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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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".

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 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...

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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