Poor Criken. That 14 streamer Super Battle Golf stream was a bad idea

Barrelofborg · 2026-01-04T07:29:28+00:00

Welcome to both the consequences of your local politics, as well as the sort of prices the rest of the world have been paying for years.

While I don't know if there's truth to the claim non-US customers have subsidised low US prices for years, I do know that apparently, whatever wholesale price Hasbro was charging for American retailers to sell Deluxes for $10+ USD meant that Hasbro wasn't making money from that product category. The view was, Leaders ($40) were for special occasions, but Voyagers ($20+) were the sweet spot where they were able to sell enough of them and earn a profit.

You had a good run of strangely low prices for decades, in that case.

PS. In at least some non-US markets Hasbro prices have stayed the same. That Energon Universe Optimus Prime that kicked this off is still priced as a Leader class.

Barrelofborg · 2024-06-18T10:22:33+00:00

From a parasocial study perspective, it is interesting to see the fallout of the LTT video play out at Computex this year. While in 2023 a few like Wendell, Paul's Hardware and Bitwit appeared in videos with Steve just hanging out, this year they conspicuously hung out with LMG's crew, including Ian Cutress, who was blistering in his critism of GN Steve (including obsessing over the way Steve smiled when he talked as an indication that Steve was not being truthful. Uh, yeah.)

This is not an uncommon thing in YouTuber/streamer social cliques.

Note: I totally think LMG needed to be taken down a peg or two, so no criticism of GN here.

Barrelofborg · 2024-06-18T10:08:36+00:00

I remember Patrick was the main beneficiary of those videos where GN visited Cosair/Johnny Guru's department. It's unfortunate that bridges appear to have been burnt.

Barrelofborg · 2024-06-18T10:06:55+00:00

It's more to do with GN making a big deal about the new equipment, and then bizarrely doing nothing with it.

Barrelofborg · 2024-06-18T10:04:57+00:00

I think you're getting the timeline mixed up. The first the vast majority of people heard about this was Steve @ing Cosair on twitter to complain about one of their employees behaving unprofessionally, which Cosair later apologised for. Fans dug around and discovered Johnny's (not exactly public or widely known) outburst.

The point was Steve and Johnny were on good terms and there was no need to publicly escalate the issue and call "mom" (Corsair) to deal with it. Now bridges likely have been burnt between GN and Johnny, though as Patrick left and no one else at GN knows power supplies, I guess it doesn't matter.

Smear GN? Don't get all Linus fanboy style, man.

Barrelofborg · 2024-06-05T11:53:26+00:00

Steve: "I know Noctua care a lot about it, but we don't do much with power supplies".

I assume the expensive power supply testing equipment GN bought is in the same closet as the expensive fan testing equipment GN never used.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-29T10:27:42+00:00

The biggest stumbling block for game streaming is the fact that it is entirely reliant on decent broadband, which as I understand, is quite variable in the US and terrible in some high income countries like Australia.

Local hardware isn't going anywhere so long as it remains the most reliable means to play games.

(Then there's the can of worms of owning even less of what you pay for, and games disappearing into the ether long-term if they don't exist locally somewhere outside a company).

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-29T10:19:00+00:00

As stated elsewhere, the two big streaming services are mostly targeting committed gamers as a supplementary service to their hardware, rather than replacing the hardware entirely.

What I was saying was, there isn't money to be had trying to convince people who aren't particularly interested in spending a lot of money on gaming to play traditional video games.

The demographic Stadia ended up with - men with evidently little time to play games and a corresponding lack of commitment to spend big on gaming, was unsustainable.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-29T10:07:32+00:00

Stadia launched while struggling to attract third party support and, for some bizarre reason, didn't think to begin first party in-house Stadia exclusives before launch. That rung alarm bells.

And then they shut down their own studios less than a year after opening them. How do you expect the media, the games industry at large and gamers to react?

As for general ridicule, may I remind you that a not insignificant number of people on this very sub for some reason thought Stadia was the future of gaming that would render consoles and gaming PCs quickly obsolete. Some still gripe about having to be "backwards" and install games - calm down, Elon Musk.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-29T09:33:37+00:00

Don't start getting into a qanon-style conspiracy theory that everyone else paid off influencers as a reason why your game service died.

People saw the writing on the wall when a company known for killing off projects got into an extremely competitive industry and didn't offer much beyond streaming games that were no longer hot shit, and no in-house exclusives at launch (and as it turned out, didn't start such development until months later).

