Sentiment about Google Stadia?

Here’s something to consider: what impact will this have on game preservation and modding, as the entire thing lives on a remote server and you’re just being fed the generated images. See Rich Whitehouse - Streaming and History - so yeah, my view more or less aligns with his in that this is not a good direction for the game industry to go in.

Also, ugh, this reply got rather lengthy, but I had to correct some assumptions here…

Well, off the top of my head:

  1. The “authors” don’t own the IP; the company they work(ed) for does.
  2. Putting those things in the public domain is an action. Not putting them in the public domain is inaction. Inaction always wins.
  3. Especially considering that putting things in the public domain isn’t as simple as saying “oh, well, this ain’t making us any money any more; let’s release it into the public domain instead!”. The ownership of every piece of the game needs to be traced, permission must be obtained for parts of the IP that don’t belong to the company that wants to release the game to the public domain, lawyers need to get involved, … Basically it’s a lot of hassle.
  4. Sometimes, the company doesn’t even have the game any more. It just got lost somewhere down the line during an acquisition/merger, or that stuff was forgotten during a move, or for whatever reason. Or maybe the diskettes it was on are no longer readable. Granted, this applies more to the source code and assets, and less to the shipped game, since that’s probably still floating around on some abandonware site somewhere from where it can be downloaded again.
  5. They may not have any plans for the intellectual property for now, but who knows what trends will manifest themselves down the line? Nobody was concerned with keeping old games available before the retro gaming craze took off. Yet once that demand was understood, plenty of old games got released again in one way or another (gog.com, Nintendo’s Virtual Console, Anthology-format ports, …)
  6. There is no obligation to put things in the public domain. Things become public domain all by themselves, after a ridiculously long period of time. But the owners of the IP in question have no obligation to either release stuff into the public domain early (which is what you’re suggesting), nor to even make an official “public domain release” once it enters the public domain. The copyrights just expire, after which anyone is entitled to freely download/share it. I have a right to share Monkey Island around once it enters public domain, but that doesn’t mean Disney has to provide me with a copy. They just won’t be able to sue me for downloading or sharing.

And I’m sure this list isn’t even close to being exhaustive.

This logic doesn’t hold up either. The source code of very few games has ever been “pirated/liberated”, yet how many companies release the source code for their old games that they no longer sell? While source code releases have become more common, it’s still a very very small minority of publishers that even bothers. So no, from past and present behaviour in the gaming industry, there is absolutely nothing that would suggest they will treat the compiled assets any different once those are no longer easily obtainable through piracy.

No, they really won’t. There are plenty of games that are still in demand, yet aren’t being sold any more. And yet, the owners of the IP are still going after sites that distribute illegal copies. Heck, look at how much those original SNES games go for these days. Depending on the rarity, condition, and completeness, you’ll pay through the nose! It would be very profitable for Nintendo to simply release those cartridges again, with the accompanying box/manuals for people to collect. Yet they don’t. From time to time you’ll find a port to a newer console (like the DS re-release of Chrono Trigger), or you might find the game in the Virtual Console, but that’s far from guaranteed.

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what I find convincing is that a company has different incentives from a single author. A single person views his own work as art, but a single company may not.
And even if it wants, in the case of a modern game, so many different individuals should give permission (and many would be long dead) so it would be expensive to put something in the public domain. However, what about illegal ways? The employees of that company might decide to just leak the binaries.

Same here. It therefore pains me whenever I have to decide between a physical game tied to Steam and a purely digital from GOG. Ideally, GOG should easily win, because it sets a statement against DRM and a bigger part of the proceeds go to the actual game developer when buying digital instead of at a brick and mortar store. OTOH, there’s the collector in me that likes colourful oblong boxes with potentially exclusive swag, and I’m also somebody who is grateful for a city centre that has more to offer than 1€ stores and shops selling mobile phones.

The one thing that redeems Steam a bit in my book is the role Valve plays in making Linux a viable gaming platform. Not out of pure kindness, for sure, but I’ll be pragmatic and happily welcome their contribution, whatever the motives.

Since Stadia is also powered by Linux, I’d be really curious if/what contributions Google has made or will make to gaming-related open source projects, if any.

