Amazon's Jeff Bezos once revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options. Will DRAM prices make it come true?
I don’t think Stadia’s problem was the technology, though. It actually worked pretty well if you had a decent internet connection.
The issue, imo, was that nobody trusted in the longevity of the platform. Given Google’s track record, why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years? I know they ended up refunding people, but it’s not like they do that with every prodict they’ve cancelled.
why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years?
I ask people this every time they put time and money into a new live service game. I was referred to this community when I went down a self-hosted VPN rabbit hole for old LAN games whose multiplayer will never die.
Yeah that’s the thing, it’s especially hard to trust a newer service without any track record of longevity or a company with a proven track record of poor support. Even then, everything dies eventually. Companies will shut down servers due to funding/popularity issues (it doesn’t make sense to continue spending money and dev time on a game nobody is playing anymore) or to funnel players into a newer game. It would be great to see more live service or otherwise online games (e.g. MMOs) that are self-hostable.
If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.
I had a good connection back then (FTTH 100mbit, <5ms latency) and it worked like shit. There are WAY too many variables that can screw up this cloud gaming stuff, the whole concept is messed up.
I don’t think Stadia’s problem was the technology, though. It actually worked pretty well if you had a decent internet connection.
The issue, imo, was that nobody trusted in the longevity of the platform. Given Google’s track record, why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years? I know they ended up refunding people, but it’s not like they do that with every prodict they’ve cancelled.
I ask people this every time they put time and money into a new live service game. I was referred to this community when I went down a self-hosted VPN rabbit hole for old LAN games whose multiplayer will never die.
Yeah that’s the thing, it’s especially hard to trust a newer service without any track record of longevity or a company with a proven track record of poor support. Even then, everything dies eventually. Companies will shut down servers due to funding/popularity issues (it doesn’t make sense to continue spending money and dev time on a game nobody is playing anymore) or to funnel players into a newer game. It would be great to see more live service or otherwise online games (e.g. MMOs) that are self-hostable.
If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.
I had a good connection back then (FTTH 100mbit, <5ms latency) and it worked like shit. There are WAY too many variables that can screw up this cloud gaming stuff, the whole concept is messed up.