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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

Surely someone in Alphabets leadership understands the damage Google is doing to their brand by only giving projects a few months to "make it big" before pulling the rug out? Look at all the developers who post on here who will not use GCP because of the fear of Google removing or dropping support for important features with no warning!

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Are they already pulling out the rug? Seems like the investment they made so far in terms of time, money, hiring must have been massive.

If they are killing stadia, that does maybe show that Google lacks "grit". The way they killed Google Plus was kind of stupid. They could have adjusted the formula and made it better, but instead they just gave up on it, it seems. It's like Google doesn't understand that it's normal not to have instant success? Maybe they should make a more active decision that here is a market segment they want to enter, and keep working at it, instead of just trying random things and giving up.

Not officially _yet_ but between the VP leaving and some other signs, it does appear that Stadia isn't likely to last a ton longer.

What will happen to all the "purchases" people made?

My immediate thought when Stadia was announced was "I'm never buying games at full price from Google if they are dependent on a service not being cancelled"

Same - if it were a subscription service I may have tried it out. But knowing how these digital services tend to go and how quickly Google kills its services I was never going to “buy” a game from them.

I think the service is amazing and I even pay for GeforceNow and did a Stadia trial. There's no way I was going to spend a dime on content or hardware. It was just too likey to be killed off. By contrast I've spent tons of money on Steam and Oculus stores, so I have no problem buying digital content from a company I have confidence in. Google has seriously hurt their brand and I am always concerned they're going to pull the rug out from me on the ancillary G products I use. Many companies sunset products, but Google has an absolute knack for destroying my consumer confidence.

At this point, I'm worried that the service wont be around for when my pre-order of baldur's gate 3 goes live.

This is the whole reason why I absolutely refused to buy a single game on Stadia while I was subscribed. I simply redeemed my free games every month. I was willing to pay $9 every month or whatever and get a couple of games that may or may not have been worth that much, but no way am I dropping $60 on a game when I know the entire service might disappear next year (given Google's track record).

I'm a stadia subscriber, so I've been hearing this forever. It may be true, but given the number of games they've launched recently, the Stadia Makers program, etc. it seems they're chugging along just fine.

FWIW, I do expect Stadia to be canned at some point, I just don't think it's in the next year or two.

They've killed off their in house game studio.

The VP of Stadia is leaving.

They recently (a few months ago before killing their studio) had a major "Sign up for stadia trial to get a free stadia controller and chromecast ultra" deal.

Sounds a lot like inventory liquidation, flagging adoption and them giving up.

It can take years to be an overnight success but they seem to have lost that vision.

I mean, you could also see that as a pivot with a new type of product, as they see which market actually uses it.

I along with others questioned why they were targeting hardcore gamers (who already have consoles and PCs) right out of the gates when the value it offers is to a more casual market.

> I along with others questioned why they were targeting hardcore gamers

They didn't seem to know why they did anything with this product. Apparently they offered laughably low sums of money to developer studios for porting games to the Stadia platform (Google permabanning the Terraria developer's account while they were working on a Stadia port didn't boost the popularity either[0]), launched the thing pretending it's a finished product while beta versions of competitors were more stable, lied to consumers (4k resolution etc.), and had a pricing model that anyone familiar with the gaming market would have recognised as overly optimistic beforehand.

Google shutting down products quickly is a problem, but not the one which prevented Stadia's success in the first place.

[0] https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696

> Apparently they offered laughably low sums of money to developer studios for porting games to the Stadia platform

The reporting from Jason Schreier is that they were paying tens of millions of dollars per game for ports of AAA games. The data from the Capcom hack corraborates that. That is the opposite of laughably small.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-26/google-vi...

Just a few AAA games that already exist on most other platforms won't attract many though, especially if people have to pay full price for them individually without any trust that those games will still be accessible in a few years. Even less so after Google already broke promises on the first day to a degree they might face a class action lawsuit.

Indie games and other smaller projects are also relevant to many, and there Google's offers were apparently so unattractive studios just dismissed them.

There's a reason Google has to pay tens of millions to large studios while MS or Sony rarely do aside from exclusivity deals. The tendency to shut down products on such a regular basis killed any trust in Google supporting anything other than their ads and tracking; gamers don't know if Stadia will just disappear overnight with their games, studios don't know if they'll ever get their investment back, even if the service continues to run.

> "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent,"

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...

Compared to the hundreds of millions the Epic Game Store spent to get exclusives, tens of millions is still very small.

