Most stuff on Steam you can play offline. With some advanced warning of Steam going I could download everything I can about and play it offline forever.
Sure there is a minute chance that Steam will Poof without warning and I lose access to all the games I don't currently have installed but I hold the chance of my house burning down and all my physical games being destroyed about infinity higher.
It ignores such insignificant forces as time, entropy, and death
Valve has actually stated that they have a contingency plan if this ever happens, there is a switch they can flip that will just un-DRM everything and let people keep everything they have downloaded permanently. Also, even right now, Steam works fine in offline mode, and you can copy games from the Steam folder from PC to PC pretty easily. I've done it between my gaming PC and my laptop quite a bit, so that I don't have to download huge games twice. The only games that DON'T work offline are games that require internet to work anyway. FFXIV (I don't own the Steam version but it does exist on Steam too), Warframe, etc.
Cloud gaming is an expensive service to run, and most cloud gaming services tend to charge way more than what Google is charging for Stadia. That would explain why Google is taking a lot of cost cutting when it comes to playing games and it obviously shows with their fake 4k 60fps. Shadow for example which is a competing cloud gaming service doesn't skimp on the hardware as they provide 8 Xeon cores running at 2Ghz with a GTX 1080 for playing games. More specifically they use Xeon 2620 processor and a Nvidia Quadro P5000. They charge $35 a month but they do provide true 1440p and 4k gaming. With Stadia you get what you pay for. But $35 a month is not cheap and will still result in worse image quality and input latency. Cloud gaming is not a sustainable business model.
10mb per second is 36 000mb per hour, which is 36gb, or around 4.5gigabyte, for the baseline 720p60fps they claim. They claim 1080p60 will take 20mbps, so 9 gigabyte an hour, and their "4k" is 35mbps is around 15.5 gigabyte an hour.
At the rates they claim anyway. May be higher or lower, I'm not sure and don't care enough to test
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
-Kujako-
All can say is yikes, and well with numbers like that I will be playing games the old fashioned way.. Buying off Steam and downloading or in a Bricks and Mortar store and installing on a computer/console.. lol
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The problem with Stadia is if one lives in a country with shit internet, then it is very much a case of SOL..
with stadia you have to buy games though in addition to paying for service. now i will fully admit, the ONLY cloud gaming service i have tried personaly is playstation now and it has issues. but. for that monthly cost (which went down recently) i get acess to entire library of games they have and do NOT have to buy them individually. you need to get a controller, but you also need to get one with stadia, so /shrug
is it a sustainable business model? I.. don't know. I'm not sure it is with the way google is trying to set it up.
they don't seem to be doing anything truly innovative. just jumping on a bandwagon.
P.S. not a reply to you specifically but rather "you don't own games on steam" i don't have to pay monthly fee to steam to play games i bought and i can play them in offline mode, so...
It can be if you're not competing with modern PC gaming hardware. This is why I said that Stadia should stick to static hardware and go from there, but already their Vega 56 with a 2.7Ghz Intel CPU is dated. Stadia can't even do Ray-Tracing. They don't use consumer grade hardware but server stuff like Xeons, Quadro, or Tesla graphic cards. Sony can get away with it because they mostly use PS3 games, which they have custom hardware that has like 8 PS3's soldered onto their motherboard. With the PS4 they'll probably use Xeons and Tesla cards but with virtualization.
If I were Google I would limit my games to 1080p and offer a downloadable version of these games but for Linux. The whole business of 4k 60fps was just dumb marketing that made them look worse than just offering a 1080p service. By offering their games for Linux they could at least appeal to us nerds which would promote Stadia as a decent place to buy games. The cloud gaming service would have been a nice bonus. Google got greedy and wanted to sound like something that Stadia just wasn't capable of, while ignoring Steam, Epic, and etc as a competitor. You don't see Microsoft and Sony just dropping their console hardware in favour of streaming, as they use it as a supplement. Google could turn this around for Stadia but they have to act fast before Stadia's reputation gets to the point where they'll need a new name.
It seems like Google just used their existing infrastructure and a virtual machine to segment the games. The games are probably ported to Debian or Ubuntu as that's the OS of choice that Google runs, which is sad that I can't get a copy of these games for Linux. The only "innovation" they did was make a controller, which doesn't look particularly good.they don't seem to be doing anything truly innovative. just jumping on a bandwagon.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
-Kujako-
Maybe a renting service stream a game for a week for X price then be done with it.
"I'm Tru @ w/e I do" ~ TM