Stadia undershot to the tune of “hundreds of thousands” of users

It’s honestly extremely funny to see Google burn millions in R&D on the AMD hardware, Linux porting tools and runtime, as well as the improvements to WebRTC while their competitors just used AWS GPU instances (like Shadow) or their own GPU farms (GeForce Now) running Windows to run games with little modification.

Stadia is an unmitigated disaster outside of playing Cyberpunk and I’ve been a longtime fan of the streaming games concept - I was an early fan of OnLive and used the GeForce Now beta regularly. It’s ultimately a case study in how investing only in tech isn’t necessarily customer obsessed.

I know of a few people who bought Stadia because they couldn't get their hands on PS5 or Xbox and were willing to give it a shot, particularly for Cyberpunk. By and large, they've seemed pretty happy with it.

I understood that Stadia sales ended up being limited because the main deal they offered was being taken up too quickly. If anything - with the Playstation/Xbox timing - they should have doubled down on the gap and gone all-out to build a customer base.

Definitely feels like they wasted that opportunity and are now going to have to compete much more directly with the existing consoles.

I have to say I was underwhelmed by the graphics quality. I tried Cyberpunk on Stadia, because my hardware was not good enough and it looked horrible. Of course the game is still not optimized on other consoles as well, but on my 1080p monitor the video stream was just having artifacts everywhere. When I switched to the chromecast 4k, this was way better, but still had some troubles from time to time. Also I remember they announced that graphics and game logic will be so much better, because on the cloud this could scale, which was exactly the opposite experience I had with cyberpunk...

Hopefully someone will decompile the firmware of the stadia controller. Then I would have at least a cool hackable hardware piece

I think the failure was most in the inability to explain to the consumer why they’re just buying a controller. The past year being a disaster probably didn’t help with any plans to market bringing it to a friends house to play together or whatever.

Just because it’s possible to stream realtime input and response, that doesn’t mean generations that grew up with physical devices are coming along for the ride without trust in the platform.

I still can't believe the latency was a non-issue.. but regardless, it's better for Google to pay developers to try to build something and return (some of) their mountains of cash back to the market than hoard it.

Would it be good to put a cap on how much cash corporations are allowed to retain on their books? I'm sure they would find a way to game it somehow but might not be a bad idea at least in principle

> I think there was some overpromising on what the technology could deliver

"Negative latency" comes to mind.

Lag make the whole concept dead on arrival.

I think there were few dozens of failed "consoles" like that. Gakai, InLive, Shadow, Gainstream... all failed because of latency.

There is no trick around c.

The sooner all of these cloud gaming services fail and companies stop trying them, the better.

I am not looking forward to the encroaching "Own nothing only rent" future.