Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that feel half-baked (Hitman crashes on first boot and complains about a lack of a controller) and a bunch of indie games that feel like a sad attempt to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a middling title (the Hello Neighbor hide and seek game) and titles released half a decade ago (superhot).
Minecraft is on every console imaginable—except Stadia. What about Roblox? Fortnite? Factorio? Among Us? Any Sid Meier's game? Any Paradox game? Every genre of game that I actually put time into is completely absent on their platform. Every game from the top 10 (perhaps 20 or more?) on Twitch right now is absent on Stadia. I don't know what they're doing, but whatever it is, it's wrong.
Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today.
The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way to draw a bunch of people to Stadia outside of that... and if Google is unable to make the business justification to develop Stadia exclusives, neither will anyone else.
They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.
Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.
Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.
There are many reasons Android and Switch games don't get ported to Linux; having to rewrite the game from scratch is not one of them.
Except they misteriously stop releasing Linux versions of their games.
Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.
But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.
Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success):
Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to third-party game developers. Recently released consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered underwhelming sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers.[22] With initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment,[41] as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone, the company secured the launch of influential new games such as Ridge Racer and Mortal Kombat 3.[22][5]
The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.
Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.
In top of that, after seeing Cyberpunk 2077 get the closest thing to an exclusive launch they could possibly hope for, I imagine they looked at the results decided that the problem is not going to be solved by one or two great games that only work on Stadia. They need many games and for that they need third party.
... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.
... which makes shutting down gaming studio part of it even weirder.
Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.
I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.
Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.
That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.
But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.
Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.
To me, that put Stadia in an odd place where only the more casual players without a gaming device would sign up, or those with enough money to pay twice because they spend a lot of time away (but with good internet).
Publishers changed their licence agreement to exclude streaming or cloud.
Since you are free to change the licence at anytime you like, they did. My bet is we will see white labelled streaming services from Blizzard and co.
We will have dozens of gaming streaming services, much like film streaming services...
And any way, NVIDIA is in no position to challenge the games industry on such things - they are very much in bed with them and would lose enormously if games suddenly all went for a big 'best on AMD' logo.
Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences which really flex the hardware - similarly the potential for multi-TB fast storage and 10 Gb connectivity could have enabled dramatically larger game worlds than we see today.
But it's absolutely a go big or don't bother problem.
I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.
I still think it’s a good idea, with a lot of people falling into the “who is this for” camp, and very well could eventually be very successful.
My impression is that it just needs more time to mature. If we were talking about some saas product, those rough edges and missing features wouldn’t be a big deal. Everyone here would be saying “yeah, it’s an MVP that they needed to get into market to test things out. It’s improving incrementally.” But because it’s video game related, people’s expectations are that it finished and perfect the day it launches.
That’s what people are lamenting, you can’t role out a competitive gaming platform with such a small catalog of titles.
>I bought an Xbox to play Red Dead Redemption 2 . . . lots of people falling into the “who this is for” camp
Those people appear to be “casual/occasional gamers”? I am very doubtful that this group will really turn into a cash cow. $10.00/month is enough that few are going to keep a subscription after they are done playing. If you amortize a console over a lifetime of 4 years it would be considerably cheaper than paying for stadia if you consider the current $75 upfront cost.
So the way I see it, for stadia to be viable there would have to be a steady stream of AAA titles(because otherwise the need for cloud compute is questionable) produced by 3rd party studios...this just doesn’t exist, titles like RDR2 & CP2077 are an exception. We only saw a handful of titles that demanding and hyped come from a non-Microsoft, non-Sony published studio in the last decade. I’m not in the game dev world, but producing these types of titles seems to be exceptionally difficult, and the trend seems to be less and less AAA titles per year as the complexity compounds.
Combined with stadia’s limited selection, Google’s history of product abandonment, and that you often have to purchase stadia specific versions of titles to play them on the platform. It’s a difficult pill to swallow. Nvidia’s product, GeForce Now, where titles are portable seems like a much more viable product to me.
I can go on the store and buy Cyberpunk 2077 and start playing on my phone if I wanted to.
And the 75$ upfront cost does exist, you need a controller. You could get a controller for cheaper, but it wouldn't be as easy to use or be usable with the chromecast ultra, which seems to be where the best experience is. Nonetheless you still need a controller and most people wouldn't settle for something that is terrible to use, so the cost is still a consideration.
Especially in the 'casual/occasional' gamer market, where they don't care enough about the difference between 1080p and 4K. Most are probably just interested in being able to play the latest hot game. That's exactly the same market Microsoft is targeting with the Xbox Series S.
Last time I signed up the Stadia Pro upsell was mandatory (you had to provide a CC). This was annoying because I was interested just in Destiny 2, which is free.
While playing Destiny 2 and Hitman on a laptop running Ubuntu and over wifi with a controller, it felt ok-ish. Almost on par with playing on a Xbox Series X but not quite there.
However, when I tried the same games on my gaming rig, on a 1 Gbit fiber connection with a mouse and keyboard it was completely unplayable for me. The input lag is just too high for me to enjoy the experience. On top of that the picture quality is pretty bad compared to running the same game on your own machine at 4K.
My conclusion is that Stadia will not replace a high end gaming rig for the type of gamer with higher demands. I even doubt it will replace xbox or playstation for the console players.
That's pretty low bar to clear
COVID sucks, but at least vadym909's kid has been able to make the most of it by investing in a usable setup and gaining some valuable hands-on experience with computers.
A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.
If no one downloads VideoLAN for a year they won't burn a bunch of money, but also they had no chance at fundamentally changing the way people watch videos.
What surprises me more is why people trusted Google enough to invest in Stadia in the first place. Had they let you import Steam games (like Nvidia does), fine, you're not risking anything. But actually paying Google for the license to a game that's ONLY available on Stadia? No thanks.
This is exactly what HP looked like a couple of decades ago. Making billions from printers meant everything else suffered.
I haven't seen a good model for incentivizing staying with a product or team in a large company. Most of the time the "ops" work or incremental growth work will never appear as significant as a new launch (particularly if 2 years on the product isn't performing to the launch teams projections)
Glass for business is a thing.
google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.
Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
- what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...?
- was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak)
- did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc?
- does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t).
Is it being used for education or something?
The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move.
After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.
Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end.
> profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off.
Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way.
> they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks,
Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users as well as at least one advantage towards each other network.
Of course by then they'd made everyone angry and made everyone here shun them
> which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect.
Probably more what I wrote above IMO. Mixing the brilliant Google+ social network with the despised Google+ identity solution wasn't the most brilliant thing they did. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but still.
> they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same.
Yep. And when they finally created the best solution the web have seen so far it was too late.
> they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results.
Can't remember it but wouldn't surprise me at all.
How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?
I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
Exactly.
FWIW: That's what I tried to explain above: "like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users"
> I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
On Google+ the social network it became really simple: You logged in using your main account.
Then in the upper right corner of the desktop (and probably in the hamburger menu on mobile) you could choose which connected identity you would like to post as.
Meaning one identity to answer serious questions about programming on the backend and another identity in a support group for front end developers etc ;-)
Google of course knew but back then we trusted Google.
I never used Google+ because it never made sense to me. There were probably a lot of great ideas that were just not obvious.
In hindsight it really looks like Yahoo all over again.
They required real names at first (slavishly copying FB in that regard), and then later as they were obviously failing they tried offering the option to use a pseudonym. I tried it, and they rejected my handle for no reason given. This was the day I started to really have deep-rooted negative feelings for Google, it was just insulting to have my time wasted by an also-ran social network.
That was the last straw for me and I burned my G+ account to the ground.
I think Google suffers from something akin to the oil curse. They're throwing out dilettante efforts to diversify but never accomplishing anything noteworthy outside their core business. In that regard they're making the world worse, because they're soaking up top-tier talent and then producing garbage with it.
All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.
>Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.
>Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.
It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...
My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book.
So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.
Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.
Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature.
A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused.
Otherwise your stock is getting destroyed.
They stuck with it for decades and have turned it into a great product.
As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told.
Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but they have a CFO who basically demands any project makes money in two years or gets canned (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not especially criticising this approach but it's clear most Googlers and their culture do not get it), and a generation of project managers who believe you can launch minimum viable products to consumers and fix it later. You can't make all three of those points work at the same time, and that's why literally anything they launch new at the moment is going to fail.
Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.
Maybe they just couldn't get licensing deals they wanted and refused to let go of the idea until now? It seems like Stadia needs both heroic technical effort and really clever go to market and they just failed outright on the latter.
(I'm ex-GCP)
https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/worldwide-cloud-market-q320
And let people install whatever they want on it. There's probably a decent market for people with low/mid range hardware that would like to stream the newest games an ultimate settings. Others who'd just like a portable game library not tied to a specific PC, and a 3rd group that might use it through a chrome cast like a game console.
I'm not sure how large of a market these groups would have been, but certainly much larger than whoever Stadia appeals to.
It's probably more of a semantic difference, but saying "Here's a VM, do what you want with it" is different than saying "Create a game library with us and we'll stream publisher X's games to you. We'll even put them in your GeForce library if you own it somewhere else!"
So publishers got mad and many of the biggest pulled the most popular games. Had GeForce just said "Here's a gaming optimized VM" and let users do whatever they want, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, an very early version of GeForce now did exactly that, complete with a windows desktop.
Have you ever worked for a tech company? They don't just fire PMs/leads because their project failed. We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private). It's the 10% that succeed that the company is going after (but you don't know that until after the fact of course). The PMs that drove this will simply move on to the next project and keep trying until they get a hit.
There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.
That's the sort of thing you have engineers for - so you don't sink money in something so idiotic. Not to mention that they picked the worst possible business model: pay price for title and pay a subscription at once.
The one who greenlit it, and proposed it should be under scrutiny.
Nvidia's GeForce go is under the same physical constraints and Cyberpunk 2077 is very playable there (so I can play it on my IPad Pro using XBox bluetooth controller...) . There are lot's games where brief latency is not a problem. I agree for some games latency is a dealbreaker but hardly for all.
But at least Nvidia's initial conceit was that it would piggy back on someone else's content ecosystem rather than building their own - building your own gaming content ecosystem is a) incredibly hard b) a fifteen year plus project and c) costs a hundred billion dollars. Google weren't willing to do those but launched a project that needed them.
Like, 600 ms latency is still 100% acceptable and enjoyable.
