While people are still grappling with the technical ramifications of Google’s Stadia platform, gamers have begun asking deeper, more troubling questions. What do mods look like in a world of game streaming? What happens to game preservation? What happens if Google dwarfs gaming the same way it has with search, browsers and advertising? And most worryingly of all, what happens if Google decides to walk away from the industry later
While people are still grappling with the technical ramifications of Google’s Stadia platform, gamers have begun asking deeper, more troubling questions. What do mods look like in a world of game streaming? What happens to game preservation? What happens if Google dwarfs gaming the same way it has with search, browsers and advertising? And most worryingly of all, what happens if Google decides to walk away from the industry later on?
In the immediate aftermath of the Google Stadia announcement, the public discourse largely centered on the technicalities. That was the part Google had provided the most detail on, so it was natural for people to focus on broadband connections, latency, and what is possible now versus a few years from now.
There was a little bit of excitement mixed in with all of that. What’s the gaming experience like when your connection is in the same room as the dedicated servers that you’re playing on? What’s the potential level of fidelity like when games aren’t limited to the hardware in a single console, or a single PC? What experiences can you have when it’s possible to develop a game that takes players across multiple screen formats?
That’s exciting to think about. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially with a company that wants to carve up a sizeable chunk of the gaming pie for itself.
The biggest complains or concerns against Stadia can be categorized into three broad aspects. The first is a backlash against Google itself. Not Google the search engine, or the presence of a company the size of Google (or its parent company Alphabet), but rather concern over how Google specifically operates as a business.
Google has a history of launching and then abandoning products, even ones that users really love. There’s Google+, the company’s alternative to a Facebook-style social offering that never really took off. There’s offerings like Google Reader, which fans of RSS readers still miss today. Google Health, a service to broaden access to health and wellness information, was shut down in 2012 after “not having the broad impact that we hoped it would”. Google’s Orkut social networking service found some popularity overseas, but it didn’t gain traction in the United States, so that was killed off in 2014. Google’s Allo messaging app was shut down this month.
It’s not just virtual products that Google has a history of walking away from. The most damming indictment of the company’s attitude brought up in the past week was the rollout of Google Fiber in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville became the 12th city added to the fiber project back in 2017, and the internet conglomerate quickly set about rearranging the city’s infrastructure to offer gigabit speeds to residents.
But Google vastly underestimated the technical scope of the project. The plan was to roll out fiber using a series of shallow trenches, where fiber was laid two inches beneath the sides of roads and later covered up with asphalt. The process caused massive disruption to the city’s roads, since they had to be torn up. Worse still, the pits and asphalt were too thin, resulting in the rubber patching and, in some cases, exposing the cables and wiring.
Google had to recover affected areas with hot asphalt a second time, but that wasn’t the only problem they faced. AT&T and Spectrum sued the conglomerate to block a city ordinance granting Google access to electricity poles in the city. AT&T owns most of the poles in the area, but the lawsuit was really just an attempt to stall Google’s rollout, as evidenced by the company’s refusal to challenge the judge’s ruling.
But the technical challenges proved too much, and after all the disruption Google announced it was shutting down the Louisville project entirely, less than two years after signups began. The experiment hasn’t been a total failure – Google’s presence forced AT&T to roll out gigabit services faster than they would have ordinarily. But for residents who watched their city pass all the laws Google wanted, and then watched as Google tore up their streets and laid hot asphalt over everything to fix it, only to abandon the project and shut down services altogether, it’s a galling lack of respect.
Rightly so, people have questioned what would happen if Google took the same approach with games. Which feeds into the second major concern.
Part of the reason why emulators are so revered is because it’s the only way some older titles can be played at all. Video games are built on a long and great history of quirks and differences – different games for different regions, titles being censored or banned outright in some nations, as well as what happens to a game during the localization process.
In the modern era, that preservation problem has been less about functioning hardware and more about compatibility. There’s plenty of modders and gamers who have found ways to get titles that used to run on Windows 95 or Windows 98 playing just nicely in 2019. GOG and Night Dive Studios are great examples of making a living doing precisely this.
But have you ever tried to get a game that only ran on Windows 3.
