There’s not much crossover between Candy Crush and GTA V.
No? So everyone that plays mobile games exclusively plays mobile, and vice versa?
Yes. It is known.
What I’ve seen (and I’ve only dipped a little into this) - the mobile games market isn’t comprised of low res, touch optimised versions of regular games. That big slice is a whole set of unique subgenres - just like there were “western RPGs”, “jRPGs” there’s now “mobile RPGs” where expectations are things like 5-10 minute chapters, maybe lots of party members by gacha mechanics. Candy Crush/Angry Birds “mini puzzle” games that are like hundreds of levels of one-screen puzzles - almost unheard of for a bigger console, but there’s tons of these that are closer to Sudoku than Portal. There must be some better analysis…
Oooh…maybe the best analogy would be mobile games are like short Youtube videos, vs PC/console games being 90 minute movies. Hmmm although if I think like that, I do see how Stadia and streaming could win - but the issue isn’t the tech. It’s the content. If Epic went all-in on streaming for all the Epic Game Store games, would that have been enough? Or do you need to go even bigger? If Google went… Stadia for Android XX?
Sure, sure when you try and charge them 60 dollars or so for a high budget game when there is non-stop bitching about 4.99 of games that were made decades ago… what could go wrong.
But hey i am sure there are folks that will invest in spotty streaming services with marketing teams that still think they’re catering to single guys in the 90s trying to sell 70 dollar games that can’t be modded nor played on private servers all while wondering why the next cool thing is like a 99 center or just flat up F2P virile thing someone spent a year making in a garage with three other people. It’s a sure thing. Robinhood will help you get there.
No, I think you are going to have a hard time getting people to pay $30-60 for games that can only be played via a streaming service. That is why Stadia failed. Where I think there is a market is in what Gamepass and Geforce Now are doing. I think people would be willing to pay a monthly fee for a library of streamable games (gamepass) or would be willing to pay for a streaming service that let’s me play PC games I’ve purchased (Geforce Now) so I can play on a low end PC or on a smart TV.
This would mean you still have the other device, but yes I can see how that would work. That “future” of gaming though, isn’t replacing the hardware people are gaming on now; instead it would be adding streaming as service, a complimentary service, and not a replacement… aka, future of gaming is not going all streaming.
Actually, this made me think about my music collection, which has become a hodge-podge of CDs (ripped to MP3s and FLAC), iTunes purchases, Google Music freebies now ported over to Youtube Music I think and Spotify playlists. Video I haven’t even bothered to rip DVDs yet so I actually bought an external physical drive to play my hard copies, plus mostly Movies Anywhere but also freebies from Microsoft Store, and Netflix/Amazon Prime/etc subs. And both of these medias have been around and are quite a bit more mature than the cloud gaming service, from that I should expect that if cloud gaming survives it will just be yet another platform. So for Stadia the question is if it’ll survive to take a piece of the pie, but I don’t see streaming as anywhere close to the endgame (edit) given how it went for everything else. Cue that xkcd comic where you invent a new standard to replace the old standards, and you’re left with n+1 standards…
I will think it will be kind of cute if they start offering “offline gaming” options, which is a pretty important use case for all my other streaming media when traveling when you aren’t always on the Internet.
Google made almost what, 57 billion dollars last year and they don’t even want to support this. Stadia is pretty much dead. I think the more interesting thing left for it is if there are any salvageable ideas from it.
Music is quite different. I realize there are audophiles that consume that art form in a very different way from most mainstream individuals, but for mainstream, it’s a 3 minute or so experience that isn’t really customized in anyway. Steaming gave us the ability to customize where and what we listen to, often in what order, so we’re not all playing 30 dollars for CDs that had one or two tracks we liked that were burned off onto mixed experiences for the experience we actually want. TV is the same way only longer, with the visual premium… people (?) buying their 100" 8k TVs and UHD files or discs, but largely it is also a static experience with the location, device and order all sort of organized by the service or applications you use.
Gaming is still an entertainment medium, but the experience can be literally different from player to player. We’re not just talking about content decisions made by publishers and developers, but third party modifications that are sometimes supported by the first party group, even encouraged, and sometimes now. In addition, you have benchmarksers who chase the wave and pay huge premiums so the rest of us don’t have to when those pieces get back to orbit and those who are fine just getting a rig up and playing whatever their system can support. There is a this big group in-between those two, and then we have overlapping and separate platforms all while having these groups over what exactly mainstream means and what experiences are acceptable and which aren’t.
Now can steaming exist within this hodgepodge of different consumers, sure it can, but it’s not as simple as trying to take a 3 minute piece of art, offering it in like a half dozen mediums in 100s of different services
So when someone struts out to the front and say this, this is the future of gaming, you have to wonder, who the heck are they speaking for? The gamers. There is no the gamers, there has never been. There’s just one arrogant group that continues to believe and often demand they get serviced as the one and only TRUE gamers… except. We’re all gamers, we’re all experiencing different offerings in different ways with different set-up and different needs.
So yeah, do I think some sort of streaming is going to have a spot in the future of gaming. Well of course I do. We already have streaming services that are being enjoyed by many different groups… but they’re not largely replacing the new releases. And if someone is looking at cable and saying, well hey there is a good idea, everyone hates them so let’s copy that model… eeeh, well, okay. We can talk about that in ten years when they wonder why copying one of the most hated utilities has shifted that hate their way and now they’re… surprised.
Maybe they’re hoping to sell the tech? Is it profitable?
