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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see how they are going to compete with Microsoft on this, or Sony for that matter. I can't help but think this will be killed off in the next 2-3 years due to low adoption. Microsoft and Sony already have their foot in the door, and xCloud is supposedly going to be an E3 topic...and I'm sure they will bundle it with existing Xbox Live services for a bump in price.

Google has proven me wrong in the past, but they've also killed a lot of products like this.

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I don't think it's as hard as you'd imagine. Gamers are the craziest of early adopters and tech enthusiasts. They'll flock to you if you give them a great product. Unlike other areas (messaging, social media), you don't need the critical mass to have a successful product especially with cross-play becoming more and more common/acceptable. Even if you need the critical mass, it's much easier to get it with a great product in the gaming industry compared to others.

If Google delivers a great product here, they'll for sure have a huge number of users IMO.

Go on a number of the gaming subreddit and you’ll see Stadia is being met with distaste and hesitation. Gamers are increasingly tiring of the games-as-a-service model, and this is a step even further in that direction.

Personally I think this will have the same lifetime as a lot of other google products: it’ll launch, have some success, and then be killed unceremoniously a couple of years down the line.

People viewing gaming subreddits most likely already own a console or gaming PC and aren't the target audience for Stadia. Google's aim is to open up gaming to new markets of people who only have low end PCs, laptops or mobile devices.

But those people certainly do not fit the mold: > Gamers are the craziest of early adopters and tech enthusiasts.

Those are the herds we all profit from. Not whales but cows. Why would I want to be on the bleeding edge and get a shit experience?

People have said exactly the same thing about:

1) software as a service

2) streaming music

3) streaming video

4) digital games

There just isn't enough people caring about physically owning something these days.

People (mostly) already don't physically own games on PC. Steam can in theory shut right down and most people's games would just be gone.

the games would be patched to ignore the steam check, or the steam API emulated to bypass it entirely

and since most games use the same steam stub this would be a pretty easy thing to do

Go into gaming related subreddits, even for beloved and succesfull games and products - and marvel at the toxicity and negativity you'll likely see all over the place.

Game reddits (and other forums) are legendarily toxic.

> I don't think it's as hard as you'd imagine.

I think it's very hard. The best article ever written on this subject is "So You Want to Compete with Steam" [1] and it applies as equally well to Playstation/Xbox.

[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...

Don't forget too that:

1. They are also targeting people with no gaming pc / console

2. A big part of the plan is the leverage Youtube to bring people in

3. Most of the infrastructure is already there for the rest of Google, so this isn't too much of an overhead for them

Put all this together, and it doesn't look as crazy as some think it is. #2 is really the crux of the strategy though.

Microsoft came out of no-where with the original XBox. You had Playstation, Nintendo, and Sega. It can happen, just need the right motivations for customers.

And if 5G lives up to it's promises, this will be one of those first great products to take advantage of that extra bandwidth.

And when Sony launched the PlayStation no one believed they could compete with Nintendo and Sega..

The Playstation was originally supposed to be the next Nintendo console...

Microsoft Xbox persevered only because of Microsoft's deep pockets not because they necessarily did anything different enough to attract gamers. It was not a successful console.

Above all the Xbox had Halo, google doesn't seem to have anything unique up their sleeve.

Funny, I know someone else who has deep pockets.

Google has deep pocket, but has a habit of abandoning projects that aren't immediate successes.

I'm pretty sure Xbox Live had something to do with MS's success.

Success? You mean they saw it as one area they did better? Microsoft considering killing off the xbox after the fist iteration because the sales figures were not where they hoped it would be and it was costing them.

To add on to this, I remember Gates said _something publicly like "I expect to lose about a billion dollars on it before it pans out" when launching xbox. I remember that it just seemed a very genuine "I think we should be in this market long term, and I know we'll lose a lot of money to get there. But we can afford it."

The XBox also had the luxury of amazing timing, although it's unclear whether it was intentional or luck.

Sony dominated generations 5 and 6 against weak competition. The Dreamcast was an outright failure that was discontinued a few months before the Xbox's release, and the Gamecube was a commercial disappointment; which practically handed Microsoft a #2 showing.

Right now all three incumbents appear strong and evenly matched, which may not leave Google much of a hole.

Uh, cross-platform gaming will be huge. It says it will work in a Chrome browser. This is running on Linux and using Vulkan as well, so I imagine the open source community will want to try to adopt these technologies more and more since it is clearly scalable and efficient enough to run a live streaming service of this magnitude. I'm happy to see less games developed in proprietary frameworks and to be supported on more operating systems than Windows.

There's no denying the underlying idea is big, the question is can Google actually penetrate the market, or have the grit to see it through when adoption is low in the beginning. I'm betting no, but we'll have to wait and see.

First time someone gets bored at Google they will drop this like nothing with a month or two notice and any games purchased will be vapor. Google doesn't care about it's users. It's just another platform to extract data mining or ai from. Google makes massive unilateral consumer unfriendly changes before breakfast. They barely care about business customers. If you're not ads or ad related and bringing in money you're not worth anything.

You’re being downvoted, but you shouldn’t be, because you’re absolutely correct.

Didn't notice I was being downvoted. Legitimately don't care about it either. I'll be dead most likely within a few years and I can't take internet points with me or cash them in to take care of my family when I'm gone. Thanks for the kind words though.

Just because the platform is running Linux and Vulkan doesn't mean that Google won't wall that behind their data centers. The PS4 runs on BSD.

