Google Stadia ***Update: Google shutting down the service***

[Wrath of Foamy]

Make another profile and pay 1$ with that one and set it as the primary account and share gamepass with it.

Honestly, I can afford the money, it just bothers me on a moral basis.

 

[Madmick]

Cliffs from the verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22233066/stadia-state-share-hitman-3-world-of-assassination

Hitman 3 and the World of Assassination trilogy launch on January 20th, and at launch, Google Stadia players will be able to share access to distinct points within a game thanks to Stadia’s State Share feature.

With State Share in Hitman, you’ll be able to share a link alongside an image or video from your game. Then, others can click on it to try the scenario you were playing for themselves. There are multiple “states” of missions you can share to customize the experience, including a mission’s starting location, the objectives, Agent 47’s loadout, and difficulty level.

The feature works with any campaign or custom mission, and you’ll even be able to use weapons or items that you haven’t unlocked yet if a game state is ahead of your own progression, Stadia product manager Catherine Hsiao said in a blog post.

The feature opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for the Hitman games. Players could send custom scenarios back and forth to each other, for example, or live-streamers could challenge their viewers to try out a particularly difficult mission or specific assassination style they just broadcast live. It’s a feature that’s unique to Stadia, despite the game also launching on consoles and PC.

More in depth discussion via that blog post:
Capture and share playable scenarios with State Share, coming January 20 to the HITMAN trilogy

State Share is an exciting feature that’s only possible with Stadia, letting you create unique game states to share with friends.

State Share turns a normal image or video capture into a portal to a unique game experience.

By embedding a game state within each capture, sharing gameplay for others to watch is transformed into a chance to try a playable slice of the game yourself. Each game state is defined by specific gameplay elements like player loadout, objectives, and difficulty, and trying each one is as easy as clicking a link.

How does State Share work specifically in HITMAN 3?
In HITMAN 3, as well as in the first two games in the HITMAN - World of Assassination trilogy, you’ll be able to use State Share to save a game state within any campaign or custom mission, during the missions themselves or at the mission complete screen. IO Interactive has designed its use of State Share to allow all saved game states to include the following gameplay elements:

• Mission starting location within the beginning of the level

• Mission objectives

• Player loadout (including weapon, gear, and clothing)

• Mission difficulty

The incredible part of playing HITMAN 3 on Stadia is that with State Share, you’ll be able to play with weapons and items that you haven’t unlocked yet. Even if you haven’t unlocked certain weapons or items in HITMAN 3, you’ll be able to experience them with State Share at the click of a link, without affecting your own progression in-game.

How do I know which captures include game states that I can share?

State Share ensures that captures which include game states will have a unique icon displayed in the top right of the image, as demonstrated below. Just navigate to your Home screen, scroll down to the Captures & game states section, and you’ll be able to see all of the game states that you can share with friends using a link.

What are some of the most interesting uses of State Share for players?

State Share opens a world of possibilities for players who want to share what they’re playing with others, literally. More competitive players can use State Share to challenge others to beat their scores on a given level with specific items.

State Share also offers a creative way for YouTube creators to interact with their community. Creators can live stream a game and share a link to their game state for viewers to try for themselves, or even try game states shared by their viewers live on stream.

How will State Share work in other games?

State Share will be used differently in each game that supports it, so the gameplay elements included in each game state and the overall player experience will vary. Stadia is providing the overall structure within State Share for our partners to decide what works best for their game.

For example, a game state might take players to the beginning of a level with the custom character, inventory, and health that you originally experienced. Other game states might teleport you right to the moment when you saved the capture. Or, they might start a new game with some of the original player's accomplishments shown on the map.

Positive press continues to build for Stadia over a year after its widely panned launch:
Forbes: The Best ‘Next-Gen’ Video Game Console Isn’t The PS5 Or Xbox Series X
Erik Kain, Senior Contributor

I have to admit, I didn’t really expect to be saying this, but Google Stadia is the most ‘next-gen’ console on the market.

When I first reviewed Google Stadia, it was a mixed bag at best. Now, as I survey my lineup of expensive, storage-confined next-gen (okay, current-gen now) systems, I can’t help but see it. Stadia is by far the most next-gen of the bunch.

It was the surprisingly great experience with Cyberpunk 2077 that compounded this realization, though I’d been dabbling more and more with Stadia before that, including a remarkably good-looking, well-performing Destiny 2 foray.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Stadia is quite possibly the best place to play Cyberpunk 2077 even if it’s not quite as rich an experience as a high-end gaming PC. The game still actually runs the best, and looks nearly as good, on Stadia. It’s leaps and bounds better than PS5 or Xbox Series X, where a last-gen version of the game is running on new hardware.

But that’s not all. My PlayStation 5 came with less than 700 GB of storage space which was almost immediately consumed by Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Warzone and a handful of other games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon’s Souls, both fantastic offerings you won’t find on Stadia.

