Stadia Developers Can't Fix the Bugs in Their Own Game Because Google Fired Them | Hacker News Reader

Stadia Developers Can't Fix the Bugs in Their Own Game Because Google Fired Them

kotaku.com

62 pointsImpossible14 comments

Not related to Stadia, but I had some issue with my Pixel 3a yesterday that it just stopped charging and had to get in touch with Google's support to try initiate a repair (turned out to be a software bug, thankfully). My learning is :NEVER , EVER, EVER fucking trust Google with your hard-earned money, ever FUCKING again. Even their customer support person did not know what is the link that you have click/form you have to fill to actually initiate a repair request and told me basically the process is not worth it.

What's been a bit amusing is seeing a string of startups go through the same lesson about Google Cloud.

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the mistake Google made was failing to recognize and focus on its core competencies. In ads and search, everything is scalable, statistical, and returns are decoupled from investment. You hire a few really smart people, and have them blow everyone else away.

It worked.

They should have looked for more businesses like that. Maps, gmail, etc. all did pretty well too. Even Youtube, despite playing whack-a-mole with demonetizing or removing channels with millions of subscribers, does well enough. There were plenty more businesses like that to diversify to.

Then Google brought that same mindset to things which required customer service (which doesn't scale), reliability (which isn't statistical in the same way as ads and search), and other domains, hired a ton of mediocre people to do it, and it seems like a bit of a dumpster fire right now.

It makes sense from their perspective: they have datacentres upon datacentres of computing power that power their own endeavours, but are underutilized. So they monetize the remaining capacity in any way they can

They simply cannot handle business that require long term support, lower margins, and communication overhead. As you said, given how effective Stats and Math have been for Search + Ads, they approach every problem with the same Hammer, which even Elon learnt the hard way, is not a great idea (Tesla's production issues with too much automation).

Reading Steve Yegge's posts (on Medium, IIRC), Android and Youtube are exceptions that the management leaves the teams to work indepedently instead of hosting the Google culture on top of them (he cites Android's API compatibility to this regard, which is in a way the opposite of how Google supports its products).

> Not related to Stadia, but I had some issue with my Pixel 3a yesterday that it just stopped charging and had to get in touch with Google's support to try initiate a repair (turned out to be a software bug, thankfully).

Yes! Android 11 has difficulty on the Pixel 3a negotiating the USB mode and will just randomly fail to charge after updates. I found moving it between a USB C PD and USB C port on an actual computer will at least bring up the notification where you can then select the USB negotiation mode.

I had a painful multi-week-long email thread with Google support because I kept getting Google Fi emails even after going through the unsubscribe link in the email despite having never been a Google Fi customer and not living in a country where Google Fi was offered.

They claimed that my only recourse was to mark the messages as spam, and that there was no internal path to escalate the issue. They finally relented after my repeated insistence that what they were doing wasn’t legal in my country.

Fixed URL: https://kotaku.com/stadia-developers-cant-fix-the-bugs-in-th...

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The fired Stadia developers will have some explaining to do when the game development experience they note on their CV is a known as a dumpster fire.

I'm guessing it'll go something like this: "Google make the decision to release [x] while in early beta... then fired everyone."

Doubt it’ll be a problem at all—most people in the biz will know the Stadia story, but write off the failure as Google being Google. It will just be a fun opening to start chitchat. And it’s still Google on the CV.

How is this news? Is it expected for them to keep working after they've been fired?

Its news that google released a broken product, then fired the development team, and it will not be fixed.

To add on, it's news that Google acquired a studio (Typhon Studios) a little over a year ago, then shut down that entire company, leaving a large amount of bugs unfixed. Some people may not know that Typhon Studios was acquired by Google, especially given that the game also had been released on consoles and PC.

Starts with a wrong headline already. It's not their own game anymore, they sold it.

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