Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

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Stadia is just an opportunity to convert pay-once gaming to pay Google $x/month for decades for the same thing. There is nothing wrong with pay-once gaming except for greedy companies wishing it would be pay again-and-again-and-again, eyeing that 200 hours you spent in your favorite game and wondering how they can 'fix' that you didn't pay for 200 hours of entertainment. The more gaming cuts into tv and other entertainment the more important it is to change how we pay for games.

Linux compatibility being required probably won't mean as much as DRM-free efforts to distribute games, open source efforts to create compatibility across platforms, and proprietary efforts like Steam's. It's more like, there is enough linux compatibility now for Google to bother.

I think Steam's approach is much more interesting, in that you own the hardware and you own the games and you stream from your device to your device without third parties mining your data.

Nvidia's approach is the most versatile, you own the games on a multitude of marketplaces, and only pay to use the VMs, and can sign into the marketplaces on your own hardware too.

In both Steam and Nvidia's offerings you will still have your favorite games in 3 years, while you will have paid Google enough for a low-end gaming PC and a hundred games but have nothing except another bill to pay to continue access assuming Google continue service.

For me, gaming is an obsession that comes and goes on a quarterly basis. Sometimes I just have a hankering to blow a weekend in a gaming binge, or I want to try a new game that I will play for a weekend ( I'm a sucker for a good single player game a la the Half-Life series ) or some tower defense maps in Starcraft 2 but other than that I am easily bored. To that end, if I could spin up a cloud instance to play games for a nominal monthly fee and have all the best GPUs and CPUs available but not have that large capital expense tying up my disposable income that I could then throw away at the end of the month I would sign up right now.

I didn't play doom 4 -- which I'm pretty sure I would have loved -- because the price of entry would have been a $1.5k gaming pc, and I couldn't justify spending that much money for one game. There's zero may my mbp would have run it.

New gaming rigs start way cheaper, especially AMD ones, but you raise an interesting point.

On nVidia's streaming service you get some GPU and some CPU but not enough for eg, Total War: Warhammer 2, so they disallow streaming it. It is likely such resource-intensive games will not show up on these services.

eGPUs are also a thing and probably plug right into your MBP, making it more like $400 for many years vs $400 for 20 - 30 months of Stadia.

You could buy a $300 PS4 or a $250 Nintendo Switch... Honestly Doom isn't a taxing game and might run on a MBP with boot camp or in a VM.

When Doom 4 was released I bought my first gaming PC in a decade. Including a monitor I think I paid 7000 SEK (including large VAT) which would have been about $850 at the time. It ran Doom 4 just fine.

Not that this is cheap, but it isn't $1.5k either.

I recommend taking a look at the reddit link I posted above (https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/b30m3g/googles_stadi...). There has been a great deal of conversation already on /r/linux regarding the points you've mentioned.

By the way, you talk as if Linux compatibility is already a given, but there is still a good deal of work to be done in order to reach parity with a similar Microsoft operating environment. Having the support of Google working directly on this will massively increase the pace of open source development. The foundation has been laid, and now we just need the resources to push it through. There is nothing wrong with having companies contribute to development. Much of open source in fact is built on paid full-time employees working. It's unrealistic, in my opinion, to except everything to be done on a volunteer part-time hobby basis.

Pay once often becomes steal once which is why customers lean towards online gaming and micro transactions.

I’m semi-convinced that Stadia is just a way to subsidize GPU’s for ML.

I’m not sure it’s possible for Stadia to ever turn a profit. But if it can help Google pay for tens of thousands of new GPUs every year which burn through ML tasks when not in use? That might be a pretty good deal for Google.

Maybe Stadia can break even. Maybe it can turn a tidy profit. I don’t see how that will ever be enough profit for Google to care.

This sounds like it makes sense, but falls apart when you start to scratch the surface.

ML practitioners can - by and large - build affordable GPU rigs. That’s why Google is heavily pushing cloud TPUs instead - they significantly outperform GPUs and you can’t buy them (retail or wholesale). You might get some spillover but I can’t see them making an investment as large as Stadia purely to soak up extra ML GPU capacity. If anything, it would be the other way around.

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