My Xbox Series X had a bit more space, but I’ll still fill the thing up sooner than later. 1 TB only goes so far when game installs are routinely over 100GB these days. Sooner or later I’ll need to expand my storage space on both systems, though for now I can use my old expansion drives to play last-gen games, sacrificing some of the loading speed I enjoy from the internal SSDs in the process.

I will never have to worry about expanding storage for my Google Stadia. Actually, I now have two Stadia setups since I purchased Cyberpunk 2077 when Google was giving away a Stadia (replete with Chromecast Ultra and a Stadia gamepad) with the game. Since every game is streamed, you never have to download and install them on a drive. You never have to worry about patching or updating. You never have to choose which game to delete to free up storage space. This is incredibly convenient.

It’s also convenient to be able to play Stadia seamlessly on my TV, my computer and my phone, switching between each screen relatively painlessly. (It can be annoying to first setup a controller with a Chromecast, and more annoying still if you replace your router and need to get the whole thing working again on a new network. Hopefully Google irons out these irritations). I mostly play Stadia on my TV, but I can switch easily between my living room TV and the bedroom TV.

Then there’s the price. A PS5—if you can find one—will set you back $399 for the Digital Edition and $499 for the disc-based one. An Xbox Series X costs $499 while an Xbox Series S (with half the storage space) costs $299.

A Stadia Premiere Edition, which includes the gamepad and a Google Chromecast Ultra (and with some offers comes with three months of Stadia Pro for free) costs just $100. That’s one third of the price of the cheapest next-gen console and it plays Cyberpunk 2077 better than any of them.

 

[rob mafia]

Forbes: The Best ‘Next-Gen’ Video Game Console Isn’t The PS5 Or Xbox Series X

seriously, i've ripped on you for citing forbes as if it's your go-to in arguments (starting with the blizzard/diablow one) about game x or console y... but i'm genuinely curious as to why you post forbes articles so often.

i've never seen forbes so much as on this subforum, and i'm on some financial//trading sites often... where i basically never encounter mentions to forbes, let alone links.

this isn't a dig, i'm just truly curious.

 

[Gregolian]

seriously, i've ripped on you for citing forbes as if it's your go-to in arguments (starting with the blizzard/diablow one) about game x or console y... but i'm genuinely curious as to why you post forbes articles so often.

i've never seen forbes so much as on this subforum, and i'm on some financial//trading sites often... where i basically never encounter mentions to forbes, let alone links.

this isn't a dig, i'm just truly curious.

Didn't ask me but I've noticed in the past 2-3 years when you do a Google search for info about gaming news... even sometimes before the IGN, GameSpot, and other gaming website articles you get the Forbes one. That expose about BioWare during the production of Anthem for example... that was released on Kotaku but pretty sure that writer is a Forbes writer now.

 

[rob mafia]

Didn't ask me but I've noticed in the past 2-3 years when you do a Google search for info about gaming news... even sometimes before the IGN, GameSpot, and other gaming website articles you get the Forbes one. That expose about BioWare during the production of Anthem for example... that was released on Kotaku but pretty sure that writer is a Forbes writer now.

ign, kotaku, and gamespot are all cancer... even forbes has to be significantly better than them. but it still seems odd.

 

[Gregolian]

ign, kotaku, and gamespot are all cancer... even forbes has to be significantly better than them. but it still seems odd.

I didn't get why Forbes kept showing up whenever I tried to search for game info either so I am right there with you.

 

[Sycho Sid]

Im especially surprised it gets trotted out here so much since it is owned by China now.

Well, a Chinese investment company.

 

[Madmick]

What a bizarre derail.

The headline there is the new save feature Stadia has pioneered. Stadia's positive press in the wake of Cyberpunk's success on the platform while it failed miserably nearly everywhere else is incidental-- arbitrarily plucked. There was a spate of headlines about it (ex. Is Google Stadia About to Be Gaming's Biggest Comeback Story?; Google Stadia on iPad is my favorite way to play Cyberpunk 2077; Cyberpunk 2077 shines on next-gen consoles and Stadia, but older hardware struggles; Stadia might be the best way to play Cyberpunk 2077 right now; Google Stadia Might Be The Best Way to Play Cyberpunk).

LG announced at CES they were incorporating Stadia functionality into their TVs at the operating system level.
Google Stadia support is coming to LG's 2021 TVs

Who could have predicted such a thing? Oh, that's right...

As I wrote in the other thread all of these companies are attempting to rope consumers into helping finance the R&D for a future technology rather than financing it themselves.

As I see it the ultimate stage of development will be when this service comes installed in TVs like Smart TVs that already carry HTPC capability out of the box. It doesn't require powerful hardware; the most demanding aspect, really, is the networking card built into the chipset. All it needs is this chipset + the software. Then you subscribe to whatever service is offered on that particular TV.

