Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: etc.

This article is compiled from: http://www.digitaltrends.com/ gaming / google-stadia-dedicated-community/

Original title: "Google Stadia's dedicated community faces heartbreak amid service closure"

Original author: Carli Velocci

Players are more concerned about how to migrate the archive and where suitable alternatives are available than whether they can receive a refund.

On September 29, Phil Harrison, vice president and general manager of Google Stadia, announced that Stadia, Google's cloud gaming platform, would shut down its servers on January 18, 2023.

Before Google officially announced the shutdown of Stadia, someone had heard the news in advance in the corresponding section of the Reddit forum. Players were discussing the UI changes in the Stadia store when someone sent a screenshot showing that the Stadia store was "now closed". Just a few minutes later, the news of the shutdown quickly spread to every corner of the Internet.

Earlier, around the end of July, similar news began to spread, when Google responded publicly that Stadia would not be shut down.

In fact, Stadia suffered a lot of setbacks in the early days of its launch, and then failed to gain a foothold in the industry. Although Google has tried to "dispel rumors" that the platform is about to shut down, it is widely believed that this is an inevitable fate. Many players are so sad that even if they get a refund, they will never be able to continue to play games on the Stadia platform.

After three years of struggle, Stadia was officially declared dead. "looking back now, there are bound to be people who say,'I knew Stadia would be finished from the beginning, and people who play games with it deserve it. 'most of the people who say this have the money to buy entertainment devices and play games on other platforms, and they have a lot of choices, and they don't understand that Google has provided a solution to a problem they probably never thought about." ColourTV, a webcast, provides such a perspective. On Stadia, he spent nearly 6000 hours playing "Online of the Wild".

As Stadia is about to retire from history, there are a lot of unanswered questions: will Google open the Bluetooth feature of the Stadia handle to allow players to connect to other hosts or computers? Are players allowed to transfer archives for games that have been released in Stadia? More importantly, will there be any platform similar to Stadia in the game industry?

Who is using Stadia? Social media user Bunion L revealed that Stadia is not his preferred platform, but he uses it to play games when he goes out. ColourTV has a powerful computer, but he likes to use Stadia to play games like the Wild Dart: redemption 2 in his spare time on college campus.

With the support of Stadia technology, players can play games on their smartphones or computers no matter where they are, as long as they have an account and a good network, without the need to install additional software.

Just because you may not care about Stadia doesn't mean that other people don't need Ricardo Bator, a Stadia anchor and co-host of the podcast Chat Stadia, who often uses Stadia to play games. " Of course I can use my computer, but the space is limited, I have to download and update a lot of things, and games will cause a lot of damage to my computer and GPU. By contrast, Stadia can play games at 4K resolution without making my computer look like a power generation device. "

For many players, some of the features of Stadia are attractive. For example, Stadia does not require players to use any additional devices or software to run, allowing you to play 3A games in a relatively cheap and easy way: you can either subscribe to the paid version of Stadia Pro to play downstream from the highest configuration or use its free version. Many people have mentioned that Stadia frees them from queuing up outside the store to buy tight mainframes or spending hundreds of dollars on PC components. In addition, Stadia Pro offers hundreds of games, which means you can play a batch of masterpieces priced above $60 for as little as $10 a month.

"I can play more than 200 games without taking up any storage space and never having to wait for updates." "Stadia runs in a browser, not a program on my computer," Mr. Battle said.

The shutdown of Stadia is not pointless, and it leaves a lot of thinking about another reason why many players like Stadia. The service allows them to play games in a more relaxed and casual way. On Reddit forums, a considerable number of Stadia players are already parents or older and do not usually spend hundreds of hours playing games such as the Assassin Creed series that may take hundreds of hours.

ColourTV revealed that many of the Stadia players he knows are older. "according to my observation, the Stadia community is not quite the same as the game community I used to be familiar with. Most players are older than me and have their own families or busy jobs. I think this is very interesting, compared with some of the more hard-core players, they may not be as hostile."

Of course, the actual experience of Stadia may not be perfect, and a few loyal users may not be enough to save Stadia. Compared with these nostalgic things in the community ecology, Stadia was shut down because its technical difficulty led to a poor overall experience and a lack of rapid growth in the number of users. Google announced the development of first-party games for Stadia, which cost a lot of money, and Google had no patience to wait. It was reported earlier this year that Stadia will be included as part of Google's cloud service Stream, and that the focus of the business will shift to providing technical support to game companies, and player-oriented cloud gaming services will account for only 20% in the future. In other words, after a variety of personnel and decision changes, Stadia has already decided to shift from 2C business to 2B business, but most people are not aware of this.

