It’s now a world after Stadia
Stadia, Google’s cloud-streaming gaming platform, shut down yesterday after slightly over a 3 year run…
tl;dr – old man muses about cloud gaming
Interestingly if you take the number of days 9to5Google says it ran (1156,) and divide by 365.25 you get pretty close to Pi… wonder if they intended that. 1147 would be the closest without going over…
Stadia shuttered yesterday, and we’re now on day two of having a bunch of free Stadia controllers working with Bluetooth. Make sure to update quickly because they’re only guaranteeing support for the updater through December 2023.
I never liked Stadia, or any of the cloud gaming options I ran across (Luna, XBOX,) for that matter. That was just my experience though and it worked for others and for other types of games. Every time I played racing games I ended up watching a cloud of pixilation as I crashed into the walls. Games that I was good at on an XBOX I found I had to re-learn timings regardless of platform. For me, and for the games I was playing it was not to be.
But I was pretty happy that the tech existed… it pointed to a future where not everyone has to have a $600 large chunk of hardware sitting in their possession as an entry gate into gaming. Barriers could be dropped and the entry fee waived to be a gamer. I just hit it at a bad time and early in the days when gaming became console-less. 60ms added shouldn’t screw with most people like it does me.
It feels weird that Stadia is gone. It looked like a proposition that couldn’t lose after the cloud platform delivery system was up and running. I hope there were reasons I don’t know about other than just not quite enough profit… and there are other platforms. They’re just not quite what Stadia was.
