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Comment by Nathanba | Hacker News Reader

I think it only seems worse from Google because their product shutdowns don't seem to be tied to financials and if that isn't the case then it makes them unpredictable to us as consumers. Let's remember that Google offers a lot of their products entirely for free. Yet the reason for shutting down Stadia was: "it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected". But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough? It seems wild, it initially makes no sense. Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers. I always assumed it was a bit exaggerated. But then you still have to wonder why the Stadia users can't be sold out for a profit but the Gmail users can be? Video too expensive? I guess that must be it.

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>But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough?

>[...]

>Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers.

Yes.

Because when you can read every email and store it for data analysis focused on "targeted" ads, you can charge your customers (that's the advertisers, in case you thought it was gmail users) more when they invade your privacy.

Stadia is (or rather, was) chump change[0] at best, and it's a lot harder to spy on everything someone does online when they're just playing games. And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.

Remember, Alphabet exists to generate profit for their shareholders -- not to make cool stuff or make their product^W users happy.

If flooding every gmail user's inbox with Goatse[1] every six minutes would increase revenue (and/or stock price), a billion people would be intimately familiar with a stranger's rectum. And GOOG would laugh all the way to the bank.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chump%20change

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx

Edit: Added the missing link, fixed formatting. Added link explaining what Goatse is, for those who are too young to have had the "pleasure" of experiencing it themselves.

> And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.

TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.

Of course having a streaming platform filled to the brim with the unending amount of cheap ad supported android game clones this would have attracted would have hardly made any sense. No need for Stadia if the games already run natively on the only supported endpoint.

>TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.

A fair point, and one I hadn't really considered.

I was thinking along the lines of multiplayer FPS games and the like. If you stop play to show some players ads, they'll be dead/have lost by the time the ad is over. If you stop play for all players to show them ads, I'd expect really high loads on servers as they "customize" the ads by region and PII.

Alternatively (as you imply), using "product placement" ads in-game without interrupting game play, I suppose that could work, no matter how disgusting it might be.

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