Hacker News Reader

Comment by phor | Hacker News Reader

It feels like this was part of what Stadia promised, but never came to fruition.

Stadia's problem was never technical, it was entirely due to bad management. The fact that they got games to play reasonably well at reasonably high resolutions is an impressive achievement, and it set the foundation to build a dominant gaming platform appealing to everyone. Then Stadia's management figured out a way to emphasize all of Stadia's weaknesses and play down its advantages and price it in such a way to appeal to nobody.

Stadia's failure to make an impact in the market despite its technical achievements brings to mind the proverb: An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Stadia actually worked pretty well the first time I tried it an I played a few games no issues, but the first time I tried Xbox Cloud Gaming, I got display artifacts and my computer locked up. The Windows Store Apps and especially the Xbox app sucks compared to steam and have very little going for them.

When I first read this and a few replies it made me think that Stadia had been shutdown, but a quick Google search shows this is not the case. Am I missing something and perhaps it’s planed to be shut down? (Or is it just not as successful as was anticipated)

I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First understand, Google will never tell you the truth. Even if they were going to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last email to you would be to tell you it's not going anywhere.

Stadia shut down its own games division - the group who was working on in house games. Then, Stadia said it's going to focus mostly on b2b stuff - basically whitelabeling Stadia to others.

They've not said they'll shut it down, but the writing is on the wall.

>I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First understand, Google will never tell you the truth. Even if they were going to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last email to you would be to tell you it's not going anywhere.

Oof this rings so true. I hear it SO OFTEN about Google, and I can't imagine that this kind of reputation doesn't hurt their ability to get folks to choose to build services/buy-in to their offerings. Are they just at a scale such that they genuinely don't care about concerns like this?

I honestly don't think it's purposeful dishonesty, just complete disconnection between groups and/or employees and management. I've always said it feels like Google is a company where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. So the Stadia team probably has zero indication their product is dead until the day of.

Apparently it has apparently been “demoted” within Google. The rumour also says it's getting renamed to Google Stream and will be licensed out to other companies to build their own game streaming platforms. I don't think any of this has been confirmed, so take it with a pinch of salt

Reply on news.ycombinator.com