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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure.

Google Cloud was late to the party, but they were very smart to invest in GPUs near edge nodes. I think Stadia is primed to eat the gaming world's lunch. They can reuse this capacity for ML during off-peak hours.

I'm actually kind of scared of Stadia. I like having physical copies of console games, and if Google makes major inroads they could become the dominant player in the gaming industry. They definitely won't be friendly to physical form factors.

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I'm a huge fan of digitally purchased games. By purchased I mean games with no DRM that don't require a multiplayer server or anything. Humble Bundle and GoG are good sources for these, but you can find them on Steam and such as well.

On the flip side, physical games are no longer truly self contained. Day one patches and license keys and DRM and server shutdowns all prevent you from owning the content on the disk any more than a digital purchase.

Now if only I still had time to play games...

The person you're replying to specifically mentioned console games. Consoles have a (very) capacity (given the size of the average game), there are benefits to having physical copies of the games rather than digital.

Most consoles that allow for downloading games have an option for external storage. My switch has a 256 or 512 gig SD card. Xbox and Playstation allow for USB hard drives.

That's great, but Switch games routinely come in at ~20 GB. That means with 256 GB you can have 12 games at a time, if you don't have anything else such as demos, screenshots, replays, etc. Once you've reached that capacity, it's much better to use physical games rather than having to cycle through deleting and reinstalling.

Thank you for reminding me to double check, it turns out I only have 1.6 gigs left. (And 25 or so on internal storage)

I think I only have a 128 gig in here now that I'm counting. (The menu only tells you free space, not capacity) I have 31 "games" installed, where NES, Genesis, Spyro, Crash, Hotline Miami, and Contra collections each count as 1.

The top three are Spyro, (which isn't even out yet) Smash, and Zelda, which are 14.8 to 15 gigs. I could get rid of Zelda and not really notice tbh.

Next biggest is Doom 3 at 8.8, then a bunch of 6.x games. 16 of them are 1.1 or smaller.

So not quite as dire as you're making it out to be, but in fairness my tastes skew more indie and retro than the average.

> I think Stadia is primed to eat the gaming world's lunch.

Not in the US, with most residential ISPs having arbitrary 1TB data caps.

And not in the rest of the world, where broadband speeds can just barely keep up with a Netflix stream

I have bought a lot of virtual content on Google Play Movies and Books. I am not nervous at all about that content going away.

I imagine it is not quite the same for games which might require maintenance like security updates. Still, old versions of their games should be available.

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