Anyone giving these guys a penny more is nutzo.
Doubt it’ll go anywhere but hell this is Murica so worth a shot:
They did make demonstrably false claims before launching. Games would run in 4k60, better than an XboneX, that laughable bullshit about negative latency, all the YouTube integration stuff, etc. Not to mention the forward-looking crap about scaling games across multiple hosts to allow completely new experiences and graphics quality better than the highest-end PC.
Credulous people believed this marketing BS just like they always do, same things are happening now with the XSX/PS5 storage magically transforming gaming, etc. Nobody wants to be “exactly the same as the previous generation except faster”, because you can’t differentiate from your competitors with exactly the same scenario. The real question is whether marketing exaggerations are actionable in court. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine probably not.
Ah, that brings back memories. Worked for a contracting company in my early 20’s, and there were rumors that the company was going to be sold.
Upper management got concerned, so the CEO went on a tour of every location, over several weeks, to tell everyone, face to face, that the company was NOT for sale. No one had to worry. Also, here’s our big picture 3 year plan with better pay/benefits for all of you!
The CEO telling us this was a patrician dude with white hair & a reassuring style.
Yeah, the sale was announced less than 2 weeks after he met with us. The new owner was not interested in our location. Much outrage ensued.
Mr. Patrician, no longer so cuddly, simply answered the complaints this way: “Of course I told you that. We were in the process of selling and we needed minimal disruption as it was closed. You need to be more mature about these things.”
He promptly retired with a couple extra million in his pocket for his troubles.
It was a lesson.
What was the lesson? Guillotines?
Never trust anyone over 30.
Haha dumb fucks who thought the useless “no patching” would outweigh the harm of relying on the data center to be updated
This isn’t so much about the data centre, it seems, but rather Google being publisher and developer, and having canned all the developers.
Well, I was referring about not being able to patch a non-local copy at all but yeah, firing the devs themselves is also something shortsighted Google would do.
Well, any remaining illusions about basic humanity in a professional environment went away. Especially the “you need to grow up” vibe when they are called out.
Obviously this was particularly bad. But it did teach me not to rule out utter deceit.
How do you run a game service if you can’t update games on it?
Is that a zen koan?
They have the ability to update games. They just fired the people that would write the updates. Duh!
Huh - I didn’t realize Google actually owned this dev until this came out.
I mean, reading that story, it’s like the exact reasons you should never want to be locked into a cloud service like that with your “purchases”. It’s an advertisement for never signing on to something like it ever again.
I guess it’s misleading to think of Stadia games as “PC games” even though you play them on PC. It’s far more “you get exactly what you see” since you don’t have the same ability to hack things with the files on disk. I guess it’s kinda obvious but also no mod support, no tweaking hidden settings in obscure datafiles, etc. You have to consider much more like a console game…which I guess is the point?
I thought the intention was you could play it on anything that could access Stadia, PC or otherwise. Like everything else though, making sure people actually understand a product beyond the marketing hype seems to be an afterthought here. Also, no platform should rely on their end-users to fix their bugs anyway, so firing everyone would not really be part of any pitch.
I guess I’m used to having the option to run bleeding edge mods where intreprid folks hack in all sorts of things. I don’t use them half as often as before, but crazy random mods is definitely part of the PC game experience. This connected/online business just makes it dicier - gotta be careful you don’t mess up your official accounts and all that when you’re trying to play the special Thomas the Tank Engine boss.
Firing the game devs but also being committed to Stadia - talk about mixed messages. I guess the cynic in me is probably thinking they were going to give it all up but realised they have to continue to support it officially due to already signed business agreements.
There are a lot, a lot of reason why I don’t believe Stadia or services like it are some inevitable future… mods is one of them. Private servers is another. And that’s assuming the tech can actually be on par with everything else which appears not to be the case. But hey I’ve been watching guys in the industry as well as enjoying the industry convince themselves that everyone wants the SAMETHING followed by them scratching their head when that’s not actually true.
I am sure there is a market for this, but there is nothing with this Google experiment that has said it’s even close to some universal want.