You’re right that any email host could maliciously/incompetently/mistakenly/rightly upend your life by locking you out, and in a sense that makes Google an attractive choice as a high profile well known and competent provider.
But there seems to be some non-zero increase in risk when you have a single account as the single point of access for more and more services, even within the same company.
I have no idea what actually happened with the Terraria dev, but it could be something like inadvertently violating a dev agreement of some kind, which takes down everything with it. There’s some value to siloing your accounts.
Yep, I own my own domain. I have Google hosting it, but if god forbid they lock me out, I could seamlessly move the address to another provider. That’s well worth the $12/year the domain costs.
There’s also no auto-renewal, so you have to remember to re-register every so often. With Google if you hit the snooze button, no big deal. I lost Internet access because I was (very) late with a bill one time and it fucked everything up.
All I can think of here is, “the car will never replace the horse”. Streaming will absolutely be the way most people play games 10 years from now, because it’s the cheapest avenue to multiple games for the consumer and that is ALWAYS the driver. People give two shits about quality, as evidenced by watching Netflix on their phones vs vastly superior means of watching said movie. It’s the same with music, most people listen to shit MP3 over many other much better quality sources.
This model has been proven to work via music and movie streaming, it’s just going to take someone with the right timing, front end, and patience to stay in the game and establish the dominant platform.
Predicting the future is pretty tough - for every “car will never replace the horse” there’s also “zeppelins will obviously replace airplanes”. I think the tech is good but it’s hardly a critical piece of infrastructure. Folks blew past needing cloud gaming and went even further down in quality to the billions of free to play app store games that work devices that have garbage specs that can’t do Stadia.
I mean, they could have partnered with Genshin Impact and brought something like that to a slightly wider audience, but good luck picking winners in that arena in advance… Maybe they should have offered the tech to like 1000 F2P games in development from the top devs on the Google Play Store/Steam F2P lists (“Duty of Call X: Zombie Warfare Stadia Edition”)
“Ahhh, this porridge is just right,” she said happily and she ate it all up.
I am not sure we have a platform that’s just right anymore. I’d rather have more too choose from than less, so no on the platforms that are so few are interested it gets almost nothing and also no on the platforms where some old rich white guy and a couple of token women and minorities decide for everyone else.
We do, we have a platform that has games for every taste and for every platform, where you can use whatever storefront you want. It even has a shopping cart.
Who gives a crap about stuff you don’t give a crap about?
If you’re wading through thousands of games with a not great search tool, a bunch of mislabeled junk, recommendation queues that seem out of whack, it’s not really about giving a “crap” about what you don’t give a “crap” about, it’s about finding the stuff you want to buy.
How many gamers do we have on this board that not only commit hours upon hours of actually playing games, but discussing them, writing about them, researching them, tearing them down, building them up, and occasionally go forth and questing to find that one game we saw a video about 3 years ago to see if it still has signs of life somewhere, and we still wind up with games none of us have heard of. We hear about those in some sort of hey look what happened to this game article, or hey look at this failed studio that put out a game no one noticed… it’s not a great situation to have.
And the same goes for music, games, and books, and no one goes to Amazon to search for their name either, they ask people; such is the way of things. At least we don’t have curators asking focus groups what gets to exist of not… yet. There’s plenty of curated stores if that’s what you want, but we all end up with a Steam account for something, don’t we?
I mean, sure, Valve could’ve improved filters well before “competition” showed up, but the APIs are there for anyone to do whatever they want, and, well, nobody does, because it’s rare that anyone goes trawling through product pages when they have a backlog cornucopia. Search is always going to be useless when the industry and fans can’t even define genres.
In exchange, we get to have Factorio, DSP, Zach-likes, Creeper World, Heat Signature and the like. I’m ok with that.
Hey if you want to celebrate Stadia’s whopping 100 games for the year to Steam’s almost 30 a day, no one is stopping you. Have at it. I will remain in my I think the better result is actually going to be in between those two.
Celebrate? Nah, I think paying more for renting a version with less features and more bugs is a non-market, I’m just here to see how long it lasts. And the schadenfreude.
As to an intermediate alternative, or, preferably, may intermediate alternatives, whether it’s the long tail effect of something else, it never happens to a relevant degree, and gaming isn’t going to be different.
Developers at Google’s recently formed game studios were shocked February 1 when they were notified that the studios would be shut down, according to four sources with knowledge of what transpired. Just the week prior, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent an email to staff lauding the “great progress” its studios had made so far.
Mass layoffs were announced a few days later, part of an apparent pattern of Stadia leadership not being honest and upfront with the company’s developers, many of which had upended their lives and careers to join the team.
“[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great progress building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong lineup of Stadia exclusive games,” Harrison’s January 27 email read, according to sources. “We will confirm the SG&E investment envelope shortly, which will, in turn, inform the SG&E strategy and 2021 [objectives and key results].” […]
Stadia developers learned the news, first reported by Kotaku, at almost the same time as everyone else via an internal email and conference call with Harrison. The messy rollout came after an already grueling year working through the pandemic.
Developers had to wait three days after receiving the news to directly share their confusion and frustration with Harrison in a second conference call on February 4. This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”
One source described the Q&A as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at extracting some kind of accountability from Stadia management.
