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There was recently an article about Stadia where a developer from a decent sized studio claimed they were approached by Google for Stadia. What did Google offer for the developer to bring the game to Stadia? Almost nothing. The figure was in the tens of thousands.

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...

> when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost

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.

Yeah, not sure where the idea comes from that Microsoft fronts like the entire development cost for ... for what even? As a publisher? Sure, maybe.

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.

My point of reference here is from this twitter thread.

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.

Having the money to port a game to console is great, but usually not comparable to fronting the full development of a game.

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.)

Epic exclusives have generally been provided in the form of a revenue guarantee on projected sales, I believe. Essentially, they're not paying much of anything if the game is successful and profitable on it's own, but if it tanks, the developers still get paid as if it did not.

For an indie developer, this basically means worrying about whether the game will succeed a non-issue prior to launch.

> How do you pay out developers? I’m a developer, I make a game, I say I’m going to put it in Game Pass, a customer pays [you] $14.99 a month. How do you decide how much to pay me, the developer?

> [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...

GamePass deals are fixed price, the "full production cost" is not an exact truth. For most indies the deal price represents an over shoot over costs, or just a large percent of cost. This is logical: no one ever shares their internal production costs. Like any business you treat business partners at arm's length.

Source: gamedev who has heard from serveral devs who got offers.

OK, but...

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?"

As an independent person without a company, Microsoft gave me a free Windows Phone just for expressing interest in developing an app for it. These sorts of developer incentives kinda come and go, depending on the platform and how much they're investing in it.

When I was in college, you could show up to their 'Make an app day' and as long you successfully uploaded your own version of their slot machine app you'd be entered into a drawing for a bunch of really nice hardware. Microsoft was terrible at promoting these events, so everytime I went there where more prizes than people.

Its remarkable to contrast with, say, GamePass; while there's not a lot of disclosure around what that entails precisely, a few small developers have suggested it pretty much floats their studio financially (and doesn't require a re-write, as Stadia does).

From a customer perspective, it gets the game on streaming, Xbox, and Windows PC.

Having been approached by Google for these kinds of projects, I 100% believe this. I was leading a team approached by them to do something similar for Google Glass. There was no real incentive there except the privilege of being an early glass partner. The entire process of working with them was a nightmare and we decided to bow out.

I'm short on any attempt Google makes at being a media company.

Just to add general interest info to this strain of the conversation: I had to work with Apple in ensuring content for the launch of News+ in Canada after they bought out Next Issue/Texture, and they were very involved and the incentives were substantial.

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.

> 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.

Namely, Google.

I'm not sure if I'm surprised or not. On one hand, it kind of fits my mental image of Google perfectly, I don't know why. On the other: doesn't Google have a shitload of money and doesn't Google burn it so often by starting hundreds of projects it just kills after a couple of years of development?

The problem is not that Google couldn't pay them. The problem is that Google is arrogant as hell: Why should we pay you when we give you the privilege to be part of something we, the masters of the universe, introduce?

They fail to understand that from the outside people don't see things Google does as sure bets.

Google glass and game streaming are two very different projects with different motivations/incentives etc for partnering. Game streaming is on the cusp of becoming mainstream. The technology works (playable latency), and the overall product is simpler than competing products (pcs, consoles) for the job we hire gaming hardware for. It is clear the future is in the controllers and displays, not in math boxes. The biggest difference is that gaming is an existing habit gamers have. Google Glass was something completely new and was unclear what we were using it for.

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.

Game Streaming also needs typical home internet connections to get better before it can really go mainstream.

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?

That's a great point. I did say the technology is proven but did not specify the market this is ready for. It is sort of like Tesla adoption 10 years ago. It will take time for the investments in technology and infrastructure to cover more of the market. Hopefully Verizon can accelerate their mmWave 5g deploys.

Given Goog's history on this, I read this announcement as them soft-killing Stadia. They aren't going to admit defeat, but unless they put real resources behind paying people to use it, they aren't going to see any use of it as an API and are effectively mothballing it.

I hope not. The Stadia platform is fantastic: the best streaming user experience out there. It’s just that much of the Stadia Pro content is mediocre, and the paid titles tend to be expensive. (Compare to GeForce Now with it’s awkward, clunky UX but near-unlimited library of content via Steam)

Yah...I just don't see that developers have much incentive to use Stadia? Like, you can't rely on an established 'Stadia playerbase' right now, so there's no natural incentive for studios to integrate with it. Other platform owners solve this by paying for exclusivity or something, but as mentioned above, reports say that Google wants to pay insultingly small sums of money for that work. Unless that changes...no one is gonna use it.

The article says that they’re reassigning 150 people who worked on internal games. If they were betting the future of the platform on the number and quality of games that can be turned out by 150 people, then this never made any sense. Major game studios are hundreds or thousands of people, so this is just Google admitting that nobody in-house can come up with any good games. I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.

I'm not sure that I would invest significant cash to buy games for a platform, which may be killed on a whim. That's apart from all its other disadvantages, namely a lack of choice.

> 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.

Thanks, from that same article proof that the Google Graveyard is hurting Google...

>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.

