Google reportedly paid tens of millions for Stadia ports

Explain this to me:
Why do they need ports for games?
Can't they just runthese games on Windows or something and stream that?

 

Very glad this failed. Almost like it was on purpose to save physical consoles. At least for now...

 

This is just embarassing

 

Hey Bethesda
Could you port one of your games to Google Stadia?
We're thinking the original Doom
Of course, we understand that porting costs money
How does $10,000,000 sound?

 

they paid so much money only for the platform to fail
maybe they should've taken notes from epic lmao

 

Because Stadia doesn't run Windows, they're using a custom built Debian distro, apparently with custom Intel CPUs and custom AMD GPUs which only (currently) supports Vulkan. So not only would devs have to implement Vulkan API support (though a fair few do by default anyways these days) but they also have to port their game to work on their custom Linux distro. Like a lot of Google's decisions, it was a stupid convoluted way to go about doing something that could have been done much easier/simpler. If I had to guess, I'd assume Google just didn't want have to fork out cash to MS to implement Windows on all their servers, and wanted complete control over the way developers/users could use their service.



Shadow is still the only game streaming service I would ever put my money towards if I didn't already have a gaming PC, they essentially just give you a Windows VM with gaming PC specs and then you can do whatever the hell you want with it, (almost) no questions asked. No "ports" required, no exclusivity deals, no "limited game lists" BS, you can install whatever the hell you want on it from emulators to legit games to pirated stuff (so long as you don't get caught).

 

So they lost way more money that Microsoft did with the first Xbox? Wow.

Edit: Stadia was not competing with the Play 5 when it launched. The Play 5 only launched last year.

 

I hope they spend more money for native ports on Stadia. More Stadia ports there are, more possible native ports for Linux users (hopefully)

 

I remember during the reveal when Pichai came on stage and the first thing he said was "I'll admit, I'm not much of a gamer". I remember thinking man who the fuck invited you then? That's not how you instill confidence in a product launch.

Just goes to show how incompetent Google is as a company. They've been a monopolistic behemoth for so long that they no longer remember how to actually compete. If a project doesn't launch with hundreds of millions of customers day 1, it's an immediate failure in their eyes. It's like they feel they're entitled to massive success.

I won't say I'm disappointed though. The thought of paying a monthly subscription to play games that I don't own with high latency and ugly compression artifacts while Google spies on me is not appealing in any way. Plus, I had zero confidence that they would release anything worth playing anyways.

The only fun thing to come out of this is betting on when Stadia will be shut down.

 

Maaaaaybe, but also the fact is that Windows are an enormous resource hog, so they would have massive overhead on every running instance. Porting to their native framework would have saved a ton in the long run.

 

This is going to be failed miserable. Streaming is not successful at all as they thought it would be.

 

Everytime I head to this link I get angry somehow.
The worst for me personally was that they killed Google Play Music for that stupid YouTube music.
Loved the Google Play Music app and the ability to upload countless of own MP3s of either own composed songs or songs I ripped myself from japanese releases that I imported via Amazon/Ebay since those tracks were not availably digitally anywhere else.
Now I really have to bother with OwnCloud/NextCloud to get a similar setup of own songs at some point.

 

you can always make fun of google losing money it is always morally correct

 

maybe 5 more years...
EDIT:
although, i remember making a school report on OnLive around 8 or 9 years ago and it didn't go anywhere either. yeah 5-10 more years probably...

 

And that would make sense...except the money they're spending on acquiring ports and paying for custom hardware and paying for the time to create their own Debian distro for that bit of extra overhead (Which, sure, would add up if they actually had people who used their service) likely far outweighs the cost of using off the shelf server racks and volume licensing copies of Windows.

Instead, Google did what they always do: Took their basically unlimited resources and used them in a way that makes everything more difficult than it has to be for basically no real benefit to anyone.

 

they wasted their fucking money I knew stadia was doomed to fail from day one. did they think just because they were google they were going to succeed where every single other streaming platform/console FAILED MISERABLY before them?!

 

My experience with Stadia is actually pretty good. I played and finished DOOM 2016 for the first time and had a blast. The input lag is no worse than if you were to enable v-sync and I would say its even more responsive. The library of games is really the only thing holding the service back.

In the days where consoles only come with 400gb of storage, games coming in at 100gb and an ssd is $100 per terabyte, cloud gaming is pretty enticing.

 

if you need to pay millions for any AAA port then i think it would have been better to pay windows fee and some more hardware lol