When will Google shut down Stadia?
stadiacountdown.com
stadiacountdown.com
* Founds telephony company Dialpad, sells to Yahoo. (I think it was the basis of Yahoo's search-via-phone-call service.)
* Founds telephony company Grand Central, sells to Google, is basis of Google Voice.
* Founds telephony company Dialpad (he bought back the name and domain).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-voice-founders-raised...
How much buzz can you get when everyone’s first thought is “how could this be any good? Google already tried that and failed...”
GTalk was really in a position to be the #1 messenger.
So, it became a useless site because there were no teeth to the rules.
This is the source of the HUEHUEHUE meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/huahuehuahue . There's even an academic study on the Brazilian online cultural traits that cause such problems in Orkut! https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265844216_'HUEHUEHU...
... which licenses its content with CC by SA 4.0[1] and has a public API.
Other licensing models of content will vary.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
At least in the U.S., I don't think it's that relevant to the use-cases I've seen. IANAL, but in the 4-factor fair use test a place like Internet Archive rehosting the content to me easily clears 3 of them if the original host goes away.
For google it's just a distraction that needs to be culled.
For eg. Allo was considered a failure because it had 'only' 10 million DAU in first 8 months. For a startup that would be like hitting a jackpot.
While it may not make sense at Google Scale, it can absolutely make sense for a small business spinoff.
Just one of many ways that Service as a Software Substitute reduces user freedom.
That's beside the point, though—my reply, it's parent and it's grandparent were discussing Google products generally, not Stadia specifically.
[0] I realize that Takeout doesn't support Stadia. Though, for two different Stadia titles (Destiny 2's "cross-play" and NBA2K20's "MyPlayer"), I was prompted to log into a publisher account where my data could be linked/stored or something.
Legally or ethically?
Spotify's been running strong for like 13 years, GPM is about to turn 10, etc. None of those people have been bitten yet, and there's literally hundreds of millions of them.
Stadia has all the user data on the backend, _and_ is expensive to run since all the processing happens on their end too.
Now compare that to stadia which'll probably be dedicating high CPU and GPU to each logged in user, in addition to the low latency video compression hardware they're pretty much guaranteed to have?
They say they won't until YouTube music has feature parity but I don't believe it.
I may sound bitter ...
Well, sort of. But relevant to the original question posed: are users of GPM losing their suscribed content? No.
Edit: Steam will let you _import_ a CD key, but that's the closest I can think of, and there's no way to export once it's in steam.
Within months of Google announcing Reader's closing, Feedly had acquired something like 8 million new users. Amazing stroke of fortune for a well-deserving product. I still happily use the free version.
And 1) I don’t understand. Feedly was one of the first ones I tried, and none of the settings I tried got me close to a headline-only view that I used in GReader. I used Newsblur for a while and am on TT-RSS nowadays. But Feedly always seemed to cater more to those people who enjoy image-heavy subreddits and full-page hero images, or pinterest.
Nothing I tried with Feedly got me a simple, no distraction one-line, click to expand downwards view.
Note that all of this was around when GReader closed, no idea what changed.
edit: Just decided to log in and check ;) So what I didn’t like was the way it popped up from the side instead of actually doing what GReader (and TT-RSS and Newsblur) can do: Simply popping down the current article, and not switching the view.
I am pretty sure that I tried Feedly in the post-"Oh no, Google Reader is going away!" panic everyone else using the service was in at the time, and like you I could not replicate the feel. The Old Reader was the closest alternative I found among the several I tried, but soon afterwards Inoreader appeared with a very, very, very close-to-Google Reader feel, and I've been extremely happy on it ever since. (If only Inoreader would correctly open the comment link and not the original article in the HN RSS feed.)
(not affiliated, just a v happy user)
I'm pretty sure that's down to HN themselves choosing to put the original article's URL into each entry's "link" field
To be honest, however, I was disappointed with the recent price increases and other changes. I have a grandfathered Pro account that I'm paying $18/year for until 2021 (with a 40% off coupon). Then my options will be to either pay $50/year for a much more limited service (only 30 rules instead of unlimited, only 30 filtered feeds instead of unlimited), or reject the price increase and go back to a "supporter" account, which doesn't have any perks and costs $20/year, more than I'm paying now for Pro.
https://www.cnet.com/news/evernotes-google-notebook-importer...
1. It was Yahoo (del.icio.us) not Google and
2. I think he didn't start until at a later stage.
(I'm an happy early user of pinboard.in)
[1] https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-20...
At least the current Chromebooks let you print on a networked printer.
Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development.
Stadia will require a substantial engineering effort from Google to make this work. The latency and network requirements are a great test to gauge network requirements as we move into 5g, AR, and self driving cars.
Gaming is huge and if Google can be the first to provide (viable) steaming as a service they can really threaten some of the incumbents like Twitch, Sony, Microsoft, etc.
Obviously Google doesn't have the best track record here but I'm excited to see them tackle this challenge.
The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has reached a point of viability and it's very exciting to see them tackle the challenge.
Obviously there are concerns with the products. Specifically paying for games, the games itself, etc. But generally I'm excited for this effort.
Yet their launch has been plauged by issues and latency is still a massive problem. They didn't crack the nut, so again, what's innovative here?
Nice Freudian slip there. We have a "smart" TV here that's never been connected to the Internet. They seem to just universally suck.
For extra credit, our TV is a Roku TV, and from the CEOs comments, I doubt I'll ever connect it to the Internet. At least until they start coming with 4G connectivity built-in...(!)
This kind of thing has been around for nearly 10 years.
>The OnLive Game Service was launched in the United States on June 17, 2010. The service was launched in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2011.
"PlayStation Now (PS Now) is a cloud gaming subscription service developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment."
Microsoft (xCloud). Free until it’s stable.
Nvidia (GeForce NOW). Free until it’s stable.
Sony (PlayStation Now).
.. Seriously dude where’ve you been?
What is important in case of Shadow, GeForce Now and roll you own, that you buy a PC game that you can access on any PC, not just using a single service (like Stadia, or xCloud).
Plus your suggestion can be implemented with cloud compute (a backend behind the UI) - it doesn't need to be cloud streaming.
My regular gaming setup is a 144 Hz monitor with a PC. Everytime I try gaming on a console with a 60 Hz TV I feel like I'm completely drunk because of the noticeable input lag. And that's not even cloud gaming. That's just the Console + TV input lag...
The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game.
If I, conversely, buy the same $60 game on Steam, I know it'll be there years down the road, that I'll be able to play it on any PC I build, and I don't have to maintain a monthly fee for it.
What Google is trying has been tried many times before, by people who had more permissive game ownership structures.
Do not tell us we shouldn't be worried about using such a product from Google given their track record -- especially when the costs to them are enormous in terms of computing power and the reception has been very tepid (meaning those costs are larger per-user than they likely anticipated).
I think Google is betting that cloud steaming is now viable and are going to put as much resources as possible to make it work.
I am not doubting that there are issues with the product and concerns about Google, I obviously have reservations but don't believe that it hinders me from being excited about the prospect itself
I love new technology and gadgets. I bought an Oculus DK2 and Vive and they were both mind blowing when I first tried them, although I don’t still use them. Trying Google Glass, on the other hand, was beyond underwhelming. Holo Lens and Magic Leap, while slightly better, were also extremely underwhelming. Other than niche industrial applications, these products are far far too early for any consumer product.
What it's basically saying is "this failed until it succeeded", because the alternative option, that of being able to accurately predict the exact point the technology is 'good enough', has proven effectively impossible to do (given how so many companies that manage it occasionally also fail at it most of the time; it's a crapshoot).
To that end, given Stadia is here, does anyone think the tech is ready? No. In fact, people seem to think the opposite, that Stadia is Google's attempt to get the tech to a specific point, or to offset the cost of the tech serving another use case.
The only way Stadia has a shot is if Google stays viewing it as a way to profit from having unused GPUs sitting around within its cloud offerings.
While this is true now, you'll later be able to play games by only paying a monthly fee or only buying the game for the normal <=$60 price. The subscription isn't necessary to play games at all.
The problem you have with the service potentially going away also applies to Steam, to a lesser degree. I acknowledge that they have a proven track record now and also require much less to continue serving games though.
WHAT? I've been under a rock and I assumed that it was a service where you buy a controller, already own a streaming device (or maybe the controller has the device in it), and pay monthly for the whole service. You have to buy the games too?
