I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on the list that you can play. None of the games are ones that I care about.
It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that feel half-baked (Hitman crashes on first boot and complains about a lack of a controller) and a bunch of indie games that feel like a sad attempt to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a middling title (the Hello Neighbor hide and seek game) and titles released half a decade ago (superhot).
Minecraft is on every console imaginable—except Stadia. What about Roblox? Fortnite? Factorio? Among Us? Any Sid Meier's game? Any Paradox game? Every genre of game that I actually put time into is completely absent on their platform. Every game from the top 10 (perhaps 20 or more?) on Twitch right now is absent on Stadia. I don't know what they're doing, but whatever it is, it's wrong.
Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?
Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today.
The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way to draw a bunch of people to Stadia outside of that... and if Google is unable to make the business justification to develop Stadia exclusives, neither will anyone else.
> how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?
Have you ever worked for a tech company?
They don't just fire PMs/leads because their project failed. We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private). It's the 10% that succeed that the company is going after (but you don't know that until after the fact of course). The PMs that drove this will simply move on to the next project and keep trying until they get a hit.
The problem with that is that it creates a culture of complacency. If failure is acceptable and even expected to be the norm, then don't be surprised when lots of projects you thought would be sure-fire hits or are executed successfully by competitors end up failing.
Why are you assuming the consequences should be draconian?
There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.
Well to be fair Stadia was an idiotic project that was doomed to fail due to physical constraints(getting sub 80ms latency, and that's VERY generous for input latency that people are used to), which are unsolvable. No ML does not fix that, because if game predicts your inputs are you even playing it, not to mention the frustration when it mispredicts.
That's the sort of thing you have engineers for - so you don't sink money in something so idiotic. Not to mention that they picked the worst possible business model: pay price for title and pay a subscription at once.
The one who greenlit it, and proposed it should be under scrutiny.
The engineering side did a great job on a complex technical task. It's satisfactory, kind of works, not great, not terrible.
What boggles the mind is that nobody is able to formulate who is Stadia even meant for. Who are the target customers?
Draw a Venn diagram of people who:
- care about gaming
- are OK paying full price for their games
- are OK paying 10 euros a month subscription
- are OK buying an extra controller
- have top-notch, 100% reliable internet connection
- are willing to accept occasional technical glitches
- are OK with Google's mercurial approach to product lifecycles
but do not:
- have a computer
- have a console
- have a Steam library
- mod their games
- subscribe to Nvidia's cloud gaming service
Just giving some off-hand estimates, my estimate is 0.00015% of the world's population meets these criteria. The only reasonable business model must be "people will want to try it out and then forget to cancel their subscription".
Not only that, but also: what's the business model behind Stadia? Like how do they expect to ever make money off of it?
Right now they are still giving away the product for free if you just use 1080p, which the vast majority of their target audience will be perfectly happy with, if you care about 4K and 120hz you probably want to have optimal latency as well and just get a local box anyway. So where do they expect the money to make the service profitable will come from?
I've said the same thing so, so many times from even back when there was OnLive. Streaming games to paying customers is an interesting idea and some people will love it, but I just fail to see the business model. If you can pick up a cheap second hand console for less than 1 year of subscription service, who are the people who are going to keep paying for your service because they 'just want to play a game every now and then'? You have to build and maintain servers all around the world to make the service work, and you expect people who are not really into gaming enough to just buy a $400 console once every ~5 years, who just want to play every now and then, to be willing to spend enough on your service to cover the cost?
It boggles the mind how much money has been going into these kinds of services without any one of them ever seeming to have an obvious and solid long-term business plan...
I think the person you’re replying to had the right analysis of why that doesn’t match the product they built: not owning a high-end PC, instant install/patching, etc. are a decent pitch but Stadia charges full price and doesn’t credit anything you already own.
I think it’d make a lot more sense if they didn’t charge full price, allowed rental/trial periods, or cut a deal to recognize your existing Steam/Epic/GOG purchases - making it a good deal for people who are traveling, don’t want to fire up a desktop at the moment, etc. – and worked on some unique features like hitting GCP strong points – AI at a new level or massive scaling for things like Sim-style games, etc. — so the value pitch wasn’t so narrow.
A top notch machine is only like 50% faster for 2-3 times the price. You don't need it. You can just get a console or a budget PC for $600. If you are crazy you can spend $300 on a PC and only play dota 2 and 2D games like Terraria, Don't Starve Together or Rimworld.
Also, what makes you think that 5/6 of the world has fast internet? I have good internet but if you asked me 3 years ago I would have said no.
The data is that previous directors that made huge gambles and got lucky are now VPs trying to figure out where they want their third vacation house to be and the unlucky ones got moved to new projects to try again.
Google's fundamental theory seems to be "users will always forgive us" or "there are always new users" and neither is true.
Nvidia's GeForce go is under the same physical constraints and Cyberpunk 2077 is very playable there (so I can play it on my IPad Pro using XBox bluetooth controller...) . There are lot's games where brief latency is not a problem. I agree for some games latency is a dealbreaker but hardly for all.
GeForce go also took down almost all of it's titles due to licensing issues where Nvidia were too afraid to upset their partners, which shows there is no business here and they should never have invested in the first place.
But at least Nvidia's initial conceit was that it would piggy back on someone else's content ecosystem rather than building their own - building your own gaming content ecosystem is a) incredibly hard b) a fifteen year plus project and c) costs a hundred billion dollars. Google weren't willing to do those but launched a project that needed them.
Do you people realise the there are whole generes of games,where beautiful graphics is a serious advantage, but low latency is not?
Like, 600 ms latency is still 100% acceptable and enjoyable.
And not only graphics. Turn-based strategy genre can also benefit from gigantic ram and cpu resources - all to make ai smarter, more enjoyable to beat the ever.
I think stadia and cloud gaming in general is a gold mine. But it is a different platform, games should be optimized for it.
You don’t need to stream video to run AI in the cloud for a game. Strangely given the existence of server infrastructure based games for decades we’ve never seen it. Maybe the idea isn’t that amazing after all?
Oh there are games where input latency does not matter. You can usually run them on toaster too.
You can make amazing AI that beats humans 100% of time pretty easily, the hard part is making it challenging enough for people to have chance to beat it... It also just needs game state, without all the cruft of stadia(visual side, sounds, graphics, inputs etc).
Also did google partner with any of developers of such games?
Did they develop their own? or even formed any form of partnership for them?
No. They went for action titles, or titles with great graphics.
It was disaster from business perspective no matter how you look at it. Do not expect game developers to just bend over for google just because they release a new platform(and where are doubts about sustainability and quality of that platform from the beginning).
Toaster doesn't cut it when it comes to convenience, full hd graphics and depth of gameplay. Because, let's face it, toaster doest have that much compute resources and storage.
What kind of games will emerge 3 TB of assets will be totally fine amount? For a mobile turn-based game, no less. Or when 6 2080tis will render graphics for your phone no problem?
Modded Minecraft has deeper gameplay than 99% of all games ever made. If anything, high quality graphics make it harder to support deep gameplay because making high quality graphics for tens of thousands of items becomes very expensive.
Roguelikes like Cataclysm DDA also tend to be extremely heavy on the complexity side despite having "extremely poor" graphics by your standards.
6 2080TIs? How are you going to pay for that waste? Do you know how delusional you sound?
There are TVs with more than 100ms of latency, and there are strategies using state rollback and replay that can further reduce the impact of the latency besides. Latency isn't Stadia's hardest problem.
I play games on stadia, including shooters, and latency is not an issue. Latency is the reason you can't launch a Stadia competitor on AWS, but Google has a lot of infrastructure to build on. The latency issue is well handled at this point.
The problem with stadia for me is that gaming platforms are social networks and Stadia is relatively small. No one else I know has Stadia and for many games you can't even expect to find randos willing to play at all. Embr and GetPacked are basically useless.
Why is it that all of the most competent people I've worked with have been humble and empathetic towards failure, while most of the mediocre to not so good people have had harsh attitudes towards others? It makes me sad.
There is being human and there is being incompetent. Stadia did not fail because of bad luck. There were lots of obviously bad decisions made that went into this. If what you’re saying is true, then the decision makers moving on to other projects are just burning Google’s money without repercussions. Oh well, no one actually cares I guess.
> We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private).
The fact that well over 90% of the products Google launches fail for very understandable reasons (I would argue that the last successful product Google launched was Android, and they technically acquired that) is why Google's structure and management need to change.
This is the really confusing part to me. For most of the major metro's of the world cloud gaming is completely feasible on today's internet. Playing on servers in NYC from Boston works flawlessly as a casual gamer, and really opened up the possibility for me to enjoy AAA titles.
Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences which really flex the hardware - similarly the potential for multi-TB fast storage and 10 Gb connectivity could have enabled dramatically larger game worlds than we see today.
But it's absolutely a go big or don't bother problem.
It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?
Bingo.
Ads making so much money has destroyed Google, because they can make mistake after mistake and still be profitable. Most companies think this is good, but it's actually a curse. When decisions don't have consequences, people don't care. Google doesn't care if Stadia fails.
What surprises me more is why people trusted Google enough to invest in Stadia in the first place. Had they let you import Steam games (like Nvidia does), fine, you're not risking anything. But actually paying Google for the license to a game that's ONLY available on Stadia? No thanks.
This is exactly what HP looked like a couple of decades ago. Making billions from printers meant everything else suffered.
This and Google internal promotion process focused on launches. Launch something, make a big splash of it and you will get more $$$. Recipe for disaster. In Enterprise world specifically in Cloud this still haunt them
In a large organization it's difficult to track if launches really were successful or not. "Striking while the iron is hot" is the expected behavior for leaders, and the folks who want to grow need to immediately look at the next big thing.
I haven't seen a good model for incentivizing staying with a product or team in a large company. Most of the time the "ops" work or incremental growth work will never appear as significant as a new launch (particularly if 2 years on the product isn't performing to the launch teams projections)
That's very true, pushing for new projects regardless they are successful or not is a path for success. I think eventually this leadership need a successful track history to prove is worth investing in this person/leader projects
I bought one. I do feel like I made a mistake. Used it only a handful of times. The only way i can justified my purchase is I got the founders edition and paid maybe $100 for the chromecast ultra, the controller and 3 months of Stadia so considering i can still use the chromecast I chalk it up as maybe a $50 loss.
Google kills a lot of shit, but comparing VideoLAN to Stadia is bogus on many levels. VideoLAN is literally UI on top of ffmpeg that grew slowly over time. Stadia is an entirely new platform stuffed into a zillion data centers to keep latency low. Compare stadia to Virtual Boy or Jaguar or Betamax.
If no one downloads VideoLAN for a year they won't burn a bunch of money, but also they had no chance at fundamentally changing the way people watch videos.
Yes, but a) they were willing to keep investing billions and billions for years, and it appears Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let Google do that any more and b) they considered it a tactical must to do so.
As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told.
Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but they have a CFO who basically demands any project makes money in two years or gets canned (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not especially criticising this approach but it's clear most Googlers and their culture do not get it), and a generation of project managers who believe you can launch minimum viable products to consumers and fix it later. You can't make all three of those points work at the same time, and that's why literally anything they launch new at the moment is going to fail.
Ironically the "invest a decade of money" market is undertapped due to a myopic quarter on quarter focus of most businesses for ~50 years.
Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.
no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results.
google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.
I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water.
Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions:
- what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...?
- was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak)
- did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc?
- does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t).
I was also there. G+ was born into an environment of fear. Google leadership had convinced themselves that Facebook would dominate tech forever in every product area because all you had to do to make something successful was make it social, and boom, it won. They were over-generalising from Facebook's success in photo hosting vs Picasa, as well as a few other products.
The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move.
After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.
Thanks for this insight and retrospective. It pretty much answers the questions that I didn't know how to articulate, behind the questions I actually asked. :)
My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book.
So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.
> no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive.
Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end.
> profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off.
Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way.
> they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks,
Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users as well as at least one advantage towards each other network.
Of course by then they'd made everyone angry and made everyone here shun them
> which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect.
Probably more what I wrote above IMO. Mixing the brilliant Google+ social network with the despised Google+ identity solution wasn't the most brilliant thing they did. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but still.
> they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same.
Yep. And when they finally created the best solution the web have seen so far it was too late.
> they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results.
Can't remember it but wouldn't surprise me at all.
> Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users
They required real names at first (slavishly copying FB in that regard), and then later as they were obviously failing they tried offering the option to use a pseudonym. I tried it, and they rejected my handle for no reason given. This was the day I started to really have deep-rooted negative feelings for Google, it was just insulting to have my time wasted by an also-ran social network.
That was the last straw for me and I burned my G+ account to the ground.
I think Google suffers from something akin to the oil curse. They're throwing out dilettante efforts to diversify but never accomplishing anything noteworthy outside their core business. In that regard they're making the world worse, because they're soaking up top-tier talent and then producing garbage with it.
I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
> like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users
Exactly.
FWIW: That's what I tried to explain above: "like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users"
> I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
On Google+ the social network it became really simple: You logged in using your main account.
Then in the upper right corner of the desktop (and probably in the hamburger menu on mobile) you could choose which connected identity you would like to post as.
Meaning one identity to answer serious questions about programming on the backend and another identity in a support group for front end developers etc ;-)
Google of course knew but back then we trusted Google.
Yeah, when you explain it that makes sense. But it was never clear to me how that related to circles or whatever. Also that identifies were even a thing. Plus even back then I didn’t trust Google to retain the functionality. How do I know they won’t merge those identities later to “streamline the experience” or something.
I never used Google+ because it never made sense to me. There were probably a lot of great ideas that were just not obvious.
In hindsight it really looks like Yahoo all over again.
>Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.
>Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.
It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google.
It's not exactly what you were implying. The article seems to be talking purely about the ad auctions. That G+ was a bargaining chip might be a tantalizing speculation, but still speculation.
Spent 2K on Glass when it came out. Horribly pissed at Google to this day. I thought I knew what I was getting except they literally turned features off after I got it (e.g. video hangouts). Their rational was dumbass that it drained too much battery .. the fix .. turn off the feature. Seriously?? They did not open up the SDK fully after they stopped dev/pivoted to enterprise .. maybe if some form of this tech takes off one day, I can sell it as a collector's item.
Interesting. Could you comment a little further? I can see the analogy here to advertising making their other products appear less competitive internally, but it sounds like you may have further thoughts.
It doesn't go too much further than that. The value of their employees is best spent on facilitating more ad clicks so without a decree from the top stating "we are pivoting" and having the political capital to follow through with that, they're stuck.
Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.
Except Azure is the new thing that makes MS untold amounts of money via the same lock-in effect created by windows/office. It‘s adjacent business basically.
Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature.
A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused.
Indeed. I think one of Google's big problems is that it has a finance division desperate to prove to the market how rational it is, with a huge mass of project managers and leaders from the Gmail days who believe you can launch any old crap and take five years to iterate it into something good.
Stadia would have been a GINORMOUS investment decision. It's not Allo. It is probably thousands of engineering years of work.
Maybe they just couldn't get licensing deals they wanted and refused to let go of the idea until now? It seems like Stadia needs both heroic technical effort and really clever go to market and they just failed outright on the latter.
The dream of cloud gaming, for me, is everyone gets an amazing gaming PC.
I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.
Have you ever tried stadia? It's incredible 99.9% of the time. But that 0.1%... I thought I could put up with a few frame drops in Metro, but it just sucks you out of the game.
I tried Stadia this christmas and while I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed. Everyone says that it runs well, no input lag, great picture quality and so on. But that was a lie.
While playing Destiny 2 and Hitman on a laptop running Ubuntu and over wifi with a controller, it felt ok-ish. Almost on par with playing on a Xbox Series X but not quite there.
However, when I tried the same games on my gaming rig, on a 1 Gbit fiber connection with a mouse and keyboard it was completely unplayable for me. The input lag is just too high for me to enjoy the experience. On top of that the picture quality is pretty bad compared to running the same game on your own machine at 4K.
My conclusion is that Stadia will not replace a high end gaming rig for the type of gamer with higher demands. I even doubt it will replace xbox or playstation for the console players.
I bought an Xbox just so I could play Red Dead Redemption 2. Had Stadia been around, or had I been interested in Cyberpunk, I would certainly play on that.
I still think it’s a good idea, with a lot of people falling into the “who is this for” camp, and very well could eventually be very successful.
My impression is that it just needs more time to mature. If we were talking about some saas product, those rough edges and missing features wouldn’t be a big deal. Everyone here would be saying “yeah, it’s an MVP that they needed to get into market to test things out. It’s improving incrementally.” But because it’s video game related, people’s expectations are that it finished and perfect the day it launches.
I don’t think Stadia is truly an MVP. It’s a Google MVP, it doesn’t have to be truly viable, only viable to google middle management looking for a promotion.
That’s what people are lamenting, you can’t role out a competitive gaming platform with such a small catalog of titles.
>I bought an Xbox to play Red Dead Redemption 2 . . . lots of people falling into the “who this is for” camp
Those people appear to be “casual/occasional gamers”? I am very doubtful that this group will really turn into
a cash cow. $10.00/month is enough that few are going to keep a subscription after they are done playing. If you amortize a console over a lifetime of 4 years it would be considerably cheaper than paying for stadia if you consider the current $75 upfront cost.
So the way I see it, for stadia to be viable there would have to be a steady stream of AAA titles(because otherwise the need for cloud compute is questionable) produced by 3rd party studios...this just doesn’t exist, titles like RDR2 & CP2077 are an exception. We only saw a handful of titles that demanding and hyped come from a non-Microsoft, non-Sony published studio in the last decade. I’m not in the game dev world, but producing these types of titles seems to be exceptionally difficult, and the trend seems to be less and less AAA titles per year as the complexity compounds.
