Google is shutting down Stadia | Hacker News Reader

Google is shutting down Stadia

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2,090 pointsvyrotek1,712 comments

Just a couple of months ago.

"Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro."

https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

So that was a lie

Probably the reason they had to give refunds, or they'd get sued, and this would be evidence #1 against Google

It’s really a lie if everyone knows it is a lie thou?

Yes it is.

It was a joke

In the current zeitgeist it was a poor one.

Blatant lies are destroying nations.

Of course it is, and it's just a blatant one at that.

What is the social media person supposed to say in this case? "we're working on a blog post about Stadia shutting down that'll be released in 2 months"? Even if Phil Harrison himself were the one running that Twitter account, he probably knew it was destined to shut down but didn't have anything official on when or the details of the shutdown.

How about nothing?

Something evasive in the vein of "Stadia represents a significant investment and Google has not announced any plans to scale back Stadia. We can't comment on rumours and speculation."

"Good night, Stadia. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

Fittingly, piracy would’ve served consumers better than Stadia did.

> What is the social media person supposed to say in this case?

If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.

"We're proud of our Stadia experience and we are working hard on projects for it." That would not be as misleading as we are not going anywhere.

Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being paid not to realize the obvious.

There are also those who knew it was at risk and in danger but thought that it could be saved with hard work and a little luck and were working toward that end.

After negative news, it’s pretty safe to assume thr opposite when PR / Marketing says something like “we wont be shutting down” or when a CEO says “there wont be any layoffs”.

If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.

A company I worked for moved from the Suburbs to downtown in the city I live in. Local news broke the story right when the deal was signed with the building contractor. For weeks on end they denied it, until they didn’t. Surprise we were always lying to you!

They usually couch it in weasel words such as "we have no plans to conduct layoffs at this time" rather than an outright lie.

That is an outright lie if they do have plans for layoffs.

Oh no, they have a plan to create a plan for layoffs, but as of right now there is no plan to layoff employees.

More realistically, "We don't have a plan for laying off employees at this time. Our plan is for laying off employees next month."

"at this time" just needs to refer to when the layoffs are happening rather than the existence of a plan.

No, that is also lying.

As a general rule, I tend to invert any sentence any manager ever gives me.

Companies, governments, and politicians do not say things to inform you about what is happening or what they are doing. They say things to produce in the listener the state they desire, whatever that may be, and they have few limitations as to what they will say to do that. (Not quite "zero", but definitely "few".)

The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more information. And the amount of time that "more information" outright contradicts the nominal content of the statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the nominal content.

I hope this becomes common knowledge and starts being taught in elementary schools.

I wish. People talk big about "critical thinking" but critical thinking curricula still tend to focus on the nominal content of claims. Motivation of the speaker and their desired goals is not an incidental concern to be briefly covered, it's the core of the skillset.

Of course asking people teaching "critical thinking" to arm the students with a toolset that can be turned against the teachers is a pretty tall ask. I've had teachers who could take that level of heat, and props to them, but I've certainly had teachers that simply couldn't.

Excellent point!. I agree typical critical thinking courses seems to be about logical/mathematical consistency. I find a follow the money approach works much better in real life situations.

This gets confusing when you consider public companies, whose shareholders are also the targets of public statements (like tweets saying "no we won't shut X down"), and there are (well, supposedly) legal limits on misleading public statements by public companies.

Unfortunately, many people let their political beliefs interfere with their use of this principle; if one institution('s representative) lies, then it's just an isolated incident or there was a good reason, but if another institution does, it's because that institution (possibly including all institutions in that class) are "evil".

> Companies, governments, and politicians

More broadly, this applies to any hierarchical authority system. The amount of agitprop is proportional to the number of levels between you and the person speaking, and the amount of truthful and not misleading information is inversely proportional.

How many times has MS said "Xbox is not shutting down."?

The corpo doth protest too much. If they have to say it, it has to be a lie.

Yes. Stadia execs lied to their own employees. It's a pattern for the company.

This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”

https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-stu...

I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits.

But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit).

At least with the mushroom treatment though you end up with some very tasty and healthy products!

I am not a product.

> I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits.

That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with this case. It gives all of us (internal employees, outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of an Alphabet executive.

I am at the moment trying to get an appointment with a doctor to tell him the same thing to his face.

What you shouldn’t do is enumerate all of the potential side effects in vivid detail. That’s the WebMD curse. But if someone wants you to look at your work you should look at your work, not blow them off on the phone. That’s just more arrogant asshole behavior, which contributes to White Coat Syndrome.

What are we going to call WCS for mega corps with short attention spans? Because I think we need one.

Google Syndrome fits well

I found much more peace as an employee by accepting that all executives lie to some degree

In their circles it’s called “controlling the message”, “not causing panic”, “simplifying” etc. They often simply do not believe it’s lying

I try to work for companies that aren't openly evil.

The greatest idea since sliced bread... too bad that leaves a vanishingly small pool of potential work.

"Working as Intended"

Pull Request: Remove "Don't be evil" from the Code of Conduct.

you best bet of doing that is spinning off your own company. I unfortunately cannot afford to do that.

I think it's realistic to assume that this happens but it doesn't mean it should be accepted. How can you trust in the leadership of someone you know will lie whenever they think it will get them a slightly better outcome? Execs like that are not leaders and they should not be in those positions.

> How can you trust in the leadership

You shouldn't. At best, they are fellow travelers. At worst, they aren't accountable to you, and their incentive structure usually does not drive them to behave ethically towards you.

Execs aren't paid to lead, they are paid to deliver business value. Ethical leadership is often incidental or counterproductive to it.

In this case, the execs were paid to do everything possible to promote and grow the product. And that's what they did.

They should probably try implementing OKRs at Google. I heard it helps with transparency.

Surely these executives will be severely reprimanded for their lack of integrity, lest employees throughout the company begin to assume that such behavior is the standard.

Actually, the Stadia management were this close to being shitcanned for failing to live up to Google ideals. The only thing that saved them was when they announced that their group had already pivoted to a promising new product idea featuring a built-in messaging client.

Upvoted because I had to think twice if this was sarcasm.

My very first TGIF after my noogler one, I sat behind some disgruntled employee who kept yelling at the stage about how the execs were lying to us.

I thought it was fairly rude and also I thought the execs were simply using careful language. After attending a bunch more TGIFs, I finally realized that nearly every exec had a very specific way of presenting things that sort of made their work sound perfect, even if it was shit. You can see an example in "An Update On Google Reader" or "Advancing our Amazing Bet on Google Fiber", or even this one.

Was it Vic "OKR=1.0" G?

No, way before that. The very end of Google Classic era.

I doubt the social media guy even knew. They were posting promotional tweets just 2 days ago.

Source: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566

It's an employee doing a job. The job was to lie to the public for short term gain. Don't have to blame the employee, do have to blame the management.

Why would s/he? S/he is prob. 10 levels below the actual decision maker and sometimes is not even a fulltime employee.

I doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.

But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain.

So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.

Publicly, knowingly uttering bullshit of which you know it's false, or has a high probability of being false, is simply called lying.

I agree, but don't see the relation. Who specifically do you believe publicly said something knowing it was false?

Like... maybe? Why does it have to be a lie instead of incompetence? They may have totally thought that back then, then changed their mind?

It's Google. Everyone knew the second Stadia was announced that it would die. It wasn't even a particularly good example of a game streaming service. If you work for Google and were convinced that Stadia was secure for the future, you should reconsider the reality you live in.

So... Just to get this correct, the social media person who probably isn't privvy to plans affecting their job in two months should have written something along the lines of "were told it's going to be ok, but who even knows with Google"?

That would actually have been hilarious.

Maybe PR teams shouldn't get a free pass to say whatever they want. If your PR team can just lie to the public due to "ignorance" it becomes very very profitable to lie to your own PR team.

They could just say "we don't comment on future plans" instead of lying to increase sales, aka committing fraud.

I've used GeForce Now and Stadia was a lot better than it on my iPad/WiFi

What service is better than Stadia at actually running games in the cloud?

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on Stadia.

From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.

> When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”

I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company which respects you; you’re worth it.

TBF, if Mcdonalds paid people 100k at age 23 to flip burgers, employees would put up with a lot more BS as well. And that salary for a google newgrad is low balling.

Unfortunately there's a reason teams and people get put on "Double Secret Probation". If consumers find out the team might get shut down they start relying on them less, at which point the probation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise.

They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover.

That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.

At this point it's standard fair for Google, in my opinion, a large reason this ended up being unsuccessful was that people were worried it was going to be shutdown.

Oh I’m totally on Team Popcorn at this point, I’m more talking about “hey kids, copying a Google is not the ticket to success”.

Being caught saying “don’t worry” just damages their brand more. What they really need is to declare some things as sacred cows. But you can’t do that after you’ve already lied using the same phrasing.

I can’t believe that I’m defending Google, but this time at least they offered credit or refunds for any purchases. Google not doing this in the past has made me extremely hesitant in paying for new Google devices that feel risky. This will alleviate that worry a bit

It's a very common problem in software that we target 'better' instead of 'good'. Or as we used to call it, "sucks less." It doesn't help that we keep trying to 'disrupt' domains that had no software or had software written by people who know how to write critical systems.

It does sound like they're trying to do better, but it was a long time coming and this still isn't good behavior.

I don't see how this is bad in the consumer's perepctive. Those that didn't use it lose or gain nothing. Those that did use it get their refunds. They don't care about the dev side.I don't think it's bad behavior to shut down something no one watns.

The exec communication with the devs is unfortunate, but a separate matter.

I mean, HN is read more often then memegen/ I guess they know now.

"Stadia is not shutting down" admits no "careful parse.

It depends on when they made the decision. Changing your mind doesn't mean you previously lied, it just means you were wrong. Lying needs intent.

This is an extremely dangerous attitude. Truth matters, not just whatever feels good.

If we collectively stopped believing non-binding statements with no skin in the game, these bullshitters would stop bullshitting.

Yep, damage control that is: "It's okay if your head's in the clouds. There are video games here." We all saw though that, and we knew it was a sinking ship.

But this wasn't really a surprise since this information was given to me from the future [0] and I said exactly was was going to happen and predicted it a year before [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255

From a cynical ex-Google employee, this would have translated to “Stadia still has more promotions to squeeze out”. Today’s message signals that it’s done its squeezing, permanently.

I mean, it was probably a lie. But, also, things may have changed. It's not like Google didn't just go through a big hiring freeze and budget process.

They really don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to abandoning products.

Everybody here knew it wasn't going to play out that way, so surely everybody in Google knew it too. Or should have known. Either they were lying, or were effectively brainwashed by the corporate environment (a real possibility.)

Delusional thinking isn’t just for random people living under a bridge.

Also, orgs have multiple levels and various individuals in leadership who have their own plans that never quite perfectly align. Miscommunications happen, and corporations aren't a single entity.

This just gave me a flashback to everyone working for WeWork pre IPO

Nobody I knew there was willing to understand how all of Wall Street was making fun of them and the valuation attempt.

It is a really low-stakes prediction, for us to guess that Google is going to cancel a product. Internally I bet they had people making good-faith arguments in both directions.

Not a pay product though. How many pay products have they shut-down cold-turkey, with no new service/product to migrate to?

My point is less that we are more likely to be correct, and more that without seeing the sunk costs first hand it is easier to say "lol it is google they will cancel things!"

For sure people say that. They don't differentiate between pay and free google. It's just google.

So yea, the meme-machine will just dismiss it as 'lol it will be cancelled in a year because google'.

But Stadia might be 1 of 1 ..maybe 2 or 3 pay services they've ever cancelled.

The company really did go from "hire like mad" to "oh shit cut stuff" seemingly overnight. It would not surprise me if Stadia was an easy way for some SVP to slash their budget to appease Finance.

That tweet was from two months ago, long after everyone saw the writing on the wall with respect to the economy. As another commenter responded, the first tweet in response to that was:

> When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months could you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the controller first? It's a good controller and I'd like to be able to use it.

In other words, people didn't believe them from the get go. Whether it was an outright lie, or a George Constanza-esque "It's not a lie if YOU believe it" message, is pretty irrelevant. Everyone knew or should have known it was BS.

Many companies, especially publicly traded ones, do overt knee-jerk reactions when there are big stories of economic downturns.

I actually think it's an intentional behavior designed to show investors that they are being studious relative to economic conditions (aka, covering their asses to avoid shareholder suits).

It's likely that the person tweeting this believed it, because it's what they were told..

I'm going to bet most of the Stadia team found out at the same time as, or shortly before, everyone else.

Most certainly not a lie. The person tweeting that was a member of the Stadia team. If they didn't believe Stadia is going to be fine, why wouldn't they jump ship earlier?

Hmm, I suppose it's interesting to consider who lied in this instance. It was demonstrably false, but it seems possible the person tweeting it didn't know this at the time.

However someone at Google let that tweet go out with no intention of fulfilling that promise, that most definitely does constitute lying.

In the UK, you know a minister will be sacked soon when the Prime Minister publicly announced they "have her full confidence"...

Same for German politicans

And football managers.

wrong. german parasites can literally do what they want. they get away with (almost) everything.

This is Google we're talking about. They shut everything down eventually.

Does anyone think we'll ever see the sunsetting of something huge like YouTube or GMail?

Yes.

Not unless the products start failing or human population grows 10x and they don’t keep up relative to other Google products. Google takes products seriously when they have huge user counts and huge user counts relative to their competition. Their problem is their inability to seriously commit to growing valuable new products to that size.

Nope. Huge products will be fine as long as they stay huge.

Google doesn't support new products enough to become huge and don't seem to have a cohesive plan to support a range of products in the long term.

I'm probably someone who could have benefited from Stadia but I feel like they never marketed to me in a way that even got me to try it. And the fear that this was just another experiment by Google didn't have me seeking it out on my own especially for the up front costs.

In 1997, I'm not sure anyone could imagine an Internet without GeoCities.

For GMail? yes.

For YouTube I think it would be something like it will slowly turn into CNGooGSNBC and be heavily editorialized where you need to work with an AI assisted nebulous entity for weeks before you can upload content.

I agree with this. At some point YouTube could possibly only allow monetizable content, meaning anything that veers even slightly out of mainstream, or covers topics that advertisers don't want to associate with, will get deplatformed.

"UsTube" should be the new name.

GMail is their way to push Google accounts. Since that's extremely useful for tracking, I don't see it going away.

100%. Not sure which will go first but my guess is youtube will fold into another product. Gmail will start breaking and be sunsetted. It would not surprise me to see search sunsetted.

Those are part of the core ad business. I could see anything that isn't an ad driver being shut down. Eg. GCP or Google docs

If Gmail goes, most people on earth will be locked out of their online accounts

Too big to fail. If Google ever collapses the G in 'GMail' will come to mean Government.

Nope because both are extensions of ads. Both are bought and managed within google ads manager. Basically a product lasts at google ifnm it can reach ad placement scale. Docs is useful for it's data and to help personalization of ads so it stays. Most of the tool shutdowns couldn't have ads or didn't assist ads effectiveness.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1361/

There are 2 classes of product that I don't see them shutting down.

1. Those that make lots of money, e.g. search, youtube, maps. Unless that changes of course.

2. Those that are heavily used internally at Google, e.g. gmail, docs, calendar. They are always going to want those as internal tools. I guess they could make them internal only, but how much more work is it to maintain the public version too given it already exists?

Google+?

youtube is backed by ads. Google has issues making anything that is not ad based.

Only if they stop paying in to the ad machine

Of the two I'd bet on gmail being the dead man walking. They should full circle it and announce on an April 1st

Somehow Blogger persists almost 20 years post-acquisition.

I still like Blogger.

Sometimes I wonder how it keeps getting updates while other stuff dies. Maybe the people responsible for it are on a different career track. I'll probably put my next blog on there. 10+ years of "Blogger is doomed!" haven't amounted to much as the graveyard fills with newer, hotter applications.

It's probably running in some PHP server somewhere that pings but nobody knows where it is

It's actually co-hosted with the coffee machine in Mountain View.

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term.

Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their cash cow, Google is in trouble

> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company.

People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.

You can’t blame this on Google’s size. Neither Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon (Disclaimer: I work at AWS) have this problem.

Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile.

Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.

Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.

It's less size and more lack of competition. As dominant as the companies you listed are, none of them completely capture a market to the degree that Google does with search and ads.

Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.

Google’s “market” isn’t search, it’s “selling ads” and capturing attention (mostly YouTube). Google is under assault in ad selling by Facebook who knows more about you and Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS) who knows your buying habits.

You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads.

On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)

You know this is not a good take, right? This is like saying Amazon's market isn't e-commerce, it's taking payments.

Amazon makes most of its profits from AWS. It’s also making plenty of money these days from advertising.

Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for?

When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy.

In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.

>In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.

Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown.

I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.

Does anyone love Google search or does it just suck less than the alternative?

Search for “bicycles” on Google with Ad blockers turned off. How do you like the experience?

Maybe we're seeing different things but I do not mind it at all. It is exactly what I would expect for such a broad query. In fact, I was prepared to see way worse things.

It sucking less than all other alternatives is a pretty good reason to like it. There is a lot of vested interest in good search engines and the fact that no competitors, even from behemoths like Microsoft, have been able to do any better shows that it's a hard problem to solve.

I think a lot of people are naturally resistive to change and are stuck in the past when the web was simple and 10 links was all it took. Nowadays, the web is so complex that it's nearly impossible to tell what you want to see off a broad query. In my experience, it guesses very well and the complaints about Search having gotten worse are really complaints about the Internet as a whole having gotten worse. What used to be dedicated websites are now uncrawlable pages on a large company's website (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc). I personally like all of the "onebox" results that don't require me to go elsewhere -- search has become much faster for me in that way.

I actually really don't like Amazon's retail site. It's complex and it's not clear why I see so many repeated identical items as separate listings. One a single listing, I can choose alternative sellers than the default. Is that linking to other listings or is still the same listing? Who knows. It hasn't changed or improved in decades.

Microsoft choked their lead in the console market to Sony despite being much larger with bigger pockets. PlayStation 4 and now 5 both outsell Xbox 3:1 or so despite Xbox 360 having outsold PlayStation 3 and had loyal customers. They also choked with Mixer, losing to Google (YouTube), Amazon (Twitch), and Facebook (Gaming). Windows Mobile was a complete failure. It is not a "Google problem". Google (and Apple and Facebook) hate is just trendy on HN.

Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware. They are all about subscriptions and streaming games.

Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other companies to see how well they were able to move into new markets

- Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers, accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have been getting rave reviews.

Apple Arcade even isn’t in any danger of being cancelled.

- Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong second, at least they didn’t cancel XBox and I bet their streaming game service will be around for awhile.

- Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail, AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices

- Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?

And then you have Google.

- YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a profit standpoint

- it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the time of the trial, Android already had the dominant market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine. That has to be more than Google is making from Android per year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...

After all these years, everything that Google has don outside of advertising has been a failure as far as profitability.

>Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware.

Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine.

>But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?

I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example, is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned.

I don't think every company needs to have the same type of business model. Google became popular because it made really great products that were all free* which increased adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would have never gotten popular if they had charged for it right away. I'm not convinced there's a single right path.

>it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit

It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways, not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for making money from the Play Store.

> Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine.

Look at the diversity of profitable lines that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have gone into over the last two decades and compare to the number of failed attempts that Google had at trying to diversify.

I’m sure Oracle was counting Ad revenue coming from Android when calculating profits.

To be fair, Microsoft had that problem long before Google had it, with different parts of the org going their own way, there's even that famous image comparing org structures (https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=750&for...).

I remember back in the days you could have three or so different image viewers created by Microsoft installed on your machine (Office had its own for example). Then there was MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Lync.

That being said, I think Google far surpassed Microsoft in creating things that get shut down and have been for the last decade at least while Microsoft has improved on that front.

What things has Microsoft tried that have been outside of their four or so verticals that have been around for ages (Windows, Office, Cloud, Gaming)? Google alone has nearly 1:1 mappings: Android/Chrome OS, Workspace (Docs, Gmail, Calendar, etc), Cloud, YouTube Gaming and Stadia just died), on top of all the other products with >1B users like Drive, Photos, Play Store, etc. Microsoft even failed with Windows Mobile whereas Google has the Pixel line.

Microsoft's Gaming and Cloud 'verticals' have not 'been around for ages' (or maybe I'm just older). They're a relatively new* creation of Microsoft which actually do well. Now, we could say Gaming is as old as Google, so that's a wash. But Google should never have been so far behind in Cloud. It should be their native arena! It's a huge loss, I suspect thanks to internal politics.

* Gorillas.BAS and Microsoft Flight Simulator aside.

** There's the Dynamics line, which I don't think really counts under 'office' given its complexity.

Xbox launched in 2001. I would call that "ages" personally. Cloud is newer I agree.

>But Google should have never been so far behind in Cloud.

I emphatically agree. Google had kick ass infrastructure way before most players and squandered it on internal use only. I think it's one of the biggest blunders in its history and shows the lack of vision in places.

As a standard disclaimer: I work at AWS in Professional Services. What I’m not going to do is criticize GCP. First it would be gouache to criticize a competitor and second I’ve never had any interaction with GCP as a user either personally or professionally. I have had experience with both AWS and Microsoft both from an implementation/hands on keyboard developer and from a more strategic business standpoint as a dev lead (Microsoft) and cloud architect (AWS) sitting in a room with CxOs dealing with vendor relationships working at startups.

That being said, despite the old wives tale that AWS came about because Amazon decided to sell its excess capacity, AWS was started as a separate initiative with completely different infrastructure when Amazon wanted to enter a separate vertical. It was led by Jassy (not technically from a business development standpoint) - a sales guy who looked at the market and went after a need (I refuse to say by “Working Backwards”). Every initiative that Amazon and AWS has starts with the business case, six pagers, PRFAQ’s etc with product managers and program managers involved. I even had to do a couple to get “funding” to spend time on a couple of features to a popular company sponsored open source solution I wanted to work on.

Being successful in the cloud is all about building relationships, knowing how to meet large organizations where they are, not being stuck on “the one true way”, developing and grooming a network of “partners”, etc. It’s very high touch. Microsoft has been doing that since the 80s and AWS had first mover advantage.

I won’t speak to GCP in particular. But none of the above characteristics is part of Google’s DNA.

Microsoft went from “Windows Everywhere” and selling boxed software to cloud, cross platform development, Office365 subscriptions and Office working everywhere, embracing open source to the point where even SQL Server runs on Linux, Azure and gaming,

Pixel - Google sold less than 1 million Pixels last quarter

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-selling-more-pixels-202...

Apple sells more phones than that in 2 days.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299153/apple-smartphone-...

Android is not really all that profitable and Google still ends up paying Apple $18 billion+ a year to actually reach mobile consumers with money to spend. The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years

https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2016/01/21/oracle-s...

Cloud - GCP isn’t profitable

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...

As far as GSuite, it’s not getting much uptake in the enterprise

https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...

I don't dispute that but this particular conversation was about who creates more and who shutters more and I don't think Microsoft is a good counterexample to Google. It has created some things, it has shuttered some things, but mostly things have stayed the same, same as Google. Apple is probably the one that has created the most lasting things and continues to release new lines of products and services. Nearly everything that has launched has had lasting iterations (except the original HomePod which is a tragedy).

You can say a lot about Microsoft. But no one has ever accused MS of abandoning anything quickly and not supporting its platforms forever - even Zune.

But my comments have basically been around Google not having strong focus and not successfully and profitably entering new markets.

Silverlight?

Silver light was introduced in 2007 and according to Wikipedia saw it’s last release in 2019.

> Android is not really all that profitable and Google still ends up paying Apple $18 billion+ a year to actually reach mobile consumers with money to spend.

So, hear me out. What do you think Google would need to pay Apple if Android didn't exist, and everyone? Would it be the same amount as in reality, or would it perhaps be way more? Pretty obviously the latter. So that delta + Play store sales are the economic value of Android.

> The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years

That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.

A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument you made.

> So, hear me out. What do you think Google would need to pay Apple if Android didn't exist, and everyone? Would it be the same amount as in reality, or would it perhaps be way more?

Considering that Apple has most of the affluent users in every market, would it be that much more?

Apple makes more in mobile from Google than google makes from Android more than likely.

> That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.

Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure. Android already had more market share than iOS by then and was already dominant. How much do you think Apple made on the iPhone during that time period? Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?

> A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument

That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.

> Apple makes more in mobile from Google than google makes from Android more than likely.

Oh, I'm absolutely sure that's the case. But basically every business on earth is less profitable than the iPhone. Are you saying that every other product is a miserable failure due to that?

Note they're totally different businesses. Apple primarily sells premium hardware, Google primarily licenses an OS to other phone manufacturers.

> Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure.

So? Your argument is that Android is some kind of a product failure because it "only" made $26 billion in profit in its first six years. But what you're ignoring is that that is an absurd level of success. It's 8 times all of Amazon in the timeframe. What Amazon product had that kind of a growth curve from zero, ever? I would bet literally nothing.

If you applied this logic consistently, you should be ripping into Amazon's decades-long failure at creating a hit product. But instead you're making excuses about "low margins".

> Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?

Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.

[0] Though obviously Amazon's search engine did fail before being killed, like so many other Amazon products.

> That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.

Ok, I'll stand corrected then. But I still have no idea of anyone could argue that's a failure.

> Note they're totally different businesses. Apple primarily sells premium hardware, Google primarily licenses an OS to other phone manufacturers.

Microsoft licenses Windows to other PC manufacturers, the PC market was much smaller than mobile even back then, do you think they only made $26 billion in profit over the time period licensing Windows? In hindsight, “missing mobile” was the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft. If you were a company right now, would you rather be “Android, Inc” or “Windows, Inc”?

> Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.

Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?

> do you think they only made $26 billion in profit over the time period licensing Windows

Windows was at that point a 25 year old business, not one starting from zero. Why in the world would they have the same profit in that time period? Windows absolutely did not make $26 billion in the first 6 years of its life. Does that make Windows a failure?

I have no idea of whether Windows is more profitable than Android right now. You don't either. But both are clearly incredibly successful products.

Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched? Just a single example of something that made $26 billion of profit in its first 6 years. Should be easy to find, given Amazon has probably launched thousands of products, many in extremely lucrative high margin areas. And when you fail to name one, maybe consider that your theories on how good Amazon is at creating projects and how bad Google is might not be entirely correct?

> Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?

Of course not. Why does that matter? Positive ROI is positive ROI.

> Windows was at that point a 25 year old business, not one starting from zero. Why in the world would they have the same profit in that time period? Windows absolutely did not make $26 billion in the first 6 years of its life. Does that make Windows a failure?

6 years in the life of Windows , there was nowhere near the number of PCs being sold every year as Android devices.

But I can guarantee you that even from the day that Microsoft license the first version of DOS to IBM that it made more per license sold than Google makes from each Android sold.

> Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched?

I see that you refuse to compare Android to its most realistic counterpart - Apple.

The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and even the Apple Watch (Cook said that Apple Watch revenues exceeded iPod revenue a couple of years ago) were all more successful in the first 6 years.

The entire point is that Google hasn’t been able to diversify at all *profitably”.

> I see that you refuse to compare Android to its most realistic counterpart - Apple.

Uh, what? Of course the iPhone is more profitable than Android, and I have already said so in this discussion. If you think that a product needs to reach iPhone numbers to count as successful, I really don't know what to say.

But I note that you are indeed incapable of naming a single Amazon product that was as successful as Android, while still maintaining that Android was somehow a commercial disappointment, while Amazon is a success story. You really don't see the disconnect?

> Microsoft went from “Windows Everywhere” and selling boxed software to cloud, cross platform development, Office365 subscriptions and Office working everywhere, embracing open source to the point where even SQL Server runs on Linux, Azure and gaming,

With the side effect that anyone that cares about their career is in a position on the org chart somehow related to Azure, and the current teams taking care of Windows UI frameworks seem filled with interns and contractors, without any background on Windows tooling history, and our expectations of what they should deliver.

That was sort of my point. Microsoft _used_ to throw a lot more stuff at the wall and see what sticks (I am talking about 10-20 years ago). These days it seems like the effort is much more concentrated with buy-in from the whole organisation (VS Code, .net core, WSL, Azure) and users can therefore put more trust in the company to continue investing into an endeavour.

(obviously there are still exceptions to this, I have lost count on the number of desktop UI frameworks Microsoft has developed in the last 15 years...)

And they are still all supported…

Microsoft has plenty of failures, but they don't hype-and-then-dump them to quite the same extent that Google does. Look at how long they supported the Zune for, for example.

I don't know, that seems subjective. Marketing is part of every successful product so "hyping" is a key part of a product's lifecycle. Sometimes products don't catch on and they have to be killed. It's not any different than the plethora of startups that promise to revolutionize industries and fail to make a single buck. Supporting a zombie product isn't noble in my opinion. Those resources could go to trying something else when it's clear that there won't be any market penetration.

Google announced three messaging products in one year.

They literally left a city streets in ruins after abandoning one of their products.

https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

Google is not some fly by night startup. But people have learned to treat it like one and not depend on their products.

Cough Kin Cough

> Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.

Them going all in on the 'metaverse' is basically 'microsoft missing mobile'-tier. I'm interested in it and even still I haven't seen a single impressive thing yet. It seems like a worse product than VR second-life. They're trying to sell an MMO to people who don't play games.

The internet is already a 'metaverse', and I think the role of our digital lives will continue to expand with increasing proliferation of consumer electronics, barring a major world war or natural cataclysm. But Meta is just trying to force a paradigm shift and EVERYONE sees right through it.

This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google practices because Google can't be wrong.

My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google.

It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But few will claim that let's say Norway will be better off implementing China's political system.

It’s easy to see from the outside that Google is incompetent when it comes to overall product and program management.

Since this is a technical audience, I guess I should clarify that “program management” doesn’t refer to software development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management

This.

And when you refer to pm-Ing in this way I’m reminded of the guy in San Francisco that did all the management for a huge eve online guild and he didn’t play the game he managed all their affects in a spreadsheet and whatever they were using to chat…. And he was making a boatload of human money a month…

I wonder where he is now…

As a Xoogler, Google is an "engineering-first" company and in practice doesn't consider "product/program management" to be part of engineering. Ironically, the origin of formal methods used in program management come from operations research and engineering management -- they are part of engineering, but not seen that way at Google.

Engineering leadership is not judged for their acumen in these areas, as they are separate job ladders, and thus to no surprise there is little cultivation of this knowledge or skill.

The only BigTech company that I’ve worked for is Amazon and there are plenty of articles about how features and products get approved at Amazon.

How does this even happen at any company that isn’t a conglomerate based on acquisitions?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

Before ~ 2007, Google didn't believe in project managers. There were actually no project managers roles (even though some people were probably doing considerable amounts of project management) and the expectation was that engineers would know enough to structure efforts and timelines.

That evolved into a situation where program managers (mostly - programs have a sense of scale right??) exist in most orgs and are critical to keep things aligned. There were (are still?) even internal conferences just for program managers.

It's more like learning to government from Saudi Arabia or another gulf country.

The money printing machine obliterates all economic feedback loops.

And the fact that it seems literally nobody at google is even looking at said loops.

But you know what is needed : is some whistleblower from within google to tell us how the decisions are made for shutting down services…

And btw I don’t even know what stadia is!

Looking at feedback loops means being honest with yourself and accepting you don't know everything. And for most people that's hard to admit. Surely if you got into Google you know almost everything. You just need a little bit of money to execute.

It's a good place to learn real engineering. They know how to build systems. There are some of the best engineering minds on the planet in there.

Only if you very narrowly define real engineering.

Google, collectively, may be among the best (I'm not hazarding an opinion) at solving technical problems.

I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends. Somewhere, Google engineers are dropping the ball there, or are so detached from those problems that their abilities in those skills are untested.

Yeah, that's fair. I'm just trying to discern between building a distributed database system with 5 9's and writing a crud app I guess. I agree "real" isn't the right term for that difference, I don't know what is.

Here's a counterintuitive piece of wisdom: building both is equally hard.

Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most people are not even capable of doing marathons.

But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.

When you're building products, your goal is not run. Your goal is to win.

Nah, it's not. Consultants pump out CRUD apps with 4th rate engineers left and right.

About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.

I'm just talking about engineering. I'm not talking about building products which get market acceptance, which is a lot more than engineering, and might be your point.

some of the most valuable companies on earth are "just CRUD apps", which was the point of the comment above. Knowing what to build is important, which google fails at in most cases. Google has incredible engineers working on stupid projects

Sure, but it's a non-sequitur from my comment.

> About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.

I'm not convinced. I've worked in many industries and many company sizes and I've met smart people everywhere. I think a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD could create these kind of systems if they were in a situation that called for them (hell, it gives you a chance to actually use all that stuff from your CS degree), just as I know for sure that a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD are more than capable of creating a programming language. The bottleneck isn't technical ability, it's being in an environment that will actually pay you to work on that stuff.

Some people convince themselves that Lebron isn't that good, that the guy at the high school across town was almost as good. Or that they can hit a 90 mph fast ball. Or that they could take Mike Tyson. There are all these funny stories of guys wanting to fight Mike, race Michael Johnson etc. They really just can't see how far they are away from the really freakishly talented folks.

Folks like Jeff Dean at Google are really out there. He built a number of systems that very few people were capable of. But you have to be at a certain level to even see it.

> Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most people are not even capable of doing marathons.

> But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.

If we go much, much farther into this analogy, it tells us that for any given agent, one of these races is always going to be much easier than the other one.

If you want to be competitive in marathons at a world level, you need to be East African. If you want to be competitive in 100m sprints, you need to be West African. Which race is easier? That depends who you are.

> "I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends."

Not necessarily. FAANGs have an army of product/project/program managers, market researchers, and other analysts and experts to handle product vision, etc. for the engineering team. That's the big advantage of being a megacorporation: they can afford the overhead of having their employees be narrowly focused specialists.

(It's also why one sometimes see people who leave FAANGs stumble when they join a startup; they're used to having all that infrastructure supporting them and have to adjust to an environment where it isn't there.)

Yes necessarily, as I'm defining my expectations. If Google has made it so engineering doesn't participate at all in product direction, that means they're not letting their engineers work optimally in accordance with my expectations (whatever those are worth); the 'untested' case I mentioned before. Which, as you note, is why in other companies those individuals may not be as able to shine, since they're being measured against a number of other skills that form the holistic whole of "solving business problems", rather than just the subset of "solving technical problems".

And yet those minds managed to build the most hated frontend framework. Not just bad or mediocre. The most hated one.

Now, I'm not denying they are super smart. But you need a mix of book smart and street smart to be successful. Google seems to only focus on books. They are incredible at solving problems. But they suck at picking which problems to solve.

Which framework are you talking about?

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

A front-end framework isn't exactly the kind of thing the engineers I'm talking about work on... there are 10's of thousands of engineers at Google. A good number of them aren't building systems per se. But if you want to learn how to build systems, some folks in there are crazy good.

Might be a bit anecdotal, but I actually hired ex-Googlers for two different startups in the past. I would be hesitant to do it again.

They can indeed be good at building complex systems.

But when we needed simple systems, they would still build complex systems.

When we needed to ship product, they would still build complex systems.

Twice I had the experience where an ex-Googler would promise to rewrite a piece of software from scratch because it had a bad architecture, only to quit/get fired few months later (obviously the big rewrite was not finished by then).

Yup, I believe it.

Come on, Flutter’s not that bad…

Google is a fucked up place in many ways. But our software engineering practices and infrastructure are second to none.

I'm honestly curious how would you know that?

Which metrics would you use to compare one infrastructure to another? Or one eng practice to another.

For example I heard multiple times that in a lot of projects at Google shipping something can take months (and I'm not even talking about search/ads). Compared to let's say Github, that deploys multiple times a day.

Deploying multiple times a day doesn’t necessarily mean “slow to ship”. That’s just how fast your commits make it out. Actually shipping software is almost always not CI bottlenecked but slowed because of social problems.

Google claims its software engineering practices are second to none. Whether this is actually true is a complicated question.

The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this.

Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago. I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me what that is.

The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those.

If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.

The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages."

It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.

"GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great servers to the platform."

Unlike Stadia, I do actually think that killing GCP would destroy the company. So I don't expect the same end outcome.

Right, they're trapped in a terrible position where it's sucking the company dry of its profits while also being necessary to continue or they will lose all credibility with enterprise and developers forever. That said, they could shut down Verily and save some $1B/year.

The thing that is bizarre to me is that Google has absolute shitloads of money. 120B+ in the bank. Megabillions in profit each quarter. Like, they could buy Nintendo for less than half of their cash on hand.

I understand that the market demands infinite growth but internally it feels like horseshit to see the ridiculous numbers and also get told that basically nothing is high priority enough to get funded.

Nothing is high priority enough to get funded because they have a firehose of money coming out of ads, compared to which nothing looks like a good enough opportunity.

Exactly. The IRR in investing more into ad platforms for Google is still higher than any other project so they keep investing in it and increasing their ad revenue. Alongside Meta, they have a duopoly (monopoly?) on that market for now so they are just milking it for all its worth.

You don't just build stuff for the sake of it. It has to be a better investment than what you currently have, and Google doesn't have anything better than doubling and tripling down on ads.

Cloud's losses ($1.8B in H1) are about 4% of the operating income of the money-making parts ($46B in the same timeframe). Sure, a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. But it's hardly "sucking the company dry of its profits".

Much of cloud's real costs are hidden in other parts of the budget, such as global infrastructure expansion.

So you're suggesting that the accounting is fradululent, and nobody figured it out except you? Not the auditors with actual access to the raw data. Not the hedge funds who could have made a pretty penny by shorting the stock and then releasing this information. Not even any whistleblowers who would presumably be eligible for an award.

Or maybe, just maybe, you've just made that up.

291 titles. Not great, not terrible.

>something nebulously magic with AI

And even then I wouldn't place a bet on Waymo producing anything interesting from a revenue perspective for the next couple decades+. And, while I'm sure Google is doing other interesting things with AI--especially from an internal operations perspective--it's not like Google Home is doing anything earthbreaking or that Google search etc. is--from a consumer functionality point of view--particularly differentiated from other major players. And plenty of AI research is happening outside of Google.

Don't forget about shoving Shorts into faces of their paying Youtube Premium users without a toggle to permanently disable it. That will definitely outcompete TikTok any day now!

If they made it possible to cast Shorts like other videos, I might actually use them. I've tapped a Short several times because it looked funny, but it wanted to start playing on my phone instead of the TV. I watch TikTok alone on my phone and YouTube with my wife on my TV, so Shorts just doesn't fit into that routine.

It's mindboggling that you can't cast Google Shorts to a Google Chromecast. My hypothesis is that because Chromecast casting is so buggy and unresponsive (compared to Bluetooth), swiping from one Short to another would be such a frustrating experience that they dare not enable it.

My 2yo smashed my Oh So Smart TV with the remote and I got a spare dumb TV and plugged in Chromecast into it since everything is streams nowadays.

Dear God how annoying it is to use. Buggy, laggy, drops randomly ... still can't play videos from my computer in an easy way.

I forgot how bad Chromecast were since I last used it 5 years ago.

When the original came out ir was practically magic to be able to have the TV on while hanging out with roommates or friends, and all be able to contribute to the entertainment for the night right from your phone...then it didn't improve in any meaningful way, and regressed in others over the following 8+ years.

Really sad with the state of things.

When he broke my TV I was in the store looking for a new one. I had one condition -- there had to be a sane way to write with the remote. None of the TVs had any sane way but used arrows and enter or some cursor marker for the on screen keyboard.

Dunno why none used a T9 type of letter entering system. All remotes but one had number pads. It is really inconvenient to use "Smart" TVs.

So I went with the spare for a while.

Get a Bluetooth keyboard.

I used to maintain the Chromecast app of a decently sized streaming company for years, and oh boy. I damn near lost my sanity working on that thing. The app was broken repeatedly by silent firmware/OS updates pushed from Google, and trying to regression test updates across devices and versions was as close to hell as I've ever been.

On top of that, if you have a Pixel, the only thing it can cast to out of the box is Chromecast. Miracast (which e.g. Roku supports) - nope. Hell, they don't even do video-out over USB-C.

And I remember that it was different back in early Nexus days - they had Miracast, but deliberately ripped it out.

It seems like within the last two weeks they changed how Shorts and Chromecast works, where I'm at least able to cast the video.

I'm still annoyed at the "hover to play" that I have to disable seemingly every few days.

Also they are testing 5 preroll ads now. Idk why as a premium customer I do not have the option to filter out shorts. It is really frustrating. Also I just want youtube with no ads I do not care about youtube music that is bundled with it.

Azure became interesting when it got better integrated into the Windows/AD/Office worlds. You're not having to manually integrate so much anymore.

The way for GCP to compete is to give customers (presumably high level customers) some real deep integration into Search/Gmail/YouTube/Ads/Drive/Maps, including data. That would not only be a killer differentiating feature, it would signal to everyone that Google is serious and won't shut this down on you like they did all those other services.

They probably won't do that, but I'm not sure why they really want to run GCP if not. If they're not going to give customers something only Google can give them, I don't see them capturing much more of the market.

It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?

"More wood, fewer arrows" has destroyed the longevity of Google as a company for anything beyond search/ads

Alphabet seems to have been a mistake, too. Instead of shielding their bets they flounder and wither.

Just terrible strategic thinking.

I’m not sure what bets they should have better shielded. Probably social generally but that seems so counter their DNA.

>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it.

It is funny I was extremely sceptical but I remember all the hype around Sundar Pichai becoming CEO and how it would improve Google. Repeating something similar to what Satya Nadella did to Microsoft. And it wasn't media / VC or submarine PR article hype, it was real hype on HN, by Silicon Valley fellows. And Google wasn't considered "evil" back then, even though nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.

> The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it.

Sure, but you don't get a company working in concert or particularly well if all you have is "go make money"

The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is earning as much money for himself (into his own bank account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if the company is working in concert etc. when Google can coast on ad revenue for many years.

1. Get stock grants 2. Sell it as soon as it vests 3. Apres moi le deluge.

> nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.

I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.

At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.

What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results.

I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.

When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely.

I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...

As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss.

If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.

The search engine is significantly worse than it was even a few years ago.

You'll find plenty of people who support every side of every issue here. You'll also find plenty of people who call out the people who support $BAD_SIDE of an issue as "classic HN" and "Silicon Valley folly". In this case, as in others, it's all in your head.

Sundar Pichai is like (the Hamilton version of) Aaron Burr. He rose to the top by not making noise and survived to be last man standing as the most inoffensive nonthreatening choice.

His goal is to keep the peace. And he's good at it. It's a little bit "game of thrones" in there.

You you’re saying he’s Tyrion Lannister? That sorta checks out…

Lol no no, I think Tyrion drinks a lot more than Sundar... and Sundar certainly doesn't seem like the womanizing type either. But hey, I didn't know him personally so who knows.

Maybe closer to Varys..?

I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.

In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.

> The only metric that most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.

Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.

Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.

Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily…

In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.

Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.

In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful," everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole thing blows over. That does not incentivize responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but in doing so, he loses control.

There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either:

* "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or

* "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies"

He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over.

This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

Why would VPs be interested in using different building entrances?

The lobbies get very crowded around 9 and 5, and so do the elevators near them.

Can't have the executives possibly smelling the rabble.

All executives exit effectively immediately!

At some offices, the exit only doors are in significantly more convenient locations.

The buildings were designed for much more open access prior to security policy changes that made most of the useful paths exit only.

Oh man, is that something that changed in the last few years? One thing I always liked about the Mountain View campus is that every door, no matter how minor, had a badge reader on it, so you could always take the most direct path between two possible points.

At the same time, there were a lot of stories on the internal social network about people walking in behind them, so I kind of get why the policy might have been changed. I would have been one of the people mad about it!

(I posted one of these following-me-in stories once; I unlocked the door and someone pushed me out of the way to go into the office ahead of me, and I didn't see their badge. I tracked down security, they reviewed the tapes, and it turned out to be a legitimate coworker. I shared the story with the angle "this is what you should do if someone follows you in", but I got panned for not doing enough to protect my coworkers. I probably didn't post this, but my takeaway was "if your security depends on me being able to beat someone up that is larger than me, you're already dead". One of the few times the internal social media hive mind turned against me, and it was really really weird.)

I think it was a kneejerk to the YouTube shooter.

There are also now rules about how many badge readers need to be between public and private areas. This turns into a mess in historic buildings that have technically-public stairwells littered throughout. (The Munich campus is particularly bad for this.)

Ah, I forgot about that incident.

In the NYC office, when I was there, we definitely had to badge in from a lot of stairwells. Also, the bathrooms that weren't completely contained in Google spaces had number pad locks on them.

(I was very annoyed when I worked on a floor that didn't have any dedicated Google-only bathrooms; I asked to have the locks removed just out of principle and was told that "people will wander in from the street and set up camp in there." You had to badge into the building though, so I wondered how true that actually was. I wish for once in my life someone would just tell me the truth instead of making something up to get me to go away. "We don't feel like paying someone to disconnect them, and other tenants in the building will complain if we do." That's totally fair!)

There are floors in One Market that are the same and equally nonsensical. The kicker is that Google stocks them with tampons and toothbrushes and all that, even though they're communal, which makes the locking even more silly.

There's an internal social network?

Like, what do people post on it?

There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter, and an internal meme site. Occasionally, some real work (setting up collaborations with colleagues) happens on the social network.

>Facebook and Twitter

That's gotta get axed or Google will stagnate even more than it already is.

Then again, I'm not sure what can come in and usurp its place as a "global-leader-company". Maaaaybe Tesla if every single little thing goes right for them (and that's a stretch)?

Or perhaps, the way things are going lately, a defense company... I hope not.

So... Google Plus is actually one of the company's longest-lived services? The irony.

It can be a massive time sink too. Have seen the debates on there about everything (politics, finances and other random stuff) eat hours out of coworkers days.

> There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter

So they maintain google plus code, but shut down it for general public?

They don't need to be bigger than you either. If someone just pushes you out of the way, and are really a bad actor, they could have a box cutter on them or just be more prepared to confront another person. Are you going to directly confront a person that has you surprised? No.

Sounds like they need to make reporting dead simple. Put an alarm button on every badge reader. Hit the button. Pre-recorded “intruder who did not badge present. Everyone present please wait for security.” Then locks second internal door. Or even better just automate counting bodies vs badging on every entrance/exit. Lots of nfc/face recognition type technology to tell who is who.

I remember when Sundar became CEO the first thing he did was hole himself up in 2000 Amphitheatre Pkwy and block access to all Google staff not in that building. The next thing he did was get bullied by the board and their CFO, but I digress.

In all seriousness, it did seem like Ruth Porat (the CFO) was the real brains of the operation. Sundar is the fall guy.

No manager who leads in demand software engineers will ever be able to change anything unless their reports believe in the vision. The minute things don’t go their way, we can just get another job,

It’s really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the current success of the company to have any type of credibility with employees.

Let’s look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.

- Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from the time it was broke until today.

- Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division from its “real” founding until he became CEO.

- Facebook - still founder led

- Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision for what the “new MS” should look like - completely different than “Windows Everywhere”

There's some bizarre PR campaign going on to try and brand Sundar as the next Steve Jobs: lots of the photos of him looking thoughtful with steepled hands overlaid with anodyne quotes about technology or AI. It's unclear to me if he's much more than a tech billionaire by luck.

No kind of strategy is ever communicated to employees, just defensive + responsive TGIF responses. Truly bizarre.

That's funny. Yes, for me this bizarre PR campaign shows up as promoted content when I scroll through my Google news feed.

>believe in the vision

Which means there has to actually be a vision. As far as I can tell, the vision at google is just to keep making boatloads of money off AdWords, and not really care about anything else.

> making boatloads of money off AdWords

You forgot "and spending it on annual chat apps"

Just think of the dividend they could pay if they admitted they are an advertising company, instead of distracting people with the carousel of "innovation".

Sundar's claim to fame is Google Toolbar for MSIE. It was a big deal at that time. It locked Google search on MSIE and ultimately enable navboost in search quality.

Then he was the product lead on the Chrome team. I don't know if it was him who lobbied Page to create Chrome.

> In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it.

What?? Sundar is the CEO. All the buck stops with him. Why are you pretending as if he doesn't have agency? The problem here is his actions and/or lack thereof, not people under him doing stupid things and he's somehow the victim. He gets paid the big bucks to lead.

That is what the person is saying. I'm not sure what you are questioning here. Sundar has agency and authority and he refuses to use it. This enables his underlings to have free reign.

Ah, then I misinterpreted the post I was replying to and we are in agreement.

This seems like a popular management style at big tech companies. I've seen exactly this kind of behavior at MS too. It's a kind of "pacifist management".

Just agree with everything and everyone so you're not seen as someone who creates conflict. But then just silently ignore or drop issues you don't want to deal with.

Don't take risks or take responsibility for difficult problems so your reputation is clean of any failures.

Jump on board only the largest and most well supported of company initiatives so you can claim success.

And the thing is, I'm not sure it's the fault of these managers that behave this way. I think it's the result of the promo system adopted by so many tech companies. As long as you have some good things to write about each promo cycle and nobody has anything bad to say about you, you can coast your way up the management chain. And with each promotion comes more money. There is no incentives to take risks as it can only hurt your promo chances and then once you're high enough up the chain, why would you risk the huge comp package? Pichai complained about engineers who "rest and vest" but only because that is exactly the behavior incentivized by the company culture and the absolutely stupid promo process and comp structure.

With leadership like that, it's sure that nothing will ever change.

This starts all the way at the interview btw. If you go out of your way to do something extra, you’ll be suddenly judged on it even if it wasn’t originally in the scope of the interview, so you’re pushed to be the most average you can get.

Well said. I rocketed up the chain early in my career for inventing some truly innovative stuff (that's been published in top conferences). Then I fought against stupid shit. I spoke out. I had strong technical opinions. Eventually I was pushed aside and my career has tanked (but rest-and-vest baby...except I'm slowly recovering and still seen as a company intellectual resource). Meanwhile I watch all the mediocre managers keep rising who are "yes, sir" and don't make any enemies. They don't do shit except follow the status quo and build their empires.

It doesn't have to be a huge tech company this is pretty universal even at mid-sized companies.

This isn't just tech per se, if you look around you in society that's literally how countries are governed.

Basically a lot of people have promoted weak leaders all the way up to premierships and presidencies and have pushed out anyone that could potentially criticize them. The result is this shitshow we're in right now.

For anyone reading this deep in the thread: read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. A variations of a few simple rules result in virtually all models of government. And none of them involve technical competence.

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Or watch the CGP grey 'rules for rulers' adaption of it on youtube

I rewatch that video from time to time. It's amazing how accurate that is, despite what academics say.

What do academics say?

This is why democracy is so rad. We can vote out the idiots whenever we feel like it. Of course, we don't always agree on who the idiots are.

Democracy for Realists, 2016

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 112-113

Scholars who have quoted Key’s colorful phrase have mostly failed to note that he used it derisively. “The Founding Fathers,” he wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”

In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times

Even before it could be said that the national Government could do much of anything to improve their condition…. Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

It is still their fault. Personal accountability is the only thing that can improve a situation. At all levels.

When has personal accountability really solved any systemic issues we humans have faced?

So you'd like government regulations?

Answer my question first and I can answer yours after :)

Personal accountability isn't meant to solve problems. It is meant to prevent them by forcing individuals to put something ahead of their own career advancement. In other words, it aligns incentives in favor of preventing problems rather than in favor of solving them - you can only be the hero who slays a dragon if there is a dragon.

The laws around medical malpractice don't fix it when doctors screw up, but they make it a lot less likely for the screw-ups to happen, since those laws force doctors to adopt reasonable standards of care.

My question still stands, when has that really solved issues if they aren't regulated? Personal accountability without regulations is moot, toothless and I don't recall any instance of it ever solving anything.

To me what you are describing is basically regulations. Personal accountability only derives from regulations because there are punishments, in that case it aligns incentives.

Democracies and republics create personal accountability through regulations, since there is no single boss and power tends to come from legislative bodies or the people directly - those people want to provide input. Dictatorships (which companies fundamentally are) do not need regulations and rule-making processes to have personal accountability. Instead, the CEO can determine if you screwed up and fire you (or the dictator can shoot you) if you did. The specter of being fired (or shot) aligns your incentives to "do the right thing" even if the rules are not well-communicated, although you are better at doing the right thing if the dictator tells you what they value and what they want you to do.

Regulations are only one form of personal accountability. Regulations, in theory, create uniformity and transparency. These can be good things. In practice, regulations are often selectively enforced, which leads back to the same situation as in a dictatorship, but with a formalized process of input for the dictator.

I actually disagree with you that malpractice lawsuits are examples of regulation. More often, when something goes wrong and a doctor is involved, there is an argument about whether the doctor was negligent or not. There is no fixed "standard of care" that is written down, only a set of practices that are known throughout the industry. Experts argue about whether negligence occurred or not. There are regulations that the experts can cite in their determination of negligence (some of those rules carry separate penalties too), but you don't need to have broken any rules to commit malpractice. This is a prime example of accountability without regulation.

Marc Andreesen recently has been talking a lot about the professional managerial class (PMC) and how it's causing the principle actor problem. Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot. Nobody really makes any hard and decisive moves because there is much to lose and not that much more to win. This was different when we had companies owned by individuals or families.

Mark @Meta seems to be making bold moves.

Doesn't that pretty much prove the point of the comment you are replying to?

> Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot.

Mark has majority of the voting shares of Meta. He could run it into the ground and still could stay in control.

Yes, but the takeaway isn't that they should start making bold moves, it's that we actually want them to churn out and be surpassed over time. It's the entrenching of them through regulatory capture or predatory behaviour that's bad.

There are still a lot of companies owned by individuals or families. You just don't hear about them because they seldom take the big risks necessary to produce disruptive innovations.

This was one of the reasons why Nokia died. When the organization grew, everything was taken over by middle management whose safest option in any scenario was “Please do not change anything.”

> His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

This is what really sunk Eastman Kodak. The popular wisdom about them missing digital isn’t really true. Heck they owned many of the key patents. But everyone was too busy focusing on growing their little fiefdom for the company to use its assets and market position effectively.

I recall one year the CEO announced he was reducing headcount by some number and the next year it had actually gone up.

"Thoughtful" - what does he mean by that? That he's thinking about it?

It's kind of an internal meme: he says "we have to be thoughtful about this" or "we have to approach this thoughtfully." Almost every tough question from inside Google is met with an answer that contains the word "thoughtful."

It seems to mean "there is no easy win for me in this situation, so I am passing the buck to (presumably) a committee of other people who will think about it instead, or perhaps a power-hungry VP who has a vested interest in making it happen."

Ah so. I had a colleague who would say "I suspect I shall have to think about this."

In retrospect, I realise it was his code phrase for not doing anything at all.

Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash these days it's reflected in their hiring where they don't even know where they want to place people half the time

  > The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be

sounds like... bullshit jobs? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's the problem. Or engineering.

It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks.

Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas.

So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.

> looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem

I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users.

Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.

All corporations are sociopaths, Google is only different in that they think their success is because of their lack of care about users instead of in spite of it.

Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.

I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells nerding out things. Accidentally some of the technologies become useful and popular. But there is no grounds up thought about 'how can we make it useful for customers', in relative comparison to products from companies like Amazon and Slack.

Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead.

Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow.

But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.

Google Analytics was also an acquisition. Look up Urchin Software.

> Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company

That, also it feels like it replicates the college environments like MIT, where projects get funded by the university, large enterprises or the state (especially defense), so when a project gets 'deprecated' its generally due to the project funders wanting it. Since these are the end users, there is absolutely no problem in it - the end user wants it deprecated anyway. As far as I know, Google was born literally from such a state-funded project in MIT. This likely makes Google environment somewhat like a postdoc extension of that environment.

But this attitude is totally destructive when facing end users: Small businesses, individuals, artists, freelancers, NGOs, municipialities - practically ENTIRE rest of the world do not have the large funding and time that Google has inside and outside Google.

They can't risk their businesses getting broken every other year, less every 6 months, because some people at Google thing that v2 is something is 'better' even if its incompatible with v1 of the earlier product, breaking everyone's sites, apps, whatever and expecting them to spend the money and time they don't have to jump through those upgrade hooks.

Worst, are 'deprecations'. They are literal 'f*k you's to end users. Even if some service is deprecated with 3 months' of warning, the small business or individual won't have the time or energy to salvage everything and move it to somewhere else. It will cost a lot to them, and it will affect their income and livelihoods.

So people just avoid Google. Build on or use the most reliable organization that does not literally sh*t on their users whenever they feel like it.

> I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste.

Good example. How complicated analytics have become shows just how little Google understands its users and how little it is able to accommodate them. Yes, there is 'great engineering' behind a lot of the stuff, but the complexit, ugprade hoops, backwards-incompatible updates and outright deprecations literally kill any benefit.

In the case of analytics, all that complication is not really worth wasting time (and therefore money) for upgrading. The products came to a point of looking like phd thesis projects more than anything intended for the end users - you have to spend considerable time even as a technical person to learn the system to be able to even use it at an entry level.

I also have analytics on all my sites. I will probably replace it with something else when the upgrade time comes. No way in hell I want to go through another upgrade hoop in 2-3 years and spend all that precious effort and time for doing that.

> The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

This is very common. Every large company I worked with is like that.

> Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years

This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.

1/10th the size of google (who has 140k employees) is still a massive company.

> Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.

imo, your eye is on the wrong ball. Google died when it's founders moved their attention to Alphabet. Google has moved from a bespoke kitchen to the catering kitchen that keeps the lights on for Alphabet while they build a strategy.

But how much "alphabet" is there still left, other than Google and YouTube? In hindsight it almost seems as if alphabet was deliberately set up as a pasture for the various doomed "moonshots" to die more quietly, with less impact on the main brand.

What moonshot--at least that is known about--is possibly transformative at Alphabet/Google scale? Waymo seems increasingly unlikely both in terms of time-scale and differentiation in a crowded field. And what else is there?

Loon could have made them the ISP for the developing world.

Waymo is very far ahead of the competition. It may be hard to compare given all the fly-by-night competitors but it has had many more years in development and the result is more dependable.

The founders retired in all but name only almost 10 years ago.

It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.

These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades.

Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.

Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.

> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.

The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.

Both are nice, but very niche.

Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.

Nitpick: niche, sure, but the deck isn't very niche. The mobile gaming market is a established market open to all sorts of gamers.

I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.

Yeah, I was saying niche because the Steamdeck experience isn't as plug and play as other consoles.

For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life.

That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.

VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be being reflected in impressive sales.

I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch.

When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.

It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS.

On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.

After having a Steam Deck for a bit I really really hope either Valve or some other decent controller company like 8bitdo makes a controller with the same style of setup. The dual haptic trackpads+paddle buttons combined with the customizability is incredible. To me it is easily the biggest leap in controller tech since the analog stick with the N64.

I've never used the original Steam Controller and I still think the dual analog stick setup is better for some games but having the trackpads is good for many others.

It should be noted that Sega released their analog controller for the Saturn before Nintendo released theirs.

And Atari released theirs back in 1982.

was that controller really analog though?

The Atari 2600 had a digital joystick. The Atari 5200 was completely analog. If you tear the controller down, there's a complex mechanism that links the stick to two rotational potentiometers. It's similar in outcome to modern analog thumbsticks, but the mechanism is completely different (and is MUCH bigger).

The 5200 joystick didn't self-center, though. The only centering force was from the rubber boot. This ended up being advantageous in a game like missile command, but is widely seen as the Achilles heel of the controller.

>Secondhand prices are through the roof.

Really? I never use mine - guess I'll have to look at selling it!

I might have overstated that. Looking at eBay "sold" prices, they seem to go for anywhere from 30 USD (controller only, no accessories) to over 100 USD (used, but in box with accessories) or 200 USD (sealed in box). But even then, there's a lot of price variation - there are sealed controllers for as low as 130 USD.

I'd argue this to be a pretty dated take on Valve's strategy, personally. Gabe stated it was a hedge over 10 years ago, in response to the risk of Windows 8 moving to mandatory Microsoft Store:

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/26/windows-8-i...

Obviously none of that came to pass, we are two more Windows releases on and much has changed since. It is serendipitous the tech built is so great for delivering a portable experience - I think Valve's actions and words demonstrate it to be far more committed to the Deck than prior efforts, I don't see this as hedging bets. And why wouldn't they? At this stage they appear to have a hit product on their hands.

In 2022, Microsoft and Valve have strategic partnerships too, which certainly wasn't the case in 2012:

> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645250/microsoft-xbox-g...

> https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22952086/valve-microsoft-...

> https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/25/22550103/microsoft-new-wi...

Yes, I should have been clearer. I meant that their Linux investment started out as a hedge, but over time they were able to pivot it to something else.

I'm not sure what the impetus was for the Steam Deck. I could see it as a hedge against anticipated future, dwindling laptop sales. I could also see it as an attempt to expand into the same space that the Switch occupies. After all, with the exodus of Sony from portable gaming, Nintendo's only competition is cell phones.

The impetus is it’s an obvious vehicle to sell more games via Steam? I don’t think it is any more complex than this.

AMD finally delivered a chip that can make the dream of desktop-ish performance in a handheld work. That simply wasn’t all that possible until very recently.

It depends on who is buying the Steam Deck. If it's people who don't already have a PC, then sure, Valve is broadening their market. But if it's people who already have a gaming PC, then it probably won't lead to a lot of additional software sales.

The VR niche has grown significantly recently with the Quest 2 selling 15 million units. Just today, what I would consider the most promising game/platform in VR released, which is BoneLab. The state of the art VR experience wise in my opinion was Boneworks, and that was only on PCVR, so I'm excited to see where we are headed with VR. It has been a slow-growing niche but it's still fighting on.

They are still pulling off big projects and pivoting well though though steam proton/steamdeck which pivoted from the initial failures of the steambox push

they may not really be in the AAA game business as much but I'm not sure that's a bad thing

> as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.

No company could ever pull off Half Life 3. This game is hyped to death before it's even announced and everyone would come in with sky-high expectations. To make matters worse, everyone would expect that game to be something different and it would be impossible to make even just half of the players happy. There's no point in creating a Half Life 3, it's a guaranteed disappointment.

They could just take the old game engine as-is, give it a new plot and art, and I would beg them to take my money.

And this is how you end with "Jaws 19: This Time It's REALLY REALLY Personal".

This is the opposite of what Valve has always been doing, with one exception being Counter Strike.

I wouldn't mind this, honestly. a game can be solid even on an old engine. just look at how long the Monster Hunter series had been on their old engine before overhauling with World.

Always leave the audience wanting more.

Not if they figure out how to interact with the signals in my brain stem it won't be!

I agree it's becoming sort of pointless to make HL3. As a fan, I'm perfectly happpy with keeping HL3 as only an asymptote and getting episode1, 2, Alyx and hopefully more.

I strongly disagree. First, to adress the grandparent comment, Valve is a private company that is still lead by its founders, so the sentiment does not apply to them.

First, Half-Life Alyx, from the technical standpoint, is a more complex project than a regular AAA fps due to the sheer amount of innovation that was required to make it work. They also developed their own VR set alongside it.

Second, measuring a company's capabilities by how popular their products are is not fair, imo. Activision, Ubisoft and the like have been churning out "blockbusters" for years at this point, essentially packaging the same game under a new title. Are they really more capable than Valve, which has released an innovative product in a completely new field?

Third, the reason Valve does not release HL3 (and this is me speculating) is not because they are unable to "pull it off" - technically, they are, they just did it with Alyx. The real issue is that the amount of hype generated behind the title is so immense almost anything they make would be underwhelming. Their decision to venture into VR complicated matters even further. VR, still being niche, would essentially make the game inaccessible to most of the fans. With valve having developed their own set, it would have looked like an intentional rip-off.

Alyx was the result of an acquisition (campo santo) and it killed their work a non-franchise game "Valley of the Gods" after "firewatch".

Citation needed. Wikipedia at least says that they were acquired while Alyx was in development and that they just joined the overall dev team.

It's an opinion comment on the internet, not a dissertation, but I base it on talking with one person who worked at valve hardware for a time and public information from the ex campo santo people's blogs and things. I could be very wrong and would love to hear from them, but I have a strong "what could have been" for 'valley of the gods.'.

Thanks for explaining. You made a claim outside of your personal experience, so expect to be asked to back it up. I’m not sure why you’re surprised.

Killed their podcasts too, which were good even if they were inveterate hipsters who played the video games you’d imagine Portland hipsters to play[0] and couldn’t pronounce Japanese names.

[0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes

St(r)eam.

Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point.

They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.

Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some point he presumably will want to sell or die.

Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today.

I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.

> I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.

This is absolutely what will happen.

>Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine.

Who knows, this could be how the Machine God is made.

Can't Gabe name a successor among the people he really trusts? Not all companies have to go public and become cash cows for investors.

I’m not ruling that out - naming a successor is much the same as selling - ownership still transfers to an entity which at this time is unknown. There’s all manner of odd ball alternative ownership structures in existence that can be considered, but each of them would be still a transfer of ownership.

Passing to “people you really trust” is not an ideal foundation for an entity which has the potential to exist for many decades.

He has sons. He will pass the company to them. They will decide how it is run. Let's hope he's been a good father.

Someone with actual experience at Valve would be better suited for the role.

I mean, if Valve was just a deli or a corner store sure. It is very likely one of the most profitable-per-employee companies in the history of the world, and probably in the running for one of the most valuable privately-held companies in the world too. We also know Gabe adores making money, so... I think it to be very unlikely it just gets passed to a kid, but who knows.

Being private, we also don't really know how much of Valve Gabe actually owns - there may be other sizeable stakeholders with a say too.

> Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine

Ah, this is what Valve is working on...

>... World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else

This fact reminds me of the resource curse.

My impression is that Google actively tries to hedge. They are aware of the fragility of the ads business.

But it's difficult to set up a business when your baseline is "Google Ads".

I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how it went wrong.

Their cloud is better, or at least I like their interface better, but how do you know they won't just shut it off? Azure or Amazon are safer choices.

they won't, it makes a lot of money, it's b2b, etc.

gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees.

still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a dangerous savant at this point.

People only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better from the perspectives of API stability, customer support, and third party support, aka the primary things cloud customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google invented most modern cloud technology.

Azure has been around for > 10 years. If they’re planning on crushing GCP then they’re taking their sweet time about it.

Sure, but they have only really been on the radar of traditional IT teams for the last 3 or so years.

Why should anybody at Azure care more than anybody at Google? Both are comfortable.

People at companies like this are only provoked to action by what affects company revenue, whether increasing it or preventing loss. And hardly anything can be demonstrated to have direct effect on revenue. (Certainly, unhappy users don't, as Microsoft was first to discover.)

Haha what a joke. First, Azure is around as long as GCP. As someone in tech I can tell you that GCP and AWS are used everywhere and no one is talking about Azure. I think their fast growth as reported in their earnings is due to their office cloud services and not "core" cloud services.

> As someone in tech ...

... you do realize that goes for 99% of people posting here? In my biased experience in consulting for ~4 years, the distribution is more like 80/10/10 for AWS/GCP/Azure.

Yet anecdotally I see an _awful_ lot of Azure use in traditional corporate IT teams looking to move away from onprem...

I’m not, it’s the other problem after the promo issue. Google is an engineering only company, if you aren’t an engineer you’re second class. So engineers see a cool problem like live migration and solve that. But they do an awful job at building a product customers want(product managers), and supporting(customer support, marketing) that.

If you look at stadia, they built the cool streaming platform, but failed to actually sell it.

Wasn't stadia absolutely dreadful at release with lags, bugs, stutter and shutdowns?

>Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else.

$15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.

I was formerly at Google on a team tangentially related to Stadia. A VP told us it was at least a billion dollar investment.

They could have paid me a million dollars to tell them it was a bad idea and saved the other 999 million. Oh well.

I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.

>become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives

I've long struggled to find a way of expressing this sentiment in a few words, but this approaches perfect. Thank you!

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

I'd say he's trying not to be remembered as the "Steve Ballmer" of Google. You know - that second-run CEO who drove the company into the ground while keeping the wall street numbers looking good. Cuz that's exactly where he's heading right now.

I think he knows he needs to fundamentally change the culture of the company. He's been making public statements as such. He knows it's a problem that Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done. And despite this obvious rot, most of the world (like everybody here who dreams of a google job) still reveres Google as an idyllic place to work. Which makes it all the harder for the company to admit to itself that anything is wrong.

Cultural change is really hard. And it's not at all clear that he's got what it takes to do it successfully. Googlers are so pampered that any attempt to push them out of their comfort zone is going to get serious pushback. I say this as a former googler. There was a hilarious post on HN not long ago which I can't find where a googler said something to the effect of "no way in hell my manager is gonna make me work."

The entire company is built around solving HARD problems, not USEFUL problems. Obviously they've pulled off a lot of truly amazing things, but that difference is pretty important when your company's entire revenue stream is still coming from key insights made in the late 1990s. To me it's clear they need to change their promotion criteria, which solidifies this and drives so much of people's energy and bad patterns. But the arrogance built into the culture of "solving the world's hardest problems" means that any changes there are likely to insult the fragile egos of all those snowflakes and cause them to go on strike or make the good ones just leave.

He structured it as Alphabet. As in 26 different companies.

Google can't VC new projects with a 50 billion to play with in excess/above line revenue to fund them a year?

How does google not have self driving car revenue? They should have highway driving (as in trucks on superhighways) solved 10 years ago and been rolling in money.

How does google not have a competitive IaaS offering? How does google not have THREE competitive IaaS offerings? Buy one or two, and have them compete against each other internally and externally.

Why doesn't google have a competitive Desktop OS based on some combination of Linux / Android / Chrome and Macbook pro level hardware?

Their AI products are all dystopian.

ChatsChatsChatsChatsChatsChats.

Why didn't they buy Java/Sun. Stupid. Why don't they buy Keybase? Actually don't then the servers will be shut down.

Silicon Valley is too woke? Start new branches.

What is the biggest recent success of Google? Chrome. Why not repeat that a dozen times over? Take important Open Source software, and make it good, and don't make it utterly dystopian until 10 years later. Linux Desktop? Open Office? WINE? Steam clone on Linux?

You know, why not have a hardware division that can deliver? For IoT, Google Glasses, an actual decent phone, self driving sensors.

Be good at software. Be good at hardware.

What a clown show.

Couldn't agree more. The problem in Google started as soon as it went public. Then "Don't be evil" went through the window and it's all a short-sighted vision driven by making as much money as possible for investors and pay dividends.

This post feels like it's been written by GPT-3. I'm reading a lot of keywords and hot takes and not much analysis.

> Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done

As a user, and customer of some Google services, I don't care about that. They should give a pink unicorn to each Googler if they want to. These are not relevant to me, as the user.

What I care about is the stuff that I am using not getting deprecated on my face because some mba thinks that it is not making enough gobs of cash and they should shut it down and do something else that will make more gobs of cash.

Cherishing and building up user trust. That's what is missing from Google. And that's not the engineers' fault.

> like everybody here who dreams of a google job

I'm supposed to dream of a Google job? Man I've been messing up.

300k/yr with amazing perks for sitting on your ass. Lots of people think that's the best thing evar. Unless you care about, say, building novel things people actually use. Then it's a dystopian nightmare.

Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for companies that are decently strong and have stable growth.

I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up.

In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't someone else there who would screw up more.

They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth stable".

There is no requirement about "solving existing issues" because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough" and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose everything.

Why this profile for CEOs?

These days, everything is amplified and the smallest mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad attention.

If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything up".

That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1]

The danger could be that the companies may become complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the JD) – and they buy out any competitors that get too haughty, as needed.

[1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ), he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones, such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.

Zuck is still there because he didn’t give up control. These companies weren’t wrested from their founders grasp, they were sold

Nonsense. Apple and Microsoft are both objectively thriving under their respective current CEOs, who have both made some tough calls and been responsible for important new products, and both now have sufficient road behind them that we can believe in their ability to call shots for the long term to at least some degree. These companies are not just treading water.

I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone outside Facebook has much respect for Zuck in terms of decisionmaking for products or anything else in particular. This may look different to a Facebook employee, of course.

Zuck's track record of acquisitions is genuinely impressive though. Buying both WhatsApp and Instagram was widely panned at the time, but in retrospect both were great moves, and Facebook also deserves credit for letting/making both prosper.

I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.

Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.

Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.

I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.

I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.

"scale and backing?"

The just ended it because it didn't scale.

I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?

Not the same sort of scale. The technology part of it scaled fine, probably because Google invested the money and dev hours into making sure it did. The product itself didn't scale for a host of other reasons, but none of them had to do with the reasons it might be interesting to develop around it.

There's certain problem spaces that are just different if you have different amounts of money and dedication behind them. Working for AWS is likely much different than working for Linode, even aside from the culture of each company. Longer runways, better access to cutting-edge tech, a pre-existing global-scale infrastructure pattern... Even working on a failed project can be an interesting experience sometimes.

And I know somebody who had been a 15 year Google employee who could choose to work any team decided to make it his new priority. This is somebody who could have worked on any platforms project they wanted. They left Google a couple years after it launched, I imagine probably at seeing their hard work go nowhere.

This is a false dichotomy. I think most would prefer a third path where Google invests in projects it actually believes in and commits to for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.

Projects contantly being half-assed and rug pulled aren't good for users or the developers being bounced around between them.

Yeah, it must be soul destroying to constantly build stuff that gets discarded without even giving it a serious chance.

Yeah, exactly. If you care about keeping people employed, what better way than to keep alive products and services that aren't the top in their field, but rather #3, #4, or #5? Even if the Google offering isn't super popular, as long as it's good enough, it'll have users, and it'll help keep users interested in other Google offerings and the Google ecosystem as a whole.

The way it is now, I have to be very cautious investing my time or money (even just time really) in any Google service because I'm worried it might be canceled at any time if it isn't Search, Gmail, or Maps. Will my Google Photos albums suddenly disappear one day because they decided it's not the #1 in its field? (Luckily, I don't use Photos as my main photo storage, only a way to share with others.)

Stadia was a bad idea, it had very little adoption, and Google was right to kill it.

I know for me I'd be very demoralized and not stay at a company very long if everything I built kept getting shut down.

On the other hand, Google still just prints money with ads. Everything else is just a talent retention program.

'Success hides all problems', but exactly what real problems does Google have making money?

The fact that it can't keep doing it forever, and its investors expect that if Google is going to keep expanding its headcount and keep spending tons of money that it will produce results.

Nobody would mind if Google just printed money with ads. That is what the trade desk basically does (TTD), and it's a comparatively very small company. Google could be the most profitable company per employee in history if it wanted to, and it wouldn't lose anything from its core money-making functions. Instead, Google wanted to build a grand technology empire.

If you're going to act like a rockstar, when the lights come on, you better be dancing up on the stage. The lights are turning on right now, and I don't think anyone sees anyone dancing.

I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs want to work on new and exciting shit, so google continuously mints projects and kills them off when they are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working as intended.

>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

Fighting a growing wave of calls from all political sides to regulate Alphabet and Google in the US, and paying an endless stack of compliance fines to the EU who already regulate Google and Alphabet.

It's not only fighting them, but also forming them: The "right" regulation can become an entry barrier for competitors.

When was there last big win?

Android and Chrome... so it looks like around 2008-2009?

It's really hard to diversify away from a major cash cow product. Everyone else's success gets compared to the cash machine. Ask for another 30 engineers to work on a product with only 100 MM profit, why aren't you more successful?

People get wise to this dynamic and just start selling dreams. Everyone can buy into the dream of the next Billion dollar product, it's harder to get buy-in to just grind out a measly 50% YoY growth.

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

His primary job is to keep the FTC at bay.

The majority of Google's income is still ads. Stadia and all others are pennies in comparison. These are little pet projects for insane millionaires, not products that solve real problems. That's what happens when you get too big, you lose focus of what's important.

Has there been a lack of direction, mission and purpose since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO?

> He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives.

https://retailwire.com/discussion/google-rethinks-employee-r...

His goal was to expand Google into china [1], then he folded on that due to employee pushback. Similarly with all the other mini dramas (working with the military, "AI principles").

He may not even be wrong, the biggest risk to google is some regulator getting unhappy so playing it safe makes sense.

[1]https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11830654/google-ceo-sundar-pich...

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question

YoY only.

Tim Cook seems to be heading the same way, trashing the quality of almost everything Apple has achieved for the sake of financial results.

The law of large numbers. Nothing other than the core ad products makes a difference to Google. The next biggest "successes" are just things that build a moat around the core ad product.

What's embarrassing is that they keep trying other random things.

Give the money back to the shareholders and let them invest in new founders. Small team success is great for the world but impossible to care about at a Google scale.

This is the way Google works, it's their operating model. Big fanfare when they launch things so the muggles continue to believe that 'Google' is still relevant, and then quiet shuttering when the product either doesn't add to their ad revenue, their overarching interest, or it was never even meant to be a success in the first place.

There is no failure here, it's working exactly the way they planned it to.

Google sells attention. Anything else it does is flim flam to support that.

I agree wholeheartedly - I’m currently using google fi which hasn’t had an improvement of any real impact in over 3 years, and it still barely works on my iPhone. I suspect it will be shutting down soon - which is a shame, it was a fantastic idea but they launched and then promptly did nothing but let it slowly rot.

Don't worry too much, Google Voice had been in that state for at least a decade and I'm still using it. (Not official statement, just long-time GV user, if your font is large enough to read in GV app it's because I complained internally and that was the only user-facing thing I ever got to improve).

Hope not. I use that to barely have a cellphone service and not have to pay much when I don't really use it :)

As far as barely having service goes, Ting is half the price. $10/month + $5/GB

There is literally only one service I use from google and I’m actively sunsetting that use : Gmail.

I never go there for search and I can’t think of another tool of theirs I use…

If you go on any website that uses adsense, Google's real customers are using their services on you. The rest is just to feed the beast. I got suckered, I loved my very early invite only Gmail account. Not sure my protonmail isn't just more of the same performative 'i'm a techie and using the fashionable thing" but can I ever escape that?

Such a brilliant comment. (seriously)

Same on gmail early invite... and totally same on *IF* i trust protonmail... which is HQ Swiss... and if you know anything about swiss history, they are not to be trusted. (this may piss ppl off, but its true) -- however, I do trust (currently) protonmail.

but yes, we need to avoid being naive to "technically arrogant"

Take away that search monopoly and you have one one of the most dysfunctional and slowest moving companies in tech. Which is incredibly surprising as they hire really bright people but their leadership and product direction is not good at all.

Once it is realized the ads are mostly harmful this is inevitable

It's curious to me that there hasn't been an evolution in re-exit strategies. You want to get bought by Google, then sold by Google. Why don't we hear about something getting sold off by Google instead of just shut down? Is it just a given that if Google can't make it work, nobody can?

Selling it off incurs the risk of strengthening a potential competitor. Also, in many cases at least half of the value is in the team of developers, which probably don’t want leave Google and which conversely Google doesn’t want to lose.

It also signals to the would-be customers of their other products that the service they want to sign for has a chance of surviving. At this stage I wouldn't touch any new Google service.

It's practically impossible to spin stuff out of Google because of interdependencies with the rest of google3 (the monorepo), not to mention assumptions about infrastructure. You might as well completely rebuild the entire thing from scratch.

Will there ever be a google4?

No. The google3 path itself is baked into so many things that it would be a monumental task to move. There was an attempt in maybe 2010 or so but it was quickly abandoned. Things are 1000x worse now.

What Google does now is just not rev the version in any repo paths. This is true of several projects that previously had versions included in the path. Now all versioning is handled separately.

The infrastructure problem is funny because this wouldn't be a problem if Google would use GCP by themselves. They should also be smart enough to create an export function for google3.

There's a fun problem with this.

No other company in the world has workloads that match Google's. So there are two options. You can spend a shitload of money making GCP actually work for the ridiculous needs of google3 applications and then actually get everybody to use GCP rather that using borg directly or you can not spend that money building all the infrastructure to do things that borg already does and has zero external customers.

Turns out the latter is attractive.

Dependencies on google-only stack plus many of the things they build aren’t actually financially viable.

There is one case: Google acquired Keyhole (Google Earth), John Hanke then built Ingress/Niantic which is a spunoff company (where Google afaik still holds some shares) doing quite well with PokemonGo it seems (while they had to stop their Catan project and killed off their Harry Potter game)

A couple of others: Boston Dynamics. Motorola.

Boston Dynamics was never integrated into Google, so I guess relatively easy to split of.

Motorola is interesting, but considering it was less than a year in Google and more focussed on hardware development probably also not fully integrated and one could argue whether Google acquired it only for the patents they kept when selling to Lenovo.

John Hanke in contrast built Maps and related things after being acquired and only after a few years moved to build Niantic, where at least Ingress was developed fully inside Google (but apparently not fully in Google stack, but so that they could transition to Google Cloud)

But yeah, good examples!

Google acquired HTC mobile development team to develop Pixel, after they sold Motorola. It's weird.

motorola was patents ($8B in protection IIRC) + key talent acquisition (called ATG at the time). I don't think Google ever wanted the bulk of motorola's operations or rf engineering.

They bought it, stripped out the things they wanted to keep, then spun it back out.

In that sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the attention span of three year old toddler.

Stadia is 2 years and 10 months old hah

And it's that property that means Microsoft always has an edge with its b2b customers.

How is Stadia any different from something like Mixer which Microsoft shut down at a record pace since its release?

Yup, he was promoted to VP before moving on to Fitbit.

I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive structure was completely set up to reward launching products and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at playing the promo game.

There was talk about the need to "land" rather than just launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.

It does seem to be that way from the outside: tons of products launched, acquired,and then nothing happens, as they either rot or get killed after a few years.

I wrote a description of the actual incentives Googlers see here a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704

What if I told you that perf has been abolished in the meantime?

It's even public: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad

This sounds like a re-brand...

From the point of view of an IC so far at least it's *significantly* different from how perf worked. I have yet to see the results though.

I guess that's interesting. Does the promotion process seem different? Ie different in the sense that you are finding yourself incentivized differently from before?

I never really cared much about promo and I haven't yet gone for promo with this new system so I can't really say. I think as far as incentives go in general nothing really has changed much, but what has changed is the amount of time we (ICs) waste on doing perf instead of doing actual work. From a manager's point of view it might be different, but for us it's more "forward" facing, we focus on what we'd like to achieve over the year and as we move forward we adjust our expectations and do regular check-ins to see if we're still on track or we need to adjust things. It feels more dynamic, but it's only been a few months so who knows.

Yup, both the mechanics and incentive structure have changed. Nobody knows the outcome yet, but the intentions were to align personal incentives with business goals. Seems promising thus far.

Yep but incentives haven't shifted, and the organizational inertia to fight in their fiefdoms is super strong

Actually incentives have shifted a lot. Personally I now skip a lot of work that was useful only for perf purposes.

2014 was when they retired.

Nope, wrong.

Agreed with this take. It's frustrating to see people in this thread pinning this on Sundar. I certainly think he could've done better as CEO, but the incentive structure and culture around products was baked in from Larry & Sergey's time.

I was around during the pivot to "landings" - which didn't actually make many practical differences. For the most part people simply redefined "landing" to "releasing a product"... which was also the definition of "launching" :)

I was at Google 2009-2014 and again from 2020-present. Larry and Sergey absolutely understand incentives - one of the things that stood out about early Google (pre-2005) was just how well they understood incentives, and they were able to build basically an unassailable $250B/year business based on it.

It wasn't just Larry & Sergey either - early Google was filled with people like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Paul Buchheit, Eric Veach, Matt Cutts, Peter Norvig, Hal Varian, et al who all thought deeply about just what the human consequences of a given social policy would be. Things like Google's promo & interview system were very well-designed for a company of 2000 people.

IMHO, the problem is that all of those folks ended up richer than you could imagine, which gave them the option of not putting up with the people that came after them. When the company grows from 2000 to 20,000 (which is what it was when I joined in 2009), 90+% of the people were not when it was 2000, i.e. you are outvoted 9 to 1 by ordinary people who don't think very much about incentives. If you're filthy rich, it's much easier to just jet off to some private island and let the tricky problem of incentives become somebody else's problem than it is to stick around and explain to tens of thousands of people why systems are the way they and modify them to fit the company's new reality.

I guess this could explain it. I struggle a little with this explanation though, Larry appeared engaged in 2014. The problem is big and obvious. I guess there isn't an obvious solution though, so maybe they just kept kicking the can down the road?

Anyway, good insight, appreciate it. They both always seemed like smart dudes with a blindspot. Maybe it wasn't such after all.

Larry's blindspot IMHO is that when he isn't connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is terrible (and conversely, when he is connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is awesome, which is why he was able to spot so many of the product cycles of the 00s). He was a terrible CEO, probably for this reason: he made company-wide decisions based on the experiences of the L-team. I remember mocking how the very first dictum when he became CEO was "Meetings should have a single decider and end 5 minutes early", which was probably important at the exec level but was so far removed from the problems that actually faced software engineers at Google in 2011. When you're CEO the information you get is very carefully curated by your lieutenants to produce outcomes desirable to them. Larry was either oblivious to this dynamic or powerless to change it

Google kind of reminds me of IBM in the early 90s before Lou Gerstner. IBM built segments of its business around the fact mainframe money would keep pouring in.

> Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products.

The thing with x amount of products failing is true. Doesn't matter if you're an indie hacker or Google. It's been shown by giant after giant releasing products and them failing. Doesn't matter what industry they're in either. That's why so many corporations just buy new products lines. They get a product that is in demand.

That's why it made sense for Adobe to buy Figma. Building a competitor would have been probably rather expensive and risky. Where instead they just buy it and have the product and the market share.

why Amazon has been buying products like Ring and the robot hover. They're in demand and Amazon just needs to put some cash behind it and it's going to generate tons more cash.

If you're wanting to build the next big thing, you've got to try building lots of things until one catches off.

Meh. There is a reason you don't hear about MS shutting down services, or Apple, or Facebook... Failing or not, you can still pivot them until they succeed. It is just Google that is shutting down everything that doesn't grow huge fast.

Facebook hasn't really created any new products have they?

MS shut down products all the time.

And Apple? They are very good at hiding their failures.

It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.

(said about twitter, but fits here)

I'm not sure how bad this is. I think it's good that they like to try new things. They couldn't do that if they committed to supporting everything they start indefinitely.

try new things under a different brand name that doesn't taint everything related to Google if you want to experiment

Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company

Examples of Google Cloud sunsetting products? As far as I know it's very rare that they do that.

Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching products that flop in the first place, or their failure to make their consumer products appealing over time, really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its Enterprise offerings

Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel in basically only accepting email from one another.

Their IoT platform last month - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-shutter-...

several other examples as well, but the worst thing they do is very frequent breaking API changes which force companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google

I believe you when you say they play fast and loose with the APIs. I've mostly suffered from the lacking documentation for the SDKs, they are often autogenerated and just plopped out there, with mutually contradictory sets of documentation scattered around the web.

> governments get serious about ad regulation

Or companies pull back on Internet advertising.

The unknown unknown is the creation of a new advertising method. I doubt that any newspaper in 1990 thought that this thing called the Internet was going to all but destroy their ad business within twenty years.

Internet advertising isn't going anywhere.

Google's ad product, however, is truly horrendous and exists only because it's perceived as "too big to fail".

The World Wide Web is more or less dead and Google Search is increasingly useless as traffic moves to TikTok, Twitch, Discord, and other siloed ecosystems.

It's possible that purchasing a Google ad still provides higher ROI than alternative options, but I'd certainly not bet on that remaining true in 5-10 years. Google's empire is built on a foundation of sand and the fact that the company seems incapable of launching new, lasting, innovative products should have its leaders and investors quaking in their boots.

working with the core ads platform, feels like one of the worst designed systems i have ever seen in my life.

definitely no innovation in that side of the business

don't fix what ain't broken.

People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search.

Google experiments constantly and shuts down bad experiments.

Experiments that probably aren't going anywhere for a long time:

1. Gmail

2. Maps (acquisition, but did not have a web interface and was not remotely popular prior)

3. Android (literally bought before the first launched devices)

4. Play Store

5. Cloud

6. Google Pay / Wallet

Most of these businesses are larger than most public companies in the world...

Google will likely continue to experiment. People should think of Google's new products as startups - because that's exactly how Google thinks of them.

Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.

Google does a very good job of distancing the Google and Android brands from things like Stadia.

All of us on here know Google owned Stadia. We're also all smart enough to know that we can keep using Gmail & YouTube without worrying about Google shutting them down.

YouTube..

an acquisition

An acquisition in its infancy.

Acquisitions happen all the time and later get turned down when they don't flourish. Many stories get posted often with negative sentiment right here on HN.

YouTube was one of the 10 most visited websites on the Internet when Google bought it (IIRC, #4)

With a completely underdeveloped ad business, unclear if it would ever produce any significant revenue. YouTube was purchased for 1b, they cleared 28b in revenue last year alone.

Weren't Gmail, Maps (Keyhole), Android all acquisitions?

GMail was internal project.

Gmail was a 20% project apparently.

> 1. Gmail

2004

> 2. Maps

2005

> 3. Android

2008

> 4. Play Store

Elementary component of the Android business, but well: also 2008

> 5. Cloud

2008 (also)

> 6. Google Pay / Wallet

A requirement for Play Store, but relaunch as general payment solution: 2011

Now the current year is 2022. And yes, they did improvements here and there and in cloud launched more services, but anything big new, with a chance of survival?

Google Drive (2012) and Google Photos (2015), both with >1B users.

Would you bet on Google Photos surviving more than say the next 5 years? I wouldn't.

It's been around for 7 years now with over 1B users and is directly monetized by storage space. I'm a big Apple ecosystem person and even I use Google Photos instead of iCloud so I would bet on it, yes.

Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own, etc etc. I have 0 to do with the Photos team.

Google Photos is an amazing product, it has an amazing offering and works extremely well. It's also extremely popular and integral to the Android ecosystem. I'd absolutely bet of it not being shutdown in the next 5 years, yes.

one of the few I would, yes.

The heart of Google Drive is Google Docs which is 2006.

Google Photos was itself a (poor) replacement for Picasa, which they acquired sometime in mid-00s.

I recently found my Dad still uses the Picasa library I setup on a home PC maybe 15 years ago.

Amazing that anyone uses Google Drive with the horrendous user interface. Honestly File Manager in Windows 3.11 is easier to use. You can actually find out how big a directory is in File Manager!

worse when you realize that Maps and Android were both acquisitions, Google hasn't had a genuine home grown win in almost 20 years

In 2 years, Cloud will likely have larger profits than most companies in the S&P 500.

Sure, Google hasn't done anything.

Chrome browser (also ChromeOS)

> Chrome

2008

| 6. Google Pay / Wallet

Since Google Wallet launched in 2011, they added a physical card, replaced that card with Android Pay, dropped NFC and limited it to Android Pay, merged Google Wallet and Android Pay into Google Pay, launched Tez in India and then rebranded that to Google Pay (which was an entirely different app than the first Google Pay), then rebranded the first Google Pay as Google Wallet, while people in India still use their Google Pay app.

I think. I still can't make sense of it.

Imagine being a store/vendor and trying to make sense of which app your POS supports while just trying to run your business, what an absolute nightmare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_Send

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wallet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_(mobile_app)

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pay-becomes-google-wall...

I can provide a little bit of insight into the Google Pay shenanigans, though I didn’t work there or interact with anyone there.

The initial Google Wallet launch irked the card networks because they presented their own proxy card rather than a card that clearly advertised the card issuer and the network. (Oh boy do they care a lot about branding…)

I assume they dropped NFC initially because it was done with the first generation tech that was very insecure and simply transmitted card numbers in the clear. Today’s contactless tech is all EMV based, and also needs to depend on a Secure Enclave chip to be blessed by PCI; that might explain why they cut off support for a number of devices. This happened around the time Apple Pay came into the scene.

The rebranding and all that though, well, that’s Google.

Or a customer trying to figure out what the payment app of the week is.

Almost everyone I knew used Google Wallet, which was pretty nice, until they shut down the cards at which time it became utterly useless since you could only use it in the Play store. That's one reason I've never used Android Pay or Google Pay or whatever it is now. Too unreliable.

A lot of us switched to Simple for awhile, but then that went defunct too.

So now we're all back to "Are you on Venmo or Paypal or Square Cash now?" whenever we want to transfer money. And sometimes just paper checks, because ancient as that is, it's still the most reliable (as long as both people have bank accounts). Most of us now have regular credit cards for payment, which are also more reliable than any app.

> And sometimes just paper checks, because ancient as that is, it's still the most reliable (as long as both people have bank accounts).

some XVII century stuff right here... it's wire transfers by bank account and phone number all the way basically everywhere east of the atlantic ocean

Google Drive (2012) and Google Photos (2015).

> People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search.

That is a total strawman. I think most people know Google has done other successful products, especially Gmail and Android.

> Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.

Actually, I think the opposite may be true. A startup like Snowflake has one business, and they are all focused on that business. They will go through hell and highwater to make that business successful. I think the biggest risk with a company like Snowflake is not folks worried that they'll fold, but worried that they'll get acquired and their "goodness" sucked out (see Figma).

With Google, though, basically nearly everything besides ads is an afterthought. Nobody trusts them anymore to keep things around. Which has the ironic effect of making some of their "experiments" invalid, because if all potential customers know it's an experiment that may get killed at the whim of whomever got promoted, they'll be less likely to try it in the first place.

I'm not a Google hater. I'm a big fan of GCP, and also a big fan of Firebase. I do get nervous, though, when I see some simple, straightforward problems that languish for literally years because apparently they're not "sexy" enough to fix. Case in point, Firebase Auth (an Auth as a Service platform) still only supports SMS as a second factor for login, despite the fact that Google itself recommends against using SMS as a second factor. People have been complaining about this for literally years, yet it's crickets from Google/Firebase teams.

Google Chrome the most popular browser in the world. Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets) more than 1B users

> People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search.

I don't even think that search is very successful. Pagerank was successful, and was also pretty quickly made obsolete. They still own search because their competitors died as they replaced the verb "search" with their brand, and then created a browser to funnel people into search. Search is only important because of ads. And buying Youtube after failing with Google Video, in order to show more ads. So it all boils down to buying Doubleclick, building a browser, and buying a popular video site for me. Android is certainly key in this too, but its key was somewhat in funneling people into Google's ads, but mostly preventing Apple or some FOSS upstart from getting between users and Google's ads.

Google was successful at being a significantly better search engine for a very short time. It took the money it made and bought the largest ad company. Then it vertically integrated the entire industry from OS to final purchase (with varying degrees of success) to funnel people into its ads.

The only skill that Google has is taking advantage of and creating monopoly positions, not technology.

edit: Oddly, I think that their greatest success might have been to covertly corrupt Firefox. Without that, Chrome might have ended up a largely USA-locked thing like the iPhone is. Although releasing a brutally locked down and closed mobile OS masquerading as an FOSS upstart is a close second.

>acquisition

>literally bought

Is it Google's doing then?

Can an argument be made that antitrust action a decade ago could have saved them billions on now-shut-down projects? If I were an investor I would want brutal focus from the top on search search search and nothing that didn't directly create value in search.

> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company

No no, please don't restructure, wreck the company, that's fine.

Or more realistically, the worst offenders are not going anywhere and Google is going to be okay (Search, Maps, Play, Ads, Analytics, Fonts, Chrome, YouTube, ReCAPTCHA…).

Stadia, I don't care either way.

I've given up trusting anything new they make. They've shut down otherwise perfectly fine products that they could of charged some money for and I would of gladly payed. Google Talk was perfect, the UI was stale but I could log on via Pidgin. Everything that followed Google Talk was a regression is what it felt like.

Something I'm still hung up on about the "promotion then bounce" strategy is wouldn't having a history of launches followed by fizzle-outs actually look bad on your resume?

Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further growth, when people can see that they have been leading failed projects?

To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI, etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is, which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for their own development. It was dead before it ever launched.

The whole point was to diversify their business model. The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K. Stadia integrated into YouTube could have been a Twitch competitor. With Covid it could have been the perfect time to really launch the product when no one could buy a PS5/XBOX. Google didn't invest in games, closed down their own game studio. It's reminiscent of Windows Phone having no apps.

> The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K.

Could they actually do that? Or more importantly, could the average user - not someone next door to the datacenter - get that kind of performance?

35 Mbps or greater for 4K.

Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically over the past year and a half. Average fixed line download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9 percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.

It's not just throughput, but also latency. I'm getting 20-30 ms ping to google, which is 2 frames latency. For something like an RPG, or among us, that's probably fine. But for an FPS or a fighting game, that's a huge difference. And I live in a city center with good internet.

Honestly they just didn't have any content due to their technology choices, I use GFN all the time because it has most of the games I want to play already

they put themselves in a position where they were stuck acting like a psudo-console-platform thing needing to get developers to support thier platform

Is their technology impressive compared to competitors? I still don't know what "negative latency" mean, was it marketing hype?

It's a shame their platform choices prevented a decent stream of content, stadia was easier to use but I subscribe GFN due to the content

on the whole I feel like they were to focused on potential vs. offering something desirable right away

It seems to be strongly synergistic with a lot of their existing product offerings.

Getting the technology done even better means that Chromebooks and Androids (or even the browser) could be heavyweight gaming machines -- and thereby increasing those audiences.

As those audiences grow (and they're already big), having better hardware streamlined into Stadia means they immediately have insane distribution power. If you consider mobile gaming dominance in Asia, and the ability to release triple-A games immediately to a billion devices worldwide, that creates huge leverage over iOS.

Then as you said, GCP. I think someone with an idea and roadmap was there, but FAANG incentive programs don't reward people focused on the long game.

I doubt the Stadia leadership killed their own division. The problem was someone higher up.

Harrison is still the lead of Stadia.

I think ads are the equivalent of resource curse [1] for Google. It is so successful that it is kind of like oil gushing from the ground funding all sorts of inefficiencies that otherwise would be unsustainable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I know some of the leads. One key guy I know bounced from Google completely right after Stadia went live. This is classic Google cool tech bad business/product

Well, we also gotta look at Google's outside incentives, those of being a monopoly. At the end of the day, it's not the most efficient use of resources to innovate internally at a monopoly (better uses include M&A, competitor sabotage, and sales/marketing, which they've of course also done).

Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil, and to make investors think it is still an "innovation" company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new products.

Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self or a company centered on innovation because that's just not how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve Jobs back.

> I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term.

apparently the product manager was Phill Harrison. He's been active in games for a few decades, so I'm not sure if this is just a pivoting move to focus the product or his exit strategy. Time will tell.

I wonder if Google even realises, like at Pichai level, how much this hurts them. I’m fairly sure it’s at least one important piece as to why GCP is struggling to gain market share. Who in their right mind would depend on a Google product for critical business functions at this point.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... makes exactly this argument.

Google is NOT in trouble. Our perception that Google is not an ad company is in trouble.

They are silo’d and it appears to be so bad that their organizational structure is now appearing in the actual products. Amazon and Apple (obviously more so Apple) don’t do silo’d product releases, they do product releases veiled within the shroud of the “ecosystem”.

What ecosystem is Stadia in? They couldn’t brand it right and veil it through YouTube or Google Play? You’d never shut down YouTube or Google Play, you’d just let that, you know, that “Google Play Live (Stadia)” feature quietly enter maintenance mode.

Apple won’t shut down Apple News. They’d never announce it. It’s just some product that’s interweaved into iOS. If it ain’t a hit, it quietly fades.

Google+, weave that shit in with Gchat. But no, no, it’s … yeah, it’s its own special thing. Special things get their own very special shut down.

I’m not wise like that, but if you want to try stuff to see what sticks, lay low and quietly try things. That way you can quietly cut it short if necessary.

If you enter loud, you exit loud. And if you don’t exit loud, people remember you left quietly and laugh that you entered loud.

Sundar Pichai has been destroying the company from inside out since he took over as CEO.

But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that.

But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on).

Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?

Android has not shut down yet :-)

There are 2 sides of the same company working against each other. There's the side that wants to create new products and then there's the side that wants to tighten costs and improve earnings. New products will always be a cost and not being able to show a profit or fast growth will mark it for closure.

I suspect that starting a new project inside google is comfortable enough that the thirst to grow and show a profit is muted. Also, I bet, the politics between departments makes it hard to do what's need to succeed.

Google should consider extracting companies into their own entities rather than closing them. Or creating an incubator where they keep a big percentage of the company and let the companies grow or die as the market dictates.

Google's primary job should be to provide resources to scale up business models that are working like they did with YouTube.

The crazy thing is if they delivered on promise it would have been huge. If you made games a part of the internet the way videos are they would have nothing but advantages.

Genuine question to the Googlers here: how do OKRs factor in the misaligned incentives internally? in other words, are OKRs a good idea badly executed, or just ineffective period?

>> I have no doubt whoever launched [project name] got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether [project name] was a success long term.

Same story in every company I've worked in. It's like the time horizon only goes as far as the next quarter.

https://twitter.com/BlueFireDemon44/status/15530629798847488...

>I mean we could wait till September 24 too

Not bad missed the estimate by 5 days.

I should have known when they cancelled the Pixelbook that this was next.

Though I'm not suggesting lying/malice on The Google's part here, it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of corporate PR. Whenever a company insists it's not going to do something, I assume they're doing damage control and that the opposite is more likely to be true (much like Bettridge's Law). If a company makes a positive statement in PR, I assume their statements won't live up to their promise or, even worse, come with a deal breaking caveat.

> it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of corporate PR.

If you look at the discussions about the shutdown rumor, hardly believed PR. I was on the defensive side and my argument was that spreading this rumor was basically a free point.

> Just a couple of months ago.

This was exactly 2 months ago (July 29th).

archived for posterity:

https://archive.ph/W3F3g

The first reply to that tweet:

"When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months could you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the controller first? It's a good controller and I'd like to be able to use it." - https://twitter.com/josh_ross/status/1553465786634604544

Gold

I am guessing they didn't release the drivers?

My understanding is that it uses Bluetooth just for pairing, so I'd assume that it's not so much an issue of "drivers" but more of controller firmware to get it to send inputs over Bluetooth at all.

Yes, the way it normally functions is directly connected to the Stadia server over wifi. It does show up as a controller connected over USB too. But Bluetooth is just for setting up the wifi connection.

I don't even want to call it pairing because the way you pair the controller to your game session is to enter in a 5 button combination that is displayed on your TV.

It works nicely as a controller over USB, I’m using my stadia controller with OpenEMU

I have empathy for their team on this topic. If they release bluetooth drivers they are committed to some minimal quality and compatibility standard and controller owners unaware of a larger OSS effort will be frustrated if it isn't actively maintained.

No they aren't.

Stadia shutting down means they're out of a job or moving internally to another project.

A driver being released from an abandoned project comes with no warranty

In the announcement Google said the tech will continue to be in operation for 3rd party partners - this suggests to me many aspects of the projects will continue even though it will no longer be available to public consumers.

Lol, I like his other response to someone praising his prediction abilities:

> It's not hard to predict the Google future. Yet another rebranding of whatever chat product will come soon enough also.

What I think happens in situations like these (from experience) is that the team is trying as hard as they can to prevent shutting down. And they either believe they'll succeed, or believe they can't succeed without boosting the expectation that they'll succeed by explicitly claiming they aren't shutting down.

If you say, both to the public and to the team, that you might shut down but you're not sure yet, that's as good as shutting down. And if there are rumors about shutting down, because it's close to happening, then you may have to address it. And you may believe that the only chance you have of not shutting down is to tell everyone that you aren't shutting down.

I like this statement. It doesn't imply ill-will such as intentional lying or selfish intent as most other posts do. This statement simply shows that people are trying to make their projects succeed in a complicated environment.

From my experiences, most people are doing what they think is right. We should take more time understanding why people think what they are doing is right, even when we may perceive the action as immoral or wrong.

If management isn't committed, it's still a lie to say they are.

Morals matter even when they are inconvenient.

> Morals matter especially when they are inconvenient.

Yes. There's a Japanese podcast (rebuild.fm) where one of the recurring guest (Hak) is from a game dev background and was probably assigned to Stadia. He never said it explicitely but from the conversation you would guess.

One of their discussion was on how much commitment was crucial in the game dev world. Devs on all sides (platform, libraries, actual game) would put their skin in the game and gamble time and money but also personal energy to make something successful, and there was an expectation that all participant would stick together even as the future gets bleaker (what comes to my mind is Nintendo supporting and pushing the Wii U for a while, even as it was a clear failure, or Sony keeping the Vita alive as much as they could)

Your reputation as a platform maker gets a serious hit if you're ready to quit the minute your forecast gets dark, and game devs never really forget this kind of things, unlike other more opportunistic ecosystems.

I kinda hope the Stadia team could move on outside of Google to a more fitting company..

Games really take 1-2 years to develop, minimum. And the expertise in game mechanics is hard to come by - a really good developer/designer who can deliver consistently fun games is likely to stay in the industry for a long time.

So this does make a lot of sense. Huge time commitment for deliverables + ultra specialist roles and expertise = the important industry people have long memories.

That tweet was surely from the Stadia team, and teams generally do not plan on shutting down. I think we can assume that was 100% honest at the time, and the team was doing everything it could to keep going.

And that upper management (VP/director/etc.) probably finally made the decision to shut it down just a couple of weeks ago or even less.

So while ironic... it's highly unlikely Google was lying, as multiple people here are suggesting. Nobody knows for sure that a product/team will be shut down until it actually is. Not even upper management knows until they see the newest numbers.

Having had some experience at large companies, many teams' whole existence is on the line every ~3 months as the product manager presents updates to the VP and associates, and then waits a week to find out later if the team a) gets new employees / higher budget, b) gets no new employees and no increased budget, or c) gets cancelled so start looking for an internal transfer.

I don't think folks really care much if it was an outright lie, or if it was a George Costanza "It's not a lie if YOU believe it" lie.

Just another data point on why people rightfully think PR posts like this are BS.

Reckless disregard for truth is as bad as lying. Claiming to definitively know things you don't know, is lying.

But the language they used wasn't ambiguous. They said they were committed to it. If they want to give themselves wiggle room to backtrack on decisions based on performance, they need to find a way of being enthusiastic without making it sound like they are going long on the tech and the platform.

"I'm committed" can imply "my boss isn't".

It can, but that means that there's room for improvement for Google's internal communication and external expectation setting.

I'm Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Also, there's this tidbit:

> Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia’s technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed,” he wrote.

I assumed they'd do a pivot towards offering it as a service for game publishers to build on, something like GCS just for game streaming. I wonder when we'll see an announcement for that.

Some people were mean to me when I said I wasn’t going to port my game to stadia. I said, “google will probably cancel it within the next few years, so I’m not even considering it,” and they got really offended by my prediction.

Well… it was a little rude to make a prediction like that, but it was based on research and past history. It was just way too big a risk.

I wonder if it’s a bit self fulfilling at this point: timid users lead to poor adoption which leads to cancellations which leads to timid users?

That's why you should always take corporate promises with a tablespoon of salt.

After seeing so many big companies promise things and only screw those over along the course of last couple of decades, this is of no surprise to me

This is what drives my hesitancy toward subscribing any Google paid product. The company is very short-term focused and fickle on measuring the success of a product. They have the cash to throw at new problems, but they lack the stamina for any of their products to weather-out a storm. Google itself has the reputational problem of being weak on product longterm visions; that makes it a non-starter for buying into their mercurial fantasies.

I used Stadia super casually, despite buying the Founder's Edition as soon as it was available. I bought maybe 5 games at very steep discounts and maybe played them for 1-4 hours each.

With that said, the way they're handling this shutdown gives me LESS hesitancy re: consumer entertainment purchases. Granting full, automatic refunds is the vest way this can be handled, period.

Now, developer services are another story... Winding down a service that I rely on (rather than just being entertained by) would cause me more work, on their schedule.

But still, I have slightly more trust that they'll handle similar things well in the future.

It’s amazing since, ever since I stopped using any Google product, nothing I use has shut down any more.

You've got to turn the lemons into lemonade. Take advantage of the fact that they are likely to close things.

I got to play Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when that was the best and most reliable way to play that game. Now I'm getting a full refund. I should have bought more games!

In July they had the gall to make fun of the rumor that it was getting shut down: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440

Google killing products left and right is bad enough, this amount of lying is just unbearable. Google's lack of object permanence is probably the reason people didn't sign up for Stadia in the first place.

Yup, didn't even bother with it because Google. It sounded right up my alley but.. turns out I wasn't wrong, lol.

Even worse, there are developers with games due to come out in a few weeks or months who are just hearing about this from the articles.

https://twitter.com/sfbtom/status/1575558078367690752?s=21&t...

https://twitter.com/burgerbecky/status/1575585277594066945?s...

Welp. I don't even understand why anyone would ever trust Google at this point.

Ah, I remember that tweet. I was astounded not long ago when Stadia came up for discussion on when there were still users on HN using it to try to convince me that Google, whatever their long term plans, could not possibly be shutting it down in the immediate future. Especially since there were games— FIFA preorder even being taken— scheduled for release.

Unfortunately Google didn’t even have the courtesy to tell all of the developers about it, and some just got the news that their games set to launch in the next few days were, on stadia at least, already dead.

At this point, unless it’s ads, you’re looking at the world through rose tinted lenses if think there isn’t at least a chance Google is about to kill almost of its products.

Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways.

Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.

well said, literally it's getting old. no one trusts amazon/google/fb new ventures. atleast fb is going all in on vr

Facebook is dumping money into VR to try and push their boulder of a terrible idea (the "metaverse") up a hill. Except the hill is a solid 90 degree angle cliff

Nobody wants to go to Walmart in VR and artificially grocery shop. That's a dystopian misery. But Facebook is happy to try!

Their counterparts at places like VRchat meanwhile realized that just making a sandbox environment for people to do whatever they wanted is far more enticing to users. Valve meanwhile is happy to chug along and putter out critically acclaimed games to go with their own bespoke hardware releases

For those who have not seen the Walmart VR demo, it's really something else. Something is going very very wrong at Meta if they thought this looked enticing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw

This is as horrible as I expected, thanks!

They are losing stupid amounts of money on VR (as part of the R&D thing) in the hope that people will use it for work. The awesome value of Oculus Quest 2 will probably never be seen again.

They could mitigate this by always releasing the source code for shut down projects so that it could be self hosted or third parties could continue the work.

That wouldn't work because their tooling is so custom you could never run it. Also the code is probably in an embarrassing state, especially if the product is getting shut down.

It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason.

I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut those products down in such a way that it's generated far more backlash and ill will than anyone else.

Just brainstorming, but perhaps a large company, when launching a new product, could establish some kind of dedicated trust to provide credible assurances that e.g. the product would be supported for at least 10 years.

Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony have all launched game streaming products without this kind of coverage. It's a Google problem.

Importantly all of their products are still alive, supported, and even if they're doing superbly do not appear to be on the verge of shutdown.

There are a few problems to Google's way of doing things, having witnessed it from the inside. In no particular order:

1) Google tends to be over-optimistic and under-skeptical when it comes to new products. This is largely driven by organizational dynamics: Google's corporate structure encourages fiefdoms that come up with the Next Big Thing(tm) - everyone involved is encouraged to be wildly over-optimistic about their products, and there is not a countering skepticism from upper management to impose the right amount of discipline re: these wild-eyed claims of TAM, growth, etc. The net effect is that Google launches products that aren't sufficiently baked, with vastly overestimated initial growth. This creates disappointment as the products bounce off the market and do not get anywhere near the (completely fictional) projections.

2) Google's go-to-market strategy tends to be under-baked as well. This is related to point #1 - heavily over-optimistic projections causes Google to accept woefully substandard GTM plans. Stadia launched with an incredibly poor lineup and burned a lot of the initial goodwill and press which stalled any kind of momentum they could've gotten.

3) Google organizationally isn't set up to reward individuals that turn around troubled products. Promotions heavily favor new product, not fixing existing broken product, especially once the product has lost executive favor. This causes team death spirals - failing products experience intense team attrition that further hampers any kind of turnaround plan.

4) Google has comparatively high executive turnover vs. similar companies. This results in rapidly shifting high-level strategy. Products and projects fall in/out of favor so quickly it causes whiplash. Other companies (see: Nvidia, Sony, MS, Apple) seem to be able to identify product areas of strategic importance to the company, executing against it, and having the executive support to continue resourcing these projects even if they initially fail/disappoint (see: Apple Maps, PSVR). Google constitutionally does not have this ability - they talk a lot about multi-year investments in strategic areas but in reality their commitments are fickle.

Though do any of those do the Stadia model of having you "buy" the game specific to them to be able to stream it?

Other systems I'm aware of mostly piggyback on some other platform so your "ownership" extends to local usage also (like how Nvidia's system works with your Steam library), or are just Netflix-esque subscriptions that give you access to the available library as long as you're subscribed (like PlayStation Now, well, whatever it's now called under Plus, and Game Pass streaming).

Neither of those models has the same type of concern over losing your purchases. Google's track record is obviously a factor too, but the business model is as well.

>What's the best way to launch new, risky things?

Slow-roll invite-only launch to establish a core user base, work out the bugs, show staying power, and build from there. Exactly what Google did in 2004 with Gmail.

The same strategy that failed with Google+. It's not as foolproof as you're making it out to be.

That's not really apples to apples though. Gmail worked with external SMTP services to send and receive mail. Google+ required that anyone you wanted to connect to also have been offered and accepted an invite (or received one of your limited invites).

It seems plausible that social networks have more of a network effect than things like a game streaming platform. Obviously there's still some network effect and a certain marketing aspect to it, but I don't think they're directly comparable.

You have to convince game developers to port their games. If the reward is a few thousand users, it's going to be a hard sell. Also the R&D and infrastructure required to even start up the project is too high. Building a Gmail (especially back then) is small potatoes in comparison.

Well for a thing like Stadia it's not doable, you have very complex hardware and r&d to do first.

That works great for a service where costs scale with users so you can run lean in beta.

Unfortunately I don’t think Stadia fits that description well; you need to build hardware, network PoPs, license games, etc.

Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it’s hard to make a splash like that.

I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not have mattered.

It just ended up not being a game-changer economically, people still want to buy consoles etc.

The model of thin-client gaming might win long-term but it’s just not a clear winner yet.

> Unfortunately I don’t think Stadia fits that description well; you need to build hardware, network PoPs, license games, etc.

Hardware is literally scaled by customer demand, and was one of the reasons gmail went with the invite only launch.

Network PoPs are less an issue when you are already piggybacking off of Goog / GCP infrastructure, and you can mitigate the remaining costs by per country launches. And they did exactly that. It's still not supported in Hawaii. https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852?hl=en

> I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not have mattered.

Stadia was too late to market, in a field where content is rare enough relative to the number of competitors to have bargaining power. And they have no vertical integration to lean on. Nvidia has GPUs in house, MS/Sony/Nintendo have game devs in house for exclusives. Amazon _might_ be able to parley Twitch into a profitable Luna, but its a long shot.

> Hardware is literally scaled by customer demand

Hardware manufacturing is, but design is most certainly not. It takes as much work to design a controller that you build one of as it does a controller you build a million of.

Okay, fair, design costs have to be amortized across the userbase, and probably the correct solution to this is to build hardware people want to use with or without Stadia, so your design isn't anchored down. I.e. I can (and do) pair PS5 and Switch Pro controllers with other OS's. Obviously those other platforms don't offer the force feedback or HD rumble, but at the very least it's a signal to the your designers and the market that you expect your designs to be competitive in the open PC market.

Obviously less viable for the set-top boxes, but still a valid strategy if you can do it.

Hardware is well understood to be OpEx intensive, and have high up-front costs. Look at the pricing for injection mold dies for example. The opposite of a good fit for an iterative approach.

In my defense I was thinking of the GPUs and servers, not the client devices (does stadia have clients?). In that scenario, might HW be capex -- a durable good you buy and use for many years, and can sell if you no longer require it?

Ah I see where you were coming from. Yes on the server-side that applies. The compute costs scale elastically with user count.

They do have a client-side console/controller, and to be fair I had to look up why they did their own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Stadia#Hardware).

> While Stadia can use any HID-class USB controller, Google developed its own controller which connects via Wi-Fi directly to the Google data center in which the game is running, to reduce input latency.[8] Google is also exploring further ways to reduce latency, using an idea called "negative latency" which involves prediction of user input through various means so that any apparent network lag between controller and game response is minimized.[12] During its GDC 2019 keynote reveal, Google confirmed that the controller would also feature Google Assistant, which will automatically search YouTube for relevant, helpful videos related to the game they are currently playing at the touch of a key.[13]

I don't think any of Google's manufacturing capex is recoupable here; it's specific to making that thing, and if you don't want to make any more of that thing it's trash. (I'm not a hardware guru though, so that's not a statement made with high certainty. There might be bits that are reusable.)

> Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it’s hard to make a splash like that.

That's… kind of the problem? They have a reputation for abandoning products after making a huge splash. The only way around it is to stop looking for big splashes and start building products slowly instead. Pixel phones were notoriously only available in selected countries. Google Fibre is even more limited.

I never had stadia so I don't know, but was it games only? Or was it a YouTube TV box/Android TV and a game box? You could build a compelling user base to develop the scale and then make it more about the games.

A coworker and I were chatting about it, what happens if/when Apple drops and Mx SoC in the AppleTV? There are the obvious apps, you create a camera add on and add FaceTime to the living room. Things like that but you also have a very serious machine that can go head to head with PS5 and Xbox, legitimately. I wouldn't be shocked if something like that were to happen.

Conversely, they tried the same approach with Google+ and the slow rollout absolutely killed the momentum of a desired service.

Shutting down most product lines doesn’t mean said product is rendered unusable.

It does mean any further support is non-existent. With PaaS and SaaS, this implicit contract between buyer and seller no longer holds.

> every company is going to shut down products

There's typically a fight, though.

> I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company.

AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB). And only when they had a viable alternative (DynamoDB) and helped their biggest users make the move.

I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted.

And Microsoft is the king of long term support. How long did they keep supporting DOS in Windows? Or 32 bit programs. Or Windows 2000!

> I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative.

I can think of an esoteric one that no one misses: Ping (their music-based social media network)

There were a decent number of features in Apple's iTools / MobileMe package which were discontinued with no replacement. One big one that comes to mind was iWeb (static web hosting).

Also their "Print a photo book" from Photos (at the time it was call iPhoto I think?). You could design a photo album and they would send you a really nice bound copy. They discontinued it but had 3rd-party plugins that filled the gap for a while before even those died (I think).

Ironically enough, Google Photos still has this capability.

Amazon shutdown Drive (their dropbox competitor), there are plenty of consumer services Amazon has shutdown. Google's problem has been their tendency to shutdown perfectly good services because they aren't successful as ads. Reader is the posterboy for this; a service probably used happily by millions (or tens of millions) that had the plug pulled.

The fear with Stadia wasn't that Google may just shut it down, it's that it could have been very successful, with millions of happy users, and Google still would have shut it down. That's what separates Google from other companies.

jedberg said "AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB)" - emphasis on AWS, not Amazon as a whole. Big difference when you're talking about developer services, as opposed to end-user services.

Now, it's a perfectly valid point that Stadia is a consumer service, like Drive - but in a thread where there are discussions about developer services (GCP, for instance), making the distinction is important.

>(GCP, for instance), making the distinction is important.

The distinction is meaningless in that case because GCP hasn't sunset any services either.

GCP did shut down IoT Core. Only one I know of, though.

Google has shutdown many developer-facing services, no?

> it could have been very successful, with millions of happy users, and Google still would have shut it down

Weeps in Google Play Music and Hangouts.

> Reader is the posterboy for this; a service probably used happily by millions (or tens of millions) that had the plug pulled.

I feel like there's a whole generation of people who are now in senior decision-making roles who are still bitter about Reader. Killing that product, specifically, is likely costing billions per year in GCP revenue.

Windows phone was the biggest shutdown of all time. Off the top of my head, there's also Edge and Silverlight.

Edge and Silverlight both had replacements. Windows phone was shut down because almost no one cared.

The difference is Google shuts down services people actually like and use simply because they aren't profitable enough

10% of Europeans cared, but it wasn't enough.

And windows phone still got updates for over 2 years even after the shutdown, despite the fact it had been semi dead for years before then.

In terms of market share, Windows phone was a few percent, but that's still millions of phones.

Silverlight may have a replacement, but that doesn't help the devs who sunk their time developing with it. Same for people writing extensions for and debugging compatibility with Edge.

So is your argument that people liked and cared about Stadia? Because right now it feels like a really odd double standard. Go read through that canonical "Killed by Google" list. How many of those products were more popular than Windows phone / had users be more invested in it / etc? Be honest, it's a handful. Most of them you hadn't even heard of.

It feels like you have a double standard at play here, and are giving both Microsoft and Amazon a free pass on their abattoirs of dead products by various excuses, and totally ignoring that those same excuses would apply to Google's.

What's the replacement for Silverlight? Or do you mean it had replacement in a sense that nothing stops devs from going back to JS?

Bias up front: I work at Google but this is just my personal opinion.

> AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB).

Sure, but that's comparing a different branch of the company. Stadia is a consumer product, not a paid developer product. On the consumer side, Amazon has discontinued plenty of things (as every large corporation has):

According to this article[1], Amazon has canceled Haven, Amazon Spark, Amazon Restaurants, Amazon Storywriter, Amazon popup stores, Dash buttons, Amazon Tap, Instant Pickup, Amazon Tickets, Whole Foods 365, Amazon Fresh's Local Market Seller, Quidsi, Endless.com, MyHabit.com, Amazon Webstore, Amazon Destinations, Amazon Local, Amazon Wallet, Amazon Local, Fire Phone, Amazon WebPay, Amazon Askville, Amazon PayPhrase, and Amazon Auction.

Relevant to this thread, Amazon Games is technically still around, but they canceled Nova, Intensity, Breakaway, Crucible, and the Lord of the Rings MMO. Many top executives have left.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-products-services-fai...

Microsoft shutdown stores, resulting in loss of purchases for customers. I lost a few ebooks when they shut down their ebook store, their Zune Marketplace and Play For Sure was a confusing fiasco with the final result of authorizing purchases for one final resting place before the DRM servers were killed.

So they don't exactly have a spotless record.

Steve Jobs's Apple liked to deprecate the whole API underpinning their OS from version to version. That and "upgrade" products with increasingly inferior versions (Final Cut, iTunes, XServe).

And then there's any era of Apple and their habit of removing consumer choice and forcing customers more into their closed ecosystem.

> Steve Jobs's Apple liked to deprecate the whole API underpinning their OS from version to version.

Can you provide some examples? The years of supports for things like Carbon are hard to reconcile with that claim.

> I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted.

Not sure if it counts, but dropping 32-bit support on macOS may be counted.

Did they ever actually shut down SimpleDB? Last I checked, it was still online, although maybe they stop most accounts from creating new tables now.

> What's the best way to launch new, risky things?

To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible.

I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature.

With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes.

With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it:

- It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in

- It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses

My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp".

So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's interest.

Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google)

[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stad...

It does sound like their distribution power is a double-edged sword when it comes to launching new products.

On one hand, the distribution power makes it extremely easy for new products to get lots and lots of users really quickly. On the other hand, it can give a false sense of security when it comes to product-market fit.

The only real solution I can think of is deliberately launching new products without the Google branding and without relying on the built-in distribution channels, working towards product market fit the hard way, and only after that should they consider taking advantage of Google's distribution power to accelerate growth.

They should have split Stadia into two conceptual halves: one with the technology to split the processing from the input and output, and one to do the hosting of the processing. Then when they decided to kill Stadia, they could have let other people run the latter, so that the former would still be useful to people who already owned it.

I remember every single article when they first announced contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was doomed from the start.

Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google product that isn't ad-supported dies, with very few exceptions.

Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. "Google Cloud is now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but Google's ad business is likely to subsidize it for the foreseeable future."[1] AWS makes money in that business, but Google does not.

So, don't depend on Google Cloud for anything critical. Only a few months ago, Google was saying they were not going to shut down Stadia. So, any PR statement about Cloud not shutting down can't be believed. Stadia, after all, was a cloud service.

Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will just kill it in years time.

I deployed stuff on GCP but we moved to AWS after stability issues and horrendous support experience on GCP.

And that was easy because we did not commit to any GCP exclusive services (because they tend to shut down all thr time). On AWS we prefer using things like DynamoDB and that further locks us into AWS.

GCP is a joke.

Funny, we use GCP extensively and never have any issues. I can't speak to the support issues because we've never needed any. AWS is a bit of a mess, and I always dread having to use it.

I mean if I had to bet development time and a product/service that has to run for years I wouldn’t bet it on GCP, precisely because of Google’s reputation.

I’m confident AWS will exist in a decade, I’m not confident GCP will. I would never recommend a dependency on a Google service, especially not one that matters where there’s potentially millions of dollars on the line.

Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out. The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.

Google is starting with a handicap, in that they have a very strong reputation for killing products that don't meet unknown high standard of performance/revenue. I mean, the term "Google Graveyard" is popular, although I prefer Killed By Google[0]. To counter that handicap for GCP, they need something that stands out as much as Amazon's initial claim, and I haven't seen it. It seems clear that Google isn't running their own infrastructure on GCP. If anything, the hope seems to be that they've spent so much money on GCP, surely they wouldn't shut it down after all of that?

But of course, the bright sparks at Google are aware of the Sunk Cost Fallacy as well as anyone else, so... yeah. I have trouble trusting it.

0. https://killedbygoogle.com

> Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out. The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.

I think even more important than the scalability, it implies AWS isn't going away as long as Amazon is in business.

Or say AWS is now Amazon's business.

I was on a blind focus group for cloud offerings. Turned out to be Azure, but every IT person their ranked them AWS, Azure, GCP. And GCP was #3 only because Oracle was universally hated

I think folks can finally accurately model what Google is going to kill... GCP surely wouldn't be on that list? ;)

> You can pretty accurately model what they will and won't do with this one unusual insight that they're a business... But "It's a Google product" is a weak signal about whether it's going to get killed, and there are many stronger signals. Let me know when they kill Ads and Cloud.

-u/geofft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30353025

GCP's profit

* 2018: -4.3B USD

* 2019: -4.6B USD

* 2020: -5.6B USD

* 2021: -3.1B USD

(https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/02/alphabet_q4_2021/)

I realize Google is making a bet on the long term of cloud, but... it's continuing to bleed money making that investment. Meanwhile, AWS is also seeing large growth numbers while remaining very profitable.

So, while I get the "investment for the long term" angle that Google is pitching for GCP, how long will they decide to continue making that investment while they lose money on it, chasing a profitable AWS

How can they lose money at the prices they charge? They already had all the expertise to run data centers and build infrastructure. I get that there's development effort, but how can you bleed billions annually over years? Or do they discount that heavily for large customers?

I believe Cloud is an investor's playground at this point, given the huge opportunity that it presents. The fact that AWS makes a profit is due to its market position, which IBM Cloud, Oracle, Azure, and GCP have been chipping away at steadily, even if slowly. For GCP and AWS, I believe missing out on GitHub was a big mistake. Though, I fully expect GCP to loosen the purse strings for similar companies in the near future, esp given Azure/Microsoft have been on a tear of late.

Of course GCP is losing money, have you seen their rate of investment in new datacenters and services? That shit is extremely expensive. AWS was losing money for many years too, they're at entirely different places.

Difference is, AWS was growing into a void. Google has to contend with established leaders.

GCP is basically number four globally in cloud - with Alibaba being number three

This tells me it won't last much longer...Google can't afford to spend all that money to be number four

> Difference is, AWS was growing into a void. Google has to contend with established leaders.

Yes, but also the market is much bigger now, and the cloud isn't something abstract people need to be convinced about. It's the de facto standard now.

> GCP is basically number four globally in cloud - with Alibaba being number three

Alibaba is niche in that few people outside of Asia would use it. It's still an enormous market, but GCP/AWS/Azure and Alibaba don't compete for the same workloads in the majority of cases. So there's plenty of place under the sun for GCP, if Google want it. Them killing it would be b2b suicide.

I wouldn't touch GCP even with a 3 meter stick. And using it in any project is just out of the question. No.

Cloud has had over 135-153% YoY revenue growth every quarter since they started reporting Cloud revenue 11 quarters ago. It's amazingly consistent high growth.

TAC (traffic acquisition costs) have exploded over this time frame. If you subtract TAC from Services revenue, the growth is merely good. Cloud revenue also seems a lot less sensitive to the recent economic downtown so far, but we'll really know after Q3.

The operating losses for Cloud are also shrinking quickly. Building data centers should be capex, but I'm guessing they count R&D as opex, which makes the losses higher now even though it will pay off later like an investment. They could probably start to have operating income any time in the next 3 years.

It was always strange that Google would decide to dabble in the brutally expensive and competitive games market, of all things.

"Brutally expensive and competitive" is right. Look at what Microsoft had to do after losing the Xbox One / PS4 generation. They've spent almost a decade building out a radically new subscription service. That's before the $100+ billion they've dropped on studios for content to fill out said service.

On the other hand, I also remember all the hype that it received (though maybe I live in a tech-obsessed bubble). "OMG, it will change everything you know about gaming". All my colleagues were so convinced that it was a technical breakthrough (maybe it was, I dunno), and that everyone will be playing with it because it is simply so amazing and revolutionary.

My opinion was "yeah, cool, but I just don't see it". It was very annoying when these coworkers judged me, thinking I am simply too stupid to realize how amazing this is...

I think there was and still is potential in cloud game streaming, its more a failure in execution. In theory we have an incredible amount of mostly idle silicon in peoples homes that with raising bandwidth and decreasing latencies become increasingly wasteful. It seems to me quite obvious that eventually there will be no particular reason why we need game consoles or high-powered gaming pcs at all. We can get much better efficiency if the compute necessary to render and simulate games happens in a shared cloud system.

Not that the economy really cares about wasteful consumption now of course, but there might be natural influences that may eventually force it to care about it.

We also never really explored what cloud-native games actually mean. Like what could we do with cloud games that we couldn't on a console? What does it mean to the compute budgets, to asset streaming, to multiplayer between cloud instances, if we could more efficiently use gpu resources if multiple players use the same gpu to play the same game, can we make multiplayer games in the cloud that are impossible any other way? etc. It feels like no game developer thought about what cloud gaming actually could mean, this could be a very exciting space in a few decades from now.

I think Stadia wasn't really a product developed by remotely competent people, they did so many mistakes that it feels like almost anybody could've told them. There even were detailed early reviews of the many issues with the platform, but they never addressed any of them. Its like they burned money it was weird.

Tying it to an expensive, mediocre controller instead of "runs on anything with a modern browser" was especially confusing to me, it seemed so incredibly foolish.

Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down, we'll refund all your purchases"

Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might kill it. If they promised me a refund I would have probably spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a pro membership.

Yes it was a decent investment to get started, too much for a whim.

I seriously thought about it but ended up scoring an Xbox and game pass and my main reason was I have to buy the games at full price for Stadia and google will deffo shut it down sooner rather than later so too risky.

Game pass is amazing for someone who isn’t a hardcore call of duty type gamer! I’ve been away from gaming since playing tiger woods on the OG Xbox so being able to play so many different types of games is awesome.

I like forza horizons!

Google's mistake was not choosing to go with a Game Pass type model - but then again, they didn't have the content as they have had to work to get each of the games offered running on Linux. It's why they have had to pay millions to developers to make Stadia versions available.

Just for clarity, they are refunding hardware and software purchases but not membership fees.

How would Stadia shutting down justify you not getting a pro membership? It's something you pay monthly anyway, it's not like you get less of your money worth if they close the service 2 years after your subscription was used, unlike hardware and games.

That's a promise you can only keep if almost no one buys anything, though. :-)

If Stadia had grown to the scale where Google would have had a hard time refunding all purchases, odds are they wouldn't have felt the need to shut it down.

Problem is though, if they ever decided to shut down they'd have to repay the entire amount of revenue they've made and more.

Nobody would have prevented them from changing the ToS after a few years to not refund new purchases after date X. It would have been a bad signal but if the platform was successful people wouldn't really mind.

If you put it in from the start it wouldn't be an issue. Or even just guarantee refunds from purchases in the past 3 years. So there is a rolling window and you can lessen the impact but closing the store and continuing operating the platform for 1-2 years.

“We’ll refund the purchases made while the service was in public beta”

Presumably it would be something like "we will refund any purchase if we shut down before 2024" or something like that.

I would have liked this kind of promise, but for the general public this marketing message might have sounded differently: "We might shut down before 2024".

Even if some people are kind of used to this happening, stating it more obviously might have a negative effect just as well.

They wouldn't have to give it a specific timeframe. It could just be a commitment that in the event that they shutdown, they would refund any purchases made within 3 years of their shutdown, and partially refund any purchases made within 5 years.

Just have a rolling refund window - "If we shut down the service in 3 years, we'll give you a full refund, and if between 3-5 years, a half refund".

And then if you need to and don't want to refund, just keep the service limping along for 5 more years.

The monthly subscription costs will not be refunded, only controllers & games you "bought", instead of played via Pro subscription. If Stadia had been a success, there'd been plenty of Pro subscriptions.

Well, you can also keep the promise if there are lots of buyers and business goes well.

Surely is down to licensing 'only'? Google presumably didn't develop those games, the games still needed to connect to servers, etc. Arguably, it's a benefit to get a new person on your gaming service so Steam, for example, should adopt all those users is the licensing that Google arranged.

If the terms Google had were "we'll sell licenses for your games, but if we shoot down then you have to accept those users as native users", then uses would have been insured against shut-down. I can't see how those terms are worse than if Google were a retailer of those games?

A lot of AAA games are freemium with IAP, surely the acquisition is Cannondale enough that game companies would go for such a deal?

I suppose there wasn't enough upside for Google as people still bought Stadia without any such promise.

"we'll make sure you have a way to play your games even if stadia shuts down" would have also been acceptable and would have guaranteed much more good will.

But they failed to adequately engage devs or their customers' desires in the first place, so such an arrangement would have been a comparatively impossible licensing and product goal for them.

They are refunding purchases to users.

But developers aren't getting their time back.

I would 100% have signed up and bought games if I was assured that I'd get my money back if the service was shut down in under, say, 3 years.

That's kinda why I keep buying on steam, because they (at least ostensibly) will un-DRM games for download if they ever shut down

My steam account is 18 years old. I can still easily download Braid, a game released in 2009, and I apparently played in 2014, install it on my Steam Deck and be playing it again in ten minutes. Considering it has cloud save support, there is a not small chance that my saves may even be intact.

It's that endurance in the platform that has me coming back. I have faith that Valve as a company is in it for the long haul to act as a game store platform and honor my digital purchases. It's allowed me to put several thousand dollars into them.

It's really the endurance of Windows more than anything. I can play stuff on Windows 11 mostly the same as I did on Windows XP. I can't play any game from Steam on Mac more than a few years old.

Proton offers some of this effect also: Wine/Proton is pretty good at playing lots of old Windows stuff, in some cases better than actual Windows is.

It's fascinating that I can just click and run a game compiled in 1996 (WINQUAKE) in Windows 11; but my ubuntu installation breaks after not touching it for two months.

Also now Wine+Proton works well thanks to Valve. Even if Microsoft dropped compatibility support in the future, some games can be run on Linux.

They can really only remove the DRM on games that use Steam's own DRM, there are plenty of games on Steam that use third party DRM that they couldn't really do much about.

However, on the flip side, there are also a good amount of games on Steam that are totally DRM free and Valve wouldn't have to do anything for those games in the event they shut down.

I believe they've stated in multiple places that they have budgeted for running the auth and entitlement systems. They set aside money in escrow to do that. Those systems are cheap compared to the CDN (which is also getting much cheaper). A small team could have a multi-year runway for running auth and entitlement.

Eh, I'm not sure that has ever been a stated policy other than an offhand remark when Steam was much smaller. Valve is unlikely to have the legal right to strip away DRM from other companies games. Especially now that everyone runs their own store front.

Maybe, just maybe they would release DRM-free Valve games, but that is as far as I could imagine they would go.

No-one at Steam ever actually said that, and I highly doubt they have the legal and contractual standing to do so if they wanted.

You have no idea who Steam's CEO would be in a scenario where they were shutting down, so you certainly have no idea whether that CEO would un-DRM anything.

It will be three years and two months from Stadia launch to cancellation. So you'd be ok with getting none of your money back in this situation?

If all the purchases were made on day 1, then sure. That's a lot more playing time than I usually get out of a game anyways. For games/accessories I bought after that – no, I'd expect a refund.

The hardware itself was cheap anyways – like $50 for a Chromecast + controller (and even cheaper with deals and bundles), and you can still use both after the service shuts down. It was the $60-80 per game that was the deal breaker.

Yeah actually, same here. When Stadia launched I really liked it. The subscription was free for like 3 months. I've not owned a gaming PC in years, but really enjoyed playing Serious Sam and almost completed it. When the free period ended I could've purchased few of the games I most liked but ultimately decided against it because I knew by that time it was inevitably going to be shut down so giving Google any money was a fool's errand.

BTW when Cyberpunk was released and didn't work, and PS Store / Steam / XBox gave refunds, Stadia was the only platform that refused refunds.

It worked well in Stadia.

Cyberpunk was riddled with actual game-breaking bugs on release, it wasn't just graphical glitches and poor performance.

"and let you export your saved games"

A lifecycle policy is a truly underrated component of a good services and software business, and I wish more people both understood that, and more companies had them.

When I buy pretty much any Microsoft product, I can go on their lifecycle policy page and see a date, often five to ten years out, when they commit to continue supporting/securing the product through. If I get more than that, great, but there's a commitment Microsoft is held to up front.

Google cannot make that commitment because Google cannot commit to anything. But it's a large enough company it could afford to do it and eat the cost when it was a bad call. The reason they won't is because Google doesn't view customers as people or partners they need to value.

Funny story. Two years ago they gave away "Stadia Premiere Edition" kits for free, which was a Chromecast Ultra and a Stadia controller which I believe retailed for USD 100. I wasn't particularly interested, but I figured it would be worth a try.

But when I got the hardware I tried signing up and realized that apparently I had signed up for the Stadia free trial 6 months earlier. I vaguely remember trying for literally a few minutes on my laptop. This means that the $100 of promotional hardware they sent me is completely useless for its intended purpose.

It's genuinely sad that some manager or team went to all the trouble of getting the budget for this hardware promotion, but couldn't or didn't reset the free trial for the Google accounts of the recipients. But it might be a clear sign of the general level of competence with which the entire Stadia project was executed.

On the bright side, the Chromecast is still quite useful, although I'm not personally using it and haven't found someone to give mine to. Last I checked there wasn't any way to use the Stadia controller for anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if people could figure out how to "jailbreak" it and make it useful.

It works over its standard USB-C interface with a computer.

I got the same deal you did and use my Stadia controller with ROMs on my laptop when traveling. Works great. Excellent controller, too.

The wireless interface is actually WiFi and some form of Bluetooth and not easily jailbroken last time I checked.

That's good to know. I think the WiFi and/or Bluetooth was what I had looked for and found nothing. I'd want to use it for games on my Apple TV or Nintendo Switch.

Yea they should definitely open source the firmware or at least do one last update to make it Bluetooth compatible. I as well got the promo deal.

I use the Stadia controller which I got for being a YouTube Premium subscriber to play Xbox Cloud games. Works flawlessly!

I finally find some use for stadia controller then

This whole sub thread reminds me of the reuse of the :CueCat

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

I had one of these too!

Assuming it's possible, they should really patch the controllers to be used like a typical bluetooth controller.

It's been a while, but I seem to remember using my OnLive controller for a good while after system shutdown as a Bluetooth media controller. I'll bet someone will figure something out.

I got the same bundle and had the same issue (already used the trial for like a minute just to see if it worked)

I had a secondary Google account for app publishing, and I was able to switch to that and start another trial there. Not that this information is really any use to you now!

For what it's worth, my experience was pretty bad. Had tons of lag spikes on my 50/5 down/up internet.

I also got a premier kit, got the nice hardware, then got an error saying the workspace I signed up for the promotional offer with is not eligible for using stadia.

Or at least use a business model that didn't require your customers to put complete trust in the fact that you wouldn't shutdown, when you have a reputation for killing projects.

I'm not a hardcore gamer and have a pretty weak desktop by gaming standards. If this was setup like an all-you-can-eat subscription, or an al-carte rental, I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat, and if it went away, oh well, I got what I paid for.

But the fact that that you had to "purchase" individual games made it a complete non-starter for me. If I purchase something, I want to actually own it, forever, not have temporary access to it at the whim of the publisher/service. I don't trust any online service to stay active indefinitely, and Google doubly so.

what's also important here is that people are very invested in the ownership of their games, probably more so than they are of their films/their music. 'your games' are intrinsically tied to your saves in those games; your characters, your items, all the bullshit grinding you did once and never want to have to do ever again. in a very real sense, "You" are in your games in a way that isn't true of movies or music or the other formats of media that have been relinquished to the cloud.

can you imagine marketing or finance allowing a statement like that through?

I don't remember exactly, but I believe this was promised in some sense when I decided to get on board a year or 2 ago. At the time you got a free Chromecast + Controller when buying Cyberpunk which was also a pretty good deal to pass by.

Someone asked Stadia devs or reps on Reddit if users would have access to purchases games if the service shut down, back when Stadia was announced, and the response was not a "no" but definitely wasn't a "yes".

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56...

(That said, props to them for refunding folks.)

That the Stadia dev's response on Reddit is pure nonsense, basically just saying that

1. we're committed to supporting this for years to come

2. you can download your game metadata (saved games)

LOL, what are people supposed to do with their game metadata now that Stadia is being shut down? Look at it in a hex editor?

> LOL, what are people supposed to do with their game metadata now that Stadia is being shut down? Look at it in a hex editor?

Take your full price refund and rebuy the game at half price.

If you don't have the hardware for it, it's much cheaper now than it was three years ago, or you could use geforce now.

The question is: Would that be more cost-effective than just outright buying Ubisoft or a similar-sized publisher so your device has some content?

"Google Stadia is a cloud gaming service whereby games can be purchased and played, but don't have to be downloaded to a console or PC."

This was a doomed business model because it blurred subscription and purchase. If it was subscription, there should have been no purchases (hardware or software) necessary. There are millions of people - myself included - who would pay for a subscription game service. Stadia was not that service.

Stadia had both. Stadia Pro was a subscription that gave you access to a few new games every month, and you could buy (licenses to play) games.

Had both means blurred - therefore doomed

"stadia" in the public's mind, and how it was primarily communicated and advertised, was a subscription streaming service where you also had to pay full price for games that could only be used on their service and would go away with it.

That's not the "Netflix for games" that it needed to be and stadia pro's limited selection was nowhere near adequate either. As a result, they set themselves up with the most unappealing business model possible for consumers.

It was confusing marketing. I didn't know what it was until I actually went through with trying it, and even then the game license ownership was unclear to me. It was weird how you'd buy a game upfront at regular price then not pay for streaming it later, UNLESS you paid monthly for Stadia Pro for the ability to stream at higher quality, which also came with some free games and hardware (?), AND there was a free trial version of it (which evidently deleted your free games when it expired).

I assume at this point that the license for the one game I bought was only good for Stadia, and I'm being refunded for it. That's good, cause Far Cry 5 got boring fast.

Not with developers though. Consumers get refunded, game developers don't get anything back.

That could have put them to unlimited risk. Let's assume they currently got $1M in revenue and spent $500K on maintenance. They can either refund everyone (buying goodwill for $500K) or book a $500K profit and piss people off. Currently, the estimated value of the goodwill is above $500K, so they are proceeding with a refund.

But it could have been different. They could have got $10M in revenue, then most users would have moved to competing platforms, while still playing previously purchased games on Stadia. This could have left them with a choice between $1M/year running costs to keep the lights on vs. $10M to purchase goodwill that is only worth $1M.

> vs. $10M to purchase goodwill that is only worth $1M.

The goodwill is worth far more than $1M because it affects Google's entire reputation.

They already have a reputation of shutting things down.

How many people will look at this, and start considering whether or not they should move off GCP?

How many people will not sign up for their next big new product because of things like this? Which will ironically be likely for that product failing and being shut down (like Stadia).

It's a vicious cycle, and Google is going to have a hard time breaking it.

That is incredibly funny, and incredibly apt.

They straight up incompetently dodged the question whenever it came up and tried to turn it into some patronizing and belittling "we understand that you're scared of the future" statement every single time.

They deserved to fail on that point alone. Either promise refunds or promise none; either way you're signaling a form of confidence in your product and making the expectations clear to your users.

Refusing to answer on that point made it clear where their confidence was and how weasely they felt they needed to be to sell their product.

I'll bet they would've failed anyway then had to refund even more money. Extra cynical view: Maybe they were afraid of this from the beginning, and that's why they didn't tell anyone.

I'd say the biggest effect was that consumers didn't trust Google to actually keep their purchases alive for more than two years. Techwise Stadia was actually very good and it could have been a good alternative to a full-blown gaming PC for people who are not gaming enthusiasts.

People who are not gaming enthusiasts are pretty happy with mobile gaming. I honestly don’t know what Stadia’s target market was.

Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware.

This would have given enthusiasts a lot less to hate about Stadia. It would have given customers a lot more confidence in the long-term viability of their purchases. It would have highlighted the flexibility offered by Google's streaming platform without making putting up with its drawbacks a requirement to enjoy your games. A player could start out only streaming their games, then upgrade to a real PC down the road to get an even better gameplay experience out of their existing library.

For many enthusiasts, the product Google actually launched felt like an existential threat to their hobby. They feared games could go streaming exclusive. Publishers could use it as a form of extra draconian DRM, or start designing their games around the limitations of streaming. As a result this turned many of the biggest gaming enthusiasts, the people casual players will often ask for advice on what to buy, into ant-Stadia evangelists.

"Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware."

Nvidia already has a product like that called Geforce Now. Instead of having it's own store it integrates with Steam and GOG.

There's still the problem that is a hypothetical customer wants to game enough to pay for Stadia but doesn't have the funds for a gaming PC... why don't they just buy the $300 dollar Xbox Series S?

GeForce Now is a good option, but their implementation is clunky precisely because it is a "bring your own games" affair.

Well Google sure proved them wrong, they kept those purchases alive for nearly three years!

This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google, Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.

Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate to bet that they'll keep going with it.

It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone might be interested enough to pick it up.

https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 (thread)

Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's caught on since when it was announced in July 2020.

https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far

The wonderful thing about making everything OSS, and also why execs hate it, is it gives up a degree of control to kill something at a moment's notice. And so Dart/Flutter are in a good place!

It's an important point to understand that it's not the flexibility to kill it but the flexibility to divert its resources elsewhere.

You lose that with OSS projects because you eventually end up with people screaming down your door and the visibility that brings. Also being assigned to work on these projects internally is career death. Both of these problems happened to Google Cloud's Terraform provider at some point and it was a headache for the company and the community.

Luckily Terraform adoption is out of Google's hands. They're just forced to play ball. OTOH, Google could easily kill off Flutter via other means.

Flutter is basically a custom rendering engine with massive effort to create pixel perfect compatability with native offerings. If google drops the ball on it, I doubt there is any company that can take on maintaining something like that.

If google drops support for flutter, the next design update by ios or android would kill it.

i can confirm that this kept at least a few teams i've talked to or worked with from choosing flutter. facebook and react native are viewed as much safer from the "killed by google" effect. same thing tossing around the idea of using carbon, their new language.

100% this. I don't know if this is a PR problem, but it very much feels like Flutter is a project that will live and die by Google's sword. Go doesn't come with this perception.

Projects that make it big from within Google need to find shelter from this perception by moving into community driven project governance, for better or worse.

I feel like it might be a little "safer" if it wasn't tied to Dart. :-/

Dart is pretty much 'done' as a language though. They are adding code generation and other nice things, but it's stable. Flutter on the other hand needs to be kept up to date as Android and iOS change, so it's very vulnerable.

What is an example of a mainstream language being "done" before?

Most mainstream languages are "done" in the way that matters here. Not "done" in the sense of "not receiving new features anymore", but in the sense that you could switch their implementations to maintenance mode today and they'd remain useful for a long time. Easily visible with languages where people do indeed keep using old versions for whatever reason.

Common Lisp

Go projects are also usually biased towards being very simple with few dependencies. A lot of projects that are well suited for go would be easy to rewrite to another language if Google did ever decide to abandon it.

I am using Flutter and have the same concerns. There are many companies that use Flutter, but Google do 99% of the development and don't seem to be using it for any of their own public apps, which is discouraging.

Well, they did a Big Damn Rewrite to use it for Wallet/Pay, and, in the process, dropped a bunch of features and made it infuriatingly tied to a phone number, because the rewrite was really for the Indian market.

My understanding is only Pay in the US and India are the Flutter version, Wallet is not using Flutter. This also had the Flutter boat shaking on reddit a bit back.

They actually wrote the newest Wallet app without Flutter, so it's a step backwards there.

Not to mention that it seems that the relationship between Flutter and the Android team is contentious at best

Yes, and even worse, the nature of Flutter means its utility is especially vulnerable to abandonment. If Go were abandoned you could at least maintain your Go applications indefinitely, but since Flutter relies on its own UI engine it requires perpetual development to stay in sync with the evolving UI design language of iOS and Android.

It's even worse than that. Not only is keeping the UI updated a herculean task. It is written in a programming language (Dart) that virtually nobody outside of Google uses. Other than another giant tech company, no one could keep Flutter going if Google ever drops it.

Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick up, and there are all sorts of hobbyist languages and frameworks that have niche developer interest. It doesn't have to replace anything major to survive.

> Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick up

Are there any major projects besides flutter built on dart? The fear is not that dart is hard to use, it's that it would not be maintained if flutter was not a mainstream success.

A quick browse shows a few notable names like Square, Tizen, and Toyota. Amazon seems to have also forked Flutter themselves to make their own framework so expand Flutter to Desktop and Web: https://docs.amplify.aws/

Seems to be enough buzz around it that I wouldn't be super worried.

I started learning dart/flutter a few days ago. Now I'm having second thoughts.

(Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.)

For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as having overtones of the Baghdad Bob meme. And indeed, why should you trust my word?

The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish.

Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.

Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that.

Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).

We're working hard on lots of fun new stuff right now, including a rewrite of our graphics rendering engine. If you haven't seen it, check out https://wonderous.app, which is using the new engine on iOS. We think it shows the potential of Flutter well!

My honest condolences that you have to do damage control here to save your project after your employer did something stupid (again). I've been in this position, it's not great.

Thanks, internal use and support Play store apps makes sense to keep it.

I use Flutter every day...your team needs to be more transparent. Tangible answers and numbers, "Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services", is great, but those services and APIs have a variety of other entry points not using Flutter, they don't depend on it.

How is Flutter funded? It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia, does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment?

"600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects, does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect.

"It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users, how many use it weekly / monthly? Flutter has a large DevRel push, how many of these projects / users are students who just spin it up once and hit star on GH when asked and never touch it again? Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told.

Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks, but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends? Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project? I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status. I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends?

It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome. I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project. It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well.

@a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation. Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard. I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage.

"which is using the new engine on iOS" - An aside... I downloaded the app, it seems pretty smooth, not sure the FPS but I saw minimal jank which is great. BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel. On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off. This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter. I have watched a friend delete a flutter app from their phone right after installing with the reasoning "I hate when apps feel like that, it's so obnoxious", these people exist, they feel Flutter apps are second class, this sentiment will 100% drive away enterprise adoption imho. Even recently a user on the flutterdev subreddit said they were leaving Flutter behind just do to this persistent user feedback.

My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.

There's a lot here, so perhaps you'll forgive me for not responding point by point. But to the critique that we need to be more transparent, I just want to share that we've gone so far as to share our product strategy publicly: https://flutter.dev/go/strategy-2022

Modulo a few minor redactions, this is the entire document. I don't know of many other projects of our scale that has shared something like this. It's reasonable to have divergent opinions on whether we're successful or popular, or what that means about our developer base. But I hope you'll see that we're trying to be pretty transparent about what we're focused on. We're just trying to build something valuable and useful, and that benefits Google as well as the broader community.

I build open source products and would kill for the kind of detailed and open developer feedback that nhannah just gave you.

I don't give a fuck about flutter, but the link to the strategy document and the generic nod to transparency came across quite poorly as a response.

> ... and could not get a straight answer I was told.

I guess he can't get a straight answer either. I would have loved to see a thoughtful reply.

I read the strategy & Roadmap in its entirety and to be honest it made me more concerned Flutter will be axed.

Strategy:

> We primarily build for external-to-Google users, but Google adoption of Flutter remains of great value to us, as it helps us “pay our bills”

So grow or die as Google adoption is heading in a negative direction now and you are racing to grow enough to offset no one new eating the dog food?

> our primary strategic objective is the growth of monthly active users

> On the other hand, even a mediocre SDK will have a healthy and flourishing ecosystem if it is used by the plurality of developers.

Don't create something people love and use internally then share it with the world with mostly permanent internal funding, but instead get enough external buy-in that Google keeps it alive via inertia? My questions above were very much about this, does Flutter have that inertia in hard numbers or are you racing a clock now that internal buy-in is seemingly diminishing? Based on this you must have a MAU target, how far off is it, could you share even a percentage? If you don't hit it will the project be axed right away or is there a runway?

> Other characteristics (runtime performance, memory usage, etc.) will earn the respect of a developer: important, for sure. But developer experience will earn love.

This is only true until they realize the devils bargain you are mentioning above, I was complaining about expansion via game dev over polishing iOS in my previous post, this seems to be the planned strategy, which is very disheartening.

> In 2022 we will make good on this promise, and further raise our quality on web and desktop. We believe Flutter's growth will increasingly come from web and desktop: ecosystems that each have many millions of developers.

> Yet the web developer market is huge (10m+) and Flutter offers something distinctive for this audience

In a world where polish is not priority I think Flutter best fits on desktop, kudos there...web for flutter is very niche as noted, I guess if expansion is all that's important that's cool, but I would take iOS polish over web any day, I just don't see business apps using Flutter for web, it really only makes sense to me for apps that would be looking toward canvas, etc. anyway.

Roadmap:

> We will update the Material library to support Material 3.

iOS once again super low priority :(

> We plan to continue to evolve the language at a deliberately slow but steady pace.

This is how churn will happen, you have buy in from many people and they are clamoring for improvements, custom linting, sick of codegen, better inference, faster analysis in large repos, etc., but this is lower priority than gaming and material design updates.

> In 2021 we resolved a number of issues around jank ... As a result, we have been rewriting our graphics backend. In 2022

Out of everything I read only this last piece on jank felt like something I need as a current Flutter developer on mobile; thank you.

I have felt for a while the developer experience was too focused on easy entry / getting started and not professional work, this seemingly is the goal. The r/FlutterDev thread on the stadia shutdown has lots of users saying "Flutter is not Stadia", but it sounds like it is. Flutter is not an OSS framework like React that is supported by Meta because they use it heavily, this is a product, you need customers, Flutter has targets that can be missed just like Stadia. This is extremely worrisome. The same MSFT employee who asked you about MAU mentioned the large DevRel spend on Flutter vs the zero spend on the main competitor. I thought at the time this was to push more people toward Android first multi-platform (I would say the competitor is iOS first), turns out that was a misread. This also explains why MAU numbers are not shared, that's not a nice metric of an OSS community like other OSS frameworks have, that is a business metric.

Unless there is more hard number / metric / goal transparency I don't think you can really say there is no reason to be worried.

Hello, Flutter TL here.

> your team needs to be more transparent.

Unfortunately most of the lack of transparency is not under the Flutter team's control, but I'll see what I can do.

> How is Flutter funded?

A number of companies (Google, Bytedance, and Canonical are three that I know have publicly stated so; there are others but it's up to them to make such statements) employ people to work on Flutter. Hardware costs (CI, source control, bug database, etc) are paid for by Google and Microsoft.

These companies don't typically share more detailed information about how they account for this funding or how much they pay exactly; it's considered proprietary, and often there are legal implications to making detailed statements about this kind of thing.

> It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia

(I'm assuming you are referring to Google's portion of the funding.) That's not really how Google accounts for things internally. Broadly speaking, the more usage (internal and external) that a product gets, and the more revenue can be assigned to a product, the more Google is likely to fund it. In the case of Flutter, Google is apparently quite happy and has been increasing funding over time as a result, as have other companies (as you can tell by looking at the number of people employed to work on it).

> does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget?

No, that's not how things work at Google. (I assume you mean Google's investment in Flutter when you say "Flutter budget". Flutter itself, as an open source project, doesn't have a budget currently. Maybe one day we'll have a foundation but right now the additional management overhead doesn't seem worth it.)

> There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true?

I think when there were far fewer apps using Flutter, and fewer other companies using and contributing to Flutter, that if Google had stopped using it internally, after a while, it would have become difficult to justify continued investment (since in that scenario, very few people are using it at all, so what's in it for Google? Google isn't a charity). However, at this point Flutter is used a great deal outside Google, as Tim discusses in his comment above, and even if Google itself were to stop using it (which seems highly unlikely) there would still be plenty of justification to continue funding it as a developer product (many of Google's APIs and developer products aren't used internally at all).

That said, this is not intended to be a forward-looking statement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement). If you want to ask Google about its future funding plans I suspect the best place to do so is a stockholders conference call.

> Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps?

With some exceptions that involve negotiations with the relevant teams, Google doesn't generally talk about what technologies it uses for its own applications. Tim listed quite a few apps whose teams have agreed to publicly state they use Flutter, though. I'm not sure what else to tell you. It's not like Google is making new apps all the time, and rewriting an app in Flutter only makes sense if the app's team benefits from the rewrite in some way.

> Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment?

No. (But then, why would you take my word for it.)

> "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects

I don't think this is an axis along which apps are categorized, so I've no idea how to answer that. (What is a "hobby project"? Does it count as commercial if someone charges for their hobby?)

> does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal?

Yes? We care about all apps.

> Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other. The Casual Games Toolkit is intended to help people who are interested in writing games with Flutter but don't know where to start; we regularly do surveys of our developer base and this was an area that people indicated an interest in. I'm not really sure what the supposed link to Stadia would even be. Work on iOS continues, and we have significantly grown the team there in the past year.

> "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users

We occasionally post the data from our quarterly surveys to our blog on Medium, the latest post I could find that separates the data by "what is your primary purpose" was the Q3 2021 survey's report and it had this graph: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*_GNHkk5TLOI7wQYc

Looks like it's <50% are "hobby" users and the number is shrinking. That said, we explicitly want to be a project that people use to learn programming, providing a seamless path from "learning" to "hobby" to "professional" so I would hope this number never gets very low.

> how many use it weekly / monthly?

That's very hard to say for a variety of reasons (e.g. many people turn off analytics, analytics are extremely unreliable in general, many people use Flutter via means that wouldn't trigger our analytics in the first place, etc) but my understanding is that as best we can tell, Flutter has well over 500,000 MAUs. I don't think we track weekly numbers.

[continued below]

> Flutter has a large DevRel push, how many of these projects / users are students who just spin it up once and hit star on GH when asked and never touch it again?

I've no idea how to measure that.

> Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told.

I mean, there's some questions we just don't have the answer to. I'm not sure what to tell you. We do share quite a lot of our data, e.g. from the quarterly surveys, as noted above; for most of your answers the numbers I just gave you can be found by Googling.

I would personally love to share more (e.g. I'd love for the analytics to be public) but there are significant privacy constraints around this. Even within the team, most people don't have access to the analytics data, and we're actually making an effort to limit that even more as part of our extensive efforts around tightening security.

I hope one day we can anonymize and aggregate the data to a level that satisfies Google's privacy team and then we'll be able to share the numbers in real time, but that won't be for some time (if ever, this stuff is hard).

> Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks

I would point to things like numbers of users or apps rather than vanity metrics like GitHub stars, but there we go.

> but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends?

I would posit that it is because Google Trends data is a terrible way to measure popularity of an SDK.

> Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project?

GitHub stars are purely a vanity metric. I would ignore them.

> I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status.

Feel free to tell them to reach out to me if they ever have a question about what they can or can't say.

> I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends?

Flutter is big and growing, but there are plenty of much bigger SDKs, certainly. I don't think that's a big secret. :-)

> It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome.

There are plenty of SDKs with much smaller communities that are very healthy and have been around for decades. I think it's reasonable to be concerned about ecosystem health, but I must say that personally I am quite happy with Flutter's ecosystem and community size and growth.

> I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project.

Well good news, the numbers you asked for have largely already been discussed publicly, so you need not have that specific worry.

> It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well.

I can't promise long-term backing from Google, because I'm not the CEO and ultimately it has to be his call. I can point to all the reasons Tim gave above for why there's no reason to expect Google to abandon Flutter any time soon, and I can point to the numbers I gave above as the "hard facts" you are looking for, or at least the closest things to them that one can have. Unfortunately with squishy things such as ecosystem size and how people use products and so on there is so much noise in the data, such big error bars, that anyone giving you precise numbers is selling you snake oil.

> @a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation.

I think Tim just pointed to a14n because he's contributed so much over the years. No one person could take over the project and I certainly wouldn't put that on a14n's shoulders!! You can look at our GitHub and Discord activity to see how the project is doing in terms of non-Google contributors.

> Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard.

We are a long way past there being any single person who is keeping the project afloat.

> I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage.

You never know. FreePascal is an example I love to point to; it's an open source project with minimal (if any) corporate/enterprise funding and yet they have been delivering reliably for decades now. I don't see why a dedicated team couldn't pick up Dart in the same way, if the interest was there.

> BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel.

The biggest complaint we hear is definitely jank, FWIW. :-)

> On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off.

If you have specific reproducible cases of this, please file bugs with test cases demonstrating it. The more concrete and specific you can be (e.g. high speed video showing the difference) the better.

We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel, so if there are cases where we're not, we would love to learn about them and fix them. (Unfortunately until recently we were mostly focused on lower-level issues on iOS, like performance and plugins, and have not had as much time to spend on widgets and physics. That's changing, though.)

> This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter.

We've made huge strides here in the past year, but yeah, we still have work to do.

> My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.

As far as I can tell, we've been transparent, with most of the numbers you say you'd like us to share being numbers we have in fact shared already. The numbers are not made up, but yes, they are mushy. If you have any idea how to get less mushy numbers, join our Discord, help us out (the link to the Discord is in the contributor docs on GitHub).

Hey, want to start by saying I appreciate the full reply, this is much more reassuring. Obviously trust in Google is what it is...

On the budget / funding side I understand not all details can be shared, I think the general gist is just the broad question of what can effect flutter funding. It sounds like Stadia shut down won't, but I see that question was also raised on Reddit, so clarity on that was appreciated beyond myself I am sure, and any more would be appreciated as well.

On internal apps, I know Flutter is being used, this sort of leaks into PRs, comments, etc, but I think the question I was getting at is if that has enough value to google. On the outward facing apps this is definitely a matter of perception, I don't think I need to expand there.

The hobby projects, I think this is hard to define but is a classic you know it when you see it. The result of a single Udemy course, something that serves 0 to few users (most of whom are the devs friends), something not actively being developed, something where the code base is quite small, etc. Projects done and published for the sake of learning more than their use to others is likely where I would draw the line. I think there is another line at profitable / paid dev, but I would say the lesser line is appropriate. I think the wider question is how many people are getting enough value out of Flutter that it truly translates into value for Google that is worth sustaining, definitely not an easy question to answer.

> I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other.

This is still hard for me to swallow. Codegen for json deserialization, data types, general slowdown in the analysis server at scale, the list feels long, I would have to dive into the current issues to get them all. But coming from other languages / frameworks there is an incompleteness that feels more important to address than games no matter what a survey says. Saying they are orthogonal is denying resources/funds could be used differently for different goals. The Stadia link was simply it seems growing Flutter user base has a priority over polish, and with an internal app shutting down it seemed growth could itself grow in importance over polish.

> <50% are "hobby" > 500,000 MAUs

Thank you! This!! This gives some idea of how many devs are truly working on Flutter worldwide. These numbers make much more sense to me and what I see!"It has a developer base of several million", I felt like this was gaslighting me as I could not see where all these devs existed, how were stackoverflow issues that seemed like they should be semi-common with 0 to 1 replies!? This did not jive with millions of dev, even a small percent working at enterprise scale, and did not fit with my experience working on other frameworks that claim similar scales.

> I would point to things like numbers of users or apps rather than vanity metrics like GitHub stars, but there we go.

> I would posit that it is because Google Trends data is a terrible way to measure popularity of an SDK.

> Flutter is big and growing, but there are plenty of much bigger SDKs, certainly. I don't think that's a big secret. :-)

Combine the use of these two stats being heavily pushed in blogs etc with the, "It has a developer base of several million", quote, mix in first hand observations that they feel off, and the feeling the team is hiding something starts to manifest. Especially when blog posts turn these stats into proof through twisting that Flutter is for lack of a better term, "the biggest". Thank you for noting these are vanity numbers, imho pushing them does a disservice. I will also submit that at 5 years old continuing to push the narrative that Flutter is "new" and the nearest competitor only has any gains do that that gap starts to get some side eyes.

> We are a long way past there being any single person who is keeping the project afloat.

Agreed, but still it feels like there are a few big hitters, it does not go unnoticed where he works and I am guessing is sorta paid by proxy by Google.

> I don't see why a dedicated team couldn't pick up Dart in the same way, if the interest was there.

Agreed on Dart, I think Flutter is another matter though.

> The biggest complaint we hear is definitely jank, FWIW. :-)

>If you have specific reproducible cases of this, please file bugs with test cases demonstrating it. The more concrete and specific you can be (e.g. high speed video showing the difference) the better.

These feel tied together, I mean this in a honest way and not to offend the team, but does anyone on the team use iOS full time and run Flutter apps on device in prod regularly (just cruise ebay motors?)? I talk to other iOS users and this is a well known issue, scroll acceleration is off (scroll fast and it's WAY off), there is an issue already posted for Flutter with scroll being a full frame behind native so the location / perceptions feels off at first touch, and pull to refresh is a bit janky at times. "We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel" I mean no offense, but is something code wise wrong in the tooling? As a full time iOS user it's VERY obvious, you feel it and see it, my friend literally deleted an app due to it after using it for seconds, it's not just a vague complaint, it's highly perceivable.

> We've made huge strides here in the past year, but yeah, we still have work to do.

> As far as I can tell, we've been transparent, with most of the numbers you say you'd like us to share being numbers we have in fact shared already.

I have gotten more info from this post than anything else I have read on the state of Flutter, appreciate it.

> I think the general gist is just the broad question of what can effect flutter funding

I mean, I hate to be flippant about it, but honestly the biggest factors in Google's funding of Flutter in the last 5 years have been COVID-19 and Russia attacking Ukraine, along with the subsequent market instability and inflation.

> The hobby projects, I think this is hard to define but is a classic you know it when you see it.

Well that's fine but I can't afford to have someone comb through 600,000 apps and make a call for each one on whether it's a hobby or not. :-)

> The result of a single Udemy course

We don't know how people wrote their apps. Also, someone can do a single Udemy course and then develop a killer app that makes millions of dollars. Is that a hobby?

> something that serves 0 to few users (most of whom are the devs friends)

I assure you plenty of commercial projects fail in exactly this way. ~90% of startups fail.

> something not actively being developed

Plenty of commercial projects have no active development. Probably most, frankly. For example my bank's app hasn't changed in years.

> something where the code base is quite small, etc.

Is Wordle commercial or hobby? Would a Wordle-style app written in Flutter count as a hobby app or a commercial app? What if it sells for millions of dollars the day after we decide it's a hobby app?

I just don't think this is a useful metric.

> I think the wider question is how many people are getting enough value out of Flutter that it truly translates into value for Google that is worth sustaining, definitely not an easy question to answer.

The value Google wants is ad dollars, Android users, and reduced internal development costs. Google isn't willing to report any of these numbers, and they are material so I would get in legal trouble for revealing them. My job is working on Flutter, and I am not concerned for my job. If that's not enough, there's not much more I can tell you.

> I would have to dive into the current issues to get them all.

I'm happy to discuss whatever issues you'd like if you're curious about current status on things. I recommend reaching out to me on our Discord (link in the contributing docs on GitHub, I'm @Hixie there). In general all our issues are public on GitHub and for Flutter I try to give regular updates on the top-voted issues (see also https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Popular-issues for a summary of the top 10).

> But coming from other languages / frameworks there is an incompleteness that feels more important to address than games no matter what a survey says.

I'm not sure what to say to that. Dart has one of the most comprehensive standard libraries out there. We have some holes, e.g. we don't yet have a good story for HTTP2, which we're working on. But compared to most languages, the core standard library is way more comprehensive than average, IMHO.

But again, the people who would work on, say, HTTP2, and the people who would work on the Game Toolkit, are entirely different people and the skills aren't interchangeable. Engineers aren't commodities you can just move around at will. People specialize, have interests, commitments are made, etc.

I would also say that "no matter what a survey says" is a very subjective way to run things. I actually strongly appreciate our data-driven approach. I think that's the right way to develop a product. You're never going to be able to address everyone's needs, but addressing the needs of the most people first seems like the better choice. We drive almost all our efforts from hard data collected in surveys, UX research, voting on issues, etc.

> Saying they are orthogonal is denying resources/funds could be used differently for different goals.

The paltry funds we spent on the Game Toolkit work literally could not have been used for iOS work. That's just not how things work.

> growing Flutter user base has a priority over polish

The two are not mutually exclusive. The Google team working on Flutter is currently focusing on growing the user base _by_ improving the polish (specifically around developer experience).

> Thank you! This!! This gives some idea of how many devs are truly working on Flutter worldwide. These numbers make much more sense to me and what I see!

These numbers have been public for some time, for what it's worth. We're pretty transparent, more or less as transparent as we can be about this stuff given constraints like privacy on analytics and given the very dubious nature of analytics in general. We tend to share these numbers on our blog and developer events regularly.

> "It has a developer base of several million", I felt like this was gaslighting me as I could not see where all these devs existed

The total Flutter developer base is much bigger than MAUs. As best we can tell from data collected by third parties, there are several million developers who use Flutter. They might not all do so within the same month, though. (For the same reason, if we had weekly active user numbers, they'd be smaller than the monthly active user numbers.)

I would be very careful about interpreting absolute numbers here. You cannot compare numbers from different sources because collection methodology is such a huge factor in determining the result (literally by orders of magnitude). In my experience the only way to use metrics like this is comparing them over time to metrics collected in the exact same manner.

> it does not go unnoticed where [Remy] works and I am guessing is sorta paid by proxy by Google.

I actually have no idea where Remy works, where is it?

> These feel tied together, I mean this in a honest way and not to offend the team, but does anyone on the team use iOS full time and run Flutter apps on device in prod regularly (just cruise ebay motors?)?

Yes, of course.

> I talk to other iOS users and this is a well known issue, scroll acceleration is off (scroll fast and it's WAY off), there is an issue already posted for Flutter with scroll being a full frame behind native so the location / perceptions feels off at first touch, and pull to refresh is a bit janky at times.

Do you have the issue #? I can see if we should be prioritizing it higher.

> "We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel" I mean no offense, but is something code wise wrong in the tooling?

Maybe? I don't know. My experience on iOS is that we do pretty well, but maybe I'm just not sensitive to the same issues, or maybe it affects different hardware, or maybe we have changed the settings, who knows. Concrete data filed in actual GitHub issues is the way to resolve this.

> I mean, I hate to be flippant about it, but honestly the biggest factors in Google's funding of Flutter in the last 5 years have been COVID-19 and Russia attacking Ukraine, along with the subsequent market instability and inflation.

Very fair

> Well that's fine but I can't afford to have someone comb through 600,000 apps and make a call for each one on whether it's a hobby or not. :-)

> We don't know how people wrote their apps. Also, someone can do a single Udemy course and then develop a killer app that makes millions of dollars. Is that a hobby?

> I assure you plenty of commercial projects fail in exactly this way. ~90% of startups fail.

Here I what I was getting at was todo examples being submitted, or some single tutorial chat client, someone can come out and make flappy birds of course, I taught kids in the past and some went on to publish their apps as encouragement from their parent. Nothing wrong with it, just don't see it paying the bills was my point. That was the totality of my point I think....

> The value Google wants is ad dollars, Android users, and reduced internal development costs.

I was trying to get at if a billion "hobby" devs don't drive any of this it's all a zero, thus my interest in that number.

> My job is working on Flutter, and I am not concerned for my job. If that's not enough, there's not much more I can tell you.

This is the best answer yet

> But again, the people who would work on, say, HTTP2, and the people who would work on the Game Toolkit, are entirely different people and the skills aren't interchangeable. Engineers aren't commodities you can just move around at will. People specialize, have interests, commitments are made, etc.

Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.

> The paltry funds we spent on the Game Toolkit work literally could not have been used for iOS work. That's just not how things work.

Seems like it didn't matter though so fair enough

> I would also say that "no matter what a survey says" is a very subjective way to run things.

> The two are not mutually exclusive. The Google team working on Flutter is currently focusing on growing the user base _by_ improving the polish (specifically around developer experience).

I could be 100% wrong but perception is real, after I wrote this I was sent links to other people on twitter lamenting the same growth into other sectors while mobile was not polished. I know in the yearly survey it asked about professional use, not sure if that gets more weight?

> These numbers have been public for some time, for what it's worth.

I tried googling this so many times, SEO of dev shops and blogs obscure whatever is out there on this subject.

> The total Flutter developer base is much bigger than MAUs

This is a deeper convo, if I have to update some wordpress php once every 6 months am I really part of the php/wordpress developer base? Idk, it's semantics I suppose, I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis. My point in being interested in this number related to "Google wants is ad dollars", and the assumption they connect.

> I actually have no idea where Remy works, where is it?

Remmy works for Invertase who make all the Firebase packages, he and they do a great job imho.

The last pieces were on iOS, here is the issue that was filed: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431 but honestly if you have full time iOS users ask them, they have to know, it's impossible to miss, this is not the only issue, but it requires more quantifying. To be totally frank as a dev with many iOS and Android test phones, Flutter scrolling feels like Android scrolling on an iPhone.

> todo examples being submitted [...]

Oh I'm sure plenty of that happens, but that's true of all SDKs. Plenty of people do that with Android Views, plenty of people do that with Swift UI, etc. I have no reason to believe that Flutter is particularly different from the others in terms of the proportion of apps of this kind.

> Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.

Ah, no. We've hired more engineers for iOS work in the past few months, but the games toolkit was mostly devrel and a contractor, if I recall correctly. Similarly for things like the pinball demo or the Wonderous app, those are primarily done by contracting an agency rather than people on the Flutter team, with the agency's feedback directly feeding into the engineering team's priorities. So for example, Wonderous was great because during its development it helped us find a whole bunch of issues we needed to fix.

> after I wrote this I was sent links to other people on twitter lamenting the same growth into other sectors while mobile was not polished

Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable. For example, Canonical is contributing to the Linux port, but it's not like Canonical would ever contribute to the iOS port, after all, their interest is in using Flutter on Ubuntu. Similarly, people Google hires to work on the iOS port are typically not the kind of people who want to work on Android or Windows, and so on. There's lots of areas of specialization, and if you task people to work on areas they're not experts on and not interested in, you're just going to burn them out and get low-quality work.

Even if people were commodities and interchangeable, though, I don't think it makes sense to focus on one area at the exclusion of another. There is more value in Flutter being able to target seven platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, web, and Fuchsia) well, than there would be in targeting just one platform completely perfectly. Especially because the effort to get from zero to excellent is much less than the effort required to get from excellent to perfect. Flutter is not unique in this. Kotlin isn't perfect on Android, but that doesn't mean JetBrains should avoid working on web support. C++ isn't perfect on AT&T Unix, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't implement it on other platforms. HTML isn't perfect for documents, but that doesn't mean we should not have extended it to applications. My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.

> I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis

By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week. Indeed, there are entire weeks where I don't write any code at all!

> https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431

Looks like Chris is working on that one. (By the way, that issue was filed by a Flutter team member, so presumably that answers your question about whether the Flutter team notices iOS issues.) (Also, that issue is a good example of the tools that we use to test this stuff.)

> I have no reason to believe that Flutter is particularly different from the others in terms of the proportion of apps of this kind

I was just trying to understand adoption rate which I believe correlates to longevity

> Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable. > My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.

I totally get this viewpoint, I think perception can be different from the outside.

> By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week.

Head back to IC ;)

> By the way, that issue was filed by a Flutter team member, so presumably that answers your question about whether the Flutter team notices iOS issues.

Need to take issue here, this was talked exhaustively about in a thread on reddit where a dev was leaving Flutter because of user complaints on this issue, the thread was seen by a team member then and taken up.

Just to cherry pick a few of your concerns:

>Codegen for json deserialization, data types, general slowdown in the analysis server at scale, the list feels long,

Those are clearly Dart critiques, sure Dart is not a perfect language, but I can tell you coming from Java and Kotlin that they have plenty of warts of their own, as does ObjC and Swift. On the other hand, Dart is still being very actively developed and improved so I have no doubt that in the future, it will be better than today, just as its sound null-safety now out classes Kotlin's NS implementation.

>but does anyone on the team use iOS full time

Not sure why you keep focusing on iOS and Flutters focus on Material. Sure you might feel the need to use iOS styled widgets but there are plenty of commercial apps built with Flutter that very happily base off of Material and you should note that the new rendering engine has been developed on iOS first to specifically address many of the valid perf issues that skia based engine has had on iOS and Metal.

>. On the outward facing apps this is definitely a matter of perception, I don't think I need to expand there.

After reading all your preceding posts and now this, you seem to want to imply something but not come out and say it. I know that Google have publicly announced Flutters use by Google Pay (https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-pay), if that's not a big enough app for you I'm not sure what would convince you.

>As a full time iOS user it's VERY obvious, you feel it and see it, my friend >literally deleted an app due to it after using it for seconds, it's not just a >vague complaint, it's highly perceivable.

This is my biggest pet peeve, anecdotally I hear a fair bit of this coming from mobile devs, especially with iOS devs who seem fixate on this, but guess who I've never heard this from in over decade in mobile dev: iOS users (and Android users) who are not devs. Literally never. Not a single non-dev person has ever mentioned it to me. Sure the complain about a million others things to do with phones, apps, you name it, it's amazing all the things people want to talk to you about when they find out you're a mobile app dev, but literally it's never about scroll physics being too fast or off.

Sure I'm very involved in the Flutter community and do it for my day job, so I can quite rightly be labelled as biased, but trying to be as objective as possible, on all measures I can think of, Flutter is a very successful open source project and simultaneously a very successful "commercial product" which is quite a rare feat to this day.

Finally on the topic of open source, I'd point out that unlike for instance AOSP (another huge Google project/product) Flutter is not developed in "throw it over the wall once a year" fashion but completely in the open, all work is done in the public repo, on public issue trackers, public design documents, roadmaps, etc. Its really quite exceptional in this regard and is really one of the big reasons why its really close to foundation/consortium style projects (think Apache, Eclipse, Linux, Rust) than a single-corp sponsored one.

> sure Dart is not a perfect language

Every language has spots of pain, of course, but the sticky points in Dart at scale don't feel like rough edges, they significantly effect workflow.

> you seem to want to imply something but not come out and say it

I have said multiple times not eating the dog food makes me weary, Google uses Angular a lot, why not Flutter? ...I think you need to read back I am well aware of Pay, this thread is about Stadia, the largest commercial Flutter project at google afaik, being killed. Pay is USA and India only.

> Not sure why you keep focusing on iOS and Flutters focus on Material > This is my biggest pet peeve, anecdotally I hear a fair bit of this coming from mobile devs > Not a single non-dev person has ever mentioned it to me.

I think you may be too deep in the Android space, I have heard this a ton. TBH I think many times the apps are wrapped webviews so scrolling works but other interactions feel off, but 100% non devs notice when iOS apps don't feel native.

Thanks for taking the time to address concerns here. Much appreciated!

Most of the anxiety and concern isn't from the Flutter project itself so I wholly empathize, but from Google's history in the dev space. Virtually anyone who had an AngularJS codebase knows what it means to depend on a Google OSS product that Google uses internally.

> There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.

IIRC, when the AngularJS team came out with a brand new JS framework and called it "Angular", I believe the team explained how they automated migration of most of Google's "millions of lines" of complex internal codebase from AngularJS to Angular in a relatively short time, thanks to Google's internal infrastructure and tooling.

You could do dependency analysis, build ASTs across projects, at "Google scale", and have special tooling, transpilers, compilers to migrate code across Ads and verticals in a fortnight. Google has the talent, tools, cash to take such grand measures and come to conferences to showcase how they did it.

So the several million devs using Flutter are still undertaking a risk if Google deems targeting each new iOS version UX is too expensive, freezes contributions from internal devs, and starts internally migrating codebases to native with some shiny, new internal tooling.

EDIT: If such a scenario does come to pass internally, I think the Flutter community would very much appreciate project leaders being upfront about it.

Interestingly, that's exactly what is going on internally at the moment with Dart code, as we migrate the Google ecosystem to sound null safety, which was introduced in Dart 2 and will be the only mode in Dart 3. Adding a feature like sound null safety to a codebase the size of Google's is a large undertaking. It also brings a ton of benefit, both to the language itself and code that has migrated, since we can now provide guarantees around nullability that are not available in most other languages.

But all the tooling we built for that multi-million LOC migration is open source, and available to everyone as part of the core SDK (https://dart.dev/null-safety/migration-guide#migration-tool). It's sophisticated, migrates much code automatically, and provides a visual editor to help make decisions about other code. That should be evidence at least that we care about migration.

Every ecosystem goes through migrations at some point (Objective-C to Swift, Java to Kotlin, Win32 to UWP, etc.) Flutter isn't immune to that risk, but I don't think it's particular to Flutter either.

I suppose two issues are at play: centralized OSS project stewardship that alters direction every 3-5 years to meet evolving org goals, and people building consulting careers on top of OSS projects that are strongly aligned with org goals (extreme case for impacted users).

At least some of your million dev userbase comprises of consultancy shops, contributing in part to your popularity by building products for their clients, but also making a buck with low effort on the underlying tech. They end up stitching codebases using unusual practices to meet deadlines that often blow up when a migration is upon them.

Angular had a migration tool called ngUpgrade that was painful in the wild.

All I'm saying is, these tradeoffs have now surfaced and crystallized.

Let me just go cry over here in AngularDart.

Thanks Tim, I appreciate you calling out these things but I feel it would make a bigger impression to elaborate on how much the Flutter community supports the development of Flutter. People are afraid of losing Google's support because they assume that without Google's contribution the framework would not continue to grow.

Firebase is a google product (not an OS framework) that Google could kill off and no one could do anything about it. It they decided to shut it down every app depending on it would go down the day day they turned it off.I don't see people being equally concerned about using Firebase because Google could kill it. It makes sense to use it because it is cheaper and faster to get started than creating your own backend and all of the related services. If they did shut it down people expect to get enough lead time to transition to something else. Using Flutter is less risky than depending on any Google service. Additionally Flutter development is faster and requires fewer engineers for the same output. Flutter code is more testable and reliable than any other option that runs on the same platforms. Flutter does not require QA teams or additional quality engineers when you leverage its full testability. Flutter runs on everything, if suddenly Oracle won a lawsuit and manufacturers stopped making Android devices Flutter would run on the next mobile OS, or the next anything OS. Regardless of what Google does in the future Flutter is the safest bet a startup can make and it is the smartest bet a mature company can make. The gains you will make in the meantime using Flutter outweigh the risks.

Yup and at least my friends and family are extra cautious when it is a service where you "buy" something which can be taken away from you at any moment.

Google is building a too strong reputation of an unreliable company. Doesn't help when an AI is in charge of banning people from accessing their critical stuff like emails and stored files.

Google's reputation is, and has been for years, so bad on this front that most of their initiatives are stillborn for this reason pretty much from the day they are announced. Three years ago we had this regarding Stadia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 (even before this, I recall lots of skepticism re: Stadia on the day it was announced)

Years back, I received quite a few contacts from Google recruiters about interviewing to work on an unannounced gaming product (which was Stadia, of course).

Google's reputation for canceling projects was bad, even back then. Never gave it serious thought. You could see the writing on the wall, even before they built the thing.

> Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.

One of the reasons why they launched and bought studios for exclusive content. Which they then shut down early, only a bit over a year after launch of Stadia (?).

Super sincere question.

> Google's reputation for not supporting things long term

I didn't know Google had such a reputation. I mostly use drive and gmail, so it was fine to me.

Does google really have such a reputation? Any place I can read more on this?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

https://killedbygoogle.com/ Lists the lifetime and EOL of everything Google has killed, along with a short blurb about the termination

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I miss Google Reader and Google Wave the most.

I really miss Google Play Music. For my needs, it was the perfect streaming service.

Youtube Music is a huge step back. Spotify is far too playlist and recommendation happy, I want to listen to albums not curated lists. Tidal is decent, but similar to Spotify. Apple Music is the one I haven't tried for more than a couple of days and I don't recall what I didn't like about it.

I don't understand this comment. You can listen to whole Albums on Spotify.

Yes, you can. Easily!

The point I was making about Spotify is that even if I solely listen to music as full albums, I only get recommendations for playlists. I rarely want to listen to a playlist. There are a number of other things I don't like about Spotify, but it works well enough.

Apple music is my choice, exactly because it is still album focused. That said, I’m not surprised you bounced off… the UI isn’t very good.

I keep getting free trials and financially it makes sense to me with Apple One etc, but every time I've tried it I've ended up back on Spotify.

I've concluded the price saving isn't enough to use a product who's UX I enjoy less, even if it works well for other users.

It made a great offline music player, too!

Same here, GPM recommendations were fantastic and the interface was very simple and nice to use. When they moved the service to YouTube music half my playlists were filled with poor quality songs uploaded to YouTube, it's a mess.

Spotify is okay and does have some nice features in the way that casting works and multiple devices joined to one account, but it's certainly not as enjoyable to use.

Gmail and drive are pretty much the only safe havens. The rest… how many its own chat apps will google kill this year?

https://gcemetery.co/

Yes, they do. I personally would never put a single service on GCP just out of principle.

Very sincerely, you must read just about zero tech news. Google has been infamous for this ever since they shut down Google Reader in 2013. For about the past 10 years they are a company adrift that can no longer launch new products without getting absolutely ridiculed. Everyday consumers have lost their faith in the company because they are so used to getting jerked around anything G. People I know wont touch a G chat app because they know it wont last 6 months.

> Very sincerely, you must read just about zero tech news.

Not 0, but really not much, that is true.

I remember the shutdown of google reader. I tried it once, but let go of it before it was shut down.

But I really didn't know google had this kind of reputation.

Honestly, at this point in time if you don't know that investing your time in a Google product is probably going to be a waste... it's on you.

Developers didn't onboard because it was Vulkan-only. You can release for GOG as an afterthought, but you had to build for Stadia as Another Separate Platform, and they somehow managed to make their SDK requirements more onerous than Xbox's.

They might still of joined if there were any customers, but customers didn't join because of the prospect of needing to buy their existing games again, then pay for a subscription service to play them, on top of the already-not-so-big group of people with great internet but not so great hardware. Though they might of still joined if there were any games.

The primary thing Google got wrong was assuming everyone would flock to their service in droves for the promise of the other side of the service, thus forming it. They didn't anticipate that all the roadblocks they installed from the start would prevent any kind of flocking.

HN posters will talk about Google's graveyard, but it is not a factor for businesses; Google's history of shuttering perfectly good services doesn't extend to services you actually fork over cash for. And this won't affect that, as it was nowhere near a perfectly good service and was doomed before it was released.

Google's GDC talks regarding Android and Stadia are kind of proofs of how they lack any kind of sensibility how to talk with game developers.

While Sony, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, NVidia do cool tech sessions, Google is all about analytics and Play Store.

Then they expect developers used to devkits and Visual Studio plugins, to use classical UNIX like development experience to target Stadia, while hoping Stadia will stay around.

Yeah, if it was truly a cheap port that was just putting the game on another store and plugging in some API calls, devs would have flocked to it. But it involved a pretty involved linux ports instead. Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 cost tens of millions to get working on Stadia.

sucks to hear as someone who wants linux gaming to get more prominance, but I guess for now the current direction is to WINE it out.

I'm pretty sure it also got bad initial response because of their pricing plan. I have no idea why Google thought it was a good idea to charge both a subscription fee and a purchase fee per game in a world where services like Game Pass only charge the subscription fee; it's like they just assumed there was no competition.

I think starting this kind of service also requires decades of prior buy-in to the gaming market. Google went in with no game studios, no relationships with game studios, no special IP, and no exclusives. That's a recipe for failure even if they had a solid reputation. Their competitors were Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony...

Google's product strategy..

Google: We're going to launch a fancy new product in an already-crowded field, not market it at all, and everyone will jump on board and love it!

Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon.

Google: No we won't, we're fully dedicated to this thing

Everyone else: No way, they haven't added meaningful features in years and they're going to sunset it soon.

Google: We're shifting our focus but we're still fully committed to this thing.

Everyone else: No way, they never cared about the home gaming segment and they're going to sunset it soon.

Google: We promise, we're in it for the long haul.

Everyone: No way, they're going to sunset it soon.

Google: Sorry, there's no way we could've seen this coming. We devoted an entire month of resources to this project and thought that was enough! Sadly it hasn't met our expectations. We're not sure why more publishers and players didn't get involved, but we're going to have it to shut it down.

Everyone: No shit, lol.

At least they're giving refunds.

There must have been hardly anyone stupid enough to buy many games. It’s probably not even much money to refund.

Not many games, but they didn't often have sales (so many were stuck at MSRP for years), and they also had some hardware sales (controllers, etc.)

For Google it's chump change, I'm sure, but I still appreciate it. I bought like two titles on there before realizing it was a doomed effort... meanwhile GeForce Now sees very active improvements and a much bigger library.

GeForce now is great and if I ever get a new gaming PC, I can play every last game on my own GPU. The tech works perfectly, the free tier is generous and the subscription is a value. Stadia was behind the moment they launched and flat out refused to give an inch to improve the product.

This is a company so obviously in love with its incredible success from ages gone by that it thinks we still owe it our brand loyalty. We do not.

Would be cool if I could use stadia hardware for GeForce now

Yeah, too bad those controllers don't work as generic Bluetooth ones :(

(if you didn't know, though, xbox controllers do work great with geforce now)

>not market it at all

I noticed that too. Google never adversises its producta. Google is almost like the startup founder who thinks their side project is so good it doesn't need marketing or sales.

They just know first hand that online advertising is not worth the money!

I remember a talk given by chief of czech google at our highschool, she told us that we are one of the few countries where they had to use marketing to compete with for search market (I remember seeing ads for Google chrome in metro when it was new. ).. I think as a monopoly they just usually dont feel the need for marketing when there is no else running ads...

I've been seeing ads for Chrome around northern Seattle (Shoreline) area

At first I was baffled why they would possibly need to advertise Chrome in the US. But in retrospect it might just be feather ruffling in Edge (Microsofts) backyard?

There's also the big one right here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/47%C2%B036'07.6%22N+122%C2... when you get to downtown from the ID (where the 3d view shows a verizon ad, it's now a "no place like chrome" ad.

Are these new? Reddit had a particularly Firefox-meme laden week last week after all of the MV3 chrome discussions.

Chrome is core to Google's business so it's worth it advertising, they also advertise the Pixel phone a lot in high-end places in global cities because they need to gain market share for mobile browsing and phones against Apple.

Anything else, not that important, even GCP which is their major bet doesn't really get any ads because it's a business product so not much sense in doing so.

They seem to believe word of mouth/viral marketing works because it worked for gmail and chrome, so they didn't double down on Stadia before product market fit, and that caused Stadia to fail(along with Google's short attention span reputation).

>Google never adversises its producta.

Not really true (e.g. Chrome) but it's probably true they advertise relatively little given their size.

They absolutely inundated YouTube with ads for Stadia for a couple of months, to the point that it felt like half the ads I saw were Stadia ads. So that’s something, at least?

I wonder what the overlap is between Stadia's target market and people who watch YouTube without blocking ads.

It's not zero, because Chromecast doesn't block ads and that's the natural fit for Stadia. But it's definitely not 100% either.

I don't see ads at all, period. I either Ublock origin or pay for a subscription. I pay for youtube premium.

How would an ad reach me? Youtubers? Can Google use its "contractors" to promote its own product? That just feels weird.

I have seen plenty of (annoying) stadia adverts

> Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon.

I’ve seen a few developers (Ryan Gordon, IIRC?) saying that the Stadia SDK was actually great. It was basically just a bog standard Vulkan/Linux environment with much fewer unpleasant surprises than consoles.

Aside from the unpleasant surprise of there not being an audience.

The whole stack was great. Google engineers worked their asses off on it. Very smart people throughout. The management was awful though.

In the 10 years I was at Google I never really had to face a "crunch" situation but there I was right before Christmas working til midnight on the very tiny bit of Stadia I had somehow been dragged into despite telling my manager I didn't want to be anywhere near it because it was radioactive (My rule learned the hard way was always stay away from the "hot" project at a company like Google. It just becomes a feeding frenzy of empire building and egos, and steady incremental contribution will get you nowhere.)

I had it much better than most though. If I recall: The original app setup (integrated into the existing Home app) was tossed at the last minute. The entire out of box process for the controller redone in the process. In literally the last few weeks before ship date.

The controller folks I knew were heroes. It's sad to see their hard work thrown away.

There's no way Stadia in its entire existence made enough revenue to cover the sheer number of SWE-hours put into it, especially the spent SWE-hours caused by last minute product changes; which nobody further up ever had to pay a consequence for.

Do you think Google will unlock the Bluetooth for the controllers so we can still use them? Maybe a firmware update or open sourcing the drivers.

VS GeForce Now, where you check a box saying "I want my game to be streamable" and then... you're done.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

Yup... until one day the game is taken off the story and that checkbox removed. Big business is rough.

Then you lost the 15 minutes you took filling out that form? And your players can still stream it elsewhere, like Shadow or Luna? Doesn't seem terrible.

VS the days/weeks/months it took you to port to Stadia, only to have the entire service shut down.

The point is that there are many PC streaming services that are basically "no porting required", whereas Stadia opted for a strange sort-of-console, sort-of-not model (despite PSNow and XCloud already being able to stream actual console games already) that required you to spend dev hours porting your game.

It backfired because most devs didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) port their x86 game targeting Windows to some tiny proprietary platform, ESPECIALLY when it's Google hosting it. Of the few that did (Orcs Must Die), Google arranged some exclusivity deal with them, lying that Stadia could do things no gaming PC or cloud streaming service could do due to Stadia's special scale or something. It was a lie. When the exclusivity expired, it showed up on Steam and GeForce Now and ran perfectly fine, and got a lot more players to boot.

Stadia had some really awesome tech -- namely the UX of being able to boot straight into a game without waiting for Steam Big Picture -- and some nifty (but relatively useless) side features like being able to capture a memory snapshot and resume that later, emulator-style. But I don't think their management really understood the PC gaming culture and what was truly important to its user base, and failed to take years of pleading and feedback into consideration. They just arrogantly did... something else (or nothing much? I can't really tell)... with Stadia and drove it into the ground. So sorry for all the engineers who worked on it and had to see it nosedive like that due to managerial incompetence.

None of this was a surprise to any gamer actually watching this space. Stadia came late, delivered less, and exited early. Google's product culture doomed it from the get-go.

depends on how you game in the future. "Show's not on netflix, but I can at least buy the Blu-Ray or subscribe to Hulu for it" may not cut it for some people and it's just "gone" for them. You already have gamers arguing over free launchers after all, I can't imagine asking those same kind of people to "just subscribe to a new launcher for X dollars per month again".

Some consumers can be fickle like that.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Like DRM and subscription marketplaces where you basically rent the rights to a game for some indeterminate amount of time?

Most people seem fine with that, and Steam totally killed the physical games segment. There's GOG if you want a copy without DRM, but they're tiny and the prices are often worse than Steam or a Steam reseller.

Besides, if the game rental model is bad, Stadia does it even worse than Steam: tiny library, horrible pricing, incompatible multiplayer, proprietary ports on a different update schedule, exclusivity deals, all from a company with a proven history of abandoning their customers.

Steam on the other hand is run by one of the oldest, most respected PC gaming companies in the history of the hobby, owned and run by a bunch of gamers (not advertising execs), who singlehandedly transformed the way people buy and get games, and worked tremendously hard to make the service better abs better every year in the service of players. They've earned our loyalty.

And furthermore, Nvidia is the provider of GeForce Now, not Steam directly. Their model is just way better, running off existing Steam and Epic games that don't require a new port or for customers to repurchase or lose their save games. Nvidia is also a gaming company. Not exactly as beloved as Valve is, but at least they're a long term player in the field.

Google just never really got it, at all. They arrogantly assumed they could just make a mediocre copycat and people would flock to it. Oh well.

I mostly agree with you, but I downvoted your comment because

> We devoted an entire month of resources to this project and thought that was enough!

...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it.

https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

@GoogleStadia "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions." Jul 29, 2022

2 Months ago

how is this relevant to what they said?

When the people who make the product literally publicly lie (while being paid extremely well), comments like the OP's (that are obviously tongue in cheek) are certainly not "wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful".

It's not a lie if they believed it. And I don't see how this justifies calling the developers lazy.

Why would you conflate some VP with the PMs and SWEs who built the thing?

Imagine you go to work at Baby Mulching LLC. This company has existed for two decades, and is dedicated to dropping infants into industrial shredders. Everyone hates Baby Mulching LLC, and they're an enormous black stain on your resume, because there is one single thing they do, and it's grind up children.

On your first day, you're asked to design a big toothed wheel. You ask your boss, will this be used to mulch babies? No no no, he says. It will be used to chop up entirely unrelated organic material. You spend three years on it, and once finished, it's immediately incorporated into the Baby Mulcher 3000, the next generation baby mulcher, which can puree one hundred toddlers per hour.

Everyone starts yelling at you for building a baby mulcher. But it wasn't your decision! You spent years working on it! This is so unfair!

Unfair, maybe. But was it unpredictable?

What relationship does this anecdote have to this scenario exactly, other than tenuously drawing a connection between Google and baby grinding?

As a third party with no skin in the game: no idea but it was hilarious.

I think what they're trying to say is that the stadia engineers should have seen the writing on the wall, coupled with the questionable history/actions of their employer when it comes to products regardless of their own good faith efforts as an employee.

I'm still not really sure what the moral of this parable is, but thanks for the most enjoyable read I've seen here all week, lol.

I can see where you're coming from.

I think it's appropriate enough to interpret the commenter in jest and see that their point is that google spent 1/nth of the required time/resources necessary for it to succeed.

In that light, it reads to me more like having some understanding for the people working on it that they were set up to fail, and the failure is not a reflection of their effort.

It's exaggeration for rhetorical effect, an extremely common stylistic device.

when everyone is "exaggerating" about how Google shuts every single thing under the sun down, it ceases to seem like a joke.

When was it a joke to say Google sunset every side project of theirs?

Disrespectful is interpreting words in bad faith. Obviously OP didn't literally mean 1 month.

Sorry, but as a player, I honestly can't tell where that effort went... feels like they abandoned it as soon as it launched.

Even at the time of its death, crossplay, cross save etc. didn't work except for a tiny handful of games. The Stadia Plus Chrome extension made a bunch of improvements on their own. There was never a desktop app. No ultra wide support. No RTX. Never got vsync working right.

In the years it was alive, what did they add? How come GeForce Now saw such activity and Stadia got... nothing? I wouldn't blame the people working on it, but some manager in Google really screwed that up.

GeForce now also had the major advantage of being able to play games your already bought on Steam

Yeah, and it was a single switch that publishers could check on/off, instead of having to port their entire game to Linux and Vulkan (what a sibling post said)

Oh, so that's what Vulkan is for. I've been wondering why it exists as I learn graphics programming. I've read that it's faster than OpenGL but also much harder to program for (which is saying something because OpenGL takes some not-insignificant mental gymnastics, at least for a beginner) or vice versa.

Vulkan is needed because the performance trade offs made by OpenGL / direct3D aren’t appropriate for some graphics engines. Vulkan allows knowledgeable & well funded developer teams (like Unreal) to make their own abstraction layer on top of the graphics card’s capabilities. And in doing so, get more performance out of their engines.

Having only OpenGL/D3D was like if the only way you could do network programming was via python. Python is easy enough to use but it’s not well optimized in every use case. Vulkan is like the C of graphics programming. It’s useful when you want to get in there at a lower level, because the higher level abstractions leave too much performance on the table.

D3D < 11

Thanks that's a helpful explanation.

Vulkan is not limited to Linux at all. In fact, it is an open standard made by the same people as OpenGL.

OpenGL was a high level interface, so to speak. And due to this, it made some things easier and other things harder. Most notably, you didn't have the low level access some people/projects wished for. Some time ago, there was a push for a more low level interface and Vulkan was supposed to be the platform-independent, open solution. Naturally, when your interface is lower level, you also need to provide more boilerplate. So Vulkan is slower to get up and running but that's not a particular fault of Vulkan I'd say. The story around it is rather interesting. It is based on AMD Mantle which was discontinued on behalf of Vulkan. Unfortunately, not every vendor was pleased with an open interface. Microsoft released DirectX 12 and Apple released Metal as direct competitors with very similar (if not identical) goals, fragmenting the whole landscape in the process.

Today, Vulkan is supported on Linux and Windows. Apple provides GPU drivers for macOS themselves (not the GPU vendor) and never implemented Vulkan support to not cannibalize its own Metal (I suppose). However, there exists MoltenVK, an open project that creates a translation layer from Vulkan to Metal.

In a way that's also a disadvantage - people who have a Steam library probably already have something to play it on and have at best a limited need for GFN. And if they have a PC + Steam then with Remote Play they already have their own streaming solution if they really want one.

How is that a disadvantage relative to Stadia? If they don't want to stream a game at all, why would they bother with either service?

And if they did want to stream a game from time to time (for me it was being able to play on a laptop anywhere, not just on my own LAN), Steam games were usually cheaper from sales and resellers, there was actual multiplayer, and the Steam ecosystem has a bunch of other advantages. It was just a better service.

And GeForce Now had better hardware, ray tracing, customizable graphics settings, vsync, etc.

If you don't need to stream a game, well, you don't need any of these services. But if you did, GeForce Now and Steam were just plain better than Stadia.

It's a disadvantage compared to the Xbox and PS streaming services - both of which cost less and come ready-made with a large library of games. It's definitely better than Stadia which seemed to consistently be the worst out of all the streaming services (which I think today's news vindicates).

GFN is good especially if you live in an area serviced by it's RTX 3080 streaming "rigs" which make it reasonably good value for money vs the cost of building an equivalent PC. But it's still the most expensive service on the market PLUS you also have to BYO library which rules out entire groups of potential users - Nvidia knows this as well based on how hard they're pushing the free-to-play titles. On top of that a lot of titles aren't even playable on it; I have a steam library of ~700 titles and apparently only ~140ish of them can be played on GFN.

Personally I like the GFN idea of being able to "rent" hardware and that's a business model other companies have proven works to a certain degree since ~2015 (Shadow.tech being a good example). However I don't think it has the same mass market appeal of the other surviving services which give you the hardware + a huge library of content just like Netflix/Disney+/Stan etc.

Stadia needed you to double dip if you wanted to play games you already owned on Steam, but GFN did not. That’s easily hundreds of dollars of a game library.

Some games, unfortunately. Lots of devs are choosing not to join it, which is very silly to me to be honest. It has absolutely no impact on their sales or development. I bought the game on steam, they have my money. Why do they care what machine I use to run it? Better yet, why do they require I use my hardware? Blizzard famously (famously in the GeForce Now/cloud gaming community that is) pulled WoW without notice when people started playing it in larger numbers.

It’s very irritating.

but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it.

Something being tragic doesn't make it not a waste of time. The writing was on the wall since day one. Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down being offered by the most ADHD company in existence. If you chose to spend your time and energy working on that and expected to accomplish anything other than being paid you were a fool.

The excerpt I quoted isn't about whether it was a waste of time or a savvy career move, just about the total amount of work that went into it.

Ha, I literally described Google as having corporate ADHD just yesterday

> Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down

Eh that's true for Steam, Epic, GoG, et al. If anything, regular people trust Google way more than those other companies since they use the browser/search engine/mail/youtube every single day

I do think it was doomed from the start, but only because the subset of people that have high speed internet, disposable income, like gaming and DON'T already own a PC or console is a very very small market

>...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it.

Fortunately you are here to be anonymously offended on their behalf.

I'm not anonymous; it's easy to figure out my identify from my HN profile.

I didn't work on Stadia, but I did work on Google Fiber for a couple years only to have almost all that work cancelled, and I'm still sad about it many years later. At the time, I really wouldn't have appreciated people on HN rubbing salt in the wound.

You both have a common enemy - nobody is blaming Google being Google on the employees - they also get abandoned without support and their project cancelled.

For what it's worth, I don't think anyone blames the engineers doing the work. That thought never even crossed my mind...

In fact I think Google has some of the best engineers in the world. Sadly, they're handled by some of the worst management and leadership in history. Your CEO has no vision or charisma and the whole company is just spinning in place, waiting for something to happen. Your middle management looks like little fiefdoms actively working against each other in some eternal civil strife. Google is its own worst enemy.

From the outside it looks like you guys are a bunch of really smart lab rats stuck in some perverse maze, being forced to run little Hunger Games style competitions to entertain some higher power.

I wouldn't want to work there for a million dollars. It jumped the shark a decade ago.

Fiber was just another tragedy in a long long list, another fight Google picked and then chickened out of. Google hasn't had a major success in recent memory, just a graveyard of half-assed attempts. But that's a bigger cultural problem at your company, not the fault of any engineer or single team. I sincerely feel for you, and I hope you got out and found something more constructive.

Edit: Sorry, not Fi, Fiber.

I left Google earlier this year. I think it was the right move for me at the right time. That said, I think your view of Google is a bit darker than the reality.

I hope so! They have a lot of talent, I just hope they eventually get better leadership to actually steer the ship somewhere, instead of just relying on the sheer inertia of ads.

Dude, they're making half a million dollars a year, they're gonna be fine

Partial list of products where this applies: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Schemer, Spaces, Checkout, Directory, Sync, Hangouts, iGoogle, Knol, Lively, Moderator, ....

Unfortunately this doesn't surprise me.

We worked on a Stadia title before launch. We were constantly reminded by Google how big the YouTube integration would be, which unique killer features we absolutely had to integrate with, and more.

And non of that ever materialized after launch. If Google can't even convince their own internal teams to cooperate, how do they expect studios and consumers to care the slightest for their product.

It also didn't help that supporting Stadia was equivalent to supporting an entirely different new console in scope, except less battle tested and much more buggy. Meanwhile all their competitors allow existing console or Windows builds to be shipped to their platforms.

And while we're sharing anecdotes, this was a fun one. For the longest time devkits were limited to 1080p, but at least the output was streamed from rack mounted servers that supported a couple of concurrent sessions. A few months before launch, they finally made 4k devkits available, except they supported only a single session, couldn't stream, and instead had to sit at a developer's desk with a monitor hooked up...

Let that sink in, a streaming service's devkits couldn't stream :)

From the consumer perspective, this reminds me of the new chromecast that was released without Stadia support, even though the previous chromecast supported it. Get that! A streaming stick that couldn’t stream the company’s own paid service. Preposterous!

IMO streaming games still has a lot of potential. Too bad Google couldn't pull it off.

The Youtube stuff is only the surface of what would be possible.

> IMO streaming games still has a lot of potential.

Not with the current internet speed.

The vast majority of people is below anything that would play "okay", and almost everyone is below a speed that would play well (1 GBPS).

Until 1 GBPS is the default EVERYWHERE, streaming games has 0 potential.

Streaming problem is not about bandwidth, but about latency. With current technology and physics there nothing you can do about latency.

It is both. I tried GeForce NOW and it required only about 60Mbps - it was just a fraction of Gbit connection. Still, I sometimes struggled to keep it at that minimum. Variable bandwidth doesn't matter for file downloads or video streaming(where there is few seconds of buffer) but it makes game streaming almost unplayable.

Nah, if you can stream Netflix in 1080p or better and have low latency then game streaming works fine. I know people who do it off LTE without issue even for non competitive games.

I encourage you to watch a Netflix movie and a live video game side by side and you will see how nonsensical the comparison is.

Doing this now... what are you expecting to be obvious from this experiment? Obviously the video game has some upstream requirements (just user input), but neither are stuttering or having any issues.

The quality is simply incomparable. A 4K movie streamed wouldn't even compared to a 1080p game being ran.

You're putting side by side compressed and raw visuals, it just doesn't compare at all.

The GP comment you were referring to recommended streaming Netflix in 1080p to, assumedly, compare to streaming games in 1080p, too; not to compare 1080p versus 4K. If you can stream Netflix in 1080p, there's not much additional strain on the network to stream games in 1080p.

Side note: Stadia also supports streaming games in 4K, which will have a relatively equal quality to streaming a 4K movie, for the same reasons. That is the result I see while streaming a movie and a game side-by-side.

Netflix in 1080p is nowhere near the quality required to play games in 1080p. It is heavily compressed, whereas games need crisp precision because it contains a lot of text that should be rendered precisely, as well as having pixel perfection for a lot of in game elements. To convince yourself look at Twitch, which has higher bitrate than Netflix for a similar resolution, and realize than even that is far from good enough to be playable.

Also video encoding must be done in strictly realtime for gaming. Twitch also prefers realtime for communication but not so strict. Netflix pre-encode their videos so they have significan quality advantage even in same bitrate. So Stadia needs more bitrate than Netflix for same quality.

Stadia ran (runs) well at 50mbps, and their competitors don't require much more (~100mbps for comparable results afaict), and 2x that minimum often results in a flawless experience if you have the bandwidth/latency to back it up (e.g. if you're on a home/work connection, rather than a busy coffee shop).

I put almost 1,000 hours into Stadia across all my games travelling across ~20 states and 3 countries the past ~3 years. It's very rare to find places where it isn't "okay" to play (with some notable exceptions near launch where you'd regularly get ~1 second input delay at times or frozen, pixellated graphics), and in many places now it feels indistinguisable from native/local games.

I don't know which platform I'll move to from Stadia, but it will definitely be a cloud one.

It does not run well at 50mbps, you have artifacts all over the screen, it's unbearable. And as people are moving more towards 1440p or 4k monitors, it's even more untolerable.

You can get high quality streaming video with much less than 1GBPS, low latency and consistent speed + latency are the important parts.

(Needed bandwidth will still be higher than regular video streaming though, as you have to compress in real time)

I Stream locally from my gaming PC to Nvidia Shield in 4k with around 80 mbps and it looks as good as an HDMI hookup.(and less than that would look fine)

Yeah streaming locally you don't even need internet buddy, the speed of your connection is totally irrelevant if you are on the same local network.

> a streaming service's devkits couldn't stream

That is just mind boggling - how on earth were you meant to test anything properly?

Do you think the YouTube integration and the other "killer features" you mentioned would have made Stadia more popular if they actually came to fruition?

Personally I believe if the YouTube integration was ready at launch the whole Stadia story would have been very, very different. I do believe that a frictionless way to jump into a game that you are currently watching a video/stream for or even join a streamer in multiplayer with a click would have been an amazing thing!

> how big the YouTube integration would be, which unique killer features

Exactly, this was advertised so much even to regular users/consumers and it genuinely seemed like it could be really cool. I'm baffled that nothing really came out in the end.

I actually got Cyberpunk 2077 specifically on Stadia so I could play the meta-game of "Can I win Cyberpunk before the unaccountable mega-corpo revokes my access to Cyberpunk?"

I will be losing that game.

you still got a few months

But can s/he get ALL the endings in time? I dunno... ;-)

Likely... there is only one ending that cannot easily be achieved. The rest are trivial and require very little prep.

True; I was forgetting that you can save before triggering the endings. You don't have to replay from square one all the way through. Still, the harder ending (I think they called it the "fear the reaper" one?) was the best I think. The saddest is the one on the space station, that one was oh my god, gut-wrenching! But I also liked the one with the Nomads :)

>"fear the reaper" was the best I think.

indeed, also the hardest by far - all enemies are max level.

The hidden ending that actually leads to the same ending, just via a different path?

the hidden is called 'the star'. No spoilers, etc.

That's not the hidden one that one is given to you on a plate.

The hidden one is different: that's the one where you have to wait for a dialog option to appear and has a prerequisite that is a little harder to get then the prerequisite for "the star".

True that - it's the Sun, Sun being a star, I got them mixed.

I considered that, but then I remembered finishing the game would, unfortunately, require me to play more Cyberpunk 2077.

(I just realized this could be a meta-joke on the plot of the game and, if so, I salute you good commenter. ;) )

I am impressed by the depth of your gaming!

He makes up his own achievements. Tough, real-world achievements...

One of those rare instances where I think NFTs and having digital copies available for all to download might make infinitely more sense than buying into centralized gaming platforms with their own licenses.

How would NFT's help?

If the company refuses to refund you, your digital "receipt" is worthless

If the game is able to connect to your wallet and confirm internally that you own the game’s token, it could unlock the game without having to rely on a server.

Who's running the server that actually runs the game?

The idea would work for single player games, where all the content is in the executable, but yeah, multiplayer is another story.

It won't necessarily work for single-player games, since it's trivial to build a game so that it requires a connection to an external server (put in some API with game logic there. Make sure logic isn't easily reversed engineered). Of course, a game company could always make a game which was built to run locally. It's all the company's choice regardless of NFTs, which are as useless as always.

Then can you just duplicate the wallet and you've "pirated" the game

Ah but we'll put it on the blockchain!

...Which is quite literally re-inventing a worse version of systems like Steam

Sure I guess, if you want to share private keys with friends.

Why not just make a separate wallet per-game? You've then effectively duplicated serial keys :)

Sounds interesting, but isn't there an issue that 10 friends could hold a key to the same wallet and all play all the same games, even simultaneously while purchasing just one copy?

I'm guessing implementing this would require some sort of known-file-type attestation distributed app.

I.e. I prove I have a token + link that token to a hash of my current system(s)

It's actually one of the better uses for blockchain I've heard so far, given the data sizes are minimal...

Who is going to maintain this distributed app, and what incentive do they have not to change the code so every game is reported as owned by everyone?

To get the inevitable question out of the way immediately: how do NFTs help? They're just receipts of purchase, not the purchase itself. If you're saying that someone else would honor the receipt of a different store... why?

I guess in the same way you can currently link Steam to GeForce Now and be allowed to play your game.

But steezier!

Oh you sweet, summer child. That is not how gaming NFTs are going to work. They are not going to be consumer-friendly transferable assets.

They are going to be vendor-locked, and they will only get invested in if they increase the bottom line of the walled garden that produces them.

This is correct. Reason: it's already technically possible to transfer games between platforms, the reason it's not done is financial, legal and political.

NFTs create a new method for the technical axis but do nothing to change the others.

NFTs would not help. Like. At all. Otoh digital copies for download would

NFTs would replace DRM, so it would, in order to actually play the game.

How does one replace DRM with NFTs if the game is locally loaded?

Have an interface that interacts with MetaMask or WalletConnect within the game.

What I mean is: the point of DRM is to regulate play of the game whether a person has rights to run the software to play it.

How do NFTs help if I have the binaries on my machine and can just patch the check for NFTs to always return "Yes this user is authorized?"

You can patch the check with binaries? Wouldn’t you need to modify the source and build?

I’m not familiar enough with tampering, cracking software like that so I can’t really say.

No problem. So in general: yes, it's not always trivial to crack a locally-hosted binary but it's generally possible. It can often be done by actually modifying the binary itself (it's just machine code; if, for example, the entire check is evaluated by one "Call out to the server to find out if we're authorized" function that returns a boolean, you can just replace the first few bytes in its machine code with "LDA $FF # true ; RETURN" and the function will think you're always registered. If it's more complicated, you could maybe run a proxy server locally that pretends to be the check server and always returns "authorized" for the query.

Assuming everyone's playing by the rules, I can see how an NFT could be used to indicate when someone has an ownership license to play a game (but not the mechanics of how that right would be enforced were someone to patch their local copy to just ignore the rights check). If the game is cloud-hosted, this is easier to enforce.

Ooh very interesting, thanks for explaining!

From reading others replies too, it does looks like client-only mechanism on its own is weak compared to having checks on both the client and server..

Patching out these checks has existed for literally decades.

Even in the 90's (And possibly 80's and before), this was common. Games distributed on floppies would have a check that involved asking you what the 13th word of page 4 of the manual was, or would have some sort of decoder wheel. And it wasn't hard to find cracked versions that had those checks patched out.

When games started coming on CDs, there were copy protection tricks that could detect if the game was running from an ISO image (via Daemon Tools or something) or even a copied disc, and those were all patched out.

GameCopyWorld was a very popular website in the early '00s. It served up these cracked versions of games. How it still exists is beyond me, tbh.

It couldn't replace the DRM, just the license check. Some DRM spyware from the publisher will still have to check if you can prove ownership via the blockchain instead of checking a CD key against the publisher's license server. If you can't, it will refuse to launch the game. Someone will crack the game and provide a DRM-free experience that is better.

I struggle to see how the NFT provides any value in this setup.

It doesn't, except that I guess the publisher doesn't have to run a license server. IMO this would be better achieved by simply not having a license check, at least on some terminal version after which no updates will go out.

Alright so the stadia games are computed in a remote datacenter, right?

Let's assume that what you proposed is good and useful and I have an NFT in my wallet that entitles me access to a game in stadia's platform

How does the NFT help me now that the compute resource has been unplugged? I have the entitlement but not the delivery.

It wouldn’t work for a native streaming service like Stadia, but I could definitely see it working for Single Player games where all the content is stored in the executable, where there isn’t reliance on centralized servers for content. Maybe download the game from IPFS or Arweave, or as another have said, developers making it available on torrents

For multiplayer games, you’d need servers for match making and such, so it’s probably not possible right now.

Unless you're putting the entire executable on the Blockchain (gigs and gigs of data), then you still need servers to host the game. I don't see how hosting the entire game is feasible, since games can be hundreds of gigs. Day one patches would also be infeasible if you store the whole game on the Blockchain.

Note that most NFTs are links to a central server hosted on a Blockchain, not the actual image itself.

Developers can still make the executables available on other centralized servers, decentralized solutions like BitTorrent, etc.

The NFT wallet check could happen internally within the game, perhaps some kind of WebView allowing access to browser wallet extensions.

The easy solution is Good Old Games. Download the installers and archive them wherever you want. NFTs are a red herring for this use case.

Or just offer steam keys

Even Steam revokes paid for content, which I think is the issue being discussed.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11481...

Not sure how this link proves the point you're trying to make. I can in fact still download all the games that no longer have a page on the Steam store.

There’s at least one game steam pulled from purchase history because it was completely unusable when the servers and auth servers shut down.

Sorry for the late reply. Dungeon Siege 1 had an expansion pack called Legends of Arranna which was sold as a bundle at first on Steam. Sometimes later LoR was removed from everyone's library leaving only the base game. You can download/pirate LoR and apply a steam fix, but as far as I'm aware, you either have to pay or pirate for LoR. The link is "grey" legally AFAICT (pirated but nigh-abandoned)

Nah, NFTs don't quite fit the bill. They can act as receipts but they're not good for hosting the product.

I think the spirit of your desire is valid though. What I want to see is the invention of some kind of digital legal-trust structure.

In theory, SAAS providers could produce some kind of "serverless" way to run their SAAS. Trusted cloud providers could host the SAAS past the lifetime of the original company. Users would need to pay for the hosting but the service can live longer than the company given there was a desire.

Legally things could be structured such that this works for closed source SAAS such that it remains closed source. It hits the niche for when just open sourcing the product on the way out isn't feasible.

If the receipt part is solved then torrent is enough for hosting installation files, no?

If you can torrent, then why bother with the receipt?

Because developers will want to make the game content only accessible to buyers who have the receipt

If the devs have servers to validate authorization anyway, then NFTs are unnecessary. Were also discussing the case where the devs go under and no longer provide such a service.

Asking clients to check their own NFTs is very weak DRM.

So what is the actual proposed flow?

I'm still amazed that I not only completed Cyberpunk but was able to do so quickly enough that I was able to get a refund from Steam support! Initially they denied it, but after showing the tweet from CDPR saying refunds were allowed they were happy to refund me

You beat Cyberpunk in 2 hours?!

They offered refunds for it well after two hours because it was a disaster

Cyberpunk was pretty rad, but after trying all endings I learned about the secret one for which I didn't qualify due to different choices in some early dialogue with Johnny far before ending, which soured the overall experience for me...

I actually really dislike this sentiment. Gamers being upset they can't access secret content on a first, blind playthrough means that developers are incentivised not to include secret content.

It seems inconsistent to complain about needing outside knowledge to find something when the only reason you know about it is from outside knowledge. There can be joy in going in fully-blind and there can be joy in following a guide like a list of chores but the no-man's land in-between leads only to disappointment and spoilers.

(this is also why I don't watch movie trailers or read book blurbs)

To be fair, the way the secret content is "discoverable" involves a very specific sequence of choices in a single conversation that you cannot go back and re-make without undoing a lot of game progression. Old games didn't have the same kind of progression, and new games are generally more forgiving about post-game exploration of all the content in the game. The game also has misleading affordances that give the impression that your relationship with this character is built up over several conversations, when actually only this one specific sequence in one conversation is known to work.

So, I don't think it's bad because the content is hard to discover without outside knowledge, it's bad because it's both hard to discover and impossible to fix once you have progressed past that point. It's not like being able to just rewatch part of a film or re read a book chapter to get a reference. You basically have to reload an old save, go through a decision sequence, and then replay the entire last third of the game until you have access to a final playable level, and the way it's implemented feels like it was very much slapped in to take the place of a johnny-friendship-meter mechanic that appears mostly broken outside that one conversation.

The King’s Quest design aesthetic.

it sucked then, too.

But King's Quest is a lot faster to go through on a new run.

that’s a depressing thought.

I finished all main/side missions and gigs, let Johnny take over whenever he wanted and then went through all reachable ending combinations (8 different endings, even if slightly) and then I learned there is a secret ending considered the best of them all which was denied to me due to some obscure choice early. So no wonder it left a sour taste.

This seems common to a lot of games, and aims for increasing the replay value. I personally also don't like it, because I am absolutely not motivated to play through tens to hundreds of hours again and also don't have time for it. But it's still ok for me - I'll just watch whatever 30 minutes of end scene I missed on youtube if I'm interested in that.

I had the same issue except it was pretty trivial to mod the game on PC so I could do that secret ending.

Thanks for the tip, I'll look if there is a mod doing it that has not been patched yet...

I guess they refer to CDPR comitting to refunding everyone who's not happy with the game.[1]

Interesting that Steam had no issue fulfilling that promise since they loose out on it as well. Also sounds like a bit shit thing to do after completing the entire game.

[1] https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1340013516628103170

Yeah I got the "bad" ending for not spending enough time with Keanu Reeves

The game was so unbelievably broken I just wanted to see out the end and be done with it

> Steam had no issue fulfilling that promise since they loose out on it as well

That would undermine them as a platform and that would make them loose more than a revenue from one title.

App Store doesn't let developers refund their customers and it does just fine.

Granted, they are the de-facto monopoly, but this specific policy is seldom criticised.

It’s also a very different populations with different expectations.

37.5 hours according to my Steam review https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197998185123/recomm...

I can't link to it since it's an internal page. But I have a record of my purchase and refund from Steam support here, too https://i.imgur.com/TvIuFEi.png

Sounds like you just mainlined it? I just finished up the last Gig (minor sidequest) and I have 110 hours in it…

You're getting a refund, at least?

Now that is an immersive gaming experience!

Seems like you ended up playing a more realistic version of Cyberpunk 2022 instead.

After the Bio-Crash of 2020 me and my chooms had to make our own fun.

The meta game!

Never tried Stadio, but do you have access to the game files? Can you make a backup of your savegame?

It might be possible with Google Takeout

I did this yesterday and yeah the data export through Takeout includes all savegames.

They have been confirmed to work on the PC versions on at least Celeste and Cyberpunk (and those are the only ones I’ve heard tried so, 100% success rate for now)

They should have promised these refunds at launch: "We're launching Stadia. if it were to shut down in less than X years, you will get a refund"

Ironically, had they done this, they would have seen more adoption from the skeptics, and maybe not even had to shut down. Typical Google, completely ignoring all the totally rational fears people had about their shutdown.

In pretty much all Stadia HN threads, the top question is always "But Google might shut this down", and it was really comical to see Google employees reply to that with 100% positivity, as though people's fears were irrational.

I’ll chime in with a somewhat positive and opposite note. I bought 77 + Stadia + Chromecast under the legal impression that under EU-law I would always get a refund. They give refunds and I’ve played on a pretty well working platform. This went pretty well considering Google being Google. (Note: have not heard anything from Google directly yet.)

But would they get developer adoption? You might refund customers, but devs are stuck with an effort they can no longer sell, which they may not have recouped the losses taken to get it on the platform.

That’d be great for people willing to dive in, but to me it just says that they don’t expect it to be around for long. You might say it shows they’re confident enough it will be around to offer refunds if it’s not around long, but nobody else launches a product and talks about it going away so that would make me think they they secretly don’t believe in it.

People will adopt a product even if they think it might not last, as long as it's a good deal for them. When MoviePass was offering their too-good-to-be-true plan of $10/month for unlimited movies, the subreddit was full of people talking about how it was too good to last. But they signed up anyway since it was a sweet deal!

Everybody is talking about how terrible Google and their culture is, so I'll just put it out there that this is great news for gamers. Cloud-based gaming services are a terrible deal for gamers.

Gamers shouldn't cede so much control to some 3rd party who will be watching over their shoulder and collecting every scrap of data on them and their friends while they play. We don't need our performance in games being used to determine our physical and mental capabilities, our online chats being mined, or our social networks being graphed. When I fire up a single player PC game nobody is logging the days I play, or how many hours that I play to draw inferences about my life and responsibilities.

With very few exceptions, the games I play on my computer can't be remotely censored or modified against my will. Neither can the games on my shelf, and I can resell those too. Instead I retain the ability to mod games and alter their settings to my liking without anybody's approval even when the creators or publishers would disapprove.

All the benefits of Games-as-a-Service came with massive trade offs and provide far more benefit for the 3rd parties who would insert themselves between gamers and the games they want to play than they provide for gamers themselves.

Well, you conveniently ignore the reality of lots of people who cannot afford or just don't want to buy a gaming computer or console there. Streaming services are an actual, viable option for them. Even though Google has done its best to show why it might not be just so viable after all...

Not having to keep up with hardware is pretty much the main selling point of games as a service and it's still not worth the tradeoffs.

I'm what they call a patient gamer anyway. I'm often 10 or 15 years behind, but I've never once run out of games to play and the savings are substantial.

Consoles (which have many of the same problems Stadia did) aren't usually terribly expensive if you're willing to be a generation behind and used console games are insanely cheap with the exception of certain franchises (Nintendo titles and JRPGs are notorious for staying expensive. Castlevania Symphony of the Night came out in 1997 and can still go for well over $100 for a copy!) but thankfully emulation covers a lot of that. By the time I picked up a PS3 I was picking up 10-15 games for the same cost as just one game at release.

As a bonus, waiting a few years to play the latest title means that everyone else has finished beta testing it for you and the entire experience is much improved. You can also usually get all (or most) the DLC included with the already low price of the game.

Point being, you don't have to spend a fortune or have a blazing fast video card to have a nearly endless selection of exceptional games.

You raise great points, but often a big motivator to play a specific game is the social aspect - playing with friends. Stadia gave me access to that when I wouldn't have otherwise. I have some really nice memories thanks to it.

Not to say I can't convince friends to replay older games - it's just a bit tougher.

I think you miss a really important use-case for stadia and cloud based gaming: infrequent players.

Such players usually use consoles, which are no better than cloud based gaming for forcing updates to content.

I jump into a match of apex legends every 3-4 weeks, maybe I get an afternoon to play because my partner has decided to go out with her friends.

What usually happens is that I launch my PlayStation and it spends the whole evening applying updates.

It’s asinine, maddeningly frustrating.

if I could pick up a controller and play: I’d be much happier.

FD: I worked on a game that came to stadia and knew about it before it’s public launch.

People who play 1 match of 1 game 1 time per month seems like bad demographic to target for a gaming service.

Well; One afternoon of gaming every month and a match here and there.

Why do you feel that this is a bad demographic?

It’s basically perfect because people like me can’t really justify a console let alone a full fledged PC gaming setup and all the work that would entail.

Streaming services lose money the more they are used, the worst customer is the one who plays a lot and the best one is the one who doesn’t play at all.

Infrequent use is really ideal, and it would have suited me better than the alternatives too.

Why can't you justify a console? The cheapest Xbox is 300 dollars. If the console lasts 5 years, that's similar to paying 5 dollars a month for a streaming service.

consoles are very affordable really (compared to the cost of a PC), but they do share a lot of the same problems as cloud services. Constant updates, little control. The PS5 interface is sadly filled with ads.

Sticker shock, and the 360 is 2 generations old.

If I want to play God of War a few hours a month then paying 700eur to enter or 75eur and a Netflix style subscription? Which is more reasonable sounding if you're not devoting much time.

Put it this way: Why do people use cloud based hosting over buying their hardware?

Mostly it's because they convert the one time cost to an amortised cost based on usage.

360? The cheapest Xbox is the current gen Xbox Series S, at £249.99.

And you can also finance that for £20.99/mo for two years.

And you can also re-sell it when you get tired of it.

People who pay a monthly subscription but barely use the service? I would think that would be the best demographic to target, at least from Google's perspective.

why not? think about how much you can overcommit hardware to such a demographic

yeah I would have loved an all you can eat stadya paid by hour played and was super hyped before the payment model became public.

then microsoft came out with the pc version of their game pass.

guess who's got my money.

FWIW, your PlayStation will update on its own if left in rest mode.

There is a setting for this and it seems to work some of the time.

As soon as there is an OS update it doesn't progress (which, granted, is uncommon) and it only works for the last game you played. So if I play GTA and Apex Legends, then only one would get the update, and only if there is no OS update, and only if I use rest mode.

A lot of circumstances where it isn't going to help.

How is a terrible deal? I would literally need to spend at least a 1000 dollars for a gaming pc, and that is 4 years of GeForce now, without considering maintenance, the space, etc.

I’m playing cyberpunk 2077 max settings on a 2cm thick MacBook Pro, I don’t have a bulky pc to move every time I move, and most importantly, if I ever get bored I’ll simply stop paying instead of having a pc collecting dust

The problem is that you have minimal control of your game. If Google bans your YouTube account b/c your video of you walking your dog recorded a restaurant playing a copyrighted song, then you could also lose your entire collection of games.

How is that any different than Steam? You’re arguing against DRM, not against cloud gaming

cloud gaming is just another form of DRM. Bad for all the same reasons plus some.

valve is a very, very, very different company

GeForce Now lets you use your existing games, there is no way for them to make you lose your games.

By comparison, the Stadia model was broken from the start.

Looks like multiple games/developers have already been pulled off of the service and there's no shortage of people posting about being banned or locked out of their accounts. I'm sure the convenience is nice when it all works, but you have to give up a whole lot for that.

But if they do that, you can just continue playing on your own PC.

There's no doubt that cloud gaming services are convenient, but you give up a lot for that. If you don't really care about having access pulled out from under you, or your games being censored/changed, or your personal data being collected and used against you than it's probably worth it, but for gamers and gaming as a whole it's a problem.

You don't even need a bulky PC. You can get a gaming laptop if your worried about space/mobility. No doubt the video cards are expensive though.

>How is a terrible deal?

you got the answer to that right in the title.

Coincidentally, Russian users of Switch can currently experience this dilemma firsthand, as Nintendo forbid downloads from the shop even for already bought games. (Sony forbids purchases, but at least allows downloading games that are ‘owned’.)

> When I fire up a single player PC game nobody is logging the days I play, or how many hours that I play to draw inferences about my life and responsibilities.

If you're playing through Steam, Origin, Epic, or even GoG's launcher then yes those two things are being recorded. Unless your PC is totally air gapped it will definitely be sending that kind of telemetry back to the mothership.

> With very few exceptions, the games I play on my computer can't be remotely censored or modified against my will

That's not really true if you've purchased a digital copy of a game (unless it's from GoG I suppose). You're buying a license that can be changed or revoked for any number of reasons, and the actual content you're given can be changed at any time.

Left 4 Dead 2 in Australia is an example of this; for the first ~5 years of its life Australia had a censored "low violence" version of the game thanks to our pearl clutching regulators.

Agreed on Steam (the only launcher I've allowed). They're absolutely collecting data too.

