[mooman219]

There's a lot of animosity on this thread, but I think Stadia shutting down is distressing and we should talk about that.

The concept of a 3rd party game streaming platform is another foot into the grave with Stadia shutting down, and that should be cause for alarm. I think most people in this thread can agree that the licensing model for Stadia was less than stellar, but it feels like getting favorable licensing requires being an existing behemoth (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Sony PlayStation Now, Nvidia GeForce Now) to have any chance of a AAA title being on your streaming platform. Blade filed for insolvency just last year, and has since been remarketed as Shadow.tech which functionally is just expensive Windows VMs.

A lot of people on here will happily argue that they want to own their games (Which I want too!), while also rejoicing that cloud gaming is increasing narrowing to fewer and fewer companies. Licensing is getting increasingly harder, and I'm worried at some point we'll be left with a monopoly and it'll be too late.

This is hacker news, what's the answer here for startups going forward? Is becoming a 1st party powerhouse (Like Netflix) while getting licensing agreements with as many indie games as you can (Like Epic Games?) the only option? How do you make this model succeed when you have no negotiating power? If Sony is suing Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on their platform, what chance does a startup have?

[wbear]

I do not want cloud gaming startups to succeed. I feel like I would own my games even less than I do now, and due to the laws of physics, games would be less responsive than playing locally. I am glad that Stadia has failed.

[mooman219]

I believe the issue is cloud gaming is succeeding for a triopoly of companies, and only them. You can not want them to succeed, but that's further entrenching their dominance. If you're fine with narrowing who can license games to just a couple of companies, then I'm afraid that's there's a very real risk of no longer owning your games at all. This is a bit of a slippery slope, but that's just my concern.