streaming – Page 2 – MMO Fallout

Google Stadia is here, by which I mean the first units are starting to ship out. Will MMO Fallout have an early review? No, those are for people who probably asked for them. Me I prefer to sit in the bleachers with the crowd and heckle from a distance.

Are you ready to pay extra and monthly for early access to a system that might not be here in a couple of years? Early reviews are out for the Stadia and the impressions are pretty much in line with everyone’s level headed skepticism about Stadia. It’s not great. On the plus side, Google announced that the launch lineup would basically double last night.

The Verge’s Sean Hollister says “I’d happily keep playing if I wasn’t already spoiled.”
Polygon’s Chris Plante says “It lacks far too many of the basic features we’ve come to take for granted in our consoles and streaming services.”
Alex Hern over at The Guardian says “Only once did I experience anything that looked like lag (when sending a picture message to my partner); every other time, it was perfect.”
Wired’s Jess Grey notes “If Google has its way, PC and console gaming are about to become more accessible to millions of users, and that’s an incredible feat no matter how you slice it. But as always, there’s a catch.”
VentureBeat’s Jeff Grub says “For me, this is a win for Google. The technology works. Or, at least, it can work, and it does so consistently for me. So I can see myself playing games like this in the future.”
CNET’s Scott Stein says “It’s weird that the Stadia interface — clean and clear-cut like the gaming equivalent of a Netflix or Apple TV — shows titles you already own, but you have to go to the Stadia phone app to buy more.”

A couple of reviews have posted prices for Stadia games and boy are they not cheap.

MMO Fallout will have coverage of the Stadia launch probably tomorrow because I pre-ordered the founder’s edition back on day one and my unit just shipped this morning. Why? I’ll give you an explanation once I’ve justified it to myself.

Google Gives Us Another Reason To Have No Faith In Stadia

Google Stadia is one of the few places where your money would be better invested in Enron stocks or Zimbabwe currencies.

Now, those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I consider Google Stadia to be a multi-million dollar scam. Here you have a company selling you a service where you are forced to pay monthly in order to access games that you have to pay full price for as part of a service whose quality wholly depends on the reliability of Google’s servers as well as their connection to your home. What happens when Google decides to shut down Stadia? Product director and accessory to fraud Andrey Doronichev refuses to answer the question and has consistently dodged the question because we all know the answer: You lose access to your purchases for good.

“I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary,” he said. “I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it’s hard to find a CD player these days :)”

Maybe it is if you’re in the Google echo chamber, but I was able to find a CD player at just about every store I went to outside of the grocery store.

I tacitly endorse people avoiding Google Stadia at all cost, and for a simple reason: Google doesn’t care about its products. It doesn’t care about you as a customer. It treats its products as “experiments” and will readily abandon them and shut down services at a whim, because they no longer feel like doing that anymore. And the people who put money into that product? Google couldn’t care less about ripping them off, it just moves on to the next “experiment” funded off of eager customers.

Don’t believe me? In 2019, Google shut down or announced the shuttering of:

Chromecast audio
Google Realtime API
Youtube video annotations
Google notification widget
Google Allo
URL Shortener
Google+
Inbox by Google
Data Saver Extension
Cloud Messaging
Youtube Gaming
Areo
Blog Compass
Google Jump
Google Trips
Works with Nest
Youtube for 3DS
Youtube Messages
G-Suite Training
Google Daydream
Google Clips
Google Bulletin
Google Fusion Tables
Google translator toolkit
Google Correlate
Hangouts on Air
Fabric
Hire by Google
Google Hangouts
Daydream VR

And we’re supposed to have faith that Stadia will be run for years to come?

I don’t trust Google Stadia because I don’t trust Google. I don’t trust when they say they’re in it for the long haul because anything they could say to reassure me has already been used to lie about previous, now defunct products. I don’t trust that Google won’t suddenly lose interest in the product and then abandon it at a moment’s notice. And what good is the promise today that they are going to keep it going in two years when they sadly announce that it’s coming to an end?

It’s worthless. Google’s word in supporting its products is worthless.

Not Massive: Microsoft Offering Live Refunds

Microsoft recently announced that the company would be changing its policy to remove a longstanding requirement for Xbox Live gold in order to access streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu. In order to appeal to those who subscribe to Gold solely for these services, Microsoft has announced a partial refund system for those with active subscriptions after the transition takes place. Following the update this June, customers with time remaining on their accounts will be eligible for a pro-rated refund.

The amount of the refund has not been detailed, but is based on how much time is remaining on the account. Now all Microsoft needs to do is lift the subscription requirement to access MMOs and the company will be more on par with Sony’s services.

(Source: Game Informer)

En Masse Entertainment Bringing Streaming To TERA

Hey, remember when En Masse Entertainment was offering a demo version of TERA on Gaikai? And then remember when Sony purchased Gaikai and shut everything down? We didn’t either, but luckily that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on The Exiled Realm of A Massive Installation just because TERA is about fifty gigabytes. In a press release sent out today, En Masse Entertainment has revealed a partnership with Happy Cloud Incorporated, to bring TERA to players devoid of time and bandwidth. Rather than having to download the 22gb file required to install TERA, players simply boot up the application and let the game download the files it needs as they are needed.

“Improving our user onboarding process for TERA: Rising is a priority for us, and using Happy Cloud’s system is an easy way for us to get more players into TERA’s immersive, 3D world,” said Soo Min Park, COO at En Masse Entertainment. “Taking a graphically rich, fast-paced game such as TERA: Rising, which contains hundreds of hours of gameplay, and delivering the bytes in the order they’re needed is no small task, but we’re confident this will provide an even better experience for our fast growing legion of fans.”

Happy Cloud’s download system is available now through the TERA website once a user registers for an account. As far as MMO Fallout knows, this service only applies to the North American version and there has not (to our knowledge) been any announcement by Gameforge in Europe.

(Source: En Masse Entertainment Press Release)

Play WoW While You Patch WoW!

Technically, Turbine has been doing this for a while with their game clients, but given that few other developers are unwilling to take on this same method, I figured Blizzard gets some notice. What’s the worst part of patching? If you have low bandwidth, your answer is likely the downloading portion. On large patch days, you can probably forget getting any World of Warcraft action in until sometime later in the day, assuming your connection holds up during the patching process.

Tentonhammer is reporting an addition to the WoW: Cataclysm beta, that will allow players to stream patches, allowing them to download only a small amount in order to get into the game while the rest downloads in the background. Your experience will not be ideal, according to the patch notes, but the hope is to minimize the time between patching and playing. There isn’t much information as to what “less than ideal” equates to, but in the realm of big patches and slow download speeds, it is better than nothing.

Hopefully this feature is made standard when World of Warcraft: Cataclysm goes live later this year.

More on World of Warcraft as it appears.

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