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Comment by HungSu | Hacker News Reader

As Google Stadia's target user, in my opinion a stronger reason Stadia died is because GeForce Now was a competing and better product.

GeForce Now allowed me to play the games I already own with a more powerful machine than I could buy myself, for just $10/month. Artifacts were noticeable but not enough for me to care. If I bought my own gaming PC later, I would be able to continue playing the game there. GeForce Now offered "Hey, you're playing Cyberpunk at 720p@25fps? Wanna play at 1080p@60fps for $10? And you can leave any time" And I said heck yes.

Stadia would have denied me the ability to continue playing on my own machine while charging me even more money. There are a bunch of stories of people with saved games trapped in Stadia. Google made no attempt to be better than the competition. It's like they're unaware of anything other than themselves.

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> Google made no attempt to be better than the competition. It's like they're unaware of anything other than themselves.

This is the curse of Google products. They don't care about what the competion is doing.

They do care what the competition is doing, but the company is such a large and slow machine that it takes them many years to change course even slightly. that means when they see their competition doing something new and innovative, it takes many years to even get to the same point.

You don’t really know this, do you? You’re just forcing to see them at a certain light?

Yeah. It’s like how one of the growing YouTube monetisation avenues is basically kept in a strait jacket. YouTube Membership or more specifically channel memberships, are a one way street, it all has to start with Google, YouTube is the video platform, the the point where I would pay a the damn extortion money, App Store style, to be able to sync a user that signed up off YouTube to a membership platform like Memberful or Patreon, over so their YouTube account has appropriate permissions… it’s a one way street though, they have a discord integration, and that’s basic the only useful feature that goes outside the weirdly hidden YouTube channel member extras pages that I continue to find people who join a channel to support it but don’t actually discover the extras! That’s how badly managed this is.

Before Cyberpunk 2077's poor launch, I was looking into game streaming to play it and Geforce Now was the obvious choice. There really was no competition due to the lack of lock in. When users potentially have multiple thousands of dollars already invested in their game library over a period of >10 years, you better support playing with that library, especially when the competition already does.

I find it interesting that a service not having lock-in is actually a reason for people to adopt and stay with it. In an industry where lock-ins are common, these lock-ins also effectively become lock-outs.

It is said the biggest motivator for people is fear and lock-in results in fear. It's powerful anti-marketing.

Consumers almost universally hate artificial industry lock-in though. I think it's pretty telling that the platforms that have endured either belong to a major publisher that can lock their catalogue behind the store, or are financed by another revenue stream.

Epic in particular basically forced their way in by using Fortnite/Unreal money to fund a combination of price dumping and exclusivity agreements.

Wouldn't XBOX with gamepass for $25/month all in be a more compelling competition?

It is yes arguably a better service in most ways and better integrated with both game studios, a TV console, and all the benefits of Xbox live community. Nut Nvidia's is arguably a closer direct competition to Stadia.

Being a purely PC game (slash arcade) platform. As much as Xbox is trying to evolve and games being cross-console/PC is getting far more common the Xbox cloud platform is still largely just an extension of Xbox games.

For ex: with Divinity and Pathfiner: WOTR they all had to release "Enhanced Editions" to support Xbox and it takes many years after the PC release to get a lot of PC games. It's not one-to-one.

That said I see Xbox Cloud completely dominating this space. Their library, pricing, and service quality is A+

It is actually line $35/year (for GP Ultimate) if you know magic words “conversion deal”.

It would depend on the games you play. For example Stadia got games like Assassin's Creed and Cyberpunk 2077 that Xbox Game Pass still doesn't. Their streaming service is still limited to Game Pass games only.

> Their streaming service is still limited to Game Pass games only.

Earlier this year Microsoft announced[1] that they are going to be allowing cloud enabled games that you own to be played without them needing to be Gamepass games.

[1] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/06/09/whats-next-for-gaming... (section titled Get More Out of Your Xbox Game Pass Membership, just over halfway down)

GeforceNow looks cheap compared to a gaming PC, but it's quite expensive when compared to a console. Especially an XBOX Series S. Not having to pay a monthly fee was a benefit of Stadia imo.

+1. Why would I use stradia when I can stream a full windows machine with my whole game collection, do machine learning and use blender on shadow.tech?

Competition is good.

You can’t play the full steam library on GeForce now only selected steam games last time I checked

Yeah; companies like paperspace offer an even better product. It’s just a windows VM with a video card. You have to install steam or cad software or whatever yourself.

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