And not only graphics. Turn-based strategy genre can also benefit from gigantic ram and cpu resources - all to make ai smarter, more enjoyable to beat the ever.
I think stadia and cloud gaming in general is a gold mine. But it is a different platform, games should be optimized for it.
You can apply the same logic to anything new. We had VR headsets before HL:Alyx and anyone could say "VR has no good games, idea is toast".
And there were great VR games before HL:Alyx and Alyx is no killer app.
You can make amazing AI that beats humans 100% of time pretty easily, the hard part is making it challenging enough for people to have chance to beat it... It also just needs game state, without all the cruft of stadia(visual side, sounds, graphics, inputs etc).
Also did google partner with any of developers of such games?
Did they develop their own? or even formed any form of partnership for them?
No. They went for action titles, or titles with great graphics.
It was disaster from business perspective no matter how you look at it. Do not expect game developers to just bend over for google just because they release a new platform(and where are doubts about sustainability and quality of that platform from the beginning).
What kind of games will emerge 3 TB of assets will be totally fine amount? For a mobile turn-based game, no less. Or when 6 2080tis will render graphics for your phone no problem?
Roguelikes like Cataclysm DDA also tend to be extremely heavy on the complexity side despite having "extremely poor" graphics by your standards.
6 2080TIs? How are you going to pay for that waste? Do you know how delusional you sound?
I am talking about future of gaming.
What boggles the mind is that nobody is able to formulate who is Stadia even meant for. Who are the target customers?
Draw a Venn diagram of people who:
- care about gaming
- are OK paying full price for their games
- are OK paying 10 euros a month subscription
- are OK buying an extra controller
- have top-notch, 100% reliable internet connection
- are willing to accept occasional technical glitches
- are OK with Google's mercurial approach to product lifecycles
- have a computer
- have a console
- have a Steam library
- mod their games
- subscribe to Nvidia's cloud gaming service
Right now they are still giving away the product for free if you just use 1080p, which the vast majority of their target audience will be perfectly happy with, if you care about 4K and 120hz you probably want to have optimal latency as well and just get a local box anyway. So where do they expect the money to make the service profitable will come from?
I've said the same thing so, so many times from even back when there was OnLive. Streaming games to paying customers is an interesting idea and some people will love it, but I just fail to see the business model. If you can pick up a cheap second hand console for less than 1 year of subscription service, who are the people who are going to keep paying for your service because they 'just want to play a game every now and then'? You have to build and maintain servers all around the world to make the service work, and you expect people who are not really into gaming enough to just buy a $400 console once every ~5 years, who just want to play every now and then, to be willing to spend enough on your service to cover the cost?
It boggles the mind how much money has been going into these kinds of services without any one of them ever seeming to have an obvious and solid long-term business plan...
I think it’d make a lot more sense if they didn’t charge full price, allowed rental/trial periods, or cut a deal to recognize your existing Steam/Epic/GOG purchases - making it a good deal for people who are traveling, don’t want to fire up a desktop at the moment, etc. – and worked on some unique features like hitting GCP strong points – AI at a new level or massive scaling for things like Sim-style games, etc. — so the value pitch wasn’t so narrow.
Also, what makes you think that 5/6 of the world has fast internet? I have good internet but if you asked me 3 years ago I would have said no.
Google's fundamental theory seems to be "users will always forgive us" or "there are always new users" and neither is true.
Not to mention that 100ms of latency in TVs is constant usually, it isn't the case with network latency.
The problem with stadia for me is that gaming platforms are social networks and Stadia is relatively small. No one else I know has Stadia and for many games you can't even expect to find randos willing to play at all. Embr and GetPacked are basically useless.
Sure, we all know 9 out of 10 projects fail. Let's make sure we only ever begin the 1 that doesn't.
“One out of ten research and development projects will succeed. I recommend cancelling the other nine.”
You need some sort of balance between the two.
The fact that well over 90% of the products Google launches fail for very understandable reasons (I would argue that the last successful product Google launched was Android, and they technically acquired that) is why Google's structure and management need to change.
I'd assume company politics. Steve Jobs described Apple like a "big startup" [1]— it had 0 committees, and instead had one person in charge of each of the things the company needed to do/care about. They all met weekly and talked about everything they were doing, and it yielded great collaboration. That's why everything "makes sense" and grows from the divisions/apps you'd expect.
Google sounds more like Microsoft before it, with different teams doing work that might overlap and compete against one another. On top of that, afaik flashy "new" products play better for promotions than building upon something that exists. Hence Play Music and Youtube Music, Android and Chrome OS, Google Play and Stadia, etc.
Nothing succeeds like failure.. In my experience at multiple companies in tech and elsewhere, it is (sadly) frequently the case that the people responsible for the biggest failures are the ones who have the fastest career progression. It's a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome where they are holding their bosses captive because as they fail the stakes for the management get higher and higher and so they get more and more bought in.
There's one person in particular that I remember from my time at Goldman. Lovely guy but every single thing he was involved in was an unmitigated disaster. Sure enough he failed his way to becoming an MD in record time.
Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. Presuming charitably everyone is doing their best etc.
What happens for companies where no-one dares to start new projects? Yeah.
So what is the correct number of new projects per risk? Everyone would like to choose only those that succeed. But the whole point of new development is that the information and experience to build such a product does not exist and needs to be learned as the project progresses.
Should companies take too many new risky projects or too few? If the reward for successful project is high, then it's obvious a company should take a few too many risky projects, rather than too few (and risk cancelling some hit in it's infancy).
In aggregate if every new project fails and business is starting to look like Kodak or Xerox then that's bad. Failing one new project is just a large company trying to innovate and cutting it's losses when a project is not a success.
If it's something completely new, then yeah, celebrate failure, because at least you learned something. But game streaming had been tried and failed spectacularly before (remember OnLive?). Stadia didn't add anything new except "this time it's Google, they know their network stuff". Turns out that isn't enough if the business model makes no sense.
You don't celebrate failure and you certainly don't celebrate causing failure by having such a poor strategy that random cartoonists predicted your failure mode on launch day and then riding it into the ground.
I don't have a PC or a console and I can play Cyberpunk - in fact the Stadia controller+Chromecast came free with it (because of a promotion).
Stadia has huge value to new gamers, but it hasn't done a good job appealing to them.
No. It was an excellent idea, with very bad execution on the supply side.
Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that.
Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market.
Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.
The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.
What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.
Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.
On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but:
https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/
“ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”
“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.
It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.
Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.
Something like Stadia requires customers to believe that it won't go away. Google, given their long history of mediocre commitment to projects, already had considerable skepticism for Stadia from Day 1. Shuttering their internal studios is just one more signal to skeptical customers that Google really doesn't know what they are doing and doesn't care.
Good luck with that.
There are real costs to supporting yet another platform and if you don't believe the platform will generate sales for you, you're not going to expand the effort.
... and most publishers didn't even bother with Stadia, so what does that tell you about how publishers view Stadia?
>because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future.
And how many customers does Stadia actually have? It seems like Stadia was ignored by customers as well.
Third-party publishers don't care about sales of First-party games. They care about sales of their titles. This means they care about the viability of the platform. So First-party games are ultimately there to drive platform adoption. They do so, by 1) demonstrating the strengths of the platform to consumers and publishers (think WiiSport showing off how Wii controllers can be used), and 2) Providing a reason for consumers to actually adopt the platform. The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming. If you're only offering a (tiny) library of games that are already out on other platforms, there isn't really an incentive to get Stadia and play the games you already own or can get ... but this time from the cloud! On the other hand, if I like Mario or Zelda, I have to get the Switch.
And by the way, for all the talk about all those partnerships Stadia will form - how is it that Microsoft was able to secure rights to hundreds of titles for their subscription-based Netflix-type gaming service (GamePass), and Stadia couldn't even muster more than a handful of games you have to buy individually? And speaking of Netflix, it's not surprise they have pivoted to creating original content to supplement their licensed library - care to guess why?
Stadia is a full fail.
FWIW, most people I know using Stadia are not the core gamers, but people who do not want to invest in a gaming PC or console (or worse, a gaming PC/console for each of the kids!). And they seem really happy with it, specifically because its a streaming thing, so I'm not as negative about it. (For myself, yeah, Gamepass would win if I'd get any of these things)
So I'm not sure what we're arguing about here. That publishers are clueless and don't realize that Stadia is a goldmine waiting to be tapped? That consumer don't know what they are missing by not buying into the platform? The platform is clearly failing.
Recently Ubisoft came on board and all of their recent titles are available on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly great to play on Stadia, and i've read about a lot of people that got Stadia for it ( there was a promo, pre-order Cyberpunk and get a free Stadia controller and Chromecast Ultra). Those are not pretty significant growth points.
Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.
I don't see much for them to gain and plenty to lose if they let google build a big customer base.
VIVE is by HTC supporting SteamVR, but Valve has their own first-pary VR headset + controllers with the Index.
I'm surprised Nvidia didn't attempt to partner with them rather than developing GeForce Now as a separate product, they could have taken advantage of Valve's developer relationship/client/store front and handled the actual running of the hardware, which Valve seems much less interested in.
Stadia on the other hand is just a demonstration of the level of hubris Google is capable of engaging in. They thought they could launch a brand new store with the twist that people would need to pay a subscription to continue playing the games they had bought and without the option of using your own hardware should you end up purchasing a capable machine.
Steamlink has hardware is dead because it was bad. Steam controller is dead as well.
Steamlink now is an android app that might work and might not work on your device.
Or can't, these days, considering how strangled the GPU market is.
I think Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will dominate cloud gaming eventually.
Partnering with Google on stadia would generate a sizeable backlash.
So far, I can confirm for a fact it works on HTC Vive, Valve Index, Oculus Rift S, and Oculus Quest 1/2 (in wired mode connected to PC, just like the other headsets, or using VR Desktop for wireless; I tried both and stuck to playing it with wireless).
The easiest users to steal from the console market are the ones that buy only 1 or 2 console games which are traditionally reserved for those consoles (NFL Madden is the latest promotion and a good example). For these users, there is massive experience shift going from buying a ps4, ps online, just to play the same game all the time. I am one of these users. If they can find these 1 or 2 games that activate each segment of users, they will take cohorts from the console market. This won't get the entire console gamer market, but it's a great place to start.
Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200).
Even cheaper if you go for the PS4.
