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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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

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.

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.

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