I prefer physical copies or at least complete installers. GoG is the first place I check. Anything I buy on steam I make sure to grab a cracked copy of as well (I've been burned by steam once already) so I can be sure games that don't need to be online don't have to be, and I can keep my purchases if steam closes shop.

The US can be weird about censored games too, but usually only with sex/nudity. I had to download Fahrenheit since Americans were only allowed a censored version named "indigo Prophecy", and I've had to patch some older games like BloodRayne too but it's nothing like what you guys have to put up with!

While inevitable, I am impressed they are refunding all purchases, including hardware. That can't be cheap.

I'm really curious the calculation here. That's a lot of money, and I'm certainly glad they're doing it, but feels both out of character for Google, and I'm surprised they have the budget allocated to just "doing the right thing". What goodwill is this saving that they aren't burning by shutting down Stadia?

I think it saves a ton of goodwill. Yes, you’re taking a platform from people, but it’s much better to not take their money too. Nobody is losing their livelihood, it’s a gaming service that can easily be replaced.

Does it though? It doesn't seem to be in keeping with how the rest of Google functions with their general lack of care, customer service, or recourse on anything. It also don't paper over the fact that they killed a service that, just 3 months ago they said wasn't being shut down.

If there was some new Google paid service that I cared about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in a couple years.

If this is for goodwill, they have to start somewhere.

Google hasn’t remained the same company through its history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a radical departure from their past.

Maybe Google is realizing they can’t keep being this cold company forever.

Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn’t get me to trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse. It would have to be done a few more times.

I don’t disagree with that, but I think it’s somewhat orthogonal. If you pay people back, the general reception is now “eh, assumed this was going to happen. Glad I’m not out hundreds of dollars.” compared to fire and pitchforks if there’s no refunds. Google already has the rep for shutting things down. This doesn’t really move the needle besides showing that they will at least financially compensate your loss.

I'm hesitant to claim exceptionalism, but history supports the claim that gamers are (a) quick to claim umbrage, (b) VERY vocal on social media, (c) have a LOT of free time to shitpost, (d) have long memories, and (e) are a younger demographic (aka future consumers).

Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the cheaper option.

Perhaps, but I wonder if that class of gamers you're talking about is the target/actual audience for Stadia. The folks I knew who had/used Stadia were a lot more casual and non-traditional gamers, since why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?

It's not like Google has a good rep in that community already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube, and especially in its gaming community, complains about YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively to move over to YT.

A lot of gamers are the sort of people that flame a developer of a bad game they never even bought/played in the first place. Attacking corporations is itself a sort of game they enjoy, having a personal stake in the fight isn't necessary for them.

On that note, some commentary from /v/:

    >even the shut down lagged by months

Sure, but what I'm saying is that "lot of gamers" in my experience is the type to flame Stadia without playing or buying it anyway. I highly doubt the overlap of the population of /v/ and Stadia owners was that large, but maybe I'm wrong.

>why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?

Lots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me were portability (playing my games at max settings while traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops, etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home, but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks like using less battery life / hard drive space / time updating / etc than the native alternative.

In other words, if I have the choice between playing the same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going to pick the latter.

I guess they're keeping the subscription fees for those who subscribed, not sure what percent of their revenue that would have been. All in all the total sales are probably paltry relative to the investment they've made in it (though surely they'll find other uses for the servers and tech), so it's not a big sacrifice to give that back to avoid anger and lawsuits

I dunno, Google has never really seemed to care about consumer anger and lawsuits. Like I said, it's a welcome change, and I'll be happy if they keep up this new pro-consumer attitude, but this feels a lot more like a weird one-off than a new policy or commitment.

Perhaps it isn't that much money...

But if it wasn't that much money, then it wasn't that many people who would be upset about not getting a refund, which for a company with the cashflow that Google has feels like not worth not pissing off.

Those "not that many people" would have been very angry and very vocal though.

Ok.

1. Gamers are particularly vindictive

2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years" into broad public consciousness

3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try again

4. Maybe it's relatively not that much money. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two people who'd ever even heard of Stadia

It's not out of character. They did exactly the same thing for "Google Offers," the old Groupon competitor from a decade ago. They refunded ALL of the purchased deals, even the ones that had been redeemed.

Dang, Groupon is a name I haven't heard in a while. I just looked and they're still going somehow?

IPOed at $522.20, now down to $8.76. Took $1.4b in investment, now worth $265m.

12 years ago, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion and Groupon declined. Those were the second and first dumbest business decisions I've ever heard of, respectively.

lol, surely.

People were extremely cautious about stadia from day 1 because while Google may be the single most capable company of actually making cloud gaming workable, this specific product required a lot of money input that had a fairly good chance of being completely wiped out based on Google's track record.

With this, next time there's a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"

The simple answer is that it's legal hedging. They don't want anything related to this closure of Stadia to lead to a lawsuit that might impact the concept of software licensing, particularly in the EU. This is a move out of pure self-interest (not that I see anything particularly wrong with that).

I’m surprised, but I’m also glad they are doing this. It could be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5 minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished product they shipped thinking they’ll solve it. But the reality is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were barely playable. I’m talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps upload speed.

It would be great if they could somehow open up the API of the controllers, they are nice.

Bandwidth isn't that important with game streaming after ~40-70 Mbps, latency and jitter (essentially latency consistency) is.

I'm somewhat surprised the 4 sibling comments as of this writing don't even mention the latency/jitter issue-- to me, that's always been one of the obvious biggest flaws with game streaming. Your average consumer has little to no awareness of it, it's beyond Google's control, and it has a very noticeable impact to anyone experiencing it. Not a good combination.

Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.

Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is also a major problem when it comes to latency & jitter. It doesn't even have to be game streaming, any real-time application such as calls suffer from it as well, despite not actually requiring much bandwidth at all.

Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.

speedtest.net used to have a sibling "pingtest" site that measured your jitter. I'm not sure why they don't exist anymore.

I remember it using a Java applet. I think the reason none of the online test sites support it is because it’s hard to test latency & jitter in the browser as the lower layers try hard to compensate for it.

Oh. It was Flash.

Sometimes I forget that was ever a thing!

Speedtest for random server (servers listed on Ookla is quite random) is useful but ping for random server is a bit useless. Just ping for targeted server that runs service you use.

I've used Stadia for the past year exclusively and it's been fine 99% of the time. I guess I'm relieved from defending Stadia duty now though, sigh

The problem with such statements is that game streaming services are INSANELY dependent on literally a century of cruft and how it was handled on a house to house basis. You can have great performance in your house, but your neighbor across the street could have utterly useless behavior.

Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem your ISP sent you when you first got service.

I'd be shocked if their contracts/EULA wasn't structured to avoid risk of suit around something like this. Shutting down a live service feels pretty defensible as not a crime or tort, and they could almost definitely fight the lawsuit for less than this costs in refunds, which makes it all the weirder.

It's the most likely reason. We've seen plenty of cases were EULAs were declared void and that won't hold in a place like the EU. You can't sign away your rights as consumers here. They might be able to fight individual lawsuits in some places, but it might eventually escalate into an investigation by the EU. There's significant legal risk there that is being avoided by just refunding a few millions. It's the sensible move.

It's also just a good marketing move. "they made people pay full-price for games and deleted them shortly after" is the kind of association that sticks around and even Google has an interest to avoid.

Honest curiosity, has that actually been proven in EU court? The sort of "licensing as a service" that Stadia did doesn't seem that different from the business models of something like Audible, or even iTunes in the DRM era. I totally agree that it's a predatory and anti-consumer model, but I wasn't aware that anywhere in the EU had successfully argued that removing access to something you were essentially "renting" access to was a violation of consumer protection laws.

These sorts of EULA arrangements are essentially the foundation of almost all modern media consumption - if anything Stadia is on better ground than most since it's not just a DRM layer like Steam or iTunes. If Steam disappears, I have a bunch of entirely playable game files on my computer that I can't use. When Stadia shuts down, you have a client for nothing. You're not paying $60 to own a copy of a game, you're paying $60 for an unlimited term license to play the game on Stadia's servers. Legally, it feels odd to claim in court that that should be the same as a purchase of the game in some other method. If Google had turned off Stadia, but transferred everyone's purchases to Steam or EGS, that wouldn't be providing the same service you purchased from Stadia.

Anytime I see an asymmetric upload bandwidth like 600/100, I assume the ISP is just advertising temporary burst speeds and does not actually allocate enough upload bandwidth to the neighborhood for people to sustain usage at 100Mbps.

You could make the same argument regarding upload speeds. They simply have asymmetrical link, and overprovision on both download and upload.

I assume you mean same argument regarding download. In my experience, the download is always far less over-provisioned than the upload.

For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a neighborhood of 500 houses.

Upload bandwidth for something like Stadia is tiny. Only thing you need to send are user inputs

However, you need consistent latency, which isn't guaranteed in a highly-oversubscribed network.

It actually just means they're using DOCSIS to carry the signal, which has asymmetric bandwidth allocations for upstream and downstream. 600/100 is a standardized allocation too.

In practice, it is always a heavily oversubscribed network that never delivers sustained bandwidth for either up or down.

Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency. Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the USA).

Speed alone isn't what matters here - latency and jitter are more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is meaningless.

I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).

This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).

Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.

Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.

Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.

Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.

Game streaming is great for casual gamers. A lot of games are perfectly playable even with 200ms tacked on, actually.

It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games

Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry making these streaming products are adults with real lives who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore players

200ms?? it's really frustrating in my experience for every game (I had 180ms when Xbox Cloud Gaming connects server over pacific ocean for unknown reason).

Yeah, a lot of people play games with their TV not in game mode, which is a ticket straight to +300ms City

Not only that, but a lot of AAA games nowadays have super long animations, tons of post-processing slapped on the tail end of the rendering engine, etc, so you end up with 300+ ms from "button pressed" to "something happens"

I suspect most of those games played on TVs would be running on consoles which are much more forgiving as their games are optimised for that use-case and there’s built-in assistance for inputs (aiming with controllers is much more difficult without it).

My understanding is that Stadia and most other game streaming providers run PC games which are developed with the assumption of precise mouse/keyboard inputs where there’s no assistance.

Maybe it is cheap. Any idea how many units they sold?

Probably the cost is small compared to their development budget.

Exactly. That one guy must be thrilled.

Yes, i am :)

I think hardware was a loss-leader anyway. They were generously giving them out for free. Games are probably the biggest loss for them as a majority of that money was handed off to publishers.

Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones, IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don't recall), and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they drastically overestimate how many people would buy their hardware.

Kudos to Google for doing right by their customers without being prompted. They could’ve said “$5 off a Nest Thermostat” or some crap and instead they manned up.

Does anyone have sales numbers on hardware and software?

If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.

Not quite hardware/software sales, but a lot of people pegged Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the beginning of the year. It's also unclear how many of those break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-game-once-and-play-it-now users.

Here's one that showed their work: https://allstadia.com/how-many-users-does-google-stadia-have

I think it begins to address mistrust of new Google products. Which is worth a lot to Google.

If they consistently take this approach for other cancellations, it could change the the common view from:

"why use this? They're just going to shut it down in a few years anyway"

to:

"oh neat, Google's experimenting with something new. Let me try it out. If it doesn't work out, they'll take care of me."

Most Google products are free. That's the difference.

They are not free. You are paying with your privacy.

No, they really are free.

Not free at all. You invest your personal capital (trust) into their products. Then it'll be degraded and shut down just like that.

You invest with your personal data they sell to data brokers, and use to improve their ML models.

Can we get those back, Google? Not just our data, but the profits and improvements you made from it?

"Free" in the age of adtech comes at a high price. The sad part is most people don't care they're getting the short end of the stick.

Free at time-of-service (and as mentioned, of course you're paying with your privacy anyway) doesn't mean there's not very real costs to the customer if the service goes away though.

Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say, gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around shifting sands like that.

Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.

So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra months of service on a second line) even to migrate off "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a business.

Yeah, if I had known this would be how they would have handled a hypothetical shutdown, I would have very happily used the service. Instead I signed up for GeForce Now since I can buy games through Steam and play them there. The main thing that stopped me from going with Stadia instead was that I was pretty confident that at some point it would shut down and I'd lose access to $xxx worth of games. If they had promised up front to do this in case of failure, maybe it wouldn't have failed.

How is GeForce Now with Steam? I have a Steam link but find it to be a pain in the rear. It's also difficult / clumsy to use for non Steam games. Does GeForce Now solve this or is it just ... different?

GeForce Now gives you a Windows box with Steam on it, and you log into your Steam account on it. They pair it with a super fast cache of the Steam Depot so your first install is speedy. That way, there's no integration necessary, and Nvidia doesn't have to reinvent the achievement/launcher/licensing wheel.

It's probably just different. I don't know what the Steam Link is like. GFN streams the games from a datacenter, so the quality will depend on the quality of your internet connection. Also, GFN can't play all Steam games; publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN, and several major publishers don't agree (eg Bethesda, Rockstar). All that said, I'm happy with it. Usually I can't tell at all that it's being streamed, and it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.

> publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN

Hrm. I have an "eclectic" mix of native Steam games, non-Steam games (added to my Steam library) and some emulators. I can't imagine those will be available, thanks for this info.

>it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.

I certainly like this.

Do you use it with your TV? Do you need a Shield too for the controller?

If you have an Nvidia graphics card that supports game streaming, install Moonlight on the steam link and look up how to stream the entire desktop using Moonlight.

It works perfectly for non Steam games and usually works better for Steam games as well.

I would recommend a wireless keyboard and mouse to launch the games or if you just want to use a controller to launch your games the Playnight launcher.

This is the exact reason that I don’t mind purchasing Amazon’s experiments. If it doesn’t work out, I get my money back and Amazon has more data for product dev

I'm a Stadia user, and Google's handling of the shutdown of Google Play Music is what gave me confidence to purchase anything on Stadia (~$500 on a quick review). I actually thought we'd be sent personal links of our games, which would live-on in Google's white-list stadia product called Google Stream - they did something similar for GPM which merged into Youtube Music. I'm fine with a refund though.

It's a remarkable decision to refund! I'm assuming all the game developers are keeping their revenue from Stadia gameplay, so it's a meaningful net loss for Google overall. Maybe not that much though; I hope someone publishes an accounting.

>That can't be cheap.

Yeah, seriously.

I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.

Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally" for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).

I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.

And now I'm getting a 50€ refund?

Their 7 customers will be relieved.

My main computer is a MacBook 2103 running Linux. Stadia was my only way to play games. I’m kinda mad I’m losing my save progress on some games.

Ironically I will probably use my refund to buy a steam deck.

There’s still a bunch of alternatives.

XCloud and GeForce Now are the two that come to mind. There are others.

It's probably cheaper than the lawsuits.

The Ars Technica article about this notes a few caveats:

- They are not refunding the 'pro' subscription charges

- They are not refunding hardware purchases made from 3rd parties

The first is a bit sus, the second does make sense unfortunately.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-offici...

If you actually get access for the term of the subscription you paid for, I don't see an issue with not refunding subscription fees.

I deleted my Stadia account a few months ago, and it had $400 in purchases. I assume that I won’t be getting the refund. Oh well, RIP.

When I rejoined Google (working in the hardware division), my managers tried to get me to work on stadia and I refused (this was shortly before it launched). I looked at it, said "this won't be successful, and google will eventually get rid of it". My managers simply couldn't understand that. They said "the leadership thinks this will be successful and we should build it" and then I realized they were sheeple.

Welcome to every big company ever

Except some big companies manage to release products and keep them running forever.

Or maybe your managers understood, but were tasked with finding workers for the project and were hoping you were sheeple?

Google is sheeple all the way down

That's even worse because it's malicious, wolves in sheeple clothing.

That is like 99% of all tech companies. They want drones not people with original ideas.

definitely not just tech companies either.

Or he didn’t believe in it either and was just trying to do his job: to get engineers working on it.

Highly paid sheeple whose paycheck and continued employment is probably correlated with their ability to oversee a technically successful execution of the designs of higher-ups. That sounds like the line that I would use if I had to build something so that I could get paid, even though I might agree with you personally.

When you looked at it, what was it that tipped you off to its eventual failure? Was it a flaw in the technical design or something? How did you know it would eventually fail? (Looking to learn how to spot things like that, here!)

My google failure sensors were honed on reader and google plus. In fact I just rejoined a company I worked at before Google and they had adopted Currents- Google's workspace version of Google Plus. Folks tried to get me to use it and all I could say was: I will never use Google Plus again. We are shutting down our Currents because... nobody ever uses it.

There's several factors at play. First, Google simply does not have any ability to compete in the consumer gaming space because they don't understand it. Second, to make the project work required an enormous expenditure across hardware, software, deployment, and game studios. If the product wasn't absurdly successful, it would be a failure simply because its profit margins would be low. Third, there's no real way to make money doing machine learning on gamer behavior (the way this works in mobile, where many games including ads) so the profit margin would be low. Fourth, I saw a number of preeminent engineers who worked on the project leave shortly after it was launched, or some time later (when it first started becoming obvious the project wasn't a hit). Fifth, leadership pitched this as something that only Google could do, that Google's unique hardware and physical presence in POPs meant they would have significant advantages was obviously wrong (multiple companies always had the technical acumen and production infrastructure to make this happen).

What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is becoming to something that Google would have to cancel because they can't get the profit margins to compare to ads.

Everything can be shutdown except Youtube, Search and 8.8.8.8

Gmail?

There are a significant number of large orgs on G Suite enterprise now. And Gmail is a key part of the offering for many. So they won't be shutting down Gmail altogether anytime soon. Although sunsetting free Gmail accounts in the future wouldn't be out of the question.

Why is 8.8.8.8 considered core product?

In reference to https://xkcd.com/1361/

Ah, ok. Haven't seen this before. Interestingly the peeps at Google probably liked it as the comic's address is found in txt records of dns.google (via cli: `dig +short txt dns.google` or `host -t txt dns.google`).

> What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is becoming to something that Google would have to cancel because they can't get the profit margins to compare to ads.

I imagine GC is one of the big three cloud platforms (with AWS, Azure) so I am absolutely intrigued by your suggestion. How bad is it going, really? They've made a lot of investment in Firebase also. I could probably see them shake things up drastically, but shutting down sounds like suicide.

As a GCP customer, I must say, it is not on the same level as AWS and Azure. Every single product offered by GCP is severely lacking when compared to the top competition. It is very clear to me that GCP is not a priority for Google.

GCP lost nearly a billion dollars last year and are trailing in 3rd place. It’s shameful really.

It's interesting that both Apple and Google still aren't very good at gaming. Maybe this is a big reason why Nintendo Switch is still the king despite smartphone is ubiquitous?

How could you know? It only became apparent it would fail after it launched. The technology is great and not the reason it was doomed.

> It only became apparent it would fail after it launched. The technology is great and not the reason it was doomed so you didn't call anything.

The technology isn't why it failed, Google is. Google was Google before it launched, and after it launched. So anyone familiar with Google could have predicted this failure before the actual launch.

As I remember comments at the time, it was the most common prediction. When Stadia launched, Google was at the peak of irritation for service shutdowns, and it was considered a string of failures, not a running joke.

Seems the Stadia engineers were only told this morning by Google.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/comment/iqe3...

I suppose this was the only way to avoid a leak, but I do wonder how far in advance Phil knew this was going to happen.

If he’s a clever guy he knew it halfway through the first interview.

Isn't it really messed up to find out you lost your job the same time as the rest of the world?

It is so extremely common that we were educated about it repeatedly in Engineering school.

Entire divisions get shut down over night when stock values go down. This is reality in the largest corporations (P&G, GE, GM, etc). Often the managers don't even know they are on the block.

Maybe Silicon Valley has been shielded from this reality of corporate culture in established industry by stocks that have tended to go up.

But also I suspect there are probably compliance issues related to insider trading about giving employees with stock or stock options a heads up.

Feels like the writing was on the wall almost as soon as they launched. It seems telling to me that Stadia couldn't get any traction even during one of the most protracted GPU shortages/crypto manias in history; connectivity requirements and lag issues aside, I think a lot of gamers just aren't interested in outsourcing the hardware side of things the way these corporations might expect. Building and maintaining your "rig" is a big part of the appeal for the PC gaming crowd that renting time on an anonymous server in a datacenter somewhere just can't match.

My personal problem with Stadia was the lock-in. You were required to buy a game at full price on Stadia and were only allowed to play it on Stadia, a service for which you would've eventually had to pay a subscription fee.

One can tell people that a PC is much more expensive upfront and that you could play for years on Stadia for the same money but the risk of it being shut down and losing access to all the full price games just wasn't worth it. Plus real-time multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible to play competitively, so you needed a PC anyways if you played even only one of such games.

Yeah, and people will shout about Steam being the same level of vendor lockin but they're ignoring the trust factor. Steam has been around for decades and rightly or wrongly people mostly consider it a given that their Steam games will never disappear. Google needed to acknowledge that and actually provide an appealing alternative.

Instead they tried to charge full retail price on games from a tiny library on a product that nobody believed they weren't going to sunset in a couple of years time. I suspect if they'd gone with a subscription cost only model they probably would have been a lot more successful.

real-time multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible to play competitively

I understand that everyone has different tolerances, but I can’t stand even slightest lags (ms range), irregularities and visual bugs in games. Had to fight my way through hardware settings on a real PC at last update, now it’s smooth and immersive.

I don’t play multiplayer games at all, but have a hard time understanding why someone would think “ah, I’m playing single player anyway, so enormous input lags are okay”. How do you play parrying (witcher, souls), shooting 2+ targets quickly (hitman, ghost recon), tight racing with such delays?

I will happily pay Nvidia to be able to play my Steam games in the cloud when I am out of state with no access to a gaming PC. But Google wanted me to buy a separate copy [!] at full market price [!!] while also paying them a subscription service [!!!]. And then there's no games, because they thought they could impose a specific graphics API instead of just porting D3D like Steam did, and in reality ports take time and nobody wants spend just as much money as any other console port takes in order to sell to a platform with a fiftieth of the users.

The subscription is optional. I loved Stadia because I only really play one game, Destiny, and I could play it year round for just the annual season pass and 0 hardware investment. Came to ~$100 a year for all my gaming needs and it was perfect.

Yeah, I mostly just bought games outright on Stadia rather than subscribing for the Netflix-y pool of games everyone said they wanted, which worked out really well for me in the end: I played for years and hundreds of hours and it was basically all for free.

i love ps streaming and chiaki because it lets me play visual novels and super robot wars on my ipad (with occasional lag spikes and drops in fidelity) but that is an incredibly niche use. game streaming has thousands of niche uses that make it a nice value-add to integrate onto existing products. currently game streaming does not have a mass-market use, especially not one that is google-scale. i am personally sad that stadia was not introduced as some weird side project like deep dream that could develop in perpetual beta until it was really and truly cooked.

I think they might have made it if they went with a gamepass style service, pay a fee per month, get access to the full catalogue of games, you could even bundle it with youtube premium.

Just look at the popularity of 144-240hz displays and eSports. The fact the 5800x3d even exists to eek you out 20 extra fps at 1080p to get you from 150 to 175..

Cloud gaming with its latency? Some people not noticing isn't going to cut it.

PS5 is hugely popular and perpetually sold old. So the console market is not hurting either..

The market has spoken and it's not interested in cloud gaming services with its downsides.

This is a great example of why you can never trust PR statements. They outright lie. We're not working on X. We won't shut down Y. Bald faced lies.

Edit: Missed that they're doing refunds. That part's good.

EDIT2: Why I'm calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on a whim. They're made months if not years in advance. A public company making public statements about how you're not shutting something down while you're internally mapping out the shutdown process... that's a lie.

Or the PR teams are just misinformed?

Some intern doing customer support on twitter isn’t going to be invited to long term strategy/budget meetings

Or even more likely, management changes their mind.

It is obvious that Google is battening the hatches for a recession. Economic conditions looks worse than just a few months ago. They’ve already reduced their Area 120 investments. This makes sense to cut as well.

Disclosure: Googler but have no inside info.

That remains a lie by incompetence. Just because Google can't be bothered get their product and PR people on the same page doesn't excuse the entity named Google from making misleading statements.

That's a leadership problem, not a rogue intern problem.

And I'm sure some Google Shareholders will be grumbling about it too, since this represents a non-trivial loss of revenue thanks to the (IMO appropriate) refunds, since it represents a material change in the value of stocks purchased between 60 days ago and today.

That's still a lie from whichever individual or group of individuals you consider to have agency over the matter. Like sure, maybe the individual who physically typed the tweet had little or no agency, but it's still reasonable to call it a lie when the responsible agent was deliberately making a false statement.

Is it even in the realm of possibility that Google, of all companies, has an intern with zero insight into the long term strategy manage the twitter account AND make definitive public statements?

This is also a great example of why you can never trust Google.

They shut down everything that does not "print" money for them. I guess they were expecting to beat Steam and that didn't happen so... bye bye

As a rule, with corporations, official denials can be thought of as unofficial confirmations. Occasionally this is not true, but for the most part they wouldn't be responding unless the issue was credible and at least a few parties had strong reason to believe whatever it is they're denying.

July 29:

https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Wonder if the CEOs can be made to sign (and stand behind) such statements, like CEOs/CFOs were made to stand behind financial statements.

Although I guess financial statements are quarterly, PR statements are dime a dozen.

Translation, for those unfamiliar with internal Google politics:

We have already promoted and transferred all the product managers and senior developers who created Stadia. None of them will suffer any ill effects from this disastrous waste of Alphabet resources.

All our other struggling products, though: we're still fully committed to those. Really. You can believe us this time.

I would love to know how many promos and packages Stadia generated. Was it at last efficient by this measure?

So many google projects seem to be quite inefficient in this regard - a handful of people get a promo and abandon the project, millions spent.

Maybe (probably not) this high profile disaster will finally make the leadership at Alphabet realize how ridiculously dysfunctional the organization is, and things will finally start to change. (doubt it)

I also doubt it.

The standard playbook for an ambitious PM or L7 SWE is:

1) sell product internally 2) launch 3) get credit for "impact" and get promoted thereby 4) transfer within Alphabet, or quit 5) rinse and repeat

Google need to open source and unlock the controllers - otherwise they just created a mountain of e-waste.

I agree, I have the controller and it's pretty decent ergonomics-wise for me. Just hate that I have to use it wired if I want to use it for other PC games.

This! I would love this!

They aren't just regular old Bluetooth?

Wifi

They're WiFi, I believe.

If I remember correctly, they do have Bluetooth hardware inside them but I think it might only be used for pairing. Not sure if someone could hack it to work via Bluetooth as well.

Of course, USB remains an option.

EDIT: Yup, official Google Store specs list "Bluetooth" and "Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2".

They have bluetooth and wi-fi hardware but currently locked and can't be used outside of Stadia. Wired USB works as a normal controller though.

A friend gave me a Amazon Luna controller he didn't want.

I was pleasantly surprised that the controller synced via BT. I was able to play non-Luna FireTV games with no problems.

It even worked without the Luna software installed on my FireTV Stick (I don't recommend you buy a FireTV stick, nor any FireTV product really).

The concept of the Luna software is interesting: Cloud streamed HD gaming on low-end hardware. Game play was really responsive. Very little video artifacts. But like all other FireTV products, the UX was geared towards sales, not user ergonomics.

I plan to uninstall the Luna app and just play the few FireTV games that I have. Sadly Alto's Adventure is too resource intense for my FireTV Stick.

No, that how google was able to achieve better latency and allowed using it on Chromecast devices. The controller has Bluetooth used only for setting it up, from there it's Wi-Fi that used to send input directly to the cloud instead of "BT to showing the stream and then to the cloud".

I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it's an excellent controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via iPad...

>I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it's an excellent controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via iPad...

He's too dangerous to allow to live.

haha, I know it's very cursed setup.

They can be used over USB

There must be several thousands of them!

You know, this gave me an idea: I'd love to see legislation that states that when a company the size of Google, Microsoft, etc. launches a product like this, then kills it off, that they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it. Not just for hardware like controller firmware etc. but also for software they used to create it. Obviously the games themselves in the case are IP owned by other firms so that would be exempt, but I think this would go a long way to forcing companies to stick it out with supporting products and customers they create over longer periods of time or not launch things flippantly in the first place.

they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it

This would have no impact on anything. If they had to share IP after shutting it down they'd just restructure the business so that Stadia licensed IP from Google Streaming Gaming Technology LLP, and do the all the real work in that absolutely-definitely-a-separate-company-look-the-logo-is-a-different-shape part of Alphabet instead.

Eh, there's probably ways to mitigate that from a legislative point of view. The point of this was to make the act of shutting products down all willy-nilly like this less attractive, and if they keep doing it at least the world at large gets a little something out of it. But you're not wrong in pointing out they'll do everything they can to sidestep accountability and screw the little guy, either. I'm just hoping there's some way we can make that more trouble than it's worth.

Maybe it would work if it was based on the production volume and product category, not the size of the company. Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason than software locks is a good idea.

But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual property just because they're successful seems counter-intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists) in a reasonable way for no additional cost.

Yeah I should have thought that through a bit more before posting it.

> Maybe it would work if it was based on the production volume and product category, not the size of the company. Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason than software locks is a good idea.

THIS!

> But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual property just because they're successful seems counter-intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists) in a reasonable way for no additional cost.

Well, this too, with a twist...

I'm not saying they have to relinquish their IP. There's a difference between open sourcing something and relinquishing intellectual property. One says "the world can USE this" and the other says "the world can use this and somebody can PROFIT FROM IT." I'm saying exclusively the former. I'm not OK with them being forced to allow somebody else to pick up their work and make money on it without them getting a cut purely because the government forced that function, that's not ok. So maybe if there's going to be a forcing function here there needs to be some kind of licensing that allows their IP to be used purely in non-profit contexts.

...but then again, coming back to my whole "should have thought it through before posting" notion, no profit might mean no maintaining body. So...I dunno.

It just rubs me the wrong way that Google launches new products and kills just as many every single year, and loads of people worldwide get screwed in the process while they get away with it every single time. If they're going to keep doing this, and let's face it, they are, the world at large oughtta get a little something out of it. Seems like having them open source the thing they're clearly not going to make any money on anyway is the right thing to do here.

I got one of the free promotional Controller + Chrome Cast Ultra "Premier Edition" bundles they were seeding to YouTube Premium customers out of sheer curiosity. I tried it for the free month, and hadn't taken the controller out of its box since (I do get a fair amount of use out of the Chromecast).

The whole system is a _staggering_ technological achievement of (unnecessary) complexity getting a pile of devices closely synchronized over the network with ... absolutely no realistic use case.

I just dug the controller out, it does work wired as a USB-C HID1.1 Gamepad device (18D1:9400). 2 analog sticks, 2 analog triggers, 15 buttons (including pressed/not pressed for the analog triggers), and an analog alias for the D-Pad (just returns min/max when pressed). Doesn't look like the 3.5mm headphone jack does anything when connected via USB, I'm not seeing a bonus audio device or anything.

It doesn't look like it presents as a normal Bluetooth controller (by testing or by the docs https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338851?hl=en ), I think the weird hybrid WiFi for comms/Bluetooth for pairing thing they did would require some hacking and/or published specs to use it wirelessly with anything other than a Stadia setup - or for Google to politely release a firmware update to enable normal BT controller behavior since they imply it's possible. They are apparently pretty nasty to get apart ( https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Google_Stadia_Controller ) for physical tampering, though there is a fairly substantial computer system in it http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Google_Stadia_(H2... .

It's actually a pretty comfortable controller, but it just became an amusing collectors item so I think mine will continue to sit in its box.

It's a great controller, you're right! Very comfortable and my goto on emulators.

I also looked into the weird WiFi/Bluetooth hybrid protocol stack. It's really impressive, and as far as I know, not jailbroken. Also massively overengineered.

They tried really hard with Stadia, at least at the hardware and streaming level. It's just that no one wanted it. They are before their time; PS Plus and GeForce Go are seeing adoption for streaming games. I bet it'll be popular in 3-5 years, maybe sooner. It's just that Google isn't a reliable carrier for this service, and they don't have enough patience.

I'm honestly astonished at full refunds for everything purchased via Google -- not just software but hardware too.

I know most of the comments here are focusing on "Google shuts down yet another thing as everybody expected" but this is really doing right by consumers.

I think they deserve a lot of credit here. With so many (usually valid) warnings about how you don't really own digital content in the cloud or hardware you can't root... the fact they're giving everyone all their money back even when they're probably not contractually obligated to, that's pretty huge.

If Stadia were a startup that ran out of money/funding, that would never happen because there wouldn't be any money left in the first place. So even if Google cancels a lot of things, this is a nice (if occasional) bright spot of news, that Google has the ability to do full refunds and actually does it.

It also makes you wonder what future gaming plans they have, especially since they're spending the cash to preserve as much goodwill here as possible.

Probably tells you how little the services were used to be able to issue a refund like that. Finance wouldn't sign off a multi billion refund for sure. It's probably less than $100m, that they can also somehow write off too if the stadia legal entity was based in some tax haven.

They deserve no credit here. Barely more than weeks ago they were officially announcing that Stadia wasn’t going anywhere and there were more great games to come. Refunds were simply the best way to preempt the inevitable class action lawsuit so that same amount of money could go towards refunds rather than lawyers. It’s not noble, it’s not laudable, it just another financial calculation that refunds are cheaper than the lawsuit combined with a corresponding few years of bad press highlighting their awful failure continuously every time the case hit a major milestone working its way through the courts and embarrassing internal communications revealed just how delicate the entire house of cards was from day 1.

You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that.

I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.

I disagree. The fastest human reaction time is something around 100ms. (https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime). I've just measured, and mine is 230ms. As such 10ms lag wouldn't make any difference. I've used Shadow Tech PC for a while during pandemic. With good upstream and downstream bandwidth it was a fairly decent experience, even for playing something like competitive Overwatch. I noticed the difference with normal gaming PC due to some other factors (quality of sound, etc.). Standard accessories worked seamlessly for USB-over-UDP.

100ms times are cheaters; 200ms is probably closer to the absolute lower bound of human reaction time.

I don't know about that. I'm off form and this was my third try after going wired.

https://imgur.com/a/8inHYSf

Agree. I used Shadow for a bit something like 2 years ago and it was pretty seamless. Sure, not as good as having a PC but it was pretty darn close.

Pro gamers can definitely feel +/- 10ms of lag. It makes a difference at that level.

Maybe not 10ms but anything above 50ms is known and proven to degrade pro players' performance in competitive FPS games

Humans can detect 10ms of latency easily. The problem is more than just reacting slightly later to events, its also how quickly the game/system responds to your inputs because its a round-trip interaction. This ends up usually being where the latency becomes more noticeable to most people. People can generally adjust for consistent latency, but any latency gains are pretty noticeable once you get used to looking for it.

Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a single frame.

Practiced musicians begin to feel discrepancies in time starting at latencies as low as 10ms. I learned this when investigating whether bands could practice live over the internet (spoiler: most of them can't). Turns out that due to limitations of physics, even absolutely optimal connections still have enough lag/jitter to ruin it for professional instrumentalists.

I tried Shadow and, well, you could really tell they host in a budget datacenter with how often there was stutter or missing keyframes (they host with OVH in Europe). I never had such issues with GeForce Now.

Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually tell you what hardware you'll be getting beyond "4c/8t". Mine turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.

You're definitely right for most people, but even 10-20ms is noticeable by experienced players and can be very impactful at pro-level -- e.g. some high-level LoL players feel 35ms ping is unacceptably high for competitive play: https://afkgaming.com/esports/news/ls-talks-about-why-35-pin... (though it probably doesn't matter much for Stadia's use cases)

Doubtful. Pro gamers are known primadonnas. If anyone ever tested them and added synthetic lag with double blind study I suspect they wouldn't identify it more accurately than what a random chance would dictate. Sorry, but pure speed of electrical signals/chemicals traveling in the body puts a constraint on that.

It's not even just "pro gamers", the most popular fighting game in the world (Smash Bros U.) is enjoyed by casual players and pros, and has an entire mechanic based on "two-framing" for edge guarding.

One absolutely does not need to be a pro to pull it off, and the whole interaction window for that mechanic is based around being able to react within ~32ms (1/30th of a second) to edge guard an opponent. It is exponentially harder to pull off in online play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4&t=90s you can literally see the difference.

Wow, this site is cool. I consistently get ~188, best was 176ms. I wonder what some of the esport gamers get!

After doing it several times it let me save the score.

Reaction Time 181ms

74.46% percentile

Top level players don't tend to do better on these than slightly above average, because reaction time is something you train for a specific task.

You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80 (Microsoft Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop things, so it's not like it's just first person shooters that suffer from latency.

You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah.

One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.

Wow. Condescending much?

A bit condescending yes but he showed a really good example of how input lag is noticeable.

Appropriate in response to the breathtaking arrogance-in-ignorance of what it was responding to.

This is the most factually true comment that I've ever downvoted.

That comment should be sent out as a blanket text message to everyone who commented on this post about latency IMO

The word needs to get out

Thanks for posting this. This comment section has been particularly frustrating to read, since it's a mirror of what I've seen in the real world. There are teams at big tech companies making TERRIBLE decisions about the future of gaming because they don't actually understand how latency affects games, and they aren't hardcore gamers so they can't feel the effects themselves.

Even the ~50ms total latency you get from locally streaming over a 1ms wired network (from buffering/inappropriate firmware design) ruins whole genres of high level gameplay. You miss tricky shots in FPS games, you can't confirm/link in fighters, etc.

The bigger issue is jitter. People can compensate for consistent delay (e.g. by leading shots in an FPS game). But when the delay is inconsistent and varies quickly, it becomes much more difficult to anticipate movements and execute time-sensitive maneuvers.

This is confused. Reaction time is irrelevant, you can still notice very short delays between two events. The fundamental issue is that when you make an input that corresponds to an action in a game, you expect that to action happen near-immediately, and anything else feels terrible.

Human reaction times have nothing to do with perceived input latency. There is a latency budget that is different for every individual that determines whether or not something will be an acceptable experience. This budget is divided between everything in the signal chain like the input devices, the computer/console, the monitor/tv, and any other processors along the signal path. Streaming games adds additional latency to the signal chain. Generously if your target is 60fps and you have a round trip latency to their server of 8ms, that's a half frame of added latency. On its own it's almost certainly imperceptible to most people, but it's not working in a vacuum and most people don't live right next to the datacenter. It can very easily go over the threshold for what is acceptable to most people.

It matters for MMOs. If there are two pro gamers A and B both with 100ms reaction time, but gamer A has 10ms ping while gamer B has 30ms ping, gamer A has a consistent advantage. This is not strictly a Stadia problem but it may be exacerbated if the display data adds latency on a slower line.

Unless cloud gaming company intend to put servers in every single city across the globe it's not going to work. Even in Boston with good, fiber internet streaming games have too much lag and the compression artifacts are horrible.

When there is fast movement the compression is much more noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing graphical comparisons do it with static images. It's quite common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup.

Also, you are misunderstanding what "reaction time of 100ms" means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length so long as they are bright enough.

What 100ms reaction time means is that you can't react to a given stimulus in less then that. Here's the important distinction, you don't react to lag, you perceive it.

To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms, and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce.

1. https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html

Moore's law is our friend and in the future seamless cloud gaming will be possible.

you cannot reduce streaming latency with smaller transistor, nor with more transistor density. or maybe there's a new more law interpretation I'm not aware of that makes speed of light in the connectivity medium faster?

a test on a mouse click? really? finger travel time is going to dwarf and eat up whatever reaction time you have.

I think there is an argument that you can level the playing field by making everyone's lag suck equally. I don't know if stadia did that though

This logic doesn't apply to single player games. I tried playing a racing game on Stadia and it just didn't feel good.

On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for PC. But that game is slow anyway.

Indeed. Count me as one person who was negative on stadia at the start (worked for a company where the CEO wanted to try to copy the idea, I said don't bother)

10ms isn't even one frame at 60 FPS. Modern consoles have more "native" input lag than that.

10ms is an extremely generous estimation of the amount of lag you'd get playing with a device like Stadia at any rate.

Jitter is what really kills it. I found out that my ISP (who own switches in the basement) limits bandwidth based on a rolling time window, so whenever someone in the house starts a download they can briefly saturate the entire link. Wish they'd know how to configure QoS on their very expensive network gear.

Yep if people were bothered by 10ms then everybody would be on CRTs. But... nobody is doing this except some extreme speedrunners and fighting game players.

Typically, not even fighting game players. The last holdouts are retro enthusiasts and Smash Bros. Melee players.

your typical high end gaming monitor is now 360hz

CRTs were nowhere near that

I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.

I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my partner on Stadia, and we’ve never noticed any significant problems - even when using non-stadia controllers.

Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud gaming market, and even the Switch supports “cloud version” games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon’s Luna service continues to grow and improve.

> I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.

Something like Stray that doesn't really require "hundreds of dollars regularly". Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that was definitely < $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then also not on the cloud...

On the other hand, it's highly likely that you won't be able to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as providers will drop it down (or outright close...).

Maybe? But I’m also ok investing the $10-20 per month in a service that can guarantee 4k @ 60fps on any hardware I’m using.

It's still $10-20 forever, monthly(assuming they never increase prices). Versus a few larger sums every few years. If you don't buy the latest and greatest, a $200 yearly budget can definitely keep your hardware up to date. If it's a PC, you can even use it for other purposes.

Let's do a little math. Let's say you want to buy a gaming PC and have a budget of $1000. Let's also assume you play 1 hour of video games a day, 5 days a week. That is 20 hours a month.

At 20 hours a month you would have to play for 50 months (4 years) on your machine before you pay off the machine. Alternatively, you could spend that same money on the streaming service. I think the math doesn't hold up if you are a casual gamer. Building a PC and maintenance just isn't worth it.

That being said, if you play a lot more, maybe even 15-20 hours a week, I think it makes a lot of sense to build your own machine (I have one and it was very worth it when I was a serious LoL player).

why would playtime affect duration of payments

Within the context of Stadia here, you could purchase a game at cost and play it forever (or, until the service shut down, heh) without paying any monthly subscription fee, which does change the math somewhat.

in what way is a subscription an investment

> I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.

If you take a look at the 25 games with the most current players[1] I would argue at least 20/25 would either be annoying to play with increased input lag, or outright highly disadvantageous.

[1] https://steamcharts.com/top

All that means is that people who choose games where lag is annoying pick Steam because that's where the lag is lowest. It's not a canonical list of all games.

This ignores consoles

When Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Switch came out I did alright on Super Mario 64 until I encountered a level that required precisely timed wall jumps in order to advance. I consistently missed my jumps and wondered what was up. I plugged in my controller via USB and was still failing to do the jumps properly. What finally fixed it was putting the input on my TV into "game" mode, which reduced the amount of processing/latency. If local display latency can cause issues with gaming, network latency would be a non-starter in a lot of cases.

Super Mario 3D all star is running emulation on the switch. How much latency is introduced with just that? It was not like the emulation was even top notch either.

It's hard to say. If the emulation to compute a single frame finishes before the frame deadline elapses then the latency caused by emulation is effectively zero.

Surprisingly the display latency on TVs is regularly over 100ms, way more than latency at most homes these days (about 10ms for Comcast here).

That is amazingly inaccurate. If you count the entire chain from input to processing to display you'll be under 40-50ms.

I only know for sure from the few displays I've looked at myself but this table from a quick Google search is consistent:

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag

Yeah, I mean if you enable post processing (which is most likely garbage) you're going to get bad input lag.

Nah, it's definitely true. I have seen plenty of (especially larger-format) TVs where, with "game mode" (or the respective equivalent) disabled, it's unbearable to even do latency-forgiving tasks like office work on them.

It really depends on the TV. And if your gaming console is plugged into a receiver, it could add more.

My previous TV had about 150 ms of video latency. Even if I enabled Game Mode, it was 75 ms, which was still noticeable.

With my current TV, I have no idea what the latency is because I stopped gaming on console and so I'm not playing Rock Band which had a calibration option to compensate for video and audio latency.

I've had a TV that were nearly 200ms, but it was the absolute cheapest panel I could find.

If you don't configure your TV correctly sure, you could get massive amounts of lag. Even with an OLED display if you turn on all the post processing you're going to have problems. That's not really a fault of the TV though. I disable almost all post processing on my TVs and get a better picture without the downsides.

With digital receivers adding lag is minimal at best. Especially with newer models that don't draw on top of the source signal.

It is quite accurate, but only for the highly processed cinematic modes. Latency is essentially irrelevant for video content as long as the audio stays in sync. The game mode drops all the processing and is usually pretty low.

For example, my LG OLED tv is regarded as one of the best for gaming. Game mode latency is about 9ms. Cinema mode is about 90ms.

Those "old games" were designed around the technology of the time, which had drastically lower latency than anything today except for high end gaming (and sometimes not even that).

- Controller buttons caused CPU interrupts, so basically 0 latency

- No OS getting in the way

- N64 era would be double buffered and then straight to the CRT

- NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen

- CRTs have virtually no latency, same with the analog signal chain because there is no buffering

So when people try to play them in modern systems, things that were easy back then are quite hard now.

There's a reason anybody speedrunning SM64 will play on a CRT.

>> "NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen"

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt#Nintendo_Ente...

In 2015 I found myself a decent deal on my old childhood console, the Super Nintendo which I had sold at a garage sale years ago (and later regretted)

I bought a Japanese copy of Super Mario World on ebay (Japanese copies of games were peanuts at the time, I assume they're more now), and found an old CRT for cheap on a local used site. I continued to play SMW many times over the years on various platforms and emulators, and I'm pretty damn good at the game.

But man, did it blow my mind feeling as little input latency as I did the first time I booted it on a CRT after all those years. It actually took a little bit of time to adapt to. It's like that phenomenon where if a button activates a light with low enough latency, people think the light is predicting when they'll hit the button, i.e. turning on before the button is pressed. People don't realize the latency we started dealing with when everything went from analogue to digital!

Yeah, the latency on a lot of TVs outside of "Game Mode" is really atrocious, commonly in the order of 100 - 200ms, which is way higher than even network latency on game streaming services assuming you're close to the data center.

Worth noting, I'm pretty sure by default when you plug a Switch controller into the dock, it just charges and continues to communicate over Bluetooth. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong

It's absolutely noticeable. The question is whether it's tolerable, and people do seem to tolerate increasing latency both from networks and their TV.

But, personally, I find the experience much less enjoyable as the latency goes up. It's not about being competitive either. (I don't play games online.) It just feels sticky and sluggish and I don't enjoy it. I miss the crisp responsiveness of older consoles. :(

> I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.

I agree with your disagreement here. For me streaming game services don't have a lot of technical hurdles.

> Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.

I disagree here. I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.

The subscription model I think has already proven it self be consumer hostile. I don't want to subscribe to Adobe, I don't want to subscribe to Office, just let me buy the damn thing outright.

> I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.

I totally think this is fair - and I think the market can support both models.

E.g.: I like paying for Netflix / Hulu / [insert video streaming service here], but I wouldn't hate on others who prefer buying the DVD. Same thing for Apple Music vs. people who prefer CDs / records.

Splatoon 3 is already one of the best-selling Switch games ever released - a competitive online shooter on a console most popular with casual gamers. Games like Fortnite and Overwatch are massively popular. 99% is a real over-estimation.

If there is demand, and the tech is fine, then why is Google shutting down Stadia?

I use GeForce now for singleplayer games and I'm super happy with it as long as I'm on an ethernet connection.

Latency really isn't a problem in many contexts. I've got some prototype streaming solutions running in an azure region near me and I can't perceive any round trip latency compared to localhost.

There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time.

Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.

I’ll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99% (99.9%?) of cases.

Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms.

I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag.

I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games.

But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.

the 10ms or whatever the real amount is, is in addition to tbe monitor lag, etc.

i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.

Local lag was significantly reduced over recent years, low latency modes of TVs/monitors, 60 and more fps even for console games, etc. So the baseline moved. That affects remote gaming also, but in a much smaller proportion. Remote gaming quality is as good as ISP quality, and most of ISPs are sh*.

> 10ms is not perceptible . . . less than 1%

The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and can easily tell if their game isn’t running with optimal fps. High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you might be right about the general population, but were talking specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more doubtful that it’s just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching yourself can mean death).

Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also cars.

Agree that many casual people don’t care much, but casual people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or wouldn’t be in the know enough to try out a streaming game service that wasn’t advertised much.

10ms is completely fine for any game you can possibly think of. Including competitive FPS e-sports. We are not superhumans and your monitor alone probably adds more lag than that.

What's not acceptable is jitter. If it's a constant 10ms delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.

If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.

I think this is right for games that are ported to streaming from a traditional PC or console release, but presumably if some studio cared, they could design games with streaming in mind. As an extreme example, imagine the original NES Final Fantasy, or the SNES Monopoly on Stadia: with mainly turn-based interaction, they would be basically indistinguishable from playing locally.

Highly disagree. Seems you have not tested current game streaming as Gamepass or GeForce Now.

>extra 10ms

That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher.

>extra 10ms

That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags, etc... )

I tend to only play "non-competetive" solo games, so I dont care much about input lag. Wasnt a problem for me in Destiny, Assasins Creed or Cyberpunk.

That's completely false. Streaming works great even for latency sensitive games.

I was cloud gaming for 2 years and recently switched to PC. I've been gaming for about 30 years or more. I can confidently say you wont notice anything up to around 60ms latency. I could still twitch aim and play and compete in online shooters no problem.

Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection starts to become unstable, even if it's a fast connection, it becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and I'm out.

(For context, this thread originally linked to https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-stream... "A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy")

Google lacks of focus. They should take a close look at what company they want to be in the next decade and more.

And yes, they should radically restructure their system of incentives. Clearly the one they have in place does not work.

They have been all over the places, from cloud, finance, gaming, mobile, os, social, you name it. And most of their revenue still come from ads.

Steve Jobs:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

>They have been all over the places, from cloud, finance, gaming, mobile, os, social, you name it. And most of their revenue still come from ads.

Telco, political machine, automotive, surveillance, more surveillance... and they made Flutter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLiiRsqXQbw

Absolutely devastated about this.

I love Stadia. I bought it for a friend last Christmas and we have been using it this year to play games together, she has a Macbook which cannot play a lot of PC games and the Stadia model works a lot better for us.

Despite the lack of AAA titles, it had everything we wanted to play, we just started playing overcooked on it. Now I do not know what we will do.

Geforce now will require a subscription + the game and I believe this doesn't work anywhere near as well on her connection.

We've also been doing playthroughs of Life is strange together, due to the new feature where they let you watch another player play.

Stadia was absolutely perfect, Google absolutely messed this up and i've got a bunch of games i won't get too lined up.

It was fun while it lasted.

Though it does need a subscription, Xbox Game Pass plus their cloud gaming works very well, plus gives you a huge library of games to choose from.

i'm going to look into it, but I'm not sure my friends connection holds out very well somtimes, geforce now didn't work too well (although this was about 2 years ago), but Stadia was perfect.

Plus it's a bit expensive, particularly when you are not an xbox user, 2x subscriptions could be pricey when all we want to do is play a handful of games. Might even work out cheaper to buy a Switch or something in the long term.

Game Pass is horrible. It has to be the worst service I've ever used.

Looks like Overcooked 2 (but not the first one) runs on Mac - buy it on Steam and then you can use GeForce Now or the Macbook depending on what's more convenient (I imagine any relatively recent macbook would run it just fine, it's not a super demanding game).

You still have a few months :)

lol, props to Google for refunding the costs of the hardware, games, and DLC, though.

I might've actually bought one, except that I didn't want to be stranded with an outlay of hundreds of dollars for a bricked streaming device. If I'd known up front that they'd have refunded my costs (or even a percentage of them) if they shut down the service in some timeframe, I'd have totally bought one.

Same here. If they intended to use this buyback as a strategy so next round we’re more comfortable buying into their project: it’s working.

Same. If they told me "we'll refund you 100% if we shut down go nuts" I would have gone nuts as the service was solid. The funny thing is it would have helped their "uptake" numbers and might have stalled or prevented the shutdown!

This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their purchases.

Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital things like trading cards and stickers, and before many games were heavily dependent on the continuation of online services.

>This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their purchases.

I didn't realize this. I'm looking to build a pc in the coming months, and the fact that valve has a plan in place is comforting

Bear in mind this was the plan in 2004, when steam was still using that weird military green everywhere

> Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital things

But by that point they had established themselves. They earned trust before selling things that required that trust.

Exactly! Google doesn't get this. Google has a commitment image problem. As a consumer I've not seen them address this with the seriousness it deserves.

Since they won't commit to their products, their customers are reluctant to commit as well.

Yeah, I'm not using any new Google products unless it's for a one off use.

And I'm reconsidering the existing services I'm dependent on as well.

GMail, for example. While I have no doubt GMail will continue to exist as long as email exists, Google's spam blocking (not just filtering...blocking, where the email doesn't even make it to the inbox), has become far too aggressive. And the frequent UI changes are becoming unsustainable.

Also, the nagging suspicion that Google is having silent data loss issues across their products is not helping either.

I actually bought one of their controllers, and it's quite nice. I'm pumped it's free now. Works great on Linux.

The thing is that nothing is bricked \o/

I end up with a Chromecast and a gamepad that are both compatible outside of Stadia and played a few games, all of that for free.

Really grateful for the major contribution Google made to the WebRTC over the years, driven by the Stadia effort. They relatively quickly turned it into a viable, production worthy, real-time protocol. Brought up the state of the art in browser-based streaming and reduced complexity in a big way. There were things you simply couldn't do in the browser before WebRTC (e.g. UDP streaming) and many other things were significantly more complex and browser-specific (e.g. tapping into hardware decoders). They were also very receptive to external contributions, which is really nice to see in a major corporate-driven open source project.

While Stadia did cause them to do more work on WebRTC (AFAIK mostly with latency), their WebRTC efforts--and you are referencing high-level stuff, not low-level Stadia-specific details--was mostly driven by Google Hangouts, not Stadia.

For those of you who haven't tried it, it is the real deal. I've tried Xbox live, playstation streaming, etc. and Stadia's performance blows every single one out of the water. Even on 4g, performance is unbelievable.

You don't even need hardware or any account. You can play destiny for free.

It saddens me that this is going away but like most people, I'm not surprised.

I just hope that the technology doesn't go to waste.

Hopefully Valve,Sony, or Microsoft acquires the tech.

it's gonna be spun off into Google Stream the white label service. you can find the Resident Evil demo online for free that uses this, I think it's still live.

Nvidia’s streaming is very technically competitive with Stadia. Most of the time it worked better. Business model rocks too, you own the game through your normal Steam or whatever account and rent the GPU time.

I have also used MS cloud gaming a bunch and it stinks in comparison.

I was expecting there to be some satisfaction at this news as I (and many others clearly from the comments) predicted this would happen. But honestly it just feels kind of sad at this point. Google used to be, at least from an outside perspective, one of the most innovative and forward thinking companies, constantly releasing new and interesting products. Not everything was good, of course, but I was always eager to give things a try.

Now Google is a paint-by-ads corporate behemoth. I've been burnt so many times that I'm now skeptical of every new thing they release instead of excited. I hate feeling that way, especially because Stadia itself is so technically impressive, but how else can I feel?

I was done feeling sad many years ago. It has been absolutely ages since there was anything interesting from them. I can’t even recall the last product that seemed like a real innovation. Possibly the first chromecast in 2013? That’s 10 years without a hit. At this point they are covered in cobwebs.

AppleTV had already existed for years by then, including with Airplay.

I would say 2005 with Google Maps.

Alright, I admit it was not incredibly ground breaking. Reason it impressed was that it was a very small, cheap and simple UI device that showed how to execute an IOT device well. It went on to be very popular and it was obvious from the start that it would be successful. And as far as I understand it was developed internally, not acquired like basically every other google product from the past 20 years.

Google maps was quite impressive, but it was also cobbled together from several acquisitions. In fact, Google Earth Desktop is still basically the same software they bought from Keyhole in 2004.

> Google used to be, at least from an outside perspective, one of the most innovative and forward thinking companies, constantly releasing new and interesting products.

Honestly, I think the change from a SWE CEO (Schmidt -- and less so Larry) to a PM CEO, Sundar, is probably the main reason.

I get why, though. At the time of Sundar's rise, it was clear that Apple was way better at making "products". (Now they're just a lot better :)

It was a mistake to get involved with game streaming to begin with.

It was never about the players, it was "everybody else is developing a game streaming platform so we should too".

In the last weeks there have been multiple streaming handhelds announce which leaves me wondering... "are there product managers who believe everything they see on TV?"

Most of the fun of a portable game console is using it on the bus, as a passenger in a car, or outside the range of reliable WiFi. If you believed everything you see on TV you might think "5G" is a solution but I have to break it to you that there are postage stamp sized plots in Washington, DC, New York, NY, and Los Angeles, CA that have 5G coverage.

Given that these e-waste devices are up against real portable game consoles like the Switch and the Steam Deck I can only hope the people who make the decisions to go ahead with marketing e-Waste products face some personal consequences for their actions, at the very least they won't be allowed to introduce more e-Waste products that hurt investors, gamers, game producers and everyone else.

I actually am bought into game streaming. I subscribe to both MS and Nvidia. I travel a lot and not needing a console or gaming laptop rocks. Most of my gaming is from the hotel or Airbnb, so the connection is not a problem.

Even then Stadia was dead on arrival for me with a completely unattractive consumer proposition of having to subscribe but get no games (aside from some trash freebies) and having to rebuy games at MSRP that I already owned on storefronts that were still going to be around when the leaves fell off the trees.

I also made the switch to streaming (GFN) and like playing all my same games from different "terminals" a lot. AirBNB and my house obviously work great. I've found hotel wifi to range from "barely works" to "does not work", lots of crappiness. I'm still looking for a good solution to this. Maybe you stay in better hotels! :)

That said, I'm getting a Steam deck soon so I hope that fixes the story for "mobile" gaming or gaming without the network that GP pointed out. The convincing thing for me on GFN was that you're buying your games in a standard game store so if GFN becomes a non-option at some point I'll still have my games.

I was thinking of a steam deck for the same reason. Decent 720p gaming on the go and 4k gaming at home on the same device with the same games sounds awesome. Cloud saves make it all seamless.

Stadia Pro subscription was optional, unless you consider 4k necessary. once you bought a game you could play it for free indefinitely at 1080p

Stadia was quite clearly part of the commoditize-the-competition strategy, probably mostly aimed at Sony and Microsoft.

Really unfortunate, and I think Google is making a long term mistake here. Stadia worked extremely well for me and some friends who all basically didn't want to invest in a gaming tower.

I had a theory though, that if you were a serious gamer, you probably stream or do a bunch of other things on your computer. As the serious gamer would need a reasonable GPU either way to accomplish this, the benefits of Stadia didn't make sense for them. Google should have implemented the missing pieces as part of the stadia experience, thus only requiring a laptop to be a mildly successful streamer.

In my head they should have worked on something that could stream directly to youtube gaming, and they should have paid $$$$ to get some streamers to use Stadia exclusively for their streams.

> they should have worked on something that could stream directly to youtube gaming

This is actually one of the two supported streaming modes, see https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9825342?hl=en.

but that's the crux of the issue streaming is much more than delivering video it's about engaging with the audience and you need the second streaming mode for that, at which poit you already have a beefy enough computer to play

The title in itself is interesting as an exemple of the modern corpo-speak bullshit as we can see everywhere now:

  <<A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy>>

In the content they tell that they are shutting down, so giving up on the project, but the title tries to pretend that they "pivot" and so that it is something that is beneficial for them in the long term to be invested in "streaming" technologies.

I used Shadow [1] for a couple years. They basically give you a windows VM and you install whatever you want. All the other big players limited the games you could install, which was a deal breaker for me. I think there's 1 or 2 others that have a similar model to Shadow, but they are pay by the hour.

Shadow was great, when they had a California datacenter (~20ms latency). I noticed zero lag most of the time. Once they closed that and I was forced to go to TX (~60ms latency), it started to become an issue for me. There were other issues too, like some games don't let you install on a VM (very rare), and I kept running out of space.

I finally upgraded to a PC this year (~$1400 w/GeForce 3070 & i5), and it is a much better experience. I was so used to the latency, I kept failing mini-games with timed key presses. Now I have all the hard drive space I need, and the graphics look and feel much smoother (I assume something to do with the compression). While the cloud GPUs were performing well, I don't think the CPUs were up to par.

I still think cloud gaming is great, and wish Shadow well. But if your cloud gaming service is going to limit the games people can play, get your tombstone ready.

[1] shadow.tech

Latency is the aspect of cloud gaming I'll never understand. There are literal physics based limits on how fast you can transmit a signal (and a lot more practical ones on top of those). I keep thinking that someone must have some secret sauce they've come up with, but unless Google or someone can invent faster light, I'm not sure what that would be. Obviously the closer you can get the compute to the screen, the better, but 20ms still sounds perceptible to me.

20ms each way is 40ms, or 2.5 frames of lag if you’re playing at 60fps. Pretty noticeable.

20ms is not perceptible to me at least, but the video compression is. Particle effects just don’t look nearly as good, and turning rapidly produces noticeable video artefacts.

This is entirely a failure of management rather than engineering.

The kind of single player AAA titles they were promoting are always going to look better and be more responsive on local hardware. They should have leaned into Stadia as a backend for massively multiplayer online games, where they would have the advantage of cheat protection and a subscription revenue model. Instead they pushed for a purchase model that exacerbated all of online gaming's shortcomings while minimizing the advantages.

The Stadia infrastructure may yet succeed, but never under Phil Harrison. He should have been sacked years ago.

Stadia owner here, the entire concept of a streaming game system where you still have to buy the games is just weird. I used it for a couple weeks and went back to my Xbox.

To succeed, it really needed to be just a gamepass-esq model.

The thing I found really impressive is that the latency felt better over the actual internet than streaming my Xbox from another room.

It's also super impressive that the headphone jack in the controller's audio seemed perfectly in sync with the video from the Chromecast despite the controller operating over Wifi. The video and audio streams are presumably completely separate, originating from Google servers.

Funny I just plugged in my Stadia controller and played around to see if the service was still active. It's sad, I really liked the service for a few reasons:

1. I don't have a gaming console, and this allowed me to easily (with the help of my Chromecast) add gaming to my living room.

2. It's way easier than Steam Link/Controllers which always require an element of "massage" to get and keep working.

Downsides:

My library of games on Steam, Epic, EA are obviously not accessible with Stadia, and I wasn't about to re-purchase or purchase exclusively any game content from a service that was doomed.

I've also played with Xbox Cloud Gaming and while decent I found it unusable on mobile.

The other big plus for me was that the backend was Linux. If it really took off, it would have been huge for Linux gaming. Sadly, it looks like the survivors are all Windows based. It's all on Steam now.

You can probably use shadow.tech as an alternative

Shadow worked pretty well for me, though it's a lot more expensive than Geforce Now and limited storage. Unless you pay even more, it's 256GB which these days might only be 2-3 AAA games. If you want AC: Odyssey & Cyberpunk, there goes all of your space.

You're looking at a cost that approaches that of a budget gaming rig (if you shop around a bit) or, for even less money (if you wait a few months) a steam deck. With either of those, provided you have access to good residential broadband, you can use them to stream remotely almost as well as Shadow. I do this fairly regularly. If you don't have good broadband to stream from home, Steam deck stick has you covered. You can even use it to stream locally to your laptop for the larger screen. (It's a shame that laptops don't generally let you use their HDMI ports for incoming though)

If you can find your game on GeForce Now you should give a try, works really great on PC or Android TV.

> My library of games on Steam, Epic, EA are obviously not accessible with Stadia

This is what convinced me to jump into streaming gaming with an NVidia Shield and GeForce Now.

You buy the games on standard game store platforms: Steam, Epic and Ubisoft. So I knew when I was buying the games that if GFN folded or I didn't like it anymore I could still play my entire library on a PC.

Not every game available on Steam is available to play through GFN. For example, you can't play GTAV. But you can play Destiny, Cyberpunk, Saint's Row, Assassin's Creed, etc. It's a credible if not complete selection.

The service was cheap (very cheap when I signed up with the Founder's lifetime rate at < $5/mo.) and I needed a new streaming device for my TV anyway (the Shield is a perfectly capable Android TV based streaming device), so I could dip my toe in it easily and see how it worked (basically the cost of the controller, which aren't very expensive). I've liked it so much I left console gaming behind and got two more Shields for two other TVs. It's very nice to be able to play the same game from different terminals, including my phone if need be (phone's not great for Cyberpunk 2077 but it does Powerwash Simulator just fine).

Time to update http://isstadiadeadyet.com

Never used in the first place, only because I had almost no trust in Google not shutting down any new services.

Not surprised. Google really needs to stop doing this.

Not surprised, but still rather frustrated. We literally just signed a deal to bring Arctic Awakening to Stadia in the last few weeks, and I know a number of other devs had done the same. They never even gave it a chance. What did they expect, to take over the gaming market in a few short years with hardly any content?

Part of the problem is that they never delivered on some of the features that really would have distinguished it from being just another streaming service. Features like youtube integration where a video of someone playing the game might autopopulate a stadia link to start playing that same game right now.

But the main thing they got wrong was the library of games. The success of just about every console launch has lived or died by the # and quality of games available at launch. Only in this case they were launching with games that were already available for anyone who wanted them. There was no additional market to tap into, existing PC games already owned the games Stadia was selling.

This meant the value proposition was either:

1)the low cost of entry for non-pc gamers. This is a relatively hard sell though. There aren't a lot of mass market games that you can't also find on cheaper consoles, so converting console gamers is rough, leaving you with non-gamers to bring into the fold, which is even tougher.

2)Convenience for existing games that already owned the same games. This is where Google really missed the ball. They should have used their giant size & resources to forge agreements with the big publishers that would let folks who already owned games on Steam to play them on Stadia. Pay them off the same way console makers pay for exclusive titles: a cost of doing business. Or a cut of ad revenue for ads shown during live streams of their games. Or even negotiate for consumers to pay a small 1-time fee to add a steam game to their account: This is a bit how Apple was able to be so successful with iTunes early on. Lot's of people already owned physical copies of music they ended up re-purchasing on iTunes because at $1/song it was pretty cheap to buy a "best of" sampling of your existing collection for the convenience iTunes offered. I don't think I would have purchased a Steam Deck if instead I could have spent a few dollars activating games I already owned on Stadia instead. Heck models for this sort of thing already exist: I've paid $1.99 to "read" an audiobook version of a book I already purchased from Amazon a bunch of times. There were multiple ways Google might have overcome resistance from existing gamers to adopt Stadia due to not wanting to repurchase their favorite games.

Instead the "free" games included in a sub were either a) already owned by the target audience or b) little better than shovelware. You got very little for subscribing

There's a lot of animosity on this thread, but I think Stadia shutting down is distressing and we should talk about that.

The concept of a 3rd party game streaming platform is another foot into the grave with Stadia shutting down, and that should be cause for alarm. I think most people in this thread can agree that the licensing model for Stadia was less than stellar, but it feels like getting favorable licensing requires being an existing behemoth (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Sony PlayStation Now, Nvidia GeForce Now) to have any chance of a AAA title being on your streaming platform. Blade filed for insolvency just last year, and has since been remarketed as Shadow.tech which functionally is just expensive Windows VMs.

A lot of people on here will happily argue that they want to own their games (Which I want too!), while also rejoicing that cloud gaming is increasing narrowing to fewer and fewer companies. Licensing is getting increasingly harder, and I'm worried at some point we'll be left with a monopoly and it'll be too late.

This is hacker news, what's the answer here for startups going forward? Is becoming a 1st party powerhouse (Like Netflix) while getting licensing agreements with as many indie games as you can (Like Epic Games?) the only option? How do you make this model succeed when you have no negotiating power? If Sony is suing Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on their platform, what chance does a startup have?

I do not want cloud gaming startups to succeed. I feel like I would own my games even less than I do now, and due to the laws of physics, games would be less responsive than playing locally. I am glad that Stadia has failed.

I believe the issue is cloud gaming is succeeding for a triopoly of companies, and only them. You can not want them to succeed, but that's further entrenching their dominance. If you're fine with narrowing who can license games to just a couple of companies, then I'm afraid that's there's a very real risk of no longer owning your games at all. This is a bit of a slippery slope, but that's just my concern.

Even if it wasn’t massively popular as a gaming platform, I thought it could be pretty profitable as marketing for games, where you can actually demo the game from a web browser and try it before buying it. This could be either directly on e-commerce sites or ads on Google.com. I’m surprised that they didn’t do more with that before killing it. If you could show having a Stadia demo increases conversion rates and sales, it would be really useful even if gamers don’t acquire Stadia gaming libraries.

I wonder if they could’ve sold it off to Netflix or something instead of killing it.

I have a Stadia and actually liked it even though I thought the go to market execution was bad. Also the latency made it problematic for multiplayer games, so I just played single player content.

Love the foreshadowing of it being a total flop from the launch exhibition: https://twitter.com/AllGamesDelta_/status/119683308108220416...

"Remember when Google compared Stadia with the Powerglove, Atari ET and the Dreamcast?"

The thing I remembered most from that launch was when Sundar Pichai walked on stage of this massive product launch, in front of the entire gaming industry filled with skeptics, and the first words out of his mouth were "I'll admit, I'm not much of a gamer".

>"I'll admit, I'm not much of a gamer"

In other words, "I have no clue about the buying & playing habits of my target market." With subtext of the launch & rollout then being "And either I ignored the advice of those who did know or nobody bothered to tell me".

Unsurprising, as I knew it was going to shut down already as I said in 2021: [0]

>> I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard. [0]

This is the second time I have seen them shutdown as I already said this before: [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255

Well, that's kind of sad, if predictable. I worked with the team that built the controller firmware. They worked their asses off. And I personally worked on and finished up / optimized / productionized the the stream receiver component for Stadia that lives inside Chromecasts.

Might be the last remaining piece of public facing code I worked on @ Google (assuming it wasn't rewritten after I left), and now it will be buh-bye.

Can you comment on anything really unique that was done w/ the controller stack to minimize latency between controller <-> chromecast <-> datacenter ?

Sorry for the stupid internet drama/shenanigans, but I couldn't resist.

> Anonymous sources providing nothing but a statement are baseless.

> Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don’t have to believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in October.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402

It ain't even October yet.

Well, autumn started on the 23rd.

So it technically did exist by the end of summer.

It's always harmful to your reputation to shut down a service, but it is especially harmful when it is an ecosystem or platform play where you are burning the good will of third parties who co-invest to create the platform. Clearly stadia is in that second category. While Google can refund consumers for their purchases they can never make up for the opportunity cost those parties suffered.

At this point, I can't see how Google can ever launch another platform or ecosystem except on a 100% transactional basis.

I really liked Stadia, it worked well for me and played lots of AC and Destiny. Never had much of an issue and things worked well. Im bummed, but not surprised. No one seems to mention the real potential of cloud gaming: which is massive worlds and players on the same "server"; and I mean MASSIVE, the likes home PC's would never have enough power/graphics/memory/storage to handle.

Have you tried shadow.tech? What did you think about it?

Never heard of it, I am currently subscribed to Statia Pro, GEFORCE Now RTX, and MS Xbox Ultimate. Because I am 100% into game streaming. Its the future. But GEFORCE Now is the best. I have high hopes for Xbox.

How was Destiny PvP on Stadia?

Lets just say I would only play Iron Banner, and do above average. Its NOT for competitors looking for 4k @ 144hz .

So, Destiny PvP is segregated by input type: controllers against controllers and kb/m against kb/m by default.

Destiny has different matchmaking types: Connection-Based Match Making and Skill-Based Match Making. Destiny also p2p network model.

CBMM was always a breeze to play as long as you can "git gud". SBMM was often a nightmare because you get matched with players all over the globe.

I played Destiny on nearly every streaming platform except for shadow, I can say that Stadia made SBMM more consistent because, well, p2p within google DC is much better than all around the country or globe. Win some lose some kind of situation here.

I mean, yeah, it's nothing like playing on my PC with 144hz monitor, but it's very much playable.

The real question here is why it took so long to shut down Stadia, especially from Google. It never had any traction at any point in its history.

>It never had any traction at any point in its history.

B/c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and stops carrying afterwards... and b/c it was marred with promises like "negative latency". But mostly it required to purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock in.

Nobody at Google ever thought to put together the venn diagram of:

* People interested in playing high end games

* People who don’t own modern consoles or gaming PCs

* People with access to fiber

Nah. Google execs and others keeping making the mistake that cloud gaming should target the high-end gamers. It should be the middle-ground between mobile gaming and pc/console gaming, IMO. Low barrier to entry with some AAA games.

Stadia users often joked about how it was really 'Dadia', since so much of the player base was younger dads that wanted to game with their friends from time to time but couldn't justify purchasing the required hardware. These are the users Google should have been targeting - along with less tech-inclined crowd.

The entire pandemic I had this vision of a Stadia commercial where a younger family member sends a link on the family group chat or over zoom and then next minute everyone is playing Among Us or some other casual party game together. Even grandparents and click a link to open their chrome browser.

You don't need fiber for casual games like these. You need enough internet to stream netflix - which almost everyone does.

Stadia leadership just didn't have vision.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

They sure do try out a lot of stuff. Google really need to do the reverse an create "productsbygoogle.com". Many of the products are pretty unknown, until they get publicity for being killed.

https://about.google/products/

A lot of AAA games presumably got ported to Linux so that they would run on Stadia. Were those efforts funded by Google? I wonder if we saw more proper Linux game client releases as a result, and whether we'll see fewer Linux ports in the future.

> Were those efforts funded by Google?

Yes[1]. One clue (among hundreds of others) that Stadia was already dead months ago was when the ports dried up, indicating that the project had lost internal funding.

[1] https://gamerant.com/google-spent-millions-stadia-ports/

That was the best thing about Stadia. Cyberpunk ran on Linux on day one, probably because of that.

Don't forget Valve though. They don't have as much power as Google, but they have done way more. The Steam Deck (as long as it lives) will help.

I remember faintly that among the leaks from Capcom this year, there was a marketing document about Capcom receiving stipends from Google for developing for Stadia.

Aside from marketing efforts, Google seems to have also supported developers with technology efforts, as indicated with the GDC presentation below:

https://schedule2019.gdconf.com/session/first-light-bringing...

I am surprised to see that this quite Linux centric community missing the obvious. With Stadia support 'cleaned up' from game engines it is a game over for Linux desktop gaming.

Fortunately the Steam Deck[0] is still helping push for Linux game support although their approach is centered a lot more on emulating Windows games. According to their Steam Deck verified[1] program it seems to be working.

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck [1]: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified

Stadia has contributed almost nothing to linux gaming. We never saw any of the stadia games released natively for linux. All effort that is done is by valve, with proton. And proton runs windows games.

I'd argue that linux native is dead, but that doesn't matter much when we can just run windows games.

Who else has noticed that when an HN post reaches critical mass, people mostly just reply to the first comment and don't see anything beneath? (even if there are other very worthy top-level comments). Anyone have a good idea for how to remedy this? Or do you feel like it's a feature not a bug?

I had a feeling they shuffled comments randomly a few times during the first 1-2h after post creation. But I guess you are right, it's easier to get noticed by bandwagoning the most popular comment.

Maybe if there are a lot of comments - display five randomly chosen and get those up/down voted first before showing everything else?

But there would still be a problem with some just having longer lifetime hence higher chance of being in the top than others.

Another idea would be to only show a certain amount of nesting by default.

Takeaway - next time you decide to buy a google product and have choice through their store or 3rd party retailer, best to go through their store!

I think the best thing is wait 5 years and see if they are going to shitcan it or not...

Direct from the horse's mouth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022775

Also from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Not saying it to argue with your point, just to highlight that we generally shouldn't put much trust into Google.

But this is from 60 days ago, and Google has now announced they are shutting Stadia down.

While "cover your ass" posts may need a grain of salt, there's no logic in "we're killing a product/service" being lip service.

These decisions are not made over the course of days or a couple of months. They're made quarters or years in advance.

So.. what's your point? Are you saying that Google saying they're not shutting down 60 days ago was wrong? Or that the current post is wrong? Or that neither should be trusted? Or..?

That PR statements are lies and not to be trusted. Trust what they do, not what they say they're going to do.

And not just Google, but every company.

I agree, just not sure what your comment meant in regards to that. Ie the decision is made by quarters, yea, what does that have to do with the parent comment?

I'm not sure what your point is.

I'm not arguing that internally, no one at Google knew this 60 days ago. They may have. I'm saying that it makes sense to cast doubt on public relation statements that cast a company in a good light, but it makes much less sense to doubt an announcement that casts them in a bad light. Why would they "lie" about killing a product or service?

>... it makes much less sense to doubt an announcement that casts them in a bad light. Why would they "lie" about killing a product or service?

If you are suggesting that I'm saying that we shouldn't trust Google's announcement that they are shutting down Stadia, then you are misunderstanding my comment.

You replied to a post saying "this is news direct from Google" with the comment

> to highlight that we generally shouldn't put much trust into Google

It seemed like a logical conclusion. Given your argument now, I assume you simply meant "don't trust anything they say" (which would include their announcement today) but it's not exactly the spirit of what you mean. Your initial intent was not clear (in my opinion.)

Just a general, friendly reminder to take whatever comes out of Google's mouth with a gigantic grain of salt, circumstantially. In this circumstance, I would trust that they are shutting it down.

I'm saying that their statement 60 days ago was a lie. A lie that leadership knew was a lie, yet they let the PR statement be generated and broadcasted regardless.

Google will have financially benefited from that positive PR (from interest on invested money, if in absolutely no other way).

Right - if you re-read what I said, it was that you can believe negative PR ("we are shutting it down") while taking any positive PR ("we are totally not shutting it down!") with a grain of salt.

The top 4th and 7th comment on the Stadia launch post on HN sort of predicted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432957

During those times I thought HN was being overly pessimistic as usual about a product being killed by Google, but now it is pretty understandable, especially as despite Google’s headstart that they were overtaken by Nvidia, Microsoft, and others in this space.

A reply to the 7th comment says "I'd say one promotion cycle for the top executives on the product, 2-3 more for the next tier of engineers/product folks to ship some cool stuff, then a year or two for the product to coast before no one wants to take on the technical debt. So I'll predict its shutdown will be announced by July 2022."

That prediction was so damn close.

Google doing what google does. Release an MVP , dump marketing dollars to gain customers, kill the product when adoption rates don't meet expectations. With no real exclusive games, Stadia was destined to fail.

Remember like three weeks ago when some news about this came out and they were like no we promise we are not shutting it down?

Glad they are doing refunds though.

This is a bit sad.

Stadia was pretty cool while it lasted. I was a Stadia subscriber for a while. Great technology, but (mostly) crappy games. The store was also pretty lame with just a huge list of (mainly B-list) titles, and no indication of whether something was good or not.

With a better game library and a better store, Stadia could be a winner. Shame they didn’t just partner with Steam!

"Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions."

- Jul 29, 2022

https://twitter.com/googlestadia/status/1552989433590214656

Likely written by a support rep who definitely wasn't in on todays announcement.

Story time. I left Google in 2017 after Fiber (which I worked on) was unceremoniously mothballed. I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode.

Before leaving one of the teams some of us considered joining was the then unlaunched Stadia team. This was an effort out of Cloud I guess to create value added GCP services. Ultimately it never went anywhere because the team didn't want a presence in NYC.

Anyway, as soon as I heard about the project I said there's only two words you need to kill this project.

"Input lag"

The conversation should've ended there as the games where this isn't a factor are so niche it doesn't justify an entire product and engineering team.

I really don't understand how projects like this get signed off. Well, I do actually. It's a pet project for someone who doesn't really understand the domain they're operating in (ie games).

This should've never been greenlit.

Don't they have competitors that are doing better than Stadia? Eg, geforce now?

TBH, I played quite a bit of Madden on Stadia and input lag wasn't really an issue. I think there are a lot of games that actually worked really well there.

I was really skeptical that this could work before trying it myself on GFN. There are network problems, and it can be a pain when it happens, but this is standard connectivity stuff (my ISP connection fails or I have a problem with my wi-fi) and the input lag just isn't perceptible to me. I was really surprised and impressed at how well it works. At that point I was sold.

I played God of War (2018), the Last of Us games, and some other stuff on PS Now (Sony's cloud gaming platform). There were some issues but overall it worked pretty well. There are some games where cloud gaming can't give you low enough input latency, but I disagree that it is as many games as you think.

They knew game streaming wasn't ready for prime time. The strategy, I imagine, was to get in early and suffer some growing pains to cement a toehold that positions Google as a major player if/when game streaming goes mass market. I guess the bean counters at Alphabet decided the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

Destiny 2 is free on Stadia. you can launch it right now after the intro hop into a PvP match to try yourself.

Input lag was never a noticeable issue for the non-PCMasterRace population, which is the majority of gamers.

> I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode.

Google Fiber is currently microtrenching in front of my house, and continues to move into more cities here. Did they restart, or did their mothballing just mean that they aren't entering new geographic regions?

TBH, I'm super excited about it because the only other high-speed option we have is Comcast and it is super unreliable and the data cap sucks, but I'm also mentally preparing for the day they get bored of it and shut the whole thing down.

I genuinely think Apple's Arcade strategy will prevail in the long run. Apple doesn't necessarily need AAA games to eat a big chunk of this market. A lot of very popular games like Roblox, Minecraft and FIFA are not even AAA quality.

Being able to run a game on both your phone and your console (Apple TV in this case) is a huge advantage.

Really?!? What a surprise! /s

They wanted game devs, with a strong Windows development culture, to port their games into a Linux distribution, using bare bones tooling vs Windows/Console devkits, a huge investment into a company that is known for quickly dropping products when not profitable enough.

Naturally most didn't even bothered.

I've long thought big companies and individuals have WAY more money than they know how to effectively use.

This is really hurting American innovation edge. If we could figure out a more effective way to get that money towards entrepreneurs / start ups - we'd be way better off.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-a...

Effectively? Cause you can get it wrong and get a bunch of WeWorks...

To be fair - didn't really look into it past the graph, but my initial question would be how much that has to do with all the money that artificially got pumped into the economy last year.

Sundar Pichai is like the anti-Satya_Nadella. Since taking over Google, the company has only gone downhill but they haven't realized this, heads will only roll once they get hit over their search and ad dominance, by that time it will be too late.

Think of Sundar as being like a nicer version of Steve Ballmer. He only existed to help the company grow as fast as possible in terms of revenue and market share. It seems likely Ruth Porat will replace him soon and then Google's transition to evil will be finally complete.

Stadia was dead in the water since day one, because you had to buy the games on stadia, even if you already had a copy in another platform.

Compare that to GeForce now, which can stream (some of) your existing library, and it's obvious Stadia had no chance.

You had to pay the monthly subscription, plus buy the games, and if you stop paying the subscription, you lose the games! That's a terrible deal and many in the gaming community predicted the demise of Stadia exactly because of this.

If nvidia can make it so GeForce Now can stream your existing library, surely Google could too? It's baffling that Stadia management didn't see this.

Two months ago, Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188

>Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don’t have to believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in October.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402

Summer ended a week ago! They were right!

It's not October yet though. I look forward to returning to that thread in a few days.

It's funny, when Google lied and said they were always going to be working on Stadia, were in it for the long-haul, etc - they lied because they knew they needed people to believe in the service to use it. Of course, people knew they were lying and didn't believe in the service and didn't use it. If Google had told the truth - "We're trying Stadia, it might shut down, and if it does complete refunds on everything" - people would've believed Google and would've tried out the service and they wouldn't need to shut down.

It was clear to me that Google was completely unprepared to enter this market when their little display outside the big reveal was a Sega Dreamcast, NES Power Glove, and a copy of E.T. for Atari 2600. It was practically foreshadowing.

I wouldn't be surprised if that display was pitched as a joke, and some executive approved it knowing nothing about these products. They just saw "Sega", "Nintendo", and "Atari" logos, and loved their product launch being compared to these instantly recognizable titans of the video game industry.

I’ve realized only recently a way to interpret what’s going on at Google economically-speaking: as companies grow and as economies grow as well (e.g. to be more automated and industrialized), this always results in greater bureaucracy [1]. However, Google while it did add more bureaucracy, tried to instead turn these new less-purposeful jobs and bloat into widescale attempts at “innovation”.

Partly legitimate, but partly to maintain culture and a semblance of being an innovative company, in spite of the fact that they are a monopoly that, at the end of the day, is not really incentivized to innovate (e.g. M&A is much more practical for monopolies, as is competitor sabotage, sales and marketing, which of course they’ve also done).

I guess Peter Thiel for example said this long ago (in a convo with Eric Schmidt iirc): that Google is actively anti-competitive. And this is always, always the case for monopolies. They’ve just done such a good job of marketing and creating sideshows to make it appear otherwise. Not to say that they haven’t made some legitimate tech breakthroughs since being a monopoly, but also that tech is solely to serve their ads monopoly, rather than to serve the general public (e.g. what do you think their ML investments are for? It’s not to create C-3PO…)

[1] see e.g. Max Weber for how industrialization leads to bureaucracy, or more recently, David Graeber’s bullshit jobs talk or book for a more fun, anecdotal take.

A lot of people on this thread are hemming and hawing about latency, and how game streaming services are never going to work out and so on. But imo this is not really true.

60fps 1080p gaming with less than ~50ms latency from controller to screen is absolutely doable right now (for most locations in the USA, assuming decent internet access - so there needs to be clear communication of whether potential customers will have a good experience on their connection), and that's enough for enough people, even as a secondary device for "core" gamers.

This is a totally viable market waiting for someone to release a decent product. Stadia failed because it was garbage and Google didn't know how to manage it, not because game streaming is non-viable.

Stuff like GeForce now is great, but the fact that it's target users are already Steam etc customers means it's not going to pull in people that aren't already in the PC gaming ecosystem, and most people already in that market aren't going to switch from owning their own hardware to streaming. The value proposition sucks for people that don't care about owning their games and playing them natively on their own hardware as well as streaming.

Someone just needs to release a polished product, with a Netflix style pay as you go payment model instead of charging full price for games that customers don't actually own.

Get a decent library of games on there, add a few exclusive "killer apps" and market it well and you will kill.

This is mostly unfortunate just because of how far ahead Stadia's tech is in front of its competitors. I hope Luna, GFN, and/or xCloud improve a bit more by the time January rolls around, but also hope maybe an exodus of users from Stadia might provide more incentive to do so.

The full game+hardware refunds are nice. Expected, but I would have also been unsurprised to end up disappointed with no refunds at all.

I still think cloud gaming will be a huge part of the future of gaming.

So since Google is refunding the likely relatively small number of hardware purchases, the losers here are:

- Game developers who spent time/focus/money on porting their game(s) to Stadia.

- Google.

This isn't just incompetence, it's a PR smokescreen that fulfilled its purpose, to smokescreen the ad and surveillance machine that has been Google Corp right from the beginning.

ShadowPC has already proved that gaming over fiber+wifi is very viable but it was never googles project - the project was yet another toy-thing that people will think google is "doing", when they are actually an ad and surveillance company.

Refunds are nice and all, but gaming is a time investment too. Wonder if they will allow exporting savegames, or will people's progress be black-holed?

Yes, you can download them through Google Takeout.

https://9to5google.com/2021/02/02/how-to-export-download-gam...

You can export your savegame via google takeout, but often these savegames will only work on the stadia builds of games, and aren't able to be loaded into stadia. (Source: https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/cyberpunk/stadia/sp-tech...)

Funny fact: one of the only times online I actually caught a company shill acting as a regular person posting - essentially, ads; and whose extensive comment history only included positive remarks about a product - was a Stadia shill/plant I found on Reddit about a month ago.

Their entire history comprised of posts and comments praising Stadia, but clearly typed by a real person; with like these weird intentional grammar and spelling mistakes to make the account look like it was a real person. Either that or the Google employee behind the account needed to go back to Grade 5 or 6.

Ironically - they’d posted the article one or two months ago where Google promised continued Stadia support, and I found it on the front page of Reddit News.

I didn’t think twice about the poster of the article; until enough people started joking that - yeah - give it a month or two and Google will close it down, kinda thing…

The OP got so defensive in a very strange way to the point where their comments started to be more than questionably ‘real’.

So, I did a quick background check on the account - only to find - holy shit; it’s true, this person is literally paid by Google to post only positive things about Stadia online. Had to be - just from looking at it - but most telling, and the dead giveaway was that once myself and several other Redditors pointed out that the account was obviously just a paid shill from Google, the entire account mysteriously disappeared about an hour later. :P

Companies: if you know your product has problems and/or is shit - here’s a thought - instead of paying people to shill mostly false positive information on social media - how about you invest in actually improving your product; or marketing it in legitimate ways that don’t make you look like a total scumbag. Just my advice.

Imagine how depressing it must be working at Google on new projects, never sure whether they might just get cancelled months down the road. And then how depressing it must be after they do get cancelled, and your work just goes directly down the drain. Speaking from experience, there is nothing quite as demoralising in our trade as this. At least the money’s good there, I guess.

The tech doesn't just dissapear into a void and isn't completely unresuable. Cloud gaming also isn't something that's gone forever, it's just a bit too early.

Someone has already mentioned this deep in one thread, but I am genuinely worried about the fate of Flutter given Google's reputation.

Google is that crazy girlfriend that all your friends warn you about, but she's really a good person and is going to change.

I still have fond memories of users here telling me that I shouldn't shit on Stadia, that it was the future of gaming and that Phil Harrison is a fucking hack that keeps failing upwards despite fucking up every single product he has been on.

Thanks Phil for proving you truly are a bottomless pit in which companies can throw money in to make it disappear.

It turns out that if you run an ads monopoly and cloud oligopoly, very few other businesses you try building will turn out to be worthwhile maintaining. I wonder if Google cut 75% of its workforce and their long tail of products, if their stock price would go to the moon because they would be ultra-profitable.

I remember in fall of 2018 some co-workers getting hyped about Stadia and I told them that given Google's track record, they will probably abandon it in 4 years.

At some point, I think Google should stop launching products that are going to be dead within 5 years, why should anyone get excited about anything they do?

It was always a strange sell, especially since you had more accommodating options like nVidias GeForce Now.

IMO Stadia was born dead because of the lag built into its design. Most googlers I talked to when it was announced did not think about it at all, it was all about how cool the stack behind it was, but from a gamer's perspective I was just terrified about the idea.

It was only a matter of time. It is a Google product after all. It's basically their thing at this point. "Hey look at this fantastic new service from Google" should be met with "No thanks, they'll close it and I'll lose everything".

Wow, this is so unexpected!

I wonder why they didn't just leave the play game page up and leave an engineer or two somewhere to make sure it still works. They could just start you a VM when you click play and kill it when you leave. Then they wouldn't have to give out any refunds.

I hope they open up the hardware so we can at least hack on the controller that we bought..

Are they even capable of launching any new products? Nobody trusts Google to keep anything.

Anyone here use Stadia? Not much of a gamer but very interested in the tech of cloud gaming.

I used it a bit. The performance was exceptional. I enjoyed playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my phone with a Razer Kishi controller. Although I'm not surprised Stadia struggled to find traction, I think this is mostly due to Google's ongoing struggle with entertainment branding, and despite this, I do agree with their sentiment that streaming is the inevitable future of mainstream gaming.

Game streaming struggles because your average American has like four different TERRIBLE networking devices between them and any service. Those devices will not be upgraded just because google wishes the internet was more like home. If you do not have a good streaming experience, there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

I tried a bit. I don't have space in my life for dedicated gaming hardware or a PC, so seemed to be a way I could play a game once in a while without commitment. Was ok. Didn't get hooked.

I use it and it works surprisingly well even on UK DSL (80/20). I found it useful to play games that insist on anti-cheat systems that deeply embed themselves into your machine. Also my PC is a bit ancient, built in 2015 and running a 4690K, DDR3 with a 750Ti so I get access to games that need a bit more poke.

I've been using for about two years I'd guess. I have a pretty fast connection and it worked pretty flawlessly at home. I used it while traveling too, and if the connection was good enough for streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, it was typically totally fine for Stadia. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the highest settings while playing on an iPad was pretty damn cool, and meant I could slim down a ton when traveling.

That said, I haven't played any multiplayer FPS games. The multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though "seems totally fine" is obviously a subjective observation.

The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn't use your Steam library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that they're refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google, I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that'd be it, and I was ok with that.

used it exclusively for gaming the last year and a half. mostly just for Destiny 2, but bought a few other games on the platform as well. worked very well for my purposes. even pre-ourchased the next year's content for destiny as well. I'm very sad.

I was a user from the beginning.

For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad/phone when you have 30 minutes free and don't want to buy/build/maintain a PC or Console.

That said, I haven't played in around a year. The games catalog was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call of Duty, EA games etc)

I've used it almost exclusively for gaming since it was released. I've occasionally had issues with poor connection over WiFi but most of the time it has worked flawlessly. I know the latency is higher than a locally running game but I'm not doing side by side comparisons so I don't notice it. With this news I guess I'll be switching to GeForce Now which supports higher quality and framerates but a worse UX in my experience. In my opinion the business case for GeForce Now makes less sense than Stadia but I guess the numbers of overs makes more of a difference.

