[HN Gopher] Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Wat...
___________________________________________________________________
Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches
Their Noses
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-05-15 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kotaku.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kotaku.com.au)
| nailer wrote:
| Stadia user here. Purchased Cyberpunk on Stadia and saw first
| hand it was broken. Never got past the intro mission.
|
| Stadia flat refused to give me a refund.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 916 days to go. http://stadiacountdown.com
| 27182818284 wrote:
| I gave Stadia a try a while back.
|
| It worked really well, but I was instantly disappointed by the
| game selection. When you advertise being able to play the latest,
| coolest games to me, I expect there to be a selection of the
| coolest, latest, games. I was really thinking I'd be able to play
| the latest, Doom incarnation and such. If I recall correctly,
| Doom was there but at a separate additional cost that made it
| very unattractive to me.
|
| I think I did the free trial plus one addition month of paid
| before I gave up on it.
| gundmc wrote:
| The game selection has improved a lot, but is still the weak
| point. Resident Evil, Cyberpunk, Madden, FIFA, etc were huge
| wins. Ubisoft seems all in on Stadia and streaming more
| broadly. If they can work out a deal to get the upcoming
| Division Battle Royale as a true free to play on Stadia that
| could breathe life into the user base.
| riku45100 wrote:
| IF everything is fine, then why do I get a connection problem
| when am using a wired connection and have a 1GB net connection,
| which my average is 800mb, if they mean fine what does that mean.
| hluska wrote:
| That's where marketing folk trot out phrases like "we're
| continuing to add value to the entire ecosystem for each of our
| stakeholder groups". When you convert that from marketing to
| English it means "you're SOL."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Because the actual usage in your region is high enough that the
| edge servers they use there are saturated?
|
| Which is a problem in the way that selling out a concert venue
| is a problem.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, it's a problem in the way that overselling a concert is a
| problem.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Is the article conflating creating 1st party games for an empty
| service versus choosing _not_ to create 1st party games for a
| busy service?
|
| I don't _100%_ grok this, i.e. it seems like good news where the
| article implies bad news, but other media outlets mentioned there
| 's a 4x spike in gamepad usage in last 6 weeks on the web, and it
| correlates to Stadia's free tier release:
| https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popula...
| creshal wrote:
| 4x increase compared to what baseline? And will these curious
| people trying it out convert to paying customers or will people
| give up on it again, like they apparently did in April 2020?
| Jabbles wrote:
| _Google spent tens of millions of dollars bringing big games to
| their platform_
|
| The gaming industry has >$100 billion of revenue per year. Surely
| these kinds of costs are/were expected. Microsoft famously lost
| money on every Xbox sold for many years.
| Fede_V wrote:
| Microsoft almost certainly still loses money on the Xbox
| itself.
| creshal wrote:
| Every console loses money on the hardware, because you'll
| immediately make up for it with software sales. Stadia's
| still struggling with the latter part.
| dbish wrote:
| Yeah, generally gaming hardware is a loss leader
| alexpetralia wrote:
| This is the "SaaS-in-a-box" business model.
| woutifier wrote:
| Microsoft recently confirmed that they have always lost
| money on their consoles (during the Apple vs Epic
| proceedings). In contrast, Nintendo usually makes a profit
| on selling their hardware.
| kevingadd wrote:
| AFAIK Nintendo is not necessarily in the business of losing
| money on hardware, especially if you count accessories like
| their controllers. I'd need to see numbers to believe that
| they lose money on the Switch, I suspect that thing is
| profitable.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| "...has >$100 billion..."
|
| You are correct, the most technical correct. However a more
| closer to reality is > dozens of trillions USD. Remember,
| gaming industry is bigger than both movie AND music industry
| combined.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Please cite your source.
|
| _As of 2018, video games generated sales of US$134.9 billion
| annually worldwide._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten. Which is a
| shame, because the technology really is just plain great. Play a
| AAA game on a $180 chromebook with basically identical resource
| consumption to watching Netflix.
|
| But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to
| lose control of distribution. The indie folks couldn't be wooed
| away from Steam, because Google just isn't going to match Valve's
| creator services community. Google isn't willing to drop the kind
| of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives...
|
| Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off
| and sell it to Valve. A Steam/Stadia would rule the world.
| [deleted]
| anonymousab wrote:
| > Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten
|
| Assuming that the industry would do all of their work for them,
| and that 99.99999% of the responsibility lied anywhere other
| than Google themselves seems like a very Google thing to do. It
| is, predictably, the kind of arrogance that begets a (perceived
| to be) floundering product like this.
|
| The system launched with a pitiful fraction of the features
| they advertised that it could and would do. It launched with
| many important questions unanswered - often purposely, because
| everyone already knows the answers and those answers are bad
| and answering them could only hurt Google further.
|
| It still lacks many of those features, too.
|
| The story of how their reveal event's gaming history display
| case came to be - the one that showcased several great failures
| and blunders in gaming history, with Stadia as the next in line
| - is an excellent microcosm of the kind of decision making that
| went into the Stadia project as whole.
|
| EDIT:
|
| > But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want
| to lose control of distribution.
|
| There have been many games on streaming services that did not
| make their way to early Stadia. Many that may still not be on
| Stadia - I haven't done the research lately, so I can't say.
|
| Moving to a pure streaming solution - one where they don't have
| to provision and manage the hardware and all that sticky
| ugliness - is an absolute dream for many game publishers.
| Console hardware control is a small part of that dream, and
| it's less important than the rest. Stadia very well could have
| been the mass-accepted vehicle that delivered on the rest of
| that dream, had Google executed well.
