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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

> Q: If the Stadia service is discontinued, do we know what (if anything) will happen with game purchases?

> Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product:

> We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :)

> The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great! Games are no different. Eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too and we'll feel great about it.

> [..]

> Of course, it’s ok to doubt my words. Theres nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't. But what we can do is to launch the service and continue investing in it for years to come. Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos. That’s exactly what we’re committed to.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/hi_im_andrey...

(I've been holding onto this bookmark for a while)

View on HN

The best part is how he just completely avoided actually answering the question. They simply refused to ever give a clear answer. Because they know the answer, and we know the answer, and it's all bad for them. Rather than engineer a system where the answer could be more positive, they stick their fingers in their ears (the most charitable interpretation).

I don’t understand why he didn’t just respond that your games will be gone. Or at least “in the worst case, your games might be gone”. People aren’t stupid, they know exactly what the evasive answer means, so why evade at all?

It’s Reddit - people _are_ sometimes stupid.

Classic SV "never mention tradeoffs" behavior.

It amazes me that this persists, it is such a bad sales tactic. If the person you're dealing with isn't a sucker, now you've destroyed trust. (You've destroyed it later with the sucker, when they realize what happened. Hope one sale was enough for you.)

Because then no one has an exact quote they can point at where he says your games will be gone. It's obvious to most readers, but you can't simply say "he said X" and link to it/screenshot it, only say that he was evasive.

PR guys aren't paid to tell the truth, they're paid to say whatever is convenient for the company. Lying straight to your face is one of their core skills.

Not being explicit gives wiggle room for people to let their hopes override their logic when interpreting how it will work.

Some number of people will read that and say "it's safe, I knew they would assuage my concerns" that wouldn't otherwise if they just said "well, you might lose you games in that case.". Those are the people being targeted.

And by those people I include you and me, but for different things. It's impossible to be completely objective and rational all the time, and I'm sure you can come up with just as many instances as I where hope overrode reason for a while. Statements like these are specifically to keep us around when we fall into that category.

It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to which the (supposed; bullshit) answer is 'not likely'. Someone might - on rational analysis - know what it means, and still come away with a better impression than if they said it outright.

The top reply to this is excellent. It's ignorant to compare cloud gaming, where you NEED the cloud to play that game license, to docs/photos etc.. where you can download them if the cloud service shuts down.

Everyone on HN predicted this, and the only way I would have ever trusted Stadia would be with a CEO-level promise of refunding all purchases if they shut down within 10 years.

That's honestly the magic of Nvidia's streaming service. You're paying for the streaming, not the game. You then link your Steam account and play. So if Nvidia's streaming service shuts down, I still have the games I paid for in steam. It's genius, and the only way I'd ever consider paying for cloud gaming. While I don't like the Xbox game pass method, as you own nothing, at least you're renting and not buying, so you're not technically losing anything if you leave or they shut down.

It was utterly shocking that Google did not copy Nvidia's streaming games bough on other stores idea, especially with so many people are fearful of a Google shutdown.

It's also a mystery to me why Valve hasn't done what Nvidia did. Presumably they will at some point. Unless they don't want to risk other cloud providers from pulling their games from steam.

I remember the same debate when steam came out. Well if steam shuts down tomorrow all the games will be lost. So better keep your Gaming CDs.

Betting on steam worked out thus far. I really like how nvidia solved this problem. Elegant solution.

with steam at least the data and executable are on my machine

it's just a small bit of hex editing away from being steamless

I would have to buy some TB of additional storage to have the whole library on my machine. This might also be a plus for steam. For the hex editing, I would have to ask around on the internet, which would maybe also be a solution to storing everything locally

> It was utterly shocking that Google did not copy Nvidia's streaming games

They wanted the lock in. They did it for profit margin. Because people like the Director of Product the GP mentions hops from one role to the next its all short term nonsense.

Funny as stadia might have seen huge adoption IF they didn’t have a reputation of killing services and leaving the service user to hang.

Killing of stadia only reaffirms peoples fear to use google products. This includes GCP.