Yes. I only tried Destiny 2 because no other game (that was available without extra purchase) was of interest to me. It worked very well and I _really_ liked the experience. Just open the website in Chrome, click on the game you want to play and it launches in seconds. Certainly faster than launching Destiny 2 on my own PC, which is also a gaming rig.

For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now. Technologically, it’s basically… remote desktop to Steam? From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam. Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.

I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it could be more like Stadia.

I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new platform and getting software on it is very hard.

Stadio was awesome. It also never had a chance.

I like GFN and I agree the experience is not seamless. It still takes a long time to launch the game VM, and you feel it; but a lot of these other issues are much better or nonexistent now. In particular having to re-auth to Steam is much rarer now; launching the VM for a newly-purchased game often used to take a long time, with you waiting for the Steam launcher go through some kind of "Preparing" state for a long time (you don't have to be in-session for this), but this hasn't happened for me in some time. I haven't had a problem with any settings like language, resolution or video, and I think performance, while highly dependent on your own network and ISP, is much improved and hasn't been a problem in a while. So I do think, while the "remote desktop" approach is inevitably going to have some clunkiness, it has improved quite a bit and continues to do so.

I'm a little bit of an enthusiast (tried all of the major platforms). I have shitty rural internet, Stadia is (was) by far the best of the bunch by far, especially with the controller. Near-native for latency and crystal clear image. 40ms ping to Google.

Currently I use xcloud, its "acceptable" with certain games that don't require low latencies but its picture quality in particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.

I use it... and honestly I'm really bummed by this. I've avoided owning a console mostly because I didn't want to drop $500 just to get started. Stadia launched CP2077 with a free Chromecast and controller, so it ended up fitting my use-case rather well.

They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any room in my house and I just needed the controller.

I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from the beginning... I'm just bummed because I quite enjoyed the ride.

Not stadia, but I tried Steam In Home streaming (basically you stream from one PC in your house to another), with ethernet and it was NOTICEABLY laggier (because of input lag). It was probably like 33ms+ of added input lag. From that point I knew cloud streaming (which is basically this plus network latency) wasn't going to be pretty.

I knew someone who worked on Stadia a few years ago. They left Google shortly after. I don't know how universal it is, but in that case working on non-core-ads-business stuff there sounded like a bit of a mess (unless it was just Stadia).

What a shame. The technology was fantastic. Good news about all the refunds but still sad.

Their "Pro" subscription gave only a handful of games a month of which were mostly shovelware. And no exclusive deals on games like Cyberpunk in a time where Microsoft is giving a huge library of games for the same amount on tech people were already happy to spend on. At that point I was just questioning how it was even still around.

Saying that, the experience with cloud gaming itself was quite impressive, the fact that I can jump into Destiny 2 instantly on my Macbook felt like the future and I still believe it is. Clearly just isn't that affordable yet for anyone involved.

It seems like a self fulfilling prophecy for Google products. They have a reputation for killing them off, so users don't want to invest and get committed to them. Then the products don't match their expectations and get killed. It just further fuels the cycle.

At some point I wish Google would take a stand and believe in some products. If they said we have a 10 year commitment to making Stadia a success and will not close it before that, no matter the cost. I might be willing to consider giving it a try. I don't want to buy into something that's going to just get shut down, especially when there are high costs involved.

Happy Stadia user here. Can't say I didn't see it coming.

I'm just frustrated at how bad Google is at marketing a good product. For example, the Stadia front page didn't show anything enticing if you weren't using Chrome!

Hopefully this means they will release the streaming rights for PUBG, so it can finally come back to GeForce NOW?

Ever since they banned keyboard & mouse PUBG play (forcing you to use the game controller) I pretty much gave up on Stadia.

Heh, the comments in this thread[1] are hilarious in hindsight.

>Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don’t have to believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in October.[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402

"Yah, hear me now and believe me later."

Well, those comments were responding to a July 2022 article stating: "Google Stadia denies the recent claims online that it would be shutting down its services by the end of the summer, promising more games to come."

So technically, the commenter was right, as Stadia did survive the summer and will be operational for a whole 3+ months!

Aged like milk indeed.

Writing was on that wall a long long time ago.

Thanks for pointing it out so that I could have a good laugh :D

That's honestly too bad. I used it to log into Destiny 2 to buy items that were on rotation when I wasn't able to be at my desk to do so, like traveling or already in bed and too lazy to go downstairs.

well you can still use parsec

https://parsec.app/

I predicted July 2022 when it was announced, off by a couple months :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434347

So, having read 100s of comments in this thread and understanding the sentiment about Google's track record, I find myself wondering whether and why I might hire Google employees for software development jobs. It's a strange question, right? It's not their fault that these products fail and are shut down, but on the other hand, ex-Googlers are more likely than average to be from teams that failed and were shut down. I find it a bit of a stretch to believe that management is 100% at fault for 100% of the products in the Google Graveyard.

Beautiful observation on Ars Technica[1]: "Google's damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it."

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-offici...

I'm still convinced industry applications that have to run on powerful hardware (such as 3dsmax or AutoCAD) would have been a better target than games, especially when products like GamePass exist.

It's a really interesting idea and also a way for those publishers to help move to subscriptions, which they all do.

I have GFN and I love it, but I will say that input methods/devices is a real weak point. Right now there's still no credible story for racing wheels, for example. I'm not sure about flight simulator rigs, either (I think no). I wonder if you'd have to do a bunch of R&D to make all kinds of tablets and digitizers and other specialized input devices available; or if the workstation costs for consumers of those applications are already dominated by license fees and expensive input hardware? Making it less attractive?

Fans of this service just seemed convince Google was in it for the long haul.. I hated being the cynic that would reference the Google Graveyard... wishing I'd be wrong but here we are again.

Google, where large engineering projects meet with half assed businesses.

Can you get your game saves out of stadia and in to a portable format? I have to imagine this is going to wreck a lot of people who like to play games with persistent state over the long term.

Yes Google Takeout actually downloads every data including your save files

Google is like an abusive partner. You keep hoping this time will be different, they'll try harder, they'll really commit to something good, they won't lie to your face, etc.

I was blown away by the claims Google made while unveiling Stadia. I saw it as a true cloud promise fulfilled. I even blogged about it. The tech is still cool. Sad to see Stadia go.

https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1575544578912178176

My best Stadia story was us trying to work out why a developer's machine kept getting flagged for malware. Turns out they were porting something to Stadia and the DRM didn't work under Linux. The publisher refused to give them a DRM-free copy and told them to warez one instead.

My favorite Stadia story is how when Outriders launched, Stadia was on entirely different code branch and release from the other platforms. Weapon/armor scaling and skill effects were different - leading to an entirely sub-meta for the Stadia platform. Cross-play (eventually) worked and other people were entirely confused why our wacky builds were so effective.

Eventually things were patched to parity but our old armor values didn't get re-aligned so were entirely too high (by a factor of 2-3x) compared to the other platforms.

Stadia always would fail. Most sane people knew this. Same as with Google+. But sometimes companies need to be bold for the sake of it.

The most worrying trend with Google is the search engine. The quality of the search results has declined over the years but it seems it has become multiple times worse over the last couple of months. Many top results for simple queries result in pages that directly send one into a redirect loop that ends on porn or casino sites.

This is absolutely insane. Everyone who has been paying for pro and buying games will now be out $$$ while losing all of their games. Google should provide steam codes or full refunds for digital purchases. Google has messed around with other services, but this is substantial amounts of money they've stolen from customers this time. Unbelievable, and I can't understand how anyone could trust them with their credit card at this point.

Oh man were is that guy from the leak who kept insisting that they would never do this, their paud products were perfect and lasted forever.

Paging @sofixa [1], [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32485397

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492932

Wow!

I was a happy Stadia customer for a while. And then an unhappy customer. And now I own relics of history (Stadia controller+purchased games).

In my view, the root problem here may be that Google is too accustomed to having a monopoly position in the market and not actually treating customers that well, whereas gaming is hypercompetitive and Google doesn't have the customer centricity in their DNA to compete successfully.

Truly wasted potential. As I wrote a while ago:

"One of the biggest problems Google has is that they excel at engineering, but they lack proper marketing or business talent. Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform. I'm wondering how many of their products were killed just because of the fact, that there was no plan beyond letting it out in the market"

I knew this would shutdown from launch. Even so, I'm becoming less & less likely to trust Google products. Funny they are even refunding game purchases, the right thing to do, but it's still burning brand capital for me. I used to be a huge google fan. I'm typing this on a Google pixel, but I'm reconsidering all Google products I use

I thought for sure they would've kept this going a lot longer, and I'm a bit shocked that they're doing full refunds. Very unexpected and very not like Google.

That's item number one marked off on my list of 2020s predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943323

Considering that consoles like Xbox Series S, Nintendo Switch are available for less than $300 and provide a much better gaming experience, it was quite inevitable.

This does even more damage to the Google's reputation. I would never recommend or use GCP for example, now.

Lastly google already has a gaming platform i.e. Android, and I would have loved to see some more innovation in that space instead.

If you are looking for an alternative, I'm currently using shadow.net for my games, and so far the ping is decent (I do have fiber though). Mind you, I'm into single player titles, I wouldn't advice trying out overwatch or lol on this.

But for 30 euros a month, I got a machine with a full functional windows system and a good GPU from the tip of my laptop.

Not perfect, but it does the job for me.

I think you meant shadow.tech

Indeed :)

https://www.businessinsider.in/advertising/google-made-a-sec...

In 2015 google acquired agawi - any game anywhere instantly

I can think Stadia was part of my Google One subscription. Do I get a discount now that one of the promised services gets removed?

Random assorted thoughts as someone who worked at Google at the time of launch (but not on Stadia), and now works in the game industry proper: Props to the engineers, the technical base was there. It really just worked. You could load a AAA game on a Chromecast, and play it. Unfortunately, it didn't work perfectly: From some users it didn't work at all (bad when this was someone reviewing the platform), and for serious gamers the input lag was noticeable on games where it mattered.

Others here are saying Stadia should've been the Netflix of gaming. Here's the thing though: Netflix isn't even the Netflix of Netflix anymore. The streaming industry is now split between the large content producers each having their own platform. Netflix survived this only by becoming a content producer themselves. Smart people at the major video game publishers have seen this trend, and to the extent streaming is going to be a thing, want to skip to running the platform themselves.

The launch was a mess. They said it'd be available at a certain time, but that's when they started a slow roll out. This didn't meet gamer's expectations, where good launches just turn on a game. The lesson here is that if an engineering process (eg, Google's usual practice of slowly rolling it out to make sure it doesn't fall over right away) is going to drive the user experience, clearly communicate that.

The suite of launch games appeared to check the boxes of a good launch lineup, but didn't actually. They had major AAA games on launch.... that were all out elsewhere for awhile. They had big games launching on the platform early on....except actually they were delayed leaving a drought of content. They had a good number of games to carry them through the first year... but no "platform sellers" which would on their own get users to try out the platform.

The target audience was misdirected. It feels like they tried to get the core gamer crowd, which are those who would be the harshest critics and have the least benefit (they have their own systems already).

Their commercials were a bit much, and failed to explain what the platform actually was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Wy_pWscsk

The landing page, on boarding process, and value proposition where an absolute mess. You could outright buy a game and play it, but they didn't really tell you that. They had a Netflix like subscription where you got games, but it was a weird system where games would rotate onto the subscription but you could keep them as long as you were subscribed. The on boarding process also immediately tried to get you to sign up to the trial for this service, which fed the impression that this service was required. The subscription also increased the resolution of the games you were playing, but only sometimes and there was no way to know what resolution games were actually being rendered at.

Phil Harrison has now overseen the launch of the Playstation 3, Xbox One, and Stadia. He should be unemployable as an executive, and be weary of anyone who does employ him.

Stadia hilariously lacked a search feature for nearly 2 years. From Google, you know, the search company.

From my time at Google, I saw many people who understood the business of video games. Lots of great insight there. However, I only saw one person (there were likely others I didn't interact with) who understood video games themselves, as a form of art and entertainment. They were on that development team that Google canned, as the first sign that Google was giving up on Stadia.

For those wondering what the return process is, keep an eye on https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/12790109?hl=en

I purchased cyberpunk combo pack few years ago. I wonder if the controller can be used on pc/osx for other games.

Anyone?

Never understood why it wasn't 'Stadia powered by Google Cloud' and I never saw any Stadia marketing or cross promotion, nothing on YouTube, YouTube TV, Gmail, etc...

YouTubetv will literally show me tens of ad slots per day with no ads (just a moment of zen and a jingle) when they could have been pushing Stadia.

laughing-tom-cruise.jpg

We all saw this coming years ago when it was first announced.

I wonder if Google's tried to study & put some numbers on how much harder it is for new products of theirs to take off, due to their reputation, and decided it's not worth the cost to fix, or if they just don't care to even find out.

I think you're probably spot on about the latter. Besides, attempting to find out if their reputation has been damaged in a measurable way wouldn't get anyone promoted. :)

I think google cloud is a lot cooler than AWS but no way am I using it with news like this coming out every few months.

Can we just shut down all these grifter tech companies? They seriously all become grift overtime. There should be just a law in place that the moment your company forgoes functionality for ad revenue or other downright irritating means, your company immediately dissolves, and the CEO forfeits their shares.

Shout out to my fellow $7.99/month YouTube Premium subscribers. May we never truly know what we’re paying for.

Good, Google can’t and shouldn’t own everything. They have too much leverage owning everyone’s phones, browsers, etc.

I know 10 or so other companies that shouldn’t own the game streaming market either, but being dedicated game distributors themselves, collectively they’re far more deserving than some ambiguous tech conglomerate.

I wonder if, in future months/years, we'll still see comments complaining that Google's reputation for killing products is unfair and exaggerated by a loud minority who are bitter about Google Reader. I recall a few comments making this argument in defense of Stadia's long-term viability.

And this behavior is exactly why I didn’t buy Stadia in the first place. One more entry in the Google graveyard.

As someone in the tech area and likes PC gaming, I know nothing about Stadia or GeForce Now, despite having a 3070 and a Shield.

Was stadia its own platform and hardware? I thought it was a way to say, play steam games over the net on an x11 session or something.

I'm not being silly, I really had no idea how the thing worked.

You could see it coming but it is a shame it ended up the way it did.

The hardware though, the platform.. it was an interesting linux machine which could have been a cracking base going forward. The whole thing had so much promise, it is such a shame they half arsed the game licensing/ownership side of things.

Somebody should start a betting site on what Google will shutdown next. I think it might be Youtube Shorts.

I don't think it will be youtube shorts. I bet it gets a lot of views from people using it on the toilett

Around 6 months back, I withdrew from the offer stage to join a Stadia team; dodged a bullet I guess.

To the surprise of absolutely no one.

This sounds bad for the legion of devs who worked on it, but does anyone here actually use Stadia? The bad thing here isn't that stadia was canceled, but rather such a big company like Google is unable to pivot te incredible underlying technology

This is Google's modus operandi; if they can't dominate the particular market and gain monopol, they will simply shut it down. Why bother losing money or breaking even when you can go to some other niche and try to dominate it and monopolize the market.

People: remember IBM. It used to be completely indestructible, like a given in any office…

From the day Stadia was announced, I wondered how many years it would take to be killed. Gave me a chuckle this rainy Friday morning. Hopefully whatever eventually replaces Stadia will not be subject to Alphabet's whimsy.

I was thinking how far back this whole “launch and cancel” cycle started and I think I’d have to say the Nexus Q was the first one. Launched, received poorly, recalled for further work to be done on it and just sort of died an ignominious death.

Managers really need to start getting fired at this company, this is getting ridiculous.

Maybe their track record in B2B is better, but as a CTO or something I’d think very long and hard before I would make my business depend on GCP (as opposed to AWS or Azure)…before you know it Google pulls the rug out underneath your feet.

People predicted this was gonna happen the minute the first Stadia announcement was made.

Just curious, what happens to the engineers when a project is cancelled at Google? Mass exodus to other projects? Do they get notice? Are they left with weeks of nothing to do while they search for other teams to join?

Streaming is not sexy for gamedevs. We all know that latency is going to suffer.

I don't understand the pain point they are trying to solve for end-users.

Gamers are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games.

This is again a case of a solution looking for a problem.

> Gamers are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games.

I think you meant “Gamers that have the money to spare are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games”.

You can get a subscription for $10/mo. That's $120 every year. That's a hell of a deal for a casual gamer that doesn't want to spend the money on a PC.

There is also a huge amount of free to play games for this audience.

Have you tried it though? It's so much better than any other streaming game service from Xbox or PSN

When cyberpunk came out, it was crashing everywhere except the stadia version. I've rarely had performance issues with a stadia game, and even playing over 4g is pretty good.

The technology almost works like magic here.

Now if only there had been more games on it and if people didn't dismiss it before it even launched it MAY have had a shot (and I guess if Google didn't have a knack for killing off things).

I am fully convinced that stadia represents a good future for gaming, and as hardware costs go up with sinking bandwidth costs, I am sure the concept will come about again in a similar way.

Oh, this idea has been around basically forever, it will come again, I have no doubts about it.

Stadia was not the first attempt; it won't be the last one.

People have been trying to build perpetual motion devices for centuries, some still are.

I just have a mac so don't have the real hardware to run proper games. I've used Stadia for the last year+ and here are some nice aspects to cloud gaming you may have overlooked.

- No downloads. This means if I wanna play any game in my 'library', I just click a button. Not decide if I wanna wait X hours to download/install the game or figure out what to delete to free up space. This means when new updates come out I just get to play them, not time out the download, etc. For cloud-only games, this also frees them from having to limit the game to to user hard-drive space.

- No cheating. I mean I guess you could rig an AI that watches your screen and reacts to it but that's much, much harder than current cheats. For a while when cheating was a bit too rampant, some destiny users opted to play PvP on Stadia instead just for the fair games.

- Convenience. Being able to switch devices/screens mid session was quite nice. Same for launching games to do a bit of maintenance from my phone (i.e. check daily vendors on my lunch break)

Google required game studios to adapt their games to a specific Linux engine, which is an extra cost for companies and doesn't make sense if there is little audience on a platform... No games -> no audience

Google is search, ads, and G Suite. Everything else is recruitment window dressing.

I honestly feel like Google is cursed after they burned so many people with Google reader. The collective bad will of those users is still haunting them, making them not being able to commit to anything long term.

How much of Stadia tech/innovations will we see in ongoing/future Google products? There was a lot of hype about how Stadia's (potential) input-lag-reduction tech, but how successful did that end up being?

The main thing that initially got me excited with Stadia were the ideas around having much bigger shared gaming worlds enabled by google-scale cloud expertise.

Too bad that all it turned out to result in was video streaming optimisation.

I'm glad that they are refunding customers, but it must suck for all the game studios that spent a lot of development hours (which could have gone towards other improvements) to add Stadia support for their games.

"make it available to our industry partners" Read: the military, right?

Are they refunding the original price of the games bought?

In that case, it doesn't seem like a bad news at all for Stadia users. They will have play through multiple pretty recent and expensive games for free during years.

After all they mismanaged and shuttered Google+ too, the best social network that ever existed so no wonder.

And no, just because it didn't work for some of you doesn't mean it wasn't best ;-)

This. Stadia was years ahead of every other streaming service, at least for me. It was the only one that was actually playable!

Everything else had either unbearable latency or unbearable image quality

And even ignoring the actual gaming experience, it just feels more polished (as in the UX and UI) than some of the other ones like GFN

I was hoping they would open source the technology for this. Also, instead of flat out killing it having an option of running it yourself on your own hardware would have been pretty phenomenal.

I hope there will be one last update for the Stadia controllers. They are pretty good but they don't work as normal bluetooth controllers right now. You can use them via USB C though.

I use gmail, photos and youtube, thats it. Pretty much anything from google that I have used in the past has shut down in a few years.

So I dont touch anything new from them at all. Pointless.

Good job google.

Kinda surprised about the full refunds on seemingly everything. That has to be a pretty huge loss doesn't it?

Did they have to do full refunds legally, or are they just choosing to?

When news of Stadia rolling out appeared on HN, I commented right away that it will be shut down before long, and was downvoted.

Of course, such predictions are just pure probability, by now.

I'm surprised. It seemed like a solid platform. Why can't Google build a business that just works and grows organically without having to completely dominate a field?

Turns out even they were a bit too optimistic: http://stadiacountdown.com/

A few years ago I did some back of the envelope calculations that suggested to me that the input and display latency were unacceptable. Were they never worried about this?

Not a surprise, nor that they handled it so poorly. A shame, as the technology actually works reasonably well. I’m sure the concept will live on with Microsoft etc

We all saw it coming, it was only a matter of time. Shame, because the business model was the real problem here.. the streaming tech was and still is very viable.

Google: "Would you like to waste the best years of your life?"

Engineer: "No..."

Google: "What if I pay you slightly above average and give you free food?"

Engineer: "Deal!"

Slightly above average?

Well, average definitely depends on where you live.

The engineers shouldn't feel that they've wasted years of their life, if they built quality tech. They should be proud of what they achieved. Not their fault that management was useless.

Good riddance. Fuck cloud gaming. It's a bad idea, with the true goal of blocking access to the very binaries of the games being played.

Entirely not unexpected. Google kills an other product. Thankfully it seems they are doing right by their customers with refunds on pretty much everything.

Imagine selling so badly that you're able to refund everybody. RIP! It wasn’t a bad service, just badly marketed and they didn’t invest in games.

Just when Netflix & Amazon are increasing their focus on gaming market, Google is shying away. This is an epic failure on the Google management.

It's quite the precedent they are setting by issuing refunds on the hardware. Presumably dodging a class action, but interesting nonetheless

It's quite a feat this was even possible. You have to own a lot of the Internet pipes to make a service like this playable to the masses.

Anyone has their numbers? With this mass refund, I believe it is the biggest financial failure in the history of the videogame industry.

You know, the day Stadia launched, someone very cynically set up http://stadiacountdown.com/ and it won't end up very far off from the truth. sigh

Honestly, I'm glad Google was willing to take a bet this big - they had a lot of serious infrastructure innovations to make this work that may end up paying off in other ways, and a company that's not willing to make big bets has a 0% chance of having a new bet land...

Funny, the stadiacountdown.com counter had actually been over-optimistic, by almost a full year, saying there are 414 days left (extrapolated based on [0]), but with the new announcement of a shutdown date of January 18, 2023, there are only 111 days to go. May it rest in peace.

As for whether Google should be taking bets that they might not be able to support, I'm actually very much against this. I would suggest that they pour their money into supporting independent start-ups, e.g. via GV[1], and then possibly acquiring them if things go well, rather than further tarnishing the Google brand.

[0] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/ [1] https://www.gv.com/ (formerly Google Ventures)

We actually got the announcement nearly timed by averaging user predictions:

https://whenwillgooglekillstadia.com

I'm somewhere between impressed and (as a Xoogler) depressed.

Google making big bets: I’m all in! Actually, no, I fold.

Can anyone find the old tweet by Stadia support, or some executive, saying Stadia will not be shut down? It was only a few months ago.

Not surprised at all.

The refunds are a very nice, unexpected touch.

At least they now how to reverse a binary tree.

Lol. At this point Google needs to be very careful about the reputation they have about support for anything outside their core.

I expect a half-hearted rebranding effort followed by another ill-fated relaunch in the near future. Because Google is Google.

I'm one of the people who posted "and when will they cancel it?" when the product was launched.

Even got downmodded, I think.

I should've taken the bet, I'd be $200 richer today. Stadia fan tears will fuel me for the next few months.

Its almost humorous at this point how many services they shut down. Starting to get worried about my google domains.

LOL, we knew it was coming. Like all of their other technology, everything they produce is living on borrowed time.

The only part of this that most people didn’t foresee _when Stadia was originally announced_ is the refund policy.

The lack of interest in Google projects because they "might" die is a self fulfilling propechy.

> And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation

This line is so telling of Google's culture...

No one cares if your product has a "strong technology foundation". Users only care that they get something out of the product. Google doesn't get this. They think as long as the tech is strong, that's all you need for a successful product.

well, I have this shrink wrapped Stadia box I got from the Cyberpunk deal I procrastinated on, and never opened. Is it worthless or does the controller work on other platforms? I think it also came with a gen 2 Chromecast, but I think that's pretty obsolete now too?

Staying clear of sunk cost fallacy too seriously to their own detriment?

Sign of rapid experimentation in a big company?

Google is a glorified ad company. That’s it. Nothing else. Nothing new. Nothing special.

Why was the link moved away from the official announcement and onto the verge reporting on it?

The reality is streaming is the future of gaming for a huge number of gamers. Stadia's business model would have never worked out but the tech does works. Stadia was always going to run into the problem Netflix is going through now, the big IP holders will create their own streaming platforms rather then sharing the revenue with a third party.

"A huge number," maybe, in the sense that the majority of the world's gamers today only play games on their phone, but not the ones spending the most money. People who will pay extra for 144hz 4K monitors or multi-rollover keyboards with obnoxious lighting aren't going to throw the benefit of those things away for a platform that introduces 100-200ms of lag in the game and creates fuzzier graphics than the graphics card they already own is capable of.

The market for this tech is very downmarket. If you try to sell it to the hardcore gamer audience, as Google tried to do, they're going to see right through this.

> People who will pay extra for 144hz 4K monitors or multi-rollover keyboards with obnoxious lighting aren't going to throw the benefit of those things away for a platform that introduces 100-200ms of lag in the game and creates fuzzier graphics than the graphics card they already own is capable of.

Console gaming have been introducing 100-200ms of lag [1] and fuzzier graphics for almost two decades.

Streaming is a huge win for the big publishers, they hate the lost of control and maintenance pc gaming requires. At some point one of them will launch their latest must play title as streaming only and the gamers who want to play it won't have a choice.

[1] https://displaylag.com/console-latency-exploring-video-game-...

> People who will pay extra for 144hz 4K monitors

They are pretty cheap nowadays, though. That's no longer a 'gaming' setup. Even cheaper if you make it (144hz NOR 4k) instead.

They must be aware Stadia was always just a "sudden but inevitable betrayal" meme.

This is the least surprising event since the last thing I wasn't surprised about.

its cloud streaming service for video games, in light of low adoption rates among users, the company announced Thursday on its news portal, The Keyword. Players will be able to access their Stadia game libraries until Jan. 18, 2023.

I wonder what will happen to semi essential services like

1) Google fi 2) google nest lineup

And things like Google tv ..

[Surprised Pikachu] Is GCP next?

Probably not GCP as a whole but services within it.

As seen from the recent IoT Core retirement notice.

Google killing something unrelated to search or advertising? Say it isn't so!

I'll just say this... If you can't pirate on it, it won't succeed.

Ge-Force now customer here, in my opinion, a better business model than Stadia.

“Gaming for everyone”

It was never available in my country of 120+ million people.

Somehow I don't think this surprised anyone. I just did a quick check and the same people who were making these kinds of decisions when I was there all appear to still be there (at least by their social status indicators like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook). Back in early 2009 when "the mortgage crisis" was the big financial scare, I talked with folks about the difference between "moon shots" and "products".

The former (also called Black Swan events in Finance) are things that change everything all at once, the latter are things that a company produces to diversify their revenue risk. Google had just released the Dream (the G1 phone) and given all the employees one so we could "eat our own dogfood" and the biggest takeaway was that the biggest issue here was that this sort of "product" really really needed a real customer support function. Google was fixated on using "smart people and technology to completely eliminate the need for 'lame' customer support that was expensive and needed managers and stuff." One 'senior' engineer (who was 'senior' by virtue of their time at Google, their first job out of school, and not because of their years of industry experience, explained to me that by 2011, 2012 at the latest, no company anywhere would use "people" for customer support, it would all be web driven, "knowledge trees", and smart dialog agents that could do anything real people could do.

I had worked previously at NetApp where they spent a ton of money and invested a lot in insuring their customers were supported, and I tried to explain that it wasn't the '90%' problem it was a '10%' problem. Your automated system can deal with 90% of the problems, but 10% of them were 'weird', special cases, that no automation would be able to deal with. And ignoring that, and leaving 10% of your customer base angry and unsupported, was death for any retail product.

I see the same thing with 'self driving' too, your car can do 90% of the things you need it to do on its own, and then that last 10% are the things that kill you.

When Stadia was announced I looked to see if they had learned about the need for real people support and it didn't appear they had. And they were dealing with "the Internet" which for engineers looks like a smooth low latency pipe between your computer and theirs, but for real people is a series of networks that have to be transited with support levels that vary between enterprise level and sixth grader enthusiast level. And with all that randomness between the product and the customer, no 'people' support to create a good "we hear you, we're on it" experience and more importantly a strong feedback loop to engineering/marketing/sales about what is causing the most trouble for prioritization of resources, and poof. It was dead on arrival. It just took a while for Google to figure that out.

I mentioned in my exit interview that I hoped they would internalize that problem before they ran out of search advertising revenue runway, but 10+ years on it looks like that isn't happening.

If it make you feel any better, they eliminated exit interviews a few years back.

That is one way to stop feeling bad that you ignored what people told you on the way out!

Yup, that's exactly what everyone expected since the beginning. And that's why publishers were not very interested, because they always suspected that's what would happen. Why invest when Google will get bored and shut it down in a couple years?

I think there would have been more interest if they didn't launch with folks having to the purchase games instead of it just being a subscription plan like most were expecting. Of course, pure subscriptions came later, but that was an odd way to roll it out.

Agreed. The upfront cost of games and a new Stadia-specific controller was too much. I subscribed to PS Now to play Spider-Man. I still had to buy a PlayStation controller, but it was reusable for other PC games.

Ironically, I am now only subscribed to a visit GeForce Now, which requires game purchases. This is primarily due to Sony’s lack of macOS support for PS Now, and my owning an M1 with no Bootcamp support.

Everyone based it on inaccurate predictions though, namely that it wouldn't work. It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive games.

> It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive games.

Stadia was cool and I think there is a future for this sort of gaming in some genres and for some audiences, but I play fighting games and it absolutely did not work "fantastic" for them, even living in Boston and having a sporting symmetric-gigabit connection.

this is especially bad news given the growth in games streaming. nVidia, Amazon, sony, microsoft and even Logitech are all growing streaming products. It was Google's game to lose.

this is especially bad news given the growth in games stremaing. nVidia, Amazon, sony, microsoft and even Logitech are all growing streaming products. It was Google's game to lose.

Yet another reason not to buy into Google. Reader was the last straw

Is there a list of all the products Google has shut down this way?

I wish they'd refund my Stadia Pro monthly subscription fees.

Earlier it was Amazon, now it is Stadia. What is going on?

Big surprise. It wasn't viable since the start, imho.

Good. Also good on them for refunding people's money.

Didn't they already? It's hard to keep track

There's been a "Google will shut down Stadia soon" news story almost every single month for the last 3 years.

This time, it's actually sourced from Google though.

The most inevitable gaming news in the history of ever.

Would Google ever close Firebase, or quick Angular?

I believe Firebase is crazy popular in the Android world, but Angular is probably not long for this world.

So shocked. I am just surprised it lasted this long

Long term and strategy doesn't match with Google

So they pulled a Google on Stadia. Here we go again…

We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store.

What are the odds of this being another lie?

Another proof that gamers do not want cloud gaming

Add it to the pile

Hopefully this puts consumers off cloud gaming.

this deficit of ideas and execution happens when hiring process is designed for those who study for six months like an exam.

I am shocked, who could have seen this coming?

Bring back Chromecast Audio and I forgive you!

Someone at Logitech is having a miserable day.

cool, so I get a free USB controller and a chromecast?

should've ordered a couple more when they were 20 euro or whatever in that case...

If they refunding then it does not matter what was original price.

ah yeah I know I'm just being stupid. I wouldn't have remotely considered getting them at full price though; I did consider getting a second at 20 just to give my mother a chromecast and my brother a gamepad at the time though but 20 somehow still seemed too much.

actually, considering how much I use both I'll just give them the ones I have now...

Quantum computing division will soon follow!

Shocking news, Google shuts down something.

A bit sad, they had the best tech by far.

As expected™ for a Google project

Google shuts down service. Film at 11.

Oh look, another Google failure, sigh

To the absdolute shock of... nobody.

Now they should open source it

You'll get used to it.

Because of course they did.

This is laughable.

Hahahahahahah

Google has degraded so badly in those years, its consumer product is officially a joke.

When is Pixel going to die, emm?

Well, who won the pool?

Great question! Two people actually guessed correctly (not posting their names for privacy), but the average date across for all users (October 6, 2022) was surprisingly close to the date they announced it would be shutting down.

https://whenwillgooglekillstadia.com

I think i am shocked

Can we stop posting links from The Verge until they revert their redesign?

Google search when?

Surprising no one,

Get wrecked Google

What a surprise!

Google has built an incredible self-fulfilling prophecy.

That was quick.

Busy day.

I so knew it would happen. I explained why Stadia's business model made no sense two years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26073799

TL;DR: Stadia was technically geared for AAA games, but had a horrible value proposition for AAA studios/gamers. It could be good for casuals, but Google's ego did not allow it. With no remaining niche it had to shutdown.

At what point does working for Google (on anything released after 2008) go from being prestigious to embarrassing?

Why are so many of you here so bitter against this company?

They have by far the most awful customer service of any big tech company. One or two experiences of dealing with issues (in my case Google Fi) turns you into a life long hater.

Because in the 2000, many of use got fooled believing "do no evil" and their hacker heart, only to see unfold the next 2 decades with sadness.

They turned evil when they started putting ads inline with search results. The main utility of that is to trick unsophisticated or unwary users, so basically they're preying on the elderly (among others), but it made the line go up and to the right, so they don't care.

Plus any company with a core business model of "being a super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal memory" is inherently terrible and shouldn't exist.

I think it stems for their beginning. The Google search page was innovative, in showing that you didn't need to be flashy, just good at what you do. The same for Gmail, which was an awesome product and completely changed how people use email. Even the original Google ads where viewed extremely favorable, as it showed that you could make money on ads, without them being obnoxious.

Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google adopted all the things we had hoped they'd save us from, just so they could make more money.

That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google these days. The only two Google products I use are Google Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.

I remember the first time I saw someone mention Google. It was just so obviously better than what came before. That's rare. Most improvements on technology have to prove themselves over time and slowly build a following. Google was so amazing it grew to IPO through the .com crash and the early 2000s recession. For a time, everything they launched was gold. No one seemed to notice or care that everything was still "beta" years after sweeping each market.

As an ex fanboy (or fanboy lite) who has circled into hater section of recent, I can give you MY reasoning.

For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge company, so only strike 1.

They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.

And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.

Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.

Me too. I was all in on Google services, owned a Nexus 4, 5, 6P, Pixel, Pixel 3. Even a couple Nexus 7's, and a Chromebook. I was into rooting and custom ROMs, I got people to use Hangouts, I had a Google Play Music subscription, I backed up all my pictures to Google Photos (still do that one), I was learning Android Development and had an app published, etc.

But after so many years of being jostled around and seeing every product I liked and used destroyed and brought back as something worse, I had to get off the train eventually. Google has no long-term plans. They only know how to ruin things that were once good. Android isn't the fun, open mobile OS it once was. It got more locked down with each update and became a cheap imitation of iOS. So eventually I just bought an iPhone. I went through so many messaging apps and renamings and relaunches of various products and services.

At some point you realize Google has no respect for their customers and no interest in making products that are nice to use. They only want to optimize people's attention so they can turn it into ad revenue. I celebrate their failures now, in hopes it'll one day shake something up enough that they'll have to try giving a shit for once.

I had your experience, except when I finally traded in my android for a iPhone I felt like a FOOL. It was so much better on every level. Just fantastic, polished and near perfect in every way. It was light years ahead and I realized that I had Google ecosystem Stockholm syndrome.

It’s not just Google, but the cause for embarrassment at other formerly prestigious places is different and not relevant.

I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.

Because they started out good ("dont be evil" and all), providing an exceptional yet fundamental internet service but somewhere along the way they lost the plot. They now hoard enormous wealth by shoving ads to our faces yet have done nothing with the money. Not to mention their engineering culture goes directly against the spirit of this site (rest'n vest vs startup's hustle culture). They're the hero turned villain all start ups fear they'll become

Mainly because of wasted potential, in my case. They revolutionized the internet (repeatedly) with a great product and found a reasonably unobtrusive method to monetize it, then moved into creating replacements for Microsoft products (browser, calendar, email, documents) and I thought they would then pivot into cloud as a good competitor to AWS, whilst also spending their copious profits on long-term scientific research projects and helping bring ML advances to the larger community.

It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's products worse. What's really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.

They have/had incredible potential. Imagine what a company with Google's resources could do. They have simultaneously the sharpest minds on the planet and a vast treasure chest of unprecedented proportions at their disposal.

What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it functioning.

It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it isn't, but it certainly feels like it.

The best minds, now spanning a couple generations, all wasted on ads. It IS a terrible misallocation. Let my people go.

When they literally had to remove "don't be evil" as their company slogan, on account of how evil they are, that did it for me.

You're not gonna get me to defend Google at all, but I'm really sick of hearing this parroted over and over because

1. It's not true. Read the [1]code of conduct, it's right there at the bottom: "And remember... don’t be evil"

2. Who cares if they say the words "don't be evil?" The actions are more important than a cute phrase. If they sent Google Ad Bots to every house in America and forced you to sit through 30 second ads every morning or else they shoot you, would you say "well at least the code of conduct says 'don't be evil'!"?

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

I am not a fanboy, have never been a fanboy and never cared about the "do no evil" marketing motto or any other Google crap. I am bitter against Google because it plainly sucks. Their products suck, they have "soft monopolies" and they have used them to Embrace Extend and Extinguish any alternatives. They are what Microsoft was in the 1990s-2000s. If you are young enough to remember the 90s and 00s Microsoft you will understand.

Note that I not only hate Google, I hate Google, Apple, Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes me an old fart.

I imagine everyone here has had at least one beloved service end up on this list - https://killedbygoogle.com

You're being downvoted, and I have no idea why.

It is embarrassing. It's not just embarrassing, it's fucking embarrassing.

Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in this country - poor broadband Internet service.

But... oh God, if only... if only Google had something they could use... something they could do to solve this problem!?

Oh... wait, yeah. They have their own fucking fiber ISP! Google could have ponied up money and started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.

But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you're stupid and/or naïve enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and Verizon and Charter and AT&T are just going to let you waltz in and steal their customers (and yes, these ISPs do think this way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you should never have entered into the ISP business in the first place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.

If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, """""""lobby""""""" all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials - they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP's territories, laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.

But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems: fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success. The road to becoming America's best ISP will be a long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but when you've got literally billions of dollars of cash at your disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors... or you could build something that would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of revenue in a decade or two.

Too bad they're focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors.

If you're a manager, why the hell are you going to risk your career trying to get the last guy's project to work? There are two incentives in corporate America: start a project to get the praise for something new, and kill a project to get the praise for saving money. Is it any wonder projects keep popping in and out of existence?

> You're being downvoted, and I have no idea why.

Because calling people's job choices "embarrassing", no matter how right you may be, isn't a good starting argument against the people in those jobs. Not to mention that it comes off as pretentious.

No, Google upper management is a bunch of incompetent clowns, and they should rightly be called out for it.

Working at Google today, you better be in just for the 200k salary, because your options there are to sell ads or work on a product that's going to be shut down in a week.

What major projects get shut down in the same week and what ads do you think they are selling?

Cole, do you know what working at Google is fast becoming like?

It's like going to Harvard.

You don't want to advertise that you went to Harvard. People who attended Harvard not only admit this, they don't even actively proclaim they went to Harvard any longer. Why is that? Because a bunch of really shitty people have sullied the reputation.

It isn't that way with Google for the general public, but the SV folks know that Google of 2022 is nothing like Google of 2012, and certainly nothing like Google of 2002.

My great fear is that it won't be much longer before saying you work at Google in say, 2025-2032 is like saying you work at Hewlett-Packard or IBM in 2022. The prestige is long gone.

Where would you say the prestige is now?

stanford

I have worked with a lot of Stanford grads and only some of them were competent programmers

I worked with a startup company once that seemed to bias towards stanford / berkeley grads. I was surprised how good some of them were, easily ahead of me with 5 yrs experience from a mediocre Canadian university and work experience in Canada.

I've noticed people adapt to the demands placed on them, so highly encourage people to at least start out in a very demanding environment.

"fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success...focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors"

A nice distillation of most of SV these days.

Full disclosure: I work at AT&T but not directly on fiber. My views are my own and do not represent my employers.

Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.

I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t / weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.

Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.

started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.

Haha, imagine them shutting it down eventually.

>If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years

Sad thing is they did not even have to do that. all they had to do was put some lobbying effort in empowering municipalities to do their own broadband and the rest would take care of itself. ISP monopolies have been kneecapping municipal broadband effort right and left and just some push from otherside would have cleared up the way for some competition. But they did not, as you said, its classic short term thinking and 'not my problem' syndrome. What really troubles me is that Google & FB have sucked up almost all of ad market but none of that revenue is trickling back into society except for these 'promotion packet' side hustles.

Well, we're still at the point where, for nearly everyone who worked on Google products between 2008 and now, it was financially lucrative and great for their resumes.

Still top on http://prestigehunt.com!

Didn't know about this website. Rankings results are interesting. Thanks for sharing!

I am more entertained by this than I should be. Back when Stadia launched I was in a Reddit thread saying that the blatant double-dip business model of subscriptions + purchase stunk and that I had no faith in Google to not shut this storefront down shortly. I was immediately roasted by a flock of obvious astroturfers telling me that this was an absolutely serious move by Google to dominate the console games market and that the executive in charge was a big shot games industry person who was going to made this an unstoppable product. The paid astroturfing felt very weird coming from Google.

Then they started locking up game publishers into exclusive deals and getting games removed from other streaming services, a definite dick move. It was obvious that this special executive in charge was pretty consumer unfriendly.

Now this service is being shut down with little notice and while it’s great that they are refunding the purchases, there’s also the matter of the Stadia Pro claimed games that were part of the subscription benefits but will be lost. Along with no clear plan for taking out save data, this is a real FU to anyone who believed those astroturfers and went all in on the stadia console.

The icing on the cake is this statement that it didn’t “gain the traction with users that we expected.” Ha! This business model was dead on arrival. The competition was innovating while Stadia stood still. And instead of giving an inch off the starting line, they took their toys and went home. This is one of the most petulantly childish things I have ever seen from them.

This company is a bloated rotting carcass. The regulators should chop it up and feed it to the seagulls.

> This company is a bloated rotting carcass. The regulators should chop it up and feed it to the seagulls.

Hey man, there's no need to be cruel toward animals here! ;-)

· didn’t “gain the traction with users that we expected.” · >> GCP : I'm scared out of my mind

Insert “I’m in Danger” meme here.

But seriously, GCP could absolutely be on the chopping block. It loses a stupefying amount of money, nearly a billion dollars last year. How mind boggling that Google can’t sell its own data center tech for a profit after 10 years in the market. Google no doubt thinks it is not gaining the expected traction. There’s going to be a lot of collateral damage when that ones goes to the G graveyard.

> The paid astroturfing felt very weird coming from Google.

I don't doubt you at all, but how does one tell paid astroturfing from rabid fanboys?

It was a few years ago, but I remember it was distinctly obvious. Stadia was new. No one really knew much about it and it was not launched yet. Several users with same-ish usernames all starting giving long well written replies that kept repeating specific talking points that were not really part of the articles or marketing, things about the product strategy that sounded very much like a social media marketing brief. And they had a lot of very nice things to say about the boss. I used to work adjacent to social media marketing and it had the fingerprint. They were either several Stadia marketing employees on a coffee break or being specifically paid for the campaign.

> I was immediately roasted by a flock of obvious astroturfers

I was a true believer in Stadia for years and still am when it comes to cloud gaming. I was never paid a cent by Google to my knowledge (although they are refunding my purchases so I appreciate that).

That said, unfortunately you are correct that Google is a bloated rotting mess. The worst part is that Stadia was a legit good product.

> blatant double-dip business model of subscriptions + purchase stunk

FWIW, the subscription wasn't required. It just got you discounts on games, access to a rotating collection of "free" games, and 4k streaming (rather than 1080p you get without a subscription).

Their communication about all of this really sucked though, because most critics who didn't try Stadia (and even some who did) thought the subscription was required to use it at all.

I believe it was required for early adopters. Then they let you claim free games while a subscriber, but you lost access if you stopped. If you weren’t subscribing you could miss free claims. It was all very manipulative and low value.

> I believe it was required for early adopters.

It wasn't.

To get access on day 1, you had to buy "Founder's Edition" which was the controller and a CCU, though. You also got 3 months of Stadia Pro with that. I was never a subscriber, other than that free 3 months, but I did buy a few Stadia games over the last few years and it worked really well for me.

Like I said before though, the messaging/marketing about the Stadia Pro subscription was TERRIBLE. Your misconception about it is VERY common

This [1] guy got it right to the year (3 years ago when Stadia started):

>It also doesn't help that it's from Google. They've lost a lot of good will in the last couple of years and honestly most people expect Stadia to be EOL'd in 24-36 months once Google gets bored with it.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e1l9j4/comment/f8ru...

It was many more people than that one guy. Myself and others were calling a shut down in 2-3 years literally the day Stadia was announced.

Those of us who were bucked off at the Google rodeo enough times eventually learned our lesson and realized it's never gonna change.

It's a Google service, what do you expect

Maybe the refunds are a hint on just how few devices they sold ...

The controller is pretty nice. I wish it worked wirelessly outside of Stadia, but it's plug and play with usb-c so still pretty great.

Typical Guurgle move. Self fulfilling prophecy and all that

This is baffling. Stadia was launched with a lot of fanfare and it got a lot of attention too. This feels like Google giving up on something that everyone wants to succeed. In other words it would have been a great success if it's with anyone but google.

Another Google example of great potential sunken by bad/terrible execution.

Why didn't it launch as a true "Netflix for Games" solution? Similar to what Microsoft is doing now with its Gamepass. Sure the gaming partnerships needed to be built but could've easily leveraged huge library of Android games.

Ultimately will be curious to see how many heads will roll for this. It must've been a huge investment for both hardware (AMD Vega GPUs, controllers), marketing, etc.

> Ultimately will be curious to see how many heads will roll for this.

If other HN commenters with (allegedly) insight into Google's politics are to be believed, none.

https://killedbygoogle.com/ does not confirm it.

EDIT: it appeared now. This is confirmed.

Was only announced today.

> https://killedbygoogle.com/ does not confirm it.

So what? Are you in doubt of the veracity of the post? Look at the URL.

A domain ends in google? sounds fishy

Not fishy at all; try https://global.canon/

Anyone with 100K USD can apply for their own gTLD.

Yes it does; it's listed below Currents.

Takes a couple minutes for the PR to merge. :D

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