Comment by throwawayzRUU6f | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayzRUU6f | Hacker News Reader

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throwawayzRUU6f

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.

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