Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise
3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against "reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you will.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_o...
Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away several games a month for a couple years now. Once a month updates at a $10 subscription is table stakes here.
I agree that content is important, but if you're talking about new games, Google doesn't have much control, the developers works on those not Google.
> Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar
But this isn't about the free monthy Stadia content. Stadia has been giving 2 free games the first of every month since launch and has not slipped a single day. The two games for February were just announced.
Doesn't matter, Google's gonna get the flak for it. People bought hardware and a subscription from Google. If they're not getting value from it, for whatever reason and whomever's fault, they're going to be mad at Google.
Why did Google release a platform if they didn't have enough games lined up and ready? I assume they're hoping they'll be able to weather this negative sentiment and do have games planned in the wings, but we'll see.
At some point, there will be a zero-install gaming service like Twitch/Itch and devs can connect directly to fans for realtime playtesting, etc. So much, so little.
It gives off the vibe that this is another one of googles random side projects that no one really cares about and will be scrapped in a year. Which is extra concerning since people have spent real money on the hardware and games.
Though I don't think the hardware would be all that usable if the service was shut down.
When you’re a massive global video game streaming service, you’re supposed to plan ahead a bit, don’t you think. This is not a mom and pop store.
I know just saying it makes it sound easy, but responsible executives and teams should be capable of doing better.
The only case where this isn't true is Search (but getting worse), AdWords, and YouTube. But everything else is not uniquely Google (eg. Drive, GMail, phones, Android, Chromebooks).
Then they may or may not abandon the project based on the uptake, leaving the adopters high and dry. I personally would not risk buying anything from them based on their proven approach to product launches.
Here we are in 2020 and only now have Sony and Microsoft begun talking about backwards compatibility in future console generations.
The initial version of the PS2 had dedicated hardware to be fully compatible with PS1 games.
* GameCube to Wii
* Game Boy to Game Boy Color to Game Boy Advance
* Also features a case of backwards compatibility on behalf of games too. A lot of GBC games would run in a Gameboy in black and white
* Nintendo DS to 3DS
* PS2 to launch PS3
* (Announced) Xbox one to Xbox Series X
I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the community hasn't been particularly happy with any kind of news. Not to be derisive, but I don't really understand the tribal fanaticism both for and against the service.
Yes, the service is missing promised features, but it's actually pretty good. For someone like me (in my 30s, don't want another box that I have to keep upgraded), I've been enjoying it for what it is — with a decent internet connection, you can play a modern looking game with very little effort.
Google did promise more, but I still haven't given up on their ability to deliver. Seems like a lot of moving parts, and maybe only their community management is missing.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-stadia-12...
2. https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro...
3. https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-it...
Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn't (yet). It very much smells like a disconnect between their business/marketing and the product development.
Yes they better because their advertising was at best misleading.
There's no winning the PR game on Reddit or other social media sites when you have some motivated psychopathic shit-posters drumming up the negative sentiment - especially when the conversation gets titled that way early. There are a few sacred cows, but almost every other noteworthy game or console at some point goes through a similar phase. If the company keeps things afloat long enough while iterating on their product, the shit-posters generally get bored or move on to something else.
Many good products succeed despite it all.
Stadia development is expected to pick back up as soon as the Google Fiber rollout is complete...
It seems like a terrible product to me from a "what kind of future do we want to live in" perspective, as well as UX.
They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.
"While I don't have product updates to share right at this second, I can promise you that I have been, and will continue taking feedback posted to r/Stadia and other channels, like the Stadia Community Forum, back to the Stadia team."
They can't even scrape together an update for a thread of thousands of people who paid good money and are foaming at the mouth.
Gaming, community, and customer service could not be further from Google's DNA.
* Their reputation for prematurely closing down products too but that's not something they can directly affect.
Stadia might become lucrative in a few years with slow adoption and improvements but if you get into it right now, you just pay to be a beta tester.
Really? I have it and it works just as well as when I had a xbox and gaming pc. You can look through some of the other stadia threads here and on reddit and find plenty of other people who think it works well too.
Someday someone is going to write a Management book about short term thinking and it will feature Google.
What? The product works just fine, people use it and can play games. How is it useless? Just because brand new flashy features weren't released doesn't make it "useless".
With the context of Google's history though, this looks exactly like what it is: Google underestimating the amount of support and reassurance users need.
They had years to plan for the months after launch. They have 110k+ employees around the world with different holiday schedules. It's not like the holiday season took them by surprise.
Google is not a hapless toddler of a company. They've been around for 21 years, they have $40B in annual revenue, and they should figure out how selling things to humans works.
This is a company that fails at absolutely everything except ads, which is a dubious business to begin with.
People put down a lot of money for the right to purchase games at higher-than-normal (compared to a PC) prices. I can certainly understand the ire at the radio silence.
As someone who helps support it in a medium sized business, do not use G Suite in your business.
I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new pasttime here.
Does anyone else feel like we're just becoming a predictable echo chamber?
I see similar comments on stories about WeWork, or Apple, or Facebook, or Amazon.
I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.
Anecdotally, as someone who games regularly, I never even looked at the Stadia. It was of 0 interest to me. I suspect most people in my position feel the same.
Clearly I can’t trust Googles marketing or Sales copy after how it handled this initial launch.
There are a lot of videos and reviews that mark it as a poor product I.e. it’s launch title Destiny having an impossibly small player population for multiplayer activities.
And then there are people who give it shining reviews such as yourself who seems like a reasonable human but is still only one data point.
So I’ll wait and remember this consumer experience for every google product that gets pitched to me.
I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.
Of course KOTOR is good, it was probably the best RPG of its half decade and it won GOTY awards all over the place.
The same year KOTOR came out, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was also released. And besides abysmal games like that, a lot of relatively forgettable games that might not stand up to another go-around in 2020 were critically acclaimed: perhaps selections like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, or even the original Call of Duty, depending on your point of view.
Sands of time, however, was different. If memory serves, it holds up okay. I played it around the same time. It's an old game, so you have to factor that in, but I recall it being pretty decent. COD type games tend to suffer, due to their draw being state of the art shooters, vs. true "creativity". For some reason, I don't feel that way about UT2004, CS:Source, and others. Maybe that's just bias.
Once people were comfortable with "game streaming" they could move forward with new/exclusive content. Which is basically what Netflix has been doing. I appreciate licensing old games is probably a nightmare, but a service offering opportunities to play old classics would have got a lot more goodwill than this mess.
If they had done both then they could have released GOG titles as filler between AAA releases and that would have been something.
It is only a problem if you work for Google.
It also promises to have longevity while following latest hardware developments, without having to upgrade your pc or replace your console with this year's hw generation. Of course the uncertainty about the longevity of the Stadia service counters this somewhat.. but the model technically solves longevity which is cool.
In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you can now go with the other evil empire.
(There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really. That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out. Land and in-world items are really expensive.)
I wanted to say that I fear for the "do no evil" Google, but that company has long since disappeard.
But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of users.
Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other products.
This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable.
I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.