Yesterday The Verge broke the story that Google is shuttering Stadia and will be refunding all purchases. I guess it is good on Google for refunding those purchases, but it does make me question how much they actually made on the platform as a whole. I know I never spent a dime on it, but still had pro access to the service for a few months. You could get the starter bundle of hardware shipped to you if you had a paid subscription to YouTube. Last year if you bought any single game on the service, they would also ship you the hardware for free. Both of these promotions tell me that no one actually wanted to pay money for the service or the hardware and as a result, they had many units just warehoused and waiting to be shipped. Admittedly I have both a Steam Link and Steam Controller when they did similarly nonsense liquidation practices to get rid of stock.
I would love to say we all saw this coming. I’ve been pretty vocal over the years about just not really understanding the value proposition of the network. However, it seems that specifically, developers who had partnered with Stadia did not see this one coming. Yesterday in my travels I came across the above twitter thread where a developer was set to launch their game in just a few days on the platform. It seems as though this decision was not widely communicated until the article and official blog post were released. I feel bad for the folks who worked on the Stadia project because in spite of all of my complaints the technology was actually really good. The big problem however is that a reasonable product offering never really coalesced around that excellent technology.
I think Google made the false assumption that if they created the technology, the games side of the equation would just sort itself out. I have had the benefit of being on this blog platform for almost fifteen years at this point, and as a result, I have all of the images that I originally used when I talked about the not-great lineup of games at launch. That is it folks, an image I clipped from a website showing the games that would be available on Stadia day one. It looks less like the launch of a new platform and more like a Humble Bundle deal from five years ago. Worse yet, and this is something I am going to dive into a bit further is that most “core” gamers that they were marketing the system towards already had access to these titles.
I think one of the biggest problems with Stadia was its marketing and who it thought was the core audience. A lot of effort was spent marketing stadia towards core gamer audiences including the big reveal taking place at E3… a core gaming event. Even this commercial from the launch of the platform seems to indicate that Stadia is a replacement for PC and Console gaming, and that core gamers should want their console to have “no smell”? However, the ideal audience for Stadia was the person who USED to play games regularly but life has now gotten in the way. Someone with maybe an Xbox 360 from the glory days of playing COD with friends, and just fell out of the upgrade cycle and now maybe wants to dip in and play with their buddies again. The idea of just buying a game without a hardware lock-in is likely incredibly appealing to that audience.
The problem is that dream never really fleshed itself out. Even Destiny 2, one of the launch titles that was given away to every single member… was isolated so that you could only play with other Stadia users. It was not until two years later when Bungie focused on cross-play functionality that Stadia finally became open to actually playing with already entrenched Destiny 2 players. This same story played out on a few other games so the idea of using Stadia as a way to jump-start into group play never really worked either. Again the tech was great and could have been this awesome in-between option for folks who did not have the time or desire to maintain hardware, but that reality never fully materialized.
There was a very snarky tweet floating around yesterday essentially presenting the facts that Stadia has had what could have been a massive headwind over the last few years. It is true, the pandemic and boom in gaming caused so many other platforms to thrive. The global chip shortage and insane aftermarket prices drove people to look for other alternatives. Even the very rough launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and the high system demands, made Stadia one of the best platforms to play that game on. None of this was really enough to every truly jump-start this platform. What the snarky tweet does not go into however is just how stiff the competition for the cloud gaming space has been.
In very short succession Stadia had GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming (XCloud), Amazon Luna, and the aging PlayStation Now infrastructure getting a fresh coat of paint. In all of those cases, they were offering a similar streaming platform with its own baked-in library of games, and other than Luna… some significant benefits to choosing those platforms. Let’s talk about each of them a bit.
GeForce Now
It was really hard to find a number of games that you can play on this platform because it supports multiple existing storefronts… but one site indicated that you could play 1311 games. The huge benefit of GeForce Now is that you can bring your existing game licenses from Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, or UPlay and then are only really paying for the streaming service itself. It was not trying to be a new competitor on the game buying landscape and as a result, remains extremely competitive if the games you want to play are supported.
Xbox Cloud Streaming
If you have Xbox Game Pass you have access to Cloud Streaming as part of that and can play 186 games completely through streaming. This library continues to grow as the Game Pass ecosystem expands and since you are not paying any additional fees on top of that service, it is a really compelling offering. Even more compelling is that Microsoft has gone out of its way to make Cloud Streaming work on unaffiliated platforms like the Steam Deck.
