Stadia Lets You Play People's Screenshots (pcgamer.com) 49
Google Stadia has a "State Share" feature that lets people click on a screenshot or video clip of a game to play the level that was captured -- providing they own the game themselves. Andy Kelly reports via PC Gamer: This week I've been playing PixelJunk Raiders, a new roguelike developed exclusively for Stadia by Q-Games, which makes particularly good use of this feature. Levels in this game are procedurally generated, so if the algorithm spits out something especially cool, you can take a screenshot and share it online, letting people experience it for themselves. A small community has sprung up around this feature, with people sharing interesting, challenging, or otherwise interesting levels in public spreadsheets.
There's also an asynchronous multiplayer element to it. You can go into someone's game state and drop weapons or handy gadgets like turrets or jump pads, then share the state again, creating a chain of people helping each other. Some players are even using states as supply drops, dumping weapons that you can scoop up then take back to your own missionsâ"which is very handy for PixelJunk Raiders in particular, a game that is both punishingly difficult and frequently stingy with its loot drops. You'll take any help you can get. Players can also use emotes to silently communicate across these chains. "Only a handful of Stadia games support State Share right now, including the Hitman trilogy," notes Kelly. "But even at this early stage it's impressive. Being able to show a friend something in a game and not just say 'look at this,' but actually let them play it themselves, feels kinda like the future."
There's also an asynchronous multiplayer element to it. You can go into someone's game state and drop weapons or handy gadgets like turrets or jump pads, then share the state again, creating a chain of people helping each other. Some players are even using states as supply drops, dumping weapons that you can scoop up then take back to your own missionsâ"which is very handy for PixelJunk Raiders in particular, a game that is both punishingly difficult and frequently stingy with its loot drops. You'll take any help you can get. Players can also use emotes to silently communicate across these chains. "Only a handful of Stadia games support State Share right now, including the Hitman trilogy," notes Kelly. "But even at this early stage it's impressive. Being able to show a friend something in a game and not just say 'look at this,' but actually let them play it themselves, feels kinda like the future."
That's really cool (Score:5, Interesting)
That's really cool, but didn't Stadia just fire a ton of people?
Re:That's really cool (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really cool, but didn't Stadia just fire a ton of people?
They closed in-house game development. I don't think they've downsized the actual Stadia team - yet.
Of course, given Google's tendency to close down everything that doesn't bring in ad dollars I'd never buy a game I could only play on Stadia. If there's any company that has a reputation necessitating playing something from your GOG or Steam library rather than buying it on their service, it's Google.
Re:That's really cool (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose they want to pitch it like a games console, but because it's streaming people don't expect to pay full price for games. I really can't see it surviving, and it will be interesting to see if they do anything to help out people who bought games.
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I suppose they want to pitch it like a games console, but because it's streaming people don't expect to pay full price for games. I really can't see it surviving, and it will be interesting to see if they do anything to help out people who bought games.
If I could run my Steam and GOG libraries on it, it is a service I might have wanted to subscribe to. Nvidia has something similar - GeForce Now - which allows you to do just that. Unfortunately, only for some games and not for all of the games in your libraries - some publishers refuse, I guess they want to double dip and get extra revenue for a game I've already bought.
Re: That's really cool (Score:1)
How many plays would it take, to pay the equivalent to a game you actually got a copy of that keeps running when Google shuts it down?
My bet is on it being a huge rip-off.
Because if they would not make more money off of you than the old way, they'd not do it.
(And yes, you're paying those ads too. If the advertising business would not make money off of you then they would not advertise.)
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I have a subscription, mostly to support a service I think should happen. I get some games free every month for my subscription, and small discounts off of some games, but mostly, the games are full price. I thought I read somewhere that if they shut down, they will give you Steam keys for the games you buy on the service, but I can't find that article anymore. I haven't bought any games outright on the service though, as I prefer local play, and mutiplayer with my friends who don't have Stadia. As far
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How many plays would it take, to pay the equivalent to a game you actually got a copy of that keeps running when Google shuts it down?