Stadia players are looking for answers. Many Stadia players want to know what happens next when the platform is officially shut down. First of all, can they continue to play games acquired through Stadia on other platforms?

For this question, at least at this stage, it is difficult to find a definite answer. Ubisoft is one of the developers that quickly assured players that they would bring games released for Stadia to the PC platform. Bungie is also studying the "next step" of Stadia Destiny 2 players. Stadia players of Cyberpunk 2077 have been asking CDPR to open the cloud archive-they are more concerned about how to migrate the archive than whether they can receive a refund. The latest news is that CDPR has released an official guide to the transfer of Stadia archives in Cyberpunk 2077, where players can transfer Stadia archives to the PC platform and synchronize with their GOG accounts.

Ubisoft already has its own game platform, and other studios that are also beneficial to Ubisoft have not provided a clear answer in the first place if they can transfer user data to their own homes. In a more extreme case, ColourTV contacted Rockstar Games to move their thousands of hours of archived play on the Wild Online to other platforms, but received no response from the customer service team. "of course, that's what I expected."

Some Stadia players are discussing where to play games in the future. Since the advent of Stadia, cloud gaming services from Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon have entered the market, but they are not perfect alternatives. Amazon's cloud games currently operate only in the United States, and Microsoft only provides cloud games to XGPU members for $15 a month. Battle also points out that Xbox's cloud streaming software sometimes has higher latency and more Bug than Stadia.

The 2019 Stadia press conference is vivid in my mind, once the promise, now … Lies? Not only after the game platform gets a refund from Google, Stadia players can buy consoles and corresponding cloud game services. However, other services may find it difficult to recreate the unique atmosphere of the Stadia community.

Netizen Original Penguin has created a "Stadia game database" to collect information about all the games on the platform, including the highest resolution that can be supported, store links, and so on. Recently, he has also compiled a spreadsheet to help people track which games they need to repurchase when the Stadia is out of service.

"the reason why I am willing to stay in the Stadia community is that the community itself can retain people." "from the beginning, we were a close team, and everyone supported each other," Original Penguin said. "over time, we gradually separated, but this support still exists."

Many players point out that despite the shortcomings of Stadia services, the community is one of the reasons they insist on using it-in this small community, players have established lasting relationships. Stefan, host of the German podcast Cloudplay, said: "until a few months ago, although there were fewer and fewer new games that interested me, Stadia was still my platform of choice." in terms of simplicity and community atmosphere, there is no other service comparable to it. "

Players actively save themselves and set up a Stadia game database during the epidemic, Battle met his partner in the podcast "Chat Stadia" in the Stadia community and even attended his wedding. "the Stadia community is like a family, where people meet through Stadia and other social media channels and support each other all the time. We are all very sad, and if Stadia goes out of service, it means that we will lose our unique emotional connection in the community."

ColourTV also mentioned that in the Stadia community, players always understand each other.

"of course there are black sheep in any community, or people who disagree with you. But overall, Stadia provides a good solution for social interaction between players, and everyone agrees with that."

What will happen in the future? There are early signs that Stadia will be shut down. It's only a matter of time since Google stopped investing in first-party games.

Immediately after Google announced its Stadia business in 2019, it announced the creation of a first-party studio, SG&E, to develop native game content for cloud gaming platforms, led by Jade Raymond, producer of the Assassin's Creed. However, in February 2021, Google adjusted its game business and announced the closure of SG&E, which will focus on providing third-party games to consumers in the future. After leaving office, Raymond started making games for Sony and believes that "Sony deeply understands the game creation process," implying that Google does not seem to know how to run the game business.

Thomas Meyer, a reporter for Android Central, points out that very few media have written reviews specifically for Stadia versions of games. In August this year, Mayer wrote a review for the Stadia version of Mafia Saints, which became the first Stadia game review included by Metacritic in about 7 months. Stadia's death is clearly not entirely for technical reasons.

Stadia is likely to change a lot in the coming months. Players want Google to open up Bluetooth on the handle, and the game studio will be able to support the migration of cloud archives or come up with other solutions.

"Ancient Scroll Online" players can also migrate and archive to PC. Like other pilot projects such as Google Plus, Stadia is dying and players can only accept the reality. Of course, cloud games do not necessarily have a future. Cloud game testers appeared and died as early as 10 years ago, but that didn't stop Google and other newcomers. From the best point of view, one day, people will no longer be bothered by technical problems and will meet platform operators who are patient and understand games. Players can wait and see what might happen next.

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