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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

If Stadia was strictly a subscription service, I bet it would still exist. People have already forgotten, but you had to buy the games on the service. On top of that there was a subscription to increase your stream's resolution. The pricing was already too complicated and the thing was brand new!

With customers already aware of the fickle nature of Google, nobody wanted to buy something that only gave you access to a game on Google's servers. It's actually surprising that Google reimbursed everyone. Nobody expected that, and nobody bought anything on the service because no one expected Google to reimburse when they inevitably shut it down.

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This.

I also bought the Cyberpunk bundle, which was great bang for the buck. I was also quite impressed by how well the Stadia tech worked.

However, due to Google's reputation I refused to spend any more money on the service, and would not recommend it to anyone, as it would all be wasted once they inevitably would shut Stadia down.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised by how well they handled the shutdown. If I'd known they'd refund people I would have been more willing to spend more money on their service.

I wonder why nobody at Google seems to realize or care that their poor track record is hurting their bottom line?

> wonder why nobody at Google seems to realize or care that their poor track record is hurting their bottom line?

If I had to guess, these things are incredibly tiny compared to their main source of income (ads). As a result, atleast from a monetary perspective, it would basically be a negligible effect on their bottom line.

From a PR perspective, it might have a slightly higher impact as they gain a reputation for shutting stuff down, but with ads and the like being their main source of revenue, this doesnt necessarily have a massive impact

> Stadia was strictly a subscription service

I don’t know. Xbox Pass or whatever it’s called, you know, it’s the same thing as Stadia, better in every way, people pay for it. But who cares. At the end of the day it makes no sense to stream FPSes.

If they focused their product development on features for innovative games exclusively practicable with streaming, they’d still be around. Instead they made VP8 accelerators for YouTube, and called a field trial for libwebrtc some sort of time-traveling latency compensation method.

I mean they were demoing ControlNet with GANs (https://blog.research.google/2020/11/using-gans-to-create-fa...) 3 years ago, way before the current AI craze, and seemingly no one GAF. It was very cool but all their product development didn’t make sense in the context of “games that are only practicable with streaming.” Usually that means “you’re an indie developer with $2 and you want to make great assets and physics driven networked multiplayer” - two things you can actually uniquely achieve with streaming - but Google was fundamentally disinterested in that. They were so focused on Assassin's Creed, because that’s a game that the PMs were fond of, a multi million dollar production which makes no sense to stream, and some indie platformers which god bless them, made more sense to sell as Humble Bundles than streams. It wasn’t a lack of imagination, they had imagination, I think they just actively rejected the folks who are trying to make things for $2, that’s the real thing that is incompatible with Google’s ethos and it’s why Google failed.

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