Stadia: Onlive 2.0

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

I do understand it. I just don't agree with it.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Even physical games tend to have server-necessitating components and/or massive updates that render physical media useless anyway. Doubly so for the flavor of games that will prop Stadia up like SSJN said. A hard copy of Apex Legends would do exactly as much for you in 20 years as a line in your Steam launcher would, which is exactly as much as a DRM-free exe on your hard drive would, which is exactly as much as subscription access to a Games Pass- or Google-hosted service would: nothing. Once EA / Respawn pull the plug, it's over across all platforms.

And online dependency isn't confined to arena shooters or even multi-player. The bulk of Mk11's single player kontent is tied to servers and only playable online. Once NRS pulls the plug, it's over. Doesn't matter if you have the disc, PS Now, Steam, Stadia, whatever.

My PS4 physical copy of Doom runs at 30fps with horrible screen tearing out of the box. Sure, it "works," but without that 14gb performance update tied to PSN, licensing, and Sony's whim, a PS4 copy of Doom and no server from which to pull the day 1 patch is pretty worthless. Same goes for anyone with ZOE Remastered. Those discs will nominally function, but once Sony pulls the plug on the servers hosting their patches, the practically playable versions are over. They may as well be DLC codes in a Blu Ray case.

And Steam's not gonna be around forever, either, y'all.

I really don't see Stadia as being any more or less precarious than any other platform. Even your disc-based games are services. The gap between what's in the box you took home from Best Buy on day one and what you're playing connected to the internet post-patching a week, a month, a year later is widening. The difference between the game on the vanilla SF5 disc I put in my PS4 and the game that actually pops up on my television is so great that the former is barely recognizable as the latter.

TLDR: The people most resistant to cloud gaming are the people who seem to think buying your Donkey Kong Country still gives you the whole Donkey Kong Country on the cartridge you took home from Toys R Us rather than the Donkey Kong Country being drip fed from a server one Donkey Kong County at a time.

[BonusKun]

You're half right on that and even then like I said previously asking people full retail pricing for those same games you could eventually pick up at a store is just mind-boggling stupid. There is still a strong market even now for solid state media even today.

I know you're using logic on this as an answer to what you're trying to point out but you have to remember that human beings arn't too logical sometimes. A lot of people feel the need/want to have something physical in their hands even with all the DLC, Updates, etc that's needed for those games.

[A Robot Bit Me]

I think the naysayers are overestimating the number of people who care about a little lag (weigh how laggy many Switch games are when played docked against the Switch's sales figures) and for whom leased media is a deal breaker. We're nine weird, old, obsessive, old, addicted, probably-on-the-spectrum, snobby old nerds. Most videogame-playing persons don't care about or probably wouldn't even recognize an Optimal Gaming Experience.

My campus is loaded with nineteen year olds playing Fortnight using touch controls on spiderwebbed iPhones. That's largely whom this stuff is for. And it's a massive, affordable, convenient upgrade for that audience.

As someone with no interest in PC hardware beyond my work laptop, I'm intrigued, too!

[Melf]

It's not about physical versus digital per se. The Stadia is just the latest example of how the gaming industry is making it that much harder to preserve and document its own past, and physical media doesn't mean much if the very company that makes the game doesn't care about preserving it. You may not be entitled to all the cars out there, but it would be nice if future generations could see and even drive today's cars. The move towards digital and now streaming makes gaming incredibly hard to preserve, and not enough people care. It's bad enough that people are eager to pay purchase prices for shit they're only renting, but this whole "play today, fuck tomorrow" attitude is why people LOL when someone calls gaming art. It's become the darling of instant gratification and nothing more.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

with the thousands of hours of footage uploaded to youtube, etc, future generations will have plenty of documentation of how games were.

[kingoffighters]

I am an old man yelling at the cloud, but I am pretty sure we have lived through the best gaming eras (8 to 16 to 32 bits). I found this gen to be pretty boring (and never bothered with XB1), and returning time and time again to past gens. I don't think I care if they preserve the present.

[Melf]

with the thousands of hours of footage uploaded to youtube, etc, future generations will have plenty of documentation of how games were.

Just like they can watch Nat Geo channel and it's the same thing as going to the zoo? And I have ZERO faith in YouTube footage being around that long. The channel's turning into a shithole as we speak.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

Nat Geo is better than going to the zoo, because they’ll only air footage of the animals doing something in their natural habitat and not selling access to animal jail for profit. Also, how many times have you gone to a zoo and the cats are off sleeping in a corner and you can barely see them. That’s such a letdown.

“Preservationists” should be downloading those youtube vids and backing them up.

[Changeling]

Everyone here is on the correct page with this for sure. That being said, the ONLY way I want to stream games is if I'm playing a game as a service, like an MMO, a shooter or anything that can be affected negatively by cheaters with hacks or whatever. It'd be great to play multiplayer games that wouldn't have those issues. If latency was not an issue, it'd be the dream.

Other than that, I won't be supporting it. I still like physical media. I still like buying games and Blu-Rays.