Google could have side-stepped this by offering a Game Pass-style all-you-can-eat subscription service instead of full-price games. While I'll be bummed if one of those subscription services goes away, I won't feel as if something I own is being taken away from me.

Agree, I thought this was supposed to be a netflix of gaming. The other problem is Xbox and PS both have cloud offerings like this and are better options

Which meminds me that I might need to spend day or two during my vacation to move all of the services from gmail to possibly more stable address...

I have definitely avoided Stadia because I wanted to give it some 5 years to see if it wouldn't be another dead Google project. I really didn't want to be right but here we are...

I'm glad to be forever cautious with Google's new products, they've burnt me a few times the past 15 years.

I switched to geforce now after some time. You can play the games you bought on steam and other platforms and just pay for computing

They don't really have a reputation of that, except on forums like hn, which is not indicative of the broader market. Even among gamers, this reputation of Google doesn't exist.

> this reputation of Google doesn't exist.

To be fair, most gamers I’ve talked to don’t even know what Stadia IS.

By definition, gamers play games. To do that, they almost always own a console or gaming pc to do so. As a result, they have no need for Stadia in the first place.

This is why I think things like Stadia are targeting a very small market.

You have casual gamers, that are perfectly happy playing natively on their phones or laptops at low settings.

Then you have “serious” gamers, that tend to be happy spending hundreds of dollars to make sure they have up to date hardware to get the most of their games (and thus, likely won’t be happy with the latency or game selection of Stadia).

Somewhere in between is a market of people that say “gee, I really want to play Destiny, at full graphics, and I’m ok with a little latency, but I can’t or don’t want to buy a better PC or $500 box for it”.

I’m sure that market exists, but it’s gotta be rather small in the best of circumstances, right?

Exactly. Google has such a strong reputation for killing products now that I’m just now willing to invest in anything they create any more.

IMO they need to fix the internal corporate culture and move it away from short-term OKR goals and promotions based on launching new stuff and a bit more towards helping to maintain and grow existing projects.

Console gamers already have consoles to play games on. PC gamers already have PCs to play games on. The Gen Z generation play games on their mobile phones. What happened is that Google thought there were huge amounts of people out there that so badly wanted to play games, but couldn't because they can't afford the hardware, that they would flock to Stadia as their first gaming platform.

Those people don't exist in any significant numbers.

Every self-identifying gamer (me included) knew this service was DoA.

Seems like he left and got into Crypto? https://www.linkedin.com/in/doronichev/

He did. And before that he was in AR/VR. I know a few execs who have done similar hops: jumping from one hype space to the next in the hopes that one of them disrupts the whole industry and they get launched up in their career.

A sort of VC fund with an investment size of one, yourself.

Nothing wrong with that. You owe nothing to the company. The company won’t be loyal to you, why should you be loyal to it?

As an executive, my expectations are a bit different. I’m more loyal to the company, and the company is more loyal to me.

To prevent the company from being too disloyal we have golden parachutes.

I see what you’re saying and I respect it. You have to take care of yourself first.

However, as someone who worked in one of those fields, it’s draining when over half of your leaders are trend hoppers. They get up on stage frequently and talk about how excited they are, and how it’s a long journey ahead. And then as soon as the industry takes a slight downturn they all leave in unison.

Some of the leaders are truly passionate about the field and they’re still around. It’s very clear who is who from the way they act towards the employees.

The experience taught me to avoid hype industries unless I’m willing to make money the number one goal in my life, which is harder than I thought, since life has plenty of things more enjoyable than money.

It's not about company loyalty, it's about whether you actually believe in any of this tech. And you're supposed to, when you're a director with PR duties.

Until someone looks in that employee's wake and sees one dumpster fire after another and the employee being the common denominator. These people aren't just jumping from hype space to hype space, they are torching each of those projects to extract short term gains to the detriment of the teams under them.

Appreciate the sentiment, but if any employee does indeed have a track record like that, its on the company for hiring someone like that in the first place.

The real question is, why is the market so inefficient at sifting through bad employees, especially near the top of the ladder? The fact that this exec has been able to jump from one dumpster fire to another, often with a promotion, tells me that there’s something broken about the way senior execs are hired.