Combined with stadia’s limited selection, Google’s history of product abandonment, and that you often have to purchase stadia specific versions of titles to play them on the platform. It’s a difficult pill to swallow.
Nvidia’s product, GeForce Now, where titles are portable seems like a much more viable product to me.
Stadia doesn't have a $10/mo cost or $75 upfront cost though. Stadia Pro is optional, and the client runs in Chrome on almost any device (not sure about iOS yet).
I can go on the store and buy Cyberpunk 2077 and start playing on my phone if I wanted to.
If we want to compare Stadia to current generation consoles then I think we need to include the 10$/mo, 1080p on stadia looks terrible on any somewhat large screen, "4k" is much better.
And the 75$ upfront cost does exist, you need a controller. You could get a controller for cheaper, but it wouldn't be as easy to use or be usable with the chromecast ultra, which seems to be where the best experience is.
Nonetheless you still need a controller and most people wouldn't settle for something that is terrible to use, so the cost is still a consideration.
But if we're comparing to a current gen console then do you include the subscription the console requires for online play? Stadia Pro also gives 'free games' the same way Playstation Plus and Xbox Gold Live do too.
Especially in the 'casual/occasional' gamer market, where they don't care enough about the difference between 1080p and 4K. Most are probably just interested in being able to play the latest hot game. That's exactly the same market Microsoft is targeting with the Xbox Series S.
Last time I signed up the Stadia Pro upsell was mandatory (you had to provide a CC). This was annoying because I was interested just in Destiny 2, which is free.
This was me last night when I received this comment. I went to go try the free experience and was prompted to give them a CC. I closed and deleted the app in response. I really wanted to try the free experience, but it appeared they were going to add the friction of, “and don’t worry, we’ll automatically renew your subscription.” No thanks.
This seems like terrible UX.
I've been using GeForce Now, the main advantage being that I will still own my games if they ever cancel the service. For now it's only $5/month and includes ray-tracing capable hardware, but I doubt it will be that price for long.
Perhaps not. But I'm in a similar boat: with remote lectures, online homework, work-from-home, and not being able to go places with friends, we don't exactly get much of a choice.
COVID sucks, but at least vadym909's kid has been able to make the most of it by investing in a usable setup and gaining some valuable hands-on experience with computers.
if you can allow users to load the code out of the cloud and or the user swarm ; onto thier machine and then dissconnect from the cloud, the potential efficiency is even more staggering.
It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.
I get what you are saying, games are essential if you are building a gaming platform
But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.
I would argue that the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform since there are no games that people want to play. I guess given the very limited functionality it’s technically not a failure. But the whole point is to have games people want to play.
Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success):
Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to third-party game developers. Recently released consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered underwhelming sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers.[22] With initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment,[41] as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone, the company secured the launch of influential new games such as Ridge Racer and Mortal Kombat 3.[22][5]
> the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform
The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.
Given that they didn't launch a single game, I think SGE just regular old failed.
In top of that, after seeing Cyberpunk 2077 get the closest thing to an exclusive launch they could possibly hope for, I imagine they looked at the results decided that the problem is not going to be solved by one or two great games that only work on Stadia. They need many games and for that they need third party.
Man, I'm so salty about GFN - they have a great product and an economic model that makes sense but, for whatever reason, they gave in to publishers' pressure to remove some games from their service. This is doubly upsetting, as publishers should have no say on where I play the games I've already purchased - whether it's on a computer I physically own or on a computer I rent in the cloud.
Sadly, you generally don't purchase a game, but a license to play one in some form. I think the exact limits of their control have not yet been tested in court, but I don't think NVIDIA wants to be the one testing it.
And any way, NVIDIA is in no position to challenge the games industry on such things - they are very much in bed with them and would lose enormously if games suddenly all went for a big 'best on AMD' logo.
Geforce Now library kinda sucks to me, not all that much better than Stadia but that's my opinion. Stadia has a few names (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) that GFN doesn't and vice versa.
It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction.
I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.
This is probably what prevented the Stadia team from doing the same thing. Lot‘s of people saying: „why not partner with valve/steam for their library“. Because it‘s not Valves library to begin with. This was inevitable. No publisher cared about GFN playing their games in the cloud in the beginning. Just like studios sold off their content to Netflix for pennies in the beginning. It was free money and they didn‘t have a use for them anyways.
Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.
That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.
But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.
So, I'm wondering, why doesn't google supply us with a desktop in the cloud, you can do whatever you want with it, but it has a nice graphics card so you can install steam on it if you want or origin or whatever. You download the game there and play that way. Publishers can't stop that can they?
Well, it would still be linux presumably. MS would likely not allow them to use Windows that way. Or they‘d make it prohibitively expensive. In any case there‘d be even less differentiation from xcloud.
Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.
GFN offers something unique: you can connect to existing stores like steam and play many of the games you already own there over GFN. This is a big deal.
They'll both let you play games you already paid for but Stadia makes you buy them again, unless that changed?
To me, that put Stadia in an odd place where only the more casual players without a gaming device would sign up, or those with enough money to pay twice because they spend a lot of time away (but with good internet).
Right... I thought as an idea, it was perfectly sound. The types of technology required to make cloud gaming work seemed to play to Google's strengths.
They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.
Google is a company large enough that you can always find fringes that contradict their main philosophies a business model within the same company. They do not contribute proportionally to their revenue nearly as much as the other FAANG companies.
Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.
Except Microsoft is investing heavily in first party games, buying loads of studios and letting them retain a lot of independence. They’re approaching the streaming service as an extension of the Xbox experience. It’s a much more robust strategy all around
The graphics backend is really not such a big cost for most games, especially with existing cross-platform engines. Also the grahics APIs are really not that different as they all model the same GPUs. DirectX vs. OpenGL had some annoying things but most of them are only a problem when you have to translate and can't modify the calling code at all. DirectX 12 vs. Vulkan is even less of a difference.
Which proves the point that even when games happen to be natively written against a Linux userland, with native support for Vulkan, it isn't economically viable to sell them on GNU/Linux.
When I first heard of Google developing Stadia I thought it's for targeting Asia where mobile gaming is huge and since for majority of users from there smartphones are their first computer; Any 'AAA' game on mobile would be a new experience; But my assumption was proven wrong after seeing Stadia getting released only in North America & Europe where gamers are particular about their games.
Arguably, Google already had a strong and successful platform in mobile gaming (Google Play Games). It's even present on TV these days, with game controllers too (Google TV Chromecast takes bluetooth game controllers with which one can play a range of made-for-TV-screen Android games). I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch for which they were obviously unable to get enough content commitments (not even talking about exclusives here, there just isn't even enough non-exclusive content).
> I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch...
I'd assume company politics. Steve Jobs described Apple like a "big startup" [1]— it had 0 committees, and instead had one person in charge of each of the things the company needed to do/care about. They all met weekly and talked about everything they were doing, and it yielded great collaboration. That's why everything "makes sense" and grows from the divisions/apps you'd expect.
Google sounds more like Microsoft before it, with different teams doing work that might overlap and compete against one another. On top of that, afaik flashy "new" products play better for promotions than building upon something that exists. Hence Play Music and Youtube Music, Android and Chrome OS, Google Play and Stadia, etc.
Perhaps because to avoid confusion between mobile games & their PC counterparts; Say 'Call of Duty Mobile' vs 'Call of Duty' if both were on Google Play Games it would be very confusing and of course licensing headache.
> Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?
Nothing succeeds like failure.. In my experience at multiple companies in tech and elsewhere, it is (sadly) frequently the case that the people responsible for the biggest failures are the ones who have the fastest career progression. It's a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome where they are holding their bosses captive because as they fail the stakes for the management get higher and higher and so they get more and more bought in.
There's one person in particular that I remember from my time at Goldman. Lovely guy but every single thing he was involved in was an unmitigated disaster. Sure enough he failed his way to becoming an MD in record time.
"how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?"
Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. Presuming charitably everyone is doing their best etc.
What happens for companies where no-one dares to start new projects? Yeah.
So what is the correct number of new projects per risk? Everyone would like to choose only those that succeed. But the whole point of new development is that the information and experience to build such a product does not exist and needs to be learned as the project progresses.
Should companies take too many new risky projects or too few? If the reward for successful project is high, then it's obvious a company should take a few too many risky projects, rather than too few (and risk cancelling some hit in it's infancy).
In aggregate if every new project fails and business is starting to look like Kodak or Xerox then that's bad. Failing one new project is just a large company trying to innovate and cutting it's losses when a project is not a success.
If it's something completely new, then yeah, celebrate failure, because at least you learned something. But game streaming had been tried and failed spectacularly before (remember OnLive?). Stadia didn't add anything new except "this time it's Google, they know their network stuff". Turns out that isn't enough if the business model makes no sense.
Failures being celebrated is about being willing to try out a new thing to see if it's viable.
You don't celebrate failure and you certainly don't celebrate causing failure by having such a poor strategy that random cartoonists predicted your failure mode on launch day and then riding it into the ground.
It's not confusing when you realize the owner of this product has his badge of releasing a "major google product" and probably a bonus. Who cares if it's successful or not, google certainly doesn't seem to care.
It gets Google's name in the tech news for something that isn't advertising/invasion of privacy. It's a success for Google-the-business even if it "fails".
If it helps, apparently the exec in charge of Stadia has left. Whether this is a "you're fired, but you can resign if you want" or a "ship's going down, why would I ride it to the bottom" situation, I don't know.
It might have gained more traction if it simply said "Hey, this is kind of like our usual compute engine, but it's gaming-optimized and you can access it through Chrome for low-latency streaming"
And let people install whatever they want on it. There's probably a decent market for people with low/mid range hardware that would like to stream the newest games an ultimate settings. Others who'd just like a portable game library not tied to a specific PC, and a 3rd group that might use it through a chrome cast like a game console.
I'm not sure how large of a market these groups would have been, but certainly much larger than whoever Stadia appeals to.
Kind of, but Geforce Now made the mistake of trying to create something that looked kind of like a storefront that appeared to auto populate your game library from Steam, which pissed off publishers who thought GeForce was basically making money off of their games without giving them a cut.
It's probably more of a semantic difference, but saying "Here's a VM, do what you want with it" is different than saying "Create a game library with us and we'll stream publisher X's games to you. We'll even put them in your GeForce library if you own it somewhere else!"
So publishers got mad and many of the biggest pulled the most popular games. Had GeForce just said "Here's a gaming optimized VM" and let users do whatever they want, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, an very early version of GeForce now did exactly that, complete with a windows desktop.
Google Cloud is not profitable because they invest all revenue into growth, as they should be doing. If they focused on profitability they would have never caught up with AWS.
Very simple: Google doesn’t sell Android. They sell mobile devices that run their version of Android. The profitability of their mobile business overall is unclear (we’ve only seen numbers for specific phones). Can you cite your billions in profit claim?
You're separating the fact that Android is OSS from the fact that google running Android allows them to run the Play Store which made billions last year. It also lets them have Google Search be the default on all those devices. Google themselves account Android this way, attributing some amount of the profit from those things to the fact that they run Android
Google is highly incentivized to show profitability to shareholders. It will drive stock value. If they are purposefully choosing to hide YT financials in quarterly statements, it’s probably not because they are good. Just search for YouTube and profitability on Google. It’s a loss leader.
Did they separate out search profit? My understanding is they don't separate out anything so by following your logic no divisions at google made a profit.
Yes, I did read it. Nothing in the article suggests youtube didn't make a profit. I get that revenue != profit. What evidence do you have that they don't
How is it a bad idea? I want to play PC games but I don’t want to buy a desktop PC just for that. I’m currently travelling but I’m planning to get it once I settle. I had playstation Now before that and it was pretty dope.
It's honestly not a bad idea, just a bad implementation. I use shadow.tech to achieve this and they do it well - instead of giving you game-specific VMs (or whatever Stadia is), they just give you a gaming VM with Windows and you install your own Steam / Epic / GOG / XBLive whatever on it.
The value is great for casual gamers, no expensive hardware, no updates to install, just sit down and play a game. The only downside I’ve experienced is the limited catalogue of games.
My sense is that they want to sell compute cycles to big gaming companies vs trying to nickel and dime consumers. Smart PMs figure out the value and pivot rapidly.
> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing
I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are not. There is no amount of money they could pay Valve to make that partnership happen that would not pay dividends.
Valve/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap, and the fact that they're still the most popular platform (and its not close) speaks volumes about whether the CloudStreamingGamePass-way things are going is actually the right one. Its reasonable to believe that people who identify as "gamers" right now are not interested in that stuff, and the strategy Google/Amazon/etc have of "Netflix for gaming, no console, convert non-gamers to gamers" won't work. Time will tell, but maybe Valve's traditionalism is the right one long-term.
You know where Valve is investing their money? VR and Linux. God damn do I love that company.
If Valve fully backed cloud gaming, that would have downstream effects on publishers and PC gaming as a platform. Who would sign on to publish a competitive, reaction driven game if the market is segmented between the high-latency cloud where anyone can play, and physical hardware only purchased by a relatively diminishing market?
The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with it so would one competitive advantage of PC gaming. Might be tautological, but the games that thrive in the cloud are games designed not to need a PC to be played.
Moreover Valve's hardest push in the past years was in VR. They are literally the only major (not indie or AA, and not doing a bad port of an already existing game, like Bethesda) developer to make a full game's worth of content for the platform that makes full use of the platform. Alyx was a breath of fresh air for anyone who wanted something out of VR that didn't feel like an incomplete experience.
And VR is inherently incompatible with the design goals of cloud computing. The slightest of latencies destroy the illusion in VR. Valve is not going to support a world that doesn't encourage people to own the hardware necessary to run VR.
With technologies like re-projection or whatever specifically the Oculus Quest uses, wireless local streaming isn't that bad, It can easily be a terrible experience if you do not know what you are doing, but its fine most of the time, the latency honestly isn't noticeable, unless you play beat saber.
Although doing over-the-internet streaming is definitely a terrible idea because of how many out-of-your-control factors exist.
> The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate
Maybe, but I tend to think that it wouldn’t diminish, and that this idea that very many will just “get over” latency is something VPs and PMs have convinced themselves of and not something that would bare out in the data.
The first time I gamed on a 120hz display was life changing in a way, I was never totally satisfied playing any sort of competitive multiplayer game at 60hz again, it’s like wearing hazy scratched glasses when the competition doesn’t. And all it took was playing on a friends PC with a 120hz display for half an hour. I think considering how great the push to >120Hz has been in PC gaming, and that High-hertz are now being adopted in smartphones and tablets I’m not alone in this experience.
My point being here that a large part of why people choose to play competitive, reaction driven games, is precisely because they are competitive and especially because they are very fast paced. So fast paced that 8ms of output latency makes a significant difference to a large segment.
Most people won't have to "get over" latency because they're not used to or sensitive to low latency in the first place. I'm not saying their eyes aren't good enough or something, but the fact is that a majority of them either can't or won't spend on gear necessary for the performance you're claiming. Steam's own hardware survey indicates that the most basic, cheap monitors are the norm with 1080p or lower being the most common resolution; refresh rate isn't explicitly shown but I'd be surprised if 120+hz is even above single digits of marketshare. Many gamers don't even play on PCs, they play on consoles running games as low as 30fps with cheap TVs that often don't have "Game Mode" turned on which alone can eliminate more than 8ms of latency.
Tactical shooters and MOBAs are still immensely popular despite the fact that most consumers likely experience a fairly high level of latency. People play games like Fortnite because they're fun, not because they're so competitive & fast paced that 8ms of latency makes a difference. Even competitive games nowadays try to soften the direct correlation between player skill and wins using matchmaking and RNG mechanics so everyone gets a reasonably consistent rate of winning. Want to play a really competitive and fast paced game where 8ms probably does matter? Play Quake Live against the 100 or so people that still tolerate that level of competition.
If it were really 8ms of added end-to-end latency compared to local, then it would be a complete non-issue – even in the twitchiest fighting games and shooters, unless you’re a literal pro-level player, as you mentioned. Most people would not be able to tell the difference even if they were specifically looking for it. It would even be tolerable for VR.
Unfortunately, the reality is more like 80-120ms, at least in one benchmark:
You're right it's likely closer to 80-120ms of difference, though that doesn't change much. It's still apparent that people are used to some pretty high latency (I remember that Digital Foundry counter-intuitively found that Stadia's overall latency is actually lower than the Xbox One X in a particular game) and elevated latency on that magnitude isn't a critical issue for a majority of players and games.
And again, that's not to say that they can't notice the difference or something, it's just not the dealbreaker that it seems to be for some vocal people. I can definitely tell the difference but it's not intolerable for me. I'm definitely happy to trade it for better convenience in many cases just like many are evidently happy to trade it for cheaper hardware.
> ”It's the dropped packets and consequent stuttering that is really frustrating.”
I agree. As a casual gamer, lag/latency has never been a problem on Stadia. Visual glitching and stuttering has. But have you noticed it only happens in certain titles?
Some games seem to suffer from periodic stutters (ahem, PUBG) no matter how good your connection is. While others are always butter smooth and crystal clear. This has lead me to suspect that it’s not entirely a connection issue, but maybe an issue with the ports/hardware at Stadia’s end?
GeForce Now can be used with Steam quite seamlessly. In fact, GeForce Now's value is to play the games you already own on various platforms on their hardware. They're not trying to be another games store.
To clarify the other commenter's point, I am a founders edition of geforceNow and it used to have just everything. Like if it was in my Steam library, I could play it. Early editions just basically launched a slimmed down RDP session with Steam being started. It was awesome.
