I empathize with most of your feelings here. I am interested in the preservation of history of games for future generations to experience and explore.
I feel that we’re already in a place where if a dev doesn’t want mods for their game they can enforce that on consoles already. I suppose you could hack your console and mod the game from there, but by an large, if a console game doesn’t support modding then you can’t mod it.
WRT to the Racist devs or not wanting ip addresses that end in 7, I’m pretty sure that would run afoul of laws that are already in place.
The firefox thing is totally valid, google could totally be like “you must use chrome!” but to me that’s similar to Sony saying “you can’t play a PS4 game on a XBOX”
WRT to a company going “the game isn’t profitable, SHUT IT DOWN” (emphasis mine) can’t/doesn’t that already happen with MMOs? Or games with a multiplayer servers that are run by the company.
I’ve already covered a lot of this in my thoughts above, if valve just says “Whelp we’re done!” and shuts their servers down today, all of us would lose hundreds of games, and all we get to keep are memories.
And who knows, it probably won’t happen, but google may one day release their custom hardware for you to buy and own. Or, when they finally shut down their servers, they’ll give some of the hardware away to other companies/museums/whatever so that it can be preserved. I doubt it, however.
So I wasn’t making an exhaustive list. All things ownership give you are things that stadia denies you.
So I could go point by point and refute them but that would make it seem like I have a list of things and as long as those are addressed we’re all good, when that’s not the case. I want to own the things I buy.
Also, steam has an offline mode. You can still play your steam games after valve goes bust, provided you’ve already installed them.
Actually your comparison to MMOs is pretty spot on. All the issues stadia games have MMOs have too. So I guess you’re cool with every stadia game having all the issue that all MMOs have. If this is really the future of gaming, then all games having the issues MMOs have.
It’s cool, I don’t think this is for everyone, I just felt that some of the examples you gave were hyperbolic.
The MMO example is the closest example. It makes everything really ephemeral.
I guess my point is that a lot of what we think we own now, Steam games, digital games on the PS, XBOX, Switch, etc., we don’t actually own. Like, we feel that we do, but really, you don’t.
If you’re buying every game on dvd and downloading and archiving everything and that makes you happy, go for it! keep doing it! Just like MMOs didn’t make regular games go away, I don’t think that stadia and it’s ilk will make all regular games go away.
That’s certainly fair, hyperbole is what happens when I go off the top of my head.
I hope you’re right, but fear your wrong. I think stadia’s potential success is a signal to the AAA industry. Make your games for us and you won’t have to worry about piracy or hot coffee mods or any other pesky stuff that you currently worry about.
Sure the indy scene isn’t going anywhere but the big bois. They may leave. Maybe not to stadia itself but to it’s model.
And while I’ll even admit there’s some benefits to the model, I think it’s like the facebook “move fast break things” model. It already has tangential effects on archivists like me and a whole host of other unintended effects.
All of this is the realm of pure theory for now. And maybe it’s not as bad as I’m worried it’ll be, like I know there’s been some good work archiving some of the more popular mmos.
When PS4 and Xbone came out 4k was something still mostly incoming, only on hands of very early adopters. So it’s reasonable that not all games of this generation get full use of all those pixels.
That’s totally different than advertising a system being capable of running games on level that only megacorporation’s computers can and then not delivering. Had google wanted to really show what Stadia could do, they maybe should have paid developers to make something for it beyond just ports.
The only game I’ve played that is capable of doing 4k on stadia is that samurai fighting game (I can’t imagine that a 2d fighter at 4k stresses anyone’s system).
I have a feeling that most people complaining about this think that if the game (usually RDR2) supports 4k on the other platforms, it should be in 4k on stadia. When really, like you said, they just got, a probably rushed, port.
You’re right, google should have pushed harder to get everything into 4k for a better launch. But if the devs don’t care to do the work, is it really google’s fault?
Google should have given the developers reasons to care. Which is money. In hand, in advance. No one sane would be putting in the time, money and effort to make unique 8k textures on every spec of dust for sake of gamble like Stadia.
Google should have, four years ago, approached developers going “we are making this supercomputer gaming thing, make us a launch title for it that can’t be run on anything else. Here’s the money.”
So sorry for being so active here for the time being but this has nothing to do with Stadia
Fuck the everliving fuck out of Google:
6 Days ago:
Yesterday:
All the reason you could possibly need to avoid as many of googles products as you can possibly extricate from your life should be right there.
Workers need more rights not less. And firing a bunch of employees for organizing is so immoral the law fucking caught up with it and made it illegal.
Just to summarize what went down. Google’s been having some issues with their employees for some time now and so now they hired a firm that’s particularly good at preventing organizing and they analyzed the employee makeup and probably did some monitoring of chat logs or talked to some of the more bootlicking employees and determined who to fire for most impact against the effort least impact to the business.
They then concocted some bullshit reason to fire them, (this is about the same level as didn’t verify signature after every credit card transaction) and then did so using that bullshit reason.
Genius has long suspected Google's search cards of copying its lyrics, starting with rapper Desiigner's song "Panda" in 2016 — whose hard-to-understand text matched Genius' character-by-character. [. . .] Genius claims that it has found more than 100 examples of Google using these exact versions of lyrics since 2017.
Was just reading the Medium article he wrote. The bit about “teams should handle their own ethics/rights assessments internally” line from management was such a clear signal that they didn’t want any of it. Yeah, lets give some super hungry big 10 graduates who only took the 1 required ethics of tech course in their CompSci program the responsibility for making the decision about how and where to do business.
