* Death
* Taxes
* Google shutting down services
Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for consumers who buy into googles promises and even a bit for the google engineers who may be out of work soon.
For a while Google was literally giving away Stadia controllers, a Chromecast device to support using it with a TV, and games for free. Every power user/gamer type person I know that took them up on it fooled around with it, agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
The big difference, I think, for why google is made fun of for stadia but few people throw rocks at Microsoft is the game selection. Microsoft does not kill off their projects willy-nilly so game manufacturers, I assume, feel better about crawling into their bed than googles.
And let me tell you, the only reason I was able to finish it is because the entire gimmick of that game is that when you're not moving, time doesn't move forward. So I could just wait out the regular lag spikes that happened every single play session. I would never choose to play a game like that.
I live in a moderately-sized city in Canada (~250,000 people?)
That's the difference, there simply wasn't any point investing in Stadia, because, well, this. There was no value to achivements, generated media, friend circles or god-forbid buying games because we knew it was going to be cancelled.
What kind of gaming platform randomly bans high profile game devs. because an automated Youtube bot told them to? A bad joke of one.
> It does in fact work quite well.
Didn't they fake high res video streams by up scaling bad renders? Haven't used it but as far as I understand there was quite a bit of overpromising and underdelivering going on.
> other first-party console alternatives,
Their competition would be GeForce Now from NVIDIA. Which not only is still a thing but also predates Stadia by several years.
> agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
So did the free trial run out? Where the games crap? Have you ever asked them why they decided that it wasn't worth using?
You mean the same friends that "just stopped using it"? There is something weird about the combination of purely positive feedback and everyone you know dropping it.
That particular statement was with regard to suggested technical issues surrounding graphics. My friends and I generally found the play experience to be unobjectionable. My very statement explains that we all abandoned the product in favor of alternatives that provided a superior experience in one way or the other, not necessarily related to play experience. I for one prefer the versatility that a general low-latency desktop session via Parsec provides. Another friend that's deeply invested in the Xbox ecosystem preferred to use Microsoft's competing game streaming offering.
Which is why Stadia is a bad joke.
My impression is that Google has actually changed how new initiatives are funded from the exec layer, such that there’s less likelihood of completely overlapping products being created, such as a new messaging service. I could be wrong about that, and even if I’m right it might change again in the future, but at least for now I’d be surprised to see a new messaging service get launched.
Can I interest you in a sixth, incompatible rewrite of Google Wallet instead that will only launch in India while you make Google Pay 7.0 ?
But like everything Google these days, they made some poor initial choices, didn’t take in any customer feedback, dug in instead of pivoting, then slashed and burned when it failed to become a billion dollar business overnight.
Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.
No need. Sony and Microsoft have their own (quite good) tech for this.
Sony's actually been in the game streaming game for nearly a decade. PS Now launched in 2014. I haven't used it personally, but I hear it's great.
Microsoft xCloud has been available for almost two years, in preview for a year before that. I got home once and found my wife playing Dragon Age II. I sat and watched for a little, then she quit the game, and only then did I discover she had been streaming it. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea that it was being streamed. Truly impressive tech.
I agree! They really gave Console as a Service a shot. But back in the day when it was launching, my take was that the "new console" part of it was secondary. The core goal would have been to get a foot in the game streaming market for their Android TV / Cast platform.
> dug in instead of pivoting
If this rumour is true, maybe that's exactly what's happening. They've proven that the experience is good enough for people to play games on it, and even pay for the privilege. So it's technically sound (depending on geography).
Gamers aren't going to play through the entire new Skyrim on Stadia, Google knows that. But what about Gamers (in the right geographical location) watching a Youtube video on their smart TV being served an ad? That ad for the new Skyrim has a "Play demo now" button, no download required, instant gameplay. Now that's an expensive ad if I've ever seen one.
I don't see anything wrong with the premise of the service or even from what I understand the technical execution.
Seems like the failure was around business development, marketing, community management, and brand reputation.
I haven't followed to closely though so other would know better than me.
To be fair that's normally the case for Google.
Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue.
Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds.
They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.
You will own nothing and be happy. Great.
I think the real failing is what you stated - biz dev and brand reputation.
Read the other replies and you will see folks say "There were no games" or "The selection was limited." Why in the world would a major game company hesitate to invest in google and google services? Well, if you have a reputation of killing off your services like the grim reaper, I imagine that would come up in an executive risk assessment.
Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Consider Microsoft's reputation in the late mid to late 90's on slashdot and other forums compared to their reputation today. It took a lot of work but possible.
Googles going to have to put down the scythe though.
Every time they take a decision like this one, they are making the hole deeper.
To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly.
I remember a poster proudly announcing that they will announce one year in advance when they plan to shut down a service on GCS.
Maybe they should look what happens when a company like HP announces end of support for OpenVMS 5 - 10 years in advance (as just an example pulled out of my ass with some Wikipedia backing the statement up) there's a lot of wailing and howling amongst their enterprise customers.
Those are the timescales big shops think in when it comes to their strategic IT decisions.
Frankly, I don't see Google ever satisfying such requirements backed by iron clad guarantees.
I disagree. It is much easier to regain trust with enterprise customers than with end users.
Enterprise costumers have contracts and lawyers on retainer. Google can draft a contract which binds them to performing a service. They can write in penalties with bite which shows to their enterprise customers that they mean it.
That is assuming that they really want to.
On the other hand this trick doesn't work with end users. They don't have lawyers to evaluate such an offer, and they have lot less of a chance of successfully suing google even if they would have favourable contracts.
Perhaps it is not their responsibility but I guess they accepted the risk in the first place. I don't think Google will kill the service anytime soon though and this rumor is probably wrong. Won't get too many new users with them around either.
If the rumor is true, the service is killed off.
If the rumor is false, well it sounds like something google would do, and consumers will hesitate to buy into it and businesses definitely won't. I've read and written my fair share of executive summaries before - I imagine this would make its way into it.
The offering is a bit limited but there are several really good games that are worth buying.
I am now pretty reluctant to pay to keep any games though with this rumour alive.