|
| To this day, I'm still astonished that they've dropped the
| ball, the slam dunk, this hard. They're limping along when they
| very well could have had their revolution, had they done a
| better job.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Imagine you're bigcorp and you sell a game which features
| multiplayer PVP combat as your central feature. You can
| optimize your entire engine to kingdom come and back, but if
| there are still latency issues, your developers get the blame.
|
| Outside of some AAA RPG and adventure games, most of the rest
| of the truly big games feature PVP content as their main
| selling point. Fifa, Call of Duty, Madden, Halo, Destiny,
| Fortnite, Apex Legends, DOTA, League of Legends, etc... they
| all live and die on network latency. They are the biggest of
| the big and if your platform doesn't have them AND run them
| well, you're dead.
|
| Hard to get someone to invest in your product knowing that your
| product is going to suck for the games people really want to
| play.
|
| I'm still not sure why Amazon hasn't bought Discord and Valve.
| Discord makes perfect sense as a complement to Twitch, and
| Valve would ensure that they basically own the entire PC gaming
| space.
| young_unixer wrote:
| The industry _did_ want to bite and all the ingredients were
| there. The only reason Stadia didn 't succeed is that Google
| fucked up in the most ridiculous ways.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It just doesn't look or feel as good as the native experience
| and the only people saying the tech was great are not serious
| gamers. Casual people don't care enough to try Stadia and
| serious gamers can tell how shitty it is.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. They need to buy and offer for free certain games
| to get people to try it.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Specifically Google Marketed it as a full priced full
| featured platform with a pitiful initial catalogue of a
| couple games (namely Destiny). They also went completely dark
| for periods of months here and there, typically around the
| winter holidays, which frustrated what initial users they did
| get.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| The Indie folks are easily wooed away from Steam, just look at
| how successful Epic has been with their free games, which they
| paid pittances for (eg. Super Meat Boy for $50,000).
|
| Look at No More Robots titles on Xbox Games Pass (which is also
| on PC).
|
| The problem is that Google just didn't put any money into
| buying up rights for titles. Plus, as other mentioned, the
| outdated pricing model. It should have been $20/month for
| unlimited gameplay of any title with maybe a discount tier of
| $15 for 900p.
| ikiris wrote:
| I honestly don't believe Google can ever be successful at a
| consumer product that is a paid service.
| doikor wrote:
| Super Meat Boy is a 10 year old game that probably had sales
| close to 0 at this point (it has been on sale for a couple
| bucks multiple times by now). Taking 50k now a decade after
| release and losing practically nothing as anyone who was
| going to buy it already did makes a lot of sense for a small
| indie dev (literally just 2 people if I remember right)
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > industry just seems not to have bitten.
|
| I know folks at AAA game studios/publishers and the primary
| reason I've repeatedly heard is: Stadia requires that we port
| to Linux.
|
| Completely insane requirement. Steam, meanwhile, is making
| Linux gaming better than ever with their investment in Proton
| (which is incredible, wine has never been so good) and Nvidia's
| game streaming service "just works" and you bring your own
| games (just log into steam).
|
| Stadia is screwed from the get-go by thrusting inane
| requirements onto their potential partners. If they had huge
| market power, maybe it'd fly, but it's effectively a new
| console as far as publishers are concerned.
|
| Instead it should _just work_ with PC games. End of story.
| ajross wrote:
| > Completely insane requirement.
|
| They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and
| that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?
|
| No. Porting engines across complicated SDKs and build
| environments is what these studios do every day of their
| existence, and virtually all the backends run fine on Linux
| already.
|
| Again, the reason the big studios aren't on board is because
| they don't want to be part of an app store ecosystem. It's
| not a technical thing at all.
| sharpneli wrote:
| It's a financial thing. Porting to Linux costs money,
| that's what it means.
|
| Depending on the engine it can be quite a lot of time.
| Especially if you don't already have a Vulkan backend.
|
| Therefore if you don't think the additional sales are worth
| the expense, including the opportunity cost of your devs,
| why bother?
| aspaceman wrote:
| It using Linux shouldn't be an issue. You could use Wine and
| Proton to make the difference the same way Valve does.
|
| They purposefully hamper the systems though. So even a game
| like Destiny 2 is running at Medium settings on a datacenter.
| Just to be able to containerize it and all that noise.
|
| You're right that it should just work from the devloper's
| perspective. I personally think this is all possible with
| existing tech, but Google failed to deliver. Game devs have
| weird gripes about porting to Linux.
| bondant wrote:
| Well it's not like Google Stadia is the only one trying to
| provide cloud gaming, alternatives exist: Geforce Now, Shadow,
| Playstation Now, Blacknut. So I don't think the industry is
| completely against it.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I think the industry is quite keen on the idea, as there are
| many similar services entering the space. I think the problem
| is stadia's model: the best value for players can be found in
| platforms like geforce now or the various smaller players where
| it's basically just renting a windows VM with a low latency
| connection, so they can just play their existing library (and
| which can be transferred to another service or played on your
| own PC), or in the offerings from Sony and Microsoft where you
| pay a monthly fee but get access to a huge library. The fact
| that stadia wants you to pay again for your games, which are
| locked into that service, have a smaller selection of games,
| and pay a monthly subscription is probably not worth the
| ability to play on a chromecast or a maybe slightly better
| latency, especially when there's unforced errors like some
| games becoming unplayable on the service for months due to
| bugs.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| The latency is never going to be acceptable playing an FPS or
| similar over a video stream. It's fundamentally a stinker of an
| idea for anything but turn based strategy and similar games.
| supergirl wrote:
| not sure if there is math to back this up. a regular
| multiplayer FPS already sends and receives a lot of data.
