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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

It's grimly hilarious that Google picked a business model that was so bad they couldn't make Stadia a success in a time period that could not be more suited to it. Hardware costs are insane. Consoles are nearly impossible to get. The GPU market is destroyed by semiconductor shortages and crypto miners. Yet Google's reputation is so god-fucking-awful people still won't bite on their "we promise we won't treat this service like we've treated literally everything else we've ever made" product.

It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet anymore.

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> Yet Google’s reputation is so god-fucking-awful

Where? In the HN bubble? Ok.

Yes. That matters immensely. This is not just any bubble, but the bubble of the people who drive technology adoption...by writing articles on tech, by having friends trust their judgment, and so on. It is a leading indicator, not a lagging one.

Gmail has well over a billion users. The number of people who search with Google is in the multiple billions.

The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter at all to the general public who just want to accomplish their communication and search tasks. HN isn't even a blip on the radar.

Early adopters matter early in the adoption curve, not late.

In two weeks, Google will start counting new photos against users' Gmail/Drive space unless one pays to upgrade. I think it could cause a shift in perception.

Google and Gmail adoption was also driven by the same sorts of people that would have been on HN if HN were around back then. Yahoo and MSN/Hotmail used to matter a lot more than they do nowadays.

This does not invalidate the original argument: This crowd here is representative of who first adopted GMail and spread the word. Without these early adopters, the other billion users would likely not have followed suit.

I cannot comment on the early years of the search engine since I was about 8 years old at the time, but I find it likely that it was similar back in the day.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

If you hang around gaming communities a bit the sentiment is the same. Google has killed many products used by a lot of people.

Nah, in gaming communities and the "little-less than tech literate" crowd.

View a Reddit thread. Not exactly representative I know, but pretty normie imo.

In every industry that might depend on it for revenue via platforms like Stadia. I’m in a number of game industry Discord servers and Stadia is a joke because everyone knows that Google’s rollout has been so bad that they’ll likely shutter the service within a year or two, which means nobody wants to put any effort into supporting it.

The other issue is that their advertising is so bad that most of the regular gaming audience has no idea what it even is. My housemate is a casual gamer with a doctor-level education and I asked him if he understood what Stadia was or did and he had no idea.

I agree with your points, though re: hardware and cloud-gaming in general: I wonder if its availability and cost issues would serve as a driver for _consumers_ - where they would seek a cloud-streaming solutions (so _they_ don't need to find/buy the scarce high end GPUs or consoles themselves -- and let Google Stadia or Shadow.tech or GeForce Now or xCloud or whoever take care of that).

I think that was their point about hardware. It's so hard and expensive to acquire as a consumer that stadia is tempting even for peoe who usually build their own gaming PCs.

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