Yeah I think that's the biggest failing here, if it were like tv/music subscriptions where you pay a monthly fee and have access to their library then it would have value but as a hardware rental service where you still need to buy your games it has less appeal - especially as you highlight that they are likely to shut it down if it doesn't make money (as any for-profit company would).
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I really can't see it surviving
Pandemic-related shortages (and resultant scalping) aside, games consoles tend to last many years and not exactly be prohibitively expensive. If this were a workable replacement for a $2500 gaming PC with mid-highend GPU, high resolutiong/refresh rate display, etc. then I could see the appeal but it's really a replacement for a $500 console that amortizes to probably less than $10 per month over its lifetime anyway then I can't really see the value proposition. But that's not just for the customer but for G
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I'd like to play Mario Maker 2, but can't quite bring myself to shell out for the console and game when I don't really want to play anything else on the system. Maybe as a treat one day.
If I could stream it at a reasonable price, I might be tempted. Mario Maker needs very low lag though, I'm not sure streaming video would work well. It's also quite high bandwidth, being pixel art any compression noise is very noticeable.
When Gran Turismo Sport 2 comes out for PS5 I'd like to play that as well, but again har
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I suspect it will be gone soon.
They gave it (controller and Chromecast so that it could be played on a TV) away to anyone with YouTube premium, and they gave it aware to anyone that purchased Cyberpunk 2077 (which cost less than the controller + chromecast) last November/December. They had insanely good deals on games throughout then too ( half price mortal kombat day of release for example). I suspect if those promotions gave promising numbers they would have kept the studio.
I'm still a happy user, but I'm
Re: That's really cool (Score:2)
I think Stadia was a longshot attempt for Google to own a gaming platform, but the real endgame is to license the technology and rent the datacenter capacity to publishers like EA and Ubisoft. Stadia's service is going to have to shut down at some point, but I'd be shocked if it completely disappeared.
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Of course, given Google's tendency to close down everything that doesn't bring in ad dollars I'd never buy a game I could only play on Stadia.
And you definitely shouldn't. Stadia is now 15 months old and third party estimates are it has 2 million subscribers globally. That's a failure by Google standards, enough that it will be shut down in another 9 months unless user counts explode, which is wildly unlikely.
Them laying off 100% of their in-house developer teams tells me they're already planning to shut it down. I figure they have to run out the clock on the contracts they have with the game companies who provided the handful of games Stadia
Re: That's really cool (Score:2)
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Yeah, I actually thought they had canceled stadia.
Maybe next year.
No. They shutdown SG&E (Stadia Games and Entertainment), an inhouse games development studio that focused on bringing exclusive and first part titles to Stadia. The service is fine.
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didn't Stadia just fire a ton of people?
They were only Google employees.
Good idea, easy tech (Score:5, Interesting)
As an idea, this is great. Technically, this is not really impressive. Steam has cloud saves and automatic screenshot sharing. Valve could implement a similar feature in a week, which games could then take advantage of.
But some games don't allow saving at any time, for various "balance" reasons. And some games have Iron Man modes where you're not supposed to be able to revert to an earlier save, which this would defeat. Both are pretty bogus reasons, but they tie in to achievements - which themselves are pretty bogus, admittedly.
Point is, technically this is not hard. It's more whether games want you to. I'd say they should all want to, because artificial scarcity is silly.
Re: Good idea, easy tech (Score:2)
I think it's more a matter of it being offered rather than it being hard.
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> But some games don't allow saving at any time, for various "balance" reasons
It's not *just* balance reasons. It's greater effort to implement "save at any time", especially for larger/more complex games. But even then, save/load at any time would allow supreme cheesing the game if random numbers are involved. Don't like the outcome? Load just before you "roll the dice"
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Half-assed ill-informed AC comments, no surprise there. Because that's exactly what I said, "generate a seed at every roll", yes
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Isnt that like calling everyone racists and then wondering why nobody likes you?
