haha, sorry about that, I didn't mean any disrespect calling out fallacy. It's just that lately I tend to look for them as I find myself questioning wether my statements and train of thought are mudding the debate rather than enhancing it.

You may be right about the corporate push for rental services over ownership and the difficulty of both models coexisting. I honestly have no idea how it will turn out, and although I can understand what you mean by people following a trend that could lead to that scenario, for me, the fact that a platform like Itch.io exists proves that we aren't doomed (yet) and that there're still platforms out there which (albeit marginalised), successfully respond to a certain audience no matter how niche it can be.

I understand were you're coming from with the "following what everyone else is doing" statement but I don't necessarily view it as a negative thing, rather, I believe it's an aspect of our nature (being a trend follower to a certain degree, that is) and the understandable ignorance or lack of knowledge over other available options. Once we understand this (that most of us are ignorant rather than morons) we can create a nice place from which to debate different points of view in an enriching manner; if not, we may be obfuscating our ability to discern the forest for the trees and getting dangerously close to that which we criticise, in this case, a follow-the-pack mentality even if our pack is the smallest of them all.

Talking specifically about Google's Stadia, it's great to see so many expanding the debate beyond "it's bad for everyone because my internet connection isn't good enough" and raising awareness over what they consider isn't right. Personally, the thing I care about the most is knowing the environmental footprint of Stadia vs consoles/pc, but even if someone else's conclusions or priorities are not the same as mine, I'm honestly really glad we're having the debate nonetheless.

By the way, animals are more than capable of reasoning. Birds for example, are notoriously intelligent creatures which can make decisions extremely quickly based on multiple factors amongst which is predicting several possible outcomes to their actions. They're also capable of cultural transmission, reciprocity, understanding inequality, delay gratification, transitive inference, vocal learning (which no primates other than humans are capable of), stealing, understanding they're being observed and "act as if" to deceive their observes, possessing a sense of aesthetics, keeping grudges, solving problems quicker than human kids, etc.

No. What you are proposing is paying for a game and then paying to play it via a subscription.

Dang I totally missed your last response, another great one...I was speaking off the cuff but definitely appreciate the correction re: reasoning with animals/birds...interested in researching birds more now (maybe I'll try Way of the Red first though). Here's hoping Baldur's Gate III makes it here. Ace series that I would hate to see lost into the abyss.

Here you go: https://www.gog.com/game/baldurs_gate_iii

Snap! Thank you!! I had missed this (I long for the old homepage and news section).

haha no worries, it happens to me all the time. I didn't know about "Way of the Red" but it may be a good choice until Team Cherry decides to level up from bugs to a higher tier on the trophic pyramid. Thanks for the reference.

This is the best thing ever.

Ok, once the storm has passed and we know a bit more details about Stadia (although we don't have a completely clear picture of the service yet), I'll summarise my thoughts here just in case someone wants to move the debate onwards.

0. Stadia is a storefront, a cloud computing service for games, a streaming service, and a subscription service on its 'Pro' modality.

1. Google's move is especially beneficial for GOG and other DRM-free stores which could potentially profit from strengthening their 'niche' audience and expand it by, for example, producing physical collector's editions of some games and becoming the new de facto go to "vinyl" producer.

2. Stadia aims for an always-online 5G future in which relatively cheap phones, tablets and other devices can decode H265 or similar codecs with ease and stream high resolution video mostly everywhere.

3. Nintendo has repeatedly proven there's a huge market outside what we traditionally understand as 'hardcore gaming'.

4. Stadia is mostly tailored for the gamer of the future, someone who doesn't necessarily commit to a specific device, someone who wants a hassle-free gaming experience, someone who may want to game "on the go", someone who watches and is engaged in Youtube content, someone who works in an office and doesn't have a PC at home, frequent travellers, etc.

5. Mobility doesn't necessarily mean 'casual', the "keynote" opened with Baldur's Gate III, if that's not a hardcore statement I don't know what is.

6. Stadia could be a big thing in emerging economies such as China, India, Vietnam, etc.

7. If Stadia's prices are the same as in other platforms, Steam could potentially become irrelevant to new consumers, especially to those who also engage with Youtube frequently and use other Google services.

8. Google's irruption in the gaming market doesn't directly imply that PC/console gaming is dead (at least not for a while), it's jut mostly aimed at a different target audience. Steam, Nvidia (GeForce Now), and Nintendo should be a bit scared, MS and Sony are already trying to compete with Google by developing their own streaming services and producing more exclusive games.

9. Exclusivities will be the new battleground for publishers and GOG's move with Galaxy 2.0 makes a lot of sense.

10. If Google's new service makes Vulkan the new mainstream graphics API this could be great for Linux and Macs (Molten) as well. On the other hand, exclusive Nvidia and Direct X features such as Hairworks, Ray Tracing (as of now), and the like could become irrelevant as the developers shift to Vulkan-based productions or if those features are not embraced by big-enough services (GeForce now, the future Xbox streaming service, etc) as a differential factor.

11. Games as a service on platforms as a service sounds scary. At this moment it seems non of your Stadia-related data is yours per se and we don't know anything about backing up save files and the like.