>Former Director of Product at Stadia.

>Former Director of Product at Google AR/VR.

>Former Head of Mobile, Group PM at YouTube.

Ouch.

Ouch? In todays economy that kind of title inflation can get you places. You might run everything you touch into the ground, but hey who cares?

Sometimes I wish I had the shamelessness some people have, it seems to be a great way to advance your career.

I wish I could figure out the secret handshake that gets you hired to one prominent, presumably high-paid, spitballin' and chattin' and "idea person" role after another, despite a track record of apparent mediocrity in actual results. Seems like it'd be really fun and—plainly—not very hard work.

At that level I think it's just more sales than substance. Many people are great salespeople without realizing it, I think this contributes to the phenomenon of failing upward.

> You might run everything you touch into the ground, but hey who cares?

In a more perfect world, when this resume hits the hiring committee's desk, they read it and think "this leadership role is too important to fill with someone who's never managed a downturn."

> The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great

When I think about it, my family still has photographs from 70 years ago sitting around in family albums.

Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.

Right but that's partially technology and partially habits.

My wife literally has track of zero printed / film photographs she ever took. She's got zero clue where they might be. Not even "shoe box somewhere" :->

Whereas, I have all my photos of last 20 years (since I first took a digital shot) chronologically sorted in folders by year then event (e.g. "Photos/2022/HalifaxTrip2022") on my NAS. It's barely any effort to organize in that way (no fancy tagging or sorting, just year and event, or generic yearly photos /photos/2022/2022_Photos as catchall), yet Typically it takes me seconds to minutes to find some obscure photo somebody remembers or wants, and near instantly for big events like trips, birthdays etc.

It's all about how much one treasures those photos / how obsessive compulsive one is :-). There's certainly ways to manage digital photo libraries, whether manually like I do, or automagically like Apple or Google do.

(we also print albums through Costco of fun trips etc. Nothing about digital prevents that)

To be fair though, When it comes to discussion about cloud and gaming though, it's an utterly disingenuous comparison. I fully and permanently own and control my digital photos in an universal format and can switch and back them up from provider to provider seamlessly. This is empathically triply not the case for stadia games.

> Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.

The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.

As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.

Well, I still print photos and I still listen to MP3 files.

The difference is that photos are conveniently took from my phone and that MP3 files are conveniently downloaded from a certain major Video Streaming website by a company with a name that is a reference to math. Every time I listen to those MP3s I make sure to watch some ads somewhere first.

Also, I get DVDs from the public library and use Handbrake to convert them so I can stream them on the living room TV from my NAS. When returning the DVDs, I, of course, I email the video files back to the library.

I literally just dusted off this same bookmark and lo and behold, you beat me to it by four minutes.

Great minds think alike

People do cloud games all the time. Steam and geforce now and xcloud are great. We just don't trust Google because they don't give a damn.

Stadia was never marketed much and always had a tiny library with no cross play. The moment Nvidia stepped up, Stadia was dead.

Stadia has crossplay on several games now, though I absolutely agree their marketing has been an embarrassment.

All I could think during the entire pandemic was how Google should be showing off how easy it is to play games on Stadia. Lower the initial barrier to entry just a smidge and it could have been as simple as texting a link to your family groupchat and then you're all playing a game together in your browser. Even grandparents can figure out how to click a link in an email to open a webpage.

Maybe better said as 'several games provided on stadia have crossplay'. I wonder if there is a better model of a user buying a license for a game, specifically a non-'live service' style game, and being able to use that on any platform that they provide the game for. I find myself buying two copies of more than a few games these days. Mostly picking it up on a more mobile platform like the switch after buying it on the pc.

I've seen this model work, primarily on digital tabletop games and their DLCs. Like you might have to buy the base game on each platform (which is usually pretty cheap) but then all the expansion packs are tied to your game account and work anywhere.

I think Uplay works similarly, and you can cross play and cross save with your sub on any device.

Microsoft GamePass is moving towards a similar direction, where your sub lets you cross play and save between PC, Xbox, cloud, and Android (via the cloud).

