Games are not movies though many making this connection is probably why many games are awful nowadays as they try to be something they are not. It doesn't surprise me that executives who have no idea about gaming see flashy graphics and associate them with movies.
Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months before i was doing my 9th playthrough of Fallout New Vegas - not long after my 6th playthrough of Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines. All these are games that i have played many times over many years and have benefited tremendously from users having complete control over their computers and the files to mod them and fix them so they become the classics they are today. If anything, just VtmB alone is a great case of how much you can not rely on the official channels for support but also how much the community - thanks to having such control - can address the issues and give the game the attention it deserves. These are games i have played and had fun for years.
Of course these are just the more known ones. I have played (and even fixed myself) and had fun with games that have been forgotten by their own developers for many years now. I actively try to find lesser known and/or lesser well received older games - i spent several days playing something like Excalibur 2555AD, a clunky and mediocre game for most, yet i had fun exploring its weird dungeons and even weirder enemy designs that look like they escaped from some early 90s British comic).
None of that stuff would be possible with something like Stadia. All of those would be long gone, broken for all their short lifetime which would end to make space for the newest overhyped release and some of them - like Excalibur 2555AD - would barely exist for more than a few months after their failure.
With a few exceptions, pretty much all of them are games i buy at some sale or at recommendation of someone i trust but i find time for actually playing them much later. Many of those games (e.g. VtMB that i mentioned elsewhere) are games i've bought (let alone played) way after their developers ceased to exist.
You probably need to check out the whole "gaming backlog" meme :-P
> What percentage of your games do you play more than a year after purchase?
Admittedly a very low percentage.
I will say that I definitely spend more than 90% of my time playing games on games that I've bought more than 10 years ago.
To me, games are a way to experience a different life in a different universe that is full with other friends and acquaintances. They are fun worlds that I can visit whenever I want.
That's why stadia (and games that require online connections) are things I can never see myself accepting.
If you approach games this way there are much better deals than Stadia. Microsoft's Game Pass and Sony's PS+ both get you free games for roughly $60 a year (so if you get one full price game out of it you're "breaking even"). They're cheap, but ephemeral (you lose the games when you unsubscribe). Stadia seems expensive and also ephemeral—not the best combo.
This is actually the perfect comparison. I can still watch movies from the 1950s on various media. Good luck playing a Stadia exclusive in 2090 in any format. Treating games like a disposable commodity is short-sighted and undermines any claim the medium might have to being an art form.
I still need to have a big ass corp to maintain the film library. Movies don't just remain watchable automatically. Without fairly large capital investment to storage they would rot away. Actually the analogue to movies is pretty good in this sense - if we had a 'universal game binary' that would 'just work' on the generic 'cloud based game platform' of the future.
But anyway, our future entertainment might be completely hallucinated by AI in an on demand fashion before we get the 'general storage game binary' thingy.
Even if we imagine some 'universal game binary', games are never going to be portable the way other media is. A movie is basically just a rectangle with some moving pictures accompanying some audio -- it's really easy to create a standard format that any movie can be shoved into. Video games, however, are much more dynamic. Video games require all sorts of complicated input devices – gamepads, joysticks, touchscreens, mice, keyboards, microphones, cameras, accelerometers, infrared sensors, etc etc etc.
You can still play old video games in emulators, but you are usually using an approximation of the original input device. This isn't such a big deal with older, simpler games – playing a SNES game with an Xbox controller is a good enough approximation of the original experience. But newer innovations like the Wiimote, Kinect, VR headsets, etc will make it a lot harder to play games made for them in the future. In 50 years, you'll still be able to boot up Wii Sports in an emulator, sure, but will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?
This seems like a good argument against buying Stadia exclusives, but also against playing any MMO.
It's a matter of degree, depending on the whims of the market and dedication of the emulator scene. Not all old movies or games are available. Not all art has survived. And apparently the old World of Warcraft is back?
MMOs are a case where the game itself inherently requires a serious server in order to work. I don't play MMOs myself, but if I did, I would not be bothered by their server-based nature as there's an obviously inescapable reason for it.
What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.
> Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread.
This is how you get cheating. Decentralized hosting can work (look at CoD for an example of a highly successful game that used end user systems as servers), but an MMO is probably one of the least trusting environments you can have.
It's not about immediate processing or anything, it's about having a trusted copy of the game state.
Keep in mind MMOs have a persistent world. In CoD, meeting a cheater can ruin a 20min (? haven't played in a while) game session. In an MMO, it might screw up the entire economy. Thus off-loading authoritative work to clients is pretty much a no go.
To prevent clients from cheating, you have to run pretty much the entire game engine on the server. Sure, you can strip graphics, but not physics, cooldowns or inventory management. As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
Pretending all this to be no big deal might be right for some specific (kind of) games, but generalizing it that much is... unrealistic at best.
Btw, dev time is valuable as well, so an overly engineered solution probably isn't a realistic option for many online games either.
Having a persistent world does not need a 'serious' server.
And I mentioned trust in my first post. It's a reason to use a server, but it's not a reason to use a 'serious' server.
None of these are reasons you couldn't use 40 tiny weak throwaway servers in place of 5 big serious servers.
> As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
That sounds more like a shooter than an MMO. And a shooter instance definitely fits into a tiny 2-4 core server.
> dev time is valuable as well
Which is why so much software is single-threaded. And single-threaded software only needs one core.
(And the dev time for what I was talking about would be tiny, and it would save money overall. There are good reasons not to do it, but I don't think dev time is one of those good reasons.)
Either you’re not making your point correctly or you’re just wrong.
I made two AAA games with online components, the game servers are “serious” (40cores, 256GiB ram, 10G network) because they have to be to emulate physics, to run AI and to do raycasting of bullets (to detect shooting through walls which the clients tell us they can do if you’re cheating) etc. And /even our/ game worlds offloaded too much in the first game leading to huge issues with cheaters.[0]
And our gameserver is written in C++ with a lot of optimisation work.
Maybe I'm wrong, but keep in mind that something like "an MMO" managed to work on the hardware that existed 15+ years ago and the underlying computational details have barely changed for many of them.
I mean a server that can handle clients at scale. Certainly, it's possible to do this sort of thing in a more decentralized fashion, but the games that I'm aware of don't do this.
Plenty of MMO code is single threaded. And almost none of it needs much RAM. They may happen to put it on big servers because it's slightly cheaper to use big servers, but that could easily be configured to use tiny servers.
Handling a thousand people in the same spot can be done on any size of server, and most of the time you're looking at under a hundred.
It is indeed sad to see MMOs go though they are a bit special in that they are inherently about their communities. Meridian 59 - the first MMO, at least over the Internet - was opensourced a while ago yet if you connect to it now, it is a shell of its former 90s shelf since most people have moved on.
quite a number of 'dead' mmos still have active and dedicated communities on private servers, smt imagine comes to mind. no stadia exclusive will have that longevity.
Plenty of platform exclusive games from decades ago are readily available on new platforms today. I'm not sure your argument makes sense, unless you're saying you bought a movie IN the 1950s and are still watching it today.
Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.
> Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price
It probably depends on what sort of games you enjoy, and why.
I still pull out games that I bought 20 or more years ago and play them, and am very happy that I can do that. I wouldn't pay money for a game if that weren't possible.
You feel differently, and that's fine. Different people have different needs and wants.
When buying a game on Stadia is the same price as buying it on other platforms but with the downside of a total loss of control or ability to play offline it becomes less attractive.
I'll go a step farther, it only makes sense as part of a "PS Now" like service, where you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a catalog of games. Nobody is paying for locked-in games that only run on Stadia given Google's track record of goldfish-like attentions span on these projects.
If you are just renting hardware then you need to run a local Steam cache (this exists), and allow players to use their existing game catalog. This is basically the "GeForce Now" model.
And yes, you may note that I am referencing other game streaming services. Google is late to this party, and they have nothing unique to offer, nor a particularly compelling business model, nor the trust of their userbase. Stadia is DOA.
If Google wants it to be not-DOA with their current business model, nothing short of a guarantee that if they fold within the next 10 years then they will issue a full and unconditional refund is going to do it. Nobody is going to pay full price for locked-in games on a platform with a track record like Google's.
Sure, if you are the kind of person to sell and buy used games, that will probably be pretty cheap. But that's becoming more niche by the day, even without Stadia. Most game sales are digital downloads from a storefront.
I have an experienced software engineer's salary, few expenses, and yet... the cost of a whole console to simply play a couple of exclusives (when the vast majority of games are available cross platform and you already own another console or pc) is still too high, even though it doesn't hurt much financially, overall. It isn't an impulse purchase. And it makes you feel like a mark/sucker if you go for it - ~$400 for a video game or two or three is a rip off. And these days, they all have a subscription service you need to buy if you want multiplayer or game updates.
At the same time, I never feel compelled to penny pinch by selling/buying used games. And I like to keep them, as I'm sure many other people do. Time, effort and inconvenience is involved with used buying and selling, and for many of us, that offsets the value of actual dollar savings.
You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU. It should support VR, but I imagine when that tech has matured I'll want to pick up another $120 GPU.
