The Video Game Industry

Yeah, same here.

"Port your game to our platform!"

"Yes sir, Google sir!"

"Whoops, you're locked out of your account. Fuck off."

Reminder that there are people who unironically stan for Stadia and want Google to usher in the "future" of gaming.

There are people who unironically stan for flatworms and Ebola. They can usually be ignored.

In principle, cloud gaming is a great idea that could be transformative to the industry if done properly. In practice, you need a slightly less flaky hand at the rudder and a lot more investment in basic infrastructure for it to have any chance of succeeding.

I did not even notice the coming and going of Google Stadia to be honest. Even Epic Games is more relevant.

x6 Apparantly Google paid Sega a bunch of money to keep Judgment off PC and exclusive to Stadia and consoles... Someone at Stadia is trying to make it work.

Edited by Memers on Feb 8th 2021 at 11:36:14 AM

I think the twitter thread about Spinks's Google ban mentioned someone about an faux pax on an unused youtube channel? Did something happening regarding Terraria and youtube?

Terraria's YouTube channel apparently got a random strike and then banned 3 days after that despite not uploading for 3 months.

To clarify: the YouTube channel itself wasn't banned (because that would make the videos there inaccessible, and they are still up), the underlying Google account was.

To my knowledge, the algorithms that govern YouTube cannot escalate their response beyond YouTube itself. So while the strike could be seen as an algorithm mistake (something that has been happening a lot lately on YouTube, but that's a subject for a different thread), the full Google account ban is not just some random error, and a sign that someone(s) at Google is going after this guy.

I'd say it's pretty clearly a "right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing" situation, since Google wouldn't have wanted to sabotage a deal to bring an indie game as popular as Terraria (which, I will note, is one of the twenty best selling games of all time) to Stadia. To top it off this is coming out right after they revealed they ceased developing in-house games for it, the worst possible timing. They need third party support, and they just showed how callous their broader company can be to said third parties.

Edited by TotemicHero on Feb 8th 2021 at 6:23:54 AM

@ Aszur

At least Epic Games has the weird honour of being willing to square off with Apple when other companies would rather not do that.

Stadia though, that is just the Atari Jaguar of this generation.

EA alleged to be determining the fate of Anthem this week in a meeting. (Twitter link because Bloomberg.) People are suspecting that EA will finally kill Anthem off.

This is technically game-specific, but I think it's still suitable for this topic as jumping-off point to talk about the whole Live Service thing.

Edited by Karxrida on Feb 8th 2021 at 3:51:28 AM

Live Service games are an issue for 3 reasons:

• Skinner boxing, nuff said
• Over-saturation. Whenever a AAA dev creates a Live service, they tend to release another in the same genre if not series a year later, kinda defeating the point of them in favor of the usual cash grabs. There is a reason Warframe was successful while Anthem wasn't
• Speaking of Cash-grabs, the AAA devs also tend to put in microtrasnactions up the asshole between lootboxes, cosmetics and convenience mechanics. Always giving the impression that the base game is an Obvious Beta no matter how polished it actual is at worse and still coming off as incomplete at best.

Can someone explain what "cloud gaming" is?

It’s one of those terms that could mean a number of similar things depending on the context. So generally it’s going to mean gaming in a way that uses data stored in the cloud rather than directly on a game devise, so you don’t install your game, you connect into it.

I think the latest Flight Simulator is like that, because the amount of space you’d need to store the world they’ve created would be insane.

I think it’s also been used for when you game in one location using a devise in another location. So your PC in another room runs a game for you but you’re sitting on the couch looking at it on your TV.

The normal usage when talking about cloud gaming is that instead of installing and running the game locally, you actually run it on a server owned by the cloud gaming service and the rendered game is streamed to whatever device you're playing on.

This introduces a whole bunch of rights issues, with some companies withholding their games or removing them from the service, and whether you should need to separately own the game or if it's a rental service.

Geforce Now is apparently pretty good, and on the "you need to own the game on some other service" side. For some bizarre reason my GPU came with an offer to get a month free. Like... why would I want that when I just bought a new GPU?

On the plus side, using servers can make for a far better experience than cheap hardware would, so long as your internet connection is up to it. On the downside... well, there's the internet connection requirement, and you're even more at the mercy of services going down or rights problems than local installations.

I think Flight Simulator CAN be fully installed, given the mention of 160GB downloads I've seen.

I think the 150GB is just for the game program, flight system and basic level graphics for the world, not the actual areas you fly over at full detail. They are in such detail (and cover the entire planet) that you’d need far more than 150GB to actually download them.

Edited by Silasw on Feb 8th 2021 at 1:06:09 PM

Seems that the actual textures it contains are pretty detailed, it's just that what it downloads if enabled is actual satellite/aircraft photography.

Still, that wouldn't normally be considered cloud gaming, nor would streaming a game to another device.

CD Projekt Red got hit by a ransomware attack.

Eh. I do not think that the ransomware will have any effect on CD Project Red.

Yeah they prolly have IT guys on the scene to remove it (assuming it didn't only hit some poor replaceable cog's work computer)

It's not just the backups and all that stuff it is mostly the fact that Project is sort of the internet sweetheart and trying to reveal, for realsies this time, what we already know about how they torture their coders with crunch time, is going to do fuckall to hurt their image.

I really doubt that. CDPR was a darling among gamers before, but the Cyberpunk 2077 launch fiasco caused their reputation to plunge faster than anything I've seen happen to any company. Now they're considered no better than the likes of EA or Ubisoft.

Of course, they aren't any better. They never really were.

A tiger never changes its stripes after all. It is for that reason that I have No Sympathy for them.

They never were, I agree with that. The amount of videogame companies I would describe wouldn't ethically deserve vanishing into a sinkhole overnight probably fit in the fingers of one hand.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't bet on the internet missing their collective shit the second CDPR gave more news about Witcher 4.