This is tens of millions *per game*. Not in total. Epic did notn pay hundreds of millions for any exclusive.

But in addition to that, these are totally different cases and deal structures. Epic was giving minimum revenue guarantees, which they needed to do to offset the lost revenue from other platforms.

Stadia was paying for ports, not for exclusivity. The publishers did not lose the opportunity to sell the games on Steam. (And they were paying it outright, not as an advance.)

Seriously people. These are eye-popping amounts to pay for a port. Whatever the many product and business failures of Stadia were, an unwillingness to pay developers was not among those failures.

"Buy a game, get free hardware" is back for Resident Evil.

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/10495261?hl=en

> It can take years to be an overnight success but they seem to have lost that vision.

Per other commenters on HN over the years, the Goog has a culture where you can only get promoted if you launch a product. If that is true, then the point of Stadia wasn't success for Big-G, it was a promotion (or a set of them) for some people. Retiring Stadia quickly then makes sense, as it saves money to get rid of the promotion vehicle quickly.

That's how I got a steam controller I intended to use for kodi/xbmc but it's not easy enough for me yet. I'll give a stadia controller a try :].

Maybe. Maybe a bunch of people tried the game made at their studio, and it was bad. And if the first 1,000 enthusiasts used to trying new stuff don't like your game, the next 1,000,000 people aren't going to like it either.

It's better for these people's careers to shutdown immediately and move onto something else, before you release something crummy. Isn't that what startups do anyway?

That's all fine and good when you are a company that merely provides a service, but it's a little different when you are selling actual software and games for $60 a pop that will evaporate into thin air if you shut down.

Imagine if you bought a car from a dealership and the car stopped working when the dealership went out of business. Nobody would accept that as being OK!

Interestingly they are spending extra time on self driving tech with Waymo. I wonder if Google has a culture of taking ‘serious tech’ more seriously than say ... video games, and certainly over social.

Waymo has certainly been given a lot of latitude especially as fully autonomous has gone from "right around the corner" in the minds of many (admittedly in part because of what organizations like Waymo were saying) to something that may not be fully achieved for a long time.

It's part Google's shitty product culture, but also part insurmountable technological barriers.

Streaming games is not going to reach mainstream adoption because the latency of the Internet is too large. There's no coding around that. Barring some new material that allows light to travel faster through it, game streaming just isn't happening.

At least in the united states, the majority of people are in urban centers. Additionally the market for games skews young, just like the populations of urban centers. The vast majority of people in the united states are within 2 light-milliseconds (372 miles) of some urban area, and data centers are generally located in places with good connectivity to urban areas.

I don't think latency is as big an issue for streaming gaming as you think.

Right but if your games only work great in urban centers, don't launch your games outside of that. Part of the problem with Stadia was the hubris they had at launch as shown through their marketing and pricing of the product. They came out like this was an A+ product when it was in fact a C product.

If Stadia had come out slowly with a few key indie games, closed beta, natural growth, and humility, they wouldn't have an ounce of the vitriol they've received.

One thing google does pretty well is performance monitoring. They have loads and loads of clients connected to their services and they know exactly the performance they’re getting.

Another thing google is good at is building data centers. They have them all over the place and they’re building more.

If you live in a major city (i.e. close to a datacenter) the latency is perfectly playable. Especially when you consider that the market for Stadia is not counterstrike pros who care about every millisecond.

I really believe that the reason Stadia hasn't taken off yet is the limited game selection, and non-existent marketing. Technically it's really good, but there's only like 3 games on there that I have even a vague interest in playing.

Everyone hates epic for buying out exclusive rights for a bunch of games, but it's certainly a strategy that has worked out for them. The Epic store is now a genuine competitor to Steam.

Stadia works acceptably even on low tier consumer cable internet connections. The biggest issue is usually weak or noisy wifi but even then it's surprisingly robust.

I don't know what it's costing them to do that, but in terms of technical capability it's there.

Having used my PS4's remote play a handful of times to stream play games while I'm on the other side of town using my own unremarkable consumer grade networking on both ends, it can work surprisingly well for many types of games. How many people notice the difference in input lag between playing on a monitor vs TV's game mode vs TV's normal mode? Those tend to increase latency more than the latency of streaming from one side of the city to the other.

That being said, Google picked quite possibly the worst lineup of games for showcasing streaming play. They were mostly action/adventure and fighting games, which are extremely sensitive to input lag. They should've gone with RPGs, strategy, and sim games which really don't mind the latency. But I guess that's just classic Google not understanding the market they're trying to enter.

