Good riddance.

Hardly surprising. Why would people think all that streaming shit would work when half the world doesn't have good internet connection? I have optic fiber but enough don't. And many, if they don't do the PC, they prefer hamming it on the console or chilling with a handheld.

I'm actually surprised that it's only just become official, I could have sworn I read its obituary over 6 months ago.

I hate the concept of game streaming for multiple reasons, but don't kid yourselves. This failed because it had a horrible business model and people didn't trust Google. The actual streaming tech got mostly good reviews, believe it or not, even from (supposedly) tech focused sites like Digital Foundry.

Xbox Gamepass is the much more likely candidate to be the "Netflix of games" in the long run.

I think Google/Alphabet/whatever pretty much had to do it, as it is not like they are as a company in financial trouble, and shutting down the whole company.

No, they just decided to drop a new venture that doesn't seem to fly and attract customers as they wished. It would create a huge backlash and lots of controversy, even among those (like us) who are not Stadia customers.

For Valve, Steam is their main business, and if they decided to shut it down, it would most probably be because they, as a company, were going bankrupt and running out of money. Sure, there would be lots of complaints from Steam customers, but they would all be pretty much dismissed with a general:

"We feel sorry for you, but the company is shutting down all its operations, so what can we do? You already got a couple of decades worth of gaming time for your purchases.

If you still disagree, you may certainly write a reimbursement claim towards the company, along with all the other creditors. Your reumbursement claim will be processed after all the other creditors' claims, so good luck with that."

At least I had a run with it: I played a bunch of worms matches with my friends one day, but only because there was a free trial lol

I would say that at this point there is quite a big gaming market for people who do have enough internet capacity for streaming gaming, ie. enough bandwidth and low enough latency. Like most people playing Fortnite and similar online.

For these people, the question still is, what purpose would a streaming gaming service serve for them?

If they are even half-serious gamers, they probably already have a PS5 or other console, or a gaming PC and a Steam account with hundreds of games in it. The most hardcore gamers even have a GOG account!

If they are "casual gamers" who sometimes like to play but don't really want to use much of any money on gaming, they probably are fine with playing free-to-play games on their phones, tablets and maybe their non-gaming laptops. They probably wouldn't even think about shelling out money every month for a streaming gaming service, so that they can play Cyberpunk or AssCreed 12 on Stadia at their home TV (which happens to be connected to their high-speed home internet). They are fine occasionally playing Candy Crush Saga on their phone.

Pretty much the only feasible market for such streaming services are the serious gamers who already have state-of-the-art gaming consoles and/or gaming PCs, but for some reason like the idea of having also a streaming gaming service as their secondary gaming platform. Maybe they are just interested to try it out because it is a new thing, or really think it is handy if they go somewhere else from home.

It just seems there just aren't enough of this type of serious gamers, who are ready to sign up for such a streaming service as their secondary gaming platform, even if they have fast enough internet at home. Especially if they are expected to also repurchase their games for this secondary streaming gaming platform.

Streaming gaming companies have this odd vision that there would be some magical untapped gaming market which don't want to buy a $300 gaming console or a gaming PC to play Cyberpunk and AssCreed 12, but really love the idea of paying every month for a streaming gaming service to play such games, just so that they can avoid buying a PS5 or a gaming PC, and/or waiting for the game to be installed on their system before they can start playing it. Apparently, there is no such market.

Some have suggested streaming gaming service would be lucrative IF they offered a model where you just pay some low monthly fee, and for that you have an access to a vast library of games. The thing is, you don't even need a streaming gaming service for that. You could just as well have a generic game store (like Steam) with strong enough DRM, where your access to your games is guaranteed only as long as you pay the monthly fee. Didn't at least Microsoft already offer this kind of service, at least for their gaming console?

So what are then the supposed benefits of streaming gaming service, in real life?

1. You don't have to download and install the games before you can start to play, but have "instant" access to any game.

2. You can avoid buying a gaming console or a gaming PC, and can play on your existing TV set or whatever.

Those two just don't seem too compelling reasons for the masses. I think the only way streaming gaming would really fly (as e.g. Google Stadia envisioned it) was if those companies were able to create some massive kind of games in the streaming gaming systems, that just are not possible to run on standalone gaming consoles or gaming PCs.

But the problem with such games then would be that they would eat lots and lots of resources also on the streaming gaming cloud farms, especially when thousands of people would want to play it at the same time when they get home from schools and work. After all, the reason such games wouldn't be possible on standalone consoles and PCs would be because they have so massive hardware requirements, like demanding 64 CPU cores and 256GB or RAM for one single player.