At that point every TV sold will be a gaming console ready to go.

*Edit*
I was back-combing through my Flipboard with #stadia and I noticed I'd missed this jaw-dropping fact:
There are 400 games in development for Google Stadia (Nov-24-2020)

 

[TuBB]

Phase 1: Buy 3 years of Xbox Gold for $180
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate and save $360

Spoiler

Profit

 

[jojoRed]

Phase 1: Buy 3 years of Xbox Gold for $180
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate and save $360

Spoiler

Profit

Pretty much exactly what I did. I got for even cheaper since I bought the subscriptions of G2A. For a 106 quid all in all with the gamepass monthly sub of 1 quid, Im sorted for 3 years.

Day 1 exclusives on PC, future EA pass, and the abundance of high quality games just makes it worth it.

 

[Madmick]

Google is shutting down its in-house Stadia game development studios

Google is shutting down its internal Stadia game development division, the company announced today, as it refocuses Stadia to be a home for streaming games from existing developers instead of developing its own games for the service.

“Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially,” reads a blog post from Phil Harrison, a vice president at Google and general manager for Stadia. “Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games.”

As part of that change, the company is shutting down both its Los Angeles and Montreal game studios, both of which existed under the Stadia Games and Entertainment banner. Google says that “most of the SG&E [Stadia Games and Entertainment] team will be moving on to new roles,” but Jade Raymond — the Ubisoft and EA industry veteran that led the Stadia studio teams — will be departing the company entirely...

But the shuttering of Stadia’s in-house studios marks a serious blow to Google’s gaming ambitions. Beyond the mere technical aspects of the streaming service itself, the fact that Google was willing to invest in multiple first-party studios was one of the most significant parts of the original Stadia vision.

That Google would be creating games for the fledgling streaming service — titles that in theory would take advantage of its unique cloud technology — marked how seriously Google was investing in Stadia. It was also a sign that the company aspired to one day introduce exclusives that could offer compelling competition to companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, all of which rely heavily on their own in-house studios to create key exclusive games to drive players to their services.

The fact that Stadia will no longer be in the game-making business makes a certain amount of sense: developing a AAA-title is an incredibly expensive endeavor. But it also means that Stadia’s future will likely be relegated to just another option where you can play the same games as you can already play on a PS5, Xbox Series X, or PC.

What was looking like a comeback story last month now appears to be just the latest in a long, long, long line of startup ideas Google will eventually abandon.

The only thing that might save Stadia now is that it managed to convince LG to include it by default in their latest line of TVs, but the TVs don't come with the Stadia controller. I would have thought the path forward would have been partnering with LG or another TV manufacturer to start offering bundles that did just this. Including a controller with budget 55" 4K TVs seemed like an obvious strategy to me. They need some wedge to gain an advantage in the user base because that's their only hope to broaden the service, now.

Otherwise, without exclusives, they've become an inferior competitor to NVIDIA GeForce Now when CEO Huang Jensen declared in the press just this week he believes the software race will determine who controls the future of the gaming industry among those who manufacture/sell gaming hardware. So don't count on GeForce Now winding down. Its growth will only accelerate, and I don't see how Stadia hopes to compete without that TV-controller bundle idea, or some similar partnership selling an apparatus for smartphones in cell phone stores. Stadia depends on Vulkan support, so their library of games will always be dwarfed by NVIDIA's.

The other elephant in the room is Microsoft's Project xCloud which is included with the Game Pass monster they created now towering over the industry. It's even worse than that, because Amazon just entered the race, and unlike Google, Bezos isn't a running punchline in tech for the habit of announcing major new projects only to cancel them the following month. He digs it out.

 

[Law Talkin’ Guy]

Google is shutting down its in-house Stadia game development studios

What was looking like a comeback story last month now appears to be just the latest in a long, long, long line of startup ideas Google will eventually abandon.

The only thing that might save Stadia now is that it managed to convince LG to include it be default in their latest line of TVs, but the TVs don't come with the Stadia controller. I would have thought the path forward would have been partnering with LG or another TV manufacturer to start offering bundles that did just this. Including a controller with budget 55" 4K TVs seemed like an obvious strategy to me. They need some wedge to gain an advantage in the user base because that's their only hope to broaden the service, now.

Otherwise, without exclusives, they've become an inferior competitor to NVIDIA GeForce Now when CEO Huang Jensen declared in the press just this week he believes the software race will determine who controls the future of the gaming industry among those who manufacture/sell gaming hardware. So don't count on GeForce Now winding down. Its growth will only accelerate, and I don't see how Stadia hopes to compete without that TV-controller bundle idea, or similar partnership selling an apparatus for smartphones in cell phone stores. Stadia depends on Vulkan support, so their library of games will always be dwarfed by NVIDIA's.

