It didn’t have a way to function in the event of system failure.
Steam sometimes goes down. When that happens, people can often still play their singleplayer games. If Steam had totally failed business-wise, it either would have been sold to another publisher who would maintain access, or the games would’ve been unlocked for permanent offline play.
Take a look at Stadia’s failure resolution strategy; they had to fully refund every person who bought a game there, because all purchases became completely unusable. Imagine if they’d gone a decade selling games to people and building off of their revenue, before encountering failure.
Zahille7@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s fine if it actually worked perfectly for you, but “just working” isn’t exactly a measure of success.
They still needed the playerbase to actually use it, and devs to actually make games for it. Which they got very little of both. So it wasn’t successful.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It kinda is though. In terms of what others attacked it for. All the attack videos and yet I played it via VPN in a non supported country. Google fucked up by launching in America. A place with plenty cash and a spoiled player base. Where it would win would be poor countries. Just look at down votes ? For saying a device worked as intended. Tells you all you need to know.
Internet infrastructure was a big issue and games were mostly Ubisoft but still. What a game changer. Then I moved to GeForce and haven’t looked back.
SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think you’re saying it showed it could work. Where others are saying a success on the sense of a viable product that can make enough money to operate and, ideally, to be profitable.
And unfortunately when it comes to a service that requires servers, bandwidth and staff to maintain and operate it then there has to be a certain threshold of users to make it profitable or else it is doomed to fail.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 9 months ago
But it did I work. I used it. Many other used it. It was cloud gaming. What hadn’t been accomplished before.
That was an issue. However many companies aren’t profitable in their first few years. The toll out was a complete mess. Also as stated they chose wrong. I get why they picked murica. Infrastructure was always going to be an issue but that’s not where you get people looking to save money and not buy a console. Third world would have been the sweet spot. A rig they can play red dead for pennies.
They opened it up to phones and with Enough bandwidth you could play games you’d never manage before.
Yes but long run. Nobody thought Google was going to saunter in and beat the big Bois. Takes time to build a playerbase get the product actually working and improve it. None of that happened in first year.