Anarchic Fox on 18/11/2019 at 22:49
Quote Posted by Brethren
Btw, what does Nintendo have to do with anything..?
Nothing much, that was just me following mental associations.
To put actual effort into the topic... I very much want Google to fail in this endeavor. This desire is strong enough that I don't feel like I can provide anything close to objective analysis. That being said, I'll note that when Microsoft entered the fray, they did so in what could be called a respectful manner. The first Xbox was an entirely conventional console, just more powerful than the others. However, Google is trying to compete in the console market, while rejecting the entire concept of a "console" as it's heretofore existed. That's... well, a level of arrogance entirely in keeping with Google's history.
Judith on 19/11/2019 at 08:52
That's not really that arrogant on their part. The concept of console agnostic games is not new (onlive, gaikai, psnow), it's just that the implementation failed miserably. But since Google has datacenters basically in every country in the world, it seems like they might succeed. I'm not saying they will, but from all other companies they have the biggest chance.
Anarchic Fox on 19/11/2019 at 23:28
That sounds even more arrogant to me. Not only are they disregarding the conventional form of consoles, they're declaring that they will succeed where those three services failed.
Renault on 20/11/2019 at 00:07
Yeah, I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing their goal is to not fail. What a surprise. That's not arrogance, that's just common sense.
And I think somewhere in here, you're missing the entire point of the service. It's not trying to compete against existing consoles, it's trying to devise a strategy where you don't need one to begin with.
WingedKagouti on 20/11/2019 at 00:38
Quote Posted by Brethren
And I think somewhere in here, you're missing the entire point of the service. It's not trying to compete against existing consoles, it's trying to
...earn
all the money.
Judith on 20/11/2019 at 07:29
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
That sounds even more arrogant to me. Not only are they disregarding the conventional form of consoles, they're declaring that they will succeed where those three services failed.
First of all, this is business. All decisions like that are thoroughly calculated. Either they do have done their analytics right and there's something we don't know, or they have e.g. separate budgets for experiments that may fail. Nobody dives into this stuff just thinking "I'm better than others, so I wont fail". Noone wans to cover that.
What does seem dumb to me though, is that they decided to charge subscription fee
and make users pay for games. Maybe it's just for early adopters, they'll pay for everything just to get their hands on new piece of tech. Although gamers aren't much respected customers anyway, maybe they expect them to cave after a short boycott, like in other cases.
About "conventional form of consoles", there's an ongoing talk in the industry about getting rid of the physical console, and the concept's been toyed with for years now. Console manufacturers would love to get rid of the risk and cost of making the hardware; game publishers would love not to pay console manufacturers the fee for every game sold on their system. So we'll either end up with "Xbox" and "PS" subscriptions for game streaming, or even better, with many competing stores, just selling game streaming services for everyone, without the old-fashioned concept of being tied to a game console / system.
But the big problem now is US and the shitty Internet providers. Such services would probably work more smoothly in Europe.
PigLick on 20/11/2019 at 12:38
I dont know if this has already been covered, but EA are now putting their games back on steam, so obviously the Origin service hasnt worked out that well for them. Although I imagine that you still need the origin launcher.
Anarchic Fox on 20/11/2019 at 19:11
Quote Posted by Judith
Nobody dives into this stuff just thinking "I'm better than others, so I wont fail".
Looking at the response so far, it seems like that's exactly what Google did! For instance, the strength of its launch lineup is widely recognized as vital to the success of a console, and yet Google fell short there. With its resources, it could easily have prevented this problem before it became a common criticism; instead, it seems Google did not even anticipate the problem. Keep in mind, however, I am not only a biased observer but a fairly unengaged one, so my impression should not be trusted.
Quote:
About "conventional form of consoles", there's an ongoing talk in the industry about getting rid of the physical console, and the concept's been toyed with for years now. Console manufacturers would love to get rid of the risk and cost of making the hardware; game publishers would love not to pay console manufacturers the fee for every game sold on their system. So we'll either end up with "Xbox" and "PS" subscriptions for game streaming, or even better, with many competing stores, just selling game streaming services for everyone, without the old-fashioned concept of being tied to a game console / system.
Yeah, I didn't mean to say that it's a new idea. I vaguely remember the hubbub surrounding earlier attempts. However, it seems like every advantage listed comes with a corresponding disadvantage. Instead of the cost of console manufacturing and development, you would have the cost of datacenter construction and maintenance; instead of console publishing fees, you would have (for everyone except platform owners) who-knows-what payment arrangement between the designers and streaming platform owners.
I can imagine this concept being more beneficial than harmful to gaming in the long run, but
only if multiple viable streaming services come into existence. If no-one succeeds at it (in the near future), I'd be fine with that. If only Google succeeds... that would be the worst scenario out of the three, in my not-at-all-unbiased opinion.
Meowdori on 20/11/2019 at 19:17
I've never been a fan of taking more and more actual processing away from the end user's device, and making her/him dependent on some service provider. Quite the opposite, actually. This makes me think of corporate greed mostly, rather than user's convenience.
I mean this depends - for a very extremely casual gamer, who doesn't want to deal with anything, and just play games it might be good, but that provided it's implemented correctly and working as intended, which usually isn't the case with present solutions
But for me personally, the idea is awful - not only am i making myself fully dependent on the service provider, which can discontinue it at own whim, i don't even posess the copy of the game in any tangible form, making it impossible to secure it. And one of the most obvious things - this makes modifying games or extracting data from their assets impossible for these who want to tinker with it, which has always been a huge part of gaming, especially on PC.
I really hope this isn't going to become the most widely accepted and common form of gaming in the future.