Now, they put you in a weird virtual zone where your library is restricted to only the game you are currently playing. And if that game is not allowed by the publisher, you can't play it. So I can't play Slime Rancher. I can't play Shadows of Mordor. And it seems like over time there is less and less there.
It sucks, because it was basically my dream gaming service. Kind of like Google Play Music was my dream music service. :(
The 2008-2017 period was great for PC gaming. Now graphics cards alone cost as much or more than an entire console. The prices only seem to go up. Game streaming has the opportunity to dramatically decrease costs. I think it will work.
You don't need to buy a high-end graphics card. Those are for hobbyists who enjoy buying the latest kit and fitting water coolers etc. for its own sake.
17" Dell with a GeForce mobile whatever-it-comes-with will let you play everything fine for 5ish years if you're into the latest shooters, longer for other genres.
Try to find any PC build that competes with modern console MSRP today. It can't be done, not even close. The equivalent gpu, the gtx 1070, goes used for $300. PC gaming fans are still living eight years in the past when the frugality argument was true. Time to update your beliefs.
Now compare it to the cost of a streaming box & subscription.
Having the latest graphics is probably a fairly niche interest I would think? Fairly exhausting to keep up with, and tends to be a bit cyclic: consoles are ahead for a few years, then behind, then jump ahead again.
I think for most people the decision on PC vs a particular console is:
* Which types of games tend to be available on that platform.
* Which specific games that they like are available on that platform.
* Inertial / brand loyalty based on what gaming machine they had on the past.
* If they play multiplayer, what their friends have.
* How much they like tinkering with / get frustrated fighting against computers.
Try to find any PC build that competes with modern console MSRP today.
If you're willing to build your own and buy second hand components on ebay you can just about put together a PC that is competitive with a modern console, at around the same price. But yea, if you're buying new from reputable dealers it's pretty much impossible.
I don't think you can. The 1070 is $300 used. That gives you $200 to fit in a case, fans, PSU, SSD, motherboard, RAM, and CPU. No way. A comparable CPU would cost at least $100 used by itself.
Graphics cards have ranged across the price spectrum for the past 20 years. The first GeForce "Titan" card was $1000 and came out right in the middle of that time range (2013). I'm not sure what PC market you were watching for the past 20 years, but it's not the one I remember.
Sure, but it also remains the defining example of "ludicrously expensive graphics card". The card below it, the GTX 780, was $650, which is still more expensive than any current generation consoles. Meanwhile the current top and 2nd tier GeForce cards (3090 and 3080) have MSRPs of $1500 and $700, which are more expensive, but not outrageously so. I just don't think it's accurate to paint a picture of the market from 2008-2017 as affordable in contrast with the current expensive market.
In 2013 you could drop to the mid-tier GTX 770 for $399 and get more performance either Xbox one or PS4.
I don't think you are wrong, just more lenient in your definition of affordable. It is compounded by the supply constraints, and markups over retail we are currently seeing. I can buy a 3090 right now on amazon, but it is $2,450, 5x the console price. Titan was ~2x console price.
MSRP doesn't matter anymore. These cards are so difficult to get that they basically go used for MSRP, and on the secondary market for nearly a multiple of MSRP.
As are the modern cards that cost $1000. You can spend significantly less that that and still play all the modern titles at high settings and 1080p60fps easily. (Or 4k if you're willing to make the same compromises on framerate that consoles do)
The minimum card you need to play current games on 1080p/60fps/high settings is about a GTX 1070, a four-year-old card which goes for $300 used. Remember we're comparing this to the cost of using a game streaming service.
Obviously at least over the short term the streaming service ends up cheaper (although with stadia charging for games it depends on how many you buy and how much more they are there than on steam, especially with sales). I was just calling out the implication that the standard price for a GPU that runs modern titles well was more than a current gen console, it's not.
(Amusingly I'm running the exact card you mentioned, and I did buy it for about $450 NZD used, although the going rate is more like $350 now on the local used market).
Valve did build out a lot of features like Remote Play and streaming on Steam, but just to a level of ok functionality. It's just clearly not their main interest.
So I agree with your point, but it's not like Valve as a company is totally unaware of the opportunities. They are just... uninterested.
>> Valve did build out a lot of features like Remote Play and streaming on Steam, but just to a level of ok functionality.
I think Remote Play works brilliantly? I've finished multiple games using it, streaming from the PC at the other side of the house to the TV with SteamLink in the living room, using an Xbox One S controller. I hardly see a difference compared to sitting directly behind the PC (granted, this is limited to 1080p on the SteamLink hardware, but my eyes are old enough to not care about higher resolution anymore).
Valve also has shipped exactly one first-party game since Dota 2 in 2013, outside of VR stuff, and it's a card game. I don't think they're tops on the list of studios that could give Google a big hit game to put on their new cloud console.
No, the point I and I think the OP are making is not Valve as a developer, its Steam as the storefront. Steam has tremendous power in moving developers toward, say, the cloud; if Valve just made it a checkbox on the publisher's page (or something to that effect), any cloud streaming service that integrated with Steam would be tier 1 overnight.
But I'm also happy they haven't. These cloud streaming ecosystems are the apex of locked down closed systems. Valve is built on a culture of modding, revving games to make new ones, and being fair to users in a way that doesn't compromise being fair to developers. Cloud streaming systems, by and large, are not. They're built by big-tech megacorps that are looking to buy-in then cash-out on an industry they know nothing about (except Nvidia; if there were one cloud streaming service I'd support, its theirs. Nvidia isn't perfect, but its definitely within their wheelhouse, not a cash grab).
Beyond that, you're marginalizing Valve's dominance in the gaming industry. Of the top ten games by players on Steam right now, again, the most popular western gaming platform ever made, three are made by Valve (CS:GO #1, Dota2 #2, TF2 #4, and #3 is Rust, the monthly TwitchFad). Overall, the only non-Steam western PC games which compete with their numbers are Call of Duty, League of Legends, Valorant, Fornite, Minecraft. The one theme with most of these games is that they're pretty old. People love games they know; when the developer sticks around, builds out a fair monetization scheme, and iterates on the gameplay, the games become unbeatable pillars on whatever service they're distributed on (the few that aren't old: Fortnite/Valorant will get there, and CoD has this in a way, but is definitely the most different every year). Valve is a rock-solid game developer; the fact that they don't release new games every year just speaks to their commitment to their existing communities.
And, they also made Half Life Alyx last year. Its legitimately the most groundbreaking game to be released in the past decade, that unfortunately so few people are able to play. You physically cannot play that game and not have a shit-eating grin on your face the whole time. It is the only game I've ever played in VR (on Valve Index) that made me think "if this game were in both non-VR and VR, I would choose to play it in VR".
The value prop for Stadia is console-class gaming without hardware. Most devices where Stadia is able to run could run a port of a decade-old PC game. Similarly, most Steam games that could run unmodified on Stadia's custom server hardware (running Linux, not Windows) would be games that don't tax the hardware. Maybe that's a better service than what Google rolled out? (GeForce Now seems to be doing better than Stadia, anecdotally.) But it's not what Stadia is, and if they wanted some more recent console-class games, Valve as either a storefront or a game developer was not going to help them much. They would still have to deal with getting Ubisoft/EA/Activision/whoever to do the ports.
Since 2013 they're released three first party games:
DOTA Underlords
Artifact
Half-Life:Alyx
The first was well received but died off the rest of auto-battlers, the second was terrible but is being reworked, and the third was critically acclaimed and the probably the most important VR game released besides BeatSaber. I know you said not counting VR but I feel like skipping Half-Life:Alyx, a game in a well beloved franchise that was very highly rated, is a little disingenuous
Besides that they've also:
Trialed Linux-based Steam Machines
Greatly contributed to Linux gaming through Proton
Tested out two unique hardware systems (Steam controllers and Steam link)
Outside of them being essentially the biggest and most important game distribution service, as well as helping devs with any distrbution, multiplayer, DLC, etc services that they need.
So I'd say it's a toss-up between whether that would benefit Google or not.
> I know you said not counting VR but I feel like skipping Half-Life:Alyx, a game in a well beloved franchise that was very highly rated, is a little disingenuous
I do wish valve would put some cash into publishing some high quality VR titles though. So many quality VR games are Oculus exclusives, it's saddening watching Facebook try to monopolise the space.
Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?
I saw far more people saying 'I don't think stadia will be around in 5 years' than I saw people buying into it. I don't think people are very suprised by this, google has basically destroyed people's faith in the staying power of their products outside of a small core.
Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?
Running a cloud infrastructure is something Google is good at. Making AAA games is not. It is entirely consistent with a deep belief in the product for them to reallocate resources toward partnerships rather than trying to spin up a AAA game studio internally.
That's not wrong but I think they've put themselves in a tricky position here: this requires companies to make a non-trivial commitment to their platform. There haven't been any new deals or increased partnerships announced to make this look less like they're just giving up on the idea, and anyone thinking about partnering with them has to be wondering about the odds of getting much return on their investment relative to the risk of Google changing direction again.
Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.
This understates the impact of the move. Everyone already was aware that Google was better at running cloud infrastructure than at making AAA games when they started their internal studios. This looks considerably worse than having never tried to make games in internal studios.
Something like Stadia requires customers to believe that it won't go away. Google, given their long history of mediocre commitment to projects, already had considerable skepticism for Stadia from Day 1. Shuttering their internal studios is just one more signal to skeptical customers that Google really doesn't know what they are doing and doesn't care.
Totally agree this is what is happening and Google may be dense enough to believe this is a winning strategy (or a way to salvage their investment). But this is not how you create a competing gaming console, or gaming platform, or whatever Stadia is. Worse, this is a pivot, which also signals Google is ready write-off the entire exercise. That doesn't give consumer and publishers a lot confidence in viability of Stadia.
So as a third-party developer, apart from getting big subsidies, why should I publish on Stadia? Especially after Google has signaled they have no faith in their platform.
But that's not what happens. That's why publishers are not porting games to Linux. That's why many console games aren't released on PC. That's why most publishers didn't bother with Stadia to begin with.
There are real costs to supporting yet another platform and if you don't believe the platform will generate sales for you, you're not going to expand the effort.
But in the context of this discussion, I'm fairly sure "Google has a game studio and is making games for Stadia" was never an important part in the decision of game makers to port to Stadia or not, because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future. (Certainly wasn't for any of the Stadia users I know)
>I'm fairly sure "Google has a game studio and is making games for Stadia" was never an important part in the decision of game makers to port to Stadia or not
... and most publishers didn't even bother with Stadia, so what does that tell you about how publishers view Stadia?
>because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future.
And how many customers does Stadia actually have? It seems like Stadia was ignored by customers as well.
Third-party publishers don't care about sales of First-party games. They care about sales of their titles. This means they care about the viability of the platform. So First-party games are ultimately there to drive platform adoption. They do so, by 1) demonstrating the strengths of the platform to consumers and publishers (think WiiSport showing off how Wii controllers can be used), and 2) Providing a reason for consumers to actually adopt the platform. The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming. If you're only offering a (tiny) library of games that are already out on other platforms, there isn't really an incentive to get Stadia and play the games you already own or can get ... but this time from the cloud! On the other hand, if I like Mario or Zelda, I have to get the Switch.
And by the way, for all the talk about all those partnerships Stadia will form - how is it that Microsoft was able to secure rights to hundreds of titles for their subscription-based Netflix-type gaming service (GamePass), and Stadia couldn't even muster more than a handful of games you have to buy individually?
And speaking of Netflix, it's not surprise they have pivoted to creating original content to supplement their licensed library - care to guess why?
> The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming.
FWIW, most people I know using Stadia are not the core gamers, but people who do not want to invest in a gaming PC or console (or worse, a gaming PC/console for each of the kids!). And they seem really happy with it, specifically because its a streaming thing, so I'm not as negative about it. (For myself, yeah, Gamepass would win if I'd get any of these things)
Let's take a step back. Stadia, as a product and service, has been out for over a year. It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing and now we have an announcement that Google isn't going to bother releasing games for the platform (even though they went to the effort of buying and setting up full fledged gaming studios to do just that - which isn't cheap).
So I'm not sure what we're arguing about here. That publishers are clueless and don't realize that Stadia is a goldmine waiting to be tapped? That consumer don't know what they are missing by not buying into the platform? The platform is clearly failing.
> It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing
Recently Ubisoft came on board and all of their recent titles are available on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly great to play on Stadia, and i've read about a lot of people that got Stadia for it ( there was a promo, pre-order Cyberpunk and get a free Stadia controller and Chromecast Ultra). Those are not pretty significant growth points.
I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.
Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that.
Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
> I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.
None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market.
Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any.
The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.
The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.
“ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”
“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.
Thank you for the links. I have not read these before and there are some very interesting snippets of information I was unaware of.
It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.
Feedburner similarly seems like something they could have monetized but nobody felt pressure to try very hard when the company was making so much money. It probably would have been a rounding error in their existing revenue stream but new markets don’t happen by accident.
> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.
What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.
Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities.
Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.
I like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental model like Stadia's).
The NVidia model sounds like more hassle than it's worth. Might as well continue buying PCs. If you could afford them before you can probably still afford them. Latency will be lower and experience will be better (no waiting in a queue).
The benefit of Stadia is actually it's simplicity. It's about bringing in new gamers who may have come from console world, but don't have the Steam libraries, etc.
I wrote this in another post, but I think Stadia right now is for the game console user who only play 1 or 2 games. This makes for a lot of extra hardware and subscriptions just to play a game you like. Why not just rent the game as a service for as long as you want to play it? When hockey season starts every year I buy the new NHL for $60. Thats $5/mo. Why should i also buy PLaystation plus, and a hardware console just to play the game? it takes 10 minutes from turining on the tv, navigating the menus, getting into the game, finding someone to play online, etc. Chatting with people is really bad UX. Google can make all of this slicker. But the value prop needs to focus on the job at hand: playing a _specific_ game which happens to be your favorite game you play mostly. Thinking of it as some kind of a gaming platform is not the way.
I’m unsure how Nvidia’s approach is worse. On GeForce now you can play games from Steam or Epic, right? Isn’t Stadia the same except you are locked into only Google’s store? That’s pretty significantly worse.
Nvidia literally throws you in a VM, where you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer. You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit. It also again assumed you have a Steam/Epic account to begin, or else that's another layer you have to deal with.
With Stadia, you press one button and you're in the game 5s later. It also has deep integration, allowing friends list, voice chat, game invites, achievements, etc. Nvidia relies on Steam for those (Epic doesn't have most of it). That's just the surface level integration too. By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.
If you've used both, it's night and day experience. Again obviously for you and me, we're used to PC gaming, but for average people wanting to play some AAA game, GFN is a complete no-go.
I've silently listened on Discord to two different friends trying to get GFN working (for Among Us) in the past couple weeks. It's crazy how hard it can apparently be to install and set up for the average person.
I just asked one of the friends what his problem was and he said that it was just the servers that were down, so I guess it wasn't too hard to set up for him after all.
> you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer
If I recall correctly, you have to do this once, and it can save your log-in details for next time.
> You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit.
Gamers are their target audience.
> By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.
That's true. I've found it's sometimes necessary to change the settings, as the default graphical settings are far below what the hardware is capable of handling.
I'm sure nVidia could do something about that if they had the will to.
I don't quite agree on that one. If you already have a 2000$ gaming PC with a huge Steam catalog, Stadia is most definitely not targeting you. Nvidia is.
Stadia is targeting people who want to play the latest AAA game or EA sports game, without having to invest in a $500 console or $1000 PC. You just play $60 and you're good to go on your laptop you use for Facebook, or spend $100 to play on your TV. They're trying to expand the gaming pie, trying to get all those people who will play games on their phones because it's easy and low friction, but won't invest in high friction setups like a gaming PC.
> I don't quite agree on that one. If you already have a 2000$ gaming PC with a huge Steam catalog, Stadia is most definitely not targeting you. Nvidia is.
I don't think so. If you have the hardware, there's little reason not to run it locally. They're both going after the same market, but with different sales models.
There's probably never going to be a subscription that gives you access to all the latest titles.
I'll repeat what I said: "the value prop needs to focus on the job at hand: playing a _specific_ game which happens to be your favorite game you play mostly. Thinking of it as some kind of a gaming platform is not the way."
By considering Steam and Epic, you are already looking at this from the perspective of a platform. I am simply saying Stadia is better if the game you love is already there. NFL Madden is the latest Stadia promo right now. If most of your gaming time is consumed playing Madden, Stadia is probably the way to pay for it.
Xcloud or Geforcenow offer the best of both worlds. You "own" (in whatever sense you can "own" the game) the game and you have the choice where you want to play it. Not at home/cheap notebook? No problem. With Stadia you can only stream the game.
The question for me is if it works on a cheap notebook or on the road, why wouldn't you just want to play it this way even when you are at home? Why do I want to own anything? I just want to play the games I bought.
Because Stadia offers an inferior experience to local rendering. In particular, the way the video compression crushes all dark colors into a single shade of black. Plus, when Google kills Stadia in a year, you'll have lost the games you purchased and paid a subscription fee for.
I was excited to see Google make a game that would only be possible on Stadia, be it an MMO, races with hundreds of cars, or something more creative their designers could imagine. With their internal developers shut down, all that's left is more expensive, inferior quality versions of games I could play elsewhere.
Stadia doesn't need to be better than local rendering, it just needs to let me play my game with an acceptable quality. I'm not 100% satisfied with the current quality and I'd like it to improve, but as I grow older I'm more interested in experiencing the game's content rather than worrying about how superior my resolution/PQ/fps is. I don't care if I lose the games I purchased 2 years ago, once I've played the game for a while I'm done with it, I'm not interested in continuously revisiting old games over and over again.