| there is always some lag. you could say at least the input
| lag is 0 but for multiplayer it's not exactly true. the
| server is authoritative and it might revert your movement or
| decide you didn't shoot where you think you shot, etc.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Server lag is one thing but a local client will at least
| let your local movements and reactions feel real-time.
| BatFastard wrote:
| You are living in the past. Latency to Stadia servers is
| 20ms. Much faster than anyone can react.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Much smaller differences in latency have been shown to be
| relevant to competitive FPS (it's not necessarily absolute
| reaction time but relative to your opponents that matters).
| That said it's unlikely to be entirely the decider for a
| lot of people. Also, that kind of latency is basically the
| best case scenario: when you factor in a not-fantastic
| internet connection, location, and wifi, the user
| experience could still wind up quite poor in a lot of games
| (and it's not something which all players are going to
| notice consciously, they're just going to feel like the
| game controls worse).
| toast0 wrote:
| 20ms is a bit more than one frame at 60 fps. If you still
| have a NES and an analog CRT tv, the best way to feel the
| difference is play super mario brothers for an hour on your
| modern tv that probably takes at least 20 ms to process rca
| video and display it, then play on the CRT for a while and
| see how much better it feels. Some things that get
| especially hard to do with lag, but are easy enough for
| most people otherwise are jumping onto a block above your
| head when you're on a single block, like the ? blocks in
| 1-1; and sliding through a one block space when you're big,
| like the spot towards the beginning of 1-2.
|
| Of course, modern games are built around expecting a lot
| more latency in the system, but having your input a frame
| behind to start with, before adding render time, encoding
| time, decoding time, and then display processing makes for
| a tough experience.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > how much better it feels
|
| I think this is the most important part of the ordeal:
| lower latency/shorter input-stimuli loop feels _better_
| and games are all about feeling good.
|
| I wonder how Google of all players missed it because back
| in 2010s they were talking how fractional second delays
| hurt click metrics.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Or an area that is simply not that close to Stadia's
| servers. Or an area on a bad backbone - like much of the
| world, like much of north america (maybe north america
| isn't Google's target audience though? ;)
|
| Or - and this is the kicker - in an area that has lots of
| Stadia users. Which makes sense - more load, more demand =
| service gets worse. But that means that you end up with a
| messed up "regional playability" curve, where the best
| experience - if not the only good experience - is had by
| people in areas close enough to the servers, but where
| Stadia is not too popular as to be overloaded.
|
| That particular caveat has gotten better over time, from
| what I understand. Throw more hardware at the problem, open
| more datacenters in the same region, and that helps deal
| with load. But it certainly left a well-deserved poor
| first-impression for many people.
| akyu wrote:
| This could work for casual FPS games, but for competitive
| FPS gaming like Counter-Strike or Valorant, 20ms is a deal
| breaker for players who want to perform at a high level.
|
| Pro FPS players consistently choose monitors with the
| highest refresh rates available.
|
| This informal experiment is quite convincing
|
| Does High FPS make you a better gamer?:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA
|
| A 60hz refresh rate corresponds to 16.67 milliseconds frame
| time, and a 240hz rate corresponds to 4.2 milliseconds.
|
| The issue here is not reaction time, but "feel". Even a
| moderately skilled player can test this for themselves by
| switching between refresh rates. Specifically the "feel" is
| the relationship between moving the mouse and the shift of
| perspective on the screen. Low refresh rates cause players
| to over correct their aim as the gaps between frames are
| larger, and the motion on the screen is less smooth.
| toast0 wrote:
| Never is pretty harsh. On my current internet connection with
| 20 ms to the first hop, yeah, it's not ever going to be good.
| If you use a low delay, high bandwidth codec, and restrict to
| users with enough bandwidth and sub 10 ms roundtrip, the
| customer base will be tiny, but the experience would be fine.
| Helps if they don't use wifi, or at least have a good rf
| environment.
| liaukovv wrote:
| It's not like the proposition is good from user point of view
| either. You "buy" a right to rent games, which right can be
| terminated by google for any reason, or no reason at all. Even
| if you really bought a game and google would give it back to
| you when they inevitably shut down the service, you still
| wouldnt be able to play it, since the whole point of stadia is
| to not own the hardware.
| symlinkk wrote:
| No different than Steam
| anoncake wrote:
| Maybe in principle. But Steam is Valve's cash cow and very
| unlikely to be cancelled anytime soon. Stadia is a Google
| product.
| creshal wrote:
| Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.
|
| It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL
| connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your
| parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told
| them to get replaced 15 years ago, or ...
| Kuinox wrote:
| Steam is not a rent model. Steam recently got sued because
| you couldn't resell your games, nor your account. You are
| now allowed to sell your steam account because you owe the
| games.
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| >Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.
|
| Ehh, I prefer to buy from GOG when I can for that exact
| reason.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Steam is explicitly NOT a rental model. You buy games, and
| then you have them, on your hard drive, to play whenever
| you like. You could be banned from Steam, Gabe could
| personally make a youtube video telling you to fuck off,
| and you could still start up Steam in offline mode and play
| all the games just fine. The only thing you could
| THEORETICALLY lose is the ability to re-download games in
| your library, but to my knowledge this has never happened
| aside from accounts getting hacked etc.
|
| Stadia, meanwhile, works like Netflix. Stop paying, or just
| anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go
| away. I like owning things I pay for. Many other people do
| to. So it's gratifying to see that this one time, we don't
| have to have our rights trampled on. Good riddance to bad
| rubbish.
| csunbird wrote:
| Actually, after a while being in the offline mode, Steam
| will ask you to go online, as far as I know.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It's technically possible for Valve to pull access to
| your entire library and games that use Steamworks DRM
| will no longer work in that circumstance, but as far as I
| know it's very rare for them to do it at this point. They
| used to do it if you issued a chargeback, but they had to
| stop doing that since it was in violation of various
| government and payment processor policies.
