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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on the list that you can play. None of the games are ones that I care about.

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.

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Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?

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.

It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.

Right... I thought as an idea, it was perfectly sound. The types of technology required to make cloud gaming work seemed to play to Google's strengths.

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.

Google had to solve same problem any new traditional gaming console has to solve -- get publishers interested in creating for that console.

Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.

Architecturally, are Google's Stadia servers substantially different from a standard PC?

AFAIK they run Linux, so porting games over isn't necessarily "free"

They run linux and use Vulkan for rendering, so this is a potentially large port burden to force on devs.

Potentially, but there's only one distro and only one set of hardware, so there's waaaay less QA than an actual Linux port.

Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.

Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.

Google isn't the company I would lodge this complaint at. They contribute a lot of code back as well.

Google is a company large enough that you can always find fringes that contradict their main philosophies a business model within the same company. They do not contribute proportionally to their revenue nearly as much as the other FAANG companies.

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.

If anyone is going to compete with Microsoft, of all companies, I'd expect it to be Google.

Except Microsoft is investing heavily in first party games, buying loads of studios and letting them retain a lot of independence. They’re approaching the streaming service as an extension of the Xbox experience. It’s a much more robust strategy all around

And not forcing studios to rewrite their games from scratch to a snowflake platform.

Porting a game to Linux and Vulkan does not require rewriting it from scratch.

It does because 99% of the game studios don't care about Linux, nor are that much into Vulkan, unless they are targeting Android or Switch.

The graphics backend is really not such a big cost for most games, especially with existing cross-platform engines. Also the grahics APIs are really not that different as they all model the same GPUs. DirectX vs. OpenGL had some annoying things but most of them are only a problem when you have to translate and can't modify the calling code at all. DirectX 12 vs. Vulkan is even less of a difference.

How many Android and Switch games get published on GNU/Linux? Yep, it boils down to it.

Let's cool it with the hyperbole, okay?

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.

Which proves the point that even when games happen to be natively written against a Linux userland, with native support for Vulkan, it isn't economically viable to sell them on GNU/Linux.

What's the alternative? Run Stadia on Windows?

That is exactly what Microsoft is doing.

But there's no reason Google couldn't have done these things! They just... didn't.

> and letting them retain a lot of independence

Except they misteriously stop releasing Linux versions of their games.

> It's only been a failure because of the lack of games

Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.

I get what you are saying, games are essential if you are building a gaming platform

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.

I would argue that the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform since there are no games that people want to play. I guess given the very limited functionality it’s technically not a failure. But the whole point is to have games people want to play.

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 never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform

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.

Succeeding here might require both.

Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.

Given that they didn't launch a single game, I think SGE just regular old failed.

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.

I remember a time where new consoles would launch with like 10 games available. It was fine, more games came later.

> tech (at least to me) feels fine [...] it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken

... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.

Careful, this much sarcasm might break the website

> It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. T

... which makes shutting down gaming studio part of it even weirder.

Compare to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming

Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.

Geforce Now library kinda sucks to me, not all that much better than Stadia but that's my opinion. Stadia has a few names (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) that GFN doesn't and vice versa.

GFN offers something unique: you can connect to existing stores like steam and play many of the games you already own there over GFN. This is a big deal.

It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction.

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 think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license

I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.

Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.

This is probably what prevented the Stadia team from doing the same thing. Lot‘s of people saying: „why not partner with valve/steam for their library“. Because it‘s not Valves library to begin with. This was inevitable. No publisher cared about GFN playing their games in the cloud in the beginning. Just like studios sold off their content to Netflix for pennies in the beginning. It was free money and they didn‘t have a use for them anyways.

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.

So, I'm wondering, why doesn't google supply us with a desktop in the cloud, you can do whatever you want with it, but it has a nice graphics card so you can install steam on it if you want or origin or whatever. You download the game there and play that way. Publishers can't stop that can they?

Well, it would still be linux presumably. MS would likely not allow them to use Windows that way. Or they‘d make it prohibitively expensive. In any case there‘d be even less differentiation from xcloud.

Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.

Still a lot of the big games missing on GFN though, e.g. all of Bethesda and Blizzard games. Apart from that -- a lovely service.

Don't forget https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps-now/

They'll both let you play games you already paid for but Stadia makes you buy them again, unless that changed?

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).

Man, I'm so salty about GFN - they have a great product and an economic model that makes sense but, for whatever reason, they gave in to publishers' pressure to remove some games from their service. This is doubly upsetting, as publishers should have no say on where I play the games I've already purchased - whether it's on a computer I physically own or on a computer I rent in the cloud.

They didn't gave in.

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...

Sadly, you generally don't purchase a game, but a license to play one in some form. I think the exact limits of their control have not yet been tested in court, but I don't think NVIDIA wants to be the one testing it.

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.

Phil Harrison oversaw the PS3, XBox One, and Google Stadia. He's like a reverse oracle

This is the really confusing part to me. For most of the major metro's of the world cloud gaming is completely feasible on today's internet. Playing on servers in NYC from Boston works flawlessly as a casual gamer, and really opened up the possibility for me to enjoy AAA titles.

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.

The dream of cloud gaming, for me, is everyone gets an amazing gaming PC.

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.

if you can allow users to load the code out of the cloud and or the user swarm ; onto thier machine and then dissconnect from the cloud, the potential efficiency is even more staggering.

Huh? That brings us right back to “everyone needs a hefty at-home computing device that goes underutilized most of the time”?

Maybe they're referring to using individual computers as part of the cluster of boxes providing streaming gaming, like distributed computing projects.

yes that is part of the reference.

I suspect the comment was tongue in cheek. "Cloud gaming will eventually come full circle and we'll be gaming on native hardware locally again"

I could see an argument here - use the home-computer at home, but use Stadia on the train or while camping or such.

I bought an Xbox just so I could play Red Dead Redemption 2. Had Stadia been around, or had I been interested in Cyberpunk, I would certainly play on that.

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.

I don’t think Stadia is truly an MVP. It’s a Google MVP, it doesn’t have to be truly viable, only viable to google middle management looking for a promotion.

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.

Stadia doesn't have a $10/mo cost or $75 upfront cost though. Stadia Pro is optional, and the client runs in Chrome on almost any device (not sure about iOS yet).

I can go on the store and buy Cyberpunk 2077 and start playing on my phone if I wanted to.

If we want to compare Stadia to current generation consoles then I think we need to include the 10$/mo, 1080p on stadia looks terrible on any somewhat large screen, "4k" is much better.

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.

