruberbanding can be felt.
If the service is decent enough with servers close by, it really isn't bad at all. In a PCgamer test, the input latency for Metro Exodus and Destiny 2 went from 46ms and 51ms local to 96ms and 75ms from GeForce Now, and 179ms and 129ms from Stadia.
For comparison, back when Tekken 7 was released on the PS4, it had 120ms of input lag.
It can be surprisingly decent depending on your connection. I've wirelessly streamed VR from my home computer in another city and it was very comfortable and playable.
Every game stream platform has been a failure. I have no idea why they think this will be any different. Is this where the raised prices and blocking account sharing money has gone?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a blog post today, Mike Verdu, vice president for games at Netflix, states that the streaming content company is rolling out "a limited beta test to a small number of members in Canada and the UK on select TVs starting today, and on PCs and Macs through Netflix.com on supported browsers in the next few weeks."
Given the mess that Linux users encounter with web-based DRM, and Netflix's peculiar device support, it's not a likely bet, at least for now.
As we noted a few months ago, Netflix Games is poised in some ways to succeed beyond the limited impact Apple Arcade or Google's Play Pass have made.
This is not a value judgment, as there are some well-regarded titles in the mix that may make their way to streaming, including Moonlighter, TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, Laya's Horizon, World of Goo Remastered, Shovel Knight, Immortality, Desta: The Memories Between, Reigns, and Into the Breach.
Netflix seems to have big ambitions for games, recently investing heavily in its studios and third-party titles.
Its latest ploy for even more access could mean the entry of a new, quirky competitor for our already highly sought-after screen time.
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If. And this is the biggest if in history. But if Netflix and other streaming sites had the bandwidth and computing power to take on Nvidia.
Fuck. Just new era of Gaming. If you could stream games to Netflix Disney apple whatever. Play games on tvs everywhere. That would be an enormous change. I doubt it would happen as Nvidia is still struggling to get games on its service as devs just refuse.
But hopefully with a shake up we the consumers can finally get a bit of price parity.
Stop locking games behind consoles or overpriced gaming rigs. Far more competition in the gaming world would be epic.
Plus you could rock up anywhere with a controller in hand. Sign in and play to your hearts content.
Bandwidth restrictions may be enforced
The problem is we've already kinda seen what that brings to the industry through mobile gaming, and it's been universally terribly not just for mobile but for the entire gaming industry.
I dunno, maybe this would be different, but to me it is just another test-bed of innovating new ways to dick down the consumers that will eventually spread to the rest of the world again.
Probably
The technical challenges are real and there’s definitely some time before it goes mainstream, but it seems almost inevitable for this to be the future of gaming.
Streaming movies was once thought unrealistic. Subscription music used to be a fringe product. Even online gaming through consoles/PCs has gone through tremendous change.
Like all the other streaming products, the creators are the ones positioned to get the short end of the stick. Hopefully that can be avoided.
Oh I don't know about that. Money will stop innovation. It always does. Microsoft and Sony don't want their cash ciw being split up.
If they stop companies from locking it. That would be barely something
Money is the key and I agree it will take some massive disruption to overcome the current state… But just because someone holds the cash now, doesn’t mean they always will. History teaches that lesson over and over again, especially with new technology.
Uber vs taxi monopolies. Netflix vs Blockbuster. Apple vs BlackBerry.
You aren't wrong. But usually the changes moves one conglomerate to another.
What's in it for the developers?
It works for the streaming tv because they pay for the content but as far as I understand it with the games they want to just give you a cut rather than a straight purchase price.
If they just buy some 10,000 licences off me for X amount of money that would be fine. But when they're like, oh you'll get 70% of the profit your game makes at $0.30 per hour of play, developers are less interested.
It's not the technology, it's the deals.
Similar system for GeForce now. You buy game and subscribe to GeForce. Both get in on the deal. It's not cheaper but it's convenient.
Maybe if Netflix did a deal to cut game prices to $25 bucks.
You are right that devs would never go for current Netflix platform. Netflix wins and devs lose.
I've been playing their games on Android for a while. My favorites are the Stranger Things Match game and Spiritfarer. They've got several others but I have not played them all.
Edit:oh they have added more recently, trying Queens Gambit Chess now.
As someone who likes to preserve games, this is just another form of gatekeeping. They get to hold onto all the games and once the platform decides a certain game isn't worth keeping around, there it goes and good luck seeing it again if someone like me hasn't backed up a copy. So many games locked to the PS3 that will never see a resurgence. I struggle to see a situation where Netflix's service will be any different.