That is an immediate about-face for me. If they shut down the service then I just stop paying the monthly fee. This is perfectly comfortable for any service. But if I have to buy-in to every game...
So yeah, if they discontinue Stadia it is an open question what happens to the games you purchased on it. They have avoided questions on it, unsurprisingly.
Unless I am misunderstanding, the 4k up-res is happening on Google's side, so it's not like they are skimping on bandwidth.
I suspect they didn't have enough clout with development studios to create that pricing structure.
As an example, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is $59.99 on Stadia ($39.99 with subscription for 4K). On Steam it's currently $59.99 too, but at 4K without the extra subscription.
Game distribution is a hyper-competitive market right now, with Epic Games in particular giving away high quality games for free every week on their Steam competitor and paying developers up front to get timed exclusives.
I think Google's going to have to re-visit its pricing and customer acquisition model on this one.
I'd expect after a few years of game streaming competition someone will try to undercut the market with a Netflix model.
But with a requirement for a $400-$1300 graphics card, depending on the FPS and quality you want. And no hope of running it at 4K on most laptops.
I'm not saying their Games strategy will mirror the one taken for Movies, but I'd advice waiting to see what will happen.
There is certainly room to be concerned with what happens to purchases if Google eventually pulls the plug on the whole service.
Games With Gold are actually free. You need the Gold membership to get them, but you can unsubscribe - they're yours.
Edit: You may be thinking of Game Pass, which behaves in the way you describe.
Who precisely is this concept even marketable to? People with high speed internet, that also can't afford a gaming console?
But can afford a device capable of handling all of the inputs & playback of the video.
So lets low ball and say a $140 chromebook.
+ the cost of the games.
How many people is this? Genuinely.
A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.
Unless you have (particularly good) fiber, this probably won't happen. The bandwidth requirements are too high.
> No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.
FWIW, all of the current generation consoles (even the Switch) have a standby mode that will let them patch your games while you're not playing, meaning that in most cases when you go to play, you can immediately play. They'll even download pre-ordered games without your input.
The only time you would need to be concerned about download times is when you're purchasing a new game for the first time. That's typically a one-time event per game.
On my Xbox I often don't get around to pre-ordering games and there is limited disk space so if I want to play a old game I have to wait again.
And, if I'm a little bit snarky, you can't exactly play those old games on Stadia either.
I game on PC, my kids use PC and consoles, and I can't say that "downloading/installing games" is a significant time sink - and if your network isn't good, Stadia isn't going to work either.
The other thing that I think will break the Stadia business model is that the free access costs Google money unless it recoups the spending on the games. So while we're hearing about reasonably competitive Day 1 prices for games, will we see the pattern of discounting that all other games go through? Second-hand console games?
It just feels like it's aiming at a niche while building out a huge system that's only going to be viable if it achieves mass adoption.
For example, say you want to play a particular new game but don't have the hardware for it. Stadia could be a good option to quickly get to play without having to buy new hardware.
Say I have a decent PC for most days and small games, but I'd like to try the new Forza Horizon because it looks fun. I could very well get it on Stadia. I'm not worried about losing access in 10 years, it's just to have some fun for a few months.
Actually for games with pretty high requirements such as the future Microsoft Flight Simulator, streaming could be the best option for most people.
Maybe there isn't enough high speed internet deployed in the world, but there certainly are a lot of devices capable of streaming given how many people already have an Android or iOS device on them at all times. Both of which support Bluetooth and most modern game controllers. Some of which have better screens than most people have at home. Some of which have better specs than, as just one interesting example, Nintendo's Switch.
For example, a gamer playing on PC and/or XBox might want to play Horizon Zero Dawn for some time, but not buy a PS4 just for one game. Or some Nintendo exclusive game.
Most people don't have all gaming consoles available, and exclusives are (IMHO sadly) a thing, and this might be a reasonable workaround to provide compatibility.
Of course its not available for Mac (yet).
And existing consoles require you to:
* pay a large upfront fee for the hardware
* purchase games at full price
* buy a recurring subscription service for access to updates and essentials, like multiplayer.
Stadia doesn't seem unreasonable at all by comparison.
I do agree that if it reaches the point where Stadia allows you to effectively rent a $3k - $4k high end gaming PC for just $10/month, it will become an interesting proposition.
The game purchase story is identical.
The multiplayer subscription is approximately another ~$4 a month, and includes an average of two new, free, games per month. It's also not required outside of multiplayer.
So, the deal is virtually identical to (or better than) Stadia, but with much more stability in poor internet zones, and the chances of Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo turning off their entire ecosystem are much lower than Google's (they have a positive track record spanning decades on this topic).
You can look at the cost another way: Buying a console is like buying a 5-year pre-paid plan for a subscription service. That puts it in clearer terms, to me.
Anyhow, once Stadia's free version is released, unless its drastically limited in someway, it will be cheaper than everything. Honestly, I don't know why they didn't advertise as a primarily free service. People think of it as a paid service first, that has a crappy free tier, rather than a free service that has a value-add pro tier.
But having a pricier option where you can save your content offline would be a way to satisfy both audiences.
Although in this case, I personally think a pure subscription model should replace the fee + pay-per-game model as the basic streaming option.
Genuine question: What is innovative here? There are at least a dozen attempts at 'cloud gaming' that I'm aware of dating back about a decade.
That's not innovation, it's just having a bigger stick than the other guy.
Cloud gaming needs even lower latency. I don't think it's possible, but if google is doing the serious datacenter work, it must be a testbed for something else, because gaming isn't worth it anyway.
> By 2018, the United States video game industry had matched that of the Unites States film industry on basis of revenue, with both industries having made around US$43 billion that year.
I'm just one datapoint, I know, but that's also just a keynote.
The games were not re-engineered / ported specifically to run 'in the cloud' as Stadia is attempting. There are some interesting things that could allow, if a developer ever decides to utilize it.
You pay the one-off cost to buy the console, you then maybe pay for the Pro subscription, but you have to buy your games and those games are locked to that platform - just like with PS/Xbox.
All the other stuff about having games that deliver something unseen before because of "the cloud" are mostly promises and theoretical features at this stage, so I wouldn't bank too much on that.
Has been a product for a long time and actually works really well.
Apparently, Microsoft is simply going to rack-mount XBox hardware and stream it that way, which means the entire XBox library is instantly compatible.
For Stadia, games have to be modified specifically for it and their Linux configuration, which limits what games are announced for the platform, and requires engineering effort.
Streaming live and streaming offline media require very different infrastructure.
Google is not the one being innovative here. This has been done before, to no real success. Google was first to the finish line (kinda, seems more like a beta in implementation), but other offerings are coming down the pipe shortly.
I don't see Google winning this one. MS is in a much better position here, and NVidia also has one in the works.
I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money.
I'm sure there are many people who would be happy to take your money to bet against Google.
where do I sign up?
BTW Twitch is a different kind of game streaming.
As-is, Google just happens to be first-to-market in the current generation of on-demand game streaming options. But we've seen this technology before, and I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home.
There are videos on YouTube of people using Xbox game streaming, but it requires setting up a VPN at home which presumably few people do.
Edit: with the Stadia launch, I'm currently working on setting up a Raspberry PI as a VPN server to try this myself.
But then they come out with some hosted older games. Eh. Maybe the big reveal will come out eventually, but this far it's pretty disappointing.
How about I don't pay the monthly subscription/for the controller and tell Google that "payments improve. Mine will too"?
I'm obviously salty because I preordered Stadia (against my better judgement) and it's terrible.
The overall quality is very beta (black screen in Stadia unless you disable hardware acceleration, which I have to do every time, Stadia can't easily handle multiple Google accounts, I have to change accounts every single time).
Probably worst thing is very Google-like support. Super long queues for "Customer Care", phonelines are closed at 10:30 AM because they're "Out of hours".
They make great free toys that mostly work and make a lot of money doing so. I'm glad to use those toys for free, but I'm under no allusions that what often works will always work. That's not their forte.
They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.
Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.
Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult. Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.
Can you provide specific numbers to the count of people devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc? I suspect the number's a lot smaller than you think. I also suspect the peoples' duties are less devoted than you think.
If Google, for example, truly worked to tackle spam then it wouldn't have a spam problem today. If Yahoo truly worked to tackle reputation, people wouldn't have trouble sending email using an email client instead of a browser.
I'll grant you that uptime does have dedicated people. But it's not to tackle spam or reputation. It's because offline services don't make a profit.