Has Stadia improved since launch? The PS5 and Xbox Series X are both more powerful than Stadia instances, not to mention modern PCs. Has Google announced any timeframe for powering up their instances to match? Will I have to pay more to access instances with the power of next-generation consoles? Will those be available for all the games I purchased, or on a title-by-title basis?
That's the scary thing for some people. The 'continuous improvement' may just as well be taking away stuff you 'own' or spying on you.
Also, money you paid to stadia are just as "frozen" (spent? frozen money implies they can be thawn) as money for online service.
While you can carry chromecast ultra with you it's PITA to setup - you have to configure the network on it and a controller. Without wired connection it's not a good experience. Meanwhile, ps5 you just plug in a play for the most part.
Seriously, When did Google ever planned anything?
It is only in recent years, they fall out of the Media's flavour did people start to look at them rationally.
Also, yes if you already have a huge Steam collection, the thought of buying games on a different store is not great, but I don't think Stadia is aimed at people with a PC gaming rig and 1000 steam games, it's aimed at people who don't have a gaming PC or console, and want to play the latest EA Sports or AAA game. Having to just pay 60$ is far better than paying 60$ + 500$ fo a console + waiting for shipping and installation.
The customer value add of anything on top of that is proving to be extremely thin. I used Now extensively in 2017, Luna extensively this year and Stadia briefly for Destiny 2 - Luna's experience isn't worse enough to provide any benefit to the Stadia lock-in model.
Stadia PM's should really consider focusing more on "Customer Obsession".
FWIW, the subscription is optional (with these perks [1]). You can also just buy the game you want to play and play it, no subscription needed.
The benefit of Stadia is actually it's simplicity. It's about bringing in new gamers who may have come from console world, but don't have the Steam libraries, etc.
I wrote this in another post, but I think Stadia right now is for the game console user who only play 1 or 2 games. This makes for a lot of extra hardware and subscriptions just to play a game you like. Why not just rent the game as a service for as long as you want to play it? When hockey season starts every year I buy the new NHL for $60. Thats $5/mo. Why should i also buy PLaystation plus, and a hardware console just to play the game? it takes 10 minutes from turining on the tv, navigating the menus, getting into the game, finding someone to play online, etc. Chatting with people is really bad UX. Google can make all of this slicker. But the value prop needs to focus on the job at hand: playing a _specific_ game which happens to be your favorite game you play mostly. Thinking of it as some kind of a gaming platform is not the way.
By considering Steam and Epic, you are already looking at this from the perspective of a platform. I am simply saying Stadia is better if the game you love is already there. NFL Madden is the latest Stadia promo right now. If most of your gaming time is consumed playing Madden, Stadia is probably the way to pay for it.
edit: in what way does Steam or Epic expect you to understand how to use a “gaming PC”?
And as the other commenter points out, playing steam games via geforce now doesn't even require installing the steam app anyway, it's just an account link.
Why? Probably less latency/better quality with a PC.
Obviously it depends on how well your local hardware compares to Stadias server farm too.
The PC and Stadia versions are much better than the PS4 and Xbox One versions though - those do not run well at all.
I suspect the actual PS5 and Xbox Series X versions will be relatively similar to the PC/Stadia version, but they haven't been released yet - you can only play the last gen console versions via backwards compatibility.
Because Stadia offers an inferior experience to local rendering. In particular, the way the video compression crushes all dark colors into a single shade of black. Plus, when Google kills Stadia in a year, you'll have lost the games you purchased and paid a subscription fee for.
I was excited to see Google make a game that would only be possible on Stadia, be it an MMO, races with hundreds of cars, or something more creative their designers could imagine. With their internal developers shut down, all that's left is more expensive, inferior quality versions of games I could play elsewhere.
Honestly, I'm sick of the limitations of traditional gaming. If that means some compression quality loss and being somewhat inferior to local rendering, then that's the price I'm willing to pay. Playing games is not one of the most important parts of my life, but with the amount of crap I've put up with dealing with flexibility and compatibility issues of a superior local rendering setup for modern games, you might think it was.
Steam is free by the way, since I guess I didn’t point that out in my last post. You just have to buy the games, same as Stadia.
You seem to be using "non-gamer" as a synonym for "too inexperienced to use basic modern technology", which I don't think is a widespread problem outside of age ranges that didn't grow up with the internet. A much bigger group is surely just people that aren't that interested in video games. (Unless you think Stadia is actually going after the geriatric market, which seems short sighted.)
Too inexperienced to use technology is a strawman, the real comparison is do they prefer the benefit of the better UX more than they fear the amorphous dangers of lock-in. The answer is easily yes.
The problem isn’t just lock in. There are also less games on Stadia. The lack of available games is directly due to Google’s strategy of recreating yet another App Store.
With Stadia, you press one button and you're in the game 5s later. It also has deep integration, allowing friends list, voice chat, game invites, achievements, etc. Nvidia relies on Steam for those (Epic doesn't have most of it). That's just the surface level integration too. By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.
If you've used both, it's night and day experience. Again obviously for you and me, we're used to PC gaming, but for average people wanting to play some AAA game, GFN is a complete no-go.
If I recall correctly, you have to do this once, and it can save your log-in details for next time.
> You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit.
Gamers are their target audience.
> By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.
That's true. I've found it's sometimes necessary to change the settings, as the default graphical settings are far below what the hardware is capable of handling.
I'm sure nVidia could do something about that if they had the will to.
I don't quite agree on that one. If you already have a 2000$ gaming PC with a huge Steam catalog, Stadia is most definitely not targeting you. Nvidia is.
Stadia is targeting people who want to play the latest AAA game or EA sports game, without having to invest in a $500 console or $1000 PC. You just play $60 and you're good to go on your laptop you use for Facebook, or spend $100 to play on your TV. They're trying to expand the gaming pie, trying to get all those people who will play games on their phones because it's easy and low friction, but won't invest in high friction setups like a gaming PC.
At least that's my take on it.
I don't think so. If you have the hardware, there's little reason not to run it locally. They're both going after the same market, but with different sales models.
There's probably never going to be a subscription that gives you access to all the latest titles.
If you're just buying a single game, Stadia comes out ahead on price when you're only paying $60 for the game rather than Geforce Now where you pay $60 for the game and then a monthly fee for every month you're playing.
At least with xcloud & stadia's approach there's both subscription fees (passive income if people don't play), as well as the 30% store cut to offset some of the cost.
Although none of these are remotely close to being priced at break-even prices, so this is also likely going to end up with even more IAP-based games on these platforms if this ever "takes off" at all. Which, yuck. This is obviously a bait & switch strategy for everyone involved. Just dressed up as "subsidized during user acquisition" instead so they can feel less evil about it.
Yes, but apply this to 90% of their new products. Google's planning in the current age is about as bad as Microsoft's in the 2004-2012 era.
You're really selling me on using Microsoft over Google here: If I'm using a product/service, I'd prefer that it stay around as long as possible even if the company decides that it's a failure. Bonus points for being a "cloud" company so that users are totally screwed the moment the company pulls support.
Yes, actually that's about what I expect. Not literally in a day, but fully do expect that in another year or two Google will announce that Stadia is going away and that in a few months it'll be gone. Games were rentals, not leased/sold, so they'll stop charging but you'll hardly be able to take your games with you. Saves might be Takout-able, so if you go re-buy the games you can keep playing... probably... if you even have hardware to game on...
In contrast, I've known people who ran MS software locally for months-to-years after it was obsolete/discontinued, and non-Microsoft software even longer (cue the classical story of the business that held on to their DOS software until Windows XP finally made it too painful to use).
This effectively kills Stadia as a service. If they were only willing to try for a couple of years... let's just say people were right to doubt that Google can be counted on for a service.
I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are not. There is no amount of money they could pay Valve to make that partnership happen that would not pay dividends.
Valve/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap, and the fact that they're still the most popular platform (and its not close) speaks volumes about whether the CloudStreamingGamePass-way things are going is actually the right one. Its reasonable to believe that people who identify as "gamers" right now are not interested in that stuff, and the strategy Google/Amazon/etc have of "Netflix for gaming, no console, convert non-gamers to gamers" won't work. Time will tell, but maybe Valve's traditionalism is the right one long-term.
You know where Valve is investing their money? VR and Linux. God damn do I love that company.
Gabe has publicly stated that he does not believe in game streaming services, because he thinks computation is best done at the edge.
The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with it so would one competitive advantage of PC gaming. Might be tautological, but the games that thrive in the cloud are games designed not to need a PC to be played.
And VR is inherently incompatible with the design goals of cloud computing. The slightest of latencies destroy the illusion in VR. Valve is not going to support a world that doesn't encourage people to own the hardware necessary to run VR.
Although doing over-the-internet streaming is definitely a terrible idea because of how many out-of-your-control factors exist.
Maybe, but I tend to think that it wouldn’t diminish, and that this idea that very many will just “get over” latency is something VPs and PMs have convinced themselves of and not something that would bare out in the data.
The first time I gamed on a 120hz display was life changing in a way, I was never totally satisfied playing any sort of competitive multiplayer game at 60hz again, it’s like wearing hazy scratched glasses when the competition doesn’t. And all it took was playing on a friends PC with a 120hz display for half an hour. I think considering how great the push to >120Hz has been in PC gaming, and that High-hertz are now being adopted in smartphones and tablets I’m not alone in this experience.
My point being here that a large part of why people choose to play competitive, reaction driven games, is precisely because they are competitive and especially because they are very fast paced. So fast paced that 8ms of output latency makes a significant difference to a large segment.
Tactical shooters and MOBAs are still immensely popular despite the fact that most consumers likely experience a fairly high level of latency. People play games like Fortnite because they're fun, not because they're so competitive & fast paced that 8ms of latency makes a difference. Even competitive games nowadays try to soften the direct correlation between player skill and wins using matchmaking and RNG mechanics so everyone gets a reasonably consistent rate of winning. Want to play a really competitive and fast paced game where 8ms probably does matter? Play Quake Live against the 100 or so people that still tolerate that level of competition.
If it were really 8ms of added end-to-end latency compared to local, then it would be a complete non-issue – even in the twitchiest fighting games and shooters, unless you’re a literal pro-level player, as you mentioned. Most people would not be able to tell the difference even if they were specifically looking for it. It would even be tolerable for VR.
Unfortunately, the reality is more like 80-120ms, at least in one benchmark:
https://www.pcgamer.com/geforce-now-beats-stadia-in-our-inpu...
