Quoting: ShmerlWould it make sense to write straight to Stadia chief Phil Harrison about it? I doubt this kind of decision can be made without his involvement.

One person might have had luck with the Intel ceo, but imagine what would happen if everybody went ahead and wrote all their thoughts to CEOs all the time.

I would think of that as inconsiderate TBH.

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Quoting: ShmerlThat's the whole point of offering a DRM-free option. Currently game on Stadia is DRMed. To make any of them DRM-free, means to offer a downloadable version (I suppose it would mean adjustments like you said, to provide ability to run it on regular desktop Linux). Technical changes aside, it will simply make it possible to back up the game and run it without the service.

I would love to still be able to own games and run them locally, sure. Sounds to me though that that's a burden on the developers rather than Stadia. I thrink people are still going to want to own games, so as long as there's a market for buying games, that won't go away because of Stadia.

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: ShmerlAny recommendation to whom send such proposal? Google isn't exactly known to be very open to external communication. I don't mind sending a suggestion, as long as it won't go to some usual stone wall of support.

Google is huge, and so is the amount of feedback they get. Depends on the team, but they usually go through everything, even if they can't literally reply to everyone. Probably the first step would be to wait for launch, then submit feedback through whatever interface they have. Mind you, they could disagree with the suggestion or have it as low priority, but they won't be able to engage with you personally due to the massive amount of feedback they get.

Actually thinking about it more, does it even make sense? If you have a game you bought but want to play on Stadia (having paid subscription fee):

- If the game runs on Stadia, it's likely already on Stadia's catalogue, which means you can play it regardless of having owned it.
- If the game doesn't run on Stadia, well it doesn't, you can't ask Stadia to run it.

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Quoting: silmethI wouldn’t want to suffer a whole game playthrough over a fallible network, but I do prefer streaming 25 Mbit of data every second for a few hours to just try the game than downloading the whole game before I can get a taste of it.

Did you see the presentation? The demo guy literally just left one device and picked up the game on another. I'm sure connection drop is not at all an issue as you should be able to just pick up where you left off.

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Quoting: ShmerlAny recommendation to whom send such proposal? Google isn't exactly known to be very open to external communication. I don't mind sending a suggestion, as long as it won't go to some usual stone wall of support.

Google is huge, and so is the amount of feedback they get. Depends on the team, but they usually go through everything, even if they can't literally reply to everyone. Probably the first step would be to wait for launch, then submit feedback through whatever interface they have. Mind you, they could disagree with the suggestion or have it as low priority, but they won't be able to engage with you personally due to the massive amount of feedback they get.

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Quoting: ShmerlExactly my point. Let me repeat what I said above already to answer ShabbyX how such thing could be implemented DRM-free, since the answer was swallowed with all this pointless claiming that Stadia isn't DRMed:

To be clear, I'm not pro-DRM. Some points in your argument are valid, but did you watch the presentation? I think the point you missed when answering my question is that Stadia, being server-based has capabilities you *can't* get on your PC. If you have a squad of 6 people, there will be a huge strain on your network to stream their views while playing. Very-large-scale multiplayer will also have issues. It's not the GPU they use that makes Stadia special (not at all). It's the fact that instances of a multiplayer game talk through Google's internet backbone.

And your idea that you can buy a game, and have the option to stream it at a cost would be nice. Feel free to suggest it, who knows maybe it gets implemented at some point.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: fabertaweIt's only DRM if it's the only way to play the game. As someone pointed out earlier, going to the cinema isn't DRM, you can buy the DVD if you want to "own" it. Same thing exactly.

It will be the only way to play games through Stadia, i.e. they aren't offering downloads. So it is DRMed.

Like I said, please think about what _you_ would have done if you were the lead of Stadia. Being large-distributed-data-center-based, how could you ensure that games that are built for that scale could run on a PC? Besides, you are not buying games individually to play on Stadia (if you did, yes your concern would be totally valid). If you pay a 10$ subscription fee, you can't expect to be able to download and play every game Stadia offers outside of it as if you owned all of them.

If 15 years ago they described Netflix, there would have probably been similar reactions: "Can't own the movie anymore. I can only watch on Netflix. That's bad". But here we are, and I don't care at all if I don't have the DVD to something I once watched on Netflix and moved on.

I have a library of ~200 games on steam, and honestly I have rarely ever went back to any of them after one playthrough. I think this is less of a DRM issue and more of a paradigm shift from people buying games individually to subscription-based play-whatever-you-want-without-having-to-buy-it-first-and-return-if-shitty. I don't think Google is actively trying to implement DRM in Stadia. As I see firsthand at Google, we are all trying to build amazing stuff, and have little time for bullshit like that.

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What's with all the DRM talk? You're not "buying" games with Stadia for DRM to apply. DRM is only meaningful (and bullshit) when you buy something, because DRM restricts what you can do with it.

With Stadia, you are paying for play time. If you go to the cinema, you don't think about DRM because you are not buying the movie, just watching it. Same with Netflix. If you ever played games at a game café, it was a similar situation to Stadia; you paid to play games the café owned, not you, and DRM didn't apply.

If you are not convinced, try to think what you could have done differently as an anti-DRM person if you were the lead of Stadia.

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Quoting: Xaero_VincentNice! So with "primarily", at least some games might be using something like Wine though? If so that would be good news, because then Google might be able to put their weight and push BattlEye and Easy Anti Cheat to behave with Wine if or when popular battle royale games hit the service.

I honestly don't know if there would be any game that's emulated.

But what's the point of anticheat on a game running on a controlled server?

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Disclaimer: I work at Google (though not on Stadia), previously Eidos Montreal (Shadow of the Tomb Raider).

Games running on Stadia are primarily native. Yeap, engines you never dreamed would support Linux, now do thanks to Google.

As Stadia has its own SDK, porting from Stadia to Desktop means adding SDL support and supporting the desktop swapchains. Personally, I think the biggest hurdle with desktop support would be testing and bug fixing, as with Stadia the game is really just tested on AMD. That said, as a desktop Linux gamer myself, I'm certainly hoping this would help get us more AAA games. :) If nothing, all the open source work means better mesa, faster kernel, more advanced profilers etc which are all good for our cause.

Regarding Google and data, believe me, Google is the farthest from evil.

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