You're not "running modern games" at any kind of acceptable frame rate and quality on a 15 year old CPU. And you absolutely aren't running VR on a 15 year old CPU even if you have a 4 year old GPU that technically fits within the minimum requirements.
Nobody said anything about the CPU, I've gone from two cores to quad to now... I dunno, whatever the hell an i7 is. 16? My screens have also gone from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080 to 2560x1080. I just took umbrage with the idea that you need to spend hundreds on your GPU to get good performance. People see the 3-monitor setups and RGB lights and streaming equipment and think that's PC gaming, but it's not.
Games are more efficient than ever today. The worst era was definitely the really lazy Xbox 360 ports at the end of the 00s/early 10s. Those games would turn my GPU into a space heater.
Might have left a couple of steps out of your upgrade path then:
> I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU.
If you've also upgraded your CPU to a relatively recent one, upgraded motherboard to suit, dropped some more RAM in it, maybe added an SSD, and your "4 year old $120 GPU" was actually a high end one that you got cheap, then sure. Your 15 year old PC case can play modern games because it's actually got a modern computer inside it.
I run VR with an i5 4440 and an RX 580 8gb. The CPU is 6(!) years old and the GPU is about 3. I have no trouble running VR games at 90fps consistently and 1.5-2.0 supersampling. Games like H3VR, VTOL VR, and I still have headroom to transcode video using OBS studio and stream to twitch and save locally. I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.
While a 15 year old CPU is definitely hyperbole, if you bought the most expensive intel cpu 10 years ago, you could probably run VR on it.
A 10 year old CPU might barely work, depending on the game. But you're describing a 2.5 year old $230 (but more in practice) GPU, which is massively ahead of a 4 year old $120 GPU. And every year past 5 for the CPU loses you more performance at an increasing rate, since things weren't stagnant then.
> I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.
Where did you get those numbers? Also you'd be avoiding a lot of the microcode security-mitigation slowdowns that way.
Specifically I am talking about advanced features for my AMD GPU in the context of SteamVR. I was also under the impression that Windows 7 still got intel microcode updates.
Also, an RX 580 8GB is massive overkill for VR. An RX 480 8GB goes for about $80 on ebay and will have 90% of the performance of the 580
> You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games.
If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.
Being worse than an Xbox One _X_ doesn't mean you could run it on an old cheap GPU.
Also the PC version of Stadia seems extra broken compared to the chromecast version right now, and there's a tweet in there saying it looks a lot better on chromecast.
I think it really comes down to the kinds of games you play, and the way you like to play them.
If you tend towards single-player, story-based games, like Red Dead etc., then maybe playing through it once and moving on is enough for you. Then again, maybe you'll want to come back to it in 3, 4, 5 years, and hopefully you'll be able to with Stadia, but with a disc/download you definitely should be able to.
On the other hand, if you play multiplayer, "live-service" games, as many are pushing to be these days, then you're already at the mercy of the dev/publisher to keep supporting the game so you can play it in the future. In that case, it become a question of who will give up support first, Google or the developer?
In either case, I think the Xbox Pass-style "all-you-can-eat" model is a better solution. No big, upfront cost for any single game, and you can still go back to something older, as long as it remains supported.
I'm the kind of consumer who uses games as disposable entertainment. I don't want to come back to witcher 3 in 3,4,5 years. I want to play the game that is the best that year.
When I was a youngling and had time and most critically - there weren't that many games - I liked to return to good games like Baldurs Gate 2 or Fallout from time to time.
Now - pushing 40, have family and career and and an acute sense of mortality (i.e. time has value) - I still like to play games from time to time, but I really have to struggle to complete any game even once.
I sample the latest AAA games and hottest indie things when they come out and are cheap on Steam but I don't really have time to complete them, except only rarely. The only game I've completed after Witcher 3 is In to the breach. I have a huge list of unplayed games in Steam from the last holiday sale waiting to be even installed.
Given this, I find a disposable cloud game library with reasonable pricing quite enticing. It would be exactly how I use steam - except sans having to download hundreds of gigabytes before I can even go to the main screen.
When those delivered a sufficiently good quality experience, I stopped going to a theatre.
Control is one part of that. "Let's pause..."
Replay is another. Maybe watch it a few times for whatever reason.
Sharing is another. I still like physical media for this reason.
Games are similar.
Renting a game should cost less than one that can be replayed, shared, etc...
Keeping history is another good reason. I have media and games from times past, and I have the ability to share that experience today. High value.
Gaming and movies today? Definitely moving away from the higher value things, yet pricing often seems the same, or not in line with the lower value proposition.
Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price. Rental services make this explicit.