Tag: games as a service

Google Stadia: impressions

Google recently announced a new game platform, called Stadia, at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA.

It can run though any device that is capable of running Chrome, which means that they already have a huge install base ready to consume. This should make the service very lucrative, potentially, as there’s almost barrier to trying the service out. It streams over high speed internet, meaning that there’s no need for any hardware beyond what is necessary to run a web browser, nothing new to buy, well, except for the gamepad. Which, see below.

Streaming

I’m immediately disinterested in any game platform that I can’t own in the traditional, tangible sense of own. Streaming games do not appeal to me. I like physical media, I like the ability to go back and play old games that I own, whenever I wish. Streamed content is always in the control of the vendor, and is subject to updating, being discontinued, and so on. There’s no guarantee that streaming resources will continue to stream forever, and it’s virtually certain that at some point the stream will either “run dry” or stream something different than original.

The downside (I guess) of traditional owned-media is that over time you accumulate a vast library which becomes difficult to store and manage, and may deteriorate over time. If you don’t like it, you can always sell it, trade it in, give it away, or throw it in the trash, so I don’t really see why that would be a downside, but if you’re a collector like I am, you like the fact that you can keep old tech and go back and use it 10, 20, 30, even 40 or more years after it’s no longer being supported, as long as the devices that drive it continue to function or be repairable.

But that’s just me. There seems to be a lot of evidence to suggest that a convenient, well-managed service would be popular and profitable with consumers who don’t all care about history and preservation as much as I do. Look at Netflix. They are doing very well, and while people are occasionally bummed out when Netflix drops a movie from its offerings, that doesn’t seem to stop them from having a profitable business selling subscriptions to a service. If Google nails the execution, there’s no reason to believe they won’t likewise be as successful, if not more.

The controller

A very standard, generic looking dual analog stick gamepad. Initial impressions are that it doesn’t look especially comfortable in the hand compared to the competition. Google didn’t need to innovate here, gamepad design is pretty mature today, even if companies like Nintendo continue to dare to try new ideas (Switch, Wii U, Wii). Still, I’m not sure why Google would emphasize their controller given that it is so very unremarkable in its design. Given that the controller appears to offer nothing new, one wonders why Stadia wouldn’t simply leverage any/all existing “standard” dual-stick gamepads.

To answer that question, there are two additional buttons: a youtube integration button, and a help button. The help button enables gamers to request help with overcoming some part of the game, somehow, without having to leave the game. Which, I guess is appealing, but man, I’m gonna miss the brutal, unforgiving difficulty, and the completely arcane hidden secrets that you can only figure out if someone tells you what to do, so you had to go buy a book or magazine that made you want to kill yourself from the NES and Atari era. I guess the help button takes the place of the magazine, but it’s just not going to be the same. The youtube button makes it so easy to set up a gamer streaming channel that everyone in the world can do it, which means billions of youtube channels that no one will be able to wade through to find the good ones. Probably. This will likely also kill the professional youtuber/patreon beggar gig that so many of the popular streamers have been doing for the past few years. I guess that’s maybe a bit harsh, naive, and premature, but the bottom line it will become very competitive and difficult to differentiate yourself from other random streamers, so the ones that will stand out will have to be unbelievably good and work very hard to attract and keep an audience.

Do we need another gaming platform?

I’m intrigued by anything Google does, and they have the resources and innovative thinking to do things that few other companies can. That said, I’m not really seeing a need for yet another new game platform. Whether Google can differentiate itself from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Steam, etc. remains to be seen. While it’s hard to bet against a company with the resources that Google has, they’ve had notable failed ventures in the past: Wave, Plus, etc. and have been known to discontinue even popular projects (Reader) leaving fans with little recourse. Will it work? Probably. Even if it doesn’t, it’ll probably be a few years before Google pulls the plug on it or pivots to something else. But it seems like they’re serious about competing in this already-crowded sphere.

It will be interesting to watch.

The Writing on the Wall

What really strikes me about this is, if Google can stream applications as powerful and resource hungry and demanding as videogames, instantly, anywhere, they can do that for any software. What does this say about IT departments in every other company on the planet? We’re pretty much obsolete at that point, aren’t we? It might be a good time to think about early retirement, and finding a second career. Maybe a livestreaming channel.

Ouya that was

It was announced today that Razer has bought Ouya.

“Razer reportedly plans to continue supporting Ouya’s existing game service for a year.”

“Razer doesn’t seem to be interested in trying to continue Ouya’s original strategy.”

So what does this mean for the users? Razer will continue the Ouya service for another year, and then they are pulling the plug. After that, will an Ouya have any useful purpose? Will it boot? Probably. But you can bet that any updates there might have been for it will not be available any longer. Can users re-install games that they had purchased? It doesn’t sound like it.

Someone will hopefully come up with a solution, a way to back up your Ouya games and run them — at least those titles that do not depend on a live service that they must connect to in order to play at all. Any games that do require a server for the client to access, will probably cease to be playable. Which is a shame. Unless perhaps the services are spun off to some other organization, or released as a product that people can obtained and run on their own hardware. But that seems quite unlikely. What profit would there be in it? The industry has interest only in selling you new product — sorry, services; it’s not fair to call it a “product” anymore when you can’t own what you are paying for — and they have no incentive to compete against what they released a few years ago, even though there might well be a long-tail niche of fans, enthusiasts, and academics who have an interest in keeping it around for amusement or research.

This weekend, I attended the 2015 CCAG Show where gamers, fans, and collectors gathered to exhibit and trade vintage and recent video games, some approaching almost 40 years old. This celebration of living video game history has been going on for 10 years now, and was made possible by the love players have for these games, and the enduring survival of the physical medium into which they were encoded. Will there be anything like this for Games as a Service consoles and mobile devices? It seems very doubtful. Once the vendor no longer wants to support the product, they will shut it down, the lights will die, and the party is over, the attendees left standing around in the dark, shuffling to music that is no longer playing, wondering what it all meant, or if it even happened at all.

Historians such as Jason ScottHenry Lowood, and others engaged in the struggle to preserve the history of the culture and industry of video games can do a great deal when it comes to archiving media and emulation of hardware, but when it comes to service-based business models, it becomes difficult if not impossible to envision how these things can be preserved so that future generations will be able to look back and see what was, and understand how we got here. The users only have access to the client side, and the service side is not only out of their reach, licensed for use but not owned, but it changes and evolves over time.