It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you

twitter.com

99 pointsmcenedella22 comments

I think that this is going to further the reputation damage for trusting Google with anything.

The fact that this was handled on such short notice is a huge problem, but who is going to want to invest in another Google technology with such a risk?

See also, trusting Microsoft with a new UI technology and how their reputation in this area is really bad.

Don’t forget Windows Phone!

I have been thinking about this topic a lot recently, since I’ve been considering a move from Android to iPhone (mainly for privacy reasons). Microsoft could’ve been on equal footing with Apple and Google in mobile, but they repeatedly blew their chances (through mismanagement?)

Why, in fact, did Google shutter Stadia? Does Google just shut down things that aren't absolutely huge for them? If so, does that mean they thought Stadia would be huge for them, but were wrong? I don't get how HugeCos think, can someone enlighten me?

Has any of the cloud gaming services been a success? To me the idea is rife with issues. You need a super reliable and a fast internet connection. Games are something where ms count. Any latency can destroy the experience. Here you're talking about streaming 60 frames per second with no lag. It might work, but I would be pretty annoyed if I can't play games because my internet is broken or laggy. Also, data caps.

I think MightyApp[1] is destined to the same fate. You'll end up spending far more over the long run for arguably a much shitty experience. Buying Hardware is an easy bargain, especially as it gets faster and cheaper.

[1]: https://www.mightyapp.com/

I am on 0.75 gbit 100km from a dc, but msft stream gaming works great on my ipad pro at least. Havent tested on LTE.

> Games are something where ms count.

Some games are. There's lots of genres where it doesn't matter much. Basically not everything is fps / racing / fighting.

Tell that to the 43m daily active users of Roblox[1], or the millions of people who play animal crossing etc. Just because you may like to play the games where ms count doesn't mean there isn't a huge market for this. Especially for the younger demographic or the "chill gaming" segment. The right cloud-streaming service for games could be massive in my opinion if they get the price point and user offering right. Noone's quite done it yet but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

[1] https://www.dexerto.com/roblox/how-many-people-play-roblox-p...

Many people play 30 FPS games on TVs that add 100+ ms of latency. Some people will buy 240 Hz gaming monitors with sub-1 ms response times but I think your underestimate what most people are okay with.

Because of greed.

As soon as these online services started appearing, some publishers noticed that you could use such a service to share a game if you take turns playing it. So they added protection to prevent their games from running inside streaming services.

Other publishers considered that a VM could be used for circumventing DRM by creating an exact copy of a licensed system. Also, a virtual machine could be used for cheating because now you have an API for video and mouse input. So they added protection to prevent their games from running inside VMs.

The result is that Stadia and Geforce Now are effectively unusable for recent high-budget launches (DRM) and for competitive play (cheating).

Streaming services are still great for super casual play, but so is a Switch. And for the latter, you can trade game cartridges with friends. For streaming, they don't allow resale or trading due to ... greed, I guess.

In the end, no game streaming service had a good user experience.

First one is reasonable for Stadia, but second one seems to not work for Stadia, though possibly GeForce Now is affected.

Maybe the op is thinking of an image based aim bots? Hard to detect if you aren’t running native software on the users computer. However, it solves almost every other form of cheating

xbox game pass is an amazing proposition and cloud gaming is cool

Stadia seems a massively expensive service to run - both in operation costs and captial to get game developers to port games to it. It would require massive user base to even break even (I think).

What's wierd is that Stadia ever existed - it was clear to anyone with half a brain that making it successful would require years of massive money sink (see Microsoft Xbox, GamePass and Xcloud) which Google was never prepared to do.

I would imagine they have growth targets which would tell them if the service is on its way to becoming a mega hit. No one can expect a new product to get to that place in just a couple of years, but that is enough time to tell if you are on your way. If not, then it is time to either change strategy or shut it down. Googles decision seems most often to shut it down

I had not realized that games needed to be ported to it. I assumed you were connected to some Linux VM that streamed the game to you. Do I have this totally wrong?

Yes, it had its own set of APIs that needed people to port games to it like another console.

In order for Stadia to be profitable, Google needed a lot of people to sign up for it.

Not enough people did, and after running Stadia for many months, there was nothing to indicate that enough people ever would, or that the burn rate could be lowered enough to be profitable with the current number of customers.

So tactically it didn’t make sense, and apparently nobody could make a strategic case (i.e., even though we are losing money now, we should continue it for <reasons>) for it either.

For comparison, Microsoft played the long game with Xbox. Who else could pull that off? Impervious to critics and financiers? Amazon?

For better or worse, Google can't bring itself to use its monopoly profits to buy marketshare in other verticals.

Every company has a certain threshold revenue size for new BU initiatives -- for a company Google's size it's going to be measured in the billions, which probably didn't seem unreasonable if they assumed game streaming would be a $5bn+ market by 2024 and they'd have a major piece of that. Instead, looks like Stadia was earning a bit south of $100mm/year (with likely unfavorable marginal economics), so well below where they would have wanted this to land.

The problem, of course, is that doing this is going to have downstream impacts if Google wants to stay in the gaming tech market (and some ancillary impacts on the perception of their stability as a tech partner in general). Whether that's worth the burn rate on the BU is a question that presumably was asked and answered, and led to this shutdown.

By contrast, of course, AWS is willing to keep solutions going essentially forever, even if they're on life support; while players like Microsoft or Intel are a lot more cautious about new BU initiatives in the first place. Google seems to be in a questionable middle ground of aggressively greenlighting new initiatives, but being unwilling to take the financial hit of sustaining them even if they don't pan out as desired.

What I don't understand then is why exactly people are upset with Google here. Is the expectation that when you launch a platform that people build on top of and involves partnerships with external partners that you should be hesitant to shut down given the investment that others have made based on your representations? I hear that, but has to have a limit. People can't expect Google to keep stuff around that really doesn't make sense for them. Is the issue that Google cheerleads these products and gets partners riled up, but is so quick to shutter them and demonstrates no concern for their partners? Like, what precisely is the critique?

Google's partners are always pushing the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

A fine way to explain "user/developer trust"

> Many players are in iterated games where they care about their reputation and, because contractualizing commitments is slow and costly, they need their repeat counterparties to understand that there is an industry culture of promises and promises made in that culture are kept.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com