| tokai wrote:
| Haven't tried a game on steam that couldn't be opened
| without steam running. Just go to the games folder and
| run the executable.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Those apps (assuming they aren't indie) will almost
| always try to communicate with the Steam client. There
| are hooks which automatically run Steam if it's not
| available.
| creshal wrote:
| Steam API integration is entirely optional, so it's not
| just indie games that ignore them or fail gracefully.
| Obviously you can't access Steam's online services in the
| game, but that's not a stopper for many games.
| ajross wrote:
| > Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way,
| and all your games go away.
|
| People get banned on Steam and lose access to games too.
| I know Valve promised you that they aren't renting those
| games, but if you look at the contract you'll find all
| you have is a license. And there have been multiple
| circumstances already where Valve has kicked users and/or
| lost licenses to its content.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Steam doesn't require me to pay several hundred dollars a
| month to have an internet speed fast enough to play a game
| without lag. I just run it on a piece of hardware I already
| own anyways.
| deadmutex wrote:
| There are also people who don't have the hardware to play
| latest games like Cyberpunk, but live in an area with a
| good internet connection.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.
|
| A long time ago, there was an official statement to the
| effect of "if steam goes down, we'll release a patch to
| unlock your games" or something to that effect.
|
| I think that was before third parties could even sell on
| Steam.
|
| Could also be apocryphal, or photoshopped emails and
| screencaps and the like. It almost certainly doesn't hold
| true today.
|
| But at the very least, you can download your steam games
| today, and if it shuts down at some point in the future,
| you can modify or crack those local files and executables
| to be playable; multiplayer systems notwithstanding.
| There's a path forward. With Stadia games, there is nothing
| without original publisher or developer intervention.
| dvdkon wrote:
| The main difference to me is that Steam is an established
| platform with a reputation for not pulling games for no
| reason and also the fact that there's always "extralegal"
| ways to play that same game if Steam does pull it. That's
| not the case with streaming-exclusive games (and sometimes
| iOS games, sadly).
| WesleyHale wrote:
| Exactly, and steam isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so
| I don't have to worry more about the game itself becoming
| dated or unsuccessful and pulling down their servers way
| before Steam decides does.
| cocoricamo wrote:
| And if my memory serves me right you can still download
| games that are in your library but not available in the
| store anymore.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| I think it's more the case that Steam is a known quantity
| by both players and developers. There aren't many surprises
| ther and Steam hews closely to its core competencies. The
| few times they've tried to expand their horizons, there's
| been noise, but it soon fizzled and they went back to what
| they do best.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It's a licensing model, not a rental model. You're not
| paying anybody a monthly fee to play, you have all the
| files locally, and the threshold for revoking your license
| or otherwise losing access to a title is extremely high.
|
| Even games with components that have expired licenses are
| kept on the account, your access is never really revoked --
| even a VAC ban won't lose you your library.
|
| You can't mod a Stadia game...
| tmerr wrote:
| I wonder if there are any examples of Google previously
| spinning off companies and selling them. It's hard to imagine
| it given how entrenched most products are in its internal
| software ecosystem
| birdyrooster wrote:
| They bought Skybox, renamed it Terra Bella and then spun it
| off into a sale to Planet in about 3 years time.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Lots, boston dynamics is the one that comes to mind most
| recently. Google is efficient with m&a
| ragebol wrote:
| Boston Dynamics did not originate at Google
| jsnell wrote:
| Niantic (Pokemon Go) is the only one I can think of.
| vmception wrote:
| Out of curiosity, are you aware that similar offerings have
| been available for over ten years. None of them lasting long
| with the exception of PS Now.
|
| The others all die a dramatic and fiery death.
| supergirl wrote:
| why would you pay $180 to play over the internet when you can
| pay $400 and get the latest playstation?
| liaukovv wrote:
| These days latest playstation goes for 2k
| cdogl wrote:
| If you can get your hands on one. Here in Australia a few
| friends and I have just given up for the time being.
| oneplane wrote:
| Because that $180 also allows you to take it with you, and do
| other things, i.e. making money so you can afford the free
| time to play games.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Hmm, perhaps the movie studios who lost access to distribution
| are whispering in there ear?
| Garvey wrote:
| Ubisoft is launching Ubisoft+ on Stadia, available in beta in
| the US now.
|
| Capcom had RE Village on there same day as the other stores.
|
| EA are also releasing games on there.
|
| So it seems at least some of the big publishers aren't that
| against the idea.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Pay $60 per game + subscription fee per month + hardware fee
| (the controller) to play a game on a $180 chrome book.
| Jyaif wrote:
| Except if you wait for sales, then it can be less than $60.
| Also you don't have to pay a subscription nor a controller.
| Other than that, you are 100% correct.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| You do need to pay a subscription for the up-scaled 4k
| experience which is one of the main features in Stadia
| advertisements.
| ragebol wrote:
| Could Valve implement their own Stadia-alternative?
| ajross wrote:
| They have the technical chops, but not the capital goods. At
| the end of the day Stadia works by equipping a bunch of local
| datacenters with specific hardware and maintaining those with
| high reliability across a global market. Running the
| framebuffer through a video encoder isn't really the hard
| part. And the part that _is_ the hard part is absolutely
| Google 's domain of expertise.
| olex wrote:
| They do have Steam Link to build off of, which apparently
| runs really well even over slower connections. So it's
| possible.
