Google seems to covet a piece of the gaming cake and their take on the future of gaming is quite an interesting one. Even if there's no detailed information on Stadia yet, what do you guys make of its announcement and promised features?

I've discussed in many topics regarding GOG's competitiveness and future that they should be more worried about streaming than steaming (sorry, I couldn't look the other way on this one). Could Google's gaming service (if proven successful) be the biggest threat to the storefront model we know and specifically to GOG?

It would not have been obvious from a search perhaps but just so you're aware, there is discussion going on about this already: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/good_news_everyone_no_really_it_isnt_good_news

I only know one thing and that is that this thing is a hard pass, Google is one reason, streaming another etc.

I don't think it's too much of a threat to anything. At first glance, it doesn't fill any role at all that any established client doesn't do better already. People don't like having their gaming libraries fragmented if it's not for some very good reason.

If Twitch wanted a piece of the cake, I would be more worried since they could fuse games with streaming with ease while promoting themselves better than anyone. Click, play and stream would probably be really lucrative.

I'd say GOG are probably the most immune to it. Streaming services will only offer the most popular current games (Fortnite, Overwatch, Minecraft, etc) because there's a much higher "viability limit" per game in terms of requiring a minimum number of simultaneous players to justify spending on rendering hardware / servers and keeping them running. When play count drops, they may just remove the game and re-use the hardware for another game. The whole game streaming infrastructure is a lot more complex than simply adding titles to Netflix / Spotify to compete with DVD's / CD's, and seems to be mostly suited and aimed at "e-sports" stuff. Likewise, many older games that are popular here won't be on there at all.

Edit: As for Google's promised features like "smooth 120fps", LOL. Maybe streamed over 10m of Gigabit Ethernet cable from one room in the house to another, but certainly not most people's Internet connections. I'm not even going to mention data caps / metered connections.

Not interested in anti-consumer practices like streaming and even if I was, I don't have Chrome, so I wouldn't be able to use it anyway. No idea how it will go but I hope it dies like all the other streaming services before it.

Linux, Vulkan.

Cool to see that.

The infrastructure simply isn't there for the vast majority of consumers for a service like this to work adequately. I don't know why Google thinks that now is a good time to try to push streaming video games.

I believe Google is taking that into account and want to secure a piece of the streaming cake sooner than their competition. Also, even if the US represents the majority of the gaming market, many other countries have solid widespread internet connections capable of sustaining 1080p 60fps streams. I'm interested to see how Google does it though, if their infrastructure is powerful enough, as I've tried a cloud gaming service for a few months and they have to use a 6-bit compressed imaged to provide responsiveness and stable framerate. I bet they can do it, the question remains when or how long it will take for them to get there.

*** Same here, this could be really beneficial to many people who don't even want or plan to use their service.

*** You think so? If it works as shown I wonder how many players will open Origin to play a game if they can just hit a button on Youtube and get ready to play in a few seconds. Let's say you get home tired of a day's work and want to play a game for 30' to an hour, is it easier to play on any screen via streaming or turn on a PC that may need a Windows Update, a client's update and/or a game's update? In my opinion if this service works as advertised it proposes an answer to many problems (from a design perspective) currently present in a gamer's game life.

*** Yeah, that might be the case although they showed Doom, an Assassin's Creed game, an NBA title, and invited to talk a representative of Tequila Works. I certainly wouldn't put any of those in the same basket as Fortnight, but I guess we'll have to wait and see, for a service so tied to YouTube it's easy to speculate that they'll try to push multiplayer and games-as-service titles before any other.

On the business aspect of things, whilst I agree that GOG might seem relatively safe to Stadia's irruption due to it's niche nature, I'd say that their small marketshare and presumably dire financial situation leaves them quite vulnerable to any paradigm change and/or minimal user loss.
In my opinion this is an interesting point as it also poses the question of brand fidelity, my take on it is that the average Steam user probably has a bigger backlog of games and therefore a stronger personal investment on that brand which in my mind correlates to being less reticent to change gaming platforms. I wonder if what GOG represents (DRM-free and old games) presents a strong enough position to compete (in terms of user retention) with Steam or other stores considering (amongst others) the aforementioned facts. This is of course, if we are to assume that Stadia's future game catalog will be mostly the same as everybody else's.

*** My bad, I wasn't aware of that topic. It didn't show up on my first forum page and I didn't think about searching further. Sorry for the double post!

What do you guys think about this crazy idea: GOG partners with Google, uploads all their games to Stadia and lets you add all your puchased GOG games for free to your Stadia library. That way you can play all your GOG games on any screen with Stadia, GOG makes just as much money as before cause you still buy your games through GOG and Google makes money (if Stadia is a subscription service).

When DRM gets jacked up to 11.

I have zero interest in this and I think the negatives vastly outweigh any perceived positives this service could provide. People think micro-transactions and stuff are bad now, just let game streaming take off and become the main (or only) way to play games.

Forget mod support, ownership, performance and everything else negative about this service. Once these companies have full control over gaming after sale and can dictate how and when you can access a game they will be able to monetize it like never before without the threat of piracy or anything else being able to at-least keep it somewhat in check. The real end goal.

This is simply trading some saved dollars (in terms of hardware) and slightly more convenience and a very heavy cost, one in which we may all end up paying because some people are to attracted to new and shiny things.

Thankfully bandwidth and speed is still a major block that will keep this form taking off... at-least for some time.

Same here, which I'm kind of doing already. Google is bad news, and I've blacklisted them using NoScript, together with other nefarious sites like facebook, both doing a good job trying to spy on what you do all over the internet. No thanks.

What I'm left with is GOG (which is on a downward spiral) and independent game releases.

I'm still amazed people actually embrace and WANT increased spying in their own living room from the various voice recognition and suchlike employed by Google and Amazon.

Humans are supposed to be the most intelligent species, but bloody hell, the competition must be utterly dire. Plenty of evil to go around, but intelligence?

Games as a type of streaming service? I don't see myself ever supporting this.