So such games would have to be priced quite high as well because used CPU and RAM resources cost a lot, even if they are "in the cloud". You can't expect to play such massive and resource hungry games for the same $9/month that you'd supposedly get to play your other streaming games.

I recall I played "Batman: Arkham Asylum", "Saints Row 3" and "Space Pirates and Zombies" on OnLive, back when they were still around and had a free trial run.

I was surprised how playable Batman and SR3 were, running on a lowly Lenovo ThinkPad T400 laptop that couldn't have possibly run those two games on its own (S.P.a.Z., maybe). Also the lag affected the gameplay surprisingly little, especially considering that the OnLive service was not even officially released where I am, so I was connected to some servers abroad for my streamed games.

So technically, I had no real issues even many years ago, with that early streaming gaming service. The real issue was their pricing, ie. having to pay the same or even higher prices for the games to play on their service as you'd pay e.g. on Steam (or GOG), and then there probably was some monthly fee on top of that. Plus of course the fact that I'd lose the access to all my games if the service decided to shut down their operations, like they eventually did.

There was also some pricing option where you pay only a monthly fee and for that price get to play a certain restricted library of games, but to me it seemed that library mostly consisted of older and/or less demanding games, probably e.g. the aforementioned S.P.A.Z. You wouldn't get the latest AAA Batman or Saints Row games there.

Maybe. Though streaming video is different from streaming games. And by that i mean the quality of the encoder. For streaming game video it would have to be fast, thus downstream quality takes twice as many bits for the same picture as say watching something on Netflix. Even better if it's encoded x265 and optimized, but that takes a lot to decode.

Mhmm...
But unless you are paying for higher quality streams you'll probably get 480p, enough for a 'trial' but i'd think you get enough of an idea if a game is worth playing by watching your favorite streamer, or by watching a review on Youtube.

Not seeing that happening. With the only exception of that they are on the go for some reason and can't be at their rig and have to settle for the streaming market.

But in such a case i'd rather bring something good enough to play play-station or earlier and not require internet.

The only other thought is some type of gaming but you can't have the room, say soldiers overseas or in training who have literally a shoe-box sized amount of private space.

But with handhelds and the switch, that goes out the window.

And unless you're in the same city as where the servers are your ping/lag is probably going to be enough to be at least a couple frames off.

Buy a game but don't need the exclusive hardware. Nice idea in theory, but since motion picture was a thing you had proprietary formats and encodings and DRM. So it's not a novel thing. You MIGHT have gotten away with it if this had been workable say in the 80's and 90's, with the Amiga costing thousands of dollars, but a stream box plus high enough quality internet/dialup to compensate for it.

But i'd say it's way past that time.

Maybe. But if you gotta choose between food and playing games, you'll choose food and do some other free option for entertainment.

Or maybe we aren't far enough in the 'digital-only games' where people remember they had physical discs, and ownership of said games, and when the internet is down or the company decides they can just pull the plug.

Probably worse than Crypto... as well as congesting the internet.

A while back when i was considering bandwidth and the TV/monitor, it doesn't take a lot of calculations to determine how much data is actually being sent by local hardware. How much you can reduce to a degree via encoding....

Let's just go to say 1024x768x24, not a terrible resolution from not long ago typically used on computers.

1024x768x3 (24bit) =2.25Mb a frame.
2.25 x 60fps = 135Mb a second
135Mb x 60s=7.91Gb a minute
7.91Gb x 60m=474.6Gb an hour

And say you play for 6 hours...
2.8TB of data in a given 6 hour day.

Not including audio. Assuming CD 44.1k 16bit, adds 1.8Gb audio in the raw.

Now if we increase it to 1080p (32bit).... which is 7.91Mb a frame (3.51x larger). 2.8TB becomes 10TB of video data in 6 hours.

The first reduction that's easy is simply reducing from 32/24 bit to 16bit, and reducing to 30fps. After that, well... that's a lot of processing and data.

If you are reducing to say 8Mbit of data, 1080 video content is then reduced 65:1, that's a lot of data to throw away to make it in the 8Mbit range.

(Hope i got all that math right)

Oh no. Anyway...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_urt_cVEvwM

:)

How much does it cost to rent/lease a console or PC? Is there any way to make a product like this competitive with that, even ignoring all the (very real) technical limitations related to streaming games as opposed to to a local solution? Streaming on the move doesn't seem very practical, so even that seems off the table for most uses...

So now its controllers and stuff all go to waste?!
No way to connect them over bluetooth since they were designed to improve latency etc... gosh what a terrible strategy.

No, owners are being refunded for games and hardware that has been purchased from them.

They'll probably go to landfill after that...

damn!