> For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost.

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.

1. What's the effort required for the port? If a game already has Linux support, it basically is compatible with Stadia, whereas if you have to port it to Xbox, that requires a lot more time and resources.

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.

The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.

Then why do it at all? What would possibly justify such a large investment of capital if Google didn't believe it to be a potentially nontrivial contributor of future revenue?

People need promotions I guess.

Because of how Google's internal performance evaluation works.

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.

So another company can't.

Cynical answer: Because at big tech companies culture leads them to believe they have to have a competing product in every new market rather than letting their "competitors" go unopposed. Occasionally it works out, but often you just get a ton of also-rans. The companies are so big a profitable that even complete failure barely moves the stock price.

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.

How do you increase revenue/stock price in meaningful way without expanding into other markets?

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.

You can do a few things well, or many things poorly. Google used to be the former but they've shifted towards the latter over time.

When you have Google's resources and talent, you probably need a reason not to do these kinds of things. If a product has a decent chance of generating revenue or building out consumer profiles or reaching a new demographic and doesn't undermine the ads business, it has a shot of being pursued.

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.

Senior engineer retention program?

Think of it like there’s generally two ways to innovate.

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

I expect this is true. Perhaps Jade Raymond will start a service like Stadia and do this. It would be an excellent move on her part.

I think they know that it’s a sub standard product that is “good enough” for today but it will never be good enough for a use case like VR. I think the future of gaming is in ultra low latency, high resolution experiences and people will look at Stadia like a silent film from the 1920s.

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.

Stadia already has very low latency. Maybe not enough for VR, but it's still an impressive achievement.

I think you are right that Google isn’t taking it seriously, but one of the futures of gaming is subscription streaming, for basically the same reasons as video. Streaming can dramatically improve user experience by making it trival to acquire or switch between games, and subscription revenue allows providers to sponsor the creation of content that doesn't make financial sense in a individual purchase model- think games that strongly appeal to a single demo or amazing, but short, experiences.

Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate.

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.

Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.

the latest chromecast is the "Chromecast with Google TV", also called the 3rd-gen chromecast. The Chromecast ultra is the previous generation.

https://store.google.com/ca/product/chromecast_google_tv

That is one of the most obnoxious sales pages I have seen in a while. WTF is up with the scrolling?

Meh, another HN complainer going on about<click>...OMG, what the hell is up with that web page?! That some truly nausea-inducing scroll behavior. Is there a RNG behind it somewhere?

I'm talking about the "Chromecast With Google TV", which is the official replacement for the Chromecast Ultra.

Google basically sounds like a large scale startup incubator where every successful project is doomed to fail.

There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.

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.

The second one should read “or it becomes a large scale ad data gathering opportunity”. That’s the value of Maps and Gmail IMO.

You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.

> 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.

My guess would be that disentangling a project from all proprietary dependencies is very expensive.

It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.

Couldn't the spun out company just license the centralized compute infrastructure and subsequently migrate as needed?

Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here

They do sometimes do that, Loon 'graduated' to become its own company that issued its own shares and has since died.

Waymo is another spin off company.

The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.

Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?

I'm sure Alphabet was really a restructuring to optimise tax returns

> 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 do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.

but up until now they did apparently have funding to be running an internal studio? seems like those funds could have been better spent bribing tv companies like the parent is suggesting.

Google is a company of engineers. Engineers solve problems by building stuff, not by bribing companies. I think the main exception is Android and Ads, which also happens to be the main parts of Google I disagree with...

Building successful platforms isn't about engineering - many well-engineered platforms were market failures.

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...

I know, it was kind of a jab at engineers since I listed two of Googles most successful parts as their most business driven parts.

Google is like a rich guy who switches hobbies.

He may have real musical talent, but he'll never put in the blood, sweat & tears for the band to make it big.

Google has ADHD.

Have they tried Ritalin? I hear it helps quite a bit.

There are like 700 full time engineers working on it. That's not a side project.

Sounds like the right approach, and it seems Google is slowly moving in that direction...starting with this decision.

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.

I don't know if this is a consideration, but the reason Sony's PlayStation 3 included "OtherOS" feature was so that it would be classified as a computer instead of a gaming console to avoid a stiff import tax.

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?

Not enough people have consistently fast internet without data caps for this to work. Can you imagine the backlash when everyones tv with "included game console" turns out to be a stuttery laggy mess?

Moreover, the people with really fantastic Internet access tend to also be the same people that can afford to buy a console or gaming pc instead.

Stadia could already be on those TVs. Google/Android TV has built in chromecast support but Stadia doesn't register these as a supported chromecast.

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.

> Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.

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.

Google generally doesn't do BD that well. I think it's something to do with their start as a consumer-facing company. They prefer making a thing and then marketing it rather than using partnerships to get in.

The Android stuff seemed to suffer quite a bit from this early on, though they seem to have a handle on it now.

Sounds like a lot of effort, why not just put an ad on the Chrome new tab page?

https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new....

Hey Google, show me the perfect antitrust suit.

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?

You can call me old-school but I prefer to play on PS5 and Switch. If I only have 20min time, ai wouldn't even bother start playing.