There are teams that actively (and solely) work on spam and abuse detection. They're larger than you seem to believe, though I won't give exact numbers. There's also obviously sre teams that maintain uptime. (Note I said teams, and there's a public approximate minimum size for an are team at Google of 8-12 people)
The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to use awa or gcp to send email, or even send spam from Gmail, prevent trickier things. So you're left to defend from a spam campaign from Yahoo while also trying to not block everyone at Yahoo, and detect the spammers who are using Gmail to spam Yahoo too.
And the spammers are always innovating, so you have to as well.
My personal belief is that Google likely considers spam detection to be an area of competitive advantage so investments are warranted.
Spam absolutely can be solved.
1) enforce identity. If the sender isn't authentic, then the sender is spam.
2) enforce reportability. If the user reports the sender as spam, then don't permit the sender to send more messages to the person who complained. if a lot of people report the problem, then block the sender.
3) enforce liability. if an ISP hosts spammers, then block the ISP.
If someone complains then walk them through the process. Just like people shouldn't drive vehicles without understanding that vehicles are dangerous, the same should be done with computers.
What's your definition of authentic? Is a self-hosted email server authentic? How do you decide?
> If the user reports the sender as spam, then don't permit the sender to send more messages to the person who complained.
If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails to other websites, what do you do? Block all yahoo senders? Try to block the yahoo accounts as they appear?
> 3) enforce liability. if an ISP hosts spammers, then block the ISP.
All major ISPs host spammers. Often they don't know that they do. Is it worth cutting off all comcast users nationwide from being able to use email? If anything, this would further centralize on one or two trustworthy email hosts, because those providers are essentially their own ISPs.
Authentic in terms of DNS. That means using and enforcing DKIM at the minimum.
Also in terms of from: and reply-to: addresses matching each other.
> If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails to other websites, what do you do? Block all yahoo senders? Try to block the yahoo accounts as they appear?
If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails, then that's a Yahoo problem. Yes, I would refuse to accept incoming mail from @yahoo.com until they've fixed their complicity.
> All major ISPs host spammers. Often they don't know that they do.
I disagree about not knowing that they do. ISPs must respond to fraud and abuse reports or they would lose the ability to do business. ISPs not responding to spam reports are offloading the cost of policing their users onto you.
Sure, these are basic things that are generally used as strong signals, but all this does is filter out the incompetent spammers. If you're sending from yahoo or from gmail, you've already solved the reputation problem. And there are other ways of doing the same.
> If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails, then that's a Yahoo problem. Yes, I would refuse to accept incoming mail from @yahoo.com until they've fixed their complicity.
I'd expect that this is approximately the baseline number of yahoo accounts sending spam when they aren't being actively targeted. Its less than 1% of 1% of the active monthly accounts on yahoo. So you'd like to just block yahoo constantly?
> I disagree about not knowing that they do.
Sure they know, in the sense that I also know that there are always people spamming from every major ISP. That doesn't mean that they can immediately address things. And while you're busy blocking all comcast users from sending your users email, your users are busy moving to a different email provider that identifies individual spam senders so that they can still receive legitimate email.
In closing, a simple question: if solving spam is this straightforward, why hasn't an upstart competitor (yahoo, protonmail, etc.) taken advantage of this strategy to fix the spam problem? It appears you're presuming a centralized system, which defeats the point of email and significantly simplifies the problem.
If my mail server is banning mail from Yahoo, I can't communicate with my grandparents and I stop using that mail server. Enough people do that and the mail server has no users.
inetknght, I get the sense that you run a mail server of your own. Have you taken your own advice here and blocked @yahoo.com incoming? Is it inconvenient? Is it more inconvenient than the two-step process of setting up a Gmail account?
Why are your grandparents using Yahoo instead of your mail server?
> Have you taken your own advice here and blocked @yahoo.com incoming? Is it inconvenient? Is it more inconvenient than the two-step process of setting up a Gmail account?
I haven't had any correspondence from anyone who uses @yahoo.com. Or, if I have, they haven't complained about me not receiving their email. Or, if they have, their complaint was also not received in which case it doesn't exactly matter. If it did matter then I would address it then. And, importantly, it also means there's another (less noisy) communication medium available already.
Because internet systems are one part technology and one part social. My grandparents already have Yahoo accounts and are unwilling to change that.
And if your solution to interoperating with Yahoo servers is "I don't have anyone to talk to using Yahoo servers," then I'm afraid it sounds like you're trying to solve a problem other than the one email is designed to solve.
Everything Joshua Morton said but also:
What is identity? A name? An SSN? How do you verify that for people in all the countries of the world?
How do you do that at scale? With hundreds of millions of users, you can't exactly call them up.
How many users are you going to have after you start adding measures to verify their identities at signup? How will the board of directors feel about that? And feel free to run your own company into the ground doing the right thing, but there are other email providers in the world who will happily accept the users you drive away.
What happens when people have their accounts taken over and start spamming? Were the accounts ever "real"? How can you even know?
What happens when the reports themselves are spam? Spammers will report other spammers to remove the competition. Or they'll just overwhelm it with useless fake reports to DOS your human reviewers.
You have to realize that every input to your system is a potential avenue for abuse. There are people sitting there all day thinking about how to prevent you from achieving your goals. Humanity went to the moon, we're problem solvers. If there's a way to manipulate and undermine your spam defenses it will be found.
I would love it if "package-manager-thing install mail-server-thing" and "service-manager-thing start mail-server-thing" could get things going with sensible defaults like they do with nginx, even if you'd probably need to tweak things after they were going just like you're almost certainly going to do with a web server. But AFAIK, that just ain't the case.
... and even for that, I had to disable / re-enable the firewall and fish around in the docs just last night to get the dang thing to accept connections from a source other than localhost (PROTIP: when running on a pretty-out-of-the-box Windows 10 config, the default options bind listeners to IPv6, not IPv4). And I definitely wouldn't recommend that configuration for production; you'll open yourself up to a universe of pain.
But as an analogy for setting up an email server vs. just subscribing to Google or whoever, I accept it. ;)
Ironically, it is the technical problem of verification that makes it difficult to run (not setup) a mailserver: no one wants to trust it.
Tell me more about how DKIM and SPF and TLS with client certificates don't verify senders.
P.S.: However, come to think of it, they don't. You can receive a perfectly legit and verified email from scammer@consrus.ru with the name displayed as "Mr. Your CEO".
Such technologies have to be done behind the scenes and presented seamlessly, or they will probably never take off.
It sure is when they don't even bother to show the From address, there's no way to make links unclickable as an email administrator.
At this point, between Microsoft and Google ruining it in different ways, email has very little hope as a medium.
Somewhere in the last 10 years or so it feels like the gmail team switched from "Make a good email client" to "Shove all the enterprisey things into gmail!".
It's gotten SO slow to load and is incredibly bloated.
I was a happy inbox user until... drumroll... they shut that down too.
I still use Gmail because old habits die hard, but I won't ever suggest a google tool at work. Fool me once, shame on you...
Sadly from a UX point of view I can't disagree. Google inbox (and other products) showed how the UX for mail clients can be tremendously improved. But they shut it down and only migrated some of the more irrelevant features. IMHO the UX of gmail is so bad that I wonder if they want to phase out email altogether.
This doesn't even include some of the thing inbox (and maybe gmail, idk) supported wrt. metadata and live updates and now is discontinued "because it's no longer needed with dynamic amp pages". Just that amp kinda misses the whole point of email :( .
I really want to write my own client. But I know it's way to much work to get to the point where it's nice _and_ that is pointless if the people sending mails will stop including thinks like json-ld sections in mail. Really sad, as that had a lot more potential then the amp * they want to ship now.
https://twitter.com/JasonCWalton/status/1065631146090868736
They've replaced the hamburger menu in the upper left with a "back arrow", which does the same thing as the hamburger menu did, while making even less sense.
Preventing Products from failing should be SOP.
It's good to see that maintenance is rewarded at Google at least occasionally. I only ever hear that it is only new products that are rewarded. And I notice new people piling on to issues in their product trackers that I've been following for years.
This one?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_serv...
Sometimes companies are shitty but it doesn’t justify such a strong hammer. If anything their search products or mobile products would themselves need to be broken up, (or FBs network and Instagram) not the whole company... but even then it’s not like they will go away.
Perhaps, but the vast majority of the hate lands on those companies that are actively screwing over their users, so... I'm happy with vindictive against a billion dollar monolith that I have no hope of ever controlling.