| Animats wrote:
| _Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain
| great._
|
| Is it, though? You're really renting a server. Other companies
| who rent you remote game servers have gone broke, because it
| wasn't cost effective. Google can afford losses to get market
| share, but at some point the price has to go up.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Steam already supports cloud gaming. I signed a legal agreement
| on top of the existing Steamworks distribution agreement which
| lets my software be distributed through GeForce now and quote
| "Valve operated cloud gaming services". So I assume this is
| something they are at least considering.
| kossTKR wrote:
| http://shadow.tech is still way better - you get your own PC so
| can run all games and work related software, stream 4k with 10ms
| latency from datacenters near you, it's almost impossible to
| discern a difference from running locally. All for 12$ a month, a
| stupid low price.
|
| Sadly this has made them go bankrupt - but have been bought out
| recently so the future is uncertain.
|
| Point being the market is more than ripe for this tech to
| accelerate - and shadow has had 1 year waiting lists, for years,
| so it's weird to me that more money isn't poured into this space.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| The business plan submitted by OVH to the bankruptcy court says
| the monthly subscription will need to be raised to $25 in hope
| for profitability within 3 years.
|
| It seems inherently complicated to provide the required CPU and
| GPU resources in an elastic way, when most gamers play at the
| same peak hours.
| danielbln wrote:
| You also get to deal with game downloads, updates, system
| maintenance and all the other stuff that I really don't want to
| deal with if I just want to quickly play a streamed game. (and
| that's if you can even get a shadow box before the end of the
| year).
| fnord77 wrote:
| messaging in big corporate entities is like soviet totalitarian
| states. they'll swear up and down everything is great, even as
| the radiation detectors are off the scale.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| "CDPR execs laughing when asked about Stadia share of sales.
| Not great not terrible."
| MintsJohn wrote:
| I tried stadia, didn't convince me at all, it was rather a let
| down. The most jarring was the sound, it stuttered. The video was
| fluent enough, but seemed horribly compressed (washed out and
| artifacts) and low res (but I have a 4k monitor). Yet when I hear
| others talk about it its nearly the same as running a game local,
| or even better when, like me, you don't have the latest and
| greatest videocard. I suppose the bottleneck was my Internet
| connection, a "lowly" 30 Mbps, but then again, it's good enough
| for everything else, and the stadia test thingy said I should
| expect a high quality experience.
| gman83 wrote:
| I hope it sticks around. I have a Mac and a Nintendo Switch for
| the kids so I don't really have a good way to play games, unless
| I buy a console. I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on
| Stadia and it's been great. No downloads is great. I honestly
| don't really care if they shut it down in a couple of years,
| personally once I beat a game I don't really go back to it. In
| the meantime they're giving me a super powerful gaming PC for
| basically nothing.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat: if Stadia isn't here, I'm pretty much
| praying that Luna continues, because honestly, the other option
| is mobile games. A gaming PC or console does not interest me
| any more. It's a different kind of lifestyle, really.
|
| But my approach to games is very similar - once I play it
| through I rarely go back to it. Outside of some strategy games
| like Civilization, of course.
|
| It really feels like Stadia could have led to a new kind of
| gaming market, but they didn't. And they don't seem to have the
| leadership to make that happen.
| [deleted]
| hedora wrote:
| I imagine these streaming game services would be much more
| successful if the model was "stream an arbitrary gaming desktop
| to your random device," but then they couldn't double dip by
| charging for the service and also the games.
| esturk wrote:
| Stadia could be more than just gaming. Imagine every software
| that people have complained doesn't work on a chromebook like
| Photoshop.
|
| Now imagine when you can stream those apps through Stadia such
| that essentially Chromebook + Stadia => every PC
|
| Which is to say, Google can always pivot enterprise apps.
| jollybean wrote:
| Nobody cares about 'Stadia'. They care about the titles.
|
| Give people a 'Halo' exclusive, or go home.
|
| 80% of the business plan relies on hard hitting amazing exclusive
| titles.
|
| And of course massively subsidized hardware.
|
| And a long term vision.
|
| It's sad because the model looked kind of cool, I'll never get to
| try it out ...
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I love Stadia and hope it doesn't go anywhere. Playing Destiny 2
| with my wife during Corona with free controllers we got for
| preordering Cyberpunk was an awesome experience. Playing
| Cyberpunk and then RE7: Biohazard during quick breaks, anywhere,
| on a potato laptop, convinced me that this is the way we're all
| going to be playing games not long from now.
|
| Looking forward to playing Resident Evil 8: Village once I finish
| Biohazard.
| smnscu wrote:
| I finished RE8 on Stadia on launch day; it looks great on PC
| but for some reason it looks even better on a TV with the CCU.
| As someone who's put hundreds of PSs and hours into Stadia, I'm
| quite content with it, I wish it had more games though, most of
| the free titles that come with Stadia Pro are ridiculous
| (though, to be fair, they did help me discover gems such as The
| West of Loathing).
| supergirl wrote:
| that potato laptop costs more than the latest playstation
| though. and it can't really be a potato laptop. you need a good
| internet connection and good video decoding
| michaelt wrote:
| Almost every processor made in the last 10 years has the
| power to decode 1080p 30fps.
|
| That's an entry-level feature on a phone, let alone a tablet
| or laptop.
| esturk wrote:
| A chromebook costs half of a PS5.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| A more interesting question would be: "How long will it stay
| fine?"
|
| If Google is (officially) that confident Stadia is doing well why
| don't they officially commit to support the product for the next
| X years?
| jsnell wrote:
| Because a promise to support the product for X years would just
| be twisted to "the product will be killed in X years"
| headlines. You can't fight a double standard like that, the
| best you can do is avoid feeding it.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Even so, will be killed in 5 years makes me more confident in
| trying it than knowing it could be killed at any moment or in
| 6 months. 5 years is the life of a game console.