Honestly, I'm sick of the limitations of traditional gaming. If that means some compression quality loss and being somewhat inferior to local rendering, then that's the price I'm willing to pay. Playing games is not one of the most important parts of my life, but with the amount of crap I've put up with dealing with flexibility and compatibility issues of a superior local rendering setup for modern games, you might think it was.
That's a fair point. I take this as being similar to reading a book on an iPad vs a kindle. Sure I can read a book on an iPad, but a kindle gives me a better "book experience". Streaming games is like reading a book on an iPad. Owning a PC or console is like reading the book on a device that is better suited for the format.
That analogy probably lands differently for different people. I haven’t used Stadia and don’t have a strong opinion of it. (But I’m open to it - my normal gaming approach is along the lines of XKCD 606 - I’m currently working through my PS3 library.) However, I find reading books on an iPad to be viscerally unpleasant, even though an iPad is my primary mobile computing device.
Cyberpunk on Stadia is the PC version, it's just running on hardware in a server farm somewhere, rather than under your desk. Afaik they didn't make any meaningful Stadia specific changes to it.
Obviously it depends on how well your local hardware compares to Stadias server farm too.
The PC and Stadia versions are much better than the PS4 and Xbox One versions though - those do not run well at all.
I suspect the actual PS5 and Xbox Series X versions will be relatively similar to the PC/Stadia version, but they haven't been released yet - you can only play the last gen console versions via backwards compatibility.
Madden isn’t available on GeForce Now apparently, but besides that I don’t think you’ve explained why Stadia is better. On Stadia and GeForce Now, you pay a subscription fee and pay for the game. Is it something about the Stadia hardware that makes it better?
Yes. Stadia does not assume you know how to use a gaming PC. Steam and Epic might be fine if you already know what those things are. If you don't, it is far too complex. Billions of people understand the simple app store model that comes with their phone. It's the one stadia uses.
Steam and Epic are literally app stores. I guess you have to link an extra account to use it with GeForce Now? For that minuscule amount of extra friction you get access to a much larger set of games on stores that won’t shut down when Google gets bored in a year or two.
edit: in what way does Steam or Epic expect you to understand how to use a “gaming PC”?
You're not making any sense to me. Steam is just an app store. A "gaming PC" is just a regular PC with more powerful hardware in it, using software on it does not take any special skills specific to gaming PCs.
And as the other commenter points out, playing steam games via geforce now doesn't even require installing the steam app anyway, it's just an account link.
I am struggling to find an analogy but here goes. I think it's like the difference between a console in the cloud v/s a gaming pc in the cloud. For casual gamers, a console in the cloud with minimal configuration - switch it on and start playing - makes the most sense.
If GeForce Now is a hosted gaming PC, I assume running a Windows O/S, it likely has the same configuration overhead of PC games, which most casual gamers don't want to deal with.
Have you ever used Steam on Geforce Now? There is absolutely no friction. You do not even have to know Steam exists. You just search for the game you want, and do one more sign-up.
I have. I used Geforce now, stadia, luna. I bought the hardware controllers. I've tried all of these platforms across all different form factors (pcs, laptop, ipads, iphones, android, LG television). I've signed up for individual games, game publisher channels UBISoft+. I invest millions of dollars into companies and my thesis is product driven. All of this is research I conduct myself, for myself. That isn't to say these services have gotten better since I last tested (Geforce i probably tested in November). From what I remember, it was a PC virtual machine with a queue system for availability. It wasn't "magic". Stadia is magic. Luna is somewhere in between.
On Stadia, you just have to pay for the game. The subscription just unlocks HD and some free games. The fact that few people are aware of this really highlights how terribly Google marketed this.
Nvidia has a monthly subscription costs if you don't want the free plan limitations like a queue time and a one hour session limit. Stadia's free plan limitation is only 1080p and stereo instead of 4K resolution, 5.1 surround sound, and HDR.
If you're just buying a single game, Stadia comes out ahead on price when you're only paying $60 for the game rather than Geforce Now where you pay $60 for the game and then a monthly fee for every month you're playing.
Do you really think "non-gamers" are going to be converted by this? At this point if you're a "non-gamer" it isn't for lack of availability.
You seem to be using "non-gamer" as a synonym for "too inexperienced to use basic modern technology", which I don't think is a widespread problem outside of age ranges that didn't grow up with the internet. A much bigger group is surely just people that aren't that interested in video games. (Unless you think Stadia is actually going after the geriatric market, which seems short sighted.)
Just go read /r/stadia or the /r/games thread covering this, yes people are convinced by this and there's many comments talking about how they can't stand the UX on GFN.
Too inexperienced to use technology is a strawman, the real comparison is do they prefer the benefit of the better UX more than they fear the amorphous dangers of lock-in. The answer is easily yes.
Do a handful of posts on the tiny Stadia subreddit justify the massive investment Google has made to create yet another App Store? Is the market of people who use Apple Mail because they don’t know how to register a Gmail account large and profitable enough for them to justify the investment?
The problem isn’t just lock in. There are also less games on Stadia. The lack of available games is directly due to Google’s strategy of recreating yet another App Store.
There are less games on Stadia because we are just over 1 year into a 10 year platform growth story. Just because Google is Google doesn't mean they don't suffer from the same chicken and egg problems that startups have. Especially when the market is over 1T and has incumbents like MSFT and sony. Give it time.
Actually, yes. I am a professional investor with a product-driven thesis. Sub-reddits are one of the most honest, representative samples for the quality and love for a product by the market. I bet millions on this.
I'd get some of your Stadia feedback from outside the Stadia subreddit specifically - it seems to either be filled with sycophants, or has a mod team that removes anything negative (or both). Sentiment elsewhere on reddit is completely different.
It’s maybe a tiny bit worse, but describing it as terrible is a pretty extraordinary stretch. Google is fucked if the entire business model of Stadia, requiring massive investment in hardware, software, and content, depends on consumers being too stupid to link an account between app stores.
The level of inconvenience is on the same level as having to log into Gmail on my iPhone. That doesn’t stop me from using Gmail or buying an iPhone. UX matters a lot, but not that much.
Steam is free by the way, since I guess I didn’t point that out in my last post. You just have to buy the games, same as Stadia.
Nah, I need to type in my password every single time into steam. My password manager doesn't work. Since I have a very long password, it's almost impossible for me to play GFN.
I signed up for GeForce Now, and truly the killer feature is bringing the games you already own. On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription, and Luna (Amazon's offering) is similar in that you can sign up for game "channels" (iirc). With GeForce Now, you can just play the stuff you already own without sinking money into games that play on a platform that might not even exist in a few years. I bet in another year or so Stadia will shut down and all those games that you paid for on the platform will disappear.
Nvidia and Luna both took the shortcut of just running a windows VM and running the game as is. Stadia is the only one that actually requires games to integrate with its API, similar to Steam with Steamworks, and this allows them to provide a far more integrated experience, with friend lists, friend invites, voice chat, achievements, and so on. None of the other services can provide that. Well GFN does but that's just running Steam. In the short term it will slow down adoption, but in the long term the experience is night and day, imo. Being thrown into a VM instance where you have to login to Steam is nothing like pressing one button and being thrown right into a game.
Also, yes if you already have a huge Steam collection, the thought of buying games on a different store is not great, but I don't think Stadia is aimed at people with a PC gaming rig and 1000 steam games, it's aimed at people who don't have a gaming PC or console, and want to play the latest EA Sports or AAA game. Having to just pay 60$ is far better than paying 60$ + 500$ fo a console + waiting for shipping and installation.
>Nvidia and Luna both took the shortcut of just running a windows VM and running the game as is
The customer value add of anything on top of that is proving to be extremely thin. I used Now extensively in 2017, Luna extensively this year and Stadia briefly for Destiny 2 - Luna's experience isn't worse enough to provide any benefit to the Stadia lock-in model.
Stadia PM's should really consider focusing more on "Customer Obsession".
In the short term maybe, in the long term, having achievements, voice chat, friends and invites may be good. I personally don't play games on Epic because I like having achievements and stats tracking for example. I'm not sure what the multiplayer experience on Luna is, can you invite people to play coop games? Voice chat with them?
nvidia's model is also the least likely to withstand the test of time. Once you have to pay enough for nvidia to break even much less make a profit, everyone is going to bail.
At least with xcloud & stadia's approach there's both subscription fees (passive income if people don't play), as well as the 30% store cut to offset some of the cost.
Although none of these are remotely close to being priced at break-even prices, so this is also likely going to end up with even more IAP-based games on these platforms if this ever "takes off" at all. Which, yuck. This is obviously a bait & switch strategy for everyone involved. Just dressed up as "subsidized during user acquisition" instead so they can feel less evil about it.
It seemed pretty obvious to everyone. Use a gamepass model so that less content stretches further, or offer a compelling variety of content - especially exclusive content - to make up for users paying full price every time.
They did neither and it's utterly boggling. They were clearly aware of their shortcomings when they dodged the more direct questions in early interviews. I don't know if it was just hubris, or an unwillingness at the top to understand. Or maybe the project started out too big to steer well and they just accepted it because, hey, high level paycheck.
There are probably a lot of now ex-googlers with a ton of I-told-them-so stories.
I think Stadia makes more sense when you frame it against game consoles.
The easiest users to steal from the console market are the ones that buy only 1 or 2 console games which are traditionally reserved for those consoles (NFL Madden is the latest promotion and a good example). For these users, there is massive experience shift going from buying a ps4, ps online, just to play the same game all the time. I am one of these users. If they can find these 1 or 2 games that activate each segment of users, they will take cohorts from the console market. This won't get the entire console gamer market, but it's a great place to start.
It's actually way cheaper to buy the console if you're just gonna play one game. You get a PS5 for $550 these days, so that's $330 total for a AAA game ($630).
Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200).
You aren't including the network service to play games online. Factor in another $60 * 10 years. That nearly squares things up. Then you have to think about intangibles. Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. The $630 you paid for that ps5 and AAA game is frozen in time. You've bought no future value. You can also play anywhere without having to carry around a 4.5kg box that computes math.
>Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves.
Has Stadia improved since launch? The PS5 and Xbox Series X are both more powerful than Stadia instances, not to mention modern PCs. Has Google announced any timeframe for powering up their instances to match? Will I have to pay more to access instances with the power of next-generation consoles? Will those be available for all the games I purchased, or on a title-by-title basis?
Well, PSN improves as well. Plus there a whole two free games every month and you not required to have great internet connection to play games.
Also, money you paid to stadia are just as "frozen" (spent? frozen money implies they can be thawn) as money for online service.
While you can carry chromecast ultra with you it's PITA to setup - you have to configure the network on it and a controller. Without wired connection it's not a good experience. Meanwhile, ps5 you just plug in a play for the most part.
> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing
Why would Valve partner with anyone? They don’t even need to make games anymore. They could fire the majority of their company and run on a skeleton crew and still be making a fortune years later.
Literally don’t think Google can afford them. The offer would be “hey wanna go from doing almost zero work and making a fortune to making a little more and having to work a lot harder and give up autonomy“
I think the parent thinks Google or Valve can wave a wand and suddenly all these games will be ported to a new platform despite no user base, little incentive to be first on the platform, and murky licensing.
To sell me on buying a stadia game -- at full price -- you have to convince me that this is the platform of the future, that Google is committed. Google starts with a handicap there because of prior behavior.
This effectively kills Stadia as a service. If they were only willing to try for a couple of years... let's just say people were right to doubt that Google can be counted on for a service.
That is a fair perspective given the history of Google. I still think this needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Google doesn't want to kill things off, they just realize the ROI doesn't make sense in terms of profits they can capture. I think specifically in the case of Stadia, there are lots of things in Google's favor that make this something they will succeed at and capture lots of profit/value from. The market is huge too. It also is a beachhead into a consumer product (TV) that Apple hasn't really invested in yet. Console-class couch/TV gaming is an important use case that Apple, Amazon and Google will battle for in their "home" product lines. This transformation is only beginning so as long as Google sticks with it they'll do fine.
I've been playing Destiny 2 on Stadia for 2 months, and I love it. It's been stable, pretty, lag-free & fluid (60fps). Even though D2 is a shooter and would thus be particularly susceptible to lag, I found the experience to be practically perfect. That said, I have Comcast Business Internet which is stable, and everything's connected over ethernet.
Stadia's voice party system works well, and while I've been playing on a TV (Chromecast Ultra & Stadia controller), I've run raids with folks playing on their phones, iPads, & Chromebooks.
Maybe because it's still a small and new community, but I've found it generally friendly and good quality.
At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.
> At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year.
You're really selling me on using Microsoft over Google here: If I'm using a product/service, I'd prefer that it stay around as long as possible even if the company decides that it's a failure. Bonus points for being a "cloud" company so that users are totally screwed the moment the company pulls support.
What do you think would happen? You wake up one day and everything is gone? As much as I am not selling Google vs. MSFT, give Goog some credit. They would make customers whole financially and find a home for the platform.
> What do you think would happen? You wake up one day and everything is gone?
Yes, actually that's about what I expect. Not literally in a day, but fully do expect that in another year or two Google will announce that Stadia is going away and that in a few months it'll be gone. Games were rentals, not leased/sold, so they'll stop charging but you'll hardly be able to take your games with you. Saves might be Takout-able, so if you go re-buy the games you can keep playing... probably... if you even have hardware to game on...
In contrast, I've known people who ran MS software locally for months-to-years after it was obsolete/discontinued, and non-Microsoft software even longer (cue the classical story of the business that held on to their DOS software until Windows XP finally made it too painful to use).
More like it’s going to drag its feet being dead for 2-3 years past the point that anyone cares about the platform. Then when usage plummets enough, it’ll get killed during some big event to mask it.
I find it funny this spun out of a contrast from Google vs. Microsoft and what you are describing is literally how Microsoft Stores died. It got dragged past the point of anyone caring. Covid happened (big event) and then it got killed fairly quietly. This is how all things get killed. Not unique to Google here. My point with Google is they are learning faster what works and what doesn't. In the limit, maybe they will stop starting things that get killed to begin with.
Obviously the planning was bad. This is about what you do when you’ve made bad plans. We’ve all made bad plans and we generally stick with them longer than we really should. I know I have.
I was sad to see them go because it was a quick way to get a Surface replacement, but you can demo Surface at Best Buy. Most of their stores have Microsoft kiosks that accomplish near the same thing in terms of demoing and it costs Microsoft virtually nothing.
This has been true for a decade. Gmail had nothing to do with management for example. Google has some really smart engineers but their management has never been better than mediocre.
>I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this.
If you look at any of Google's project besides their core data-farming business, it's their usual mode of action : half-ass something cool and drop it.
It feels as though the games which are on Stadia right now are games which, with few exceptions, are games which Google paid a significant amount of money to during development to support Stadia as well as other platforms.
I'm guessing that if you look at an existing title along the lines of any of the ones you mentioned, the team has to balance between ongoing development of the game and porting it to Stadia, and they may just not have the resources or inclination to do the porting even when huge cheques are involved.
Valve only came up with Steam Boxes (and it's whole Linux push for that matter) as a defensive response to the Windows Store and the, at the time very real-seeming, possibility that Windows would become an entirely walled-garden they'd be beholden to. They put much effort into Steam Boxes, they were just a PC with Valve's Ubuntu derivative distro. Fortunately for Linux users though they did continue to put a lot of effort into making Linux gaming actually viable, thus insuring that they'll always have an out if Microsoft goes stupid.
Valve has the Stream Link and VIVE. Steam Link is pretty much Stadia using your computer instead of the cloud. They're very much in the hardware business.
Valve have their own VR headset, the Valve Index. Steam Link was previously a hardware dongle but has been replaced by android/smart TV apps with the same name.
I'm surprised Nvidia didn't attempt to partner with them rather than developing GeForce Now as a separate product, they could have taken advantage of Valve's developer relationship/client/store front and handled the actual running of the hardware, which Valve seems much less interested in.
Stadia on the other hand is just a demonstration of the level of hubris Google is capable of engaging in. They thought they could launch a brand new store with the twist that people would need to pay a subscription to continue playing the games they had bought and without the option of using your own hardware should you end up purchasing a capable machine.
Ah, that's interesting. I had assumed any partnership would have integrated with the desktop steam client rather than a third party app, although I can see the benefits of separating it out in terms of pricing/billing models.
With Steam Link requiring you to own a beefy computer it's not really a competitor to what Stadia offers (and I don't know anybody who was able to get good performance out of Steam Link).
VIVE is by HTC supporting SteamVR, but Valve has their own first-pary VR headset + controllers with the Index.
I was able to get latency down to 10-20ms using steam link over ethernet, it works great for pretty much everything. It might give you problems if you're playing at a very high level in csgo/fighting games, but for most people it's pretty solid.
If you want to make a cloud gaming service that isn't expensive and a good experience, you need it to be huge scale because more locations is essential for less latency, and you need a varied workload instead of just people playing games to amortize the costs of the servers. I don't know what other stuff Nvidia or Valve does that would keep these machines productively busy during the work day, but the big cloud companies probably have all kinds of things to justify over-provisioning machines so it seems like they have a limitless supply at peak gaming times while being cost-effective
I think Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will dominate cloud gaming eventually.
Are you talking about Half Life: Alyx? It works on basically any VR headset as far as I know. I think they just need to be SteamVR
compatible which basically everything is.
Just to confirm, you are correct, it works on almost any mass-market headset (probably on all headsets period, but I cannot verify that myself).
So far, I can confirm for a fact it works on HTC Vive, Valve Index, Oculus Rift S, and Oculus Quest 1/2 (in wired mode connected to PC, just like the other headsets, or using VR Desktop for wireless; I tried both and stuck to playing it with wireless).
