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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Stadia exists because Google is a perpetual spaghetti throwing machine.

Mainframe-style gaming is possible and they have the resources to try it so... here we are. If it doesn't take off, Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years.

That said, I really don't see the problem with this strategy. It surely makes much more sense than having an ever growing stable of also-ran offerings. The upshot of course is that every now and then one of these "side projects" takes off into an enormously successful business unit (e.g. Android, Maps, GSuite). All of those programs could have just as easily died on the vine like Google Plus or Wave.

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My main issue for Stadia has been that they are trying to rebadge existing games to work on Stadia instead of making a game that uses the cloud to provide a unique experience. It's one of the things that none of the other streaming companies I am aware of have tried to make an advantage of the proximity of the actual VMs/shared runtime to make it a Mainframe-style experience where you wouldn't have to compromise as heavily of number of tracked objects in concurrent simulations as the simulations are being run spatially closer so the base latency between sims are wildly different than the current distributed model.

Give it time. They're clearly interested in exploring the possibilities there, as their GDC presentation suggested.

Stadia is unique though that there are people buying digital games locked to the platform. So its entirely possible when the inevitably kill it those games could just be lost.

So I hope for the people's sake that buy into it that Google won't shut it down (or at least have a way to add your purchases to steam or something), but its a different risk this time.

I think Stadia being shut down is a near certainty (and the GP comments' 3-4 years is very optimistic for how long it might survive), but I think that Stadia owners losing their games is fairly unlikely. When other digital services with purchases have shut down, there's often some attempt to offer a migration for user licenses. (I've watched Ultraviolet and Flixster's shutdowns and the like of late.) The game studios partnering with Google would be extremely upset for their customers to be dropped, and I'd especially expect games like Destiny 2 to cleanly migrate a user's data and progress to playing on another platform.

Even when Google shut down their Assassin's Creed demo of Stadia's technology, which was free, they gave everyone a game key to redeem on Steam at the end, so my guess is that's what would happen in a Stadia shutdown.

The most likely "loss" is from the hardware purchases, though Google has hedged here a bit on the fact that a Chromecast Ultra will still be useful post-Stadia. Even the controller might not go to waste if it works as a generic PC game controller.

There have been exclusives for other platforms that have eventually made their way to the PC ecosystem. I just saw Halo Reach advertised for the PC. I played the heck out of it when it came out, so I don't have a desire to buy it again, but it is nice to see it.

Their competition includes Nvidia, that is testing a streaming service that allows you to buy games through other platforms (Steam, Uplay, maybe others) and stream them from the cloud.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/

Hopefully they give you keys which can be redeemed in another platform like Steam. It’s unfortunate that so many people will have to migrate off of Stadia, but it’s inevitable.

If Google shuts it down, they will likely refund all games purchased. (But probably not any subscription fee)

They have done that previously with all discontinued products. Even hardware they tend to refund in full if it fails during the warranty and they don't have stock of that model anymore, or if they shut down the servers.

In my experience, it's difficult to get Google to hold up that warranty. When my Nexus 6P started to bootloop, Google refused to repair the product at all nor refund me the money (I purchased directly from Google and I did have copies of all receipts including pictures of the original package it was delivered in).

The bots don't care if they decide the warranty doesn't apply.

If Google decides to just not refund the game price or offer ownership in other ways, what are you going to do? You didn't buy a game, you bought a license to stream the game from Google's servers. You don't own anything and Google owes you squat.

>Android, Maps, GSuite

All of these products have existed for 5+ years.

What recent thing has Google brought to the table that actually stuck?

That's an oxymoron: how can you tell if it has stuck if it's recent?

Probably their cloud offering and / or parts thereof, e.g. Firebase.

Their cloud offerings are a distant third to Microsoft and Amazon and support - especially enterprise support - is legendarily bad.

As someone who uses Google Cloud, Azure, and used to work for Amazon, I am happy using GCP but find Azure to be lacking in a lot of ways.

Also Google support is usually absent but when I actually get to talk to a human, they're great. Microsoft support is usually present but often seems explicitly designed to waste my time.

Since you use to work for Amazon, I would suspect that your bar for acceptable support would be a lot higher. Even on the business support plan, opening up a ticket and starting a live chat is close to immediate with AWS. I’ve used them as the “easy button” plenty of times when I probably could have figured out the issue myself but didn’t want to waste time. They are batting close to 100.

The one exception was a weird ECS error I kept getting that they couldn’t figure out. I realized later on that I hosed the permissions trying to do something cross account.

I’m sure they would have eventually figured that out.

Curious as to what you find so bad about GCP support.

(I work in GCP enterprise support)

Their support is non-existent not just bad. They shouldn't be in any consumer market.

Hmm, for the retail options? Or the premium options? We were a nine-fig customer and it was quite nice.

You don’t have to be a “9 figure customer” to get great live support from AWS. It’s 10% of your bill (declining over certain thresholds) with a minimum of $100/month.

I understand. I use AWS at work now. It's mostly curiosity about your experience than anything else.

Firebase was bought, not developed by Google itself.

It’s more like 10+ years but your point is a good one. Hard to grow trees when you keep cutting off the saplings.

Have you never heard of Google Home? Google Assistant?

Google photos?

Just recently lost a major syncing ability and became less useful.

What syncing ability are you referring to?

Between Drive and Photos. Also it's only one way now, up, you can no longer sync photos between computers. It was major news for Photos users when it happened. I'll provide a link for more info. There was a large amount of functionality lost when this happened. Iirc it also dropped the ability to save Photos in native resolutions higher than the compressed Google format but I'm not 100% on that since I sync my family photos using Plex to my own server.

https://www.talkandroid.com/341036-google-drops-photo-syncin...

Google Fi, the Nexus and Pixel lines, Google Play Music, Google Home, Protobuf, Guava, ReCaptcha, TensorFlow, Google Assistant, Android Auto, Chromecast, Google Tag Manager, Google Chrome, Google Flights, Google Translate, Google Domains.

Google Play Music is heading to the graveyard and replaced by the worse YouTube Music. Nexus is long dead.

> Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years.

Probably a good reason not to invest in the controller/chromecast just use your laptop for now until it matures and we see if Google actually commits to it and the game library increases.

Stadia is marketing the platform as if the technology is rock solid and reliable when there are a lot of indicators that it may not be. If it was marketed for what it is, I'd probably be rooting for it. But my gut says this is going to disappoint a lot of kids and college students who are attracted to the bottom barrel pricing. Also if game studios buy in and build key infrastructure and it disappears, a lot of human hours are going to evaporate into oblivion.

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