We worked for 4 months to build a port for Stadia and today we finished it
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/
Write a postmortem, publish it to gamedeveloper dot com and capitalize on all the Stadia drama while it's hot to boost sales for your original game release. Make a YouTube video talking about the pain you went through, all the things you learned that you didn't get to give to people, and see what kind of hype you can salvage.
Or just get it on HN and tell people where they can buy your game?
It's salvaging a silver lining from a shitty situation, nowhere near a good thing yet alone "best thing to ever happen to them".
edit: Elaborated on this in a reply to a reply, here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034563
It's very possible that I'm wrong: obviously we don't have the knowledge of what their expectations from Stadia were, nor is it possible for anyone to now know how successful or not their Stadia launch would've been if Google had decided to keep trying to make Stadia work, nor do we know how many sales the game will get from this exposure.
But I still stand by my view despite agreeing with your first few sentences about the industry generally.
edit: It's mainly coming from gut instinct, so I've tried to think more about why my gut says that. I think the main thing is that the exposure is going to people who are interested in games industry business, or tech industry, or Google specifically. That's what everyone is discussing, not whether or not the game is actually worth playing (and unlike if it was some planned PR, there's not even any subtle suggestion within the story that the game is worth playing - nor to be fair that it's not worth playing).
Sure, a few people might click onto the steam page out of curiosity, or buy the game out of sympathy to the poor people getting screwed by this situation, but it would be surprising (to me at least) if the amount of people converting is more than if they actually just had a marketing person spend a day writing a piece of content for Hacker News / GamesIndustry.biz with the goal of being both interesting tech content and featuring mentions of what makes the game worth playing. And that's just thinking about doing targeted marketing to not-very-good target audiences (for promoting indie games - sure there are some areas where HN traffic is incredible and businesses that would love a front page post, indie games not so much).
SteamDB's data on the game doesn't seem to suggest that I'm wrong here, but maybe with time I'll become wrong. (Side note, while writing this comment I couldn't remember the name of the game we're talking about, so I had to go look it up... because the name of the game wasn't the interesting bit when I read about this earlier!) https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/
Attention in the games industry likely doesn't drive sales for this title, but could lead to contacts and development for future titles, etc. (if the game shows promise)
Some games (very few) have growing sales from word of mouth, this news could get that started. (if the game is good)
5 months of dev time was to place the game on another platform and generate revenue, with an expected return of X. If they make more than X (ignoring the knowledge gained along the way) then in every way possible the exposure from this outweighs the 5 months of wasted dev time
The game is (mis-)tagged "4 Player Local" but also "PvP"; I don't see anything in the trailer showing how multiplayer is supposed to work, either adversarial or cooperative. ("4 Player Local" sounds mistagged; it conjures up memories of "Gauntlet"). The voiceover says there are many ways to play the game; that's too open-ended "Either play solo or challenge up to 3 friends, local or remote", overlaid on an animation showing exactly that, is way clearer. I don't even get the tag "Battle Royale", it seems irrelevant, if it isn't then you need to add to the static screenshots and trailer to show why this is "Battle Royale". Own your listing's tags and delete the misapplied ones.
I find it hard to get useful information from Steampowered. Curiously, "Jump Challenge!" does not appear anywhere in Steampowered's 17 hits for "Jump Challenge!" (?!) [3]. Probably downweighted by sales rank/popularity.
Does Steam provide the developer with analytics on how many users viewed the trailer and bounced? by demographic, by OS, by genre of Steam titles purchased, by referring channel/URL...?
Also, I tried crossbrowsing by the tags used for Source Byte Franchise > "Jump Challenge!"" "Action/Casual/Racing/Battle Royale/Parkour/4 Player Local/Multiplayer/Local Co-Op/Platformer/Arcade/Co-op/PvP/Pixel Graphics/Runner/Exploration/2D Platformer/Puzzle Platformer/Funny/2D/Rhythm"
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1287030/Bubble_Bobble_4_F...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/8400/Geometry_Wars_Retro_...
[3] https://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Jump+Challenge%2...
