I Have No Mouth But I Must Game Stream (Google Stadia)

Yeah, I think Google’s culture is about providing a superstructure for an existing burst of activity to grow around. They’re inclined to be way more hands-off than Valve.

If Stadia is run like a game store than I’d imagine it would be like this but I think it definitely fails. Since it’s not piggybacking on an existing new computing device, it needs exclusive games to push the first few years. F2P and ad-supported business models may not be tenable if the game provider has to pay to render and stream it too, which would kick the legs out from under the multiplayer market they might hope to foster.

If they go for a subscription model (and I think that’s the only strategy that will work), they need to have a stable of exclusives and be working towards owning the most popular games on the service, which requires spinning up a full publishing team, which would sit roughly against Google’s corporate culture, as noted. I agree that Google will find it tough to build this business properly even with an initial money and technical advantage. There best bet is if the team is siloed like the Xbox team, and has been given five years of play to build it right. Phil Harrison is a good bet, and they’re building an internal development studio, which is also uncharacteristic of them, so it may be distant enough.

In theory, I feel like there’s nothing technology-based standing in the way of hooking up an API into something like Second Life or whatever, where you could have Stadia running on an in-world TV screen that you and all your friends could gather around

i’ve been thinking about the engineering problem presented by decoupled headless controllers since the announcement. in a room full of headless controllers connecting to one player’s account (stadia is “the return of couch coop”, we’re told) and a few others on other accounts and other output devices (google refers to them as “screens”) how exactly everybody pairs where they belong and gets setup on the local network and talking to “the data center” (lol) correctly, even assuming a unique account id per-controller is a fun thought problem both in technical and interface/experience terms.

the answer is: you don’t, because they haven’t solved it in time for ship (if they ever will) and the onboard radio, though capable of bluetooth, doesn’t come out of the box with firmware for it. so they’ve now peppered their ads with smalltext to clarify the thing only works wirelessly with the 4k chromecast. all the pixel phones it works on… require usb c cable play i guess. this completely eliminates the need for their controller since they’ve clarified any HID capable controller will do.

look I just want to see fixed function AV1 decoding and this dumb thing is the best way to get it

We’ll find out how much it fails to deliver before quietly going into the graveyard on November 19!

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Aw dang, bye bye Daydream you were pretty sweet to use to watch Youtube while lying on my back

And for the record I think Daydream was the best name for a VR platorm yet

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Wish there was something to actually do with that other than throw it away

another high quality google product

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streaming hiccups notwithstanding (my main concern is that streaming gaming becomes part of a industry-wide trend to lower the bar for quality at a given resolution (obviously not to mention input latency), the same way that so many of netflix’s 1080p encodes are horrendous compared to widely available releases), the most obviously embarrassing part of stadia to me is how clearly it buts up against google’s complete inability to have consumer-facing business models for anything.

like the subscription costs &c. make no sense

and as usual, gaming’s extreme-enthusiast-hobby aspects seemingly don’t map at all onto the specific compromises involved here, so you wonder who it’s supposed to be for

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which is to say

I think this is more true than ever

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It is wild to think that Google was once widely seen as a pretty good company that found success everywhere they went and tended to be the best at whatever they tried their hand at.

It’s been instructive watching every bit of that fall apart.

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yeah, I mean, they’re absolutely not failing any more than microsoft ever failed (which is not much in the grand scheme of things, they are both undisplaceable titans of essential infrastructure), but their core premises of

  • we don’t ever want to sell things to consumers because all of our revenue is advertising and everything else is an offshoot of that

and

  • we came up in the early 2000s so we seem vaguely agile and populist and open sourcey in light of what wasn’t being done by competitors at that time

have largely not changed, and a lot of their perceived fall from grace is a direct result of that. like their compulsively killing services is because virtually none of their actual consumer “products” make relatively much money on their own, turns out that turns people off

Like many very successful companies, I think Google’s ability to launch new products is directly constrained by the success of its core products. Google search is a thin portal atop others’ content. Youtube, when it’s functioning correctly, is the same; Google falls down in exactly the ways they need a more direct hand. When Google tries to do a game service, it approaches it just like its other products, so to the extent games require exclusives and direct relationships with consumer sales, they fall down.

It’s the same way Microsoft was hobbled by Windows’ business model until Windows became marginal enough that they could feel comfortable shipping software on other platforms. Now, as a business-services company, they believe in ‘our services where the customer is’, and that extends in other ways that may be detrimental to their businesses – all the Xbox-exclusive content showing up on PC doesn’t help the Xbox ecosystem, but it might be better-positioned for a post-platform (streaming) world.

that doesn’t fully account for just how unwilling they’ve been to offer anything but free services with minimal support until those services are no longer potentially valuable to the advertising business – that’s why they’ve made such a lunatic number of messaging apps

the best thing about this so far is all the photos of people with the controller usb-c jacked into their cell phone

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i’ve heard a few times that there are huge bonuses and other incentives for starting a new project regardless of what it is or how it turns out, probably a simpler explanation re: why they throw so much shit up the wall

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via usgamer’s review

Just Dance 2020’s problem is the specifics of its style of play. You need to connect a smartphone to Just Dance 2020 in order to play; there’s no options for controller play. On TV and PC, that’s fine, but mobile means you’re playing with a smartphone connected to the Stadia controller, and another smartphone on top of that. (Stadia games won’t run without a controller linked.)

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boy that sounds like a human ever tested it, yes

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further to this because I forgot to mention and it’s important: goog have been dismayingly effective at stifling internal criticism and organizing lately to a remarkable degree, which is big black mark imo

Even Microsoft which has like eight million legacy defence contracts they’ll never let go of seemingly hasn’t stonewalled debate to that extent, though I think that’s more generational than anything else – Microsoft has always been both more sclerotic and more obsequious toward younger people in a way that accidentally gives them a louder voice, whereas google seems like it’s still pretty firmly controlled by a Gen X libertarian mindset.