Maybe, as soon as I heard it was VR only I stopped paying attention. But the point still stands - Valve is very much a hardware business, has been for years.
I wouldn't characterise them as a hardware business, their main focus is on software and they happen to be willing to produce hardware when they feel they need to.
Well, ads does afford them the luxury of trying new things, develop new products and revenue sources. Google is just pretty poor at developing new products.
It is actually pretty fascinating, short of cloud computing, and Gsuite, Google doesn't appear to be able to produce products that people will actually pay for. It's not that Google doesn't have success stories, they do, Android for instance. They just don't seem to be able to sell anything.
The game library was the big issue for me, most playtime was quite smooth for me. But to a large extent it's publishers' faults, Geforce Now has the same problem with games they had before getting removed because publishers/devs opted-out.
I think Stadia had hoped that it could become big enough quickly, with the backing of Google's name and capital, that it could negotiate some good deals and build a big library quickly, to the point that there's so many gamers on Stadia that you can't not publish there anymore without losing a lot. Netflix and Spotify did it, too.
I agree with most of this, but the Superhot game that's on Stadia Pro is a new release. (It's basically a Superhot roguelike, and I don't like it, but it is a new game.
Google has more money than they know what to do with.
I don't know if the quality of their hires has been dropping, but it feels like they just can't execute new ideas. They throw money at problems, and mostly they are really all over the place.
Google is REALLY bad at marketing. I have no idea who runs their product teams, must be college interns, because they have no clear goal.
Stadia still is missing basic features like pagination or searching, but the EXPERIENCE is great. I don't know why you are having issues, but Hitman 2+3 work amazing for me with the stadia controller. 60fps, 4k, etc.
They also have Ubisoft+ integration and with this news they seem to be pushing for more integrations like that which will make the platform even better.
Twitch will never be on Stadia as they compete with Youtube Gaming, which has direct integration with Stadia.
I know Google/Stadia recently partnered with LG to bundle the Stadia app with LG TVs, but I wonder why Google doesn't do this with every TV manufacturers (save Sony.)
If I were Stadia's marketing chief, I'd
1. Bribe the TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app
2. Advertise that the TV includes _a game console_ during TV commercials.
3. Allow the TV users to pay a bit extra ($20?) to buy a basic game controller.
4. Have all the store demo units to auto stream Stadia playing video games and explicitly explain you don't need a xbox/playstation to play these games.
5. Buy out Witcher 3/Call of Duty 4/Project Cars 2/other older games and make them free for TVs with Stadia bundles.
Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.
Fiddling with my phone to play Stadia on my TV is pretty crumple some. It's just too much work for normal folks. People just want to turn on the TV and start playing.
Edit: I guess monopolistic abuse is a concern. However Sony and MS have their own streaming services. Google can just advertise 'play games with Stadia and Playstation Now and Xbox Cloud on your TV!' I am 100% if players switch to playing games on TV without game consoles, it hurts MS/Sony a lot more than to Google.
There was recently an article about Stadia where a developer from a decent sized studio claimed they were approached by Google for Stadia. What did Google offer for the developer to bring the game to Stadia? Almost nothing. The figure was in the tens of thousands.
For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost. Sometimes millions of dollars. Google is just cheap and won’t invest in their own platform.
Direct quote:
"We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it."
Having been approached by Google for these kinds of projects, I 100% believe this. I was leading a team approached by them to do something similar for Google Glass. There was no real incentive there except the privilege of being an early glass partner. The entire process of working with them was a nightmare and we decided to bow out.
I'm short on any attempt Google makes at being a media company.
Just to add general interest info to this strain of the conversation: I had to work with Apple in ensuring content for the launch of News+ in Canada after they bought out Next Issue/Texture, and they were very involved and the incentives were substantial.
It makes a real-world difference, there's no doubt about it. Hell, this is why governments issue arts funding. The return has virtually limitless potential in more than just the financial aspects. But it does take commitment, perseverance, and often, patience.
I'm not sure if I'm surprised or not. On one hand, it kind of fits my mental image of Google perfectly, I don't know why. On the other: doesn't Google have a shitload of money and doesn't Google burn it so often by starting hundreds of projects it just kills after a couple of years of development?
The problem is not that Google couldn't pay them. The problem is that Google is arrogant as hell: Why should we pay you when we give you the privilege to be part of something we, the masters of the universe, introduce?
They fail to understand that from the outside people don't see things Google does as sure bets.
Google glass and game streaming are two very different projects with different motivations/incentives etc for partnering. Game streaming is on the cusp of becoming mainstream. The technology works (playable latency), and the overall product is simpler than competing products (pcs, consoles) for the job we hire gaming hardware for. It is clear the future is in the controllers and displays, not in math boxes. The biggest difference is that gaming is an existing habit gamers have. Google Glass was something completely new and was unclear what we were using it for.
I would also say "media company" is pretty broad. Will Google become a media infrastructure company? yes (they already are). Will they become a media platform? yes, (they already are). Anything more and it's probably spreading investment too thin, but those are substantial components to media.
Game Streaming also needs typical home internet connections to get better before it can really go mainstream.
Not everyone has low latency, high reliability fibre in their home, yet. If you have some crappy DSL or whatever then the experience isn’t great. Likewise if your WiFi signal is anything less than perfect!
And the people who do pay for the best internet connections are often those who don’t need Stadia, because they already have latest-generation consoles and gaming PCs?
That's a great point. I did say the technology is proven but did not specify the market this is ready for. It is sort of like Tesla adoption 10 years ago. It will take time for the investments in technology and infrastructure to cover more of the market. Hopefully Verizon can accelerate their mmWave 5g deploys.
> when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost
We once had a Microsoft rep come visit us to get us to publish our upcoming mobile games for Windows Mobile Tablet notreallysurewhatwasthatanymore. When we asked what kind of support they were ready to provide, they offered to lend us a device for a few weeks.
Of course it's not representative of how things should happen, but for every big partnership or exclusive you read about, there's a dozen dumb wastes of time.
Yeah, not sure where the idea comes from that Microsoft fronts like the entire development cost for ... for what even? As a publisher? Sure, maybe.
For games coming to Game Pass? No.
Same for the EGS, it's not like they front all those games. (Most exclusivity is bought way later in the process.)
But the original comment is pretty much Windows Phone back then. To this day I have no idea why Microsoft was so cheap and didn't even try to get developers on their platform. Rip Lumias, some of you were some great devices.
> How do you pay out developers? I’m a developer, I make a game, I say I’m going to put it in Game Pass, a customer pays [you] $14.99 a month. How do you decide how much to pay me, the developer?
> [Phil Spencer, head of Xbox:] [In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk.
GamePass deals are fixed price, the "full production cost" is not an exact truth. For most indies the deal price represents an over shoot over costs, or just a large percent of cost. This is logical: no one ever shares their internal production costs. Like any business you treat business partners at arm's length.
Source: gamedev who has heard from serveral devs who got offers.
"With Nowhere Prophet, it was an interesting case because we were also launching on Xbox Game Pass at the same time, which had essentially already secured financial success for the console versions"
Not exclusive, still got a significant chunk of cash.
Having the money to port a game to console is great, but usually not comparable to fronting the full development of a game.
There might be a couple where Epic might have done that (kind of, I know they saved some games), but I don't think Microsoft funded any development for a gamepass game so far. (From a third party, not published by Microsoft.)
Epic exclusives have generally been provided in the form of a revenue guarantee on projected sales, I believe. Essentially, they're not paying much of anything if the game is successful and profitable on it's own, but if it tanks, the developers still get paid as if it did not.
For an indie developer, this basically means worrying about whether the game will succeed a non-issue prior to launch.
As an independent person without a company, Microsoft gave me a free Windows Phone just for expressing interest in developing an app for it. These sorts of developer incentives kinda come and go, depending on the platform and how much they're investing in it.
When I was in college, you could show up to their 'Make an app day' and as long you successfully uploaded your own version of their slot machine app you'd be entered into a drawing for a bunch of really nice hardware. Microsoft was terrible at promoting these events, so everytime I went there where more prizes than people.
was that the end of the discussion? Was there, you know, pushback like "we want 10 devices each of the two most popular sizes, and exclusivity for xxx months, and, and..."
Or did everything just fizzle out after "well, we'll lend you the unit I have in the back of my car?"
Thanks, from that same article proof that the Google Graveyard is hurting Google...
>This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.
Given Goog's history on this, I read this announcement as them soft-killing Stadia. They aren't going to admit defeat, but unless they put real resources behind paying people to use it, they aren't going to see any use of it as an API and are effectively mothballing it.
I hope not. The Stadia platform is fantastic: the best streaming user experience out there. It’s just that much of the Stadia Pro content is mediocre, and the paid titles tend to be expensive. (Compare to GeForce Now with it’s awkward, clunky UX but near-unlimited library of content via Steam)
Yah...I just don't see that developers have much incentive to use Stadia? Like, you can't rely on an established 'Stadia playerbase' right now, so there's no natural incentive for studios to integrate with it. Other platform owners solve this by paying for exclusivity or something, but as mentioned above, reports say that Google wants to pay insultingly small sums of money for that work. Unless that changes...no one is gonna use it.
The article says that they’re reassigning 150 people who worked on internal games. If they were betting the future of the platform on the number and quality of games that can be turned out by 150 people, then this never made any sense. Major game studios are hundreds or thousands of people, so this is just Google admitting that nobody in-house can come up with any good games. I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.
I'm not sure that I would invest significant cash to buy games for a platform, which may be killed on a whim. That's apart from all its other disadvantages, namely a lack of choice.
> I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.
We probably disagree here, but to me that's an ear piercing yell about the confidence Google puts into Stadia and its future.
> For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost.
This is so painfully misleading.
You're either describing situations where Microsoft or Epic have become the publisher for the game, or you're describing situations where extremely large titles are paid to exclusively release on a platform where they will then recoup costs from as the sales have to go through their platform.
1. What's the effort required for the port? If a game already has Linux support, it basically is compatible with Stadia, whereas if you have to port it to Xbox, that requires a lot more time and resources.
2. Was the offer to be a timed exclusive like with Epic, or just to add integration for Stadia? I would assume the offers money to be very different depending on that.
3. Are we comparing similarly sized games? "one prominent indie developer" is kinda vague. Again not sure how comparable it is with Epic/Microsoft deals.
Its remarkable to contrast with, say, GamePass; while there's not a lot of disclosure around what that entails precisely, a few small developers have suggested it pretty much floats their studio financially (and doesn't require a re-write, as Stadia does).
From a customer perspective, it gets the game on streaming, Xbox, and Windows PC.
The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.
Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate.
The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.
There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.
Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.
You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.
Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?
It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.
Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.
Meh, another HN complainer going on about<click>...OMG, what the hell is up with that web page?! That some truly nausea-inducing scroll behavior. Is there a RNG behind it somewhere?
I think they know that it’s a sub standard product that is “good enough” for today but it will never be good enough for a use case like VR. I think the future of gaming is in ultra low latency, high resolution experiences and people will look at Stadia like a silent film from the 1920s.
Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.
Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.
I think you are right that Google isn’t taking it seriously, but one of the futures of gaming is subscription streaming, for basically the same reasons as video. Streaming can dramatically improve user experience by making it trival to acquire or switch between games, and subscription revenue allows providers to sponsor the creation of content that doesn't make financial sense in a individual purchase model- think games that strongly appeal to a single demo or amazing, but short, experiences.
Then why do it at all? What would possibly justify such a large investment of capital if Google didn't believe it to be a potentially nontrivial contributor of future revenue?
Cynical answer: Because at big tech companies culture leads them to believe they have to have a competing product in every new market rather than letting their "competitors" go unopposed. Occasionally it works out, but often you just get a ton of also-rans. The companies are so big a profitable that even complete failure barely moves the stock price.
Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.
How do you increase revenue/stock price in meaningful way without expanding into other markets?
Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.
Because of how Google's internal performance evaluation works.
You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.
When you have Google's resources and talent, you probably need a reason not to do these kinds of things. If a product has a decent chance of generating revenue or building out consumer profiles or reaching a new demographic and doesn't undermine the ads business, it has a shot of being pursued.
For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.
The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.
Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.
but up until now they did apparently have funding to be running an internal studio? seems like those funds could have been better spent bribing tv companies like the parent is suggesting.
Google is a company of engineers. Engineers solve problems by building stuff, not by bribing companies. I think the main exception is Android and Ads, which also happens to be the main parts of Google I disagree with...
Building successful platforms isn't about engineering - many well-engineered platforms were market failures.
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
Sounds like the right approach, and it seems Google is slowly moving in that direction...starting with this decision.
As others have commented, it was pure hubris for Google (and Rick Osterloh) to believe they could just start a new game studio and use it to fuel growth of the Stadia streaming platform. Xbox surely would've died without Halo!
This "do it all myself" approach needs to start with building a massive user base upon which to lure other game developers and TV manufacturers - not the other way around. A telling sign is that the newest Google TV dongle doesn't yet support Stadia...
From a hardware technical standpoint, I think most TV manufacturers don't include a powerful enough SOC from which to run a Stadia app (e.g. a built-in Chromecast != Chromecast dongle). There's also some server-side compatibility issues that we're not aware of.
I don't know if this is a consideration, but the reason Sony's PlayStation 3 included "OtherOS" feature was so that it would be classified as a computer instead of a gaming console to avoid a stiff import tax.
I wonder if there's a difference between making Stadia available via an app store and having it pre-installed or advertised as a core function of the device?
Not enough people have consistently fast internet without data caps for this to work. Can you imagine the backlash when everyones tv with "included game console" turns out to be a stuttery laggy mess?
> Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.
A lot of them have pretty bad game mode latency, though, which isn't a problem with home consoles but start to become a problem once you add streaming latency. Then some of them have >10ms decode latency, and all of it starts to ramp up the delay.
Google generally doesn't do BD that well. I think it's something to do with their start as a consumer-facing company. They prefer making a thing and then marketing it rather than using partnerships to get in.
The Android stuff seemed to suffer quite a bit from this early on, though they seem to have a handle on it now.
Seriously though, I think Microsoft and Sony would scream the house down if Google made movements like this. They may not be monopoly holders in console gaming, but you think that would stop a suit like that being heard?
This is totally the right move. I am a (very happy) user of Stadia. If you haven't tried it, you really should...it's an amazing piece of tech. I can find myself with 20-30 minutes worth of downtime during the day, fire up Cyberpunk 2077 or Hitman or Assassin's Creed in moments from my browser *on a macbook* and play at high settings with no noticeable lag.
Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for Stadia to shine, but I'd guess that the HN crowd skews towards that.
If you're an old gamer who wants to play newer games but doesn't have a ton of time and don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.
The game library does leave a lot to be desired, no question about that. But this decision seems to be the right move to mitigate that by giving developers better access to getting their games on Stadia rather than Google trying to be both the platform and the content.
> Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for Stadia to shine, but I'd guess that the HN crowd skews towards that.
Sad Australian internet noises.
> don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.
Or, or, do buy the gaming rig, because it will still work and you’ll still have the games 3 years after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing.
The amount of times in my life that I've gone back to play an old game I've already played is like...three. I'm not a curator or collector, I just want to play some games here and there.
If owning games forever is important for you, then buy the hardcopy. For me, being able to play games now on the devices I already own is a huge win.
I guess people who play chess or soccer are "curators" and "collectors" considering how old those "game" concepts are?
Some people may only see video games as a replacement for popcorn movies, a vapid session of watching characters talk about meaningless things and occasionally press a button or two as an illusion of interactivity with something.
But some of us get attached when there's something actually -good- out of it and time memorable beyond the technology used to build it. Thoughtful set of rules that allow a person to either challenge themselves or others. Some of us will always continue to play Starcraft, Counter Strike, Street Fighter or arcade shmups. They don't need a "revision" much like Chess doesn't need to be modified into a game that isn't Chess and soccer doesn't need to become handegg.
You're a tiny minority among the people who spend money on games. Every single gamer I have ever known has at least a few high replay value games that they come back to every few years or games that they don't finish and revisit later. Beyond that, it's not about "owning games forever" it's about owning what you purchase on your own terms not on the basis of a capricious corporation's disposable business model.
Literally every single statistics out there on game ownership. In fact among high spenders there's a troubling statistics showing a lot of people buy games yet never even launch them :
>Nearly 37% Of All Registered Steam Games Have Never Been Played
Steam's most played games list tend to change very slowly over time, with a few slots occasionally taken by mediocre "throw away" titles that people consume once and then forget after a few months :
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
In the current month's list, almost all the games most launched on steam are games that are old and have high replay value. Counter Strike, Dota, PUBG, GTA5, PoE, Rocket League.
Outside of steam, one of the most played game of the world is League of Legends. It currently has a 115 million monthly player count, and a 50 millions peak daily logins. Yes, that little competitive PC game has seen more people playing it than the playstation 4 has seen buyers in its lifetime.
The best selling game console by the way only ever saw a few of its titles ever reaching a large player base :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video....
This is known as the Wii's tragedy. The best selling console in the world, but games barely ever sold on it, with people mostly sticking to a few Nintendo's first party games. You could say it's a tiny subgroup that kept financing literally every other games on the platform.
People tend to stick to a few game they consider worth their value and replay them. The people who keep buying new things over and over at $60+ and forget about them after they're ""done"" are a minority among gamers. They're a very attractive archetype for game developers as they tend to be a failsafe for when their games just can't appeal beyond very superficial characteristics but they're not the majority of gamers by far. Most games sold on the market don't sell that many millions and it's always the same group who keeps buying the new shiny thing.
The average AAA game tries hard to become an experience akin to movies with their many cutscenes, dialogue and visuals because devs are trying to get the attention of that guy who just keeps buying new shit over and over and throws it away once done.