My bet is that there was not even an intention to do it, and just made this post for the clickbait. Wouldn't be the first time.
the inability for people in this website to see through this PR scam is mind boggling
the website for VCs? yeah sure
https://nicklafferty.com/blog/what-happens-when-you-re-on-th...
18,000 website visitors.
400+ LinkedIn Profile Views
15+ connection requests
100+ newsletter subscribers
Numerous emails from people all around the world. If you sent me an email, thank you! I’ll do my best to get back to everyone but it’s been an overwhelmingly positive response.
Icy Tower, Operation Spacehog, and Happyland Adventures were all amazingly high quality for software that was given away for free.
The whole industry is there and this is how you start a keynote. Not surprised that most people weren't confident about Stadia.
But it's also baffling when there were so many running services and standalone products already. Steam Link, Nvidia Geforce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Playstation Remote Play, Parsec etc. It's not like Google had a brand new open field ahead of them and no idea what to do
No one's mentioned it, so I have a feeling it may be the latter, and if so I apologize.
If you did mean Ballmer- as in Steve, then may I ask what you mean by saying what the crowd wants to hear?
I'd always thought he was honest in the face of strong opposition.
Thanks in advance!
GCP: copycat of AWS, but with less high margin, higher level services, so have been losing money since the beginning (ask some of Alphabet's board members, if you can, and watch their eyes rolling). The only thing that could have given them the advantage - not, not Kubernetes, although K was and is a great thing to fund - was a "cloud in a box" product, so companies could install a rack of GCP in their existing Data Centers, and use it. See "The Cloud Wars of 2017", written by me [0] six years ago.
Stadia: you can't build Stadia without getting into account that the market has one big monopoly (Steam), and a few huge other ones (Xbox, Epic, etc). The strategy has simply been to ignore this simple fact. It's like Netflix building a streaming service, without a huge investment into content as well. Doomed to fail from the get go.
Small rant, no horses in this game on my part; just a pity that two huge opportunities were wasted like this.
[0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac...
I've paid for one game on there. It was an exclusive and is the only reason I finally installed the damn thing. I think I'm up to about 150 games on Epic, and I didn't even get in near the beginning and have missed a few since. What they've managed to buy from me, with that, is a +1 in their install-base stat because the free games every couple weeks keep me from uninstalling it, but I still buy everything on GoG or Steam. I don't even care if epic has a lower price, I use one of those.
If Stadia had taken the same approach, the average account would have spent $100 or less but would "have" $3000+ worth of games.
I can understand that established services like Steam oppose the transfer of licenses. But why don't the less established services remove the fear of losing access by making the licenses transferable among themselves? This must be prevented by the publishers. What's their benefit?
I don't think it really took off. It was a little clunky and I'm not sure they got enough buy-in from publishers that the catalog available ever expanded much past their initial offering.
More broadly, I'd love to see a strict, legally-mandated separation of media distribution and production. Mostly for the film and TV industry (there's precedent—the US only very recently stopped barring movie studios from owning movie theaters, because it caused serious problems in the past, similar to how vertical integration of studios and streaming platforms is making things worse today) but maybe something similar would help the game market work better for consumers/users, too.
The ideal would be an open system where you can buy a license directly from the creator (or from a publisher on the creators behalf) then retrieve that content from any publisher by presenting your proof-of-purchase.
[0]: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...
It didn't _seem_ like they were being sarcastic, but they for some reason were claiming that the management team didn't understand how enterprise sales worked after a decade of trying to sell GCP, and were saying that like it was a good thing.
For example, embedded in the entire concept is the unwavering belief that Googlers has that their stuff is just by definition BETTER. I don't know if this is part of the orientation or the culture, or just the kinds of people that the Google hiring process is optimized for (the absolutely most insufferable software engineers i know wind up at Google), or just a lot of kool-aid drinking from the cloud department, but they clearly believe that the only reason they're not winning is sales. Not that they didn't build as good a product. Not that AWS or Azure just might be better at anything.
That hit the Google “no accountability” tarpit: Anthos looked cool, nobody cared to show up to sell it. Amazon shows up.
I don't think it's fair. Compute and networking are still ahead of AWS, although the gap is narrowing. GKE was great from the get go, but today it's not much of a differentiator.