And again, that's not to say that they can't notice the difference or something, it's just not the dealbreaker that it seems to be for some vocal people. I can definitely tell the difference but it's not intolerable for me. I'm definitely happy to trade it for better convenience in many cases just like many are evidently happy to trade it for cheaper hardware.
If you design lag-prediction into the game it isn't so bad. People even used enjoy working the "lag shield" (be erratic, change direction frequently).
It's the dropped packets and consequent stuttering that is really frustrating.
I agree. As a casual gamer, lag/latency has never been a problem on Stadia. Visual glitching and stuttering has. But have you noticed it only happens in certain titles?
Some games seem to suffer from periodic stutters (ahem, PUBG) no matter how good your connection is. While others are always butter smooth and crystal clear. This has lead me to suspect that it’s not entirely a connection issue, but maybe an issue with the ports/hardware at Stadia’s end?
So I agree with your point, but it's not like Valve as a company is totally unaware of the opportunities. They are just... uninterested.
I think Remote Play works brilliantly? I've finished multiple games using it, streaming from the PC at the other side of the house to the TV with SteamLink in the living room, using an Xbox One S controller. I hardly see a difference compared to sitting directly behind the PC (granted, this is limited to 1080p on the SteamLink hardware, but my eyes are old enough to not care about higher resolution anymore).
Valve is not behind in VR
Now, they put you in a weird virtual zone where your library is restricted to only the game you are currently playing. And if that game is not allowed by the publisher, you can't play it. So I can't play Slime Rancher. I can't play Shadows of Mordor. And it seems like over time there is less and less there.
It sucks, because it was basically my dream gaming service. Kind of like Google Play Music was my dream music service. :(
I don't think you are wrong, just more lenient in your definition of affordable. It is compounded by the supply constraints, and markups over retail we are currently seeing. I can buy a 3090 right now on amazon, but it is $2,450, 5x the console price. Titan was ~2x console price.
(Amusingly I'm running the exact card you mentioned, and I did buy it for about $450 NZD used, although the going rate is more like $350 now on the local used market).
17" Dell with a GeForce mobile whatever-it-comes-with will let you play everything fine for 5ish years if you're into the latest shooters, longer for other genres.
Now compare it to the cost of a streaming box & subscription.
If you're willing to build your own and buy second hand components on ebay you can just about put together a PC that is competitive with a modern console, at around the same price. But yea, if you're buying new from reputable dealers it's pretty much impossible.
I think for most people the decision on PC vs a particular console is:
* Which types of games tend to be available on that platform.
* Which specific games that they like are available on that platform.
* Inertial / brand loyalty based on what gaming machine they had on the past.
* If they play multiplayer, what their friends have.
* How much they like tinkering with / get frustrated fighting against computers.
And a massive failure at that.
But I'm also happy they haven't. These cloud streaming ecosystems are the apex of locked down closed systems. Valve is built on a culture of modding, revving games to make new ones, and being fair to users in a way that doesn't compromise being fair to developers. Cloud streaming systems, by and large, are not. They're built by big-tech megacorps that are looking to buy-in then cash-out on an industry they know nothing about (except Nvidia; if there were one cloud streaming service I'd support, its theirs. Nvidia isn't perfect, but its definitely within their wheelhouse, not a cash grab).
Beyond that, you're marginalizing Valve's dominance in the gaming industry. Of the top ten games by players on Steam right now, again, the most popular western gaming platform ever made, three are made by Valve (CS:GO #1, Dota2 #2, TF2 #4, and #3 is Rust, the monthly TwitchFad). Overall, the only non-Steam western PC games which compete with their numbers are Call of Duty, League of Legends, Valorant, Fornite, Minecraft. The one theme with most of these games is that they're pretty old. People love games they know; when the developer sticks around, builds out a fair monetization scheme, and iterates on the gameplay, the games become unbeatable pillars on whatever service they're distributed on (the few that aren't old: Fortnite/Valorant will get there, and CoD has this in a way, but is definitely the most different every year). Valve is a rock-solid game developer; the fact that they don't release new games every year just speaks to their commitment to their existing communities.
And, they also made Half Life Alyx last year. Its legitimately the most groundbreaking game to be released in the past decade, that unfortunately so few people are able to play. You physically cannot play that game and not have a shit-eating grin on your face the whole time. It is the only game I've ever played in VR (on Valve Index) that made me think "if this game were in both non-VR and VR, I would choose to play it in VR".
The first was well received but died off the rest of auto-battlers, the second was terrible but is being reworked, and the third was critically acclaimed and the probably the most important VR game released besides BeatSaber. I know you said not counting VR but I feel like skipping Half-Life:Alyx, a game in a well beloved franchise that was very highly rated, is a little disingenuous
Besides that they've also: Trialed Linux-based Steam Machines Greatly contributed to Linux gaming through Proton Tested out two unique hardware systems (Steam controllers and Steam link)
Outside of them being essentially the biggest and most important game distribution service, as well as helping devs with any distrbution, multiplayer, DLC, etc services that they need.
So I'd say it's a toss-up between whether that would benefit Google or not.
How? Stadia doesn't support VR.
They did neither and it's utterly boggling. They were clearly aware of their shortcomings when they dodged the more direct questions in early interviews. I don't know if it was just hubris, or an unwillingness at the top to understand. Or maybe the project started out too big to steer well and they just accepted it because, hey, high level paycheck.
There are probably a lot of now ex-googlers with a ton of I-told-them-so stories.
Stadia still is missing basic features like pagination or searching, but the EXPERIENCE is great. I don't know why you are having issues, but Hitman 2+3 work amazing for me with the stadia controller. 60fps, 4k, etc.
They also have Ubisoft+ integration and with this news they seem to be pushing for more integrations like that which will make the platform even better.
Twitch will never be on Stadia as they compete with Youtube Gaming, which has direct integration with Stadia.
I think Stadia had hoped that it could become big enough quickly, with the backing of Google's name and capital, that it could negotiate some good deals and build a big library quickly, to the point that there's so many gamers on Stadia that you can't not publish there anymore without losing a lot. Netflix and Spotify did it, too.
Usually ads can be equally or more expensive than development and production.
If you look at any of Google's project besides their core data-farming business, it's their usual mode of action : half-ass something cool and drop it.
Why would Valve partner with anyone? They don’t even need to make games anymore. They could fire the majority of their company and run on a skeleton crew and still be making a fortune years later.
Literally don’t think Google can afford them. The offer would be “hey wanna go from doing almost zero work and making a fortune to making a little more and having to work a lot harder and give up autonomy“
Stadia's voice party system works well, and while I've been playing on a TV (Chromecast Ultra & Stadia controller), I've run raids with folks playing on their phones, iPads, & Chromebooks.
Maybe because it's still a small and new community, but I've found it generally friendly and good quality.
I'm guessing that if you look at an existing title along the lines of any of the ones you mentioned, the team has to balance between ongoing development of the game and porting it to Stadia, and they may just not have the resources or inclination to do the porting even when huge cheques are involved.
It's almost as if Google product development stops a v0.8. Maybe time to have the company run by engineers instead of PhD's.
It is actually pretty fascinating, short of cloud computing, and Gsuite, Google doesn't appear to be able to produce products that people will actually pay for. It's not that Google doesn't have success stories, they do, Android for instance. They just don't seem to be able to sell anything.
It is no longer the year 2000
I bought a PS5 last year and have not bought a PS5 game. Mostly played PS4 games and some of what came in PSPlus.
I don't know if the quality of their hires has been dropping, but it feels like they just can't execute new ideas. They throw money at problems, and mostly they are really all over the place.
If I were Stadia's marketing chief, I'd
1. Bribe the TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app
2. Advertise that the TV includes _a game console_ during TV commercials.
3. Allow the TV users to pay a bit extra ($20?) to buy a basic game controller.
4. Have all the store demo units to auto stream Stadia playing video games and explicitly explain you don't need a xbox/playstation to play these games.
5. Buy out Witcher 3/Call of Duty 4/Project Cars 2/other older games and make them free for TVs with Stadia bundles.
Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.
Fiddling with my phone to play Stadia on my TV is pretty crumple some. It's just too much work for normal folks. People just want to turn on the TV and start playing.
Edit: I guess monopolistic abuse is a concern. However Sony and MS have their own streaming services. Google can just advertise 'play games with Stadia and Playstation Now and Xbox Cloud on your TV!' I am 100% if players switch to playing games on TV without game consoles, it hurts MS/Sony a lot more than to Google.
You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.
Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.
Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.
For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.
The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.
Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.
1) Old-school Waterfall: evaluate, commit, and then build (Tesla, Apple, 2000s MSFT are examples)
2) Spray and Pray: build, evaluate, and then commit (Facebook, Amazon are examples)
Google is 2
Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.
Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.
The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.
Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.
They would only do that if the spinoff made them a noticeable amount of money. I suspect that is rarely the case.
Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here
Waymo is another spin off company.
The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.
They do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
He may have real musical talent, but he'll never put in the blood, sweat & tears for the band to make it big.
For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost. Sometimes millions of dollars. Google is just cheap and won’t invest in their own platform.
Direct quote: "We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it."
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
We once had a Microsoft rep come visit us to get us to publish our upcoming mobile games for Windows Mobile Tablet notreallysurewhatwasthatanymore. When we asked what kind of support they were ready to provide, they offered to lend us a device for a few weeks.
Of course it's not representative of how things should happen, but for every big partnership or exclusive you read about, there's a dozen dumb wastes of time.
For games coming to Game Pass? No.
Same for the EGS, it's not like they front all those games. (Most exclusivity is bought way later in the process.)
But the original comment is pretty much Windows Phone back then. To this day I have no idea why Microsoft was so cheap and didn't even try to get developers on their platform. Rip Lumias, some of you were some great devices.
https://twitter.com/RaveofRavendale/status/13094734056039096...
"With Nowhere Prophet, it was an interesting case because we were also launching on Xbox Game Pass at the same time, which had essentially already secured financial success for the console versions"
Not exclusive, still got a significant chunk of cash.
There might be a couple where Epic might have done that (kind of, I know they saved some games), but I don't think Microsoft funded any development for a gamepass game so far. (From a third party, not published by Microsoft.)
For an indie developer, this basically means worrying about whether the game will succeed a non-issue prior to launch.
> [Phil Spencer, head of Xbox:] [In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk.
https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-int...