12. If all the consoles and PCs which are used exclusively for gaming are replaced by Stadia gamers, could this potentially be an environmentally efficient move? (considering clean-sourced energy). Hardware will be shared by many at the cost of not owning the games we play. There're many factors in play here so who knows, but a "greener" option would be nice to consider.

13. VR could become more widespread with a cloud-based computing solution like Stadia and a cheap DYI product like Google Cardboard.

14. We still don't know if 'Pro' Stadia users will offset the computing cost of the 'free' users on the same way Spotify does it. Will Stadia 'free' have ads?

15. Stadia 'Pro' isn't (at least for now) the Netflix of videogames as it doesn't allow access to all the catalog available, just selected games.

Do you work for Google? Stadia Pro, so you can get 5.1 AND 4K, costs $9.99 a month in addition to having to buy most games aside from their PSN Plus/Games With Gold offerings. WHY would I want to sign up given you have to buy the games then pay for Stadia as a service.
Google should instead offer a high bitrate video streaming service to compete with Netflix and others, that would see more attention then this.
The only way I see Stadia surviving is offering buckets of cash to pay for developed exclusives, even with killer exclusives some will wait unless there's a cheap game rental option.
Oh and you better hope we don't go streaming only as can you imagine how expensive PC's will start becoming for the average consumer, it would make the cost untenable for those who are video editors and other professionals PC parts will then no longer be mass manufactured(NOT a good thing).

No, just giving my two cents on the matter to (hopefully) generate an interesting and enlightening discussion.

You're probably right on the 'Pro' modality, I wonder if Google will end up changing it to something more akin to Netflix as you said. I believe they stated that every so often they would be adding more games available for the 'Pro' subscriptions, so there's that. I think that will come eventually with time and when more competitors show up (Microsoft and Sony) on the streaming front.

As for the exclusive games, Google stated long ago that they would be developing their own games for Stadia, now we know they will also be publishing others. It makes sense to me that they will seek to differentiate themselves by creating experiences which can only be had on their server infrastructure. As for the publishing exclusivities we'll have to wait and see, but getting all worked up with Google for something others have always done, to me it sounds a bit hypocritical (at least I can't recall anyone being angry at Sony for making Bloodborne exclusive to the PS4).

I'm not hoping for the gaming sector to "go completely streaming" at all, I'm just trying to analyse what Stadia entails without adopting the point of view of a zealot. But to answer your point, maybe you're right and if enough of the gaming market switches to cloud-based solutions and vendors shift their focus to profit-making server parts, consumer-grade hardware will increase in price. On the other hand, that could also mean more affordable prices for the desktop in order to make them more appealing to wider audiences. Honestly I have no idea, but I would say that without figures your argument and mine sound a bit too shallow (no offence). We're moving towards low-power ARM architectures for laptops, will that make desktops more expensive too? Where was all that worry when Intel was producing horribly-priced processors? A high demand doesn't necessarily translate to cheaper prices (see the crypto-currency bubble), competition does.

To conclude, it's great to speculate, rationalise, and be cautious about what new technologies mean for us and our way of doing things, that was the purpose of this thread. No point in getting angry though.

My concern about all this is concern for a broader movement which is to shift almost EVERYTHING to a rental model, this talk about how GM and others will handle Automated cars. Streaming you can never truly OWN it and access it whenever you want offline. Just in the last few days, Apple announced the cancellation of iTunes. Now I'm willing to pay a decent bit for an album but I want it FLAC and studio quality.
I like Netflix and some other streaming services but for SOME of the shows I love(non-Western) their Blu-ray releases resemble extortion pricing at $200(this pricing is similar to what VHS rental copies cost before mass production, like $90-100 though I think that's expensive given we're talking about movies) and up per season. This is the only way I can see the show at the highest possible video and audio quality.
It's all about shifting stuff to a rental society that sucks up as much from you when you're alive then when you die your children/siblings see nothing left for you to leave to them and more has been hovered up from those on top. Imagine if we have this streaming model only, what games/music/movies/books can I leave to my insert frend, sibling, child?
You may say well you can leave this book, painting, sculpture, yeah no they'll figure out a way to force it into the cloud. I hope they'll be enough pushback, possibly with 3D printing as a big "***** ***" response to cut them out.

When you say "birds" are you including any other species besides the corvus? I know of one other intelligent bird species, indigenous to the Falkland Islands, whose name escapes my attempts to recall it. (Possibly a skua? Sadly, it's been more than a decade since I saw the documentary.) The birds were tested and could open a trap with an Umweg step (something that even chimpanzees cannot do).

Crows seem to fit the description you have used; they have been tested and remember faces of humans. (They will hide (bury) food and only reveal it to those humans who have already seen them hide it, for instance. Although some wasps have facial recognition for friend-or-foe authentication of nestmates, they don't employ this level of craftiness.)

Human symbolic intelligence is almost certainly unique (certainly in its scope) and there are only two other species that have the capacity to develop it. (Crows, obviously, are the descendants of the surviving dinosaurs, and hence have a pretty hefty evolutionary momentum behind them.)