And that's without counting "casual" type of gamers who also tend to focus on their one or two game and forget about the rest. Of the casuals, the wealthier types who are willing to spend irrationally are what every single mobile game developers wish they had, because the ''whale'' archetype will spend countless grands on just the one game they always play. All the ""free"" video games that have paid for options rely on these people who show extreme loyalty toward the one game. The modern incarnation of Counter Strike subsists from people willing to keep spending insane money just to get a skin that says that they spent hundreds or grands on something that doesn't even give them a competitive advantage.
I'm not sure you're making the point you're trying to make. My point was that I very rarely come back to a game to replay it. 37% of games going unplayed on Steam is orthogonal to that point, at best.
> after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing
There is literally no way Google shuts down Stadia and doesn't refund people their money and let them export their save files (you can already do the latter). So no, the worst worst case is that you got to play on Stadia for free and if you really want the game again you can use that money to buy it somewhere else.
Like all those people who paid for Google music for years and then when it was killed and replaced with YouTube music lost out because some stuff wasn’t on there, or wasn’t available in their country, etc right?
All my purchased music was properly transferred to YTM, and the analogy isn't quite 1:1 since I can download the mp3s I bought too and store them on my computer. There may have been some cases where specific songs licenses weren't available (I'd like to see the percentage), though the help page says that once they get the license, the song will re-appear in your library too. Over the past year I have found their licensing has gotten better and I run much less into missing albums anymore.
Did they actually remove purchased tracks? Or just couldn't stream the same songs? You buy the games on Stadia so the comparison only works if it is the former.
I believe you can still download the mp3, just can't stream it since they don't have the streaming licences, though they have been re-acquiring a lot of licenses over the past year for YTM.
I thought I had to buy Stadia to Pro to play any game. This isn't the case. There was a game I wanted to play, it doesn't run on Linux, I bought it 50% off on Stadia and I'm a happy user. I'm not going all in on Stadia of course; I realize that there's a good chance Stadia will disappear eventually. For the convenience and quality I'm getting now I don't mind buying this game on Steam again later if it happens that Stadia is gone and I want to play it again. For the right use case I recommend Stadia.
I honestly don't see how Stadia could go away without refunding users for their games. So yes the worst case if you just have to buy it on Steam with the refund you get.
what do you mean? why would they? Does it indicate anywhere in the ToS that refunds will be made if your account is disabled?
I'm a happy Stadia user and I'd love for this to be the case, but I think it's incredibly unrealistic. If Stadia shuts down we'll be lucky to get 3 months warning, let alone refunds.
There aren't many precedents to work from, the closest is GPM but that's not quite a match and there your purchases were mostly transferred to YTM and you could also download your MP3s. On Microsoft side, they closed their eBook store and refunded everyone's books, as well as extra credit for people who had annotations which were lost. While Google does deprecate products, almost all of them were free / small experimental services, so while we don't know how they would handle this case, I still just don't see how they can shut it down without either transfering your licenses to another service or refunding you. Do you have any examples of them leaving people completely high and dry on something people had paid for? Or any other tech company for that matter?
I am with you. I think the actual use case for a casual gamer is absolutely there, running and playing decent games from many different devices, without having to invest in and own a more expensive PC equipped with higher end internals (graphics, etc.).
I am worried about Google's ability to actually execute and make this successful, however (And that does give me hesitancy to buying some of the games that are on there, because they aren't transferrable to somewhere else if Stadia is shut down).
For one, with this in-house studio model, they haven't even shipped a single game yet and they're pulling the plug on the approach. That just seems like giving up before they've even tried. But Ok...
As others have said, the single biggest issue with Stadia is not that it doesn't work wonderfully (it does), it is the extremely limited catalog of games available that needs to be addressed. If they can successfully address that, then they really do have a pretty sweet offering that will be tough to beat.
They shipped Outcasters and just today Journey to Savage Planet. Admittedly I believe both those games may have been in development before the studios were acquired, but they are both first party exclusive Stadia games.
Journey to Savage Planet was made by the studio they had acquired (Typhoon studios) which they are now letting go again. You are right that it's not exclusive, though I still think it would count as first party (or maybe second party?).
Great that it works where you are, I assume the US.
Here in New Zealand of course it's not launched. So while I can pick one of any other consoles/devices to play games on, Stadia isn't one of them.
If you can't reach more than one country, why would anyone want to develop for it?
The sarcasm does not add anything to your comment.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> If you're an old gamer who wants to play newer games but doesn't have a ton of time and don't want to drop $1k+
Or just pay $150 for a second-hand graphics card that is one or two generations behind current models but was top-end at its age, and put it to a basic desktop PC.
Assuming you have a basic desktop PC, otherwise that will be more than $500, at which point you may as well just get a last gen console... Or you can pay 0$ and just play on Stadia within 5 minutes and not go through the trouble of buying and setting up hardware for a week.
I tried it and was far less impressed. It was a novelty that quickly grew stale playing on my phone, that aspect seemed questionable at best. If I wanted to actually do some gaming on the TV, it was quite inferior to the (now quite old) PS4 Pro. That leaves it in an awkward middle ground. Where I'm both on my laptop, but I also happen to have better input devices handy. Since if I'm going to get up to go fetch a controller or a mouse, I'm just gonna plop in front of the TV anyway.
Travelling would have been an interesting use (although not interesting enough to buy games a second time), but, well, not a great past year for that.
As someone who has tested GeForce Now, Stadia and Shadow PC. I would advice see first what games are available on Stadia before jumping in. Being honest here Stadia library is really limited compared to Gamepass were with a beta xCloud included at least you get free to play games. Shadow PC play anything from any store like Steam or Gamepass on PC or any Android device. Stadia is a cool tech but lacks the backbone.
I can't imagine anyone seeing it as a good sign of confidence if Sony or Microsoft abandoned all first party game development for their platforms. Not even just exclusives development. Not just selling off or divesting their studios, but shuttering them altogether.
Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.
> I can't imagine anyone seeing it as a good sign of confidence if Sony or Microsoft abandoned all first party game development for their platforms.
Apples to Oranges IMO. Stadia is a PC game streaming service, not a physical game console. Google doesn't own the PC game platform, they're just facilitating it.
If Google had never attempted a game studio and launched Stadia as a standalone platform (as it will now be), no one would have said "ok but it's a bad sign that Google isn't getting into the game development business"
> Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.
Probably true. I wish it were a standalone company also, but it's not.
> If Google had never attempted a game studio and launched Stadia as a standalone platform (as it will now be), no one would have said "ok but it's a bad sign that Google isn't getting into the game development business"
Throwing money at a first party studio was a sign of investment and dedication, though. Had they thrown the money at something else - like developer outreach - sure, that would have been fine. I don't see that as the likely alternate reality had they chosen not to open a studio.
> This is totally the right move. I am a (very happy) user of Stadia. If you haven't tried it, you really should...it's an amazing piece of tech. I can find myself with 20-30 minutes worth of downtime during the day, fire up Cyberpunk 2077 or Hitman or Assassin's Creed in moments from my browser on a macbook and play at high settings with no noticeable lag.
There's zero chance I'm ever going to give Google any support in trying to take over the gaming industry. The best thing they can do is kill Stadia, considering how anti-consumer it is.
> The company plans to begin offering its Stadia tech to publishers, opening up the possibility for Stadia to become the streaming tech for other video game companies.
The gameplay experience is extremely impressive. I expected input lag and streaming quality to be problematic, but I've been a frequent stadia player ever since my (free) premium bundle arrived around Christmas and issues have been rare.
The only thing stopping me from spending more money on games is the fact that I expect it to just evaporate one day and take the games I "bought" with it. Moving to a licensing arrangement to let me play the games I already own/could retain even if Stadia goes away, would help a lot in this regard.
I know a lot of people, some with children, who have enough income to drop $60 on a game every month without batting an eyelash. Busy people are often a great target market.
These people are mostly Switch players, so Stadia is a perfect upgrade for them.
No source, it just seems like basic logic to me that people who don't spend a lot of time on your product are very prone to cancelling. The linked article seems to confirm that Stadia is not doing so great.
Busy people are a great market if you have a product that can save them time. Stadia is not that.
Stadia is also an upgrade to a last-gen dedicated games console, a PS4 or an Xbox One. Just look at the recent Cyberpunk 2077 release which ran fine in Stadia, but struggled on those consoles. With the current-gen just releases, plenty of people have not yet upgraded.
Strictly console-wise Stadia is an upgrade to those last-gen consoles. But they really need to get more games on the service because that's what people are there for.
For context, Amazon is also struggling to make first party games [1]. I think it was hubris that these large companies didn't start with smaller scoped games and instead jumped head first into building their own engines and ips.
My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL
My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive.
There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!).
Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!
> Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position?
Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
I think a lot about Treasure, a quirky game developer that tended to make a bunch of strange games in the past. I think their studio director and founder, Masato Maegawa, understood the value in being more hands-off in a leadership role. [1] [2] Part of me feels like Amazon and Google thought their super-direct top-down style would be successful in a creative project involving larger team, unaware of the lessons previous game developers had learned.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker, on the other hand had a unqiue idea and was a critical success, and in a retrospective the developers were very explicit not to impose a top-down attitude to development. [3] (disclaimer: I work at Blackbird Interactive, but not on Hardspace: Shipbreaker)
They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that.
This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great deal on this!"
Unfortunately the engine they got a great deal on was CryEngine, which has made some cool games, but by a lot of accounts is not great to work in. Much like the issues reported at EA's studios (with Frostbite), if you're working on a game in it you want to be working closely with the engine devs. They're the ones who know how to make it work, or can fix it when it doesn't work.
A number of CryEngine developers left to join Cloud Imperium's Frankfurt office working on Star Citizen. That office basically exists to pick up the ex-Crytek people who wanted a job where they'd get paid. I don't know if Amazon snagged any of them, it would've been a harder sell to relocate to the US, but with the amount of money they were pouring into this, not impossible.
> They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that.
If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place.
Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment.
I saw a talk about Lumberyard once. The really special things they wanted to do were integrate it tightly with AWS and Twitch, which enabled some neat features like letting people spectate games and move their own camera around the field to do so.
Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?
No. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.
I know absolutely nothing of game dev, but adding cameras to the scene doesn't sound like it would be the most complex aspect of developping a video game?
Imagine a Twitch livestream with tens of thousands of viewers, and each one is able to independently move a live camera to get the view they want. The complexity comes from scale.
You could very well tie that to a high-tier subscription to any Twitch channel. Depending on the game (e.g. Fortnite) you could easily server a bunch of viewers from the same GPU.
I mean, I could probably figure out how to do that in Unity in about a week.
You would basically just need to stream the cameras output texture to a web app, and then read inputs from from said web app. Regardless there's no reason to try and create a whole new engine for this, CryTek has always been known as one of the worst engines to work in, just because it's not supported very well.
Yes, that would be the low-tech way to achieve this, but if you want to scale that up to Twitch subscriber level of users, you would certainly want engine support for such a feature. That CryEngine was a bad choice is a valid point, though I guess there weren't that many public engines to choose from at the time that were that desperate for money.
Yes and no, if Amazon really wanted to do this they could have bought a source license from Unity and made whatever modifications they needed. It feels like an absurdly niche feature to focus on though.
The way I would personally do it I would maybe create a multiplayer game and for each ten cameras spin up a game client instance.
According to the other comments here it looks like Amazon wanted to create some type of bizarro system where if you use their engine you had to use AWS as your cloud back end. Which does sound pretty horrible, like I can't even do a HTTP request to get weather data unless it goes through AWS ?
I disagree with this a lot. Building your own engine offers many advantages, especially for a company with ambitions like Amazon. If anyone should build their own engine, it's them.
Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards.
I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet.
Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error)
However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.
> I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine.
For the same synergistic effects as Epic and their game store + their engine. If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. It's basically trying to incentivize selling on their platform and using their platform tools at the same time.
Can you imagine spending tens of millions on a game then getting blocked from AWS on a policy violation and not being able to move it to another provider?
I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
The license (last I checked anyways) also lets you self-host your servers. If you can afford the upfront costs for that, it's probably cheaper in the long run. IIRC, part of the motivation for Roblox's IPO was to raise funds to setup their own hosting infrastructure to lower costs, because AWS was too expensive.
And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files.
So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.
and I'm sure there would be an incentive (financial) to using all amazon services/storefront etc.
The reason they started with lumberyard was because amazon does platform thinking. Unlike open source they can't just take it, so they bought cryengine to start with.
I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .
Perhaps hubris. But it could also be the same thing that plagues every developer that tries to build games: procrastinating the impossible part (building games, especially games worth a damn) by the doing the easy part (building tools). And the delusion that you're doing anything of value because it feels productive. And the allure of generalization.
What's funny is a friend of mine who is a talented developer and started a game studio surprised me when he started blogging about his experience and he was solely focused on the characters, story development, animation, etc. Instead of technology. Reading about the problems Amazon has been having, this seems like the only way to go.
It's probably more that PC gaming is just saturated anyways, and even throwing money at it won't work unless there is a clear and compelling advantage or hook. There are way too many market killers that just suck up time and attention now, with the rise of games as service.
Fundamentally these big tech companies just don’t understand game development.
AAA games cost a lot of money, so these companies think that if you come with a bunch of money, you will end up with a AAA game.
My company was pitched by both Google (for stadia) and Amazon to create games for them and it was totally clear they had no idea what they were doing, and no idea what they were even trying to achieve.
The funny thing is that in both cases we felt that their attitude was also “These guys have no idea what they are doing” about us too.
It's just a different culture and process even. Game studios are more entertainment companies than tech companies. There's also a high ratio of artists and other talent which tech companies aren't used to dealing with. The development process and workflows are very different too.
I love to imagine the interactions between professional artists and engineers / executives at Google. Moreso executives. I think a lot of folks have never had to work with an artist.
Until you can play your Steam game library (and perhaps Epic and Unisoft and GOG) on Stadia, I think they'll struggle.
I have paid for Geforce Now which does let you play Steam et al games (although not everything is available which is annoying) - it is about £4 a month currently (or free if you can spend time waiting to play) and the experience feels largely the same to Stadia to me in terms of latency and quality. Many happy hours playing high-end PC games on a super cheap and lightweight Chromebook that starts up instantly and runs silently compared to my weighty, expensive, and noisy gaming laptop that needs to boot into windows (although that only takes 5-10s these days to be fair)
Feels like nVidia (...and Xbox? Not tried that) have eaten Google's own lunch in the stream-to-chromebook context.
Yeah, Google doesn't offer enough of an edge that would justify ignoring Steam.
Similar to your experience with Geforce Now, I had a great experience with shadow.tech, where you can bring your Steam library, and I'm sure there are many more competitors.
I get the point you're trying to make, but actually your example is one where I wouldn't mind. I'd rather my bad health not be the central profit driver for someone...
I understand it as - premiums are limited by law as a multiple of payouts. The more they pay out, the higher premiums they can charge. So, peversly, the more they pay out, the more they can make.
I think this might get the “oh, Google shuts down another area after a few years, color me surprised” crowd going, but for me this is totally the right move.
There are a LOT of videogame developers out there. Many of them are quite good at what they do.
The cloud gaming space, while much better than it used to be, has plenty of room for improvement — it’s not remotely mainstream yet, and there’s still time yet to mint the cloud gaming household name.
I agree that they didn't need this in the first place, but this is the venture they started last March [1]. What changed for them in those 10 months that wasn't an obvious trend before?
I presume that they came out of the gate with the sensible perspective that if you build it, and there aren't any games on it, the players won't come. My guess is what changed is that the infrastructure is now viable as infrastructure, they don't need to prop it up with their own game releases.
Likely it’s the other way around and Stadia isn’t doing well enough to think that first party titles released in a few years time will pay development costs or necessarily have a platform to launch on.
IMO, it would be better to take the Nintendo approach and build out a couple generic games that highlight the best features of the system. Wii tennis and wii bowling ended up being my favorite Wii games.
That... is very interesting. I didn't realize the timeline was that short; I was assuming the game studio had started around the same time Stadia had (multiple years ago).
First thought: it's probably pretty hard to start a new game studio during COVID? That article is dated March 4, oof.
I think the reason this is a big deal is that one of the selling points of Stadia was that "cloud gaming" would enable things that consoles and PCs didn't, like huge persistent worlds with a ton a players in a single area. With no first party support, Stadia is just going to be a way to stream ports of games designed for consoles and PCs. Imagine if Valve released the Index, then announced that they aren't making VR games any more. That's basically what Google is doing by saying it isn't worth it to develop games specifically for Stadia.
I agree, but I do think they've been doing a good job lately getting partners to dip their feet in the "cloud-only" functionality Stadia enables. For example:
- GRID added a 40-car race mode that's "just not possible on consoles". (Unfortunately there were rarely enough Stadia players playing GRID for matchmaking 40-car races to work well!)
- Orcs Must Die 3 added Stadia's "Stream Connect" feature, which is basically like screensharing with people in your party. They also apparently increased horde sizes on Stadia compared to other platforms.
- The Hitman series added Stadia's "State Share" feature, which lets players set up scenarios and create customized game states that they can share with others to play.
- Dead by Daylight and Baldur's Gate 3 added "Crowd Choice", which lets streamers create polls for in-game choices that automatically selects an outcome based on viewer votes (e.g. choosing whether the streamer is a killer or survivor in DbD)
- Outcasters uses Crowd Play which lets stream viewers instantly jump into games with the streamer they're watching
- etc
There's a lot of cool stuff that can be enabled when the hardware runs on beefy cloud servers. Although it would be cool to see what novel functionality Google's internal studio would have showcased, I also think it's pretty important to focus on getting "real" games and encouraging devs to take advantage of cloud-specific functionality.