But if we're comparing to a current gen console then do you include the subscription the console requires for online play? Stadia Pro also gives 'free games' the same way Playstation Plus and Xbox Gold Live do too.

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.

> Stadia Pro is optional

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.

This was me last night when I received this comment. I went to go try the free experience and was prompted to give them a CC. I closed and deleted the app in response. I really wanted to try the free experience, but it appeared they were going to add the friction of, “and don’t worry, we’ll automatically renew your subscription.” No thanks. This seems like terrible UX.

Have you ever tried stadia? It's incredible 99.9% of the time. But that 0.1%... I thought I could put up with a few frame drops in Metro, but it just sucks you out of the game.

Like when your own computer starts lagging?

Yes, but more frequently and unpredictably, at whatever resolution...

I see. I guess you really need a good connection. To be honest I’m surprised at how well Playstation Now worked

I tried Stadia this christmas and while I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed. Everyone says that it runs well, no input lag, great picture quality and so on. But that was a lie.

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.

>Almost on par with playing on a Xbox Series X

That's pretty low bar to clear

Exactly, meaning it's not good if comparing it to PC.

Not if you factor in the cost of the Xbox and the cost of Stadia ($0).

I've been using GeForce Now, the main advantage being that I will still own my games if they ever cancel the service. For now it's only $5/month and includes ray-tracing capable hardware, but I doubt it will be that price for long.

On the flip side games I bought to play on GFN got pulled with no warning.

Opposite. My kid built a gaming PC and uses it for school from home and gaming from 7am-9pm or 90% of his waking hours

That doesn't sound healthy.

Perhaps not. But I'm in a similar boat: with remote lectures, online homework, work-from-home, and not being able to go places with friends, we don't exactly get much of a choice.

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.

Sounds like a regular kid with free access to a good computer. IMO the only outstanding part there is that he gets up at 7am

It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?

This is an ironic contrast as it appears next to the link on Hacker News about the 20-year anniversary of VideoLAN.

A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.

Google kills a lot of shit, but comparing VideoLAN to Stadia is bogus on many levels. VideoLAN is literally UI on top of ffmpeg that grew slowly over time. Stadia is an entirely new platform stuffed into a zillion data centers to keep latency low. Compare stadia to Virtual Boy or Jaguar or Betamax.

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.

Bingo. Ads making so much money has destroyed Google, because they can make mistake after mistake and still be profitable. Most companies think this is good, but it's actually a curse. When decisions don't have consequences, people don't care. Google doesn't care if Stadia fails.

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 bought one. I do feel like I made a mistake. Used it only a handful of times. The only way i can justified my purchase is I got the founders edition and paid maybe $100 for the chromecast ultra, the controller and 3 months of Stadia so considering i can still use the chromecast I chalk it up as maybe a $50 loss.

This and Google internal promotion process focused on launches. Launch something, make a big splash of it and you will get more $$$. Recipe for disaster. In Enterprise world specifically in Cloud this still haunt them

In a large organization it's difficult to track if launches really were successful or not. "Striking while the iron is hot" is the expected behavior for leaders, and the folks who want to grow need to immediately look at the next big thing.

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)

That's very true, pushing for new projects regardless they are successful or not is a path for success. I think eventually this leadership need a successful track history to prove is worth investing in this person/leader projects

Requiring a successful track record pushes people even harder to try to build one by launching new projects.

Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.

Well now I'm curious to know how Glass is doing.

Spent 2K on Glass when it came out. Horribly pissed at Google to this day. I thought I knew what I was getting except they literally turned features off after I got it (e.g. video hangouts). Their rational was dumbass that it drained too much battery .. the fix .. turn off the feature. Seriously?? They did not open up the SDK fully after they stopped dev/pivoted to enterprise .. maybe if some form of this tech takes off one day, I can sell it as a collector's item.

Not so bad actually.

Glass for business is a thing.

It's a thing, but it's barely a product (i.e. a market).

no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results.

google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.

I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water.

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.

Can you tell us any more about what happened?

A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions:

- 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?

I was also there. G+ was born into an environment of fear. Google leadership had convinced themselves that Facebook would dominate tech forever in every product area because all you had to do to make something successful was make it social, and boom, it won. They were over-generalising from Facebook's success in photo hosting vs Picasa, as well as a few other products.

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.

Thanks for this insight and retrospective. It pretty much answers the questions that I didn't know how to articulate, behind the questions I actually asked. :)

> no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive.

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.

> Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity

How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?

Privacy from other users, not privacy from big G.

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.

Thanks for the clarification.

> like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users

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.

Yeah, when you explain it that makes sense. But it was never clear to me how that related to circles or whatever. Also that identifies were even a thing. Plus even back then I didn’t trust Google to retain the functionality. How do I know they won’t merge those identities later to “streamline the experience” or something.

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.

> Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users

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.

Actually, G+ was full force UNTIL there was an agreement for Google to back off in exchange for Facebook not competing with certain ads products.

All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.

Is there a source you can point to, or is it hearsay?

I want to know this too, I'd love it to be true, very Hollywood

From the NYT article [1]:

>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...

It's not exactly what you were implying. The article seems to be talking purely about the ad auctions. That G+ was a bargaining chip might be a tantalizing speculation, but still speculation.

Ugh. Google Plus.

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.

Google basically has Dutch disease.

Interesting. Could you comment a little further? I can see the analogy here to advertising making their other products appear less competitive internally, but it sounds like you may have further thoughts.

It doesn't go too much further than that. The value of their employees is best spent on facilitating more ad clicks so without a decree from the top stating "we are pivoting" and having the political capital to follow through with that, they're stuck.

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.

Except Azure is the new thing that makes MS untold amounts of money via the same lock-in effect created by windows/office. It‘s adjacent business basically.

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.

Indeed. I think one of Google's big problems is that it has a finance division desperate to prove to the market how rational it is, with a huge mass of project managers and leaders from the Gmail days who believe you can launch any old crap and take five years to iterate it into something good.

Lock in is fine. But Microsoft saying “we’re no longer primarily a Windows company” is one hell of a step.

And on the other hand, Microsoft lost billions on Xbox (I can't find a citation, so I'm going from memory) and Xbox 360.

They stuck with it for decades and have turned it into a great product.

But the original xbox launched with great exclusives like halo. There have been no hyped, got to play it game, that launched on stadia.

I remember differently, it didn't do as well as PlayStation but original Xbox wasn't a failure...

Yes, but a) they were willing to keep investing billions and billions for years, and it appears Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let Google do that any more and b) they considered it a tactical must to do so.

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.

Ironically the "invest a decade of money" market is undertapped due to a myopic quarter on quarter focus of most businesses for ~50 years.

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.

Stadia would have been a GINORMOUS investment decision. It's not Allo. It is probably thousands of engineering years of work.

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.

Serious question: does Google operate a single profitable business besides AdWords?

Android, G-Suite, even YouTube (though that is also advertising)

Huh? Android is OSS. YouTube has never posted a profit.

It hasn't?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

Perhaps I missed it, but that only seems to mention YouTube revenue - not profit.

Sure, so what evidence is there that youtube does not make a profit?

Google is highly incentivized to show profitability to shareholders. It will drive stock value. If they are purposefully choosing to hide YT financials in quarterly statements, it’s probably not because they are good. Just search for YouTube and profitability on Google. It’s a loss leader.

Did they separate out search profit? My understanding is they don't separate out anything so by following your logic no divisions at google made a profit.

No, it hasn’t. Did you read your own link?

Yes, I did read it. Nothing in the article suggests youtube didn't make a profit. I get that revenue != profit. What evidence do you have that they don't

? What does OSS have to do with being it being profitable (to the tune of dozens of billions $ / year)?

Very simple: Google doesn’t sell Android. They sell mobile devices that run their version of Android. The profitability of their mobile business overall is unclear (we’ve only seen numbers for specific phones). Can you cite your billions in profit claim?

You're separating the fact that Android is OSS from the fact that google running Android allows them to run the Play Store which made billions last year. It also lets them have Google Search be the default on all those devices. Google themselves account Android this way, attributing some amount of the profit from those things to the fact that they run Android

You should look into that Google Cloud thing.

Profit figures have never been released for Google Cloud.

Google Cloud is not profitable because they invest all revenue into growth, as they should be doing. If they focused on profitability they would have never caught up with AWS.

(I'm ex-GCP)

GCP caught up with AWS? From what I've seen GCP isn't close to catching up to Azure, let alone AWS. Maybe I'm looking at wrong or out of date figures?

https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/worldwide-cloud-market-q320

If it helps, apparently the exec in charge of Stadia has left. Whether this is a "you're fired, but you can resign if you want" or a "ship's going down, why would I ride it to the bottom" situation, I don't know.

Yeah, Jade Raymond.

She ran one of the studios and wasn't in charge of Stadia as a whole.

Ah, damn, I'm not a good reader.

It's not confusing when you realize the owner of this product has his badge of releasing a "major google product" and probably a bonus. Who cares if it's successful or not, google certainly doesn't seem to care.

It gets Google's name in the tech news for something that isn't advertising/invasion of privacy. It's a success for Google-the-business even if it "fails".

The value is great for casual gamers, no expensive hardware, no updates to install, just sit down and play a game. The only downside I’ve experienced is the limited catalogue of games.

It might have gained more traction if it simply said "Hey, this is kind of like our usual compute engine, but it's gaming-optimized and you can access it through Chrome for low-latency streaming"

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.

Isn't that a lot closer to Geforce Now?

Kind of, but Geforce Now made the mistake of trying to create something that looked kind of like a storefront that appeared to auto populate your game library from Steam, which pissed off publishers who thought GeForce was basically making money off of their games without giving them a cut.

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.

check out shadow.tech then...

How is it a bad idea? I want to play PC games but I don’t want to buy a desktop PC just for that. I’m currently travelling but I’m planning to get it once I settle. I had playstation Now before that and it was pretty dope.

It's honestly not a bad idea, just a bad implementation. I use shadow.tech to achieve this and they do it well - instead of giving you game-specific VMs (or whatever Stadia is), they just give you a gaming VM with Windows and you install your own Steam / Epic / GOG / XBLive whatever on it.

> how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?

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 is being human and there is being incompetent. Stadia did not fail because of bad luck. There were lots of obviously bad decisions made that went into this. If what you’re saying is true, then the decision makers moving on to other projects are just burning Google’s money without repercussions. Oh well, no one actually cares I guess.

The problem with that is that it creates a culture of complacency. If failure is acceptable and even expected to be the norm, then don't be surprised when lots of projects you thought would be sure-fire hits or are executed successfully by competitors end up failing.

So how do you prevent mediocricy because every employee is afraid of failing because of the draconian consequences?

Why are you assuming the consequences should be draconian?

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.

Because grand parents mentioned firing people...

Well to be fair Stadia was an idiotic project that was doomed to fail due to physical constraints(getting sub 80ms latency, and that's VERY generous for input latency that people are used to), which are unsolvable. No ML does not fix that, because if game predicts your inputs are you even playing it, not to mention the frustration when it mispredicts.

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.

Disagree very strongly that it would be idiotic.

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.

GeForce go also took down almost all of it's titles due to licensing issues where Nvidia were too afraid to upset their partners, which shows there is no business here and they should never have invested in the first place.

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.

Do you people realise the there are whole generes of games,where beautiful graphics is a serious advantage, but low latency is not?

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 don’t need to stream video to run AI in the cloud for a game. Strangely given the existence of server infrastructure based games for decades we’ve never seen it. Maybe the idea isn’t that amazing after all?

That is quite true, the technology was here and nobody used it. That proves nothing, though.

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".

It proves quite a lot about the hype around cloud native and the things it enables.

And there were great VR games before HL:Alyx and Alyx is no killer app.

Oh there are games where input latency does not matter. You can usually run them on toaster too.

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).

Toaster doesn't cut it when it comes to convenience, full hd graphics and depth of gameplay. Because, let's face it, toaster doest have that much compute resources and storage.

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?

Modded Minecraft has deeper gameplay than 99% of all games ever made. If anything, high quality graphics make it harder to support deep gameplay because making high quality graphics for tens of thousands of items becomes very expensive.

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 have persistent feeling you are talking to some other person. I don't have standards you mention.

I am talking about future of gaming.

The engineering side did a great job on a complex technical task. It's satisfactory, kind of works, not great, not terrible.

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

but do not:

  - have a computer
  - have a console
  - have a Steam library
  - mod their games
  - subscribe to Nvidia's cloud gaming service

Just giving some off-hand estimates, my estimate is 0.00015% of the world's population meets these criteria. The only reasonable business model must be "people will want to try it out and then forget to cancel their subscription".

Not only that, but also: what's the business model behind Stadia? Like how do they expect to ever make money off of it?

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...

Stadia could be a way into gaming for crowds who cant afford top-notch machines.. which is 5/6 of the population on this planet.

