Google Stadia: Leaked Documents Explain Its Failure (Porting to Linux a Factor) | Hacker News Reader

Google Stadia: Leaked Documents Explain Its Failure (Porting to Linux a Factor)

boilingsteam.com

12 pointsekianjo21 comments

I think that Stadia had a lot of headwinds, some of them self-inflicted. My analysis of Google as an org is that it has a superiority complex, and they easily fool themselves into believing that all challenges will evaporate before them, and that any prior attempts failed because they weren't done by Google. This complex also leads them to believe that they are fundamentally better at doing things than other companies, and so they didn't partner with Xbox or Sony (or did they?), they simply announced that they were doing game streaming and expected everyone to rejoice. Also they overvalue the Google brand. Google getting into random verticals (remember fiber? Or their health-tech branch? Or the self-driving cars?) has a spotty past, but I'm sure that within Google they still see themselves as the golden child of the internet age. And even the name "Stadia" was terrible. Is it an artificial sweetener? Zero self-awareness, at the organizational level, IMO.

I think you're painting them with too broad of a brush. The documents here discuss exactly what the main problems were, so there's no need for us to speculate that a poor name or a lack of partnership from other platforms were big factors.

However, I do think we can speculate about why the lack of games became so dire. In my opinion, finding a way to license Windows at some sustainable pricing level would have saved them. And perhaps partnering with Valve to develop Proton further might have been a decent option as well.

> The documents here discuss exactly what the main problems were, so there's no need for us to speculate

Hmm, no, I prefer to not believe everything I read, thanks.

To be skeptical is a good trait. But in this case, I trust that this exec, who has intimate knowledge of the program and the challenges it faced over its whole lifespan, knows broadly what went wrong.

As discussed in the document, they did thorough market research and spent a lot of money on making this work. I too don't believe everything I read, so I will dismiss your explanation of the program's failure ("Google as an org... has a superiority complex") as a prejudiced and irrelevant assertion.

This is a strange response. So we should be skeptical of people not knowing things, but not skeptical of people in general? Politicians know a lot of things, do we trust them 100% of the time..?

We can be skeptical of a truck mechanic's opinions on quantum physics, and we can be skeptical of a physicist's opinions as well. But certainly the physicist deserves less skepticism, because they have expert knowledge on the subject (whether or not we trust them to tell us the truth).

Just because you can provide a worse example, doesn't mean your logic isn't also flawed.

Missing from this is the seemingly broad expectation on the part of developers that you can't count on Google to not toss your investment in the trash as they are not in for the long haul with their products. Stadia as a product lasted less time than it can take to develop some of the games they wanted on it.

While I get the ‘it’s Google they will drop it’ argument, my gut reaction when I first saw the service was that it would fail because it was a gaming platform with no games, and no sales/very high prices. Porting games to Linux was unlikely to be a viable strategy, so ‘no games’ was going to stay that way.

I personally chose GeForce now at that time, because I could play the games I already owned, and could buy new games at reasonable prices in existing well established stores.

What was needed is for an exec to have come out, and commit to Stadia being around for as long as, say, the original XBox was produced.

There were various other failures, but that, I think, was the largest. It's a shame, too. I really liked the service. I really liked the idea of never buying a console again, because the upgrade cycle was on their end, not mine. (I still have a launch PS3 that I don't know what to do with.)

It was doomed as soon as it had Google in the name. Who did not see that coming? Sticking with something like Stadia is just not in their wheelhouse.

It wasnt that far off from their wheelhouse to be honest. They do mobile platforms and cloud computing. They are an internet services company. They stream entertainment/media with youtube/tv. They have tv set top boxes/dongles. It sure felt like Stadia could have worked with their product and service Portfolio.

It's within their technical and hardware wheelhouse, no question. The problem comes when you consider them as a company, how they act and how they do products/projects.

When your primary competency as a business is rewriting, renaming, combining and splitting the ~same chat app 6 times in 10 years, you _should not_ be getting into a business where customers aren't even going to give you a chance until you can show stability for a few years and build up relationships and a library of games.

Not to mention when your idea of customer support is an algorithm and zero humans, you probably shouldn't be getting into a customer-focused business.

I talked to Google support on the phone Sunday, it was fantastic. Every time I call, it's one of the best support experiences, with real humans, who are enabled to solve problems, not deflect. They even got on a screen share to help me out

Your understanding of Google support is outdated

Very cool. How many figures is your company paying them?

Personal, very small dollar amounts, been like this for years

maybe chill on the snarkiness?

Apologies for the assumption. I've used several Google products for years, including paid ones, and never so much as seen a way to contact a person.

If the thesis panned out, nobody would care about reputation because we would have access to games not playable elsewhere according to this leak. Sure many people would not be early adopters, but there is always enough of a cphort that would. Because the cloud native gaming thesis didn’t play out, its easy to say it had something to do with not trusting Google. However the average Google user doesn’t have these kinds of opinions about Google.

Besides the Google brand meme, as someone who was bullish on the whole cloud gaming scene back then, Stadia was a DoA for me because I could neither bring my own games (like Shadow PC, or beta GFN), nor pay a flat fee and play a selection of titles (like OnLive allowed you to, many moons ago). No one was going to buy games exclusive to a platform that could Google could kill off at any time. And 'lo and behold, what we predicted came true.

Also, trying to convince devs to port games to Linux was never going to work - a more practical approach would've been to use/develop Wine instead. In fact, Valve had released Proton a whole year before Stadia went live, so if Google wanted to, they could've worked with Valve and combined their efforts to make Linux gaming better. Even if they chose not to approach Valve directly, they could've still used Wine and still benefited from Valve's upstream contributions (and vice versa). But instead they made the insane decision to try and convince devlopers to port their games to a niche platform Google which could kill off at any time... It's like they deliberately set the whole thing up to fail, then came up with excuses as to why it didn't work. Like Project Ara.

Typo in current HN headline: “leaded” s/b “leaked”.

Latency and lack of games, that is why I cancelled

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