Source: gamedev who has heard from serveral devs who got offers.
was that the end of the discussion? Was there, you know, pushback like "we want 10 devices each of the two most popular sizes, and exclusivity for xxx months, and, and..."
Or did everything just fizzle out after "well, we'll lend you the unit I have in the back of my car?"
From a customer perspective, it gets the game on streaming, Xbox, and Windows PC.
I'm short on any attempt Google makes at being a media company.
It makes a real-world difference, there's no doubt about it. Hell, this is why governments issue arts funding. The return has virtually limitless potential in more than just the financial aspects. But it does take commitment, perseverance, and often, patience.
Despite these being crucial attributes to being a good developer, it's shocking how few (people and tech organizations) exhibit them.
They fail to understand that from the outside people don't see things Google does as sure bets.
I would also say "media company" is pretty broad. Will Google become a media infrastructure company? yes (they already are). Will they become a media platform? yes, (they already are). Anything more and it's probably spreading investment too thin, but those are substantial components to media.
Not everyone has low latency, high reliability fibre in their home, yet. If you have some crappy DSL or whatever then the experience isn’t great. Likewise if your WiFi signal is anything less than perfect!
And the people who do pay for the best internet connections are often those who don’t need Stadia, because they already have latest-generation consoles and gaming PCs?
> I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.
We probably disagree here, but to me that's an ear piercing yell about the confidence Google puts into Stadia and its future.
>This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.
This is so painfully misleading.
You're either describing situations where Microsoft or Epic have become the publisher for the game, or you're describing situations where extremely large titles are paid to exclusively release on a platform where they will then recoup costs from as the sales have to go through their platform.
2. Was the offer to be a timed exclusive like with Epic, or just to add integration for Stadia? I would assume the offers money to be very different depending on that.
3. Are we comparing similarly sized games? "one prominent indie developer" is kinda vague. Again not sure how comparable it is with Epic/Microsoft deals.
https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new....
I think its probably some technical issue or they don't want to risk getting a bad reputation by supporting a wide list of semi-compatible devices.
I wonder if there's a difference between making Stadia available via an app store and having it pre-installed or advertised as a core function of the device?
As others have commented, it was pure hubris for Google (and Rick Osterloh) to believe they could just start a new game studio and use it to fuel growth of the Stadia streaming platform. Xbox surely would've died without Halo!
This "do it all myself" approach needs to start with building a massive user base upon which to lure other game developers and TV manufacturers - not the other way around. A telling sign is that the newest Google TV dongle doesn't yet support Stadia...
From a hardware technical standpoint, I think most TV manufacturers don't include a powerful enough SOC from which to run a Stadia app (e.g. a built-in Chromecast != Chromecast dongle). There's also some server-side compatibility issues that we're not aware of.
The Android stuff seemed to suffer quite a bit from this early on, though they seem to have a handle on it now.
A lot of them have pretty bad game mode latency, though, which isn't a problem with home consoles but start to become a problem once you add streaming latency. Then some of them have >10ms decode latency, and all of it starts to ramp up the delay.
Seriously though, I think Microsoft and Sony would scream the house down if Google made movements like this. They may not be monopoly holders in console gaming, but you think that would stop a suit like that being heard?
Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for Stadia to shine, but I'd guess that the HN crowd skews towards that.
If you're an old gamer who wants to play newer games but doesn't have a ton of time and don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.
The game library does leave a lot to be desired, no question about that. But this decision seems to be the right move to mitigate that by giving developers better access to getting their games on Stadia rather than Google trying to be both the platform and the content.
If you can't reach more than one country, why would anyone want to develop for it?
Totally feel for you, but similar to anything that requires a decent internet connection, NZ and AUS get left in the dust
Stadia is in a bunch of countries and rolling out to more. It's almost as though it's a new product and didn't immediately launch at global scale.
The sarcasm does not add anything to your comment.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Sad Australian internet noises.
> don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.
Or, or, do buy the gaming rig, because it will still work and you’ll still have the games 3 years after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing.
If owning games forever is important for you, then buy the hardcopy. For me, being able to play games now on the devices I already own is a huge win.
I mostly play the same three or four games and have for about a decade. Stuff like KSP and ARMA where save state and modding are extremely important.
Source?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/04/17/nearly-37-o...
>Nearly 37% Of All Registered Steam Games Have Never Been Played
Steam's most played games list tend to change very slowly over time, with a few slots occasionally taken by mediocre "throw away" titles that people consume once and then forget after a few months : https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ In the current month's list, almost all the games most launched on steam are games that are old and have high replay value. Counter Strike, Dota, PUBG, GTA5, PoE, Rocket League.
Outside of steam, one of the most played game of the world is League of Legends. It currently has a 115 million monthly player count, and a 50 millions peak daily logins. Yes, that little competitive PC game has seen more people playing it than the playstation 4 has seen buyers in its lifetime.
The best selling game console by the way only ever saw a few of its titles ever reaching a large player base : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video.... This is known as the Wii's tragedy. The best selling console in the world, but games barely ever sold on it, with people mostly sticking to a few Nintendo's first party games. You could say it's a tiny subgroup that kept financing literally every other games on the platform.
People tend to stick to a few game they consider worth their value and replay them. The people who keep buying new things over and over at $60+ and forget about them after they're ""done"" are a minority among gamers. They're a very attractive archetype for game developers as they tend to be a failsafe for when their games just can't appeal beyond very superficial characteristics but they're not the majority of gamers by far. Most games sold on the market don't sell that many millions and it's always the same group who keeps buying the new shiny thing. The average AAA game tries hard to become an experience akin to movies with their many cutscenes, dialogue and visuals because devs are trying to get the attention of that guy who just keeps buying new shit over and over and throws it away once done.
And that's without counting "casual" type of gamers who also tend to focus on their one or two game and forget about the rest. Of the casuals, the wealthier types who are willing to spend irrationally are what every single mobile game developers wish they had, because the ''whale'' archetype will spend countless grands on just the one game they always play. All the ""free"" video games that have paid for options rely on these people who show extreme loyalty toward the one game. The modern incarnation of Counter Strike subsists from people willing to keep spending insane money just to get a skin that says that they spent hundreds or grands on something that doesn't even give them a competitive advantage.
I guess people who play chess or soccer are "curators" and "collectors" considering how old those "game" concepts are?
Some people may only see video games as a replacement for popcorn movies, a vapid session of watching characters talk about meaningless things and occasionally press a button or two as an illusion of interactivity with something.
But some of us get attached when there's something actually -good- out of it and time memorable beyond the technology used to build it. Thoughtful set of rules that allow a person to either challenge themselves or others. Some of us will always continue to play Starcraft, Counter Strike, Street Fighter or arcade shmups. They don't need a "revision" much like Chess doesn't need to be modified into a game that isn't Chess and soccer doesn't need to become handegg.
Stadia is to gaming what MTV is to music.
Please let others enjoy games the way they like to, also.
I keep going back to these games:
- Knights of the Old Republic (2003)
- Jade Empire (2005)
- Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
- Game Dev Tycoon (2012)
- Long Live The Queen (2012)
- Banished (2014)
( Didgeridont? BTW amazing stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG9ZX1FS20A )
Self-owned gaming rig also nets you backwards compatibility.
I have used Stadia and have been impressed by its relatively seamless "drop in and play" capability.
There is literally no way Google shuts down Stadia and doesn't refund people their money and let them export their save files (you can already do the latter). So no, the worst worst case is that you got to play on Stadia for free and if you really want the game again you can use that money to buy it somewhere else.
Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.
Apples to Oranges IMO. Stadia is a PC game streaming service, not a physical game console. Google doesn't own the PC game platform, they're just facilitating it.
If Google had never attempted a game studio and launched Stadia as a standalone platform (as it will now be), no one would have said "ok but it's a bad sign that Google isn't getting into the game development business"
> Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.
Probably true. I wish it were a standalone company also, but it's not.
Throwing money at a first party studio was a sign of investment and dedication, though. Had they thrown the money at something else - like developer outreach - sure, that would have been fine. I don't see that as the likely alternate reality had they chosen not to open a studio.
I am worried about Google's ability to actually execute and make this successful, however (And that does give me hesitancy to buying some of the games that are on there, because they aren't transferrable to somewhere else if Stadia is shut down).
For one, with this in-house studio model, they haven't even shipped a single game yet and they're pulling the plug on the approach. That just seems like giving up before they've even tried. But Ok...
As others have said, the single biggest issue with Stadia is not that it doesn't work wonderfully (it does), it is the extremely limited catalog of games available that needs to be addressed. If they can successfully address that, then they really do have a pretty sweet offering that will be tough to beat.
The only thing stopping me from spending more money on games is the fact that I expect it to just evaporate one day and take the games I "bought" with it. Moving to a licensing arrangement to let me play the games I already own/could retain even if Stadia goes away, would help a lot in this regard.
I'm a happy Stadia user and I'd love for this to be the case, but I think it's incredibly unrealistic. If Stadia shuts down we'll be lucky to get 3 months warning, let alone refunds.
Or just pay $150 for a second-hand graphics card that is one or two generations behind current models but was top-end at its age, and put it to a basic desktop PC.
There's zero chance I'm ever going to give Google any support in trying to take over the gaming industry. The best thing they can do is kill Stadia, considering how anti-consumer it is.
> The company plans to begin offering its Stadia tech to publishers, opening up the possibility for Stadia to become the streaming tech for other video game companies.
This alone scares the fuck out of me.
Travelling would have been an interesting use (although not interesting enough to buy games a second time), but, well, not a great past year for that.
Yea, I can't imagine that playing AAA (or even indie) games designed for full sized screens is going to translate well on a phone sized screen.
Source?
I know a lot of people, some with children, who have enough income to drop $60 on a game every month without batting an eyelash. Busy people are often a great target market.
These people are mostly Switch players, so Stadia is a perfect upgrade for them.
Stadia is an upgrade to nothing, as in having Stadia is better than having no way to play games. But an upgrade to a dedicated games console?
It's also more convenient to just use the screen in front of me (TV, phone, tablet, laptop) than to find my Switch and boot it up.
Strictly console-wise Stadia is an upgrade to those last-gen consoles. But they really need to get more games on the service because that's what people are there for.
Busy people are a great market if you have a product that can save them time. Stadia is not that.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Ama...
This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great deal on this!"
http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-i...
Unfortunately the engine they got a great deal on was CryEngine, which has made some cool games, but by a lot of accounts is not great to work in. Much like the issues reported at EA's studios (with Frostbite), if you're working on a game in it you want to be working closely with the engine devs. They're the ones who know how to make it work, or can fix it when it doesn't work.