Actually, I think your point that streaming music and video is customized experiences from an enormous library a la Netflix and Spotify, which actually that’s more the subscription business model part of it - that’s the real innovation of streaming media, the tech made it possible but it’s not the game-changer. I actually do use the Google Play Music (haha dead I guess I switched to Youtube Music?) and Google Video(?) parts to stream media that I’ve bought but my internal valuation of that part (the streaming tech) of the service is that it’s worth FREE dollars - part of me is actually “you should be happy for the privilege of hosting my collection/that I’m using your service/that I’m willing to spend my time to upload my content to your service”.
Part of the reason why I mention the Epic Store is at least I feel they tried to get in on the gaming market - their tech is ummmm … but they spent serious money on Freebies and that makes them memorable. Stadia…I can remember one actually interesting sale when they offered Borderlands 3 and some others as a $1 special - and that wasn’t enough to make me bite, such is the cut throat nature of game valuation in the post-Steam, post Humble Bundle, post Epic/Amazon prime AAA freebies world. I remember going through the catalogue to see if anything was worth redeeming a $10 off coupon and discovering that $1 special was the best use of it, the rest of the sale was just ordinary sale prices, of which happen all the time. If they had $1 games all the time - but plenty of stores already do that. They’re just a regular store, which is a pretty tough sell in the PC world. But maybe they’re not losing money, they’re just…a completely unremarkable store.
I mean, their streaming gaming tech is truly a technological marvel, but… is there anything else to their dream of the future? Did they ever get the instant jump into a Hitman savegame from a link working? At least xCloud is playing with the GamePass a subscription library model - and I can see streaming as very attractive there, since currently I install things hoping to have them ready to play and end up uninstalling them when they rotate out of the service. That would completely free up all that disk space used up by my backlog.
I’m so sick of Google moving things around, retiring this, merging that. I have no idea what they did with HangOuts or +, maybe’s the same thing. I don’t know. Yeah it’s YouTubeMusic now. As far as I know I converted everything some time ago.
My sister got a Stadia account because company sort of forced people through it to get a beta or EA, maybe it was Humankind. I don’t know. The next thing she knew she is getting an email saying Stadia was changing. I was like, oh yeah, You got that account didn’t you, just for that. She has spent zero on it, and plans to spend zero on it.
I currently use Playstation+, and the main reason was for MP which I am still not happy with. I don’t really value the free games they put on there that much because… I wanted to have those games, I would’ve bought them. For me, free games is not the issue, free devoted time to play games is. 20 year old me though would’ve loved to spend like a minimal amount to have games to play with other people that I knew would work because I burned so much money on crap and games that didn’t work.
I think streaming will carve it’s way into our donut… but when people say mainstream, I don’t think that’s console or PC today, I think mobile is full stream ahead and lot of those games are cheap, fast to downlead, painless fun… and then Fortnite.
I also think it helped no one, zero people, that Google was behind this first push. There track record with these things… I feel sorry for any devs that hopped onto that wagon thinking maybe this time they would treat this approach as something than some employees vlog attempt.
A Friday Bloomberg report, citing unnamed Stadia sources, attaches a new number to the failures: “hundreds of thousands” fewer controllers sold and “monthly active users” (MAU) logging in than Google had anticipated.
Someone fucked up bad on the projections. Everyone outside of the project knew it was a pile of shit.
The tech was fine, Google didn’t invest in it. They launched it like it needed to make money day one, an entirely new platform. That’s why it failed.
Yeah, I was in that first beta test. The tech was great. Smooth. No drops. Terrific for 30fps AC Odyssey.
The project as a whole was still a pile of shit though. The game selection was bad. The pricing right out of the gate was awful. Advertising was crap. Then it never got better.
The “hundreds of thousands fewer than projected” phrasing is odd, because it depends totally on what the projections were. If the projection was for 300k MAU and they got 50k, that’d be really bad. If they projected 1M and got 700k, that’d be a pretty accurate.
The thing is, I don’t understand how they could have gotten a greenlight to proceed without projecting several millions of users. The scale they needed to reach for this to make economic sense is so high that missing by just hundreds of thousands would be totally irrelevant. The product clearly failed, so my best guess is that something has gotten garbled in the reporting, and the actual miss on projections was significantly larger than hundreds of thousands of units.
The article claims that they were willing to pay shockingly high incentives to ports. (Which already seemed to be the case from the Capcom leaks). Clearly they were willing to invest in it.
Yes, clearly Google put some money into the project, they developed the tech and tried to build entire dev studio. They didn’t invest in marketing, and they priced like it needed to make money day one. To get in you had to spend $130 up-front, a $10/month subscription, and then games were full retail price just to stream.
Compare that to MS Game Pass. It normally costs $15 and I’m convinced they lose money at full price. But you can get it for as little as $151 for three years, $4.19/month. This isn’t a secret, it’s worked for a year now, Microsoft knows about it and they don’t give a shit. This gives access to hundreds of games on Xbox, Windows, and you can stream them too. For $4.19/month. That’s what it takes to get people to sign up, you offer a deal so obviously amazing that you lose money hand over fist for years.
That’s why “priced like it needs to make money day 1” is so damning.
My theory is some Google executive came up with the idea, got Sundar to green-light it, and then fucked off to work at an investment bank in Dubai or something. The next suit in line picked it up and saw a great opportunity to save easily a billion dollars by letting it rot on the vine.
Google’s famously long and involved hiring process can take six to nine months. And it took time for Google to broaden its hiring standards to accommodate skill sets necessary for game development rather than its traditional fields.
This seems dumb, like really dumb. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised with how large companies snail their way to adjusting to a big change but still…
Honestly I think I biggest mistake Google did here was to start a 1p dev studio in the first place. Assuming they were treated the same as a regular Google engineer, they would be being paid 2-3x market rates as a standard game dev. Probably cheaper to just buy a game studio instead.