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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.

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.

I’ve been playing an exceptional amount of Path of Exile since I last posted, but I am not going to talk about that this morning. Instead, I am going to talk about a few disconnected topics. As payment for passage, however, I am sharing a cute picture of Gracie conked out on a blanket laying on my desk. When we first got her she was hassled quite a bit by our eldest cat Mollie, and as a result, she would scream her head off any time she needed to go potty… and we would walk with her up to the litter box and guard her while she did her business. Thankfully we have moved past this and she comes and goes freely from the upstairs bathroom where the litterboxes are at. However, she has started screaming at us for different reasons.

For example Friday evening I was playing Path of Exile and my wife was exhausted, and as such went to bed early. Apparently, my wife and I going to bed at different times is a capital offense in Gracie-land. I had moved from upstairs on Teamspeak to downstairs chilling on my laptop, and it was not long before Gracie was running around screaming at me. At first, I thought she wanted attention and I tried to coax her into laying on my legs like all of our cats seem to enjoy doing. She was having none of this and continued to scream at me until I agreed to shut down my laptop and head to bed. Then when I got to bed… it wasn’t enough and she took to screaming at me until I finally laid down in the position she wanted me so that she could curl up in the hammock of blanket that forms between my legs.

Last night we had a repeat performance of this whole sequence, as my wife went to bed around 9 pm, and shortly thereafter Gracie was telling me how improper this all was. I held out until around 9:45 when I finally gave up and went to bed. At which point she seemed to be satisfied enough to let me choose my own position in the bed and not demand the leg hammock. However the moment I decided to put down my phone and actually go to sleep… she hopped over to my legs and started purring. This is essentially going to be our life now.

In other news, I watched She-Hulk last week and am looking forward to more episodes this week. We really are living in this golden age of comic book media. The thing is that not every show has to be the literal best thing ever because we get so many different snapshots of the same comic book world. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy She-Hulk because I absolutely did, but more that the pressure that I am placing on each individual show is a bit lowered because we are getting so many of them. The CGI work was greatly improved from those early trailers that had a deep uncanny valley problem. I think the big thing I am looking forward to in shows like She-Hulk is a fleshing out of the world, and that not everything has to be building towards some major crisis. That is in part why I am looking forward to a lot of the Star Wars series as well because they are putting more content in the world and expanding it.

In other other news… for some reason, I have decided to start watching Bleach again. Well, I know the reason… and it is because the seventeenth season is about to be released after a massive gap. Why I am starting over from the beginning because I could not remember exactly where I left off in the story. To the best of my knowledge, it was somewhere during season 13 of 16… but it had been well over a decade since I last watched bleach and as a result, the rewatch is probably warranted. For those who are curious, the entire series run is now on Hulu of all places. Like so many fighting anime… it had become extremely formulaic in the late seasons but starting from scratch makes me remember why I loved this show so much in the first place.

I think part of why the first three seasons worked so well, is that there was a lot of “emotional payload”. There was this epic adventure that involved a suicide mission to save a friend, and because of this, it felt like there was so much more riding on the line than just fighting baddies. After the third season, it takes a turn into the formula of meeting a new super powerful enemy… that requires learning a new fighting technique in order to defeat. I am wondering how this is going to feel watching it play out in fast forward rather than waiting a week between the encounters. So far the pacing has seemed more enjoyable chain watching the show as opposed to constantly waiting for the next episode to land… and then having it be half retracing what happened the week before. The new show lands in October… but I have no clue if I will be able to watch all 200+ episodes of the series in order to be ready for it.

It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.

Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.

I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.

Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.

• Velyna’s Storm Brand Inquisitor for 3.19

Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.

Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.

• Lightning Strike Raider for 3.19

If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.

If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.