1608

Stadia Pro isn’t a real product. Google gave up before it launched. Netflix charges for their service and isn’t an ad company. Google is.

1609

Sony bungled PS Now, constantly changing business models and confusing customers.

Moreover, Sony relegated the subscription service to older games that most people already played. Microsoft Game Pass gives you day-one access to all first-party exclusives.

PS Now also requires a PC or console. xCloud will open it up to everyone with a phone.

Sony realized they can’t compete in cloud gaming. Not alone. You have to be an Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Facebook behemoth to play in this realm now. Which is why they partnered with Microsoft.

1610

Hm. Why does that matter? As far as I can tell the argument about ads on Stadia Base is that Google will not be happy with a $20 cut from selling the game, and will want to gain some extra pennies from selling ads just because they can. If that’s the case, why aren’t they already showing ads on Stadia Pro? That’s just leaving money on the table.

Obviously it’s because trying to get those pennies will endanger the actual business.

Ads would be colossally stupid; a massive risk for an imperceptible benefit. Now, it’s pretty obvious that the clowns running Stadia are more than capable of making stupid decisions. This particular one I think would be lethal, so if they do that, I’ll happily stick a fork in Stadia and call it done. But can we at least wait for them to actually make the mistake, rather than pretend it’s somehow a given that it will happen?

But Google isn’t giving the product away for free either. Stadia doesn’t have any F2P games, so anyone playing a game will have paid more for whatever game they want to play than they paid for their Netflix subscription. They’d be quite annoyed at being shown ads. (And I’d bet that Stadia won’t have F2P games for a long time if ever, for the reasons discussed earlier).

For the “ads company” angle, Google has a lot of paid services, and at least none that I’ve ever paid for had ads. (Gsuite, Youtube Music/Play Music, GCP).

Ok, I didn’t realize you mean it’d specifically be the Game Pass library. Yes, $10/month for access to the Game Pass library + ability to stream them would be a great deal for the consumer, even if it’s just at Xbox One S performance. Good for MS if they can pull that off.

1611

It used to be $20/month until October. So it’s only been at that price point for 2 months. And when it launched it was even more expensive. Plus even this price drop has been weirdly not well-publicized. I wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t been for Qt3.

1612

PS Now is doing pretty great these days. 1 million subscribers is nothing to sneeze at.

1614

Well they had to drastically cut the price to get anybody to notice the service. Also a million subs is one percent of their PS4 user base…after 5 years. This is clearly not a cornerstone of their business, and it never really was to begin with.

1615

I had no idea it has expanded past just ps1/2 titles

1616

If there’s one thing Sony has been especially bad at this generation it’s marketing. See also: PlayStation Vue, which didn’t require a PlayStation device.

1617

I paid 60 dollars for my Playstation Now. I haven’t used it yet, so even the 10 dollars/mos might be misleading since so many of us got it for so much less than that.

1618

They couldn’t sell Vue so it’s being shut down. I anticipate Stadia failing to get 1M paid subs quick enough though.

1619

/Nelson laugh

2 month old version of game at 30 FPS without couch co op mode

1620

Fascinating leak if true. One of the keys to Stadia’s business strategy is that it is a customer for Cloud and smooths out demand for its development. Cloud is more important than Stadia, so it’s a) probably not given as generous a timeline, b) can probably have its deal altered if Cloud deems it necessary to make itself look good or whatever.

That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information. The group, which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page, discussed whether Google could “win” in the business, who would be best to lead the effort and the difficulties of competing on things other than technology, such as sales and marketing. The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said.

Some evidence that Stadia is a potential future victim of Cloud:

Google’s growth goals for its cloud platform business have also had an impact on its apps division. A person directly familiar with the matter told The Information that the company halted new engineering hires for G Suite in 2019. Instead, Google shifted headcount growth to its cloud platform sales and engineering teams. (The company said in mid-2019 that the sales force for its cloud division would triple in size over the next three years.)

That and other changes rattled the department, the person said. Leaders in the group began departing, including vice president of engineering Garrick Toubassi and vice president of user experience Amy Lokey, both of whom exited Google altogether. The division’s head, Prabhakar Raghavan, became the head of ads in October 2018. In August, the company announced it would be shutting down Google Hire, which levered G Suite apps, like Gmail and Calendar, to help recruiters manage their pipeline of candidates.

1621

The cloud strategy or the borderlands 3 feature deficiency?

1622

No shift code support on stadia either

1623

If BL3 drop rate and drop quality are adjusted down anything like BL2’s were before they finally relented and fixed them, I hope they’ll adjust the drop rate up on Stadia to compensate for the absence of these shift codes.

1624

You really don’t need shift codes, they just compensate for a string of bad luck.

1625

Yeah, well, you don’t really need Stadia either. So there!

1626

I can attest that the Golden Key loot stuff in Borderlands 3 is unnecessary. The keys give you purples for the most part, and they drop naturally in-game all the time. It’s not like how Borderlands 2 gave some of the best guns in the keys.

That said, they’ve given out some pretty cool cosmetics recently via Shift codes.

1627

This jives with what I was saying earlier. Stadia has always been about locking companies and consumers into the cloud where Google has stable monthly revenue. Find a way to use all that computing power they own or get out entirely sounds so very Google of them.

1628

They must not really want to with the half assing they’re doing in Stadia.

“Not as good as last gen, worse than next gen” isn’t a good tagline.