Here's an example from Apple:
Only Apple Maps can show you maps on a locked screen.
Until iOS 13 Siri tightly integrated with Apple Music ways no other app could.
Apple Pay is the only payment method that can work with a locked phone.
Only Apple's app store can install apps.
Only Apple's messaging apps can create new contacts.
All built-in apps only call other Apple apps for supporting functionality, for example Reminders will only open Apple Maps, Siri smart suggestions for ETA only work with Apple Maps as well.
All Apple apps get an immense head start of integrating with new APIs and OS features.
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So if you create a competitor to one of those Apple apps, from day 1 you're at a disadvantage.
If they were broken up, all competitors would be on a much more even playing field with Apple's apps.
And Apple is just an easy example, Android is much more open than iOS, but Google Play Services is still a guillotine over anyone who dares to go against Google's wishes.
Imagine if Google services were separate companies so a claimed misdeed on one couldn't end what is the core of billions of people's online existence...
Generally, just because someone may find a way around a law is not a justified reason for not having the law.
A break up usually means many of these people are laid off or move on. Every separate company would have its own books that would either need to be public if they remain public entities or have audited financials that match expenses to revenue and investments. Not an easy thing to hide QTR over QTR. Furthermore, depending on how the companies are broken up, they will be acquired by other companies or PE rather than be stand-alone enterprises. Lastly, whistleblowers.
TL;DR It's not worth it for spite and any significant gains or advantages that are imagined, are probably significant enough to be noticed by the government or some enterprising analyst.
Same here. I hesitate to invest any time or money in something they make until it's been around and looks like it's going to stick around.
As though that would indicate how likely it is that the product will have a long life. They are telling me with that question they want my software for a long time. But when they hear the answer they bail.
I still don't know how to get over that hump.
The hump you have to get over, I think, is the one where your product doesn't explode the second you disappear. That's tough with web stuff, but easy for native.
In the short term try offering to put the source code in escrow so that if your company fails the customers can take over the product themselves. This reduces their risk a little, at least for large enterprises with competent IT departments.
> Even when they come out and claim that this product will not be cancelled,
When has this happened?
Has Google broken its contracts?
They are also optional: you'll be able to play on Stadia without the controller and without the Chromecast (e.g. on a computer with mouse and keyboard).
Lately I find myself putting more and more energy into preparing for my eventual departure from all things Google.
I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management is/was.
Now I have no clue what they are thinking with their product launches as of late. All of their products (and marketing) invoke this conservative, risk-adverse blandness that tries to appeal to everyone and in turn appeals to no one.
Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which then results in shutting things down.
What's missing is the company-level portfolio management.
While I generally agree that Maps is a great and amazing product, I really feel that it is now suffering "peak product" syndrome like MS Word circa late 90s/early 00s. That is, I think Maps was probably "optimal" about 2 or 3 years ago, but since then there has been so much organizational pressure to do something new and add features than each successive version gets worse overall with feature bloat. Yes, some of those new features are useful, but overall I have less and less screen real estate taken up by the actual map and more and more taken up by shit I usually don't care about.
Same thing with Gmail - what was once zippy and performant-feeling now feels like swimming through molasses.
- Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing")
- Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)
Uhhh...
Maps? Mail? Pixel 2 and 3? Fi? Sheets?
Sure, their Cloud doesn't sell as much as Amazon's, but it's been praised as being a much more coherent product.
Not sure how anyone could argue that Google hasn't gotten it right several times.
I agree with none of the others.
Search and Gmail transformed the web.
Google Docs and Sheets brought standalone office suite online.
App Engine was ahead of it's time for cloud based applications.
Google Big Query still is an amazing cloud based way to analyze TB/PB of data cheaply.
I'm critical of some of their business practices, but denying quality of Google's products is myopic.
And then they killed it for no reason.
I would phrase it as "other search engines are catching up to Google's capabilities", myself.
It isn't noticeable better than DuckDuckGo, which is a better alternative for privacy reasons.
They've also acquired Google Docs, YouTube, and Android which are arguably their most appealing current offerings. But those products are themselves giant question marks. YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws.
Probably the most compelling product to come out of Google in a long time is the Chromebook. Given their history, a lot of people are rightfully suspicious of Google's intentions with the Chromebook and privacy aspects around it.
I tend to eye Google's offerings the same way I looked at MSFTs 15-20 years ago.
Ethical and privacy issues aside, they're also fucking riddled with UX nightmares.
Gaming is big business, Google wants to own the consumer relationship so it can force publishers to advertise/sell through them.
There is no such team as a "product team." There are programmer teams, sysadmin teams, business admin staff teams, adhoc project teams, and taskforces.
The moment the product ships, all go minding their own business till the next big assignment. This is an inescapable problem in big companies.
That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers.
Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting.
They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.
YouTube also launched a subscription model, although I have no idea if the number of paying users is relevant
Same goes for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which offers an incredible set of features for free, even though their is a paid Analytics 360 tier.
How many users would it take for Stadia to achieve that kind of critical mass? Gaming is not as sticky as email or collaborative document editing. So if the critical mass is not reached, I'd expect them to discontinue it.
Paying ISPs for internet access and on top of that paying for accessing a particular web app? It's too much IMO.
I could be wrong, but this reminds me a lot of 2006 or so when smartphones existed but were mostly Blackberry / Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PCs. We were ripe for a technology revolution but didn't know it at the time.
Either that or we are progressively turning into grumpy old people who don't like new technology?
They are quite poorly run. You have this huge monopoly product that is locked up super-voting shares. The people in possession of those shares appear to have no management ability or even interest (or just ability in the case of Larry Page). There is no oversight.
So it shouldn't be too surprising that the products they develop have no value...that isn't really what Google do. They make products for staff to manage, not for consumers to use. Maintaining products isn't fun for managers: they need to build empires, acquire staff, and grow budgets. Google is a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly (btw, this is totally unique...I am not aware of another company that has ever been like this outside of tech/the present...the East India Company maybe?).
Sometimes that results in products, but sometimes it results in multiple teams working on chat apps that never see the light of day, or Android being shipped with multiple SMS messaging applications at the same time, or that weird split between Gmail and Inbox. The money wasted must be tremendous.
There is a successful future in cloud gaming and nobody denies that. However, it's extremely likely to be delivered by a company with both the technical chops and industry chops, including a deep existing library. Google only has one of those, and they didn't even nail the technical side convincingly.
Look toward Microsoft or Sony instead; all the pieces are there for them to waltz in and drink Stadia's milkshake. And we know they're working on it. It's Disney+ all over again.
But they did none of it. The focused on the technology with no thought on the value prop and the business and consequently decided on the easisest and worst model where the customer pays full price for old games. Typical Google.
1. They are investing in first-party studios, but I’m not sure about second-party
2. Most of the launch games available to Founders are up to 50% off and included 2 free games (although that’s just like Free Games with Gold so I wouldn’t necessarily say it sets them apart)
3. They’ve worked with other studios getting their games on Stadia. For example, they sent engineers to Bungie for 6 months to help port Destiny 2.
4. It took MSFT years to develop Game Pass and the relationships with the developers to do so
5. Not many, if any, AAA companies are going to agree to put their new game on a subscription service, which is why Game Pass only has old games and Microsoft’s first-party games (although there might be a couple of exceptions)
6. It’s the developers that are choosing to sell the games for full price. Google definitely could eat some of the cost though
The launch was a disaster in that there is no excitement about the platform. I like their statements on first-party development, but quality first-party games should have been at launch and ideally platform sellers.
Though I referenced Microsoft, Microsoft isn't doing a great job either. They have bungled the XboxOne launch and somehow ended up with almost no first-party games. They have certainly regressed since the Xbox360.
>For example, they sent engineers to Bungie for 6 months to help port Destiny 2.
Developer relations is something that Google is actually pretty good at. They make their engineering resources available to their partners (even outside of Stadia). I worked with them when we moved to GCP. That's not the issue. Their technology isn't the issue. Their engineering talent and technology is top-notch.
The issue is the commercial, marketing and business side. They also have a big problem with dealing with customers directly. Their natural inclination is to be a platform. That's great for search, cloud, YouTube (though they should be creating a catalogue of high-quality content), but not great for things like phones, and in this case, Stadia.
