To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.
There’s a damn good chance that lots of people up the chain secretly think that too, but they don’t see any alternative to just putting one foot in front of the other.
I lived through OnLive -- from beta to shutdown -- and that is exactly why I'm putting zero money into these cloud-only game licenses, unless it's a Netflix-style subscription. When the time comes for shutdown, they won't do the courtesy of granting one free license for that game on another platform, e.g.: Steam, Xbox Live, PSN. The purchases will just be gone and people will point at the ToS.
The only way IMO is GeForce Now-style services, where your existing digital library is honored. That or Netflix-style subscriptions like Game Pass Ultimate.
I realize we're talking about music and google here, but i'm curious how people feel about Audible and Kindle? I made a fairly large bet on Audble+Kindle because we ran out of space in our home for books (as well as the portability.) Our entire library is now on Kindle with elaborate notes -- how big a risk do you think this is?
(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)
At least with Kindle books, you can run them through DeDRM and back up the DRM-free files. With Audible audiobooks, I’m not aware of a method other than to play them back and record the audio in real time.
OpenAudible works to remove the DRM on Audible books. Worst case, grab the CD versions from your library and rip them yourself.
It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.
Good point, though with the YouTube-dl DMCA takedown recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911), I wouldnt be surprised if DeDRM type utilities also get taken down soon.
Kindle and even PC downloadable games fall into the same category. You stand to lose your license to access if the service shuts down but at least you have binaries or files that could be reversed. It’s becoming harder though, considering how much effort RDR2 took to crack.
I (mostly) only buy DRM free books,and I'm happily reading them on my ancient Sony reader which has neither a touchscreen nor wifi. Baen has a fantastic collection of DRM free content you can buy directly from them. All the Tor books are available from your favorite bookseller without DRM.
I use a Kindle, but always buy books from sources that also offer epub and PDF in addition to Kindle formats, unless the only digital alternative is on Amazon as some editors are very keen on Kindle DRM.
For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.
The thing is: this isn’t even a fringe viewpoint. It’s pretty obvious that people are avoiding it at least in part because it’s from Google, and Google are never in it for the long haul.
They’re already getting proved right, as well, Stadia’s getting barely any updates or new games, no exclusives worth the candle. It’s really just a matter of time.
I am for now. There was the upfront controller investment as I already had the Chromecasts. For the most part I just play the free games on offer because of the fear of throwing money down a hole.
"I don't know what their vision is for product" Unless it pipes ads at you, after collecting as much telemetry as possible, they don't have one either.
Ok then that's much better than I expected it to be. Other services that act primarily as digital shops get a lot of praise overall( qobuz bandcamp) so I'm not sure about the situation here.
To every Google employee reading this: your company sucks. Tell that to your manager.
With the exception of Youtube, I will never use Google entertainment products again. No Stadia, no Google Play Movies. I don't know what their vision is for product, but whatever it is subtracts from the world. I was worried a decade ago when I saw music moving into the cloud. Now my fears are confirmed. Google never intended to be a good custodian.
Google shits whatever goodwill it establishes right down the toilet. They do it at every turn.
Before Google's music subscription product, I bought a lot of music on the service. And now they're deleting it all. All of my playlists and listening history is disappearing. That's not a good feeling.
Screw you, Google.
After the DOJ takes your illegal money printing machine away, you won't have customers left to go chasing after.