Google's ambitious push into gaming is floundering
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
1. Appeal to developers by making exclusivity deals with them (e.g: we give you a bag of money upfront if you only sell your game via our store for a year) which is really beneficial for developers as the game business is quite risky. The developer gets guaranteed cash and Epic gets everyone who would buy that game on their platform (minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal)
2. Appeal to the customers by giving away free games every week. Epic pays developers for you, so you get a free game while the developer also gets paid. Epic wants you to have a library on their platform so you keep coming back, and because you need to visit the store to claim the free games they literally train their customers to use the store, from there it's a small step to convert them to paying customers with good deals.
It's absolutely baffling to me Google didn't do anything like this, they have literally more money then they could spend, yet they didn't do anything to get people to actually use their service. Compare it to the Gmail or Chrome launch suddenly there was this 'free' product you could jump onto, it was technologically superior and exciting and it came out of nowhere. Imagine if they did that with Stadia, just suddenly release it without fanfare, all your favorite games are on there and you can play X hours a week for free or something like that.
I think Google has to some extent been crippled by their search success - they built something and everybody came and uses it with little or no promotion or support, and its fantastic profitability has colored their view of everything else they try - if it's not an immediate massive success (and at Google, something that makes a hundred million in profit every year is generally not even worth the trouble), they lose interest and the people internally working on it disperse to other projects with better prospects.
They have the best hammer in the world, and it's cost them the ability to see anything that's not a nail.
Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it.
Good for us consumers, isn't it?
So all side projects are done kinda like a hobby.
If customer service is the foundation of a business, it drives a certain attention on the individual experience of every user, and there's a real incentive to be a customer's #1 choice by the customer's own criteria.
But Google's relationship with the userbase is statistical, not individual. As along as enough people look at their ads, that's good enough. They were never intending to please everybody, and so don't really have to pay attention to the details.
So it's entirely unsurprising to me that they're failing at gaming, which is very much about delivering amazing individual experiences to one's chosen niche. Ditto their failure in social networking. In both cases they built something that sounded good on paper and could be adequate for some people, but never succeeded in being truly great for enough people to capture an audience.
Sure, Google did sort of adopt it. But as you say, it got pushed aside.
I'm desperately wishing google would build a company-aimed wiki because confluence is atrocious.
And if anyone is going to deliver cloud gaming, my bet is it's google. It plays to their strengths: their ability to orchestrate and deliver scaled computing at the highest possible speeds. Further, it addresses one of the few markets at a large enough scale to make an impact on their revenues.
I wouldn't call docs and sheets good by any means; they're passable at most, with tons of missing features.
That's not what they are though. They're really good group collaboration on docs, particularly content, and collaborative lists with owner assignment. We do a huge amount of editing / signoff / planning / workbacks / etc in them.
And yet they entirely replace Microsoft Office for millions of people.
For one, it's missing the point about what everyone said is important about gaming, and hits the point that everyone said google doesn't understand about customers. why do you think 'deliver scaled computing at the highest possible speeds' = good at gaming? its kind of typical google, 'we offered the best X statistic, therefore they must like it.'
for "if anyone is going to deliver cloud gaming, my bet is it's google.", No. If I were to bet money, I would say it would be someone who is good at cloud, or good at gaming. Google is good at neither.
And Google isn't good at cloud? Maybe not gcp, but their internal application delivery capability is second to none.
GCP SA: We are “smart people” (tm) you should move your entire workload to $cool_technology before we migrate and do things the modern way.
edit: I just remembered: I've actually begged people not to make projects dependent on knol or wave. Its unsurprising how those projects ended after they ignored me. What did surprise me were the people who identified the use of those platforms as a failure in judgement and left immediately.
On that metric, Google is far ahead of everybody else in that particular field.
Now if Cloudflare or Akamai were to enter the cloud gaming business...
The number of edge locations you have doesn’t matter; latency does. It looks like startups in this space can achieve “good enough” latency with a small number of edge locations.
For instance, Shadow covers the vast majority of the US population with four data centers (they have six, total, but two are in Europe):
Coverage map:
The gaming industry is already good at that. Like, really really good. Do you think companies that operate world-spanning low-latency gaming experiences are going to be quaking in their boots because Google?
What Google is really, really bad at is humans. And the gaming industry is all about understanding that there are a raft of interests ranging from casual to shooter to arty to... whatever. There's still a lot of room for taste-driven sleeper hits (think Untitled Goose Game) as well as research & marketing driven extravaganzas like GTA Online or FIFA whatever-the-year-is. And wrangling social media, forums, engaging with fan wikis and chat and stuff, which is part of the fabric of gaming, is the sort of thing Google are absolute shit at. Gaming chat is famously terrible, but even gamers look down their nose at YouTube comments.
have you tried Google sites?
Docs and Sheets strike me as probably in the same bucket. They're perfectly cromulent, but there's nothing amazing about them. They were acquisitions, not an in-house creation. All they really do is take the basic features of any number of competitor products going back 20 years and put them on the web. If you like what they deliver, great. But if not, I wouldn't wait around for Google to add features aimed at specialists. It seems more like a basic utility than a consumer product.
But even for collaboration I think there's a long way to go. It's not like they significantly rethought the product in terms of true collaboration at a global scale. As far as I've noticed they've added non-conflicting, real-time edits and showing cursor location to the previous Word/Excel collaboration features like comments and proposed changes.
Not the "life or death" serious companies are for their main business.
But it's a really bad one. They killed Reader because it would let them abandon some legacy infrastructure. All other businesses don't have that luxury. They deal with annoying challenges head on. Google's unlimited money basically lets them abandon products when maintaining them stops being fun, or when extra work is required to power through the last 10% and make that product viable for take-off.
Everyone I've ever met there subscribes to the ideology you can soft launch things and build over time. "It worked for Gmail" they say. But ultimately Gmail didn't ask people to shell out real money. And it was a long time ago. Consumer culture has changed, and a launching half finished messy products with no real support or direction really alienates people now.
That approach also only really applies if you can give a product away for nothing for a long time to build a userbase. Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let that happen, because Google's new fiscal discipline means she kills products if they don't have a clear path to profitability after three years.
And that's the real contradiction. There's nothing wrong with Porat's approach, but Google structurally is not set up to deliver products like that at all. And Google's culture did used to be successful, but can't work with what the Stock Market has made it very clear that Porat is to do (it's extremely clear stockholders like the three year requirement).
Ultimately you've got to look at the top of the company for the rot, because senior leadership do not seem to be pulling in the same direction, and as a result you end up with now... when was the last time Google launched a successful consumer product? The Nest Home Mini is probably the closest one, and I suspect that still hasn't made any actual profit with how many they give away.
This comment echoes Paul Graham's observation about the wrong attitude founders often have about initial growth [1]: "A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist."
I think what Google is doing is just re-investing back into x amount of companies/ideas where even if 1-2 of those companies bounces back and becomes profitable they make up their investments + they make profit.
I think they do realise how much money there is to be made in the gaming world and such. Its just time and money against profit for them.
Throw eggs in the wall and see what sticks or not.
Personally I don't like that model and thats why I use google services less and less. Even gmail is a huge no-go for me due to their nonexistent support.
Stadia feels like something that got designed by asking "how can we make something that's worse for our users than the other alternatives that are out there now?" and then going and building that.
Now had they come out with virtual machines better than what anyone could get at home, maybe?
Don't get me wrong though; I'm sure a lot of this is death by a thousand compromises.
As a side note: I was watching the Product Keynote from Flutter Interact '19 and when the person from the Stadia team was speaking about their app, it reminded me that despite all the negativity Stadia is getting, we should remember that there are real people building it that are enthusiastic about what they're doing and trying to make something good.
Gmail was just a much better service than Hotmail or Yahoo! mail, arguably their biggest competitors at the time. They also offered a ridiculous amount more space.