>Not many, if any, AAA companies are going to agree to put their new game on a subscription service
Agreed. Exclusivity is very expensive. You won't get RDR2 or MK11 at launch in your subscription service. Even having AAA publishers supporting a marginal platform at all will be a challenge (if they can't move units on your platform, why bother supporting it?). That's why you can't rely on those publishers. They need to be building their own library of first and second party games.
Two very different issues, and both of which are arguably "solved" at this point.
1. Long tail sales is on par for Xbox One with where they should be at, at this point in the generation.
2. Microsoft divested several studios prior to the Xbox One. Such as the aforementioned Bungie which was a first party developer for the Xbox 360, and Epic which was a strong "second party" developer. It's taken them a bit for the spin-ups of their replacements to match their former brethren's output levels (343 and The Coalition, respectively), and Microsoft has also invested heavily into acquisitions in recent years, adding a bunch of interesting heavy hitters (such as Obsidian, inXile), and some interesting oddballs (such as Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Compulsion). It will take a short while for those new first parties' power to be felt in the Xbox space, but no other console manufacturer has invested as much in the first and second party development as Microsoft has recently. The only thing watering that down is that Microsoft (for very good reason) still believes the PC to be their first and oldest console, and "first party exclusives" are getting released to Windows 10 and now (again) Steam simultaneously with Xbox releases.
(I think it says a lot that Microsoft let Bungie go. They didn't try to kill the golden goose. It's made the Xbox One a bit slower to catch up to some of the highs that the 360 saw with Halo 1 and Halo 2, but maybe it's so much the better for the industry as a whole that Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 haven't been Xbox Exclusives.)
I'm over simplifying but I'm sure MSFT has a plan out there if they wanted to move forward after seeing how Stadia works out.
Both platforms are at similar levels of maturity, actually, with similarly limited support for platforms, controllers, and games. Microsoft just hasn't had the audacity to charge for their beta test.
We'll see how effective their respective libraries are at reducing churn when it comes time to pay the piper.
Ha, well, that's what all the critics are saying about Stadia, but PS Now has ~800 titles. So it's still pretty comparable.
> looks like they use PS3 there
They have some PS4 games too.
"Playstation Now" came out years ago. You can stream games, or you can cache the executable locally if you have a dodgy connection or want to go offline. And if I'm reading this correctly, you don't need to pay for the individual games, either - just the service.
It's seemed more of a test bed, for something they plan to do together with the PS5
> not fully released to be played on phones/ipads etc in all areas
Yes, the feature set is different. But, again, debuted in 2014. And it is available on PC, which shows that at least it's somewhat cross-platform.
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-now/ps...
>June 30-Sony Computer Entertainment has agreed and signed an agreement to acquire Gaikai for about $ 380 million [12].
that statement is in the playstation now jp wikipedia page.
also there
>In addition to PlayStation 4 (PS4), it is a cloud-type game service provided to various terminals, and was officially announced under the name “PlayStation Now”. PlayStation 3 (PS3) games will be provided using the technology of SCE subsidiary Gaikai
Just transalate the playstation now japanese wikipedia page for more info.
Google is going to face the classic conundrum that anybody who's ever tried to enter the gaming industry has had to face, it doesn't matter how complex the technology is, every generation of gaming has some degree of complexity. Google will need a killer exclusive franchise.
When Microsoft entered the market with the original Xbox, it took Halo to make them competitive. When Nintendo did it in the 80's, it was Super Mario Bros. Sega did it with Sonic. Google needs a flagship IP or they'll fail.
I don't really see Sony doing that... I could see MS doing it though as it plays into their cloud ambitions and they seem more open to alliances than the other big cloud players.
The CPMA mod then came up with even better adaptive prediction in their netcode.
Without some prediction opponent movement would be jerky depending on the other players ping. The downside is that sometimes shots don't register which are a clear hit on your screen and sometimes weird flick shots hit which are far off the target.
Not to mention even fighting games like Melee have a little local input lag, which you can then remove and use to hide network latency online.
Seriously, if any startup launched it in its current state, people would be cheering and blaming it on a new tech/new challenges. But cause it's a very big corporation with top talent it means that they have to release top quality product every time? What the hell...
I'm very excited about the project, although not really interested in it at the moment. I don't think its target audience is hardcore gamers, so why all of you are so over dramatic? Possibly, feeling happy that "real" gaming isn't going anywhere anytime soon?
Obviously, there are problems and challenges, but I'm pretty sure that sooner or later it will get better. That's what the MVP is for, isn't it?
Yes - they have closed down so many services that people depended on.
> with top talent
I don't see much evidence of this in their service provisions.
I do agree that it speaks volumes how Google's PR team isn't doing a good job recently, though.
You can live life, have good moments, enjoy and have a good laugh about things without it coming at someone else's expense.
People have spent a good portion of their working life to put this product out there. It has flaws and it's not perfect on day one, sure. It might even get cancelled a year from now. None of that matters nor does it mean we need to make a mockery of their work. So much negativity around us these days. It doesn't have to be this way.
To the customers who spent money on Stadia and games on Stadia only to have it shut down and leave their games inaccessible it matters. If this were a free service there wouldn't be so much negative chatter about it. This is mostly people warning others to consider purchasing Stadia may be equivalent to a high-priced one year subscription.
The current negative sentiment as seen on HN is about Google dropping products. But I think the negative sentiment outside of our bubble is due to Google blundering into this with dishonest marketing. Google tried to force this into a viral success on day 1 and that's not going to happen. This strategy also eroded trust that it will be fixed to the point it was originally promised either.
Finally, it didn't help that they didn't vertically integrate the games themselves and are charging full price for the game on top of the service. Microsoft is a good example of how it may have been done, by investing heavily in studios and exclusives to get the people going. To be fair though, Microsoft has decades of experience with this with xbox alone.
EDIT:
Because of a sibling comment I just want to mention how I think this may end. I think Google is now between a rock and a hard place, they either dump immense resources to get it right, or they dump the product and face even worse consumer reputation decline (this time in an entirely new market segment!). I suppose there may be a third alternative of putting it on life support. Either way there is no clear win here, I do empathize with the team which probably has a lot of passionate members who just want to do a good job. It'll be a good PM lesson to watch how it shakes out.
What do you mean by this? What is the difference between a big marketing campaign from a large company and a campaign "forced to go viral on day 1"?
I've not seen any of the advertising for Stadia so I'm probably out of the loop here.
They are marketing to hardcore gamers
I'd direct you to a review of Onlive, a previous startup doing exactly what you say[1]. The take away is exactly what I've heard about Stadia:
"OnLive's streaming game system is a really cool concept, and the ability to access a library of games with no downloads, discs or storage worries is definitely cause for excitement. Some gamers will be put off by the occasional lag, though, and the list of currently available games isn't hugely tempting.
Still, OnLive is an exciting proposition, and it costs nothing to try it out. It probably won't suit you if you're pernickety about lag and image quality, but we'd recommend checking it out nevertheless."
I personally think that, after seven years, Google seems to be in the same place as a much smaller company, speaks to why it feels disappointing to me.
And another solitary tear from the other eye for Google Inbox :,(
Vote with your wallet and choices. Use non-Google tooling whenever possible.
To be fair, Gmail has been my primary email since early 2009 and I'd never even heard of Inbox until people on Leo Laporte's podcast started whining it was going away.
Google Inbox was great. Intuitive, modern, snappy, a testbed for new features, and on the surface it seemed less monetized and ad-ridden than gmail.
I switched away from Google's email-clients as soon as Inbox died, also having used Gmail since as soon as I got an invite when it was more closed than today.
It's fair because MANY people had never heard of it. I even heard on those same Leo Laporte podcasts people going "what's inbox", people who report on tech for a living. I imagine, compared to people just using the gmail app or the web interface, it had terrible adoption rates which made it not worth supporting. From all I could gather is it was almost exclusively used by those in tech and then only by a small subset.
I imagine reader had a small user base. RSS feeds are a pretty obscure thing and always were.
The only hangouts messages I've ever received have been group spam and likely has a relatively small user base.
Google Circles was largely spam and garbage content created for SEO in my experience and probably had a very small real user base.
Etc etc. If you your user base is a small percentage, or a fraction of your percentage, of your overall user base it's perfectly fair to go "well, let's shelf that".
Couldn't figure out how it was better than the stuff I already used and switched back to the regular Gmail client again.
iOS App - Android App - Windows Phone App
Not interested unless there's a plain old HTML over the web thing which Reader did well.
But it seems I've tried InoReader before, I'm giving it another shot.
