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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

They've just recently announced Stadia, a streaming gaming platform. Industry veterans immediately gave the product a 2 year lifespan.

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I came here to make a similar comment. Google has the institutional attention span of a goldfish and I'm going to wait a few years to see if they actually stick with Stadia before getting my hopes up.

It is considered a pretty big deal in the gaming industry, specially if they do leverage all the YouTube infrastructure they have like they say. We will see about that one.

Maybe to some, but PC gamers are averse to not owning their games. The input latency is also very obvious, which is not good for high paced games (of which all of the top games right now are).

PC gamers haven't really ever owned their games in the whole Steam era. Most are too young to even be aware that buying a game anonymously and being able to resell it later was an ability that we used to have.

You're right about the latency being a problem. I wouldn't touch Stadia but I believe many will and it's one more compromise people will accept in exchange for convenience.

PC gamers are a tiny minority of computing device owners. This is for people with phones.

Normally I would agree, but Microsoft and Sony especially have similar services and they seem to be doing well enough.

Quit the circlejerk.

Yeah, Google shuts off unpopular, unsuccesful projects. So what? Most of the ones listed are literally useless and/or outdated relics of the past which have been replaced by something better. Google is a business after all, not a charity. They don't want to maintain an useless project from 2005 written using who knows what technology stack.

If Stadia becomes mainstream and acquires a lot of users, they won't kill it off as it will be profitable. If it has an user count of 500 in two years, it will be gutted, why support an unprofitable product?

it’s not about being a charity. that is extreme. it is about not understanding how to grow products. they seem to have no idea how to do this. for example, look at the recent gmail update, which is still objectively worse than it was before. so google releases some product with a big fanfare, doesn’t grow it, and then kills it. since this happens more often than not, so people have become wary of it.

Google has purchased and killed off numerous profitable companies. They've killed off Hangouts, Allo, Gchat, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few wildly popular chat services only to replace them with inferior products. They've killed off Google Reader which someone built a clone of and appears to be making a profit. They killed off Google Fiber, Nexus, and Glass all solid hardware that many people are/were still using. The point is you can't trust Google to not just drop something at a moment's notice, even if it's older or profitable, try getting help from them as well good luck finding want kind of support unless you happen to know someone inside the company personally. As a business they are hard to work with and notoriously flaky, I'd always choose to go elsewhere now after years of being a Google advocate. They're even looking to replace Android so what can you trust from them?

Neither Nexus nor glass was killed.

Nexus became pixel. Glass never left beta and is still an enterprise product.

Nexus and Pixel are very different. They are both phones but the market and strategy is not the same.

In what way?

The major differences are that Google is more involved with pixel hardware design than nexus (probably a good thing), and that pixels are more expensive (which follows the market price for flagship phones).

They both fill the niche of first-party flagship devices with the "pure, as google intended" (or something) android experience.

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