By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes, if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast' prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not launch the product in the first place.
Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the “Netflix of gaming”. I double knew it was over when I watched Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can’t make moves like that, you aren’t going to outcompete
License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have more than one frame of latency to start with.
As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library, bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt). Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down the service.
[1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price, under the caveat that apparently if a single billing detail changes the price goes to the current market price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
My laptop doesn't handle monster hunter well (my desktop does), i wanted to play with my wife, but the game was pulled out.
This make it challenging: I have a steam library, but I can't trust what I can and cannot play. In the end it's easier to buy another desktop.
Well, unless crypto fucks up the chip world. Sigh.
I meant to get into GCP in this thread with regard to how it's part of Google's pathology. They have a hammer and everything looks like a nail ala Stadia even when the industry is pushing compute for experiences to the edge, Google is always looking to centralize.
Support is absolutely urgent. If you don't seem to be taking your platform seriously by doing things like day 1 support for your own hardware, you shouldn't be surprised that consumers don't take it seriously either.
I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor at product development, partially because they don't really internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up somewhere great.
With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.
Personally I don’t care if they pull the plug: it’s unlikely I’d want to play the same game again, and if I do, I have no problem purchasing it again.
Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.
Stadia is so bad, I have a founder’s edition controller sitting in my living room unopened. It’s not marketing that’s the problem. It’s that if your games can barely do 1080p on a 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.
I would disagree here, they are the largest advertising company...
I doubt Stadia suffered from a lack of exposure, I just think that many don't like the model they are offering.
There are other such services from Steam or NVidia and I don't think they are lacking compared to Stadia. And those did even get less exposure while Stadia was held up as a revolution.
I hope Google doesn't neglect the tech in favor of marketeers. That industry is overheated as it is.
They would have made more by developing or buying a game engine and tying their services into it.
At this point google is to greedy for it’s own good. It wants the whole vertical from day one. A consistent Google scale hug of death.