I think those two successes alone led a lot of us into a place of just using Google products by default for a while.
It’s an utter shame what’s happened with the company, especially with its privacy issues.
My friend has Stadia and it's actually a great product. The latency is negligible. I would be the exact target audience. I usually play 8-10 games a year. I don't really want to invest in a console or gaming PC just for that. The ~100 upfront cost is great. But Google's reputation kills it. I won't pay full price for AA titles when it can be taken away in any minutes. Till that fixed, I just stick with buying ~5 years old games from Steam that runs on my MacBook
https://www.businessinsider.com/mapquest-a-symbol-of-everyth...
... but totally in a non-monopolistic way, of course.
The free "no subscription needed, just buy the game" tier of Stadia is the thing that should in principle be distinguishing them from the competition, and is actually kind of compelling from a consumer perspective. While the Stadia Pro just makes no sense as a product; it's targeting the people who least want this service and who are the most likely to already have huge game libraries on other platforms. How can it be that four months after launch, the tier that people might actuall want is still nowhere to be seen?
Isn't that how every other game store works as well? Unreal's, Steam, Microsofts and others all work with that same idea. They also have additional subscription services, but by default it's just "no subscription needed, just buy the game"
There's a few possible business models for streaming. E.g. with PS Now you have to pay a subscription, you get access to a games library, and can only play the games that are part of the library. (Not other PS4 games that you own). Or GeForce Now which in practice requires a subscription (the free tier is only 1 hour at a time) and allows you to play a limited set of games as long as you own them on the right platform (e.g. Steam). Xcloud seems quite likely to just be sold bundled together as part of another subscription.
So the free tier of Stadia should have been interesting due to not requiring a large up-front investment, and not requiring an ongoing subscription. Which at least at this moment is unique. Or rather, would be unique, because 9 months after the announcement it still has not launched.
With its added latency, vendor lock-in and Google-related privacy pitfalls, Stadia wasn't attractive enough for existing PC and Console gamers to switch in mass.
Er, Stadia works just fine on a chromebook with a 10 Mbit/s internet connection? That's about as low end as it gets for both measures. Does it require a high end phone to play on a phone? Yup. Does it require a Chromecast Ultra for higher resolutions and a higher speed internet connection (35 Mbit/s) to play on a TV? Definitely. But you can play on Stadia for less than a Nintendo Switch even if you add together the cost of a chromebook and an xbox game controller. Which is what I use on my laptop to play Stadia games.
There's only one reason to not do that: if your platform can't actually handle having users.
Stadia is selling games, so the service should do its best to get out of its users way as much as possible.
Though it works perfectly for party games where even a second or two latency is tolerated, like the Jackbox party games.
edit: the 1GB mailbox !
hotmail had that nice tie in with messenger, which was a huge plus
other emails had the ability to delete email
google tried to use email for ads which users found creepy
google had an invite system that made signing up difficult
etc etc
They pay Apple around $8 billion a year to be the default search. Apple has made more from Google in mobile than Google has made from Android.
products have to make an appreciable difference in the bottom line
I never said developers have faith in Google. I said shareholders do. My point is Google doesn't really care what developers think.
Their business depends on developers just like Lehman brother's depended on the mortgage market. Pride before fall, etc.
You ignore facts on the ground at your peril.
Out of the major tech companies - Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.
Google is one of the least diversified and has been the least able to pivot over the past decade.
Also in the US and to a lesser extent other developed countries, the wealthier more lucrative users are using iOS. Google knows this. That’s why they pay Apple a reported 8-12 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS.
Ads, GSuite, Youtube, Android, Chrome, and GCP, how much would it affect their profit?
Isn't that Waymo?
Disclsure: Work at Google, but opinions are my own.
That said, there have been other successful products and acquisitions which improved their ad busines. GMail, Maps, Android, Chrome all products with giant user numbers, but whose main contribution is probably to improve ads.
Still, a system like Stadia relies on convincing developers that it has a viable future, and it's difficult to build momentum when developers feel burned by the shutdown of other platforms, e.g. Google Plus or Chrome Web Store, where they've sold developers on a bright future, mostly abandoned the platform within a year of launch, and eventually shut it down.
But they pay peanuts to creators, $1k - $3k/million views per monetized video. And they own their own CDN, so bandwidth is a cost they can control or share with other properties.
And not operating Youtube would mean another advertising company would have a foothold to compete against them.
Except, it’s not actually $15 billion. Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat told investors during an earnings call on Monday afternoon that YouTube pays out a majority of that advertising revenue to its creators. Although Porat wouldn’t say how much of the $15 billion goes to its content makers, she did specify those payouts belong to YouTube’s “content acquisition” costs, which run around $8.5 billion.
Thats the real moat Google has, to replicate it would likely cost hundreds of millions a month in bandwidth, especially from places where they charge insane amounts (like GCP)
This is actually bigger than just appeal. I now have almost as many games on Epic as on Steam. This means that I start the Epic Games Launcher almost every day to see if there's something I want to play. In fact I now run the Epic Games Launcher more frequently than Steam. This exposes me to their store and I have started buying games from them. Before Epic started their free give away, the launcher was in the same category as the other non-Steam launchers I have, like Uplay or Origin. Something I virtually never start except when to play a game that requires them (and even then I'm reluctant). This means I'm never exposed to their stores and never entertain the idea of buying a game from them through those stores - out of sight, out of mind.
See the controversy where Borderlands games were getting review bombed on Steam, because Epic secured exclusivity rights for Borderlands 3.
https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-s...
In the gaming world, you're basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. If Google had aggressively gone for exclusives, they'd be getting the same backlash that Epic has gotten/is getting. But since they didn't they might be getting an equal but opposite sort of backlash now.
> Linux gamer
I fail to see the contradiction. Per Steam’s October 2019 user survey, all Linux distros together total 0.43% of their users. I am using the notably pro-Linux Steam as a benchmark for how many gamers are affected by this.
Basically there’s a subreddit of Steam fans making an outsized amount of noise that if you look into, doesn’t make a lot of sense but has kinda turned into its own thing.
Epic isn't in this to garner compliments on Twitter, they're in this for money, and while they've got a long way to go to beat Steam, they're seemingly on the right track. (See, eg, https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21064951/epic-game-store-...)
just worth reiterating that /r/gaming or whoevers favourite gaming YouTuber is not "the gaming community" or people that play video games.
So it appears either some people are fine with waiting, unaware of the Epic store, or just needed new headlines to remind them.
https://www.techspot.com/news/84095-metro-exodus-has-sold-ov...
The tragedy is that a whole generation doesn't realize you used to be able to buy and play games anonymously, offline, without going through a middleman. It would be better if you weren't forced through any launcher, but if there has to be one, more options are better.
In retrospect, the Epic approach is obviously the right way to do it. It was pretty obvious before too, but I think most people would have discounted the "build a platform by throwing an enormous pile of money at it" approach as being impractical (if for no other reason than most people who want to build gaming platforms don't have enormous piles of money lying around). Epic showed that, no, actually, you can just go ahead and do the obvious thing. :)
And I find it odd because first, Epic did all this before Stadia's dissapointing launch, so it's not like Google execs can claim they just literally had no idea you could build a gaming platform this way, and second, because (like Epic) Google can clearly afford it.
It almost feels like Google doesn't want Stadia to succeed...? Or is this just a culture clash from Google's experience with ads, search, video, and webmail, where success seemingly just fell into their lap, and they're struggling to imagine needing to market a service? (I find the latter suggestion implausible since, actually, quite a lot of marketing went into making those a success, but man, I don't have a lot of other ideas.)
The case of Stadia is wildly different, because it requires a lot more engineering, both from Google and the developers. They also need a lot more resources per user, as each active user basically has their own dedicated cloud instance running the game. Scaling that up and giving that out for free isn't as trivial, even if money wasn't an issue.
So I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison here. We'll see what the demo looks like once Stadia actually releases it, what we have so far is really more of an early access to test out the infrastructure.
People massively underestimate the business affairs aspect of getting people to come onto your platform. It requires really good people, and a lot of them.
Google seem to have made the same mistake.
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-24-google-is-...
IMO, it's more about a game store's expected longevity.
At this point I will probably never spend money on a game that's not on Steam (unless they go out of business) simply because:
1. I've gotten burned too many times by non-Steam stores that have later gone out of business.
2. Steam works really well.
I suppose a few people might be outraged by exclusives. I think most people just want an experience at least as good as games-on-dvd.
They've promised they'll let you download DRM free if they ever shut down steam. Yea yeah, promise from a corporation, but still.
Providing services like chat or webmail for free likely does not trigger any concerns. It has become accepted that this kind stuff does not cost anything to consumers so giving them free is not considered dumping.
YouTube could be definitely a concern, but Google seems to be careful with it. For example their spending on YouTube exclusives feels quite modest.
I suspect (but don't know) this might be related to the 20% time thing where employees can spend time on any project they want.
But the thing is, google projects too far removed from the core advertising business don't seem to survive.
Sometimes they develop an open source technology or pave the way for something, but other times they suck the air out of nascent niches.
I remember that when the orange box launched a lot of people (at least on the messageboards) where opposed to steam because it sucked and was basically DRM disguised as a store it's only because of the passing of time that it's now considered good. The orange box was in hindsight also a masterful move. I guess the lesson is, if you have content people REALLY want, you can get them onto your platform despite the outrage.
But for a game to be featured on Google, the game developers have to port it to Vulkan and Linux. This only makes sense for game developers if the cost of development/porting is going to be less than the money that they would make from the google stadia store. And given the less number of people who are using Stadia, game developers are shying away. And users are shying away because of lack of games. It's a classic chicken and egg problem which is unique to Google stadia. Geforce Now supports Windows games and xCloud uses microsoft's xbox library.
http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-gam...
I wouldn't be outraged by a "we'll help fund development in exchange for exclusivity" deal, but I am outraged (equally at Epic and the developer of the game) for making exclusivity deals after the game has been made, and seemingly in a lot of cases making it specifically a "you can release anywhere but steam" deal rather than an actual exclusivity deal.
I also wouldn't be outraged if it was just devs choosing not to release on steam because they get a better cut from actual game sales than they do on steam. I'm just outraged by Epic throwing fistfuls of money around to convince devs that have already finished their game not to release on Steam specifically.
Chrome was built out of the frustration of Firefox didn't get any faster. And at the time they have a real need to compete with IE which was holding back the web, their search engine, and hence their ad money.
Gmail was built by an employee as their 20% project, got traction within the company, improved the Spam filter for their own use before it was open to public ( or invite ).
Both of them were born from product mentality, where they see a problem, have real frustration and have vision of where it should be.
It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea rather than real needs. ( That goes the same with Apple Arcade, although one can argue it was designed for kids ) And whether there is a market for it remains to be seen.
Despite all the criticism Apple gets, and all the flaws it has lately, they are still very much a product mentality company, and possibly the only one out of the big corps. Google on the other hand, is more like a one off success. I cant even remember a Google product on top of my head that are not from acquisition or 20% project and was born out of a product mentality.
Edit: Ok there is one, Google Map.
Im not sure how or whether other services Stadia fit in to that. Maybe the fact they don't is why they get cancelled so easily? But I don't think it's accurate to say Chrome and Gmail were just standalone projects solving single issues, they were part of a wider strategy that has paid off.
I'm guessing the cloud gaming stuff is planned as a way to generate revenue with spare GPU capacity in their server farms. They're already spending a ton on GPUs and network bandwidth, so why not sprinkle some kubernetes on top and run games on it when it's not running training datasets?
http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-gam...
The whole thing felt like a rushed impulse idea out of Hooli (HBO's Silicon Valley) that didnt get researched further before jumping in. They could of made a decent Steam competitor. In fact they would of known that Nvidia has dwelled into this space and could of hired them for consulting on the matter.
It had ideas that sounded next gen and worthwhile such as playing from where a YouTube video leaves off at.
Sad to see really, since EPIC certainly has one of the best game engines to develop against. But in my circle, nobody jumped on that train. They will have a certain demographic though.
Overall I still doubt they could have solved the problem with money.
For example to Robot Entertainment (devs of Orcs Must Die).
That's a terrible reputation for any company to have.
In addition to Stadia, it seems to be killing off Improbable's Spatial OS, which is a back-end system for very large world MMOs. Originally, that had to run on Google Cloud. Three of the first games shut down, partly because the costs for that service are high. Nobody big is using it.
The other thing is - they must, must be playing the multi-year long game here. Infrastructure around the world just isn't ready for game streaming.
Having said that, from what I hear GeForce Now is giving people a FAR better experience than Stadia.
Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out? I never got the impression anyone was dying to get their hands on it. They could have given it another year of polish at least and nobody would have complained, surely?
I'd love to hear Google's internal rationale for why they thought this pricing model was a good idea.
1. You can't foresee competition, why give up early.
2. It's a big market, worth a shot even if it fails.
3. Someone thought the project would be good for their promotion. This happens more frequently than you might think :)
If you keep on moving fast and breaking things, people who don’t like it when you break their stuff are going to think twice about trusting you.
One thing: some pockets of the world do have good enough internet already, and they are only going to multiply.
I've traveled in so many countries, and the ones with the best fiber in the world can't guaranty a stable ping for the entire day.
This is what makes so many online games frustrating. I played MOBAs for a long time, and there is nothing more irritating than losing because you didn't get an information at the right time.
Now a non multiplayer game is not real time, so you can put mitigation measures in place, but it can't fix everything, especially for games where the rhythm is important: plateformers, FPS, racing games, etc.
We put up with it in multi-players game because there is no alternative.
But are you going to tolerate than sometimes, randomly, you are going to die because the network had a spike in ping when playing Mario or Cod when you could play comfortably on your TV locally ?
Remember the joke: videos games don't make kids violent. The lag does.
I wouldn't mind the occasional bad lag nearly as much as in a competitive multiplayer fast-reactions game.
I was thinking of eg XCOM 2.
Most games on Steam require activation through Steam servers, so unlikely. Also in case Steam went under, there would most likely be legal issues at play, preventing Steam from issuing any sort of no DRM fix.
The reason for that is as you say, they're playing the long game here. They know it won't make money, not today, not next year, not in 3 years. But in 10 years it could make billions. And getting actual user data and feedback early while you're building the architecture is probably worth a lot.
It's also much cheaper in most case. In average I paid less than 5$ per game on Steam (and that include many full price games).
I have no idea what the legal ramifications really are, but I don't think there's anything morally wrong with the service they are providing. If companies really believed in the whole "selling a license" thing more of them would be willing to provide cross-platform copies for free once you own one instead of grabbing another sale.
As a developer, you have an additional burden of testing on and optimizing for Google's hardware, which are apparently different from consumer hardware.
For consumers that's fine. They understand the situation and approach Google products with that knowledge. Stadia is a good example.
The people who should be most wary of this policy are Googlers who are looking for a team to join.
Only building new shiny things from scratch and never having to support them? Doesn't sound like a bad deal.
Most people (certainly everyone I've ever worked with) need to have positive external input and feedback on the work they do to drive them forward, and if you're not getting that and the feedback is repeatedly "Meh, it'll just be killed in a few years" it would eventually start to impact your confidence and ability to do good work.
So taking that lens it's easy to see why so many new products are launched but then fall away and are killed, because the people involved can get their money and then move on to do other things. Also explains the constant user hostile redesigns of existing products.
To fix the reputation in this regard the internal reward structures would need to be changed so that building new things is the only way to get ahead.
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/7/11631634/new-google-head-david...
A month earlier I'd suggested 4-5 years, earily on-mark:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115022452/https://plus.goog...
(I'd made a few other predictions, but they were roughly in line with that. I insist it was a fluke.)
And it turns out that it was very nearly precisely five years later that the service folded.
This on what had been a "bet-the-company" effort in 2011:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-aims-to-subtract-users-...
It was the only true competitor to FB, it would've needed to steal more features from Facebook but with G+'s touch, but nothing happened for years, they lost the vision to topple FB.
Given the dissembling surrounding G+ from the very beginning, credibility of that rationale is ... low.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Google which was an industry gold standard for innovation and job satisfaction has become anything but.
What I found most interesting is how Microsoft and Google have seemingly changed roles.
Microsoft was the old boring behemoth while Google was riding the front wave.
I guess complacency really is a silent killer.
I would really love to hear Brin's or Page's thoughts regarding the current Google
It's been worse. Google bought all those robotics companies a few years ago. Some, such as Bot and Dolly, had real customers, and the customers were cut off. All the companies they bought were silenced - no papers, no demos, nothing. People in robotics outside Google land thought Google must be doing something spectacular. No. Just a total botch with no plan. Google ended up dumping all those companies. Some just folded. Google basically trashed the advanced robotics industry.
At least Google isn't buying game companies and trashing them.
Though I think the game industry is kind of used to that by now. Big giants like EA, Activision, Microsoft, etc keep buying smaller studios and shutting them down after a few years and a few projects.
I kind of hope that isn't the case with the studios that Microsoft has purchased recently.
Although one suspects talent will start to flee very shortly.
This worked out not only because Microsoft had the money but, critically, because they had the will to make Xbox a success. They resolved to slog through the years of losses, failures (anyone remember the Japan launch?), and missteps in order to build a successful business.
Whilst Google have the money, more than enough money, to do the same, I don't think they have the will.
From my own perspective, as a gaming enthusiast, Stadia simply isn't solving any problem that I have, and I don't believe it's going to be around long enough that I want to invest in it.
[1] I'm sure they would have preferred if it wasn't.
Microsoft is really good at supporting products it releases even if they don't take off, at least when it comes to software.
But by the time they finally had a really good OS, developer interest simply wasn't there anymore and a mobile platform lives or dies by it's app store.
Gaming is different because you have the advantage of being able to court and fund exclusive titles eg Halo and Gears of War
But in 2 years it won’t be just Stadia in the games streaming game.
Their free tier isn't too bad, as of now, too. I see very little sense in buying something on Stadia, when I can buy it on steam and play at my desktop, or stream on my laptop.
I see one specific market it could target: visual heavy "walking" simulators. Contemplative games where you don't care too much about input lag but having a powerful rendering hardware could add to the experience.
Honestly, they nailed the 'hard part' - technically the platform is incredible, I can pick up the controller and be playing almost immediately with short loading times, no updates etc.
And then they screwed up the launch itself, all the marketing and failed to get a decent library of large games.
It might sort itself out though as they are set to launch the free version next month which will add many more players (so multiplayer without crossplay won't be dead) and equally there are some huge games down the line like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldurs Gate 3.
I bought it because before I had a gaming PC but to upgrade it I'd have to replace the motherboard and practically every component - whereas with Stadia I can play on my PC with kb+m or on my TV with controller etc. depending on how I feel and it's easier to get in and play.
I hope they sort out the problems as I feel it has a lot of potential.
Think Android NDK, just worse. At least that is what I get from those comments.
It vastly increases the work required by devs for very little incentive.
If they launched and made a go of it? You could make a slow transition. But up front? Insane.
I don’t see how this is possible if they are sending player input to a server somewhere with a 50ms ping. That’s a full twentieth of a second, not counting any lag at all from the server side.
I guess if you play an MMO or something that doesn’t care about lag it wouldn’t matter but I don’t see how you could play even a simple fighting game like Street Fighter 2 with that kind of lag, except at the most basic level.
The reason some people think that is absolutely insane and ridiculous is simply perception. I switched from 100 Hz CRTs to 120, then 165 Hz LCDs. Console games to me are unplayable already. Obviously, Stadia in it's current form is entire useless to me, no matter what game I'm playing because it just feels bad.
However, people who mostly played 30 FPS console games their entire lives, can usually play on stadia perfectly fine. The input lag isn't that much worse.
As for a game like SF, I am not sure. They have MK on Stadia and I hear people enjoy it but I don't know what the latency is like.
This is with wifi hitting a local router, to a separate wifi access point, then wifi to my desktop. None of the network equipment is “gaming grade”.
FWIW: At 60 ms (due to a misconfiguration) super meat boy was unplayable.
If they had done some basic market research they could have saved themselves a ton of money.
I have a Ps4 and recently tried out the PS4 now streaming service, and while it was nice to try, I would not subscribe because of one reason: to much lag. And I have a very good internet connection and ethernet connection. I also live in a city where there are datacenters which host service.
Even then the lag was unaccceptable to me and I wouldn't even call myself an avid gamer. I'm just a moderate gamer.
There's only a certain type of game that is feasible over a streaming service and that is slow-paced strategy type games, or adventure games. Anything that requires fast reactions who's work. Kids won't like it. Kids will demand a PS4 or PS5 from their parents.
Putting games like Doom on Stadia is pure idiocy. These are the wrong type of game to put on it.
In any case, it will certainly fail and be shut down pretty soon.
I'm bearish on streaming games as well, but if there's one company that has the potential and know-how to solve the hard problems, it's Google.
I think Stadia has come about 20 years too early. Cloud gaming makes sense, but the infrastructure isn't there yet.
If they did that, they could offer cloud gaming as a niche service on that platform, to test the waters, meanwhile they are building up a solid user base.
Instead they decided to go all-in on unproven technology, launched with barely any games available and no clear path forward.
It’s true that at this moment - I don’t even know what, other than the streaming side, Stadia is even based on.
Edit: Apparently it’s Debian and Vulkan? Because that’s what every game developer uses as their tool chain, right? eye roll
Google wasn't going "all in" on "unproven" technology. They were making a strategic investment in a new market segment using technologies and people that it already was an expert in rather than trying to follow the footsteps of competitors that have several decades lead on them. And they're not betting the bank on stadia. They could turn it off tomorrow and it wouldn't make a blip of difference to the health of the company.
You already have a laptop/PC. A lot of gaming can be done with iGPUs so the cost for you would be zero.
If you really want to play big titles, then you are looking at a delta of 300$ (the price of a good GPU) for 5 years, which amounts to 5$ a month.
I don’t see why anybody who has already a computer would pay more money to vendor lock-in themselves into an online-only service, one-store-only, no-mods-allowed, Internet-quality-dependent service.
I can see the appeal for people that wasn’t into computers before that, though. But still, if I were in that case, I would choose a non-locked-in platform at all costs.
I use Paperspace + Parsec for a regular Windows cloud desktop so I’m not locked into anything and pay just a few dollars per month for my gaming.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544
eGPUs are supported by any Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac1 running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later
The key is to realise that modern cables coming out of laptops are basically extensions of the PCIe bus. The bandwidth through them is phenomenal. It's entirely feasible to run an external GPU.
However, you don't really need one. I am a casual gamer who uses my laptop (got an Xbox too though), and even with the embedded GPU strategy/city building/etc type games work fine and look great. The Mac isn't a good platform if you're a capital-G "Gamer" but if you just want some entertainment on long flights and the like it works just fine. Go grab Steam and off you go. I don't think I'll be using Stadia any time soon as a consequence.
https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...
I ended up having too many glitches and lost connections and eventually moved to Shadow.tech and been thrilled with their service (though it's more than a few $'s a month).
Geforce now probably isn't it, but titans are overkill (unless you're also using them for work.)
Either way there are certainly options other than nvidia's most expensive consumer end card.
https://blog.parsecgaming.com/a-seamless-cloud-gaming-experi...
You run a windows vm with a beefy gpu in the cloud, so anything that can run in windows is supported.
I’m definitely rooting for them. I don’t want to introduce a middleman that decides what games can and cannot be distributed.
Also, if parsec or paperspace or microsoft or steam go sideways, it’s easy enough for the industry to bypass them. That won’t be the case if one or two cloud vendors have monopolies over gaming hardware.
Part of me wonders if this is due to the fact that google doesn't hire traditional sysadmins.
It might sound weird, because convention has become that you can "dev" your way out of "ops" and that SRE is the new hotness- but consider the fact that (as a gross generalisation) developers don't like maintaining stuff, it's much more beneficial for your own sanity and to present to management: new things! especially shiny things.
Sysadmins however think the opposite; how can we take $legacyThing and make it better, always the eye on maintenance and longevity. SRE's solve for reliability but not maintainability or longevity.
EDIT: guess I hit some peoples nerves, could someone elaborate on why?
Scroll forward a couple of years and you have a reputation for just abandoning existing things rather than improving them, because people individually maximise their own career advancement by migrating off difficult maintenance and improvement projects on to "new hotness" projects only to abandon them again later for an "even newer hotness".
Small organizations have an immune system that rejects bullshit like that but as orgs grow they institutionalize and it becomes harder and harder for them not to succumb.
Most developers make terrible operators. Devops shops also sometimes shift release management and QA tasks onto developers.
Most developers are terrible at those roles too (and most are uninterested in learning them). I’m good (for a developer; mediocre-to-poor vs specialists) at some of the non-developer roles I mentioned, but I hate doing them, and am better at developing software anyway.
Continuous deployment “saves” the system by just throwing something over the wall at customers. This means you always meet the development metrics that get passed up to upper management.
SRE’s optimize for minimizing the number of pages generated by the monitoring system.
All of the positions that acted as customer advocates or considered long term development roadmap (beyond a few sprints) are eliminated in such shops, so even successful products end up being a flash in the pan. At best, they get too popular to shut down, and immediately stagnate.
I’ve seen this play out in multiple organizations from multiple different angles over the years.
That's how you end up with x programming languages, y services and 1000 messaging/chat apps.
1. The game catalog is totally the most important thing and they don't have any really big games. I'm not a Fortnite person, but they don't have that, nor Apex, nor PUBG. Battle Royale may not be the biggest thing in gaming anymore, but this is the type of game that at least a lot of people enjoy and they have none on the platform.
2. They sold Stadia as being able to achieve higher quality than local hardware at a fraction of the cost. Yet it's been shown multiple times that the games running on Stadia are running at less than promised quality, with techniques like upscaling being used for 4K instead of native 4K: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-addresses-comp....
3. As a person who wants to play with a keyboard and a mouse on a computer, I get really frustrated that the Stadia output resolution is fixed. You can't output 1440p to a monitor at all, and 4K is only available if you have a Chromecast. Why?
I've also tried Shadow and GeForce now. Shadow is easily the best in terms of quality, because you can run at arbitrary resolutions and pump the bandwidth up to a max of 70Mbps down, which is astoundingly good looking compared to what Stadia offers. GeForce Now is great too, but point 3 applies to it: you can't run at non-preset resolutions, which really stinks if you have a bigger monitor with a higher native resolution. However, both Shadow and GeForce Now leverage existing game libraries, look better, and are generally more approachable than Stadia's "rebuy everything, run at lower quality, and lack significant features" plan.
The old joke when you read a fortune cookie out loud, is to say "in bed" afterwards - "Things will look up soon... in bed." When talking about the performance of game streaming services you need a similar qualifier at the end... "for me". "<x> streaming services performs better than <y>.... for me"
That's because experiences with the various streaming services can't be generalized so easily. GeForce now is an absolutely miserable experience... for me. However, Stadia is fantastic... for me.
That being said, it does feel that GeForce is having a hard time keeping games on their platform. Anecdotically, ever since they launched the paid service, there's been lots of games pulled from their platform, which is a real shame.
They also don't have a transparent way of discovering new games on their platform which is a huge issue.
I remember having tons of fun playing Portal and Left 4 Dead with buddies in my dorm room when 720p was pretty high end. Is 4K really that necessary to have a good time with a video game?
Or perhaps I'm... officially old :(
In terms of raw quality with streaming game services, bitrate matters much more than resolution. 4K mandates higher bitrate to deliver the pixels in a timely fashion. All of the services have some upper cap on bitrate, and if you can drive that up (can downstream clients support it?) then you can increase the streamed game quality to be closer to what's actually being output. This is most noticeable in areas where it's extremely dark or shadow detail is important, less so in light settings.
But either way, quality is a combination of the game settings (what is being output to the card), the output resolution (the scale of things you see), and the bitrate (what is being sent down for you to actually view). If these three components are mis-tuned, the quality of the image you're looking at will be lower due to one of those components.
This really goes to show that Stadia is a video streaming platform (i.e. something to help compete with Twitch) rather than a game playing platform.
Text is indistinguishable from print type. You're able to see an enormous amount of information without panning. With a good mouse you can pick and rubber-band much larger groups.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't yet really have cross-platform support? Without that these games wouldn't be very fun. Also, I don't think Stadias current model is really designed to work with F2P games. Maybe if you have a Pro subscription that can pay for it.
Really though, what we have right now feels like an early access, and it's unfortunate how poorly they marketed it. Like, it makes no sense why I can't even use the controller with PC/Mobile wirelessly yet. The issues you mentioned too, all those things sound like they will be eventually fixed, but right now what we have is clearly unfinished.
I've seen some people mention that latency makes some FPS games unplayable on the game streaming platforms they've tried. Which is fine if it's a physical limitation, there are other genres to enjoy, we should just be aware of what it's good for.
Technically, Stadia is perfect.
It's just the poor handling of the launch and the current lack of games that is disappointing.
Although tbh by the time I've finished Red Dead I guess there will be more games.
I'm more scared of Google just killing the platform.
- the tech is on point ! Playing on my 4k tv, it looks pretty incredible and plays just fine.
- the launch catalog is ... disappointing. I played a little bit with the releases games. There was nothing of interest to me. There are some great games on the platform .. but I have already played them. I have zero interest in Destiny 2 (one of the free launch games for pro subscribers).
- nit : I might be very tempted to try stadia again IF I could play doom eternal with a mouse and keyboard on my tv (with the expectation that the game will be worth playing).
Some of this could have been solved by shoving tons of money in the direction of some studios so that stadia got some big exclusive games at launch.
Even the "orc must die" games that will come later this year might have been enough for me to keep the "founder" edition past the 2 weeks return period. That's not a big license like Zelda that will get people to buy just because of the brand name but at least a game where I have some fond memories (and the orcs catapulting physics could use stadia's backend.
Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win. But biggest of all, most of the games are just via Steam. So buy it once, play on PC or ShieldTV, your choice. This was, as it turns out, too good to be true. In the last month, at least two huge publishers pulled out, essentially disabling the ability to play a purchased Steam game via Geforce Now. Now their fate is looking questionable as well.
One month ago, I would have said Geforce Now is absolutely the way to go. Today, I'd tell anyone curious just to wait and see what happens this year.
Definitely planning to be a late (real late) adopter of this tech in the future.
The Shield gathers dust while the Switch sees a ton of action.
GeForce Now works fine with Xbox controllers with no configuration needed. IIRC it also requires no configuration to work with Shield TV's controller.
There will be people streaming the games they are playing, there will be people playing streaming games, but it won't ever overtake playing on a local device. (I include handheld consoles, phones, consoles, PCs in this).
You can use "any" controller on Stadia too (I'm assuming by any you meant the popular consoles controller): https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9578631?hl=en
There's a common misconception that because Stadia has its own controller and because playing Stadia through Chromecast requires that controller (because Chromecast has no Bluetooth so the only way to connect would be something like a wifi controller like the Stadia Controller) that you cannot use other controllers to play Stadia, that's incorrect.
Wifi controller is a bit of a dead concept, so I would understand not supporting that, but the bluetooth functionality of steam controllers works just like any other bluetooth controller by exposing a HID to the host.
Do we know why they did that?
Unfortunately the library is not great yet. Not bad either, but I'm missing some favs. Plus while most people play a few popular titles, most people also have an obscure title only they play. And you can't run those, which keeps me going back to wanting to run my own hardware.
I went to stadia.google.com and there's no catalog with the available games on the platform. There's nothing that show me, with trailers, videos, what's on there and why I should buy this. Remember, I am a casual gamers, so I don't know much about what is out there in terms of games.
What I see is some images of games that tells me nothing, a link to buy the service and links to both App stores. That's it.
Basically, this is Google assuming, once again, that because they're Google, that people would be tripping over themselves to sign up for this. Total lack of empathy.
I ended up closing the tab.
Given the frequent discount sales model popularized by Steam (and maybe Humble Bundle was first to that?) I think a lot of avid gamers are in a similar position.
As a result, game streaming services that doesn't let me bring my own games is a complete non-starter for me. Especially for a sales model like Stadia where I really don't own it. GoG is an excellent storefront to safeguard your library with DRM free games and archiveable installers. Even Steam has made sounds about finding a way to let you keep your library if they were ever to go under. But past failures like Onlive have left gamers bereft of purchases. I think I lost some games when Direct2Drive had some issues or transfer of ownership years ago.
If Google really wants to make a viable product, they should be looking at integrating Stadia streaming tech into compute instances that let me install Steam or any other storefront or stand alone game.
If you're looking for such a service, you could do worse than Shadow or Paperspace. I demoed GeForce Now and liked it better, but they're also running into some trouble over not firming up publisher agreements, so I'd wait for the dust to settle there in the next months.
It's assuming Stadia is "floundering" because it doesn't have a ton of indie titles, assuming those are "critical" for success.
But are they? The article is clear that Google is working with "EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft, 2K Games, and Rockstar Games".
Google is obviously consciously choosing a product strategy of starting with major publishers rather than indie ones.
Now I don't personally know if that's the right strategy. But it's clearly the strategy Google is pursuing, so they should be judged on whether that's working.
Judging solely on the presence of indie titles just seems weird.
I want to play games like I watch Netflix, free with lots of variety. Indie game makers would keep me coming back for no other reason than I want to try new things regularly and I have zero interest in paying $60 for titles I've already played or had no interest in in the first place.
Dr. Kate Compton articulates what I want well in this twitter thread:
Eventually they will need to release more games to keep me coming back, but I agree that the thrust of the article is not especially convincing.
Indie developers are not the de facto bellwethers for a platform's success; you have to make that case as a game journalist. Not sure that happened here.
This is ironic because it seems like replies to every new game release on Twitter bemoan Google for having nothing but indie titles on Stadia.
1. Before they released Stadia, they could only work with a small handful of developers without too much getting leaked.
2. Now that it's public, it takes time for all the devs to port their games.
They did announce that there will be 120+ games in 2020, which matches up with my point above. Most of those probably only started porting mid 2019.
Furthermore, if compared to consoles, and not decades of PC history, Stadia does have a reasonable number of games at "launch", though not enough exclusives.
There it is, right there. Nobody takes Google seriously on any new initiative outside their core wheelhouse. We've all been burned too many times.
Can someone here name "so many other (paid) services" that Google has killed? And even for free ones, how many major services can you name of the scale of Stadia? G+ is really the only one, and maybe Allo. Hangouts is still not killed though its future is uncertain, GPM is apparently being migrated and Inbox was mostly a UI over Gmail.
Other than those, almost every other item in those cemetery site is a trivial side project, not even close to being comparable to Stadia.
Does Google have an alternative or are they just ditching it for no purpose?
Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon (Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some clearly do.
Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few articles to that extent. They know how to run business.
Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are imaginary?
Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.
They simply don't want to burn bridges with Google. There is nothing to win by doing so. Everyone knows Google has enough money to throw it against their problems if they decide to do so.
And it seems like the Steamworld developer is quite serious about porting games to Stadia, since 4 games out of the 10 you mentioned are all related to Steamworld in some way. That doesn't strike me as a healthy indie market if it's so heavily sustained by one developer.
And announcing 4 more indie titles coming soon doesn't leave me with any confidence. It's not much.
But what can you expect? This is a new entrant, all the new platforms faced similar issues. Some overcome it, some didn't, we'll see how it goes here. For what I know, Google already invested a lot and has deep pockets.
Nobody is eager to put anything on Stadia. As an indie developer myself, Stadia would at best be an afterthought long after I've comfortably released my games elsewhere. It doesn't seem worth the time investment.
I don't see the comparison to other cloud media services like Netflix or Hulu- on Stadia, you have to pay for the service AND the individual items, instead of just the service. As far as I know, there isn't any other business like this. I don't think this is appealing to consumers.
Most of these are just related to scale (like 1,000-person Battle Royales, 500-car races, MMOs that don't have to shard players in the same area into separate "worlds", etc), but there's other features that'd be exciting to see when games have effectively unlimited resources (instead of having to worry about what's available on each consumer's PC); Google's got a lot of resources in NLP and language recognition/generation they could apply to NPC dialogues, massive amounts of resources could make enemy/npc AI way more impressive than what you'd see on local hardware (I'd love to play against DeepMind's Dota 2 bots!), or even something as mundane as Maps-like navigation as a first-party feature to help you navigate through game worlds.
I'm less excited about some of the streaming-based features they've advertised (streamers being able to share save-states with viewers that viewers can click to start playing from, viewers being able to instantly jump in and play live with streamers, being easier to stream at 4K while also playing in 4K, etc), but I guess those are probably appealing to some people also.
Even for Google, it will never affordable to spin up giant clusters of servers for one person playing a video game.
The basic premise of Stadia being able to match and surpass a high end desktop gaming machine makes no sense. The cloud isn't magic, and it takes people thinking it is magic to buy the pitch. Stadia reminds me of SimCity 2013 promising it had to be online based because of all the magic cloud power they needed to make it work, which was almost immediately proven to be utter bullshit.
There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU, and their promise of 4k at 60 FPS takes a very serious amount of specialized gaming hardware.
I think the whole idea of economics at scale (and much of cloud computing) is predicated on the idea that users want to use that $1,000 GPU without having to pay $1,000 to own it, and that companies can sell access to many users per $1,000 GPU to recoup the costs of that GPU, both over time (as the initial cost gets amortized over recurring subscription/usage revenues) and horizontally (selling access to many users who timeshare that GPU, maximizing its use compared to owning one you'd only use N hours per day).
Scale that up to thousands of GPUs making a profit from hundreds of thousands of users each accessing those resources at a cost cheaper than what it'd take for them to purchase those resources for themselves and you've got the magic of the "cloud".
tl;dr Users can pay <$1,000 for access to a $1,000 GPU and companies can afford to do so because the number of users multiplied by what they're paying exceeds the cost and upkeep of that GPU. Everyone* wins.
Even if Google could develop this stuff at scale and in the cloud. Google isn't writing the games, game developers are. All of these resources you are talking about require large amounts of developer time on a unique set of resources which are in theory not available on other platforms. If Google wanted to deliver this sort of unique feature into their games, they would have to bankroll it similar to the way Microsoft bankrolled a lot of the Kinect special titles.
I think they're just scratching the surface of what's possible, and I'm excited to see how other games take advantage of the new form factor Stadia offers as time goes on.
Every console has its pros and cons, and something "new" that a new console/platform can provide can definitely be appealing to some developers looking to differentiate themselves or their games from what we've come to expect as normal (or even possible, in many cases).
Another is a consumer who has been away from gaming for awhile but wants to get back in. In the past, they would have to research and build a new PC. With Stadia, you can be gaming within 10 minutes.
As a customer, why would I "buy" a game that I will never own, on a service that is likely to close on a whim. As a game developer why would I invest time and effort supporting a new platform from a company without a proven track record in the game industry.
This will severely limit their impact on the industry, and the executives have nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of trust.
Google makes some bad products too. Stadia happens to be one of them imo.
Admittedly, most of my issues were because I have a GSuite account, but when it can’t read my own calendar or set a reminder, you realise they just don’t care. Alexa can read my GSuite calendar just fine.
I always approach Google products with caution.
Either way, the experience for consumers is shockingly bad the moment you have an experience that is outside of their simplified 'marketing' message.
The only answer I can come up with is, "this _is_ their version of flirting with an idea." In which case I think the problem is nobody else realises that given the scale and price tag.
They can get incredibly polished looking marketing pages, and advertising campaigns without actually committing.
Google probably still has a lot of the best engineering talent in the world, but without coherent product strategy and marketing what good does it do? When was the last time Google made a big bet that achieved the same level of success as their earlier products? Does Google's inability to diversify its revenue stream make it more vulnerable to disruption than say, Amazon, in the long run?
Yes. If ads went away, Google would collapse. Google's core search experience is not that good any more, though it's still the best in town; you have to wonder what would happen if Amazon or Facebook decided to actually go after search in a serious way.
1. No ads, sponsored listings, etc. 2. Let me filter out listings that aren't sold/shipped by Amazon.
They're probably too concerned about antitrust these days to try anything like that.
Basically, it's where an executive idea flows through an assembly line that involves marketing, design, product, and eventually software developers. There's no real feedback loop with users; everybody just builds the executive vision for a long time until launch. And then goes on building in a top-down, do-whatever-the-boss-says way.
A lot of Google's failures to me feel like some high-level executive getting high on their own vision and/or their desire to conquer a particular market. Which might work if they had the experience, the humility, or the discipline to focus on really serving a specific audience.
What digital markets exist with current or future revenues in the multi-hundreds of billions of dollars? They tried building a social network, and it didn't work. Doubling down would just further commit them to digital advertising as the entire business. What's left? Enterprise software (GSuite), cloud computing (Google Cloud), video games (Stadia). Any one of those could replace a significant shortfall of revenue from digital advertising if Google could get a significant market share. And significant doesn't have to be that large. Cloud computing market revenue is estimated to be over $500B in 2023, 10% market share in cloud computing would bring in almost a third of Google's current revenue. And 2023 video game market revenue is estimated to be above $200B.
Even within major cities, internet connectivity can suck a lot. Couple that with data caps, and streaming games becomes a chore to play. Nobody wants to play a game that “buffers”( we already have to deal with loading screens! )
I don’t think this is feasible in the States, and even other western countries.
The exception would be Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, where there are no data caps and internet is much faster and cheaper. The market is different, however, so I don’t think there would be much success.
And then there’s the ownership argument.
I'm rather fond of physical game media. I like the way it looks on a shelf, and how I can always trade it at a local store for something else. I like that I can demo titles via Redbox. I like that I own my hardware and can get some value out of it if I sell it. Downloadable games don't have those qualities, but at least they can (generally) be played offline and still allow for permanent ownership. That said, all of those qualities have essentially vanished with music and video streaming and gaming isn't fundamentally different than those mediums. Look at home stereo systems over the past 50 years, where audiophile quality has given way to convenient delivery almost universally.
Any player in the game streaming business needs to have big metal, fat pipes, and money to burn on acquisition, so it does seem like a somewhat of a natural monopoly.
The other, though, is even harder for Google to solve: it's their culture of contempt for creators. Google's most successful products are all founded on the idea that content is worthless, and that whatever Google brings to the party is so valuable that paying in exposure, or the opportunity to participate in surveillance capitalism via advertising, ought to be enough to make you happy.
Search increasingly repackages other people's work, and Google are happy to leverage their monopoly to delist you if you don't like it; AMP ditto. News is wholesale the same story. YouTube spent years turning a blind eye to rampant copyright violation (particularly for music videos) to build itself into a monopoly. Google Scholar, Google Books - almost every Google success story is based on the same formula: take other people's work, repackage it, tell them you'll see them in court if they don't like it, and drop you from search (hell, at one point, Google banned a news outlet for a story about concerns with Google Maps' privacy aspects, if you want to understand how freely they'll use their monopoly).
Here, though, the creators have many outlets competing for their output, and an audience who are well-engaged with Steam, the Windows Store/Xbox, PlayStation Store, and so on. But Google's culture appears to be too arrogant to actually recognise the value of creators.
You tack on "drop you from search" as if it were an afterthought. But the "copyright violation" or "taking other peoples' work" is the process of making it searchable. What logical possibility is there other than doing it or not doing it?
I think the future of "cloud gaming" looks a lot more like Shadow than Stadia.
- music streaming
- chat
- phone hardware
- ISP
- health
As far as I know, they have two profitable products: ads and G Suite.
http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3...
I think this points to a somewhat more important problem for Google. As the article points out, to incentivize developers and their studios to do the work to move their games to the Stadia platform, Google would need to offer to them the benefit of a base of dedicated users. If we consider that many prospective users may already be using Steam or home gaming consoles, the question becomes: how does Google attract these users to their platform? In my opinion, as someone who has played games from an early age, the best way to do that would be to either develop a game for the platform themselves (however feasible that may be) or hire a studio to produce a game for the platform with at least a temporary exclusivity deal. I've known many young kids throughout my childhood who were inspired to go out and get a game system simply because there's that one game that can't be played anywhere else. Whether it's Mario on Nintendo, Halo on Microsoft, or Uncharted on Sony, every gaming platform has historically had exclusive games that can't be played anywhere else. Imagine if Google Stadia had secured Fortnite as an exclusive game - Fortnite would probably have not been as successful as it is now, but Stadia may likely have received a serious boost in consumer attention, all things staying the same.
SpriteKite, SceneKit and MetalKit aren't without their share of bugs, however on Android's side they are just inexistent.
At any GDC, or IO, the only thing Google seems to be able to talk about is PlayServices, even the Vulkan support on Android is a joke, asking developers to clone github repositories and compile shaderc from scratch.
They just don't know how to talk to game developers.
I'd also much rather build my own system though, unless they put a datacenter in my suburb I don't see this ever being a better experience than my own machine.
I would never buy a serious console game on anything but hard media.
In a couple years, all the money people spent on games for Stadia will literally have been completely wasted - and my Sega Genesis I got when I was six, and the games I paid for 20 years ago will probably still work (I’ll admit bitrot is a concern, but that’s a hugely different issue), along with my PS5 or whatever I’m using at that point.
This is a zero-value, long-term net-loss concept for me. It boggles the mind.
But hardware has out run gaming needs now. My 6 year old PC plays the latest games and streams 1080p at the same time without issue. I could probably mine some crypto in the background.
If I was constantly upgrading, a "rental" service like this would make sense. But I'm not. I'm struggling to justify any changes to my setup. So why would I pay to rent someone else's?
And thats without the fact that Steam already offers games virtually on demand or that consoles have a big chunk of the market sewn up...
I was excited about Stadia when I first heard of it but needing to buy hardware for a service that will likely be languishing in a year and sunsetted in two just didn't interest me. I'm more likely to spend money on a 8 times more expensive VR set than a cheap piece of hardware that will be collecting dust in a drawer soon.
