Definition of Insanity

The second post I ever made on this blog was way back in April, 2009.  The topic was about "OnLive".  Essentially, It was a cloud gaming service in which people could purchase games and play them on a variety of streaming devices.  It launched in June 2010, but failed to gain much traction and by August 2012 all of the employees had been laid off.  It was bought out for a tiny fraction of its previously estimated value.  Sony then resurrected the service in March of 2014, only to shutdown OnLive for good in April 2015.

Sound suspiciously familiar?  Google Stadia is basically the same thing.  Actually it's worse from a consumer standpoint in that there's a monthly subscription fee on top of having to buy games.  All the same technical problems remain; bandwidth shortages, data caps, infrastructural limitations...the list goes on and on.  Then, there's the issue of less customer freedom.  People using Stadia (much like OnLive) can't borrow, lend or trade games.  They can't resell games either.  If the service ends then say goodbye to all those games you bought.  Yes, Google is a big company, but have you taken a look at a website called "Google Graveyard"?  There are over a hundred-and-seventy projects that the company has abandoned or shutdown over the years (no reason why Stadia couldn't become one of them).

I've also been seeing some odd comparisons to streaming movies or music (from the director of the project no less).  First off, neither of those forms of media are interactive.  Second, the amount of time invested in watching a movie or listening to a song is typically orders of magnitude less than the time spent playing a single video game.  Even small studio indie game experiences are almost always longer than big Hollywood blockbusters.  Aside from some techno and classical music, songs typically don't go on for more than a few minutes.  If anything the closest media relative of video games are books...possibly choose-your-own-adventure books.  Guess what?  There aren't any streaming services for novels.  Sure, Amazon has their E-book reader and distribution system, but if you buy a digital book from them and download it to your Kindle (or whatever device) it's yours as much as buying and downloading a game from GoG is.

Perhaps the best question to ask is, "who's this service for?"  Hardcore gamers aren't going to go for it.  They want their own personal software library and some tricked out piece of hardware to run anything in it...the possibility of input lag alone will be enough to turn most of them off right away.  Casual gamers aren't going to go for it either...the service is too expensive.  Plus, the only place you're going to get the wireless bandwidth you'll need is via a 5G network...but here's the catch - transmitters for 5G have a really short range meaning that it's really only going to be available in the downtown parts of big cities.  If you live in the suburbs or (heavens forbid) the countryside then no Google Stadia for you.  Don't worry though I suspect it will go the direction of OnLive in very short order...a pity that Google doesn't seem to realize how ludicrous the idea of a cloud gaming service was and still is.