| dontblink wrote:
| For you maybe. For many of the rest of us we would avoid it
| like the plague.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| But likely for reasons that have little to do with how
| long it will last.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'd be curious how many of that demographic aren't
| already avoiding it like the plague for the originally
| stated reasoning though. I.e. it's not likely the lack of
| any guarantee is making many in that group any more
| confident the service will be here in 6 years in the
| first place.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| But at least it would give clarity. Right now both dev
| studios and gamers are very cautious because they have no
| idea whether Stadia will exist for 5 more weeks or 5+ years.
| In a time when courts are trying to decide whether an online
| "purchase" is actually a purchase or if the company can just
| make it inaccessible over night this is not a good situation.
|
| The way Google communicates does not help, on one hand they
| say everything is fine, on the other hand they just closed
| their dev studio days after telling their employees
| everything's fine. It's hard for them to make Stadia seem
| even riskier than it looks right now.
| gregmac wrote:
| This. Google must be well aware of their reputation. It boggles
| my mind why they keep repeating the same pattern.
|
| Maybe it's just my bubble (HN, tech twitter, like-minded
| friends) but it certainly seems like everyone in it is loathe
| to adopt new Google stuff, precisely because they have a
| reputation going back 15+ years of mercilessly killing anything
| they release, no matter how great it is.
|
| I would bet if they commit to maintaining a product for x years
| (and continually extend that timeline) they'd see a lot more
| use.
| angus-prune wrote:
| The original Xbox lost $5-7 billion in 5 years Epic games has
| lost $593m on the Epic Game Store in 3 years Apple invested $500m
| in Apple Arcade (and that was on an existing hardware install
| base).
|
| I couldn't find how much Google has spent on Stadia, but it
| doesn't seem to have approached it as the long-term, expensive
| investment that it required.
| franczesko wrote:
| One of the biggest problems Google has is that they excel at
| engineering, but they lack proper marketing talent. Stadia is
| really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and
| grow the platform. During covid time that's truly a lost
| opportunity. I'm wondering how many of their products were killed
| just because of the fact, that there was no plan beyond letting
| it out in the market.
| creamytaco wrote:
| Google's brand is poisonous for a lot of Gen Z. A lot of them
| are not willing to look past ad-peddling, data-siphoning and
| profile building.
| [deleted]
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Personally I'm not willing to invest in games I could lose
| access if they decides to pull the plug. I suppose they'd offer
| some kind of license transfer or some kind of compensation if
| that happened, but to me it seems like a risky deal from a
| consumer point of view. I'd be less worried if a purchased game
| was made available on alternative stores right off the bat.
|
| With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games
| to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have
| to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.
| gretch wrote:
| Disclosure: work at google, not on stadia
|
| Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was
| over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the
| "Netflix of gaming". I double knew it was over when I watched
| Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can't make
| moves like that, you aren't going to outcompete
| toast0 wrote:
| You have to pay for the games _and_ you can 't take them with
| you _and_ we know Google will shut this down eventually. It
| would be different if you could use your existing licenses,
| or even if you could buy on Stadia and play on something else
| too.
|
| License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important
| thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have
| more than one frame of latency to start with.
| akmarinov wrote:
| There's GeForce Now, where you still pay for the games but
| can take them with you (Steam) and it's not like that's
| super prosperous.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I heard people have to queue for a while in order to be
| able to play GeForce Now. The demand is very much
| exceeding the supply here.
| akmarinov wrote:
| For the free tier - yeah. The paid tier is way better on
| that front.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I subscribe to Geforce Now. The tech works well but the
| business model is a bit niche. I pay a subscriber fee but
| still have to buy the games. If I already had a large
| game library then it's because I already had a computer
| that could play them. If I buy new games that my computer
| can't run then I will lose access to them once I stop my
| subscription. Not every game on my steam library is
| supported, in fact the library is missing a lot of the
| major publishers besides EA.
|
| As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can
| eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library,
| bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could
| install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt).
| Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special
| hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices
| higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your
| licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down
| the service.
| defaultname wrote:
| nvidia recently doubled the price[1] and have basically
| done zero marketing for it. They seem to be as prosperous
| as they want to be. When publishers tried to extort GFN,
| nvidia just shrugged and kept going (and have been adding
| dozens of games weekly).
|
| [1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price,
| under the caveat that apparently if a single billing
| detail changes the price goes to the current market
| price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
| dougmwne wrote:
| As a consumer, I personally knew it was over when Google
| released the new Chromecast without Stadia support. They
| could have had an opportunity to shave a few more
| milliseconds off the lag with a bespoke device that paired
| with the Stadia controller for "The best streaming experience
| on any platform!" Instead they don't even support their own
| services. What a completly sad and broken company.
| ska wrote:
| > but they lack proper marketing talent
|
| I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies
| things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor
| at product development, partially because they don't really
| internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class
| engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up
| somewhere great.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| One engineering problem they haven't solved is keeping an old
| service on life support. Nobody gets promoted for keeping their
| API stable indefinitely, so prohibitive maintenance costs are
| driving them to kill everything but huge hits.
| edoceo wrote:
| It hurt itself in it's confusion.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| I disagree here. They don't lack marketing talent. They lack
| executives with a cohesive view of 'Google' the company. It's
| just a bunch of hyper rational utility maximizers trying to
| meet whatever quarterly/yearly targets they have.
|
| By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly
| skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google
| products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes,
| if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast'
| prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user
| base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good
| product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first
| adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not
| launch the product in the first place.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Lacking marketing talent vs poor marketing execution is a
| distinction without a difference.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| That's not what's happening. Google has a product strategy
| problem more than it has a marketing problem. Google can
| hire people to do marketing (and they do) but they can't
| outsource product strategy.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract
| players and grow the platform.