PlayStation Now or Whatever they are calling it today
This was another service that I had a hard time getting data on, but based on one site they indicated that there are 750 games available through streaming. I do not think the number is that large, but regardless…. it is a large library that you now gain access to through various premium tiers of the PlayStation Plus subscription. This is the oldest of the streaming infrastructures, but it still seems to work remarkably well.
Amazon Luna
I really feel that Amazon Luna is another service that doesn’t really make much sense. I fully expect we will be hearing that Amazon has canceled it any day now. The service supports 96 games based on a wiki post, and some of those games require additional subscriptions to UPlay in order to access. As bad as I personally feel the product offering is… it does not push aside that this is also a direct competitor to Stadia and that if you have an Amazon Prime subscription you are getting access to several games each month on Luna.
Stadia
While Stadia was a better product offering than Luna, it doesn’t really stack up to any of the others. If you pay for the now $9.99 a month pro subscription you get access to 57 games. Then you can purchase another 233 games for the full market price through their storefront. I think what ultimately killed the service is trying to be its own unique competitor to the other storefronts. It never seemed to be able to cut the deals required to get the games it needed on its platform. Cyberpunk 2077 was the one shining example of a must-play game actually playing as good if not better on the platform, and even it was not enough to make the service viable.
I guess one of the sad things is that Stadia works extremely well on the Steam Deck. Granted this has nothing to do with anything that Google did and relies entirely upon the legwork that Microsoft did with the Edge browser and full native support for the Steam Deck controller, but it still worked beautifully. I do wonder what will happen to the Stadia tech now because it really did work extremely well. Will they rebrand this and try and turn it into something that they sell to publishers in order to let YouTube users launch directly into game demos while presentations are being streamed? There are a lot of possibilities here, and I really hope that it isn’t just going to rot somewhere in a git repository. If anything I think my biggest fear is that the takeaway is going to be that cloud gaming is dead.
I am thoroughly committed to cloud gaming, and I use Parsec streaming every single night to play my gaming desktop across my network from my laptop. In my working world, I use a Microsoft Azure Virtual desktop as my daily driver system. I think hardware virtualization is going to become the reality for the consumer in the same way that it is for server infrastructure currently. It is absolutely certain that gaming will be coming along for this ride, even if it is only to augment the processing power of existing console hardware. Stadia died because it never could quite create a product offering that made sense, not because the technology was bad. I expect to see cloud gaming as a continued presence for years to come.
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Good Morning Friends! I have to admit I have slowed down a bit on my whole “Steam Deck Nonsense” largely because I will not get my upgraded storage until early October. After reviewing my options I decided to go with an OEM drive originally designed for the Microsoft Surface, but provides 1TB of storage and fits the 2230 single-sided form factor required by the Steam Deck. This seemed to provide the most bang for the buck as 2TB drives are a wee bit out of my price range for the moment sitting around $600. Over time it is a certainty that the price will go down, but 1TB appears to be the largest reasonable option for the 2230 form factor. If you ONLY care about parity with the highest stock Steam Deck unit… you can pick up the 512GB for around $20.
So let’s play a game and talk about the total cost of what my unit is going to ultimately be versus the highest stock model. We know that the premium version comes with a special anti-glare screen treatment and 512 GB of internal storage. My unit will have 1TB of internal storage, so roughly twice the space but for sake of this experiment we are only going to see if my upgraded version could beat the price of the stock premium version. Let’s add up the components that I have added or will be adding to my unit.
Base 64GB eMMC Steam Deck – $399.00
WD PC SN530 M.2 2230 SSD 1TB NVMe – $134.60
Anti-Glare Screen Protector – $3.33 ($9.99 in a 3 pack)
So my finished unit is going to be $536.93 and will have a similar anti-glare screen with the benefit of it being a screen protector and having twice the internal storage and still come in $112.07 cheaper than the deluxe model. If you add in the 512 GB SD card I am also using with the unit, and the 20,000mAh power bank that I am using with the unit, you end up around price parity. However, you end up with a package that allows me to recharge the Steam Deck three times and have three times the storage capacity. Basically, I still think it is well worth the investment of time, to go with that base model and upgrade yourself and the pricing for storage will only get cheaper over time.
