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Comment by tyfon | Hacker News Reader

It's one of the reasons I will never buy any games on google stadia when it launches, I expect it to be shut down in 2-3 years.

I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance, ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my ps3.

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Yeah, it looks like games will actually need to be built on stadia. It doesn't look like it just spins up an instance of vanilla install of the game. So there will need to be a deliberate choice by developers to support a new platform. Add that to the fact that many gamers already have a library of purchased games (like in steam) and aren't going to be thrilled at either buying them again or paying a subscription to play games they already own, and I really don't see how Stadia is going to work from a financial model standpoint.

This makes me think that Stadia might be a "build now, monetize later" experiment that will quickly be shut down if/when people don't buy/subscribe and no other revenue stream is easily found.

I might pay for Stadia if it was something like PaperSpace, where I can basically spin up a VPS optimized for game streaming, install steam, and play whatever games I have. Absent that, Stadia would need to provide offline copies of the games for backup should their service either go down or be cancelled.

Afaik it's built to a ubuntu + vulkan setup, but I suspect the rendering will go directly to a proprietary encoders framebuffer and that it uses custom input mapping and not libinput.

What would be nice if they released offline linux + vulkan versions in addition to the streaming version but that probably goes against their MO of tracking and monetising. It would make me much more inclined to buy on their service though.

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