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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

I really can't stand how Google has handled the whole stadia thing. Just want to get that that of the way. I don't want to excuse google here.

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?

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Since there were much fewer games on Stadia, your game had a much bigger chance of getting discovered. And if they got their game into Stadia Pro (subscription) they would benefit from its generous revenue share. Hundred Days - Winemaking Simulator made 25% of their revenue from Stadia.

https://twitter.com/YvesHohler/status/1519966206169649152/ph...

I imagine there were a lot of small developers hoping for a repeat of the early days of the Switch.

It kind of reminds me a bit of how TowerFall's standout success on the Ouya helped pave the way for Celeste.

I was one of the people who regularly used Stadia and was part of the Stadia Reddit and discord.

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.

> After watching ReviewTechUSAs video on it, another Developer working on a Stadia port explained that apparently Google Stadia was paying the Developers for the amount of Gameplay Stadia users played their game. So it was enough for them to decide it was worth the investment to focus on porting their game as they would be making a bare minimum.

> I really can't stand how Google has handled the whole stadia thing.

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.

I think it's the best way to handle shutting it down but I'm talking about the entire product lifecycle: the technical choices made during development, the decision to launch, the business relationship handling, and post launch execution, marketing and comms. I am not claiming that every aspect of stadia has been a failure, and the full refunds for everyone (except developers lol) is one of the few things that is going well.

Ironically, I think that if they’d made that a policy at the beginning the service would have had a much better chance of succeeding. So much of the initial coverage was dominated by people balking at paying full price for games they couldn’t use when Google killed it - saying that they’d give you Steam/Epic/GOG codes or something would have been a good way to completely avoid that and start rebuilding their corporate reputation.

Yup, I never touched Stadia for this exact reason. I'd have been curious otherwise especially since I travelled quite a bit for work before covid (so no access to my gaming pc) but assuming I'd lose any money spent when Google inevitably cancels the service prevented me from even trying it.

It’s wild thinking how they missed the boat during a time when billions of people were looking for online entertainment and GPUs were hard to get. They could have done some kind of pandemic promo if they didn’t want to commit to friendlier terms forever.

There's not just users involved, see headline story.

Not quite “all” purchases. Pro subs and 3rd party purchases won’t be refunded,

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