Installing Decky and Power Tools
Like I said before, I have slowed down configuring items on the Steam Deck that require a novel application of my time. My theory is that I should be able to clone my existing hard drive onto the much larger 1TB model when it comes in, but in case that fails… I don’t want to get too deep into the woods that it will be a challenge to bring my unit back up to where I am currently. If I have to wipe and start from scratch, I have a relatively minimal investment timewise currently. There is one thing however that I have been using quite a bit and have not really talked about and that is Power Tools. Essentially Decky is a plugin manager, and Power Tools is the default plugin that installs which allows you to modify various system settings on a game-by-game basis. This is terribly useful especially when it comes to emulation because it seems if you throttle the total core count it increases the speed that each individual core runs at.
Unlike most mods we might add to the Steam Deck, we are actually going to begin in Game Mode. The first step is that we need to go into Settings and the System menu and enable Developer Mode. Be very careful when you are in this menu because Format SD Card is located precariously below the option we need to toggle on shown in the screenshot above. Enabling Developer Mode is different from say unlocking your file system, and is a relatively safe operation.
Once enabled, you will now have a new option in the settings menu all the way at the bottom labeled Developer. In this screen, you are going to specifically toggle on something labeled “CEF Remote Debugging”. This is what allows Decky to install plugins from the storefront. Incidentally, while you are in this menu, you might also want to untick “Enable Wifi Power Management” because one of the problems with the Steam Deck is that in order to save battery life, it often drastically reduces WiFi transmit strength.
Next up we need to actually install Decky. In order to install this, we are going to need our old friend the console app, which means you will need to boot into Desktop Mode. As always you will have needed to set a password with the “passwd” command that I covered in a previous article. Next up we are going to get the install command for Decky from the project GitHub page. You are going to paste the following command into Konsole:
curl -L https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader/raw/main/dist/install_prerelease.sh | sh
This will install Decky to your steam deck. You will be prompted to enter the password that you set previously with the passwd command. Once everything finishes, reboot your device which will load into Game Mode by default. You have to reboot in order for the plugin to take effect, so simply returning to Game Mode is not sufficient.
If everything went as expected, you should see a new menu icon at the bottom of the menu when you click the “…” button. This will be where all Decky plugins can be located, and by default, you will have a single plugin loaded called PowerTools.
At the top of this menu on the right hand side next to the name Decky, you will now also have a storefront page that allows you to browse and install plugins. The storefront will allow you to install an addon or select a previous version if for some reason something is not supported in the most current version. I’ve never had to do this and for the most part, just install the latest version of everything. I guess let’s talk a bit about the plugins that I personally find useful.
vibrantDeck
VibrantDeck is essentially a very rudimentary version of a tool like ReShade for the Steam Deck. You can configure it globally like I have, just to increase the color saturation a bit, or enable per-game profiles for more granular control. While you can’t do some of the crazy screen effects like you can with ReShade, you can steak the settings to make the Steam Deck image a little more pleasing to your preferences. I personally feel like by default the Steam Deck is a little bit desaturated, and this can resolve that easily.
CSS Loader
CSS Loader essentially allows you to style the theme elements of the Deck as well as configure various visual tweaks. For example, if you scroll back up to the first image in this post, you will notice that all of my Deck icons have a slightly rounded edge to them. I achieved this by installing the Round theme element which allows you to control the curve intensity on most images. I also have one that similarly applies a rounded effect to the virtual keyboard that overrides my existing rainbow keyboard theme. There are a bunch of themes that folks have created that do various things, so it is well worth spending some time browsing. I personally landed on Obsidian because it is essentially the default theme of the Steam Deck with the ability to change the background colors.
DeckFAQs
This one is admittedly a bit frivolous, but I come from an era when GameFAQs mattered. This essentially gives you rapid access to text-based game guides from within steam. By default, it will take whatever game you are playing as the search parameter, but you can also submit your own queries. Ultimately if you click through to a guide it will load the full text-based guide in an overlay window on the deck. Admittedly you could do ALL of this on your phone, and would probably have a better experience but I mostly installed the plugin for nostalgia sake and for those rare times when I am playing something that I want a walkthrough on like FFV for tidbits of information I might not remember when doing a playthrough.
ProtonDB Badges
This one is pretty straightforward, but it allows you to apply the compatibility information to your hover-over effect on Steam games. This will tell you quickly if a game is fully compatible, works with issues, or is not supported at all. Steam maintains a list of games that are completely verified to work with the Deck, but often times most of your library has some support that might require something as simple as occasionally doing mouse input with the trackpad. What you really care about however is how well the game might run, and there is an external resource called ProtonDB that does this.