The only other sentients capable, as far as I am aware, are the cephelopodes. (The jury is still out on other mammals like cetaceans.) There are good data showing their ability to learn from their environment (e.g., there is a Mediterranean octopus that is particularly astute) but they live only a couple of years and do not pass on knowledge intergenerationally.

I totally understand the concern over the loss of ownership, and if you want to check it out, we've been discussing about it on this same thread. My perspective on the matter is that we should be cautious about streaming services whilst at the same time, consider the new ways in which gaming might be able to reach us or others beyond our PC or other devices. Adopting an antagonistic perspective from the get go in my opinion isn't constructive, mostly because even if something isn't made for us it doesn't mean other people won't find it useful, and also because we can't say for sure (at least not without data) that new videogame streaming services will end ownership as we know it.

As I mentioned on a previous post, platforms like Itch and GOG or others which produce collector's editions, can prove that streaming videogames doesn't necessarily mean the end of ownership for gamers. In my opinion, it's up to them and up to us to keep supporting what we love as consumers instead of trying to boicot what we don't. Also, in order to widen our thoughts, we should also realise that the things we care about today aren't necessarily something which next generations should or would care about as much as we do or did as their times will look pretty different from what ours is or was like.



Hey, thanks for the info. I'm no ornithologist nor biologist but I happened to be reading 'The Genius of Birds' during the time we were having the conversation about Stadia. If you're interested on the topic that book is alright and talks about cognitive abilities, social behaviour, and sexual behaviour amongst other traits, weaving its discourse through anecdotes and interesting facts. I'd have preferred a more cohesive discourse but maybe that might have been too technical. I'll be shortly beginning 'Mind of the Raven' so maybe that one is better :)

But to answer your question, I wasn't referring to corvids alone. The book mentioned African grey parrots and how they coordinate in teams and strategise accordingly in order to solve certain problems together. Other parrot species are also quite remarkable like New Zealand's Kea (which I believe it's the only alpine parrot and shamefully endangered like many other birds), or the annoying cockatoos. It all depends on what we understand and describe as intelligence when talking about animals. From bowerbirds to migratory birds, songbirds or more sedentary species, there's a ton of aspects we could consider as intelligence traits. For example, just a few weeks ago I saw a flock of sparrows gather around a small farm field after a tractor engine kicked in. They were correctly anticipating someone walking behind and dropping seeds afterwards. That means they have adapted well to their surroundings, can gather information from different sources, reach a series of complex conclusions, and remember where to be and when for a reason. All that is extremely remarkable for such a common little bird like the sparrow is.

Thanks, I have added it to my books-to-buy list. :)
If you are interested in how humans evolved language —( and why no other animals have )— then I highly recommend Dr Terrence Deacon's magnum opus from 1999, The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the human brain. (Symbolic intelligence is quite remarkably different from general cunning, which is evident in, say, a crocodile, or even pattern recognition, as recently proved in minds as small as a bee. It is this symbolic comprehension that grants humans the ability to understand their individual nature, the self as defined in psychology, primarily as not-other.)
One caveat I will provide is that the book is a little dense; it's quite technical and covers topics ranging from primatology (Kanzi the bonobo who learnt ASL) to phonemics, (neuro-) anatomy and philology (building on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and CS Peirce, to name just two) but the effort is certainly worth it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

After twenty years I am amazed at how few people are aware that Deacon proved language evolved (Noam Chomsky was wrong) — people like the late Tom Wolfe, whose last book (The Kingdom of Speech) apparently dismissed the evolutionary explanation for language.*

Briefly, symbolic comprehension is different to the tokens and indexical representations (like the recruitment dance of a honeybee, which leads other bees to the target flower/s, whale songs that adapt with the seasons but contain the same core, and vervet monkey calls to alert their troop of predators, which differ for eagles and leopards). Think of laughter, and try to explain humour. Or — my favourite example — a wedding band. There is nothing about a band of metal that induces one to think of monogamy; it is a learnt association that has complexity depth. A symbol, ultimately, has no fixed attachment to the phenomenon it represents, which is why symbolism can drift and even become ironic over time.

The only animals I have encountered that may have symbolic comprehension are the corvids (and this other species on South Georgia / the Falklands).

* It is possible I may have misunderstood this, because I haven't read it; I know he criticizes Chomsky for his "discontinuity" theory of language development, where Chomsky is arguing that humans suddenly developed language through a spontaneously generated mysterious cerebral organ. This was also argued against by Steven Pinker in 1990 (with Paul Bloom, in Natural Language and Natural Selection), but Deacon actually proves it within the book.

Well, apparently my reply got lost in the warp of the GOG forums, awesome (...)

Anyway, thanks for the information and the book reference and also for mentioning Saussure, that sure took me back to my university days when information retention was as easy as a quick chat in the cafeteria. Taking that into account, I have added the book to my 'to read' list but as nothing good ever comes out of that, I've left a post-it note on the inner back cover of my current read, hopefully that'll help. I could blame ageing but of course it's not that, it's the damn videogames!