Nah, that's what consoles are for. You don't even need the latest one sometimes. Consoles have existed before Stadia.

I think the person you’re replying to had the right analysis of why that doesn’t match the product they built: not owning a high-end PC, instant install/patching, etc. are a decent pitch but Stadia charges full price and doesn’t credit anything you already own.

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.

A top notch machine is only like 50% faster for 2-3 times the price. You don't need it. You can just get a console or a budget PC for $600. If you are crazy you can spend $300 on a PC and only play dota 2 and 2D games like Terraria, Don't Starve Together or Rimworld.

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.

But Google makes all decisions based on data and research, we keep getting told.

The data is that previous directors that made huge gambles and got lucky are now VPs trying to figure out where they want their third vacation house to be and the unlucky ones got moved to new projects to try again.

Google's fundamental theory seems to be "users will always forgive us" or "there are always new users" and neither is true.

You never heard of rollback netcode?

Why would anyone want this in a singleplayer experience? Or rather, why would anyone want two layers of rollback on their multiplayer experience?

There are TVs with more than 100ms of latency, and there are strategies using state rollback and replay that can further reduce the impact of the latency besides. Latency isn't Stadia's hardest problem.

It is, as it is input latency stacked on top of display latency, stacked on top of internet latency!

Not to mention that 100ms of latency in TVs is constant usually, it isn't the case with network latency.

I play games on stadia, including shooters, and latency is not an issue. Latency is the reason you can't launch a Stadia competitor on AWS, but Google has a lot of infrastructure to build on. The latency issue is well handled at this point.

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.

How do you prevent mediocrity when every employee is nice, accepting of failure of others but absolutely useless?

This reads like a classic Dilbert strip.

Sure, we all know 9 out of 10 projects fail. Let's make sure we only ever begin the 1 that doesn't.

Found it: https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-03-08

“One out of ten research and development projects will succeed. I recommend cancelling the other nine.”

If you accept failure that easily, you will never try hard to turn anything around.

You need some sort of balance between the two.

What ever happened to "fail fast"

But don't fail stupid.

And don't fail the same way over and over again

Vine..

Why is it that all of the most competent people I've worked with have been humble and empathetic towards failure, while most of the mediocre to not so good people have had harsh attitudes towards others? It makes me sad.

> We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private).

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.

When I first heard of Google developing Stadia I thought it's for targeting Asia where mobile gaming is huge and since for majority of users from there smartphones are their first computer; Any 'AAA' game on mobile would be a new experience; But my assumption was proven wrong after seeing Stadia getting released only in North America & Europe where gamers are particular about their games.

Arguably, Google already had a strong and successful platform in mobile gaming (Google Play Games). It's even present on TV these days, with game controllers too (Google TV Chromecast takes bluetooth game controllers with which one can play a range of made-for-TV-screen Android games). I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch for which they were obviously unable to get enough content commitments (not even talking about exclusives here, there just isn't even enough non-exclusive content).

Perhaps because to avoid confusion between mobile games & their PC counterparts; Say 'Call of Duty Mobile' vs 'Call of Duty' if both were on Google Play Games it would be very confusing and of course licensing headache.

> I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch...

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.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5b4nn3ZEVU

Absolutely yes. Also Google has had an explosion of upper management (director and vp) and the way they battle for turf is like game of thrones.

Because of this man! https://x.company/team/astroteller/

> Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?

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.

"how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?"

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.

> Failures should be celebrated and not shunned.

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.

Failures being celebrated is about being willing to try out a new thing to see if it's viable.

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.

> The value for gamers is debateable at best

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).

If you didn't previously have a pc or a console, I think most would say you were not a "gamer."

Stadia has huge value to new gamers, but it hasn't done a good job appealing to them.

I think it was a worthwhile project. The shame is abandoning it imo

My sense is that they want to sell compute cycles to big gaming companies vs trying to nickel and dime consumers. Smart PMs figure out the value and pivot rapidly.

Smart PMs figure out value and pivot. Google uses trial and error.

> Everyone knew this was a bad idea

No. It was an excellent idea, with very bad execution on the supply side.

> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing

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.

Valve can do this stuff because they are a private company.

Gabe has publicly stated that he does not believe in game streaming services, because he thinks computation is best done at the edge.

If Valve fully backed cloud gaming, that would have downstream effects on publishers and PC gaming as a platform. Who would sign on to publish a competitive, reaction driven game if the market is segmented between the high-latency cloud where anyone can play, and physical hardware only purchased by a relatively diminishing market?

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.

Moreover Valve's hardest push in the past years was in VR. They are literally the only major (not indie or AA, and not doing a bad port of an already existing game, like Bethesda) developer to make a full game's worth of content for the platform that makes full use of the platform. Alyx was a breath of fresh air for anyone who wanted something out of VR that didn't feel like an incomplete experience.

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.

With technologies like re-projection or whatever specifically the Oculus Quest uses, wireless local streaming isn't that bad, It can easily be a terrible experience if you do not know what you are doing, but its fine most of the time, the latency honestly isn't noticeable, unless you play beat saber.

Although doing over-the-internet streaming is definitely a terrible idea because of how many out-of-your-control factors exist.

> The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate

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.

Most people won't have to "get over" latency because they're not used to or sensitive to low latency in the first place. I'm not saying their eyes aren't good enough or something, but the fact is that a majority of them either can't or won't spend on gear necessary for the performance you're claiming. Steam's own hardware survey indicates that the most basic, cheap monitors are the norm with 1080p or lower being the most common resolution; refresh rate isn't explicitly shown but I'd be surprised if 120+hz is even above single digits of marketshare. Many gamers don't even play on PCs, they play on consoles running games as low as 30fps with cheap TVs that often don't have "Game Mode" turned on which alone can eliminate more than 8ms of latency.

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.

The problem is that the 8ms figure is wrong.

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...

You're right it's likely closer to 80-120ms of difference, though that doesn't change much. It's still apparent that people are used to some pretty high latency (I remember that Digital Foundry counter-intuitively found that Stadia's overall latency is actually lower than the Xbox One X in a particular game) and elevated latency on that magnitude isn't a critical issue for a majority of players and games.

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.

It's not that long ago people were playing with 300+ ms delays on 56k modems.

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.

> ”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?

I accidentally realised I could stream from Steam the other day which is interesting that they can technically do it.

Valve did build out a lot of features like Remote Play and streaming on Steam, but just to a level of ok functionality. It's just clearly not their main interest.

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.