If you look at 7 Days to Die in your library you see the standard information icon, that you can click through and get additional information.
If you click through to the game profile, you can now see a ProtonDB badge in the top left corner of the profile indicating that the game has been platinum certified to run under proton.
If you want even MORE information, you can click on the badge and it will bring up the full game profile on ProtonDB. In this case for example it shows that 7 Days to Die not only runs under Proton, but it actually natively supports Linux, so the game should run excellently.
The Steam Deck continues to be a phenomenal piece of hardware that walks that line between ease of use and enthusiast shenanigans. Like I said I am mostly in a holding pattern as I wait for storage before I go too much deeper down this rabbit hole. Probably my next wave of modifications will be to get specific games working on the deck. I want to try and get Final Fantasy XIV, GW2, and World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha running. All of those will require a specific brand of nonsense that I do not relish doing a second time if my clone disk idea does not work as intended.
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Good Morning Friends. Sometimes in a game, it is the little things that you really enjoy. Last night I had this thought about how much I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 when someone else is driving the car. My entire adult life I have been the primary driver in our household, for various reasons… but not the least of which my wife has significant issues. As a result, I never get to just chill out and gaze out the window watching the scenery go by as I did as a child. So I deeply enjoy the experience of when an NPC drives me around from point a to point b while on a mission. There is just something so cool about the way that this tech works in-game, and I wish honestly that it were an option to just hop in a taxi instead of using the fast travel system.
Another thing that I really dig about Cyberpunk is how Night City has more of a sense of presence than almost any other game that I have played. While set in the future, there are absolutely places that feel like places I have been before. The texture of the city is recognizable, especially as it fades into areas that blend more and more industrial development. Living in Oklahoma there are lots of areas where there is prolific petroleum industry debris jutted right up against an attempt at residential areas. The poorer the area, the more the zoning lines blend and fade into each other. Basically, it is a believable space for me to inhabit while living in this future punk late capitalism hellscape.
I’m going through a weird time where I am bouncing pretty heavily between games. I spent some time over the weekend chipping away at Diablo III Season 27, and also some time poking around Path of Exile. While I have largely wrapped my goals up, I still have a stack of maps and tablets to run through and do when nothing else sounds right. I got this really dumb or lucky drop depending on your perspective and found 38 maps in one single kill. It seems that I had a combination of an affix that turns ALL loot drops into maps and that was combined with another affix that causes everything to drop a mirrored copy. So that means I have a ton of maps to play with and even managed to get a few divines to drop last night.
I am still in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for the Greatsword/Brimstone Sands patch to drop. I spent a lot of time poking around the PTR, but have largely tapered that off given that it is throwaway progress. I am sufficiently happy with what I have seen as far as leveling speed and ease of leveling professions. I am still angling for a restart when the patch drops, and I kinda just want to get that all over with. I hate living in this limbo of not quite knowing for certain what that process is going to look like and when it is going to happen. I am still occasionally poking my head in, farming a bit of gypsum and getting a few expertise raises a day on my main. However, I really want to start fresh and experience all of the new content from scratch… and have it NOT be on a PTR server.
The post Cyberpunk needs a Taxi System appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This is going to be a bit of an odd topic, but it is a whirlwind of half-remembered memories, expectations, and the second death of G4. Starting on the 14th we began to hear news of significant layoffs at G4TV and these have continued over the last few weeks to where most of the talent originally running the rebooted shows is gone. I specifically chose the above image from the early marketing material, because every single one of those hosts is now long gone from the network. A quick check on a recent episode shows that it seems the remaining members are Gina Darling, Kassem G., Will Neff, and Vanessa Guerrero. I hope that they can reboot the concept of the network and turn it into something that actually becomes viable.
However, I feel like we need to take a step back from the death of G4 and talk a bit about its bizarre return last November. When I first heard about the return in October, it was indicated that there would be a major cable television presence for the rebooted network. However at least in the case of Cox… I never did see it added to the channel lineup. Instead, the shows were a blending of Twitch Live streams that seemed to go on for untold hours, and a series of edited shows being posted on YouTube. It didn’t seem as much of a “Network” as it did a weird case of nostalgia not quite living up to reality. The shows that I managed to catch just weren’t all that enjoyable to watch. The mental image I had of the show that I remembered fondly… didn’t quite live up to the modern reality.