Slack, FWIW, is actually quite a bit like Wave was. I feel like if Google didn't screw the launch up so badly, and iterated on the product, they could have had Slack about 5 years before it actually existed.
At the time I was working on the mail delivery infrastructure and they basically reached out to us at the last minute asking about email functionality. That was horrible because its not easily to wedge into a product after the design phase.
It annoys me so much because it was such a cool idea but the tech stack was badly implemented from the start. =/
It was pretty nice to have some kind of dashboard when opening the browser.
A todo list, a calendar, emails, news, weather.
When it went away I tried some alternatives, but they weren't the same :/
The title says "When Will Google Shutdown Stadia?"
It should be "Shut Down", which is a verb phrase. A "Shutdown" is a noun, eg, "There will be a shutdown in March."
Another common example of this:
You need to log in. (long in == verb)
What is your login. (login == noun)The whole takeaway from it seems to be that self-described descriptivists intentionally use non-standard definitions of words then blame the other party for misunderstanding, making the writer fail at the primary goal of communication. And that is literally ridiculous.
When I worked for Nintendo we broadly called the segment I’m in “lapsed gamer” and it’s actually a pretty big niche...
What I read between the lines is that people are pissed that Stadia doesn’t address the “core gamer” demographic well (this kind of reaction is recurrent - see the Wii!), but might this not be a great go-to-market strategy?
Not really hate but more people are so dazed by google's "product" zigzagging that it's hard to take it seriously anymore. Google managed to induce massive amounts of cynicism in their users.
e.g. Remember Google+? The thing that got shut down? Couple weeks ago I get a corporate email saying please update your profile pic on google+.
1. I thought it's dead.
2. What profile? Did you guys create a profile for me on a dead product?
3. Or did they keep the corporate version alive?
4. What about google currents? Google+ pages? Different things? Same thing but renamed?
I don't bloody know. And no I'm not updating my profile pic dear HR. Google will kill it in 3 months time and/or launch 2 clones or relaunch it with a lick of paint anyway.
It's the same with all their other stuff too. Their chat thing I use every day? It's got 3 different interfaces with different functionality and I don't even know what it's currently called. Hangouts? Meet? Google Chat?
[1] https://www.onmsft.com/news/you-can-grab-an-xbox-one-s-all-d...
I'm interested in what you've said here. Not only does it describe me but, if Nintendo are tracking it, it explains why they're one of the few companies I would trust to continue making the kind of solid, single player experiences that I enjoyed when I wasn't 'lapsed'.
I have no interest in 'e-sports'ey online multiplayer because I don't want to invest time to be good enough to enjoy it. I don't want to invest in a game-as-a-service because I don't want to feel trapped in it.
We saw similar strategies around the launch of Steam. Sure you're just buying a download code, but if you send us $5 for postage we'll mail you a physical disc to go with it. Same concept.
The problem is that, to move them to a new platform, for example Steam, they need to pay the platform's cut of the sale price. To give users the option to do this in future, they would need to keep all of the revenue they get from selling games in reserve to possibly do this in future. They would have to do this by charging users what it cost. I think it'd still be attractive though.
We should look at how many startups from YC die within 4 years and make the comparison. I might be wrong, but the ratio could be very similar.
Still, Stadia will fail for sure ^^
It doesn't mean that zero people use it. Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes.
If big YC companies all got shut down if they failed to turn into another letter in the FAANG acronym, maybe people would become reluctant to use services from YC companies.
I still use some Google services, but I check out my data on a regular basis, I'm not buying a Fitbit, and I'm not subscribing to Stadia because I want those things to last longer than I think Google will keep them around.
Other than google reader I doubt any of these would have gotten traction at all without big g behind them.
So if Google is going to launch something under the Google brand they either have to be happier with things that aren't making 10s of billions, or not make so many efforts and burning their users/customers/devs at every step. Why as someone downstream do I want to dedicate my time and money to their product when they've shown that unless it becomes a massive success it will be folded?
Google Code: GitHub sold to Microsoft for a good chunk of change. GitLab, Bitbucket, Source Hut, all seem to be doing fine.
Hangouts: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Portal, Matrix/Riot.im, iMessage, Skype is maybe back from the dead depending on who you ask (certainly not kids, though). It's almost easier to ask who isn't in the Messenger game right now. The fact that Google managed to fumble two huge market share leads between Google Talk and Hangouts is maybe only equaled by Microsoft's multiple, complicated fumbles of MSN Messenger and Skype.
But the team needs to be disciplined not to get wave overblown, that's true.
When you are a company that is as large as Google with a brand like Google, you don't want to be known to be making half baked marketing efforts, getting people on board and failing. Customers and developers then remember that and rightfully associate Google as a company that will gladly abandon you and cost you your money if it does not become big enough for Google to care (multi-billion). So Google cannot operate like a startup if they want to keep their reputation. A start-up would be very happy to have a low millions revenue but for Google that would be a rounding error and killed. So they need to make less bets, and put much more effort into getting their bets to the level that they can make acceptable money for Google while being mindful that killing a product does a lot more than lose Google the money invested.
They haven't shown anything compelling why this would be a game changer for end users.
The games are not more fun or unique than on any other platforms.
Any of the cloud arguments also hold for consoles or PCs on internet connected games.
I think the site may be a bit optimistic.
Don't mistake the fact that you don't want cloud gaming for nobody wanting cloud gaming
So clearly there are plenty of people who want this and are even willing to risk it being total crap at $130 each.
Also don't mistake half a dozen people on a tech forum as being indicative of a mass audience that's commercially sustainable for something.
Especially given HN is rather prone to imagine a product as turning out in a utopian perfect way rather than the more realistic "compromised by the requirement to be economically plausible" one.
For me, I prefer something like Apple Arcade because it downloads the game to my system. I'm not sending commands over a network connection that might flake out at a critical moment. I also don't care about playing with others, usually, though.
Some games lock players in and absorb their time continuously (e.g. Overwatch, PUBG, WoW, etc), while others package a digestible block of content that can be consumed in 10, 20, 50 hours, and then it's done. Subscription payouts based on proportional screen time would drastically favor the former over the latter, while lump-sum compensation flips the tables since it doesn't consider ongoing server and infrastructure costs needed to make multiplayer work.
I think this "Buy your games, and subscribe to them too" model that Stadia is using is how they're trying to split that baby, but given that nearly every other service is either subscription or one-time purchase, I have a hard time seeing it stick around long-term. Then again, some console systems also function that way, so I might be wrong.
I don't get this view. They really did show compelling, game-changing features for the end-user, if you watched their talks and demos. They showed lots of potentially game-changing features for developers too, which impact the products, which impact the users.
Most of it is vaporware at this point though, and what we have in Stadia today is basically an early MVP.
Why?
I don't play video games that often. Usually, when I play a newer game, it's because I happen to have new hardware that's capable of playing the game. Otherwise, I just sit on the sidelines when there's new games that come out because I don't want to shell out $BIG_BUCKS for some shiny new console or new PC that I'll only use for 20-40 hours total.
But, assuming I could stream a game with hardware I already have, or very inexpensive hardware, I'd probably play more games. Not nearly as much as active gamers willing to play $BIG_BUCKS for a shiny new console, but probably 1-4 hours a month.
And, yes, I understand that the speed of light introduces fundamental latency problems with streaming. It means that these systems only really work well in dense population centers. It's not like I live out in the boonies where this won't work for me.
I think the point of game streaming is to remove the high cost of entry of a console or PC. At some point, these services can be integrated into smart TVs, and all you need to play a game is a generic USB or bluetooth controller. Everyone wins, especially in a market where consoles were historically sold at a loss.
For now. I think it‘s a good solution for certain people. I have gigabit fiber, but no interest to buy a gaming pc atm. So what if I quickly want to look into a game without spending thousands? Could be an OK solution.
Azure is the latest big hit.
Somehow Microsoft has adapted to this reality with some grace, they even balance it with the "Who moved my cheese?" attitude of its customers.
It's certainly helped push Dell and the like to improve the build quality, thermal engineering, etc. on their laptops.
On the other hand, the whole "Windows Tablet", "2-in-1", etc. hasn't been a big hit.
The model where you're still "buying" the games ties you to the ongoing operation of the service much more strongly than in many of their services where an eventual migration might be a little painful, but it's still possible.
The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record.
Exactly, in fact, Stadia is really just a way for Google to subsidize their cloud GPU buildout. Do you think those expensive GPUs are sitting idle in the meantime? No way! They're crunching numbers or spot instances for AI/ML workloads.