|
| Stadia is so bad, I have a founder's edition controller sitting
| in my living room unopened. It's not marketing that's the
| problem. It's that if your games can barely do 1080p on a
| 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.
| gerash wrote:
| So have you used it if it's unopened? My experience with
| Stadia on a 100Mbps connection has been good
| mdoms wrote:
| The addressable market for stadia right now is vanishingly
| small compared to the market for every other platform. What
| proportion of gamers live in an area where it's available? Is
| it even a double digit percentage? I doubt it.
|
| Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would
| still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google
| invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's
| just no way to make the numbers work.
| piger wrote:
| I jumped on Stadia with Resident Evil 8: on PC (Win 10) I had
| constant frame drops with Chrome, fixed by installing Chrome
| Canary. Not a great start, but after that the game played
| perfectly. Then I got the chromecast ultra + pad bundle, too bad
| by the time it arrived I already completed Resident Evil; the
| onboarding is kinda silly, having to download one app to set up
| the chromecast and one to set up the controller, logging in to
| Google twice.. but the real problem is the selection of available
| games. Very very few recent/new games, a bunch of random indie
| games, a bag of generic old shooters... and that's it
| gman83 wrote:
| This is such a bad faith article.
| butz wrote:
| On one hand game streaming is great, as it reduces hardware
| requirements, but not having actual game files on your PC might
| not give some gamers a chance to experience game modding or
| "hacking", that usually leads to learning how games are built,
| and even how computers work.
| causality0 wrote:
| It's grimly hilarious that Google picked a business model that
| was so bad they couldn't make Stadia a success in a time period
| that could not be more suited to it. Hardware costs are insane.
| Consoles are nearly impossible to get. The GPU market is
| destroyed by semiconductor shortages and crypto miners. Yet
| Google's reputation is so god-fucking-awful people still won't
| bite on their "we promise we won't treat this service like we've
| treated literally everything else we've ever made" product.
|
| It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading
| the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is
| incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet
| anymore.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| > Yet Google's reputation is so god-fucking-awful
|
| Where? In the HN bubble? Ok.
| theonemind wrote:
| Yes. That matters immensely. This is not just any bubble, but
| the bubble of the people who drive technology adoption...by
| writing articles on tech, by having friends trust their
| judgment, and so on. It is a leading indicator, not a lagging
| one.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Gmail has well over a billion users. The number of people
| who search with Google is in the multiple billions.
|
| The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter
| _at all_ to the general public who just want to accomplish
| their communication and search tasks. HN isn 't even a blip
| on the radar.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Early adopters matter early in the adoption curve, not
| late.
| interestica wrote:
| In two weeks, Google will start counting new photos
| against users' Gmail/Drive space unless one pays to
| upgrade. I think it could cause a shift in perception.
| SllX wrote:
| Google and Gmail adoption was also driven by the same
| sorts of people that would have been on HN if HN were
| around back then. Yahoo and MSN/Hotmail used to matter a
| lot more than they do nowadays.
| majewsky wrote:
| This does not invalidate the original argument: This
| crowd here is representative of who first adopted GMail
| and spread the word. Without these early adopters, the
| other billion users would likely not have followed suit.
|
| I cannot comment on the early years of the search engine
| since I was about 8 years old at the time, but I find it
| likely that it was similar back in the day.
| joezydeco wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| ajnin wrote:
| If you hang around gaming communities a bit the sentiment is
| the same. Google has killed many products used by a lot of
| people.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| In every industry that might depend on it for revenue via
| platforms like Stadia. I'm in a number of game industry
| Discord servers and Stadia is a joke because everyone knows
| that Google's rollout has been so bad that they'll likely
| shutter the service within a year or two, which means nobody
| wants to put any effort into supporting it.
|
| The other issue is that their advertising is so bad that most
| of the regular gaming audience has no idea what it even is.
| My housemate is a casual gamer with a doctor-level education
| and I asked him if he understood what Stadia was or did and
| he had no idea.
| aspaceman wrote:
| Nah, in gaming communities and the "little-less than tech
| literate" crowd.
|
| View a Reddit thread. Not exactly representative I know, but
| pretty normie imo.
| _gtly wrote:
| I agree with your points, though re: hardware and cloud-gaming
| in general: I wonder if its availability and cost issues would
| serve as a driver for _consumers_ - where they would seek a
| cloud-streaming solutions (so _they_ don't need to find/buy the
| scarce high end GPUs or consoles themselves -- and let Google
| Stadia or Shadow.tech or GeForce Now or xCloud or whoever take
| care of that).
| admax88q wrote:
| I think that was their point about hardware. It's so hard and
| expensive to acquire as a consumer that stadia is tempting
| even for peoe who usually build their own gaming PCs.
| oblak wrote:
| After seeing the news about a Quake 3 client hitting the front
| page, I can't help but ask my fellow shooter fans who have tried
| stadia or another such service: how bad was it?
| Jyaif wrote:
| Well unfortunately there's no equivalent to Quake 3 on Stadia,
| nowadays the FPS are all controller-friendly crap. The
| controller friendly crap works well on Stadia.
| bartread wrote:
| I like playing games. I like playing them a _lot_ but the reality
| is that these days I don 't do it that much. I'm about as far
| from a hardcore gamer as it's possible to get, although the games
| I tend to play overlap significantly with what more "serious"
| gamers might choose to play (I'm not really at all into the
| category of games generally described as "casual" these days).
|
| That community is full to the gunwales with people who will
| complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in
| console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan
| endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because
| I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your
| typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon
| graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine),
| polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were
| practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications
| they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping
| down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they
| were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-
| obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so,
| I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly -
| online shooters and racers.