The little problem you presented is self-inflicted. Full stop.
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Erm... I never said to generate a seed at every roll. Why would you think that? That would kinda defeat the purpose of using the RNG.
I'm just saying that, if you're using at least a single RNG to evaluate all the randomness, you save game, open chest, don't like result? Load game, do something else that causes rng eval, then open chest, and yay: RNG uses new state, so chest contents are different.
Of course that could be fixed if you have a chest RNG, and another RNG for other situations and so on, but that'
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*sigh* that was sarcastic, do I **really** have to put the /s? Could you not see my previous post, where there was no mention of that?
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Some games work that way, but others like Xcom do not.
In Xcom if you do the same thing after a save it will always have the same outcome. You can of course not waste your rocket if it's going to go crazy and kill your team in the re load, but it doesn't let you keep trying until that 10% chance for a critical succeeds.
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Indeed. I'm not saying it's impossible to engineer it to avoid these retries, but it takes a bit of extra effort to get such a system in place
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Wrong use of that feature (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like (and actually is) the same as launching a game on a PC where it can take a minute to even see the start menu because of the usual logos and loading screens. Why not just memory snapshot the game in the "ready to play" state for all players and then offer snapshots for individual game sessions. If Google had sense they'd even throw that in as a perk of being a Pro subscriber because there is precious little reason otherwise to be.
Re:Wrong use of that feature (Score:4, Informative)
What's being saved/restored is a game state that the game knows how to restore, not the entire executable state. Note how it requires explicit support and implementation by the developer. It's basically just a 'save game' that presumably excludes profile/account/preferences type information.
Executable state sharing works well enough on old generation games before things like profiles, achievements. Nowadays, lots of the data in memory belongs exclusively to the individual playing the game and isn't suitable for just restoring the state of the entire process somewhere else.
As for restoring the game after the logos - games take a minute to get to the start screen not because they're actually loading, but because we want to show the player logos and legal. Saving executable state at the title screen and starting players there isn't desired or else we wouldn't be putting anything in front of it in the first place.
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"a terrible experience" that you'll get regardless of which platform, because as I pointed out, it's a decision made by the developer, not a technical characteristic of the service.
Trying to make people like you not whiney just because you don't like a particular company is like promising you that you can be a fireman when you grow up. There's really not much we can do, you've left the ranch of objective reasoning long ago.
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I should add to this that I'm developer that ships games across the 5+ platforms out there. I'm not google. It's our "fault" you have to sit through logos and legal and it's our "fault" that any streaming service capability isn't going to make the title screen instantaneously available. I have no idea what Google did you do, but it's affecting your ability to think straight.
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Nice slashvertisement bro. Now sod off.
Literally 100% of new software features or developments will be the result of some private company developing a for profit feature. 100% of them could be considered to be an advertisement of some sort. If you don't want to see these it's easy. No I don't mean don't visit Slashdot, I mean go to your basement, get someone to lock the door from the outside and use scissors to cut through your network cable.
That way you'll be protected from OMG ADVERTISEMENTS and never have to fear the incredible pain of seeing
Game reviewers (Score:1)
"... proving they /own/ the game"? (Score:2)
Man, you should take a peek at those license agreements you've never been reading.
Because you'll be in for a huge disappointment! :D
(They state that you get temporary usage privileges. All you own, is that license. ... So unless you are the programmer... or more likely the distributor who feeds on programmers, you don't ever "own" that game.)
Wasn't Stadia shutting down? (Score:2)
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Wasn't Stadia shutting down? Or is just the game studio?
Just the game studio. And the fact the question gets asked repeatedly is more proof it was a stupid thing to do. But it's Google. They specialize in stupid.
that will totally help for destiny 2 (Score:2)