There's probably something to be said for the Ubisoft+ model (basically a separate, smaller streaming service on top of Stadia/Luna/etc), but I don't think cable-like "channels" bundles are the way to go for streaming of any kind.
To me this pivot makes a lot more sense. They’re sticking to their core competency. Gaming as a service, without a dedicated device or powerful machine, already has big appeal. If they nail that, they can always try some first party offerings to push the boundaries.
I don't know about that. Google has even less skin in the game now, with a game studio you could be convinced they were in it for the long haul, but now they can pull the plug almost effortlessly.
IMO the single business decision that doomed it from the start was the fact that you had to buy Stadia game to play on Stadia. Nothing from Steam/Epic/Ubisoft, and no cross-play.
I would not at all be surprised to hear within a year that they stop taking new subscribers, with a sunset a year after that.
That's a pretty interesting thought, I hadn't at all considered the "cloud native game" angle.
Based purely on my own experience with games, I tend to think that for the best results, you'd need a really good game studio to learn how to make a cloud game; I'm not sure you want a really good cloud company to learn how to make a game.
But it's still a really good point. Was the Stadia studio explicitly for these kind of cloud-gaming-enabled games?
I dunno. Cloud gaming (theoretically) means that anyone could play from anywhere at any time. Surely such a powerful idea enables some cool new experiences out there in the infinite realm of human creativity?
Cloud native (and streaming) offers a couple of advantages over installed games. Cheating becomes much harder, although not impossible. And people can launch the game easily without an install.
It has some real trade offs as well. Increasing felt latency is the one people love to talk about. But a huge increase in compute and bandwidth cost for the game operator is the other. Both in terms of the wiz bang features people imagine which are also possible with an installed game. And because for each player at peak CCU you have to run the game for them, encode video and transmit that to them. That’s quite the ops cost increase over a traditional game.
The bandwidth consumption and compute cost hurt the play anywhere at anytime idea. Firstly because places where bandwidth and latency are acceptable for play are not ubiquitous and there is no clear roadmap for that to happen. Secondly because the hike in compute cost per user free accounts are considerably more expensive to allow. Adding subscriptions removes ubiquitousness, allowing free players will bring dark patterns to convert that would make Zynga blush. Platform subscriptions will result in a chase for ‘engagement’ and more of the latter. All without anyone able to offer more than vague affirmations that there is anything creatively interesting.
Cloud native is really good for one thing though. Getting investor money.
Game development is terribly fickle, and it's very much a space where Google is better positioned to sell pickaxes to miners than to try and seek the motherlode itself. TBH, I'd forgotten that they'd started up an in-house game dev team in the first place.
As a gamer, I'll buy a console for the exclusives that I can't experience elsewhere. Having solid AAA content that's exclusive seems to come from having solid first party development studios.
PS Now is great. It has most (all?) Sony exclusives and they run great on your desktop or laptop. The only issue is that I don't think it is available for OSX/iOS.
When google tries to make a product that is new and could go either way, i forgive them for dropping it. You have to make mistakes and some products just don't work. But stadia is different. You could see it was never going to work, the infrastructure is just too wonky. I don't respect them for taking on a project they knew they couldn't do, or for deluding themselves into thinking they could.
> "The service’s best moments may have been when its third-party ports showed off the strength of the cloud gaming model, in which a game can run well on just about any device with a screen and a strong internet connection. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ran well on Stadia. Destiny 2’s Stadia support let players of that game drop in for an extra match or quest from their phone or laptop when they were far from their regular gaming gear. When Cyberpunk 2077 was faltering on everything else in December, it was running quite well on Stadia.
They’re not wrong. If Phil *Harrison is trying to turn Stadia into, say, the "Unreal Engine of cloud gaming” (scare quotes added by me), he’ll likely be much more successful at doing that than trying to make "a traditional console like PS5, but, like, in the cloud."
This shatters my confidence in Stadia as an ongoing consumer platform, though (especially that Stadio Pro sub, and possibly even the hardware/controllers too.)
> This shatters my confidence in Stadia as an ongoing consumer platform,
Being affiliated with Google is why I never bothered with Stadia. Google can't stick with platforms long enough to make investing in them worthwhile. I knew Stadia would under-perform whatever obscenely high standards Google set for the product and would roll it into YouTube Gaming or something before silently killing it off.
It was quite well known that Cyberpunk 2077 was running smoother on PCs and trash on consoles. I was surprised too, but lots of reviews came out that Stadia was the best performing out of the "console" varieties.
It's worth pointing out that there are/were game breaking bugs, ui bugs, AI bugs, lack of features, strange stuff that plagued all versions of the game.
I'm surprised at all the negative comments equating closure of the _game stuido_ to Stadia not doing well. Google is not known for good content production. Only example I can think of are Youtube Originals which hardly stand out.
I read the announcement as Google doubling down on title acquisition which probably worked out well. Cyberpunk was the largest game release last year (last 5 years?) and seemingly very popular on Stadia. Other titles they have (RDR2, Doom, Odyssey) are also among the best games of the last few years.
Personally, I never played any of the non-AAA titles on Stadia and would imagine most users are in a similar boat. Just doesn't make much sense to use a streaming service for low-key games I can play on my laptop directly. This is a big difference from early Netflix model, where they went for quantity.
My guess is that the internal studio failed to pitch any competitive titles and was disbanded. Makes sense to focus on the plumbing, while leaving titles to external studios who know how to do it well.
My read is that Google has soured on Stadia but needs to wind it down slowly to manage their image, and because Gamers are notorious for taking bad news badly.
The studio goes now. Hedged with a commitment to bringing you yesterday's games next year, from a skeleton crew of portfolio managers.
Next, the GPU clusters will track GCP usage, not the PC hardware hype cycle. Cloud GPU users only need commodity compute; Gamers want ray tracing cores, AI processors, the latest DirectX features, yadda yadda. The enthusiast hardware market is a well-oiled marketing machine. Stadia, by virtue of running on a platform that only buys workhorse cores, will become increasingly hostile towards gaming use-cases. Studios won't waste time porting an unreleased game to oddball hardware. Stadia probably doesn't have the subscriber numbers to make the juice worth the squeeze.
Last comes the email that your Stadia games will be accessible until June 202X.
Alternatively, they might actually think they have a chance to succeed from the publisher & platform angle. Everything will look fine internally until the fund dries up because publisher bets are multi-year affairs and exclusivity is expensive.
Best case, they have a hit and people subscribe long enough to play it. Now find another hit, no big deal. Most likely case, they don't find a hit in time. These kinds of publisher funds only get funded once.
> Said one source familiar with Stadia’s first-party operations, citing another tech giant’s widely publicized failure to create video games: “Google was a terrible place to make games. Imagine Amazon, but under-resourced.”
"Google" and "under-resourced" in the same blurb is very funny.
I feel bad for Phil Harrison. He worked v hard at Sony PlayStation to get a Facebook style platform off the ground way before FB ever existed, got shafted in the 1st party game dev worldwide studios politics wars, joined MSFT to try and resurrect Xbox and is now presumably not doing well with Stadia at Google which has broken a lot of very hard ground to enable cloud gaming. The games always come before the platform (People bought Sonic The Hedgehog, not the enabling Sega hardware). Assuming Stadia doesn't disappear someone else will probably profit from all this.
I really wanted to check out Stadia! It seemed like it might be a decent value and a good way to play recent games without a high powered PC. Unfortunately, I have the latest Google chromecast with Google tv... and it doesn't support Stadia.
I swear it seems like Google is entirely unable to commit to anything new. How much have they wasted on Stadia? What do they have to show for it?
Dabbling and half assing everything, pissing away money only to pull the plug. I'm glad they didn't bother to support their flagship chromecast for this thing, so I never wasted any time on it. At this point it's clearly destined for the Google graveyard.
Some of the industry's largest players have been in the game development space for 30+ years and even then are only marginally successful. Xbox itself was on the brink of being shut down/sold off a few years ago. What exactly did Google (and Amazon/Apple/Facebook) expect would happen?
Focusing on Stadia's strength as a platform seems to be a good move forward. It is a technically sound service. I'm sure the massive bump it got from Cyberpunk showed execs that a partnership-only gaming model could be successful. They do need to expand licensing, improve their subscription catalog and get more indie studios involved. Relying on users to consistently pay $60+ for games on top of the monthly fees is a losing business model.
Yeah I agree this is the right move. They should use the YouTube model of just providing the best service for everyone else to provide their content on. Google has never been any good at creating original content.
They also desperately need to improve things like the store, which has no wish lists, no way to see all of the titles in specific categories, etc, at least on mobile.
The problem with Stadia is the its value proposition is in conflict with its technical direction and in conflict with its business strategy - the former is manageable, the latter will kill Stadia.
Stadia has an decent proposition for cheap casual gamers, everywhere else you have a better option. These are however the lowest value gamers for most game companies, at least the ones that build AAA games. However, the technical direction is overbuilt for some (mostly unused as of yet) special capabilities. So the companies that go for casual gamers have to port/build their product with no support. Result: both casual and AAA companies just go for different more profitable platforms.
In addition, the type of gamers with the most benefit from Stadia are the ones least likely to hear about it. Google doesn't market it directly anywhere as much as it could. That means you need some kind of external support for marketing - like, say, Android's many many resellers. The game equivalent would be exclusives. But there's no good reason for an AAA company to agree (again, relatively low-value gamers).
In short, Google needs to either admit Stadia is a casual platform and manage it appropriately - or pivot into a very different type of platform focused on things only cloud gaming could do, which may well require making its own games if others don't care about the capabilities.
Closing its own studios probably kills the latter option, but it's not enough to make a pivot into casual. Since Google is unlikely to do it (casual is a lower status thing), I expect Stadia to be closed within 3-5 years.
Typical Google half-assery. If they wanted Stadia to succeed, they should have been investing in game studios years before so at launch they would some games to demonstrate the concept of cloud gaming and actually drive sales. After all, it's really all about the games. And third-parties are never going to do it.
But there was no plan. They just did it and hoped success would just happen.
Yeah, I feel like they should have looked how Microsoft more or less lucked out with Bungie producing a killer app for them. [1] Successfully creating a game service requires content, content, and more content.
That said, there's still space for Stadia's infrastructure to compete with Xbox/Azure.
Yeah luck was involved, but Microsoft was at least smart enough to buy a company with a good looking game which had been in development for a while. This brought down the timeline. Bungie had showed off halo at MacWorld and was initially targeted at Mac (with an expected port to PC).
Google could do this, or pay even bigger $ for a timed exclusive from a AAA publisher. Instead google started their own studios, which would likely pay off in the long run, but google doesn't have the attention span to operate like that.
Microsoft has also acquired every good mid-sized game company with a track record in the last 5 years to their Xbox Studios. They are really good at this while Google, obviously has no clue what they're doing.
This will probably be an unpopular opinion here, but I love Stadia. I have a gaming pc, but my GPU is getting old so the newer games don't run well. So I gave Stadia a go. My internet is good enough and the fact of not having to download a game before playing is just fantastic. Also I can play on my tablet in bed.
I definitely think this is the future, if it's not from Google, then it'll be Amazon, Microsoft, or Epic/Tencent.
I don’t think many people have a problem with the concept of game streaming or even google implementation. It’s the fact that you have to buy games specifically for stadia and that one day google will shut down the service and a lot of people are going to lose the games they paid for.
I'm very confident Stadia will shut down, but I'm also confident Google will give some offramp for people who bought games, either by refunding the full price or offering a digital key for some storefront.
I don't know how HN feels about Stadia, so a honest question: why is it unpopular? I personally find it absolutely astounding that anyone can question that this is the future.
I'm absolutely confident this is the future. Except, unlike you, I don't mean it in a positive way: I find it to be a one more face of the impending doom, anti-utopian authoritarian future, where people will be forbidden to perform arbitrary computations without a special permission. But that's that kind of wild socio-philosophical predictions that nobody discusses seriously, and nobody even thinks you are serious for suggesting something as preposterous (but then it happen anyway and nobody is really surprised).
On the technical matter, though, it is so much better than owning your own hardware, that it's hard to imagine how that could fail. I mean, obviously, Google will not succeed in making their own games (never could have). And of course current state of Stadia may not suit the "real gamer" (always a minority), because you can have a better performance on your own hardware.
But these problems will be solved, eventually. Better studios will make better games for this kind of platform, eventually it won't be games only, but the whole workspace. CAD running on Stadia will perform better than it could have on your upper-middle-range laptop you paid a shitload of money for, and that still lags and overheats when running your 100-tab browser on it. Your client device will be cheap, completely silent, low-temperature and will run on a battery for several days (that is, with no power-battery technology improvement). Light and portable. It will be unbreakable, compared to your current PC. Basically just a good display, a networking card, and some input device. There is absolutely no way your software won't run better on a shared hardware than you can buy for the same amount of money it will cost Google (or whoever will succeed with this).
I don't know if latency will ever be low enough for every human-use application (which again makes me wonder why are they starting with games: probably the most latency-sensitive thing an average customer uses), but it is surprisingly good right now, and there's still some room for improvement: computation servers will be more evenly distributed (CDN-style), and last-mile latency (the biggest problem, anyway) will improve in the upcoming years, especially on mobile.
I'm pretty concerned that in the not too distant future it will be impossible to build your own PC without having to drop a ton of money for something subpar, since most are happy paying $50 per month to rent their PC from the cloud.
I don't believe Google has the right culture to make compelling video games anyways. Maybe at best a super safe mario clone for children. Anything remotely controversial will have half the staff protesting threatening to quit.
It's not a novel idea that all great art is in some way disruptive or transgressive. If you're aiming for art with cultural relevancy you've got to push some kind of boundary, mechanical, technical, or social.
If you have an culturally oppressive environment, whatever flavor, you're going to struggle to make great art.
Compelling to a significant demographic maybe? “Controversial” can include violent. Seems like those games tend to be technically amazing, as well as particularly entertaining / humorous if that’s your thing.
Google sells all of these games on Google Play without any form of "revolt" from their developers. So im not sure where you're getting this idea, other than baseless conjecture
"Redhead erasure" is, in my experience, a talking point for "great replacement" types, who I would think tend to overlap heavily with the "women can't have muscles", "there are two genders, men and political", and similar mindsets that are the incumbent position in gamer culture.
I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.
Hopefully the games that SG&E do finish showcase what's possible when a developer targets Stadia's strengths.
Why is that sort of game only possible with cloud rendering vs some dedicated server architecture?
I think you'd need to go much higher in terms of how many unpredictable, latency dependent objects are needed on screen before you'd start hitting issues with client side rendering.
Synchronising the game state in games now is exceptionally hard even with 64 players for any sort of latency dependent game. It's a constant grievance in most gaming communities today. If you just have to point a gpu view into the world, then it just depends on how many gpu's you can attach to the server.
>I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system. Never be able to sell it somewhere else.
>I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system.
Google seems to be best in creating - or buying and scaling - a platform to let "creatives" make "things". They simply time after time seem to confirm that they just can not be "creative" themselves but they do build great technologies.
And from a technical perspective Stadia does makes sense, you just seem to be making an interactive YouTube?
That was to be expected, Google definitely has no idea how to talk with game studios.
Every time they do talks, it is all about KPI, Play console and user acquisition (marketing), almost never about SDKs, rendering techniques, tools, anything that what Intel, AMD, ARM, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo regularly do at GDC and their own conferences.
I know it's cool to hate on Stadia still (but less so than it used to be, now that everyone seems to just use it as a Cyberpunk console...) but this move makes sense to me.
1. First-party AAA games are a huge investment (in time and money), especially for a company without any experience in building them. Starting a first-party game studio is a huge risk (financial and planning) that I'm not surprised didn't pan out.
2. Stadia has a reputation as the "indie game streamer" platform in a lot of circles after such a large % of their first games were older and from smaller dev cos. The unpolished first-party AAA game (if it ever came out) wouldn't do much to help this reputation; focusing on partnerships and getting new releases on the platform seems like it'd do far more for the service's future.
3. Unpopular opinion but I don't think exclusives should exist for any platform. It may be good for business but it's bad for most gamers.
4. Politically, it feels like we're about to move into a period where companies need to be way more careful with monopolistic moves into new markets. "Owning the platform and the content" seems to be a wedge-prone position that a lot of companies are worried about (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc) and this kind of just clears Stadia/Google from having to worry about that on "their console".
FWIW I have almost 100 hours on Stadia and 49 friends online in Stadia at the time of writing this comment, but YMMV, I am most definitely in some kind of Stadia-bubble, I probably have some confirmation bias, and this may also be wishful thinking based on the fact that I want Stadia (and cloud gaming as a whole) to succeed.
I get all the doom and gloom about this announcement, but it's exactly what I would be doing if I ran Stadia. Don't waste money trying to build first-party games when you don't have scale, spend all your money on scaling. Specifically:
- Spend budget on getting more AAA titles released on Stadia on launch day. (like they did with Cyberpunk)
- Spend budget giving huge discounts on AAA titles to attract more users.
- Spend the money to get integrated into every Smart TV platform (Roku, Google TV, LG Web OS, Tizen, Apple TV, ect.). TV Boxes should include a Stadia controller in their box and a few months free.
- Advertise that you can play AAA console games on the TV / Streaming box you already own.
These are all things that consoles and existing game stores do extremely well already, and the last two are net deficits for Stadia if you have an ISP or router that's not up to the job.
Amazon Luna, GeForce Now, Shadow, running Parsec in the cloud and paying by the minute, xCloud, and PS Now all better Stadia by offering game subscriptions or more features or are more sustainable by being cheaper in the case of GeForce Now for 4K.