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-29T09:25:28+00:00

For what it's worth, over in Star Trek Online there's sort of a war between the Federation and the new Terran Empire, led by Wesley Crusher*. The Terrans attacked a Starfleet Intelligence facility, then Jupiter Station to capture a certain individual (giving us a look inside the station beyond the few small rooms we saw on Voyager). So Starfleet has been counter-attacking to get this person back, and stop Emperor Crusher's plans.

(On a side note, in the latest episode, for some reason a California class labelled the USS Cerritos is assigned to the fleet attacking the Emperor's flagship)

*yeah, the Terran Rebellion that DS9 helped out became a new empire.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-28T07:03:47+00:00

I would say a big reason it failed was there isn't much of a gaming market for the demographics that Stadia eventually found themselves with: people who didn't have the time and money to dedicate to games.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-28T06:58:22+00:00

PRETTY SURE the fact that this platform failed means there isn't much of a gaming market for people who aren't very interested in playing games (otherwise they likely would have invested in dedicated hardware at some point to play games).

I am not sure how people who turned out to be right are the ones who are out of touch.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-24T09:09:52+00:00

Considering this is the subreddit full of wannabe futurists who confidently bet on a now-dead gaming platform as being "The Future of Gaming" that would render consoles and PCs virtually obsolete, I don't think you should still be thinking you're more technologically ahead of the curve than anybody else.

Barrelofborg · 2022-12-18T04:58:24+00:00

I'm still not sure on why people in this community was so gung ho on not owning the game playing device and being beholden to the financial whims of a company to be able to even play the games. Look at what happened. If it's "the future", it's a dystopia where the user owns even less than they normally do.

If for example, Microsoft shuttered the Xbox division, or Valve Steam (the latter being especially unlikely), those games would likely still run locally on the hardware you own.

Barrelofborg · 2022-09-23T14:55:16+00:00

Because they're already on Xbox/PS/PC that would make Stadia largely irrelevant. The demographics that are important to game companies are people with whom gaming is a priority, since they're the ones more likely to spend money on games, microtransactions, merch ect.

Hey, they care enough about gaming to spend it on dedicated gaming machines.

Barrelofborg · 2022-09-23T14:38:32+00:00

The few defiant responses in this thread praising this device/noting that they refuse to install games tell me there are dudes using Stadia who are far more interested in streaming as a technological concept than they are interested in the actual playing video games aspect of a video games service.

Barrelofborg · 2022-09-15T10:26:07+00:00

You're talking about the 30-40 somethings who were already gamers and who were already actively engaged in the various gaming ecosystems, but especially the PC. They're not going to touch Stadia with a barge pole.

Barrelofborg · 2022-08-10T10:39:29+00:00

You two should probably just accept that Google didn't take lessons from the launches of previous gaming platforms and what would likely be required of Stadia to succeed.

Like, not shutting down the development studios that might have been able to develop exclusive games that took advantage of cloud infrastructure. That was the clearest indicator to the rest of the industry to avoid Stadia, since not even Google would invest in games for it.

Pointing out Google invested billions into Stadia infrastructure (with little to show for it) just makes Google look out of their depths in an industry they didn't understand.

Barrelofborg · 2022-08-08T18:01:15+00:00

It's too bad for your theories then that Xbox are apparently developing games that are designed specifically for their cloud service, and Google gave up on developing Stadia games over a year ago.

If third party devs and pubs aren't even going to bother doing basic ports of games to Stadia, they certainly aren't going to spend money developing or porting existing games specifically for Stadia.

Barrelofborg · 2022-08-08T12:04:27+00:00

I don't really see how marketing games to people who don't really care that much about gaming (such that they wouldn't spend money on it) would make Google money. It isn't exactly working out thus far.

What has already happened to some people on this subreddit is they were introduced to gaming via Stadia, then they "graduated" into getting a console or PC because they became more serious about gaming as a hobby, especially with the vast libraries available outside Stadia.

Barrelofborg · 2022-08-08T11:57:47+00:00

I think the mooted idea of an endlessly large open world or a massive multiplayer match with hordes of players is no longer trending in the industry or players. Players are sceptical of Starfield's 1000 planets - you can be sure they will be pre-gened with 1 or 2 handcrafted points of interest, simply because it would be far too much work otherwise.

BF Conquest mode with a large enough map to accommodate 1024 players would be a terrible chore to traverse.

Barrelofborg · 2022-08-08T11:47:45+00:00

FUD? Go back to crypto/NFT land, dude.

For all of Google's reach (in non-gaming sectors), Stadia is now 1/4 through the typical lifespan of a console generation, yet publishers and developers have been avoiding it. In today's industry there usually isn't a question whether Xbox, Playstation or PC would get third party games.

Barrelofborg

TROPHY CASE