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Indeed, Valve is directly responsible for making my Xbox One controller work like a charm, and indirectly for making Rise of the Tomb Raider run as well as it does. It’s largely thanks to Valve that one day I realized that not only can you play one or two games on Linux, but most games I consider worth playing are actually playable on Linux (this was probably around 2016). Even if I actually get most of those games DRM-free from GOG and to a lesser extent Humble (and one or two other platforms).

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I got to try Stadia out today at the Google booth at GDC. I was playing an impressive first-person shooter on a low end laptop and there was no discernable lag. But of course, I don’t know what the connection speed was to the server, or if the “server” was another computer under the desk. But it really was impressive. Full frame rate, no discernable glitches or hiccups.

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A first person shooter I typically hope to play at 60fps (stable). Many players want more, but I think 60 and stable is just about fine for me. Low-Latency is a big deal. I would be amazed if this looked good. Video compression has a lot of issues once you deal with a lot of “samey” colours. For instance, if more than half of the image is green because of a lot of vegetation, it’s going to turn into mush very quickly with most high performance codecs.

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Maybe, but I gotta say it looked awesome. I didn’t see compression artifacts. But then I wasn’t doing an A-B comparison. Definitely running at 60fps. They say that by the time they launch, they’ll be able to stream 4K video.

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I would be very impressed with that, too. Everyone on Twitch is dealing with this kind of thing on an every-day basis, and even the very best they can do with what little they have, can sometimes look pretty amazing, but they do not have to worry about any lag so much. Even I have tried it several times, and still everything looked rather meh when I did.

Maybe I am too old to really be able to love what this means, but who knows. I can still learn and adapt. My own hardware - anything that can run the games that I love - isn’t going to run away. Maybe in 10 or 20 years, Retrogaming means to play it offline. :wink:

That pretty much sums up my own sentiments:

In addition, there was an interesting article in the newspaper I read on my way to work last week. There’s some research into streaming that claims it uses up more natural resources than distributing stuff on physical media. So in order to save the planet, don’t stream, including the video above! (And don’t dump your old DVDs into the sea!)

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On such a big event like GDC I wouldn’t expect the Internet to be working flawlessly all the time, be it wired or even wireless connections.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if it was “faked”, but it would be understandable from a technical point of view.

Yes, very important for action based games like FPS and platformers. But on the other hand story based games would work rather well with current technology.

IMHO they are wasting a lot of time talking about unimportant issues.

About half of the video is about technical issues like latency etc.
But that’s not something I’m concerned of, this is not a reason to not do this and try to push technology.
It would already work quite well for slow paced games, like story based games, point’n’click adventures etc.

People are already using wireless controllers for games like FPS and VR and latency is very low compared to early attempts. Technology will improve and unless you also ridiculously increase your demand on display resolution (4K, 8K, …) it will only get better.
And when you want to use such technology to play on a phone even something like 1080p may be sufficient.


In the second half of the video they are talking more about the issue of preservation of games, copyright and DRM etc. :+1:

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I’m positive as for the new take on game industry. This goes for both Google Stadia and similars (Microsoft etc have such plans too), but also Apple Arcade which again will be something different.

These kind of things bring with them new takes on what games are, how they can be made, sold, used, played etc - some things will be better, some will be worse and some things just different. We will just have to wait and see. Some of these new services might succeed and some might fail.

Personally what I’m looking forward to is how it can change the games themselves. The games will evolve under the new types of restrictions that will apply to these new services/platforms. I grew up playing games in the 80s/90s and I must say that the games from the last ten years have been largely uninteresting to me. The games that make the most money today on mobile platforms are the ones that sell stuff in the game. That concept made games change totally and yes I lost all interest in those. It’s not “games” to me. I’m sure they are to others.
Oh by the way, being an adult with kids, I rarely have time to play anything but mobile games anyway.

With these new platforms I hope I can find my way into games again.

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Dang, you are probably around my age and can still see things positively. I’m not good at this. :slight_smile:

I should rename myself to something like, I don’t know, “gaminggrump”.

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I suggest “Ypmurg_Remag”.

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I’d say that on the contrary, there are an awful lot interesting games again. The mid to late 2000s is when everything was just the same old with slightly better graphics. Not on mobile of course. That’s 99 % dreck. Same old with worse graphics & gameplay. :slight_smile: