Google’s Stadia Could Take Video Games Out of Your Hands
Google’s all-streaming vision may be the inevitable future of the video game industry, even if Google’s not the one to do it. However, if Stadia and its future streaming competitors become the norm, it could cause serious harm to the idea of owning a video game and all that comes with it.
In the past, when you bought a video game cartridge or disc, you owned that game. You could dig Super Mario World out of storage, plug it into your old Super Nintendo, and play it right now, even though the hardware platform it plays on is more than 25 years old. Platforms like Steam also let you own the game in that you can download digital copies. If Steam were to go out of business, you might not be able to download a game anymore, but as long as you already have it on your computer, you could keep it as long as you wanted.
With Stadia’s streaming model, however, you never download a game. The game is installed on Google’s servers, it runs on Google’s servers, and your game progression is stored on Google’s servers. This new paradigm provides convenience and a potentially amazing experience, but it replicates problems we’ve seen as other types of online media have shifted from owning to streaming. And those problems could be much worse for the gaming industry.
The most prominent question with a service like Stadia — aside from whether your internet speed can actually support this — is what happens should the game be removed from the server? Steam sometimes removes games from its store but will still (with rare exceptions) allow anyone who already bought the game to download it. And if you downloaded it, you can keep playing it forever, even if Steam shut down. This isn’t an option for game streaming, however. If a game is removed due to licensing issues, technical problems, or a server outage, you lose the game and potentially any progress you may have made.
This is exactly what happened to some users of Sony’s similar streaming game service PlayStation Now. In 2015, several Assassin’s Creed games originally designed for the PlayStation 3 were made available through the subscription streaming platform on the PlayStation 4. By 2016, those games were removed. The only way to play the games today would be to buy the old physical or downloadable versions and play them on an actual PS3 console.
This raises the even more complicated problem of what happens to the time and money you invest in a game. According to professor Jon Festinger of the Centre for Digital Media, games have already faced issues where users can lose valuable data. “You buy a game, it’s an online game… and then you spend money, you buy upgrades, you do whatever,” he says. “And the game company decides, ‘This isn’t financially worthwhile, and we’re closing it down.’ And so everything that you’ve invested in the game is now gone.”
If you’re watching your favorite show on Netflix, it could disappear from their library before you get to finish it. That’s not great, but at least you could pick it back up on Hulu or by other means without losing anything. You can’t “unwatch” the episodes you’ve seen. Your games, on the other hand, include your progression, achievements, inventory, and experience. These can be lost to the ether if you can’t export them. Even if you buy the game somewhere else, you’d have to start over.
Sony indirectly dealt with this problem on PlayStation Now by letting users download and transfer game saves to a console. If you dig around in your system’s files, you could copy game saves from your PS4 to a PS3 (or vice versa). It’s a tedious process, but it at least gives the player some autonomy. Stadia, on the other hand, won’t have a console at all. With nothing to download saved files to, there’s no way to preserve your progress on your own terms, unless Google expands its Takeout service — which allows users to download Google data like Gmail — to include game saves.
According to Google’s presentation, developers will have the ability to migrate game save data if they so choose, but this just puts players at the mercy of a different company. Without direct access to your save data — which players easily have access to in most downloadable games today — users run the risk of losing tens or even hundreds of hours of progress on the whims of gaming juggernauts. Large companies managing popular games will almost certainly enable this feature, but smaller developers may not have the resources. And unpopular or dead games can get left behind.
Speaking of dead games, what happens when a game gets so old that it’s forgotten or the developer goes out of business? Such games are called abandonware. Enthusiast sites like My Abandonware collect the files necessary to play old games that companies no longer maintain. This helps preserve games that would otherwise be lost to the ether. On a streaming platform like Stadia, there’s no way to access the game files, which means there’s no way to preserve them.
This kind of preservation isn’t just relevant for connoisseurs of gaming history, either. The great sci-fi spoof show Mystery Science Theater 3000 famously coined the phrase “keep circulating the tapes” in response to its viewers’ habit of recording and trading episodes of the show. During its early seasons, MST3K was only available on certain regional broadcast stations late at night. Fan circulation led to much wider exposure, a deal with the cable network Comedy Central, and decades later, its very own Netflix revival.
With games exclusively on a streaming platform — and Google has announced that at least some games on the service will be Stadia-exclusive — there seems to be no way to download a game you bought and preserve it. If Stadia, or another publisher, decides to remove a streaming-only game that’s not popular enough or too controversial, it could be lost forever.
Ownership rights for digital media like music, TV, and film is already eroding, but with services like Netflix, the “tapes” can at least keep metaphorically circulating to ensure nothing is ever truly lost. If Netflix ever closes down, someone on the internet will probably have a (somewhat extralegal) copy of Stranger Things preserved out there somewhere. But average users can already lose legal access to content, as was the case when classic film site FilmStruck shut down last year.
The choice to preserve game data may be out of Stadia users’ hands. As Festinger puts it, “It’s well worth watching to see what Google does with [Stadia], because their general position, certainly with Android, etc., was to build open platforms… But it’s up to Google whether they do that.” Unless Google proactively works to ensure that players can keep their data, that buying a game means you can access it forever, and that old or lost games can be preserved, Stadia would end game ownership on its platform — and, if it catches on, the whole concept of game ownership might be lost entirely. If that happens, we could lose more than we’d ever realize.
Google’s Stadia Could Take Video Games Out of Your Hands
Research & References of Google’s Stadia Could Take Video Games Out of Your Hands|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments