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Comment by polytely | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting if you compare it to Epic's entry into the game selling business. What they did was:

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.

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Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place".

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 easy to sunset policy makes them an easy target in any industry that isn't ripe for change or that provide any setbacks. If the going gets tough Google exits.

Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it.

> Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it.

Good for us consumers, isn't it?

Like any tool it depends on how they use it. Leaving the abusive fiefdoms of others in place doesn't help consumers. It is a matter of nuance essentially. Google and all competitors may do things good, bad, or both for consumers and their size doesn't have much to do with it.

I think/suspect/speculate that since Google has search/ads billions raining from the sky, nothing else it does really matters to them.

So all side projects are done kinda like a hobby.

Makes sense to me. And I think another factor is that with ads, users are the product, not the customer.

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.

Google built a pretty successful social network, which even grew faster than Facebook for the first half decade. And like with their messaging services, they then decided it was better to just create a new one from scratch rather than trying to work with what already successful.

Orkut?

Yeah.

Orkut? I'm not sure we can really count that as something Google created. As I recall, it was a single engineer's side project based on work he did previous to Google.

Sure, Google did sort of adopt it. But as you say, it got pushed aside.

Reader was kind of a social network too, and would have equally been a great foundation to build on instead of shutting it down for google+

It's weird though, because GSuite -- esp google docs, google sheets, and google calendar -- are really good and pretty well supported. So they _can_ do it. Now to be fair, we're rapidly approaching $15k/year in spend with them.

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 believe docs and sheets were from their acquisition of Writely in the mid 2000s, not something that's homegrown.

I wouldn't call docs and sheets good by any means; they're passable at most, with tons of missing features.

No doubt they're an ok word processor and a mediocre spreadsheet.

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.

> I wouldn't call docs and sheets good by any means; they're passable at most, with tons of missing features.

And yet they entirely replace Microsoft Office for millions of people.

Docs and Sheets were entirely rewritten in house many years after the acquisition. They don't work at all like the original products.

I'm guessing you're getting down-voted for that last bit.

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.

I don't think it's sufficient, but it is necessary. I'm not sure who else has an edge network that can deliver comparable compute and comparable latency? A very short list, if anyone.

And Google isn't good at cloud? Maybe not gcp, but their internal application delivery capability is second to none.

What's so bad about GCP/Firebase?

It’s not the technology, Google is horrible at Enterprise sales and support. Firebase also isn’t going to win them large enterprises.

+1. They're an ad company and ultimately they feel clunky and condescending to deal with in a consumer context.

Azure Solutions Architects: You want to move your SQL Server 2003 database running on Windows 2000 on Azure? Ok we can do that and come up with a project plan to modernize your stack and extend your support.

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.

We are not game developers, our opinion doesn't count.

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.

For cloud gaming, the hard and highly relevant infrastructure work is about how many edge locations you have.

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...

There is a lot of competition in the cloud gaming space, and there is a low technical barrier to entry, especially since the streaming server + client are likely to commoditize (they’re all based on similar codecs, and require hardware acceleration that’s provided by the GPU).

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):

https://status.shadow.tech/

Coverage map:

https://shadow.tech/usen

> their ability to orchestrate and deliver scaled computing at the highest possible speeds.

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.

> I'm desperately wishing google would build a company-aimed wiki because confluence is atrocious.

have you tried Google sites?

Ironically I am yet to find a Wiki as good as confluence.

I'm not sure I can call that a real exception. Calendar is something they needed themselves, and also use as a "soak up everybody's data to make things more sticky" tool. It's good for what it is, but if it were a serious product offering, I'd expect it to be more flexible, more feature-rich.

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.

Have you worked collaboratively with Google Docs?

Sure. That's what I mean by "on the web". They have decent basic real-time collaboration features. Otherwise, they're basically the same as Word and Excel were 25 years ago.

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.

Just what you want from your service provider.

Actually most of the Google projects exist to defend Ads/Search combo and to napalm potential threats.

My thoughts are my own but I think Google is very serious about diversifying their sources revenue away from mostly advertising.

Sure, but it's a "nice to have" serious.

Not the "life or death" serious companies are for their main business.

I don’t doubt they are trying, they just haven’t shown they know how to compared to other large tech companies.

Google is the world's most expensive post-college hiring and training program, subsidized by the core search/ads cash cow.

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.

I think it's more that Google's management/culture currently doesn't work.

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.

> Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place".

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."

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

I wouldn't say that directly applies to what Google is trying to do.

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.

It's funny though, I remember the old days before Google and they built something that was demonstrably superior for their users than what was out there at the time. They did win with a superior product.

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.

It was actually the same with Gmail as it was with Search.

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.

> 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.

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

Forgot about http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. Great post and relevant as ever today.

iirc Google Maps was initially not a success. MapQuest had a majority market share of online maps up until the release of the iPhone. So they floundered for about a year or two.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mapquest-a-symbol-of-everyth...

So you're saying Google Maps wasn't a huge success until Android?

... but totally in a non-monopolistic way, of course.

I'm saying that Google does sometimes stick with products that aren't doing well initially if they see the promise in it.

You couldn't actually just use Gmail when it launched. You needed to get an invite for a fairly long time, which made it a little bit of status symbol. Google have tried repeating the same play a bunch of times since then, and it has always failed. For a while I did wonder whether they were trying it also with Stadia.

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?

> 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

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"

Yes. But for all of those you need to buy hardware that can actually play the games. (A few hundred for a console, a thousand for a PC). The promise of game streaming is that you can play AAA games on the low-powered laptop or phone that you already have.

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.

If Google is going to succeed it is going to do so by bringing tons of new people into video gaming who didn't have experience with the native hardware.

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.

I mean, yeah, it would certainly be unique. But would it ever be sustainable? It basically requires them to pay for the ongoing costs of hardware+bandwidth for rendering and streaming, all for the store fee they get at the time of purchase (about $20 on a regular AAA game?).

Isn't there a conflict of interest? They want you to buy as many games as possible but play them as little as possible. This will mean that they will primarily allow short games on the platform. Something like Skyrim or Rimworld could be a guaranteed loss.

Except that you can’t actually use stadia to play on the low end equipment you already have. It only works on a select few high end phones, it only works on the most expensive chrome cast, and it requires a high end internet connection. The people who have the money for that stuff is likely to easily afford a Nintendo Switch which can actually be used for gaming everywhere without needing an internet connection.

>Except that you can’t actually use stadia to play on the low end equipment you already have.

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.

Okay, so you have a choice between a cheap Chromebook or an Xbox One at literally identical price points. Except the Xbox one actually comes with the xbox controller with games custom built to use the xbox controller.

And when you buy the games, you get to keep them! No risk of your xbox disappearing overnight after you go to bed, unlike cloud offerings.

Well 10mbit is nice, until someone in the house starts streaming a video as well.

Yes, I believe that's the point the poster is trying to make. The restrictions google is putting on the service currently aren't necessary, and are hurting the product.

Meanwhile, Nvidia GeForce Now is rounding up users with the tried and true freemium strategy with a 100% free tier to remove psychological barriers to sign up.

There's only one reason to not do that: if your platform can't actually handle having users.

I haven't tried GeForce Now (but I have played ~300 hours so far on Stadia), but from what I've seen on Twitter they have some kind of waitlist for servers before free users are allowed to start playing a game (and paying users just jump to the front of that line), and then they can only play for one hour at a time (6 hours for paying users). That makes me think they might not have as many servers as they'd like people to think from such a freemium strategy at first glance.

GFN isn’t selling games, so they need to be more willing to degrade the free tier.

Stadia is selling games, so the service should do its best to get out of its users way as much as possible.

I tired GeForce Now for about 30 minutes and found the latency to be unbearable. On a more than gigabit fibre connection right next to their data center.

I barely find Steam link playable on my home wired network.

Same experience here, do not enjoy fast paced games over streaming, and can't imagine what is would be over the internet... Image quality also take a hit obviously, video compression isn't magic.

Agreed.

Though it works perfectly for party games where even a second or two latency is tolerated, like the Jackbox party games.

The difference is that Gmail was way better than its competitors at the time. The spam filter alone was a huge sell.

edit: the 1GB mailbox !

Yeah, back then Hotmail gave you something like 10MB and everyone literally thought 1GB was an April Fools' Day hoax. If Stadia was literally 100x better than the nearest competition while still having a far superior user experience then they wouldn't be having any trouble.

the fact that it didnt catch on then says it was not better than its competitors.

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

Are you saying Gmail didn't catch on? That's like saying nobody buys an Android phone. Gmail is the #1 email provider in the world and Android is the #1 mobile OS in the world.

Yeah but it isn’t very profitable in the grand scheme of things. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google had only made around $23 billion in profit from Android from inception until around 2016.

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.

It didnt catch on till 2012. It was also gmail that caused a change in public perception of google

Plus, they were not yet notorious for killing services after a few years. It's becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy with newer Google products that need a critical mass to take off.

blame the new era of fiscal discipline at google.

products have to make an appreciable difference in the bottom line

does anyone remember when gmail first launched it didnt have a delete email option because they wanted to 'teach users to value data like google values data'?

It mostly worked on me if that was the goal. Except now my storage is at over 93% and I'm trying to figure out if I can just download my mbox file and delete all the emails for the next decade...

I'm exactly on 93% too, I'm am going to clean out my Google drive which is full of stuff I could put elsewhere and will give me another few years. It's about time they increased their limit from 15GB though!

It's unlikely they will, there's an upgrade path called Google One that gets you 100GB storage for about $20 a year, across all their products, and shareable by family members. It also comes with human tech support.

Google allows you to download your emails. I don't know what format it is in though. (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en). If it is not mbox format I am sure there is a converter if you need it.

>Compare it to the Gmail or Chrome

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.

I thought chrome and Gmail (and android and maps) were built specifically to gather user data. That's why they launched Gmail for free literally months after Hotmail (outlook) started moving towards a charging model. The big plan for Google has been user data since at least 2000. They realised that's what would make them "more than a search engine". And they were right, and ahead of the curb by at least a decade.

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.

> It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea

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?

Except that from some gaming blogs, podcasts, the dev experience is quite bad, worse than using pre-release console devkits.

http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-gam...

Google Maps was also an acquisition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions

Google photos was developed in house, launched in 2015 and hit 1 billion users last year. Not sure if it was a 20% project but I doubt it.

I believe Google Photos was separated from Google+, which in itself was a reaction to Facebook being possibly a direct threat to Google.

Agreed, 100%.

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.)

To be fair, Epic's approach doesn't require many resources other than just money. Hell, for the longest time their store literally did not have even a "search" function, and I'm pretty sure it still doesn't even have a shopping cart. Software development takes time, but they mostly bypassed that and went straight into giving out free games. The games themselves already exist for PC, Epic didn't need to do much there.

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.

No wonder they’re having a hard time finding games then! A lower margin platform, with less customers and that requires significant engineering work is not at all attractive. It also shows a lack of understanding about the games industry.

> To be fair, Epic's approach doesn't require many resources other than just money.

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.

Doesn't "enter a market by throwing enormous piles of cash at it" violate various anti trust laws, unless you're really careful?

That is only necessary because of the steam monopoly

> Epic gets everyone who would buy that game on their platform (minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal)

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.

Also important point 3:

They've promised they'll let you download DRM free if they ever shut down steam. Yea yeah, promise from a corporation, but still.

They can't keep that promise because publishers are free to implement third party DRM. You can't blame Valve for the shutdown but you can blame them for lying.

Of course only Steam-based DRM (not that you need them to do it - removing steam DRM is fairly trivial and a shutdown would rapidly spread the tool for removing it).

Steam does indicate on the store page when games have additional third party DRM.

I wonder if someone could create an Apache style foundation where companies can donate their game stores and game servers to it. It would also act as an archive for free games.

That sounds like a job for archive.org.

Epic and Google are vastly different systems. Epic can get away with paying much less because the effort required by game developers is minimal.

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.

Not only that, it appears to be bare bones Linux development experience without some nice games related SDK.

http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-gam...

To be honest, that actually makes me want to use Stadia more, not less.

Just like Android and ChromeOS games, that doesn't mean GNU/Linux will get any of it.

Agreed. Having more games built on linux and vulkan seems lik ea nice benefit.

This is the same company that released an amazing/life-changing email client called Google Wave and did not automatically make gmail content accessible in it. I got an “invite”, I invite my colleague who sits 10 ft from me, we logged in with the ability to connect only to each other. We looked at each other for a minute (irl) and closed the window.

You couldn't actually read mail in Wave though, and it didn't use an email protocol.

> 2. Appeal to the customers by giving away free games every week

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.

Yeah, the reluctance to open a client you don't use very often cannot be overstated. If you haven't played anything on a client for a year, then just opening it is likely to set off updates to the client, possibly updates to the game library, just a whole flurry of potential activity you might have to sit through.If you aren't fully committed to playing whatever is in there, it's very easy to just decide on something else.

I wouldn't call EPICs store a success story. Many enthusiast gamers were repelled by exclusivity of titles that aren't from the developer/publisher itself. A good reason in my opinion, because this is pretty consumer hostile, you just get baited with some free stuff to sign up. They had the capital and wanted to buy market share.

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.

Is it really baffling that Google’s product marketing/business people have yet another failing initiative? Have they ever shone any ability to profitably diversify outside of advertising?

No: https://killedbygoogle.com/

No matter what happens with Stadia and its market, Google simply cannot afford to kill the projects in the next few years. It would be a huge blow to their already tarnished reputation wrt keeping services alive. They need to prove to the world that they can long-term commit to major challenges even if they are suffering in the short-term.

Judging by Alphabet's stock price and their years of shuttering services at the cost of their reputation, it seems shareholders disagree with you.

They're not mutually exclusive. Google's search and advertising cash cow is so profitable, the company grows despite its boneheaded mistakes in so many other areas. If you read the article, every single developer mentioned they have no trust in Google not canning the service, and who can blame them? At this point, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> every single developer mentioned they have no trust in Google not canning the service

I never said developers have faith in Google. I said shareholders do. My point is Google doesn't really care what developers think.

But that's kinda the problem. If Google doesn't care what developers think, they are very unlikely to succeed with Stadia.

I agree. I actually think Alphabet's long-term (10+ years) future is pretty grim.

It doesn't untill it does.

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.

So what happens when more people start using ad blockers and advertisers move more toward FB where ads are harder to block and better targeted?

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.

That's why Chrome market share is so important for Google, and why they will stop other advertiser to use it, and adblockers too. Chrome is the advertising channel for Google... and the entry point for Google Ads

And when ad blockers get so much better on other browsers people can switch. Especially now that IE is Chromium based.

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.

Improving their stock price is exactly what they've been spending their reputation on by doing this - if the stock price had also tanked then this strategy would have been an absolute failure on every axis. It's undeniably bought them better numbers in the short term; the argument is that they are killing their long term potential.

there's an interesting thought exercise i read where someone suggests Google stock would go through the roof if they fired their entire workforce and cut all R&D and just coasted on the ad business

For all of the lack of success they’ve had with everything else, if they just focused on

Ads, GSuite, Youtube, Android, Chrome, and GCP, how much would it affect their profit?

If that's the case, they should consider some kind of official statement that they'll provide support until at least X date.

Then they have to actually provide support until at least X date. Which, if it’s not successful, they don’t want to do.

> They need to prove to the world that they can long-term commit to major challenges even if they are suffering in the short-term.

Isn't that Waymo?

Disclsure: Work at Google, but opinions are my own.

Waymo hasn't launched, so it can't flounder and flop.

This one not at all, as proven by their track record on Android, they just don't know how to talk to game developers.

Or the enterprise. Between the three cloud providers, GCP is by far the worse when it comes to enterprise engagements or support.

YouTube and GSuite (Docs, Sheets) etc are probably the only other business lines that would work well as big standalone tech companies. Google Play is probably making a decent chunk by running ads, skimming 30% of purchases and new subscriptions + 15% of subscription renewals.

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.

It’s estimated that Youtube is barely break even between what they pay creators and bandwidth and storage costs.

You could argue that Youtube breaks even.

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.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertisi...

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.

every analysis ive ever seen about YouTube bandwidth costing google vast sums of money completely ignores that they are directly peered with almost every ISP on earth and pay absolutely nothing per byte or per mb/s and just assume they pay level 3 or similar tier 1 provider publicly stated rates.

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)

> minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal

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.

> 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.

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.

Epic brute forced their way into this space and still have an inferior product. Your comment might be one of the few times I’ve ever seen someone speak halfway positively about them.

Well I get the outrage and all that, but that's mainly hard-core enthusiasts who pay attention to the industry. I also was kinda pissed when Control and Outer Worlds went exclusive, but in the end my love for those developers won out against epic's business practices. I just think it's very impressive how they leveraged their sudden hoard of cash from Fortnite and their developer contacts via the unreal engine into a seemingly(?) successful steam competitor. I'm not really a business-oriented-guy but it seems to me like it is an amazingly clever and well executed move.

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.

Epic's entry into the game storefront business has been a drama filled shit-show. It has not been well received by very vocal swaths of the gaming community. In fact, their strategy of buying out developers for exclusivity rights is one of the reasons they've drawn so much ire.

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.

The epic approach gets a lot of hate from a vocal minority. Everyone else has had multiple storefronts for a while, and having -one- more is borderline meaningless. As long as they don’t jack up the price, how many people give a shit which executable they have to click on to launch a game?

The Epic Store isn't supported on Linux. When they turn existing games on Steam into Epic store exclusives I can't play the games I have purchased.

> vocal minority

> 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.

What game was released on Steam, then became an Epic store exclusive and stopped being playable on Steam?

Rocket League. The developer was acquired by Epic, and a few months later they announced that they were dropping support for Linux and OSX. Epic has previously stated that their platform will never be available on Linux.

It's a pain to not have all the games in a single library. I put off buying Overwatch for a year or so because it was in a different launcher, and did the same for Forza Horizon 4; I'd be eagerly awaiting a sequel to Child of Light if it hadn't had some awkward double-launcher thing where playing it meant waiting 10 minutes for uplay to update every time. So I do think this ultimately affects customers enough to vote with their wallets, and that means it will affect developers where it matters. (Of course, if Epic is paying enough for its exclusives then developers will correctly decide that the tradeoff is worthwhile).

It’s a very vocal minority, but definitely a minority. And they’ve essentially rebranded terms like exclusivity agreements, an industry standard, into ‘extortion’ in their parlance.

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.

I remain unconvinced any of that matters in the slightest. A small slice of overly-online people will whine about anything.

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-...)

I'm not convinced either... but I'm also not convinced that things are so dire for Stadia either. Vocal minorities, etc.

> very vocal swaths of the gaming community

just worth reiterating that /r/gaming or whoevers favourite gaming YouTuber is not "the gaming community" or people that play video games.

Interestingly Metro Exodus was an Epic exclusive for a whole year before becoming available on Steam recently. It still sold 200,000 copies in a few days on Steam.

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...

Epic was not a shit show. The needless histrionics of the community response were a shit show. Not only unnecessary, but downright illogical for the community to throw a fit that amounted to begging for there to be no competition. Players got pissed off for having to sign up for a different free store and click a different button to launch their games.

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.

I feel like Google is not really competing to make killer products anymore. Its more like managers in Google are competing to move up in the organization, and whether or not products and services actually succeed is fairly incidental.

The only interaction I have with the Epic Store is hoarding free games "just in case". I see no reason to buy a game there unless it's cheaper than the other stores.

If Google did that, it might raise some anti-trust questions. Using money from the search business to buy them a market share in another area might be seen as anti competitive move.

Yes, completely unlike Chrome browser, or Android OS, or gmail, or YouTube, or any other Google service.

Android and Chrome are a bit different as they were started years ago and Google has been somewhat careful in not pushing then too hard (for example only allowing Chrome on YouTube). With Android and Google services they have already attracted some attention.

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.

Simply throwing money around to enter a new market is not anti-competitive. Throwing money at something unprofitable with the goal that growing user-share will drive future profits is a generally accepted business practice. Unless they come up with some truly outrageous predatory pricing scheme, or try and bundle it to some other Google product to push it, I don't think they'd run into any problems.

It's not just Epic. (1) was part of MSFT's playbook with the original XBOX.

I just remembered that steam made a similar move with the orange box (half-life 2, HL2:episode 1, HL2:episode 2, portal & Team Fortress 2 for 60 bucks, but you have to install steam to play) also amazingly clever. Still the best gaming deal I've ever made if you look at price v quality of games.

They pay for original YouTube content and they paid for some exclusive VR games. Not sure why they're not doing that for Stadia but it has to be intentional. Maybe they don't think its really ready yet?

AFAIK, acquiring Typhoon Studios in December was their first public announcement of a first-party game studio. The exec in charge of Stadia said in an interview that she was planning on building out more [1]: "We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners."

[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-24-google-is-...

The exec in charge of Stadia wouldn't be the one who makes the decision to drop it though. Her job is literally to keep the thing going until it's dropped.

Sounds like the Uber model with an actual ability to scale.

Google did give a bag of money to some developers at least.

For example to Robot Entertainment (devs of Orcs Must Die).

The annoying thing is that google dabbles in things.

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.

Was it a different team within Google doing high-level strategy, maybe?

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