A number of CryEngine developers left to join Cloud Imperium's Frankfurt office working on Star Citizen. That office basically exists to pick up the ex-Crytek people who wanted a job where they'd get paid. I don't know if Amazon snagged any of them, it would've been a harder sell to relocate to the US, but with the amount of money they were pouring into this, not impossible.
Unreal and Unity are both fantastic. Let your dev teams pick from one of those two and be done with it.
Unless your doing something really special theirs no reason to build an engine( if your goal is shipping games )
For the same synergistic effects as Epic and their game store + their engine. If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. It's basically trying to incentivize selling on their platform and using their platform tools at the same time.
The reason they started with lumberyard was because amazon does platform thinking. Unlike open source they can't just take it, so they bought cryengine to start with.
I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files.
So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.
Unless you have a contract dispute with them, in which case they bankrupt you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_disput...
I don't think contract dispute is the right word. The developer sued epic for things it knew about in advance. Epic countersued and won.
https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq
Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?
No. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.
Seems like you’d need an instance of the game with its own GPU for every viewer.
Twitch plays Pokemon worked fine .
You would basically just need to stream the cameras output texture to a web app, and then read inputs from from said web app. Regardless there's no reason to try and create a whole new engine for this, CryTek has always been known as one of the worst engines to work in, just because it's not supported very well.
The way I would personally do it I would maybe create a multiplayer game and for each ten cameras spin up a game client instance.
According to the other comments here it looks like Amazon wanted to create some type of bizarro system where if you use their engine you had to use AWS as your cloud back end. Which does sound pretty horrible, like I can't even do a HTTP request to get weather data unless it goes through AWS ?
Unity is pretty much none existent in AAA, it's mostly a mobile engine.
I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .
HDRP is still new, give it a few years.
Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards.
I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet.
Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error)
However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.
If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place.
Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment.
edit:
To add links to the code:
ly framework, clearly core engine systems unrelated to cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
Gems, the non crytek plugin system: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
A big dump of cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
Which we can see has been dramatically shrunken in the time since the initial commit: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEn...
My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL
My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive.
There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!).
Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!
Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
...wait a minute
Hardspace: Shipbreaker, on the other hand had a unqiue idea and was a critical success, and in a retrospective the developers were very explicit not to impose a top-down attitude to development. [3] (disclaimer: I work at Blackbird Interactive, but not on Hardspace: Shipbreaker)
[1] http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/sinandpunishm...
[2] http://shmuplations.com/aliensoldier/
[3] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026825/Forging-Hardspace-Ship...
AAA games cost a lot of money, so these companies think that if you come with a bunch of money, you will end up with a AAA game.
My company was pitched by both Google (for stadia) and Amazon to create games for them and it was totally clear they had no idea what they were doing, and no idea what they were even trying to achieve.
The funny thing is that in both cases we felt that their attitude was also “These guys have no idea what they are doing” about us too.
It’s just a total ideological mismatch.
This is pretty much how every Googler thinks.
I have paid for Geforce Now which does let you play Steam et al games (although not everything is available which is annoying) - it is about £4 a month currently (or free if you can spend time waiting to play) and the experience feels largely the same to Stadia to me in terms of latency and quality. Many happy hours playing high-end PC games on a super cheap and lightweight Chromebook that starts up instantly and runs silently compared to my weighty, expensive, and noisy gaming laptop that needs to boot into windows (although that only takes 5-10s these days to be fair)
Feels like nVidia (...and Xbox? Not tried that) have eaten Google's own lunch in the stream-to-chromebook context.
Similar to your experience with Geforce Now, I had a great experience with shadow.tech, where you can bring your Steam library, and I'm sure there are many more competitors.
They should lean into that kind of thing.
But having your entire Steam library is very cool
Next day: Publishers start crying and all change their TOS to exclude cloud gaming like they did for GFN.
Look what happened to Netflix. Publishers and rights-owners love to collect exorbitant royalties (and not pass them on to devs/creators).
In the end, if you‘re consumer-facing, you have to create your own content. Or be extremely entrenched.
There are a LOT of videogame developers out there. Many of them are quite good at what they do.
The cloud gaming space, while much better than it used to be, has plenty of room for improvement — it’s not remotely mainstream yet, and there’s still time yet to mint the cloud gaming household name.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164801/google-stadia-sha...
First thought: it's probably pretty hard to start a new game studio during COVID? That article is dated March 4, oof.
But yeah, that's weird.
There is a widespread and well founded suspicion that Google will just get bored and shut it down one day. This exacerbates that fear.
IMO the single business decision that doomed it from the start was the fact that you had to buy Stadia game to play on Stadia. Nothing from Steam/Epic/Ubisoft, and no cross-play.
I would not at all be surprised to hear within a year that they stop taking new subscribers, with a sunset a year after that.
Based purely on my own experience with games, I tend to think that for the best results, you'd need a really good game studio to learn how to make a cloud game; I'm not sure you want a really good cloud company to learn how to make a game.
But it's still a really good point. Was the Stadia studio explicitly for these kind of cloud-gaming-enabled games?
Cloud native (and streaming) offers a couple of advantages over installed games. Cheating becomes much harder, although not impossible. And people can launch the game easily without an install.
It has some real trade offs as well. Increasing felt latency is the one people love to talk about. But a huge increase in compute and bandwidth cost for the game operator is the other. Both in terms of the wiz bang features people imagine which are also possible with an installed game. And because for each player at peak CCU you have to run the game for them, encode video and transmit that to them. That’s quite the ops cost increase over a traditional game.
The bandwidth consumption and compute cost hurt the play anywhere at anytime idea. Firstly because places where bandwidth and latency are acceptable for play are not ubiquitous and there is no clear roadmap for that to happen. Secondly because the hike in compute cost per user free accounts are considerably more expensive to allow. Adding subscriptions removes ubiquitousness, allowing free players will bring dark patterns to convert that would make Zynga blush. Platform subscriptions will result in a chase for ‘engagement’ and more of the latter. All without anyone able to offer more than vague affirmations that there is anything creatively interesting.
Cloud native is really good for one thing though. Getting investor money.
- GRID added a 40-car race mode that's "just not possible on consoles". (Unfortunately there were rarely enough Stadia players playing GRID for matchmaking 40-car races to work well!)
- Orcs Must Die 3 added Stadia's "Stream Connect" feature, which is basically like screensharing with people in your party. They also apparently increased horde sizes on Stadia compared to other platforms.
- The Hitman series added Stadia's "State Share" feature, which lets players set up scenarios and create customized game states that they can share with others to play.
- Dead by Daylight and Baldur's Gate 3 added "Crowd Choice", which lets streamers create polls for in-game choices that automatically selects an outcome based on viewer votes (e.g. choosing whether the streamer is a killer or survivor in DbD)
- Outcasters uses Crowd Play which lets stream viewers instantly jump into games with the streamer they're watching
- etc
There's a lot of cool stuff that can be enabled when the hardware runs on beefy cloud servers. Although it would be cool to see what novel functionality Google's internal studio would have showcased, I also think it's pretty important to focus on getting "real" games and encouraging devs to take advantage of cloud-specific functionality.
There's probably something to be said for the Ubisoft+ model (basically a separate, smaller streaming service on top of Stadia/Luna/etc), but I don't think cable-like "channels" bundles are the way to go for streaming of any kind.
> "The service’s best moments may have been when its third-party ports showed off the strength of the cloud gaming model, in which a game can run well on just about any device with a screen and a strong internet connection. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ran well on Stadia. Destiny 2’s Stadia support let players of that game drop in for an extra match or quest from their phone or laptop when they were far from their regular gaming gear. When Cyberpunk 2077 was faltering on everything else in December, it was running quite well on Stadia.
They’re not wrong. If Phil *Harrison is trying to turn Stadia into, say, the "Unreal Engine of cloud gaming” (scare quotes added by me), he’ll likely be much more successful at doing that than trying to make "a traditional console like PS5, but, like, in the cloud."
This shatters my confidence in Stadia as an ongoing consumer platform, though (especially that Stadio Pro sub, and possibly even the hardware/controllers too.)
0. https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
This is the first time I have heard that, it seems like something that Stadia's marketing team would want to tell people.
- https://www.androidcentral.com/cyberpunk-2077-stadia-review
- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-cyber...
Being affiliated with Google is why I never bothered with Stadia. Google can't stick with platforms long enough to make investing in them worthwhile. I knew Stadia would under-perform whatever obscenely high standards Google set for the product and would roll it into YouTube Gaming or something before silently killing it off.
I read the announcement as Google doubling down on title acquisition which probably worked out well. Cyberpunk was the largest game release last year (last 5 years?) and seemingly very popular on Stadia. Other titles they have (RDR2, Doom, Odyssey) are also among the best games of the last few years.
Personally, I never played any of the non-AAA titles on Stadia and would imagine most users are in a similar boat. Just doesn't make much sense to use a streaming service for low-key games I can play on my laptop directly. This is a big difference from early Netflix model, where they went for quantity.
My guess is that the internal studio failed to pitch any competitive titles and was disbanded. Makes sense to focus on the plumbing, while leaving titles to external studios who know how to do it well.
The studio goes now. Hedged with a commitment to bringing you yesterday's games next year, from a skeleton crew of portfolio managers.
Next, the GPU clusters will track GCP usage, not the PC hardware hype cycle. Cloud GPU users only need commodity compute; Gamers want ray tracing cores, AI processors, the latest DirectX features, yadda yadda. The enthusiast hardware market is a well-oiled marketing machine. Stadia, by virtue of running on a platform that only buys workhorse cores, will become increasingly hostile towards gaming use-cases. Studios won't waste time porting an unreleased game to oddball hardware. Stadia probably doesn't have the subscriber numbers to make the juice worth the squeeze.
Last comes the email that your Stadia games will be accessible until June 202X.
Alternatively, they might actually think they have a chance to succeed from the publisher & platform angle. Everything will look fine internally until the fund dries up because publisher bets are multi-year affairs and exclusivity is expensive.
Best case, they have a hit and people subscribe long enough to play it. Now find another hit, no big deal. Most likely case, they don't find a hit in time. These kinds of publisher funds only get funded once.
"Google" and "under-resourced" in the same blurb is very funny.