The other elephant in the room is Microsoft's Project xCloud which is included with the Game Pass monster they created towering over the industry. It's even worse than that, because Amazon just entered the race, and unlike Google, Bezos isn't a running punchline in tech for the habit of announcing major new projects only to cancel them the following month. He digs it out.

They’ll always have their Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 to be proud of.

 

[Madmick]

They’ll always have their Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 to be proud of.

I suppose that's more than the Apple Arcade ever gave us.

Although I've been mystified by why it runs so well on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 is DX12 only on Windows. Stadia only runs Vulkan. I've read that Vulvan's DXVK library allows for games written for Direct X to run on top of Vulkan, but that's a tool for WINE, and like WINE, it's essentially an added layer amounting to pseudo-emulation. Obviously it isn't that simple, either, because Valve even went out of their way with a new "Proton" project to get it to work on Linux, offering support only exclusively for AMD cards, and while they were successful, it was even glitchier than the official release on supported platforms.
Valve's made Cyberpunk 2077 playable on Linux
Some characters might not have a face, but it works.

 

[Madmick]

Dead man walking VG coverage:
Stadia is coming to Chromecast with Google TV on June 23rd
The game streaming service is also on the way to NVIDIA Shield TV and other Android TV devices.

Google has only supported Stadia on the web, phones, tablets and Chromecast Ultra until now. At long last, the company is bringing the game streaming platform to more devices. On June 23rd, Stadia will be available on Chromecast with Google TV, the company's latest streaming dongle, and Android TV devices such as NVIDIA Shield TV and Shield TV Pro.

The other Android TV devices with full Stadia support at the outset are Hisense Android Smart TVs (U7G, U8G, U9G); Onn FHD Streaming Stick and UHD Streaming Device; Philips 8215, 8505, and OLED 935/805 Series Android TVs; and Xiaomi MIBOX3 and MIBOX4.

It's a good thing they're expanding a service nobody wants, and for which they stopped developing games, to more devices. Now you have the option to never use something which has nothing to play. This is progress.

 

[Law Talkin’ Guy]

Dead man walking VG coverage:
Stadia is coming to Chromecast with Google TV on June 23rd
The game streaming service is also on the way to NVIDIA Shield TV and other Android TV devices.


It's a good thing they're expanding a service nobody wants, and for which they stopped developing games, to more devices. Now you have the option to never use something which has nothing to play. This is progress.

This is like a console designed for my wife. Like all her purchases, would never be used. The stadia controller could go in our storage room between her sewing machine and bread maker.

 

[Madmick]

Samsung gaming hub adds Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now to TVs at CES 2022
Launching later this year on select Samsung 2022 TV models, it's billed as a one-stop shop for cloud and console games.

The most popular way to game on a nice TV is with a dedicated console like a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, but cloud gaming services -- which stream playable games over the internet, no console required -- are getting better all the time. At CES 2022, Samsung unveiled a new feature on its latest televisions that caters to cloud and console gamers alike.

Dubbed the gaming hub, it's a dedicated section of Samsung's new smart TV menu system launching later this year on select Samsung 2022 smart TVs. The full cloud gaming libraries of Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now and Utomik will be available at launch "with more to follow," according to Samsung's press release. Users will be able to pair third-party controllers to the TV for instant play, no console or other hardware required. The hub will also allow access to YouTube gaming to follow streamers.

Built-in cloud gaming support on smart TVs isn't new. LG supports both Stadia and GeForce Now (currently in beta) on select TVs, Stadia is available on Google TV and Android TV models from TCL, Hisense and others, while select Amazon Fire TVs support Luna. Of course you can always connect a dedicated cloud gaming device, such as a Chromecast with Google TV for Stadia, a Fire TV Stick for Luna or an Nvidia Shield for GeForce Now or Stadia, to any TV.

First it was LG, now it's Samsung.

The obsolescence of consoles nears. One wonders if the 9th gen will be the last.

 

[rikwebb]

LG and Stadia are offering 3 months of Stadia Pro for free, applicable to new and existing customers. Also if you've never had Pro before you can also get another month on top of that.

*Stadia app only available on LG TV's from 2020 and onwards with WEBOS5
List of compatible TV's here: https://www.lg.com/us/support/help-...app-with-your-lg-tv-CT10000018-20152456683119

 

[rikwebb]

Google's shutting down Stadia, service will remain online until Jan 18th 2024, Google will refund all Stadia Purchases which will be paid back Mid January

“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison said in a blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.” Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company.

 

[Madmick]

Google's shutting down Stadia, service will remain online until Jan 18th 2024, Google will refund all Stadia Purchases which will be paid back Mid January

The inevitable result when you take a half measure.

 

[Jonesisinnocent]

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023

anyone here use it?