This has nothing to do with latency and everything to do with price.

I have a gaming PC but it's stationary. I'd much rather use stadia on my Android TV device or whatever to grab a controller and go. I got the trial and it does work.

But having to pay full price for games I already own? Forget it. If the subscription had higher quality content I would use that, but it's just mostly old titles.

It's stupid because Google could have thrown money at this thing to subsidize subscription titles, or worked out some way for me to play stuff I already bought for another platform without paying MSRP again, and in either case I would have used it.

Stadia has no selling point. Pay MSRP and get the rights to stream a game from Google (only for as long as the service lasts?) No thanks!

>Streaming games is not going to reach mainstream adoption because the latency of the Internet is too large

Im not sure i agree with that. We already deal with latency while playing games like CS:GO and others. They are already making the roundtrip and are playable. I think it's more of a bandwidth issue of being able to send enough "raw" screen data instead of game scenario deltas.

I hear this from time to time, but how many people are actually choosing not to use GCP for that reason? Yes, Google keeps killing consumer products (Hangouts is reportedly getting the axe…), but Google Cloud seems to have a much more stable set of services, especially when you look at the core. Things like App Engine have been around forever.

Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no?

Part of the trouble here is that the Google brand spans their B2B and B2C offerings.

Hangouts is now read-only for messages to/from phone numbers (as of December 2020 iirc), but you can still message people who are signed in to chat on Gmail. Effectively axed.

I'd say the fact that Google is the "0 support or human interaction, ever, once you need help with anything, forget it" company does not help either.

When it comes to their paid products I hear mixed reports in my circles, some claim that they have good experiences with it. But ultimately the question is: Why risk it?

Virtually anyone who is using google cloud to run their business is surely paying for access to real human interaction. This costs as little as $100/mo for basic support all the way up to dedicated support.

I agree with your pout for consumer, but GP is talking about b2b cloud, where google behaves very differently than their general “no there is no customer support” behavior.

> Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no?

Apparently not:

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

It's no different than choosing a B2C startup for your company, and then having them go out of business.

There are certain core services that I would expect Google to maintain, and others are gambles. It's important to know which is which.

Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud.

The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft — currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share — or risk losing funding.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

Read the top comment—the fact that they are setting deadlines & performance goals does not mean that services are getting shut down.

But it raises the question in people’s minds. If you are building your company on a cloud platform why would you risk GCP after seeing that?

I try to isolate and minimize dependencies on Google due to their habit of abruptly banning entire accounts because one of their bots thinks it spotted something slightly odd on a single service that account is using. It's absolutely part of my risk-assessment at work, when selecting which services to use. Their fickle approach to services that aren't ads or search is just part of the problem.

> Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no?

Not differently enough, and I'm not directing enough of our services spending to Google to find out if that gets us over the line where they won't shit all over us without at least giving us a heads-up. Maybe it would be, maybe not, but why risk it when most of what they offer is far from unique and not much better-priced than alternatives, if at all.

I have heard anecdotes of them linking accounts together and banning them all at once if one of the algorithms deems you unworthy.

Unless you are really splitting them, by using a different IP and browser characteristics for each of them... But then you are very likely to have them banned separately, due to suspicious behavior.

I think of all of Google that's not Search & Ads as "side projects" that they do kind of like a hobby.

They'd like for them to succeed, but it's nowhere near the focus an org that lives or dies by the project has.

So if gaming proves harder than expected, they move on to other fun things.

With the way apple is leaning in terms of making life harder on advertisers, if they were to release a value phone ($200) with all their consumer privacy protections soon after a revelation in the news about how pervasive advertising companies are / how much they know about you, I wonder if it would make a dent in google's only real line of business.

I'm probably projecting too much of my own privacy-mindedness onto the general populace, though.

Well said! In contrast to Apple which gives its projects time. Apple Arcade is growing slowly but surely. People who have kids don't mind signing up for it because it makes sense.

Apple can iterate on Arcade with their now impressive chip design advantage. They can come to the consoles market at some point. I personally use my Xbox only for FIFA. It's a game that can probably run on M1 with no problem. I don't mind not spending $500 for my next console and have access to my FIFA on my iPhone and Mac

Surely they don’t or they wouldn’t have developed this reputation in the first place.

Google grew into the incoherent American corporation long ago and is totally beyond salvaging. Unfortunately their inertia will let them keep steamrolling over people for another century just like GE does.

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