I swear it seems like Google is entirely unable to commit to anything new. How much have they wasted on Stadia? What do they have to show for it?
Dabbling and half assing everything, pissing away money only to pull the plug. I'm glad they didn't bother to support their flagship chromecast for this thing, so I never wasted any time on it. At this point it's clearly destined for the Google graveyard.
Focusing on Stadia's strength as a platform seems to be a good move forward. It is a technically sound service. I'm sure the massive bump it got from Cyberpunk showed execs that a partnership-only gaming model could be successful. They do need to expand licensing, improve their subscription catalog and get more indie studios involved. Relying on users to consistently pay $60+ for games on top of the monthly fees is a losing business model.
Stadia has an decent proposition for cheap casual gamers, everywhere else you have a better option. These are however the lowest value gamers for most game companies, at least the ones that build AAA games. However, the technical direction is overbuilt for some (mostly unused as of yet) special capabilities. So the companies that go for casual gamers have to port/build their product with no support. Result: both casual and AAA companies just go for different more profitable platforms.
In addition, the type of gamers with the most benefit from Stadia are the ones least likely to hear about it. Google doesn't market it directly anywhere as much as it could. That means you need some kind of external support for marketing - like, say, Android's many many resellers. The game equivalent would be exclusives. But there's no good reason for an AAA company to agree (again, relatively low-value gamers).
In short, Google needs to either admit Stadia is a casual platform and manage it appropriately - or pivot into a very different type of platform focused on things only cloud gaming could do, which may well require making its own games if others don't care about the capabilities.
Closing its own studios probably kills the latter option, but it's not enough to make a pivot into casual. Since Google is unlikely to do it (casual is a lower status thing), I expect Stadia to be closed within 3-5 years.
But there was no plan. They just did it and hoped success would just happen.
That said, there's still space for Stadia's infrastructure to compete with Xbox/Azure.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwqjg3/the-complete-untold-h...
Google could do this, or pay even bigger $ for a timed exclusive from a AAA publisher. Instead google started their own studios, which would likely pay off in the long run, but google doesn't have the attention span to operate like that.
I definitely think this is the future, if it's not from Google, then it'll be Amazon, Microsoft, or Epic/Tencent.
I'm absolutely confident this is the future. Except, unlike you, I don't mean it in a positive way: I find it to be a one more face of the impending doom, anti-utopian authoritarian future, where people will be forbidden to perform arbitrary computations without a special permission. But that's that kind of wild socio-philosophical predictions that nobody discusses seriously, and nobody even thinks you are serious for suggesting something as preposterous (but then it happen anyway and nobody is really surprised).
On the technical matter, though, it is so much better than owning your own hardware, that it's hard to imagine how that could fail. I mean, obviously, Google will not succeed in making their own games (never could have). And of course current state of Stadia may not suit the "real gamer" (always a minority), because you can have a better performance on your own hardware.
But these problems will be solved, eventually. Better studios will make better games for this kind of platform, eventually it won't be games only, but the whole workspace. CAD running on Stadia will perform better than it could have on your upper-middle-range laptop you paid a shitload of money for, and that still lags and overheats when running your 100-tab browser on it. Your client device will be cheap, completely silent, low-temperature and will run on a battery for several days (that is, with no power-battery technology improvement). Light and portable. It will be unbreakable, compared to your current PC. Basically just a good display, a networking card, and some input device. There is absolutely no way your software won't run better on a shared hardware than you can buy for the same amount of money it will cost Google (or whoever will succeed with this).
I don't know if latency will ever be low enough for every human-use application (which again makes me wonder why are they starting with games: probably the most latency-sensitive thing an average customer uses), but it is surprisingly good right now, and there's still some room for improvement: computation servers will be more evenly distributed (CDN-style), and last-mile latency (the biggest problem, anyway) will improve in the upcoming years, especially on mobile.
Any game like that would have a full on employee revolt as people demanded the team involved to be fired.
If you have an culturally oppressive environment, whatever flavor, you're going to struggle to make great art.
https://etcanada.com/news/548672/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order...
Hopefully the games that SG&E do finish showcase what's possible when a developer targets Stadia's strengths.
I think you'd need to go much higher in terms of how many unpredictable, latency dependent objects are needed on screen before you'd start hitting issues with client side rendering.
Very active subscriber base and developer even in 2021.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system. Never be able to sell it somewhere else.
And from a technical perspective Stadia does makes sense, you just seem to be making an interactive YouTube?
Every time they do talks, it is all about KPI, Play console and user acquisition (marketing), almost never about SDKs, rendering techniques, tools, anything that what Intel, AMD, ARM, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo regularly do at GDC and their own conferences.
1. First-party AAA games are a huge investment (in time and money), especially for a company without any experience in building them. Starting a first-party game studio is a huge risk (financial and planning) that I'm not surprised didn't pan out.
2. Stadia has a reputation as the "indie game streamer" platform in a lot of circles after such a large % of their first games were older and from smaller dev cos. The unpolished first-party AAA game (if it ever came out) wouldn't do much to help this reputation; focusing on partnerships and getting new releases on the platform seems like it'd do far more for the service's future.
3. Unpopular opinion but I don't think exclusives should exist for any platform. It may be good for business but it's bad for most gamers.
4. Politically, it feels like we're about to move into a period where companies need to be way more careful with monopolistic moves into new markets. "Owning the platform and the content" seems to be a wedge-prone position that a lot of companies are worried about (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc) and this kind of just clears Stadia/Google from having to worry about that on "their console".
FWIW I have almost 100 hours on Stadia and 49 friends online in Stadia at the time of writing this comment, but YMMV, I am most definitely in some kind of Stadia-bubble, I probably have some confirmation bias, and this may also be wishful thinking based on the fact that I want Stadia (and cloud gaming as a whole) to succeed.
- Spend budget on getting more AAA titles released on Stadia on launch day. (like they did with Cyberpunk)
- Spend budget giving huge discounts on AAA titles to attract more users.
- Spend the money to get integrated into every Smart TV platform (Roku, Google TV, LG Web OS, Tizen, Apple TV, ect.). TV Boxes should include a Stadia controller in their box and a few months free.
- Advertise that you can play AAA console games on the TV / Streaming box you already own.
Amazon Luna, GeForce Now, Shadow, running Parsec in the cloud and paying by the minute, xCloud, and PS Now all better Stadia by offering game subscriptions or more features or are more sustainable by being cheaper in the case of GeForce Now for 4K.
If Amazon Luna/GeForce Now can succeed as upstarts, it says Google should've likely focused on a game subscription service or offering a standalone game streaming platform. They're closer to being the later with this announcement, but not until I can play my Steam/GoG/Itch/Epic libraries on it.
I have a few hours in AC:Odyssey and BL3 on Stadia, it's a good service that has improved a lot too. It's still tough to recommend if you're not the most occasional gamer.
If we're speaking in net good/bad, I'd wager the last two end up being net positives when you consider how many people think their ISP/router isn't up to the job (and therefore don't try Stadia at all) compared to how many actually aren't up to the job.
The minimum speed Stadia requires is 10 Mbps, or 35 Mbps for 4K streaming; I'd personally recommend at least 20 Mbps without 4K though, since it's "playable" below that at the cost of graphics artifacting. To put these numbers into context though, Speedtest/Ookla reported an average USA broadband speed of 135 Mbps and an average worldwide broadband speed of 64 Mbps for 2019 [1], rising every year.
It's a lot harder to measure latency, though, which is the biggest variable IMO for whether Stadia works for you. It doesn't work well on my parents' HughesNet satellite internet, but I regularly got <4ms ping when I lived in Kansas City and rarely go above 10ms round trip here in Oregon (on Comcast, even!). They seem to have done really well with their edge node placements, because even in small cities like Joplin/Bentonville (both around 50k pop.) and in Netarts (800 pop.!) the latency feels on par with native games. Luna latency here in Portland spikes to multiples seconds at a time on occasion, and GeForce Now was pretty much unplayable in many cities/towns outside of Kansas City back in the Midwest (but seems to work fine most of the time here). In my experience, Stadia's been by far the most consistent experience wherever I went.
I'd wager that the the subset of [people Stadia would work well for but they think their connection isn't good enough so they don't try it] is larger than the subset of [people that would try Stadia but don't have a good enough connection for it].
[1] https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/global-index-2019-in...
Connection speeds have improved since Stadia launched, but you will almost certainly go through a 1TB cap before the month is over if you have 2 TVs streaming 4K. This is really the main reason people considering Stadia might still say no, and there aren't a lot of ISPs left without caps: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/at-le... People could just pay an extra ~$30/month for unlimited internet, but that will pay for a console in a year or two.
What is up with the Stadia people thinking anyone on Earth gives them a single moment of thought whatsoever? No one who doesn't use it cares enough to Stadia to hate it, trust me.
I feel like it would be clearer if this said "Google Stadia shuts down internal game studios, changing business focus".
Quote from the article: Google will close its two game studios, located in Montreal and Los Angeles. Neither had released any games yet.
"Hi everyone, I completely understand your emotions surrounding the news, so I wanted to chime in with a couple more thoughts. Please note that Stadia.com, Stadia Pro, and your games aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we’ll keep bringing more games to the platform and Stadia Pro. We had an exciting launch with Cyberpunk 2077 back in December, and the Stadia team is dedicated to bringing even more titles to the platform this year.“
They are completely opaque with everything from the release all the way up to the uplay+ roll-out.
There really isn't anything left to take their word on anymore.
The EU seems to be tired of tech companies owning both: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/platform-busin...
1. Microsoft: https://kotaku.com/microsoft-now-has-23-first-party-studios-...
2. Nintendo owns many successful games on their platforms: Zelda, Mario based titles, etc.
3. Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Interactive_Enter...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468760/apple--steals-...
With SG&E shutting down Stadia is dead whether they admit it or not.
It seems clear to me that Google deciding not to focus on game development is showing a level of awareness we should want to see. In fact, by redirecting those resources they are directly investing in the platform instead of content for it that, let's be honest, probably would have flopped.
I've been a happy Stadia Pro subscriber for about six months and in that time all I've heard from the community is "we want AAA, we want game x, y, and z" and with Google's decision, they're likely freeing resources to do just that.
They do something promising and better (?)
Also with VR, many people use 'VirtualDesktop' to link between a PC and the Oculus Quest wirelessly. I can see a future where they offer remote PCs to connect via their software too.
