This suggestion also doesn’t make much sense. “Muted launch” means bleeding money on fixed costs because cloud gaming needs economies of scale
Reminds me a bit of Andrew Sullivan arguing in 2004 that the real problem with the Iraq War is the details of its execution
yeah i think the issue is everyone hated it and it didn’t seem to work and most people don’t have internet that’s good enough to justify it?
the features they talked about, eg embedding save states in streams, were actually very cool and seemed technically doable, but trust in google’s consumer services, especially the ones that ask you to pay for quasi-ownership licenses the way videogames do, is very low
also targeting mostly AAA games brings you into collision with a lot of people who already have very specific ideas and investments in how they play those games in the first place, and attempting to obviate all of that with streaming misses the point for a lot of folks
I just don’t think it’s feasible yet. they bit off more than they could chew. idk if it’s more complicated than that?
it’s pretty feasible but mostly for like, the wrong subset of games to build a platform on, especially when you consider that they had their own Linux + AMD environment they needed to optimize ports to
a lot of their assumptions were equivalent to like, launching a brand new console platform with its own store and APIs, and no one really does that anymore for good reason
this is at least the fourth wave of game streaming but Google didn’t bring the showmanship of supervillain cosplay
I’ve been playing Destiny 2 this season on Stadia with their controller and it’s absolutely fantastic and I can’t feel the latency. It’s awesome to be playing one of these “games as a service” and not have to constantly manage storage space and download patches like I do on my PS4, and also have the flexibility of being able to play it on any device I want.
It shocks me how good the experience has been, because it doesn’t seem like it should be possible. I know how this shit works, and it’s really fucking hard to pull this off to the degree they have.
Seems like the entire gaming world has just decided that it’s common sense that everyone thinks Stadia sucks, but I dunno, it’s got a lot of PR issues and it’s a risky proposition given Google’s history of abandoning shit they get bored of, but as a player, the experience has been great.
If new Final Fantasy 7 is going to feel this fanfic-y even with so many of the original staff involved, just sell the company to Disney already.
Pokemon Legends looks dope, I’m still expecting turn based battles – and please change the lengths of the battle transitions and move animations. These things are not tied to the franchise’s continued success, and I know there are people at Nintendo who believe that they are.
whereas I’m fairly allergic to any lifestyle games like that (I tried playing the new destiny expansion everyone said was going to be good for like 2 days and I couldn’t stand it) and I’ve already made a bunch of investments in generic streaming solutions for my home that don’t require google but provide the same device flexibility (and in fact I enjoyed setting up the streaming environment more than I enjoyed playing destiny)
i’m cautiously optimistic.
Maybe the controller makes the difference but our experience checking it out with our normal controls was over 50ms of input latency
I guess I mean feasible in the way it was envisioned and marketable. it is already feasible to the extent that it already existed pre-stadia, and continues to exist.
That’s fair! And to be perfectly clear: I have a hard time justifying the purchase of full-price non-service games on Stadia just because of Google’s abandonment tendencies. Your purchases would be vaporized overnight and that would suck. Performance is by definition going to be inconsistent, but I’ve been playing somewhat consistently since December when I got the controller, and I only had noticeable issues during two play sessions, and my Internet is pretty unreliable, so maybe I’m just blessed with good Stadia RNG.
I guess I’m just trying to say that I came at it with an open mind and realistic expectations informed from knowing how networking works and experience with competing services, and I came away pleasantly surprised by how good the experience was on a technical level. Google has no idea how to market this shit and everything they say about Stadia ends up biting them in the ass, and as a user, that sucks because I really would rather they shut the hell up and get FFXIV on Stadia
Yeah, it’s hard for me to comment on it because I haven’t played mouse-and-keyboard FPSes regularly in over a decade, but I feel like I did notice it way more when I was playing it in Chrome on my Mac.
I have no nostalgia or fondness for Diamond/Pearl, so the announcement of the remake doesn’t do much for me. The graphics are OK, I guess, but aesthetically it’s so boring. Same with Arceus or whatever. I don’t know. A lot of this Nintendo stuff just looks the same to me, and it doesn’t do anything for me, I get fucked up lazy PlayMobil vibes from so much of it except everything has jagged edges. Obviously there are exceptions (like Breath of the Wild).
I’d love to see a Pokemon game game (I don’t know if I have it in me anymore to play Pokemon) in this sort of handmade clay/toy model aesthetic.
Or even just a straight up clay aesthetic like the Neverhood stuff. I find it really hard to get engrossed in a world because so many video games just look like a video game, and that’s boring and mundane.
I’m looking forward to El Shaddai’s PC release.
I adore all of the casual Dark Cloud knowledge you drop on this forum. Never knew the OST had this art.
I guess a Stadia-like product is probably what will give the uniform out-of-the-box console performance @tt_zop described above and consoles will be appliance PCs
My money is on Microsoft making it work as owners of datacenters and a subscription game service platform that helps the anxiety around purchases tied to an ephemeral eternal beta
I want to believe that this is true from a publisher standpoint and that you can get somewhere around 20:1 as a developer with a strong prototyping development culture; I feel like my primary example there of Supercell has kind of fallen off given that they haven’t released anything in two years, so it’s highly probable that this is a delusion driven by my own desire to see some more activity in the gulf between corporate behemoth franchises and games that a single person or small team can develop on their own without the expectation of it subsisting their existence.
Supercell was pretty phenomenal for a long time there, that’s gotta be one of the best track runs anyone has ever had
I think that analogy makes more sense in mobile F2P where you’re always targeting the biggest possible market and the sky’s the limit. Console/Steam-style indie games, the kind we want to talk about here, seem to top out at 2m for a mega-mega-hit (Steam produces something bigger maybe once a year but that’s out of tens of thousands of games). If you get one of those out of dozens of bets and sell it at $20 a pop, that doesn’t cover a lot of ground or sell consoles next to 7-10m sales targets at $70+ per user.
A large part of my reaction to this is because I worked at a mobile f2p studio where we absolutely should have done what Supercell were doing (and there were multiple very salty people at the company because Supercell’s early hits were arguably clones of a game style that had originally come out of our studio) and while there were a ton of people at the company who all felt that was the way forward, instead large amounts of money were invested into a half-dozen hugely-scoped projects brimming with storied and expensive talent, of which two reached a level of middling success, barely capable of sustaining their own teams, let alone the other 80% of the company.
Two of the games that kind of fit the model that I’m thinking about are Katamari and Outer Wilds, which both came out of a complete lack of corporate pressure/planning/oversight, so that’s as good an argument as any that trying to formalize that process is a mug’s game.
as an outsider, that sure was a funny company