This is the point where we get into faulty memories. In my head, I remember going home after work each day and turning on Attack of the Show while I was dealing with sorting out dinner and then eventually sitting down to consume it. The key piece that I was forgetting what I was so fondly remembering was actually TechTV and not G4. Then the show that I remember watching was actually The Screensavers and not necessarily Attack of the Show. At this point in history, Slashdot was essentially the internet newspaper, and I remember going home each day and watching TechTV and getting some more behind-the-scenes information on those stories. I remember skits, but I mostly remembered enjoying just a bunch of tech and gaming news being thrown at me in quick bites as I sat down to eat dinner.
After some digging, I remember the TechTV and G4 merger, and the broader rebranding… and the show that was taking the same slot as Screensavers was Attack of the Show. THIS is the version that I remember, the one with Kevin Rose, Kevin Pereria, Patrick Norton, eventually Olivia Munn, and occasionally Morgan Webb and Adam Sessler visiting from their shows. Watching through the clip of this first episode after the merger, it still feels a lot more like Screensavers than the show that would be rebooted last November. There were a few more skits, but still a heavy emphasis on tech and gaming news. I think maybe the problem is that over the years they lost most of their hard-hitting tech enthusiasts and were only left with folks like Kevin Pereria that were more gameshow hosts than technologists. I know Kevin Rose for example left to found Digg and eventually Rev3, the later producing a lot of content similar to the original TechTV.
So I think the core problem with the return of G4… is that on some level it was a play for the attention of folks who remembered the channel fondly. The problem at least for me specifically is the version of the show that I remembered fondly… is not the version that was ultimately taken off the air in 2013. The version that seems to have been resurrected is this format that was mostly made up of largely not terribly humorous skits. I am not sure that version is the one that anyone wanted. I am not exactly certain when I stopped watching Attack of the Show, but I faded away from it long before the 2010s. In the post-WoW era, most of my time was spent engaged in an MMORPG as opposed to watching television in any form. I do however remember in the vanilla/bc era that several of us would talk about things that we saw on Attack of the Show, so it was still something I was consuming then.
I think what ultimately lead to the obsolescence of G4 originally, is that the internet changed around it. Internet and ultimately gaming culture when TechTV launched centered around GameFAQs, Slashdot, Flash Animations, and grainy Quicktime exports on sites like Ebaums World. This is a time before YouTube and Reddit, and as a result, we were starved for any sort of content that actually focused on our interests be they geek or gamer. Then YouTube launched and technology evolved to the point where anyone anywhere could create fan-based content. Now you are drowning in a sea of options all vying for your attention, and as a result, we have all spread out to consume different sorts of content. Essentially Attack of the Show is trying to do a bunch of things… that other channels now specialize in and as a result often just do better.
Quick Gaming News – Maybe you should check out CheckPoint which does a quick rundown of major gaming topics and is actually funny.
Skit Comedy – Maybe you might prefer Good Mythical Morning and Good Mythical More which deliver a daily dose of good-natured skits.
Behind the Scenes – Maybe you might enjoy NoClip which deep dives into the story behind the creation of various gaming franchises.
Detailed Tech News – My personal favorite here is probably The WAN Show from Linus Tech Tips.
Essentially everything that I used to get from TechTV/G4 I have found another source for on YouTube. So when the channel relaunched back in November I gave it a shot… but largely found the streams difficult to watch and the YouTube clips were fragmented across a half dozen individual channels making it very hard to follow anything. Something like the WAN Show has ballooned from an hour to two hours, but it is something that requires very little of me and that I can have playing in the background while I do other things. The nature of how Attack of the Show was produced and existed mostly on Twitch… a platform that I do not regularly consume, makes it a bit of a frustrating mess to actually watch. Having commercial breaks built into a Twitch stream… that was for broadcast television breaks… also felt really weird.
I have to admit when I first heard about G4 coming back I was a little bit excited, in part because I do have fond memories of that era. The problem is that what it provides, we already had in an overwhelming bounty. In the post YouTube era, we have ready access to extremely detailed content on whatever niche we want to consume and it is available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Coming back G4 had to compete with an army of specialists and generalists who are all focusing on their segment of audience and doing a better job of serving them. While what G4 did at the time was unique, it now just feels like yet another high production value channel… in a sea of high production value channels. So what I see is a project that spent a lot of money on something that no one actually asked for, and hinged upon nostalgia that never really paid off.
I wish everyone involved with the most modern incarnation of G4 the best of luck, but I cannot visualize a world where they can pull out of this tailspin.
The post The Second Death of G4 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
