Hacker News Reader

Comment by fumufumu | Hacker News Reader

I know Amazon tried. I haven't heard of Google trying. Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.

I have hard of MS's issues. The biggest issue is a game dev team is generally lead by a game-director. It's not a "design by committee, come to consensus" type of thing like software dev is at Amazon, Google, Microsoft. The way work happens is not the same. They might look superficially similar but as a simple example, at typical game dev team is 70% artists, 20% game designers, 10% software engineers (+/-) where as a typical team at Amazon, Google, MS is 95% software engineers.

View on HN

Google had internal teams, and were naive to think studios would rewrite their tooling into Linux and Vulkan, given their fame.

On the last year before shutting down Stadia, they were finally addressing this.

"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"

https://youtu.be/8-N7wDCRohg?si=lOU6iTtwi6MS_Bhw

I remember we got a "devkit" into the studio before public release: it was an entire 1u server.

How are we supposed to use a 1u devkit!? Had no one on their team ever do console work!?

Console devkits fit on a desk because that is where a console devkit needs to go. On the porting engineer's desk, so they can do the work.

In the end Google announced the non-sense business model and we saw the writing on the wall. I do not think that devkit ever got setup.

Yeah, GDC talks from Google even nowadays, seem mostly marketing and telemetry related, I keep wondering if they ever bothered to have folks with actual game development culture.

1U is quite small compared to PS3 devkits...

1U is a "pizza box", you don't have to rack it to use it. Lots of people have bigger rackable switches and servers just sitting on a desk.

Depends on the depth. “Pizza box” generally referred to the smaller rack mounted stuff that could fit in the 24 inch depth racks. They were called pizza boxes because 19 inch width and that depth made them nearly square.

A typical 1U full sized server is 40+ inches though. Those are really annoying to put at a desk.

Not really, back in the days of UNIX glory workstation days also as something to put on the desk,

https://blog.pizzabox.computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza-box_form_factor

Not sure what you mean, but nobody I know of referred to the 4ft long servers as pizza boxes. Because the name sort of implied it was something small enough to throw on a desk and stack stuff on.

From what I recall the PS3 devkit was significantly larger than 1U so it's not that uncommon.

Jade Raymond was famously (gamedev famously that is) hired to lead a studio to create first party content for stadia

> Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.

They had. They just did not end up releasing anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com