<story><title>Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches Their Noses</title><url>https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/05/google-says-everything-at-stadia-is-fine-as-the-water-reaches-their-noses/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>creshal</author><text>Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.&lt;p&gt;It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you&amp;#x27;re visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …</text></item><item><author>liaukovv</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not like the proposition is good from user point of view either.
You &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot; a right to rent games, which right can be terminated by google for any reason, or no reason at all.
Even if you really bought a game and google would give it back to you when they inevitably shut down the service, you still wouldnt be able to play it, since the whole point of stadia is to not own the hardware.</text></item><item><author>ajross</author><text>Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten.  Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain great.  Play a AAA game on a $180 chromebook with basically identical resource consumption to watching Netflix.&lt;p&gt;But... the big studios don&amp;#x27;t want it because they don&amp;#x27;t want to lose control of distribution.  The indie folks couldn&amp;#x27;t be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn&amp;#x27;t going to match Valve&amp;#x27;s creator services community.  Google isn&amp;#x27;t willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives...&lt;p&gt;Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve.  A Steam&amp;#x2F;Stadia would rule the world.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ergot_vacation</author><text>Steam is explicitly NOT a rental model. You buy games, and then you have them, on your hard drive, to play whenever you like. You could be banned from Steam, Gabe could personally make a youtube video telling you to fuck off, and you could still start up Steam in offline mode and play all the games just fine. The only thing you could THEORETICALLY lose is the ability to re-download games in your library, but to my knowledge this has never happened aside from accounts getting hacked etc.&lt;p&gt;Stadia, meanwhile, works like Netflix. Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away. I like owning things I pay for. Many other people do to. So it&amp;#x27;s gratifying to see that this one time, we don&amp;#x27;t have to have our rights trampled on. Good riddance to bad rubbish.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches Their Noses</title><url>https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/05/google-says-everything-at-stadia-is-fine-as-the-water-reaches-their-noses/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>creshal</author><text>Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.&lt;p&gt;It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you&amp;#x27;re visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …</text></item><item><author>liaukovv</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not like the proposition is good from user point of view either.
You &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot; a right to rent games, which right can be terminated by google for any reason, or no reason at all.
Even if you really bought a game and google would give it back to you when they inevitably shut down the service, you still wouldnt be able to play it, since the whole point of stadia is to not own the hardware.</text></item><item><author>ajross</author><text>Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten.  Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain great.  Play a AAA game on a $180 chromebook with basically identical resource consumption to watching Netflix.&lt;p&gt;But... the big studios don&amp;#x27;t want it because they don&amp;#x27;t want to lose control of distribution.  The indie folks couldn&amp;#x27;t be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn&amp;#x27;t going to match Valve&amp;#x27;s creator services community.  Google isn&amp;#x27;t willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives...&lt;p&gt;Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve.  A Steam&amp;#x2F;Stadia would rule the world.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomc1985</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a licensing model, not a rental model. You&amp;#x27;re not paying anybody a monthly fee to play, you have all the files locally, and the threshold for revoking your license or otherwise losing access to a title is extremely high.&lt;p&gt;Even games with components that have expired licenses are kept on the account, your access is never really revoked -- even a VAC ban won&amp;#x27;t lose you your library.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t mod a Stadia game...</text></comment>