Hacker News Reader

No. In fact, the incompetent people at the head of those projects fail upwards. Take Phil Harrison, who is at the head of Stadia (not Stadia Games and Studios):

- Worked at Sony Entertainment, handling the software side of things, was there to help for the massive fuckup that was the PS3 launch.

- Got fired (or "resigned" in C-level speak), joined Infogrames (soon to become Atari) and majorly fucked up, saying that single player games would become increasingly rare as well as contributing to running the company into the ground while taking massive dividends.

- Got fired from Atari and joins Gaikai (another game live streaming service that failed miserably and was picked up later by Sony for Playstation Now).

- (Most likely got fired from Gaikai, but no news from this anywhere) and joins Microsoft, just in time to utterly fuck up the Xbox One launch and making the branch he was a director of produce... absolutely fuck all ?

- Got fired from Microsoft and gets named vice president at Google, before heading the Stadia team as a product manager, utterly fucking up its launch, closing down Stadia Games and Studios (that actually managed to build up a pretty talented team), and soon, closing down Stadia.

This clown just gets paid to fail. He's got the reverse Midas touch, short anything he touches.

We call that a Shit Midas, where everything they touch turns to shit.

Or the Mierdas Touch

One of the reasons for this is probably that all (minus Stadia, it seems) of the products you've mentioned might have had bad starts but ended up gigantic successes:

>PS3

performed extremely well, beating Xbox 360 by a fairly thin margin.

>Gaikai

sold for $380M USD to Sony (most people consider this a success, even if you think it should have been more.)

>Xbox One

lost to the PS4 by a factor of two but was still successful (50 million est. lifetime sales)

Even if every single thing he was in charge of failed catastrophically, anyone who isn't looking closely is going to see someone with a huge amount of industry expertise working on some of the largest and most successful products to ever exist full stop (not just in gaming.)

You'd expect that at this level of responsability and salary, the background check would be more than just a single scroll on his wikipedia page, but then again a clown is pretty much only hired for a circus, half of those taking those decisions have failed upwards themselves too.

Everything you mentioned has gotten successful both late in its existence, and very much after Harrison left.

I don't feel it's fair to say Gaikai failed miserably. They were on par with other competitors such as OnLive. That whole first generation of game streaming created a new market, but was ultimately too early -- the internet infrastructure they were betting on didn't come soon enough to enable their product to take off. At that point, getting acquired by the biggest dog in the gaming industry is the best possible outcome.

Phil Harrison is an absolute tool though.

Gaikai failed miserably, the same way OnLive failed miserably. Yes, the infrastructure was not there, but also, the product itself was just not ready. If I start selling prototype home fusion reactors that don't react and I get bought by <big energy company>, it's not a success, the thing literally didn't work.

Do you think senior leadership was involved? It seems just as likely that some platforms engineers figured they could mess around with hardware on the edge and got it shipped from the bottom up.

No, they had a huge push behind it at one point, they even had internal game development studios and hired inhouse game devs, which they then proceeded to fire less than 18 months later. That's right, from new platform to fired in less than 18 months. It's a shameful way to run a company.

I know they put the full force of the machine behind it, it's just not obvious to me that the reason they did it came from the top, or was even known to the top, versus just being an emergent phenomenon.

I think people ascribe way too much agency to corporate executives.

>But this one is probably the clearest, obvious failure of execution ... There is an absolutely crystal clear playbook of a Tech company forcing its way into the Gaming business.

I'm not sure this was an 'obvious failure of execution'. They wanted to build a gaming cloud-streaming-only service, and they built one. I don't think you can build a better one because the problems with cloud-streamed gaming are with the concept not execution. The streaming service provided by Xbox is on par with Stadia, in that it suffers from the same latency, and graphical downscaling issues as Stadia did. On the Xbox it is part of my subscription (so technically 'free') and I don't want to use it because the experience is bad (although it is nice to quickly sample a game without needing to wait for download and install).

Oh, there definitely were obvious failures of execution. Not on the core streaming tech side, but on the business and product aspects. The product should have been quite compelling: a way of playing current gen console games with basically no up front hardware investment and no ongoing subscription. That's what the "free" version of Stadia was.

But then they muddied things up with Stadia Pro, making people think it was actually supposed to a "Netflix for games" subscription service, and crucially making Stadia Pro the only SKU for a very long time. So rather than the really appealing entry point to console gaming that people could have easily tried, they ended up targeting the exact people for whom Stadia was the worst fit (hardcore gamers with existing console owners and large game libraries).

Absolutely agree. XBox Cloud gaming took the "Netflix for games" strategy and with inferior quality was able to decently establish itself.

How to fund the development of a risky but long-term valuable new platform? Whomever was calling the shots on that question failed spectacularly and in a way that technology companies usually don't. You're already losing hundreds of millions making the tech, why not spend a few more loss-leading the user growth?