>> Valve did build out a lot of features like Remote Play and streaming on Steam, but just to a level of ok functionality.

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/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap

Valve is not behind in VR

I do wish valve would put some cash into publishing some high quality VR titles though. So many quality VR games are Oculus exclusives, it's saddening watching Facebook try to monopolise the space.

GeForce Now can be used with Steam quite seamlessly. In fact, GeForce Now's value is to play the games you already own on various platforms on their hardware. They're not trying to be another games store.

I don't think this is true anymore after publishers pulled back.

To clarify the other commenter's point, I am a founders edition of geforceNow and it used to have just everything. Like if it was in my Steam library, I could play it. Early editions just basically launched a slimmed down RDP session with Steam being started. It was awesome.

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 loved Google play music. When they migrated over to Youtube Music I was happy that I could still upload my albums and migrate my playlists. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522

The 2008-2017 period was great for PC gaming. Now graphics cards alone cost as much or more than an entire console. The prices only seem to go up. Game streaming has the opportunity to dramatically decrease costs. I think it will work.

I already have friends for whom it’s cheaper to own a computer and use streaming systems (Shadow?) than it is to own a single Gaming PC.

Graphics cards have ranged across the price spectrum for the past 20 years. The first GeForce "Titan" card was $1000 and came out right in the middle of that time range (2013). I'm not sure what PC market you were watching for the past 20 years, but it's not the one I remember.

Titan was the most premium card available and probably not representative of a typical build.

Sure, but it also remains the defining example of "ludicrously expensive graphics card". The card below it, the GTX 780, was $650, which is still more expensive than any current generation consoles. Meanwhile the current top and 2nd tier GeForce cards (3090 and 3080) have MSRPs of $1500 and $700, which are more expensive, but not outrageously so. I just don't think it's accurate to paint a picture of the market from 2008-2017 as affordable in contrast with the current expensive market.

MSRP doesn't matter anymore. These cards are so difficult to get that they basically go used for MSRP, and on the secondary market for nearly a multiple of MSRP.

In 2013 you could drop to the mid-tier GTX 770 for $399 and get more performance either Xbox one or PS4.

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.

Titan MSRP is $1,499; unfortunately the only units for sale on Amazon are from scalpers.

As are the modern cards that cost $1000. You can spend significantly less that that and still play all the modern titles at high settings and 1080p60fps easily. (Or 4k if you're willing to make the same compromises on framerate that consoles do)

The minimum card you need to play current games on 1080p/60fps/high settings is about a GTX 1070, a four-year-old card which goes for $300 used. Remember we're comparing this to the cost of using a game streaming service.

Obviously at least over the short term the streaming service ends up cheaper (although with stadia charging for games it depends on how many you buy and how much more they are there than on steam, especially with sales). I was just calling out the implication that the standard price for a GPU that runs modern titles well was more than a current gen console, it's not.

(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).

You don't need to buy a high-end graphics card. Those are for hobbyists who enjoy buying the latest kit and fitting water coolers etc. for its own sake.

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.

Try to find any PC build that competes with modern console MSRP today. It can't be done, not even close. The equivalent gpu, the gtx 1070, goes used for $300. PC gaming fans are still living eight years in the past when the frugality argument was true. Time to update your beliefs.

Now compare it to the cost of a streaming box & subscription.

Try to find any PC build that competes with modern console MSRP today.

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 don't think you can. The 1070 is $300 used. That gives you $200 to fit in a case, fans, PSU, SSD, motherboard, RAM, and CPU. No way. A comparable CPU would cost at least $100 used by itself.

Having the latest graphics is probably a fairly niche interest I would think? Fairly exhausting to keep up with, and tends to be a bit cyclic: consoles are ahead for a few years, then behind, then jump ahead again.

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.

Valve also has shipped exactly one first-party game since Dota 2 in 2013, outside of VR stuff, and it's a card game. I don't think they're tops on the list of studios that could give Google a big hit game to put on their new cloud console.

Didn't they make that DOTA autochess game as well?

Huh, so they did. I don't think that materially changes my point, but, yes.

>> and it's a card game

And a massive failure at that.

No, the point I and I think the OP are making is not Valve as a developer, its Steam as the storefront. Steam has tremendous power in moving developers toward, say, the cloud; if Valve just made it a checkbox on the publisher's page (or something to that effect), any cloud streaming service that integrated with Steam would be tier 1 overnight.

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 value prop for Stadia is console-class gaming without hardware. Most devices where Stadia is able to run could run a port of a decade-old PC game. Similarly, most Steam games that could run unmodified on Stadia's custom server hardware (running Linux, not Windows) would be games that don't tax the hardware. Maybe that's a better service than what Google rolled out? (GeForce Now seems to be doing better than Stadia, anecdotally.) But it's not what Stadia is, and if they wanted some more recent console-class games, Valve as either a storefront or a game developer was not going to help them much. They would still have to deal with getting Ubisoft/EA/Activision/whoever to do the ports.

Steam does natively integrate with cloud gaming, they just don't want to run a service: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

Since 2013 they're released three first party games: DOTA Underlords Artifact Half-Life:Alyx

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.

> 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

How? Stadia doesn't support VR.

Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?

I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.

I thought the same about reader.

I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.

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...

> I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.

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.

What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any.

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.

> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.

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.

Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities.

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.

True, letting you access posts from before you subscribed (if that's what you mean) was unique (as far I know) to Reader.

Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates.

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.

Thank you for the links. I have not read these before and there are some very interesting snippets of information I was unaware of.

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.

Feedburner similarly seems like something they could have monetized but nobody felt pressure to try very hard when the company was making so much money. It probably would have been a rounding error in their existing revenue stream but new markets don’t happen by accident.

I saw far more people saying 'I don't think stadia will be around in 5 years' than I saw people buying into it. I don't think people are very suprised by this, google has basically destroyed people's faith in the staying power of their products outside of a small core.

Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.

Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?

Running a cloud infrastructure is something Google is good at. Making AAA games is not. It is entirely consistent with a deep belief in the product for them to reallocate resources toward partnerships rather than trying to spin up a AAA game studio internally.

That's not wrong but I think they've put themselves in a tricky position here: this requires companies to make a non-trivial commitment to their platform. There haven't been any new deals or increased partnerships announced to make this look less like they're just giving up on the idea, and anyone thinking about partnering with them has to be wondering about the odds of getting much return on their investment relative to the risk of Google changing direction again.

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.

This understates the impact of the move. Everyone already was aware that Google was better at running cloud infrastructure than at making AAA games when they started their internal studios. This looks considerably worse than having never tried to make games in internal studios.

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.

Totally agree this is what is happening and Google may be dense enough to believe this is a winning strategy (or a way to salvage their investment). But this is not how you create a competing gaming console, or gaming platform, or whatever Stadia is. Worse, this is a pivot, which also signals Google is ready write-off the entire exercise. That doesn't give consumer and publishers a lot confidence in viability of Stadia.

It’s the first step to cancelling it in an year or so.

So they are going to compete with Valve?

Good luck with that.

So as a third-party developer, apart from getting big subsidies, why should I publish on Stadia? Especially after Google has signaled they have no faith in their platform.

Same as for any other platform: because it's one place more you can sell your games.

But that's not what happens. That's why publishers are not porting games to Linux. That's why many console games aren't released on PC. That's why most publishers didn't bother with Stadia to begin with.

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.

But in the context of this discussion, I'm fairly sure "Google has a game studio and is making games for Stadia" was never an important part in the decision of game makers to port to Stadia or not, because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future. (Certainly wasn't for any of the Stadia users I know)

>I'm fairly sure "Google has a game studio and is making games for Stadia" was never an important part in the decision of game makers to port to Stadia or not

... 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.

> The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming.

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)

Let's take a step back. Stadia, as a product and service, has been out for over a year. It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing and now we have an announcement that Google isn't going to bother releasing games for the platform (even though they went to the effort of buying and setting up full fledged gaming studios to do just that - which isn't cheap).

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.

> It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing

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.

I guess I was wrong. Stadia is clearly a success.

How did they signal they have no faith in the platform? This move was to consolidate to just focusing on developing the platform.

>Why are people still so surprised

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 like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental model like Stadia's).

I signed up for GeForce Now, and truly the killer feature is bringing the games you already own. On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription, and Luna (Amazon's offering) is similar in that you can sign up for game "channels" (iirc). With GeForce Now, you can just play the stuff you already own without sinking money into games that play on a platform that might not even exist in a few years. I bet in another year or so Stadia will shut down and all those games that you paid for on the platform will disappear.

Stadia supports the UBISoft+ channel just as Luna does. It's in beta now.

Nvidia and Luna both took the shortcut of just running a windows VM and running the game as is. Stadia is the only one that actually requires games to integrate with its API, similar to Steam with Steamworks, and this allows them to provide a far more integrated experience, with friend lists, friend invites, voice chat, achievements, and so on. None of the other services can provide that. Well GFN does but that's just running Steam. In the short term it will slow down adoption, but in the long term the experience is night and day, imo. Being thrown into a VM instance where you have to login to Steam is nothing like pressing one button and being thrown right into a game.

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.

>Nvidia and Luna both took the shortcut of just running a windows VM and running the game as is

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".

>On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription

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.

[1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9798345?hl=en

The NVidia model sounds like more hassle than it's worth. Might as well continue buying PCs. If you could afford them before you can probably still afford them. Latency will be lower and experience will be better (no waiting in a queue).

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.

I’m unsure how Nvidia’s approach is worse. On GeForce now you can play games from Steam or Epic, right? Isn’t Stadia the same except you are locked into only Google’s store? That’s pretty significantly worse.

I'll repeat what I said: "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.

Madden isn’t available on GeForce Now apparently, but besides that I don’t think you’ve explained why Stadia is better. On Stadia and GeForce Now, you pay a subscription fee and pay for the game. Is it something about the Stadia hardware that makes it better?

Yes. Stadia does not assume you know how to use a gaming PC. Steam and Epic might be fine if you already know what those things are. If you don't, it is far too complex. Billions of people understand the simple app store model that comes with their phone. It's the one stadia uses.

Steam and Epic are literally app stores. I guess you have to link an extra account to use it with GeForce Now? For that minuscule amount of extra friction you get access to a much larger set of games on stores that won’t shut down when Google gets bored in a year or two.

edit: in what way does Steam or Epic expect you to understand how to use a “gaming PC”?

In the way that those are apps that gamers install on their gaming pc.

Can you elaborate? You don’t need to install Steam or the game to play that game on GeForce Now.

You're not making any sense to me. Steam is just an app store. A "gaming PC" is just a regular PC with more powerful hardware in it, using software on it does not take any special skills specific to gaming PCs.

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.

I am struggling to find an analogy but here goes. I think it's like the difference between a console in the cloud v/s a gaming pc in the cloud. For casual gamers, a console in the cloud with minimal configuration - switch it on and start playing - makes the most sense. If GeForce Now is a hosted gaming PC, I assume running a Windows O/S, it likely has the same configuration overhead of PC games, which most casual gamers don't want to deal with.

Have you ever used Steam on Geforce Now? There is absolutely no friction. You do not even have to know Steam exists. You just search for the game you want, and do one more sign-up.

I have. I used Geforce now, stadia, luna. I bought the hardware controllers. I've tried all of these platforms across all different form factors (pcs, laptop, ipads, iphones, android, LG television). I've signed up for individual games, game publisher channels UBISoft+. I invest millions of dollars into companies and my thesis is product driven. All of this is research I conduct myself, for myself. That isn't to say these services have gotten better since I last tested (Geforce i probably tested in November). From what I remember, it was a PC virtual machine with a queue system for availability. It wasn't "magic". Stadia is magic. Luna is somewhere in between.

On Stadia, you just have to pay for the game. The subscription just unlocks HD and some free games. The fact that few people are aware of this really highlights how terribly Google marketed this.

Xcloud or Geforcenow offer the best of both worlds. You "own" (in whatever sense you can "own" the game) the game and you have the choice where you want to play it. Not at home/cheap notebook? No problem. With Stadia you can only stream the game.

The question for me is if it works on a cheap notebook or on the road, why wouldn't you just want to play it this way even when you are at home? Why do I want to own anything? I just want to play the games I bought.

Not possible with Stadia. You have to buy the games again to stream them.

Why? Probably less latency/better quality with a PC.

Is Cyberpunk better on a PC or better on Stadia? I've heard it's the best to play on Stadia.

Cyberpunk on Stadia is the PC version, it's just running on hardware in a server farm somewhere, rather than under your desk. Afaik they didn't make any meaningful Stadia specific changes to it.

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 playing with video compression, a max of 60fps and added latency is not ideal.

That's a fair point. I take this as being similar to reading a book on an iPad vs a kindle. Sure I can read a book on an iPad, but a kindle gives me a better "book experience". Streaming games is like reading a book on an iPad. Owning a PC or console is like reading the book on a device that is better suited for the format.

That analogy probably lands differently for different people. I haven’t used Stadia and don’t have a strong opinion of it. (But I’m open to it - my normal gaming approach is along the lines of XKCD 606 - I’m currently working through my PS3 library.) However, I find reading books on an iPad to be viscerally unpleasant, even though an iPad is my primary mobile computing device.

> Why do I want to own anything?

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.

Stadia doesn't need to be better than local rendering, it just needs to let me play my game with an acceptable quality. I'm not 100% satisfied with the current quality and I'd like it to improve, but as I grow older I'm more interested in experiencing the game's content rather than worrying about how superior my resolution/PQ/fps is. I don't care if I lose the games I purchased 2 years ago, once I've played the game for a while I'm done with it, I'm not interested in continuously revisiting old games over and over again.

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.

The UI is worse as you need to make yet another account and pay for steam. That experience is terrible enough to kill the thing for a non-gamer.

It’s maybe a tiny bit worse, but describing it as terrible is a pretty extraordinary stretch. Google is fucked if the entire business model of Stadia, requiring massive investment in hardware, software, and content, depends on consumers being too stupid to link an account between app stores.

Slightly better UX is the raison d'etre of companies like sony, apple, zoom, slack, etc. It matters a lot.

The level of inconvenience is on the same level as having to log into Gmail on my iPhone. That doesn’t stop me from using Gmail or buying an iPhone. UX matters a lot, but not that much.

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.

Nah, I need to type in my password every single time into steam. My password manager doesn't work. Since I have a very long password, it's almost impossible for me to play GFN.

Do you really think "non-gamers" are going to be converted by this? At this point if you're a "non-gamer" it isn't for lack of availability.

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.)

Just go read /r/stadia or the /r/games thread covering this, yes people are convinced by this and there's many comments talking about how they can't stand the UX on GFN.

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.

Do a handful of posts on the tiny Stadia subreddit justify the massive investment Google has made to create yet another App Store? Is the market of people who use Apple Mail because they don’t know how to register a Gmail account large and profitable enough for them to justify the investment?

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.

Actually, yes. I am a professional investor with a product-driven thesis. Sub-reddits are one of the most honest, representative samples for the quality and love for a product by the market. I bet millions on this.

I'd get some of your Stadia feedback from outside the Stadia subreddit specifically - it seems to either be filled with sycophants, or has a mod team that removes anything negative (or both). Sentiment elsewhere on reddit is completely different.

Do you have a recommendation?

There are less games on Stadia because we are just over 1 year into a 10 year platform growth story. Just because Google is Google doesn't mean they don't suffer from the same chicken and egg problems that startups have. Especially when the market is over 1T and has incumbents like MSFT and sony. Give it time.

All the other gaming platforms have Fortnite (or insert other popular game) on them, why not Stadia?

Because Stadia is 1 years old

Nvidia literally throws you in a VM, where you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer. You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit. It also again assumed you have a Steam/Epic account to begin, or else that's another layer you have to deal with.

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.

I've silently listened on Discord to two different friends trying to get GFN working (for Among Us) in the past couple weeks. It's crazy how hard it can apparently be to install and set up for the average person.

I just downloaded it, booted it up, signed in, and it launched my game.

I just asked one of the friends what his problem was and he said that it was just the servers that were down, so I guess it wasn't too hard to set up for him after all.

> you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer

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.

> Gamers are their target audience.

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 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.

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.

Nvidia has a monthly subscription costs if you don't want the free plan limitations like a queue time and a one hour session limit. Stadia's free plan limitation is only 1080p and stereo instead of 4K resolution, 5.1 surround sound, and HDR.

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.

Google doesn't have a great history when it comes to chat/social functionality.

nvidia's model is also the least likely to withstand the test of time. Once you have to pay enough for nvidia to break even much less make a profit, everyone is going to bail.

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.

It seemed pretty obvious to everyone. Use a gamepass model so that less content stretches further, or offer a compelling variety of content - especially exclusive content - to make up for users paying full price every time.

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.

I think Stadia makes more sense when you frame it against game consoles.

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.

It's actually way cheaper to buy the console if you're just gonna play one game. You get a PS5 for $550 these days, so that's $330 total for a AAA game ($630).

Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200).

Even cheaper if you go for the PS4.

You aren't including the network service to play games online. Factor in another $60 * 10 years. That nearly squares things up. Then you have to think about intangibles. Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. The $630 you paid for that ps5 and AAA game is frozen in time. You've bought no future value. You can also play anywhere without having to carry around a 4.5kg box that computes math.

>Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves.

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?

>Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves.

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.

Well, PSN improves as well. Plus there a whole two free games every month and you not required to have great internet connection to play games.

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.

On Stadia you don’t need to pay any subscription to play your games in HD.

> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing

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“

I think the parent thinks Google or Valve can wave a wand and suddenly all these games will be ported to a new platform despite no user base, little incentive to be first on the platform, and murky licensing.

To sell me on buying a stadia game -- at full price -- you have to convince me that this is the platform of the future, that Google is committed. Google starts with a handicap there because of prior behavior.

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.

That is a fair perspective given the history of Google. I still think this needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Google doesn't want to kill things off, they just realize the ROI doesn't make sense in terms of profits they can capture. I think specifically in the case of Stadia, there are lots of things in Google's favor that make this something they will succeed at and capture lots of profit/value from. The market is huge too. It also is a beachhead into a consumer product (TV) that Apple hasn't really invested in yet. Console-class couch/TV gaming is an important use case that Apple, Amazon and Google will battle for in their "home" product lines. This transformation is only beginning so as long as Google sticks with it they'll do fine.

I've been playing Destiny 2 on Stadia for 2 months, and I love it. It's been stable, pretty, lag-free & fluid (60fps). Even though D2 is a shooter and would thus be particularly susceptible to lag, I found the experience to be practically perfect. That said, I have Comcast Business Internet which is stable, and everything's connected over ethernet.

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 dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this.

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.

This has been true for a decade. Gmail had nothing to do with management for example. Google has some really smart engineers but their management has never been better than mediocre.

At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.

Yeah, but Microsoft also shutdown retail stores in part because of the global pandemic, a few other companies followed.

And, those retail stores gave people an opportunity to play with and become comfortable with their surface form factor.

Expensive way to achieve that goal, IMO.

I was sad to see them go because it was a quick way to get a Surface replacement, but you can demo Surface at Best Buy. Most of their stores have Microsoft kiosks that accomplish near the same thing in terms of demoing and it costs Microsoft virtually nothing.