The OpenCL ML ecosystem is really lacking at the moment.
(Disclaimer -- I'm one of the devs. Even though we were bought by Intel a year or so ago, we've been pretty good about keeping the AMD / OpenCL support intact.)
The better "guarantee" on that end is the knowledge that Steam makes Valve lots and lots of money so they'll probably want to keep it running. The fact that you do have some sort of local copy and cracking would be an option if it came to it is some comfort also, though that's not really a solution that scales to the size of peoples' massive Steam libraries. There's also of course DRM-free stores like GOG as an alternative.
1. If Steam shuts down, Valve shuts down. If Stadia shuts down... Google is doing just fine.
2. What Stadia is attempting to do is much more technically challenging, and I've yet to see a strong reason people would want it. Steam fills a clear and unambiguous need, and does not depend on near-magic technology to work.
3. Steam works, right now, and is reliable. Stadia? It's unlikely to ever be reliable for many users. Maybe it will be, but that remains to be seen.
It's conveniently indexed by year.
I was expecting people to be worried about stadia being 200 or more ms latency but 80? Come on.
I expect Stadia input latency to be much greater than that, though, because most display hardware adds at least 30ms on top of whatever latency Stadia introduces.
With Stadia, the whole gaming graphics are streamed to your local client, so when the network is slow, the graphics will lag. And of course, it takes magnitudes more of data to transmit.
Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it, so playing with 80ms input lag would be fine for 99% of players.
This is just straight up not true in the slightest. There's a reason HDMI ALLM exists, and it's not because "nobody notices hundreds of ms."
80ms is very noticeable, it's like moving around in sludge. hundreds of ms is straight up unplayable. This is no where close to what consoles & TVs are currently doing, which is closer to 50ms.
The fact that console gaming is so popular despite it having such horrendous latency is proof that latency is not an issue for streaming services to go mainstream. I'd look more at unreliable latency and data caps, people definitely notice 100ms latency spikes.
They're surprised because that's absolutely not even remotely close to true. Consoles & TVs do not have hundreds of ms of latency. This horrendous latency does not exist. That's why it's not an issue.
Look here, the games averaged 100ms for a monitor with no display lag, add another 50 - 100ms for a typical plasma tv: https://displaylag.com/console-latency-exploring-video-game-...
And I do notice 100ms which is why I mostly play on PC with sub-50ms end to end latency. But this is besides the point.
> add another 50 - 100ms for a typical plasma tv
The typical TV has never been plasma? LCD TVs have had game modes for a decade and those are 10-20ms latency. Consoles automatically switch into game mode, too, and have for a long time.
Unless you are Tarn Adams
P.S.: Don't take this statement the wrong way, I love small indie devs and donated for Dwarf Fortress.
Of course I'm just theorising - it could be an idea that no-one's implemented yet.
Exactly, companies like "Artificial Software" (artificialaiming.net) have been selling aimbots for FPS for a decade or longer. I was curious back in 2009 and purchased access for a game in the Battlefield franchise.
It allowed me to have colored rectangles around all other players, my own team being green and the opposing team being red. You could see this rectangle through walls which would let you rack up kills and avoid getting ambushed. You could also auto-aim and tell it if you wanted the head or the torso, you could headshot people that were so far away you could not see a single pixel of their body. It also allowed you to start using your knife rapidly if an enemy got within a certain proximity of you.
It would even allow you to spawn in on enemy team memebers instead of your own team on maps that allowed you to spawn on team members AND it would change your name on non-hardcore servers to appear to appear as an ally to the enemy so you could spawn on one and casually follow them around, them thinking you were on their team, and just knife or headshot them when you wanted or follow them to a group of them and det pack/grenade/spray and pray and kill a bunch of them.
A quick look at their site and they still have many bots that still allow many of these features (and others like radar hacks, no recoil, no bullet spread etc) for various titles because all of this is still on the client side.
Matching output seen on the screen has existed for decades under the umbrella of macros. I remember writing my own for an MMO around 2005 using AutoIt; it was significantly easier than any client modification.
Having your server verify every action is the only way to prevent hackers from simply sending a packet that says "I got a headshot on that guy". Instead the server replays through all their actions. You never say you got a headshot, you just say when you clicked and the server figures out if you hit.
And because like you mention, clients only receive gameplay data and not the fully rendered screen, this allows clients to do things like interpolate the (delayed) server data with their own realtime input elements. Otherwise every single action you take would be delayed by whatever your latency is, and every other player's actions would be delayed by a similar amount. Instead, it appears seamless until your latency gets so bad that you just begin teleporting between positions because the server can't track you well enough (often called multiplayer rubber-banding).
Instead (well designed) game servers run their own authoritative version of the game world and track each player's latency, and use that to replay the previous few ticks of the game when an input comes in from any player. So if you have a 100ms ping, and press "W" to walk forward, when the server receives your forward input it treats it as if you have been moving for 100ms already.
Basically, saying every player shares the world model is incorrect unless you can set them all to the same latency.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lag_compensation
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...
Edit: additional source, these gafferongames articles are a bit old (2004) but still extremely relevant.
https://gafferongames.com/post/networked_physics_2004/
https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_t...
Complex physics with high object counts can be difficult because synchronizing a lot of state is bandwidth intensive. Most games with lots of moving objects (RTS for example) use deterministic lockstep so only inputs need to be transferred, even if there is an authoritative server.
The fact that I have to pay full price for a copy of a game that may go away at any moment is ridiculous.
There's no beating the laws of physics here. RTT in normal installed titles with modest system requirements is already an issue for gamers, let alone the latency this requires. Maybe in a few years when something like Starlink is in wide use, this can be revisited.
I really don't get who Google's target market is for this. A flat monthly fee I can see, that's what Playstation Now and, I think, XCloud is doing, but requiring full price purchases on this platform is lunacy.
The problems Stadia addresses - eliminating 100GB downloads and constant 10-20GB patch downloads that might take hours to pull down, removing the cost of entry in the form of a console, being able to play AAA games on your phone - these are things the average non-hardcore gamer cares about.
I'm not a hardcore gamer -- I think hardcore gamers would call me a "casual gamer". But Stadia is not interesting to me at all. It offers tons of important limitations, and brings no actual benefit that I can see.
The benefits you cite are not things that matter to me at all. They may matter to others, of course, but I can't speak for others.
But similair things were true for lots of dead products, and google's willingness to launch a large number of products and only keep the ones that gain massive market traction shows just as much paranoia about ending up with a stable full of lqggards and weak brands.
If user growth flattens out after two years, be nervous.
What will happen to the service when the people first involved have moved on and they have trouble finding engineers wanting to work on something that's not brand new? Wasn't that why they cancelled Reader?
That's why they integrated it into everything that they could (YouTube, Drive, GMail) and shut down any service that might remotely compete with it (Reader, Wave).
If Google could kill Google+ then they can kill this.
https://gcemetery.co/youtube-nintendo-3ds/?ref=lifespanrecen...
I realized that I actually would really like video game streaming. It would be really neat to pop open whatever game I'm playing on a tv in another room, or on a chromebook or some other non-gaming device.
The problem is Stadia also wants to control the game library and the hardware. I'm not okay with either of those. Really, I just want to stream from the ps4 in one room to the TV in the other room. And, I bet there's a way to do that already (going to look more into it later). Either way, it's not a multibillion dollar venture, so I think that's why google wants to be streaming, renting a computer, and owning your game library, all in one. I don't care about the other two services. I have hardware and I have game libraries.
If I could run Stadia with a game installed locally on my LAN in addition to content from the internet (like how chromecast works) I would give it a try, maybe buy a TV for my bedroom which is currently devoid of technology save an iPad.
It would restrict things like modding and user modifications of games, which I value rather highly. The fear that I suddenly loose access to software is also present since I certainly am one of these backwards hoarders. I saw people loosing some of their digital media when GFWL shut down.
Still, in context of this page I believe that there is life in the old dog yet, even if the dog isn't old at all.
Google doesn't have a process internally (AFAIK) equivalent to series funding, but the processes they do have are functionally equivalent; if management decides a project isn't worth investing in, teams get re-assigned and that's it.
And companies that can offer a 10+-year support cycle on their products announce fewer new initiatives a year.
Digital games are bad enough in that they can be pulled out out of the respective stores whenever, but when you can't even have it downloaded to your own console? Get out of here. What utter nonsense.