To me this seems like xCloud is in response to Stadia. Google has the infrastructure and Microsoft and Sony need to work together to compete. This would be similar to how Microsoft and Sony responded to the Nintendo Wii.

Because Microsoft does not have the infrastructure? Azure has more DC and compute power around the world than Google Cloud.

The problem is that Microsoft can't really be taken seriously in the gaming market, or in any consumer space where they might have good or great products but little to zero traction, and Sony doesn't have the network infrastructure.

>Microsoft can't really be taken seriously in the gaming market

But they are in this market for a long time and are taken serious.

Microsoft has the Xbox, a major gaming console and Sony has the PlayStation Network. It's not as clean cut as you say.

Are you saying Xbox has little to zero traction in the gaming space...?

XBox has like 35% market share vs %65 of Sony. I wouldn't call that not taking Microsoft seriously in gaming market.

From what I understand, Sony and MS are literally throwing xbox's/ps4 hardware into racks and streaming from them. Doesn't seem very scalable or cost effective.

Google built their game platform from the ground up for the cloud, including specialized graphics hardware. Sounds like it will be able to scale up to meet demands of games, while the other services are just renting a console-in-a-datacenter to the user.

Maybe it will matter, maybe it won't.

Microsoft certainly isn't just filling server racks with Consumer model Xbox Ones, if that is what you have pictured. They have rack-mount servers that share the Xbox Architecture.

The Xbox One and PS4 are modified PC architectures with slightly specialized graphics hardware. All three are doing the exact same thing: building traditional server racks, just with with an added focus on GPU power/performance. Google doesn't have a leg up in their datacenters, and if anything has the detriment that both Microsoft and Sony can run Consumer-targeted software builds directly on their racks, whereas supposedly Stadia needs new game builds, customized to the new hardware.

From a full-system integration might not be cost ineffective:

    1. Single SKU for Server & Client (volume reduces cost)
    2. Games target & optimize for this hardware already (nothing new) 
    3. Microsoft & Sony are essentially *the* targets (no platform integration cost)
    4. Proven user adoption (approximate ROI known for these projects) 
    5. Brand recognition (xbox and playstation are household names)
    6. Price (Microsoft is doing subscription for service + catalog)
    7. Bought publishers (Microsoft & Sony "own" many dev shops)
    8. Primary library vendor (DX11)
    9. Network Effect (I bought an xbox because all of my friends owned one)

The only new components Microsoft needs:

    1. Mount Game (iSCSI)
    2. Output (HDMI to RTMP transcode) 
    3. Input

I'm not saying either solution is better (I prefer Google's approach) but they're only doing it if they've run the numbers.

> Azure has more DC and compute power around the world than Google

Interesting. Do you have a source for this?

Last I heard, Google's products are responsible for a significant proportion of all internet traffic e.g. in 2013 - 6 years ago - Forbes reported that it was 40% [1]. I think I heard more recently it was getting close to 50+% now but I cannot find any sources.

I'd be surprised to learn that MS is handling more traffic than Google and so has more DCs and more compute... or are they pissing money up the wall and just building data centres that are sitting 99% idle purely for bragging rights?

1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/17/fascinat...

You're confusing Google's main services vs GCP and Azure. Stradia will be running on GCP, xCloud will be running on Azure. Azure has more data centers than GCP by a large amount.

Where did you read that Stadia will be in GCP only? From the looks of it, they are sharing a lot of infrastructure with YouTube which implies otherwise.

I have not read anything that suggests this is running on GCP?

Microsoft has been working on xCloud for a lot longer than that. And Microsoft has more cloud data centers than Google around the globe.

While I agree Microsoft is going to be a major and probably the biggest competitor to Stadia, I don't think number or size of data centers makes any difference here. Microsoft has traditionally not been a "cloud" company while as Google has lived it's entire life as one. Google definitely has an advantage here given it's technically their turf. Not saying MS are incapable of delivering cloud workloads but Google definitely is considered the better of the two when it coming to cloud infrastructure and talent. This might be changing now rapidly though.

What are you talking about? Microsoft has Azure and before they had that, they had numerous Internet scale services like hotmail. Microsoft has vast experience with building and running internet scale applications. Just like Google has.

It's one thing building Azure in response to AWS and GCP and another thing innovating to support something like Google search for decades and then using the same knowledge and tech to build other cloud services. Of course Microsoft is totally capable of delivery cloud workloads but they can still be considered the underdog here when it comes to Google vs MS

I'd say MS is pretty well positioned to compete against Google: they have the infrastructure plus an actual good catalogue of games. Sony may not have the infrastructure on their own, but by partnering with Microsoft, they'll become a solid competitor too since they have an excellent games catalogue.

Google are the ones who will have to prove themselves here, IMO.

OnLive tried this, failed, and got acquishutdown by Sony: https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8337955/sony-buys-onlive-o...

Other players who could do this fairly naturally are Valve (steam link) and Nvidia themselves.

They're putting a big emphasis on the "frictionless" aspect.

If they can get people impulse buying subscriptions/games, they'll get some traction.

Its not exactly breaking most people's bank to have a $9.99 subscription for all you can eat gaming.

For those who don't already have consoles, its a no brainer.

It’s not all you can eat. They have some free games but you have to buy your games still.

I wonder where the ads come in. I can imagine creating an ad network and placements in-game, which would then let them offer the product for free/cheap to users, and pay a cut of the money to game creators who hook up the placements.

By being a click away on youtube, android, chrome and chromecast.

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