|
| Why do I bring this up?
|
| Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV
| shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a
| data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly
| it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms
| packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of
| latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection.
|
| If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a
| strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at
| best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around
| 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At
| 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16
| frames of latency in the worst case.
|
| Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less
| casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true.
| But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to,
| where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore"
| games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are
| just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband
| connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great
| playing experience.
|
| Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent
| resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content
| supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd
| expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst
| this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to
| make for a pretty annoying gaming experience.
|
| Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but
| it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good
| enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need
| to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the
| dinosaurs in _The Sound of Thunder_ : it's already dead but it's
| too stupid to realise it.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Pretty much all the old classics hum at a cool 60fps.
|
| 3 frames of latency borders on unplayable if you want to make a
| game that flirts with human reaction time - one popular sweet
| spot of "fun" in the design space.
|
| You can definitely feel 2 or 3 frames of added latency at
| 60fps. No matter the game. And the games of old did run at
| 60fps and there's definitely value to the ones that do nowadays
| too. Even if the AAA games moved away from low-latency gaming
| in general.
| Orphis wrote:
| It really depends on how the game is made. If the game knows
| what latency you have, it can compensate for it.
| whateveracct wrote:
| To a point, yeah. But only to a point.
| gundmc wrote:
| Honest question: Have you actually tried Stadia? You have a lot
| of assumptions and theoreticals in your post, but for all of
| Stadia's shortcomings the streaming tech is _incredibly_ good.
|
| A ton of people will run mental calculations, assert it must
| add at least x ms of latency so it can't possibly work, but
| just try it. It's free. It works.
|
| I have been PC gaming for 25 years. I have a $3k+ rig with a
| 3080. I'm very attuned to input lag and fidelity. Is Stadia as
| good as playing locally? No, of course not, but it's far far
| better than I imagined it could be. You might be surprised.
| anonymousab wrote:
| A difference of even 2-4f in a fighting game can make all the
| world of difference, both in balance and in the simple feel
| of the game. Games have to be designed for an expected amount
| of delay, which itself is often a design component of how
| they expect the game to function online (i.e. type and
| implementation of netcode).
|
| So what did we see with that genre on Stadia? Well, Stadia
| not only adds different input/response latency for both
| players in a fighting game, but it also doesn't colocate the
| matches to the same server in between players (or same
| running game instance); so the matches have the standard lag
| between Stadia data centers on top of the user <-> stadia
| delay. Unsatisfying for both players, and inferior to
| alternative ways of playing those games.
|
| Ironically, player-led initiatives for that kind of hosting -
| to deal with poor netcode of older fighting games - have
| shown that the very idea is sound, and can deliver a better
| experience e.g. Parsec game tournaments. Not optimal, but
| better. Google has simply failed to deliver.
|
| Part of the problem is up to the developers to solve, but the
| buck stops with Google. Stadia needs to deliver a world class
| experience on its merits, and it needs to give developers the
| tools and guidance and working examples - if not real games -
| showing how to do so. And it needed to be doing that on Day
| -1.
|
| Or they can just say "Stadia is for genres X, Y and Z", and
| only spend their time and money courting games and developers
| in those genres, and everyone involved would probably be
| better off for it. They could have - and still can - set
| grand but realistic expectations and deliver on them.
| gundmc wrote:
| You chose the single most latency sensitive type of game.
| If you're someone who plays those games competitively,
| you're better off sticking to your local rig and CRT
| display.
|
| For most games and most users, you'll get the feel within a
| minute and forget you're not playing locally. I played
| quite a bit of Destiny 2 streaming and it was quite
| playable. Again, no comparison against my powerful local
| rig but I don't think Google/Amazon/NVidia are targeting
| 3080 owners for their streaming services.
| bartread wrote:
| I play Destiny 2 semi-regularly with friends on Xbox at the
| moment. Latency issues are sometimes noticeable (and quite
| irritating), even though it's obviously sending a lot less
| data down the wire than Stadia during play.
|
| Theoretical concern or not, if that can't work flawlessly
| over my broadband connection then I don't see how Stadia can:
| it's not magic.
|
| Sadly it doesn't actually matter how well it works for other
| people because it has to work well for _me_ on _my_ internet
| connection. The evidence I have so far suggests it 's not
| going to be that great, so I'm not going to pay for it.
|
| The reason this doesn't bug the heck out of me already is
| because I don't actually play that many online games: I'm a
| fan of single player story driven campaigns, and (to a lesser
| extent) single player sandbox experiences, as well as arcadey
| racing games with couch and online play. Finally, I also play
| a lot of more retro titles.
|
| These are all experiences that work really well when played
| on local hardware that absolutely aren't going to improve via
| any kind of streaming experience as those services currently
| exist.
| gundmc wrote:
| Fair enough. For what it's worth, Stadia pro includes
| Destiny 2 and the expansions/DLC and there's a 1 month free
| promo. (The base game is also totally free without the pro
| trial, but honestly there's not much to do in the base game
| anymore.)
|
| Stadia plays Destiny at 60fps (pretty sure Xbox One is 30).
| So it sometimes actually feels as good or better than on
| consoles imo. In any case, since it's free it's worth
| checking out just to see what the tech is like. You might
| reaffirm your opinions, but you might reconsider them too.
| edent wrote:
| It is such a confusing proposition to buy. I got a discount offer
| for the Stadia (PS60) but I couldn't find an official list of
| what games are available, or how much they cost!
|
| Then I found out that if I wanted the 4K streaming it'd be an
| extra tenner a month!
|
| At which point it is cheaper to buy a 2nd hand PS4. And, that
| way, I can buy 2nd hand games if I want.
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