Perhaps we will reach some sort of google launch singularity where projects are launched and abandoned instantly.

Imagine the money they'd save!

Making a new game takes at a minimum a year for a simple game, more likely 2-4 years. So no, that is terrible planning on their part once again.

Obviously the planning was bad. This is about what you do when you’ve made bad plans. We’ve all made bad plans and we generally stick with them longer than we really should. I know I have.

The sunk cost fallacy only applies when it hurts.

I am not sure what you are implying?

> At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year.

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.

What do you think would happen? You wake up one day and everything is gone? As much as I am not selling Google vs. MSFT, give Goog some credit. They would make customers whole financially and find a home for the platform.

More like it’s going to drag its feet being dead for 2-3 years past the point that anyone cares about the platform. Then when usage plummets enough, it’ll get killed during some big event to mask it.

I find it funny this spun out of a contrast from Google vs. Microsoft and what you are describing is literally how Microsoft Stores died. It got dragged past the point of anyone caring. Covid happened (big event) and then it got killed fairly quietly. This is how all things get killed. Not unique to Google here. My point with Google is they are learning faster what works and what doesn't. In the limit, maybe they will stop starting things that get killed to begin with.

> What do you think would happen? You wake up one day and everything is gone?

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).

> Google's lack of planning on this

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.

>I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this.

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.

It feels as though the games which are on Stadia right now are games which, with few exceptions, are games which Google paid a significant amount of money to during development to support Stadia as well as other platforms.

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.

I don't think they had the slightest chance of Valve partering with them

Why not? Valve is not in the hardware business.

A successfull private company, with the best video game catalog, already king in PC gaming...

I don't see much for them to gain and plenty to lose if they let google build a big customer base.

yeah, valve has its own ecosystem it wants to lock people into

Valve has the games and tried to build their own console and failed. Google has now effectively built their own console and doesn't have the games.

Valve only came up with Steam Boxes (and it's whole Linux push for that matter) as a defensive response to the Windows Store and the, at the time very real-seeming, possibility that Windows would become an entirely walled-garden they'd be beholden to. They put much effort into Steam Boxes, they were just a PC with Valve's Ubuntu derivative distro. Fortunately for Linux users though they did continue to put a lot of effort into making Linux gaming actually viable, thus insuring that they'll always have an out if Microsoft goes stupid.

Valve has the Stream Link and VIVE. Steam Link is pretty much Stadia using your computer instead of the cloud. They're very much in the hardware business.

With Steam Link requiring you to own a beefy computer it's not really a competitor to what Stadia offers (and I don't know anybody who was able to get good performance out of Steam Link).

VIVE is by HTC supporting SteamVR, but Valve has their own first-pary VR headset + controllers with the Index.

I was able to get latency down to 10-20ms using steam link over ethernet, it works great for pretty much everything. It might give you problems if you're playing at a very high level in csgo/fighting games, but for most people it's pretty solid.

Valve have their own VR headset, the Valve Index. Steam Link was previously a hardware dongle but has been replaced by android/smart TV apps with the same name.

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.

They are partnered, it's just not exclusive.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

Ah, that's interesting. I had assumed any partnership would have integrated with the desktop steam client rather than a third party app, although I can see the benefits of separating it out in terms of pricing/billing models.

You're a few years late. VIVE is a separate HTC headset now. Vavle Index is Valve's VR headset.

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.

What's in it for Valve?

Access to people that don't want to buy a gaming PC.

Or can't, these days, considering how strangled the GPU market is.

If Valve wanted to do that why wouldn't they build it themselves instead? They have the server expertise.

If you want to make a cloud gaming service that isn't expensive and a good experience, you need it to be huge scale because more locations is essential for less latency, and you need a varied workload instead of just people playing games to amortize the costs of the servers. I don't know what other stuff Nvidia or Valve does that would keep these machines productively busy during the work day, but the big cloud companies probably have all kinds of things to justify over-provisioning machines so it seems like they have a limitless supply at peak gaming times while being cost-effective

I think Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will dominate cloud gaming eventually.

Valve’s customer base is almost entirely semi-serious to hardcore gamers: then people with the most to lose and the least incentive to adopt stadia.

Partnering with Google on stadia would generate a sizeable backlash.

Yes they are? Their latest flagship game literally only works on their hardware.

Are you talking about Half Life: Alyx? It works on basically any VR headset as far as I know. I think they just need to be SteamVR compatible which basically everything is.

Maybe, as soon as I heard it was VR only I stopped paying attention. But the point still stands - Valve is very much a hardware business, has been for years.

I wouldn't characterise them as a hardware business, their main focus is on software and they happen to be willing to produce hardware when they feel they need to.

Just to confirm, you are correct, it works on almost any mass-market headset (probably on all headsets period, but I cannot verify that myself).

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).

I've played Alyx three times on two different VR headsets by two manufacturers and this is definitely not true.

Uhh, Valve definitely IS in the hardware business. They make streaming boxes, controllers, VR headsets/base stations and BCI tech.

If Google didn't make tons of money with ads through it's search engine, the comoany would IMO already be bankrupt.

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.

Well, ads does afford them the luxury of trying new things, develop new products and revenue sources. Google is just pretty poor at developing new products.

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.

The game library was the big issue for me, most playtime was quite smooth for me. But to a large extent it's publishers' faults, Geforce Now has the same problem with games they had before getting removed because publishers/devs opted-out.

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.

I agree with most of this, but the Superhot game that's on Stadia Pro is a new release. (It's basically a Superhot roguelike, and I don't like it, but it is a new game.

Google has more money than they know what to do with.

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.

Oh well, seems like there will be another entry here soon: https://killedbygoogle.com/

They threw away millions of dollars in ad money and they will see no return on investment.

Usually ads can be equally or more expensive than development and production.

The lack of search or pagination on the games list shocked me. I really have to scroll past every single Destiny pack to get down to NBA 2K1?

The games page also takes around 35 seconds to load on my pixel 5.

When the PS2 came out there were like 10 games available.

It could also play almost all PS1 games and it was the year 2000.

It is no longer the year 2000

So you buy a PS2 the month it was launched to play PS1 games? K

At least you had a back-catalog. The amount of games you can play on Stadia is just what you see.

I bought a PS5 last year and have not bought a PS5 game. Mostly played PS4 games and some of what came in PSPlus.

Google is REALLY bad at marketing. I have no idea who runs their product teams, must be college interns, because they have no clear goal.

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.

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