But I do question the wisdom of porting this game to Stadia. It has only a single user review on Steam after having been out on that platform for four months. Even if only one in a thousand people leave reviews, that suggests a revenue of only $2500 or so, or more like $1750 after steam takes their cut. How can it possibly make financial sense to spend nearly half a year porting this game to an even smaller platform?
https://twitter.com/YvesHohler/status/1519966206169649152/ph...
Why? It's not great that they're shutting it down, but refunding all purchases is by far not the worst way to handle this.
It makes a lot of sense. Stadia has a very small game pool - VERY small, think a new console a few months after launch. It's the best time to launch a game that can get discovered and get a fan base. It's like that side scroller game that was free on PS+ the month PS4 launched - it got incredibly popular even though it normally wouldn't hold a candle to AAA games (Resogun)
Heck, look at Crayta on Stadia - it's a pretty average game, but was extremely popular on Stadia because it was a launch game and the only sandbox game available.
It's also interesting to contrast Stadia to the original Xbox and how Microsoft stuck to it while losing money for years.
I just found an interesting thread on game development Reddit today and wanted to share. I don't have anything to gain or lose here.
I agree that it's debatable whether that game really required 4 months of work to port. It does look simple. So, maybe the developer isn't that competent. Or maybe the whole integration process takes a lot of effort? Idk.
Thanks.
But then again probably there's some sort of "eat shit and die" clause in the agreement developers have with Google.
Microsoft and Apple have decades of experience with selling stuff to people.
Depending on the estimates you believe, Google is only selling 800K to 1.2 Million Pixels a quarter
https://9to5google.com/2022/05/19/pixel-6-us-market-q1-2022/
That’s about the number of phones Apple sells in a couple of days in a down quarter.
Also Google isn’t “selling” Android. It’s giving the operating system away to support advertising. Microsoft sold billions of dollars worth of Windows and DOS licenses over the years. It never had to give them away to get uptake.
The better point in favor of the "Google can't sell anything" argument is that they don't really sell Android to end users. The OEMs do all the selling, and they just get taken along for the ride while they offer a platform where they also sell ads and gather user data to target ads better.
The devices they actually sell (Nexus, Pixel) have never really had that much success outside of enthusiast communities.
Google probably no longer wants to support it because it's losing money and they see no feasible plan that will make it profitable.
You can still sell companies like that, if they have valuable assets. But the buyer would still shut down the service and make money off the valuable assets (typical by selling them to someone who can use them).
In this case, I think there are valuable assets -- some of the tech, and the people -- but Google has a use for these themselves, so no need to get a buyer involved. That is, they are doing directly what a buyer would do anyway: shut down the money-losing service and making use of the remaining valuable assets.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_...
X doubt.
At the very least google is to blame, and the stadia exec that assured stadia wasn’t going to shut down.
NVidia makes and sells GPUs, so renting them is in line with their primary business. Although with Stadia gone, NVidia might raise the price on GeForce Go. Originally both Stadia and GeForce GO were $5/month, and everybody was losing money. Then they both went to $10/month. NVidia also has a premium version with a better GPU at $10/month.
There is some question as to whether anybody can make money in cloud gaming. The cloud gaming services that are independent companies, such as Shadow, charge about $30/month. They're basically reselling AWS. Several of those have gone bust. Anyone looked at the economics?
See also them pulling the rug out from people that built on IoT core about a month ago.
However, I say theoretically, because you'd need an insane amount of money and five to ten year timeframe to get anywhere with it. That's no small risk if you lose, and there's always the chance you do. A class action lawsuit on the other hand might be worthwhile.
Flutter looks good! Would I use it - no chance there's alternatives that will be probably survive.
What is mad is that most people don't realise that Google's search engine doesn't go past about 25 pages of results anymore - it says "millions of search results" but you can't access them so it's actually a search engine now that's probably less useful than Lycos or Excite were.
There's a video online about Google deleting the internet - watch it and repeat the experiment yourself. It's crazy.
This isn't the result of some freak natural event. Literally every action taken was the direct result of a decision made by a person. A lot of people are to blame.
"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."
July 29, 2022.