I dunno why Google never bothered doing that. Stadia tech wise is actually really impressive and comparable to nvidia's offering, with much better UX, but they just gave up almost immediately after launch. What a missed opportunity :(

Yeah, that was always the dream, but I don't know how they botched the execution so hard. All the technology for that was already there, especially with their controllers and Google TV, but they just never finished connecting the dots. Why? It beats me. They got 80% of the way there and then just... stopped caring?

It's like they had a team of awesome engineers who built the thing but... no gamers? Like it just seemed that nobody at Google, on or off the Stadia team, actually wanted it to grow beyond tech demo status. Their library is still laughably small, years later, and only very very few games offer crossplay.

3 years is “years to come”

I am slowly moving all my customers/clients away from Google Analytics, mostly to Matomo. Couldn’t be happier. Some clients can also diversify their ad spending to other platforms. Google needs to start feeling what “customer service” means, for now it has none.

I didn’t even realize Stadia required you to actually buy games. I assumed the whole point of streaming is you pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to content. The business gets a cashflow it can securitize and sell on Wall St., and the customer gets unlimited content access, everyone’s happy. Really weird that Stadia required you to (also?) buy each game you wanted to play. If not for that, they never would have had to answer difficult questions like this.

The monthly fee is optional, you don't have to pay it to be able to stream games you have paid for.

It gives you access to a library of additional games you don't have to buy.

Interesting. I wonder why not just have a monthly fee for unlimited streaming, and no other costs to play. No purchasing of games or anything like that.

And if they need more market segmentation, then offer an additional premium monthly fee that gets you early access to upcoming AAA games or some other similar value add like that.

It's just weird they decided to make some games unlimited and some for purchase. Maybe that was the best deal they could negotiate with the publishers, who knows.

He's not wrong. All my games are in the cloud and it is great; it's just not Google's cloud.

You know why I keep buying stuff on Steam? This is why... It is putting all the eggs in single basket, but at least it is the sturdiest and oldest basket.

It helps that Valve is privately owned and thus less likely to chase growth over other things.

Hopefully when the current owners age out the new leadership will continue as it is.

Honestly, I have no idea what the hell Valve is chasing. They don’t need to chase growth, it comes to them :P

valve is worried about being made irrelevant by Epic Game Store, by whatever facebook uses to distribute games, by amazon, etc.

There are plenty of companies who already run or could run a competitor to steam, and slowly they could eat their lunch. Epic Game Store bought exclusives and gives away coupons to bolster their market share. IF everyone starts burning cash for market share, Valve will have to figure out a new way to compete.

Until then its sort of business like normal.

With Steam you can basically make your own personal Stadia with the steam link app, no need to re-buy any games again and no need to rely on anyone else's cloud services (as long as you have a decent connection and PC)

I backup all the games I have on Steam locally. If they ever go under, I will get a DRM crack.

I saw something the other day that really struck home on this: for any given software technology you encounter, your best estimate is that it's halfway through its useful lifetime.

I know some TED level influencer had some story about basically everything in mail order catalogs from 100 year ago is still for sale somewhere today, so maybe it's wrong, or maybe software is just more prone to vanishing.

In addition to Steam, I have GOG and Epic linked to my Steam Account, they sync my Steam purchases in their library if the publisher allows.

So I would imagine if Steam did go under, they would all be clamouring to help users transition to their platforms.

Notice how even after all that bloviation he doesn't actually answer the question.

>Theres nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't

Why can't everything be licensed directly from the right owner of a game so that the license of a game can be transferred from one streaming service to another?

why allow people to pay once when people will pay more than once ? their logic

> Exactly how we've been doing with gMail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos.

Assuming the rumor about Stadia is true, then in hindsight, this is directly tarnishing the reputation of those other products. Every canceled product does, but it's strange to see it in writing. Although I wouldn't give this comment much weight, it's clearly dodging the answer.

Thanks, I googled for a minute trying to find that quote but couldn't remember it exactly.

>I hear you.

If you read this - run. Or ignore everything that comes after as it's filled with lies.

“You will own nothing and you will be happy”

Hahahahaha you called it

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