Google's reputation for discontinuing projects already influences me. Is this something that people outside the HN bubble think about?
But in general, you don't need either of those things to play games on stadia. You can use any controller (or kb/m, and any device that runs chrome, AFAIK).
Especially since the chromecast ultra doesn't support non-Stadia controllers, so if you do want to play with say an Xbox controller google is bundlefucking you with hardware you will never use, which certainly doesn't make the service look any more attractive to people who might otherwise be interested.
Just use your old rig. I used the same CPU for 7 years and it was never the bottleneck. The only reason I upgraded was because a bad PSU killed my GPU after 5 years. You order the GPU from your local online shop (Amazon is overpriced), remove 3 screws to open the case and plop in the new card. This doesn't take more than 15 minutes and you're good to go.
https://ajit.dhiwal.com/2020/01/google-stadia-shouldve-used-...
2) Google would be highly unenthusiastic about using Windows both culturally and because of the need to hire large numbers of engineers with deep Windows expertise.
Stadia is DOA, because of its absurd pricing and rollout, really strange design decisions (usb controller for select phones, but wireless for Chromecast?)
It will be interesting to see how they treat paying customers when they inevitably shut this thing down.
When you’re the owner of a successful indie game company and you’ve got some partnerships exec treating you like “big me little you” because I work at Google and you’re an indie who needs me and will work for free, it’s a real turn off.
You can argue if it's the right design or not, but as it is, it takes time and effort to move games to Stadia, so it's not as trivial as just running them on Wine.
I'm sure, using Wine+dxvk as a first step for existing games is a lot easier than writing native Vulkan renderer. In this sense, Google can actually provide one level of incentives for native games (higher one), and another for Wine use case.
I.e. developers can first release it in Wine (phase 1), and then make a native version for example (phase 2) to improve performance.
What Google could do, is to provide integration of their SDK with Wine for phase 1 above.
PlayStation has a great ecosystem. You need more than just a Google name to break in.
Even something like a Raspberry Pi inside a keyboard enclosure would be good.
I am actually very intrigued by the hardware, a powerful linux box which may make a cracking console in it's own right. Wouldn't mind one of those at home.
I don't trust a single product they launch these days. Usually it's best to wait 5 years and get a sense for its longevity.
What products do Google make that last longer these days? I feel the majority of new stuff ends up canned because it just doesn't hold up to the tech debt and costs for running the service at such huge scale.
GeForce NOW has been somewhat successful but has had support from both Bethesda and Activision recently pulled.
Meanwhile, Google is just kinda half-arsing it around, even tho they would easily have the money and infrastructure to create something like a "killer-app" for the scalability of gaming in the cloud.
But apparently there isn't any attempt at something like that, so what's even the point?
Game streaming is very appealing to me on paper for competitive games. Compared to the traditional dedicated server scenario, cloud multiplayer gaming could nearly halve the player to player latency.
> Compared to the traditional dedicated server scenario, cloud multiplayer gaming could nearly halve the player to player latency.
There's still the network latency from your streaming edge to the game server, and yours to the streaming edge. You can just use the same optimized routing to reach the shared game server.
Improving routing or using multi-pathing solutions can achieve a similar result. Things like Haste, which offer optimized routes to supported games and shoot your packets across 4+ of them at once for redundancy, can cut your lag tremendously. Haste is a particularly good example because, at least from my packet capture, it looks like they're partnering with ISPs and putting their edge nodes in ISP datacenters.
At best Google is handling most of the graphics rendering, but those graphics are still being encoded/decoded client side by different hardware. All the other bottlenecks also remain.
50-250ms latencies are game breaking in many contexts and game genres. Google does not sync these latencies between clients because that would also be game breaking. If you're interested in reading more on these topics checkout some of the gamedev literature for Doom and similar "early" FPS titles. They're filled with fascinating hacks for making clients seem like they are in sync when the truth is anything but.
Why do you mention google’s implementation as if it was something I was suggesting would be suitable for competitive gaming? I am suggesting that total player-to-player latency is reduced if all clients and the server are combined into one system.
To the point though, I still think it's unrealistic to completely change game architectures in order for the client to be entirely "dumb". We need client logic for latency interpolation for most multiplayer games (and most games do have a strong multiplayer component even traditionally single player games like GTA).
And I think we've arrived at the elephant in the room: Google wants studios to rewrite their games for Stadia's latency models and that just ain't gonna happen for 100 different reasons, not least of which being that most studios are still on 10+ year old game engines.
In theory you wouldn't have netcode. You would just have "splitscreen" multiplayer where each player only sees their own display.
Assuming you build on this by having some unsecured shared state, e.g.: hypervisor shared memory, and all clients rendering their own game -- that means you're now restricting gaming by geographic region. If you do that and segregate players by area, you would fragment the playerbase and eventually kill off the game as any loss of popularity snowballs.
Suppose Player A in San Francisco and Player B in London see each other on their screens and both click the shoot button. Neither of them can know who shot first until a network roundtrip has happened between them - hell, if their timing was precise enough then under relativity it might be physically impossible to categorically state that one was before or after the other. So either each sees (on their own screen) that they have shot first and this is later contradicted for one of them, or neither of them sees their shot being made until after the network roundtrip has happened. That choice and that tradeoff has to be made, and I don't see that cloud gaming makes any difference: either you have latency for everything you do (and whether that latency is between a thin client communicating with the game server or a thick client communicating with another thick client is really neither here nor there), or you will see inconsistencies.
You can already have that; no need for streaming. For example, original Quake handles all input on the server and movement feels kinda like skating on ice with the latency. You can feel the latency when you shoot; your gun doesn't actually fire until the server acknowledges it. I've played Quake online somewhat recently, and I absolutely hate how it feels. I can't imagine anyone wanting to play like that. There's a damn good reason why newer engines added client side prediction, even if it makes different players' view of the game inconsistent.
Unreal Tournament, up to UT2004, (maybe later -- I'm not familiar enough with newer ones) are similar. I think they added prediction for player's movement at some point, and that alone makes it feel much better, but jump pads (and such) are still unpredicted, shooting still has latency (I can't recall the details; it's possible that your firing animation/sound is instant but actual projectile only appears on your screen once the server acknowledges it).
It's great when you're playing with <20ms ping but it absolutely sucks to have little to no prediction with higher ping. I much prefer unlagged Quake 3 engine games, where hitscan weapons hit what you see on your screen (they're latency compensated on the server). Otoh some people argue for Unreal because everything's synchronized and you don't see the ugly side effects of prediction, like getting shot right after you leap into safety behind a corner.
Notice that interpolation and prediction are two different things! Interpolation actually increases latency; I turn it low or off in Quake 3. The result is that everyone's movement is jerky (they update when the server sends an update; higher packet rate is better). If you enable interpolation, then their location is going to be interpolated between two most recent updates.
- Vague recollection of the "I hit you with a rocket salvo and saw it explode, and you didn't die, and my rockets suddenly reappeared" moments from when I played it as a kid;
- Memories of reading the papers on network architecture in UT back around 2004-2006, which I'm convinced were describing the pre-2004 version.
- Memories of digging deep into UnrealScript around ~2001, and struggling with understanding what's up with all that "proxy" keyword and "replication" stuff.
It's sort of like that already (server being the canonical state), except the link isn't gummed up by video streaming.
/s
And then we can make fun of them for having yet another chat app. It's a win-win.
It is only matter of time before some google snowflake would call a game transphobic or "too violent" etc. and write lengthy posts that the game be pushed off Stadia. Right now this is not a problem but if google becomes 1st or 2nd largest player this would be increasingly a problem.
I am a big lover of violent video games and Google is not good for such games IMO.