And to add to that, in the future too, I can see Facebook/Oculus adding 5G connectivity to a next-generation headset alongside a future Snapdragon XR2(+).
(Maybe that's actually a bit too optimistic. ;-) )
Like I get the need to shut something down if there's no product market fit but at least when you've got pretty much unlimited free money give it a good shot.
The way projects such as Stadia are structured now just shows how only incentivising the launching of a new product/project is not the right way to go about things. You also need, people with a long term vision willing to see a project through and enough resources given to a project.
If this was spun off into its own entity it could easily raise money and become a proper competitor to Sony/Microsoft...
Also lot of people on this thread don't undertsand that it's the gamestudio shuting down not Stadia the cloud platform.
That aside, I do not think this is a bad move at all. None of the titles they were working on were that appealing, hopefully it will mean they pivot to integrate more into a shared licensing model. I would pay $5 a month to be able to import my current Steam games and play remotely, but this fractured model is incredibly reminiscent of video streaming.
We had a first mover (Steam/ Netflix) come in and now all the stragglers are saturating the market with similar but slightly differentiated products (Stadia/ Peacock). I am curious what the next evolution of this model will look like.
Marketplace.
On the streaming video side it is even harder since we never license or pay for videos, just the ability to watch as long as the service persists.
Big name directors like Villeneuve and Nolan are already yelling at the studios, but the days of their massive tent poles are over.
I think we'll probably wind up subscribing to our favorite creators directly.
I loved Google Play Music, Reader, Hangouts and god knows how many chat apps google have made over the years to later kill. Still don't get why they don't better just make a startup with the idea and be like a VC, as right now it's really hard to trust any "made by google", it's almost a meme that will not last long.
It's hard as heck. One can do all the things, and keep turning up with un-fun games. Games require magic, in a way few other things do.
But I also think these big companies have some of the best chance of creating something special and better. They keep reaching for better scaled universes, better scaled worlds, and I think this ambition is really key. Better scaled worlds is what's important, is what we need to be up to. Lots of simulated agents, lots of space, lots of players, all in virtual space.
EVE Online seems to be really running up into the wall, these days. It feels like there's such basic fixes for some of this stuff (allow modules to be set-to-go online while in warp), but the huge grid filled with players, the massive time-dialation.... it's a real cluster $@#@#$[1]. Few others have tried to be anywhere near as cool. We all get some little shells, shards, and the bigger total us never happens.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/how-eve-online-commandos-pulled-off-...
Were there any games currently in the works in these studios?
Google cannot run a business, they really don't know how to protect their brand, and never fail to piss off everybody and especially their early adopters!
My guess: Hardware, they say "it's still a Bluetooth game controller and a Chromecast, they can be used as those things". Software: They give you some Steam codes for the games you bought on Stadia.
IIRC, it only works as a bluetooth controller with Stadia (either supported Chromecast or Chrome web app); otherwise, it is only a wired USB controller.
Well, I guess it's a USB controller at least. I would hope standard Bluetooth game controller compatibility could be pushed as an update though.
I expect to see what the web went through in the early 90s as far as turmoil goes. Lots of platforms with all their quirks and developers getting behind various ones. Eventually (hopefully?) some standards enabling cross platform development of stream gaming. Bandwidth/latency still needs to play catch up but 5G is getting there. Cellular connections are getting more and more stable while landline methods are lagging.
I expect to see each platform playing to their strengths with Google pushing their expertise in infrastructure and Nvidia with their hardware. Also expect to see the space get even more crowded as traditional players join the market.
* For anyone curious: I have 120 mbps internet connection and Stadia works fine on it.
Its also nice to not have a large box hooked up to your TV.
I personally wouldn't use it because I'm anal about refresh rates/max settings/latency/etc but for other people (especially younger gamers with less disposable income) I think it's pretty compelling.
Putting aside Cyberpunk's overall problems, it performed a lot better on Stadia than last gen hardware https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22167303/cyberpunk-2077-...
Theoretically nobody's going to play 24/7 so you could share the hardware between multiple customers, but in practice latency means that your DCs need to be close to them anyway.
The only way Stadia (or some other bullshit like it) could possibly be cheaper would be:
1. Price dumping
2. Preferential game pricing from publishers (to instead hide the hardware costs there)
3. Gym model (tricking casual users into signing long and expensive contracts)
From my perspective, I probably average 8 hours of gaming a month, so there is plenty of opportunity to pack my usage onto some shared hardware.
Plus you can play on your TV, mobile device, computer, etc, with the same game saves seamlessly moving between all of them.
No initial $400+ cost.
It offers a lot of the same benefits as consoles, including a monthly subscription that provides good, free games.
The downsides are latency and having to have an internet connection, and the latency is actually pretty decent. Oh, and having to buy the games from Stadia, even if you already own it on Steam, but that's no different than other "consoles".
It's a very compelling platform that they've completely failed to market correctly. With them giving up on first-party games, it seems pretty inevitable that they'll give up on the whole thing now, too. A lot of people never thought it'd last in the first place, and that's partly from their history and partly because Google didn't show enough commitment to it. Those studios that they just shut down were the best proof of their commitment.
Worth pointing out that Microsoft has opened up their platforms so you can buy a single copy of a game and play on any supported Xbox or Windows PC: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/xbox-play-anywhere
I dunno about that. Counter example: YouTube got huge before Google made original content for it. So, I don't buy the whole "not serious cuz they don't have first party content" argument.
Can you only play select games in the subscription? Do they ever get removed?
I'm just trying to see why it is struggling. It seems like a great concept
They also offer a paid subscription (like XBL and PS Plus) that offers certain benefits (higher resolution, etc) as well as free games each month.
If you cancel your subscription, you can no longer play the games you got for free, and you can only play your paid-for games up to (IIRC) 1080p.
It's a great concept that a lot of people don't really see the point of, since they've already invested in PCs and/or consoles, and they don't really want to game remotely at all.
There's also very, very few exclusive games, and they're all pretty weak.
The system as a whole looks good until it's compared to other systems, and then the problems start to show up.
This was all made worse by them requiring that you buy $100+ of hardware to get started at launch, when one of the best use cases for it is people who can't afford to put much money up-front for a console. You can now play it for free, but that wasn't the case at launch when the hype as at its peak. They ruined their best marketing window, and they didn't trumpet the change loud enough when they finally made everything available to anyone.
They've basically screwed up marketing on this in every way possible, and now they aren't even committed to making first-party games, unlike every other console.
I think it's being realized across the industry that there isn't huge value prop in bringing existing games to the cloud and targeting low-spec gamers, but rather architecting entirely new experiences that simply are not possible without cloud compute.
Jeff Bezos seems to recognize this, his exact marching orders for Amazon's game efforts was to make "computationally ridiculous games". That to me is the bigger opportunity, because it opens the doors to the next internet called the Metaverse.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/19/18272965/google-stadia-stu...
*through acquisition
What engine was SGE using? When I heard AWS wasn't just going to do something like license Epic I thought - uh oh... here we go!
https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/cloud-gaming-should-be-a...
That is to say, if somehow Stadia is successful then I expect a long term outcome where games are nearly all freemium adware or grind-to-win, with a few poorly-performing notable exceptions; mashing out the same three or four proven-successful concepts with new skins ad nauseum. The margins will be so razor-thin that there won't be any room to risk on innovation.
This is because they don't care to improve discovery on their store front. It's always been awful, it will continue to be awful. There will be virtually no quality control to speak of, with sudden and opaque decisions to remove products, and so on...
Recall that in the very early days of the Android app store it was flush with $20 games, and effectively absent of stolen content, adware and spyware. Look at it now.
The two major improvements that it might have over the App Store experience would be an absence of asset-ripped "clones" (read: your APK is ripped, minorly re-branded, and re-uploaded with a similar name), and perhaps far less malicious software, because access to the local device will be limited.
They give it five minutes and if it’s not an instant success just run away from it and give up.
Building a game platform takes time and gamers need a reason to be there.
"What's Google Stadia?" I replied.
This is the main reason I hate Google. They're one of the largest corporations in the world, they have immense resources and power to move the human race forward. Yet they don't. Some might attribute it to laziness, or stupidity. And maybe it's both, but those are symptoms, and the root cause is the lack of competition allowed to fester by the flaccid noodle that is our government.
Break them up already!
This was predicted on launch day.
I havent bought a game[among other digiassets] for some time.
If its not on physical media, if it requires an internet connection to even see runtime, im not interested anymore.
Is anyone collecting objective data on the average lifespan of google products that aren't search, ads or maps?
Google will continue to operate the Stadia gaming service and its $10 monthly Stadia Pro service. It’s unclear how many, if any, exclusive games will still come to the service, though the company has indicated that it can still sign new games and will bring more third-party releases to the platform. It nevertheless will look to many like a draw down of the plan to have Stadia run as a bona fide competitor to console platforms.
You might get a kick out of https://killedbygoogle.com/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/1/22259836/nintendo-3q-2020-...
It just doesn't work. Not until we have 6G everywhere at very low cost and even then it won't be as good as running games off your own machine.
reliable high speed connections
or
Computing devices with dedicated graphical processors
Survey says... nobody wants what you're selling Google, and nobody with half a brain trusts you to maintain services long term anyways. Stadia is doomed and riddance.
I'm glad she got out.
The idea of running a game on the cloud and letting users play it from any device as long as they have an internet connection is surely interesting. But if you want to convince gamers who have already spent lots of money for their beefy gaming machines to switch, you'd better provide them with content - especially exclusive titles.
And, let's be honest, the content was extremely scarce, and in many cases it wasn't anything that you wouldn't already find for standard PC.
Google tried to play both the part of the platform developer and game producer without having any experience on the latter, and it expectedly failed.
When Stadia was announced I remember that my first reaction was "why don't they just provide the platform to gaming companies and let them develop their titles, instead of trying to do everything in-house?" Now, more than one year later, it seems that they've reached the exact same conclusion.
I think Stadia is one of the few really innovative products released in the gaming world in years. Everyone else is just pumping their money into sales & marketing and you keep buying their products year after year, even though there's nothing new to them.
Perhaps they wouldn't kill more than half of the projects they start if you'd give them some real feedback on how to improve them instead of constantly throw shit at them like they owe you something.
It's not really innovative though, Google was not even close to the first company to try cloud gaming. OnLive started in 2010. PS Now started in 2014.
It was a bad implementation for a number of reasons, and Google should be criticized for it.