For comparison in the game industry, Sony has publicly committed to 10 years of support for each numbered PlayStation console generation, and that seems to have worked out pretty well, with generations spaced about 7 years apart.
(Sadly the PSVita/PSTV didn't get that support, nor did some services like PlayStation Vue, PlayStation Home, or Qore; also many multiplayer game servers have shut down after a couple of years, rendering the games unplayable online.)
Stadia should have more clearly set launch expectations: there are only a few games worth playing for, most of the cool cloud features aren't there, etc, etc
But that doesn't mean all of those things aren't coming? For all intents and purposes, this was a soft launch. Sure Google is going to burn a ton of consumers by launching before the true value-adds are there, but it doesn't mean that one-day Stadia won't be worth buying.
Google is on the hook for a bunch of titles and features they haven't delivered yet, if they were to "lose interest" in the next six months to a year I'd be pretty suprised
They haven't had a success in a while, bluntly. Perhaps the "Google way" of launching a half finished product over vague windows and iterating after that doesn't actually work? Or if it ever worked, doesn't work now when Google isn't a plucky underdog and the products aren't competing with other unfinished platforms but often mature, feature complete alternatives?
Smart watches were here and there long before Apple jumped in and made it main stream, and just like iPhone they made an industry out of it.
Google should stick with what it does best, like Android model (even wear OS model). Let the market for a new product starts maturing, then use the its software&services to beat the crap out of others.
I'm having a hard time finding the data in tabular format.
Summary: they solved a technical problem without a clear user story, and were ultimately too early. Sounds a lot like Stadia.
If Stadia is successful I can see it being a way to pay for new data centers for Google's cloud infrastructure.
If you consider that most consoles last a 4-5 years, they cost ~$299-500 over that period, that's ~$39-$125 per year for the generation. Instead of the users owning the machine locally, Google installs a consoles worth of power in a data center. Once the generation is over, the data center is still there and Google has put all that money into a semi-new server datacenter infrastructure that can be rolled into Google's Cloud service offerings. "Kids" / Gaming money then pays for "Adults" / Cloud Server infrastructure. The idea sounds great as long as there are enough gamers who don't mind the latency.
I am unfamiliar with the lifespan of a Google data center but I imagine it's around 5+ years.
It's already close, I've gotten stable <20 ms over 100 m distance with Steam Link in standard 1 gigabit ethernet LAN without any tweaks (QoS etc). This is enough to play slower performance-heavy games like citybuilders without noticing any difference compared to playing on a local computer.
That was the case decades ago when technology was advancing fast. The last couple of generations are more like 7 years and future generations will probably last even longer.
If the product is good, I'll pay for it. With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business.
I do wonder if this would be profitable though. Is Google operating at a profit even with the current model?
NOTE: I got way into writing this comment. I have things to do, but I thought I'd do some napkin math instead haha. I'm probably way off, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
My guess is it isn't. I'd be surprised if Google is selling the hardware at a profit right now, simply because the volume is not too high and they definitely want to reduce the barrier of entry.
On the software side, game companies probably don't want to lose margins and it sounds like right now they have leverage since this is a nascent platform. My guess is they're taking around 70% of the game sale (wild guess from the "digital sales" info in these Ubisoft slides [1]).
Let's ignore Stadia Pro for now and just assume the $10 a month go towards the the free games, or the extra compute for the 4k games / surround sound, or the discounts. If we go with $60 as the average price of a game, this napkin math tells us Google is making like $18 per game and that this their main source of revenue.
How long is a game? It varies widely, depending on the game (and the player) [4]. Let's say people spend an average of 20 hours on a game though. An hour and a half a day for two weeks.
Can Google stream games, HD at 60fps, for less than 90¢ an hour? Of course, this is Google so they're just employing their existing developers infrastructure, etc. The scale probably means they can probably get RTX 2080s in bulk at a discount. It's perfectly plausible they can. Im again, also certainly way off in my numbers. But it is a huge investment— the promise is it could open the doors of an industry for Google, but if it doesn't, is it worth it?
To be clear, I'm not calling doom on Stadia just yet— YouTube operated [2] (operates?) without profit and there's still old services that have stuck around. Google Voice still exists in spite of many calling its doom years ago [3]. Just wrote this for the analysis, not really to make a point one way or another.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_reta... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f... [3]: https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-... [4]: http://www.gamelengths.com
I tried Steams version which steams a video from your gaming pc to another pc on local host and the input lag is still noticeable
I don't want it to go down because, I'm sure Google will lobby with ISPs to improve their latency and ISPs in many countries have long hidden their pathetic latency behind bandwidth/data numbers.
I don't think it will go down, because once latency issue is fixed there's no debilitating issue with stadia and western reviewers who are bearish about Stadia are forgetting how big mobile gaming is in Asia. Many of those mobile gamers haven't owned a console let alone a computer and Stadia in their cheap android mobile would be first console quality game they experience.
A dead on arrival product.
They want to get into the gaming industry, but take a gordian knot solution. They don't want to compete against consoles. They want to be a console for computers, regardless of OS.
Do they kill things? Yes. But, if those things are making billions.
Video games make billions.
Survey says?
(Just IMHO, and not much to substantiate my prediction.)
So far nobody has come up with a viable revenue model for cloud gaming that people are willing to pay for. People are already complaining about Stadia's $10/mo just to then pay full price for old games. And there's no way even that is covering Google's costs to run the service.
The biggest hurdle is not Google gets bored and canning it. It's at what point does Google decide Stadia needs to at least be revenue neutral and prices double if not quadruple, with the free tier eliminated entirely. Is the service still viable at that point? Will anyone stick with it?
I guess I don't understand what people want here.
Can't wait until it dies off.
And I'd rather take it from Merriam-Webster than someone's belabored "notaverb.com" hobby horse.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shutdown
First known use of shut down as verb: 1779.
If your issue is merely with the lack of a space, then it just seems petty to me, like getting technical about raincoat vs rain coat.
Can you show me anywhere "shutdown" is used as a verb (in the computer industry or otherwise) where it appears as a choice rather than a simple error? Like in the title of a well circulated article, or otherwise in something that has been subject to professional editing?
https://twitter.com/apstylebook/status/1087717834975789056?l...
Not yet. But if that becomes common enough, then that just becomes how the language is, like it or not. I personally would hate it and would be that annoying pedant who always calls it out, but if people mostly accept it, then I wouldn't really be in the right. When usage is in transition like that, it's these sorts of debates that determine what the end result will be.
My current pet peeve is the use of "literally" for emphasis rather than actually meaning literally. Although I will always object, this usage has become very accepted by people (below a certain age), and so I can't really say they're wrong in some sort of objective sense. But I'll complain anyway.
There is also the issue that phrasal verbs are often split up or rearranged ("when will they shut it down?" "it is shutting down", etc), which isn't all that compatible with merging into one word.
Anyway I'm glad to see they changed the title on HN, even if I got downvoted for my complaint. :) I appreciate your pointing out the value of this discussion, though! ("it's these sorts of debates that determine what the end result will be.")
I'm personally ok with the non-literal use of the word "literal," but that's a different tangent...
Originally it was just "Sorry, but pet peeve. Shutdown is not a verb." and I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they weren't just quibbling over a space.
noun: Can you share your login?
verb: Check the URL before you log in.
noun: Is that a turnoff for you?
verb: Turn off the TV when you leave the room.
This is a whole class of words that are always two words when used as a verb, and one word when used as a noun. Setup/set up, login/log in, lookup/look up, checkout/check out, etc.
I guess you can claim it is petty, but to me it is like using the wrong "there". Especially bad in a title.
This sort of word does not become compounded in the way "rain coat" can become "raincoat".
There isn't a single example where the verb form of any of these, as a single word, is considered correct:
backup carryout checkout comeback cutover cutoff failover handout knockout lookup lockdown login logoff logon logout meetup meltdown pickup rollback rollout rollover setup showoff shutdown shutoff signin signoff signout signup slowdown startout startup takedown workaround workout
And it isn't just a case of typical compounding, words/phrases of that general form are never compounded in verb form.
What are you talking about? The hypothesis was extrapolated over hundreds of Google's products.
Stadia's just the beta test to get the hardware running, tested and get developers familiar with the backend platform they need to develop for/port too.
Video games are one of the few really massive and lucrative markets which Google can move into and make a dent on their balance sheets.
So yeah Stadia will probably get canned at some point, but the technology will probably go onto bigger and better things.