If Amazon Luna/GeForce Now can succeed as upstarts, it says Google should've likely focused on a game subscription service or offering a standalone game streaming platform. They're closer to being the later with this announcement, but not until I can play my Steam/GoG/Itch/Epic libraries on it.
I have a few hours in AC:Odyssey and BL3 on Stadia, it's a good service that has improved a lot too. It's still tough to recommend if you're not the most occasional gamer.
>the last two are net deficits for Stadia if you have an ISP or router that's not up to the job.
If we're speaking in net good/bad, I'd wager the last two end up being net positives when you consider how many people think their ISP/router isn't up to the job (and therefore don't try Stadia at all) compared to how many actually aren't up to the job.
The minimum speed Stadia requires is 10 Mbps, or 35 Mbps for 4K streaming; I'd personally recommend at least 20 Mbps without 4K though, since it's "playable" below that at the cost of graphics artifacting. To put these numbers into context though, Speedtest/Ookla reported an average USA broadband speed of 135 Mbps and an average worldwide broadband speed of 64 Mbps for 2019 [1], rising every year.
It's a lot harder to measure latency, though, which is the biggest variable IMO for whether Stadia works for you. It doesn't work well on my parents' HughesNet satellite internet, but I regularly got <4ms ping when I lived in Kansas City and rarely go above 10ms round trip here in Oregon (on Comcast, even!). They seem to have done really well with their edge node placements, because even in small cities like Joplin/Bentonville (both around 50k pop.) and in Netarts (800 pop.!) the latency feels on par with native games. Luna latency here in Portland spikes to multiples seconds at a time on occasion, and GeForce Now was pretty much unplayable in many cities/towns outside of Kansas City back in the Midwest (but seems to work fine most of the time here). In my experience, Stadia's been by far the most consistent experience wherever I went.
I'd wager that the the subset of [people Stadia would work well for but they think their connection isn't good enough so they don't try it] is larger than the subset of [people that would try Stadia but don't have a good enough connection for it].
Latency is important as you say, and I would say that it's highly variable depending on the router and ISP you have. This Google mesh WiFi update made a huge difference for me: https://support.google.com/wifi/answer/10087384 and it was only made last September.
Connection speeds have improved since Stadia launched, but you will almost certainly go through a 1TB cap before the month is over if you have 2 TVs streaming 4K. This is really the main reason people considering Stadia might still say no, and there aren't a lot of ISPs left without caps: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/at-le... People could just pay an extra ~$30/month for unlimited internet, but that will pay for a console in a year or two.
What is up with the Stadia people thinking anyone on Earth gives them a single moment of thought whatsoever? No one who doesn't use it cares enough to Stadia to hate it, trust me.
@dang I think that while this is the exact title from Kotaku, it misses the context (given by what site it's on) that they're shutting down specifically their _gaming_ studios.
I feel like it would be clearer if this said "Google Stadia shuts down internal game studios, changing business focus".
Quote from the article: Google will close its two game studios, located in Montreal and Los Angeles. Neither had released any games yet.
For context: given Google's reputation with shutting down products and the struggles that Stadia and cloud gaming have been for Google in general, there exists a countdown to when Stadia is predicted to be axed: http://stadiacountdown.com/
"Hi everyone, I completely understand your emotions surrounding the news, so I wanted to chime in with a couple more thoughts. Please note that Stadia.com, Stadia Pro, and your games aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we’ll keep bringing more games to the platform and Stadia Pro. We had an exciting launch with Cyberpunk 2077 back in December, and the Stadia team is dedicated to bringing even more titles to the platform this year.“
Yeah, I think it is a bit tricky to draw the line. Consider brick and motor pharmacy stores putting generic brand white-labeled items next to name brand items. This has helped the consumer (IMO). But, at the same time I can see how it can be abused. The tricky part is coming up with a way to get best of both worlds. Unfortunately, I have personally seen the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other (based on rushed outrage driven legislation) too many times.
The EU? That tax machine... its a wonder these companies still sell there at all. Seems like they should double down on Asian markets instead of bothering.
"Stadia Games & Entertainment." It's Google's in-house content dev studio. Shutting it down means Stadia will need external support to work. If it's gets that then it'll be great. If it doesn't then it'll get killed off.
I've seen this comment a few times now across HN and article comments. Can you say more about why you hold this opinion?
It seems clear to me that Google deciding not to focus on game development is showing a level of awareness we should want to see. In fact, by redirecting those resources they are directly investing in the platform instead of content for it that, let's be honest, probably would have flopped.
I've been a happy Stadia Pro subscriber for about six months and in that time all I've heard from the community is "we want AAA, we want game x, y, and z" and with Google's decision, they're likely freeing resources to do just that.
You need to put yourself in the shoes of the game developer, not the shoes of the consumer. As a game developer, you have a range of platforms you could potentially target, and because you run a business your decision of what platform(s) to target is a purely financial calculus. Each platform you target involves significant costs (including not just engineering but marketing, support, QA, etc.). As you make decisions about which platforms to target you are thinking both about how many copies can I sell per year at what price and what is the risk that platform ceases to exist before I recoup my porting costs. With new platforms, the later risk is statistically very high (not just re:Google) so you look closely for any signals you can find before going that route. A heavy investment in first party titles by the platform owner is traditionally one of the strongest signals of commitment to a platform. Without seeing that commitment, most professional game developers will conclude the risk of platform shutdown is too high to justify the costs. Unity3d is arguably the counter example, but at this point their market presence is strong enough to provide other signals to potential developers. Absent that strong first party commitment, most game developers will only port to a platform if they are paid to do so, and while Google almost certainly did that in the beginning the signals that they are continuing to do so are weak, again suggesting little reason to belief game sales will remain strong on the platform and little reason to believe the platform itself will remain alive.
I was going to mention Shadow. I see quite a few people who want to play PCVR games using it if they don't have a PC up to the job.
Also with VR, many people use 'VirtualDesktop' to link between a PC and the Oculus Quest wirelessly. I can see a future where they offer remote PCs to connect via their software too.
And to add to that, in the future too, I can see Facebook/Oculus adding 5G connectivity to a next-generation headset alongside a future Snapdragon XR2(+).
I also liked Shadow. I could play Windows games on Arch Linux without booting into Windows, their latency wasn't terrible, the wait wasn't too long (only about a month for me), it wasn't terribly expensive, and best of all, their business model actually required them to do their best to make the product a success. A novel concept to some large tech companies, it would seem.
I've had a great experience with their service quite some time ago, though I'm a bit worried about their ability to scale up. IIRC they had suspended new sign ups for some time, and rollout of their Ultra and Infinite offerings seems pretty slow (possibly because of GPU shortages?).
My experience with this platform seems to be completely antithetical to most people's and this article's proposal. They just released Madden, meaning they've made a deal with EA. Clearly no one cared about exclusive games. Everyone in the sphere wants this to be a console without a console. Which it is, and better, because any screen. If the gaming media anti-hype is the downfall of this product, I and others, will be sorely disappointed. I hadn't gamed in years, because, being an adult, I couldn't justify a purchase of over $150 on a console purely for gaming, this was a no-brainer, especially during quarantine. And coming from catching up on Steam on a 5yr old Linux box with a mildly upgraded video card, it was easily worth it to play mainstream titles with no compatibility concerns. I was super skeptical at first, but have been won over by any-browser playability, and server-grade performance, with only mild bugs.
Imagine it being a banner year for PC gaming during a pandemic, and then shutting down your cloud gaming service. It's almost like Google can easily make their money elsewhere, so they don't have to make their money any other way, or even put in the work to make it work.
Why doesn't good spin off these amazing projects into their own companies and have 3,5,10 year goals associated with these projects.
Like I get the need to shut something down if there's no product market fit but at least when you've got pretty much unlimited free money give it a good shot.
The way projects such as Stadia are structured now just shows how only incentivising the launching of a new product/project is not the right way to go about things. You also need, people with a long term vision willing to see a project through and enough resources given to a project.
If this was spun off into its own entity it could easily raise money and become a proper competitor to Sony/Microsoft...
That aside, I do not think this is a bad move at all. None of the titles they were working on were that appealing, hopefully it will mean they pivot to integrate more into a shared licensing model. I would pay $5 a month to be able to import my current Steam games and play remotely, but this fractured model is incredibly reminiscent of video streaming.
We had a first mover (Steam/ Netflix) come in and now all the stragglers are saturating the market with similar but slightly differentiated products (Stadia/ Peacock). I am curious what the next evolution of this model will look like.
Don't we have a marketplace already? If we take the game example we have Steam, Origin, Epic, and other stores competing to sell games. There are differences in offerings but they all still do a healthy business.
On the streaming video side it is even harder since we never license or pay for videos, just the ability to watch as long as the service persists.
Honest question. What will happen if Google shut down stadia with the games I purchased? That's the main issue I have with the platform, will be a refund or even a steam / epic key after?
I loved Google Play Music, Reader, Hangouts and god knows how many chat apps google have made over the years to later kill. Still don't get why they don't better just make a startup with the idea and be like a VC, as right now it's really hard to trust any "made by google", it's almost a meme that will not last long.
I can't help but feel like any big software platform company that's not trying to get good at virtual worlds, gaming, virtual space is making a huge mistake.
It's hard as heck. One can do all the things, and keep turning up with un-fun games. Games require magic, in a way few other things do.
But I also think these big companies have some of the best chance of creating something special and better. They keep reaching for better scaled universes, better scaled worlds, and I think this ambition is really key. Better scaled worlds is what's important, is what we need to be up to. Lots of simulated agents, lots of space, lots of players, all in virtual space.
EVE Online seems to be really running up into the wall, these days. It feels like there's such basic fixes for some of this stuff (allow modules to be set-to-go online while in warp), but the huge grid filled with players, the massive time-dialation.... it's a real cluster $@#@#$[1]. Few others have tried to be anywhere near as cool. We all get some little shells, shards, and the bigger total us never happens.
The only way I would even consider buying a game on the Stadia platform is if Google provided a money-back guarantee for if (or when?) it joins Google Graveyard.
Microsoft shutdown Invoke - I got a $50 voucher and I still can use the device as a bluetooth speaker. What happens with my Stadio investment in hardware when they shut it down soon?! How many times we need to say: "Not again!" investing any time with a new product/service from Google?! My daughter got a Pixel 3a - it has so many issues and Google won't fix saying it has to do with my carrier. Their forums are flooded with people from different carriers having the same issues, but, not, they blame Bluetooth problems to T-Mobile! Same with Google Home Max - I bought one wanted to buy another until it's gone (when it was $179) just to be brought back at full price ($299) and then be gone again! Same with Google OnHub - I bought it, then it became unsupported and gone!
Google cannot run a business, they really don't know how to protect their brand, and never fail to piss off everybody and especially their early adopters!
> What happens with my Stadio investment in hardware when they shut it down soon?!
My guess: Hardware, they say "it's still a Bluetooth game controller and a Chromecast, they can be used as those things". Software: They give you some Steam codes for the games you bought on Stadia.
> Hardware, they say "it's still a Bluetooth game controller and a Chromecast, they can be used as those things".
IIRC, it only works as a bluetooth controller with Stadia (either supported Chromecast or Chrome web app); otherwise, it is only a wired USB controller.
This is a fantastic move by Google. The war for gaming as a service will be on the platform level and something that Google is well positioned to win in. Not saying that Steam, Nintendo, Nvidia won't be some serious contenders as well but the outlook for gamers is quite positive.
I expect to see what the web went through in the early 90s as far as turmoil goes. Lots of platforms with all their quirks and developers getting behind various ones. Eventually (hopefully?) some standards enabling cross platform development of stream gaming. Bandwidth/latency still needs to play catch up but 5G is getting there. Cellular connections are getting more and more stable while landline methods are lagging.
I expect to see each platform playing to their strengths with Google pushing their expertise in infrastructure and Nvidia with their hardware. Also expect to see the space get even more crowded as traditional players join the market.
Considering how poorly Google's external developer support has historically been, I think it's safe to say that without Google dog-fooding Stadia it's going to sputter and die.
Cross platform is old school. You can send email between providers, call people on different phones, and access websites without knowing what kind of server they're on, but can you place a video call from Skype to Google Duo? Send messages from Slack to Discord? Tweet something using your Microsoft account? The open web is dead, it's all big companies' silos now.
The concept of Stadia is mind-blowing but execution is not so much. I got Stadia controller+Chomecast Ultra free as I have YT Premium subscription and enjoying* playing a few games (Example: Tomb Raider is pretty good on Stadia) but as much as I like the concept of playing any game without worrying about buying console or PC and thinking of how much higher the hardware specs required to run the game, It hurts to know in a couple of years Stadia is still struggling with expanding its game availability in any meaningful way. I am always nervous of buying a game thinking if the service would be discontinued by Google then I'd lose my content library. Google really needs to make sure to add every major game title (past classics/platinum hits and future titles) on Stadia to really compete with Xbox or PS here.
* For anyone curious: I have 120 mbps internet connection and Stadia works fine on it.
PC Games with the power of an always-upgraded PC. Maybe not 100% top of the line, but above average, always, with no upgrade cost.
Plus you can play on your TV, mobile device, computer, etc, with the same game saves seamlessly moving between all of them.
No initial $400+ cost.
It offers a lot of the same benefits as consoles, including a monthly subscription that provides good, free games.
The downsides are latency and having to have an internet connection, and the latency is actually pretty decent. Oh, and having to buy the games from Stadia, even if you already own it on Steam, but that's no different than other "consoles".
It's a very compelling platform that they've completely failed to market correctly. With them giving up on first-party games, it seems pretty inevitable that they'll give up on the whole thing now, too. A lot of people never thought it'd last in the first place, and that's partly from their history and partly because Google didn't show enough commitment to it. Those studios that they just shut down were the best proof of their commitment.
> partly because Google didn't show enough commitment to it. Those studios that they just shut down were the best proof of their commitment.
I dunno about that. Counter example: YouTube got huge before Google made original content for it. So, I don't buy the whole "not serious cuz they don't have first party content" argument.
In general, you pay for games on Stadia, just like any console. They're only available digitally, of course.
They also offer a paid subscription (like XBL and PS Plus) that offers certain benefits (higher resolution, etc) as well as free games each month.
If you cancel your subscription, you can no longer play the games you got for free, and you can only play your paid-for games up to (IIRC) 1080p.
It's a great concept that a lot of people don't really see the point of, since they've already invested in PCs and/or consoles, and they don't really want to game remotely at all.
There's also very, very few exclusive games, and they're all pretty weak.
The system as a whole looks good until it's compared to other systems, and then the problems start to show up.
This was all made worse by them requiring that you buy $100+ of hardware to get started at launch, when one of the best use cases for it is people who can't afford to put much money up-front for a console. You can now play it for free, but that wasn't the case at launch when the hype as at its peak. They ruined their best marketing window, and they didn't trumpet the change loud enough when they finally made everything available to anyone.
They've basically screwed up marketing on this in every way possible, and now they aren't even committed to making first-party games, unlike every other console.
You don't have to buy any hardware to start using stadia from your browser. If you want to play on your TV the hardware is a lot cheaper than a PS5 or Xbox.
Its also nice to not have a large box hooked up to your TV.
It's a lot cheaper. You can imagine the cost getting down to basically the cost of the controller if users already have a streaming device (eg Chromecast) capable of running the streaming client.
You're still paying for the hardware somehow, even if it's not in your home.
Theoretically nobody's going to play 24/7 so you could share the hardware between multiple customers, but in practice latency means that your DCs need to be close to them anyway.
The only way Stadia (or some other bullshit like it) could possibly be cheaper would be:
1. Price dumping
2. Preferential game pricing from publishers (to instead hide the hardware costs there)
3. Gym model (tricking casual users into signing long and expensive contracts)
At the moment when PC GPU prices are going through the roof into insanity territory, Stadia and its hardware requirements seems like a great idea in comparison to paying $2k for a GPU to play almost any title fairly smoothly at 4k on a shiny TV. This calculus isn't what was predicted for the value statement to consumers though
For one, it's been very difficult to buy a PS5/Xbox/high end PC for quite a while now. Stadia and other similar services are one of the few platforms that can run the newest AAA titles well and does so without physical supply problems.
it's way more portable so that's a major value proposition in my book. I would never use it for multi-player games, but for single player it's probably okay if you're an average gamer.
I personally wouldn't use it because I'm anal about refresh rates/max settings/latency/etc but for other people (especially younger gamers with less disposable income) I think it's pretty compelling.
Had Google been willing to invest in some next gen "cloud only" titles, we could have seen something truly magical. Imagine a WW2 game with thousands and thousands of concurrent players, or a real time 3D life Sim where people could meet and socialize like in real life.
I think it's being realized across the industry that there isn't huge value prop in bringing existing games to the cloud and targeting low-spec gamers, but rather architecting entirely new experiences that simply are not possible without cloud compute.
Jeff Bezos seems to recognize this, his exact marching orders for Amazon's game efforts was to make "computationally ridiculous games". That to me is the bigger opportunity, because it opens the doors to the next internet called the Metaverse.
I think this just reinforces the fact that Google isn't a content company. They aren't producing video games for the same reason that Cobra Kai is now a Netflix production. Google doesn't have what it takes to adapt to a new market and actually adapt. Can I view the exact pixel your eye browses to whilst playing a video game and use that to sell you incontinence pads? No. Well then Google isn't interested. This is unfortunate, because this is exactly what killed Intel. Funneling tonnes of cash into businesses they didn't understand and then failed in because they had no idea how they were going to capture any more value from their core market that share holders had already accounted for.
Stadia is a good idea that did not reach its potential. But the same can be said about just about anything Google launches these days. I'm starting to get worried about waymo in particular. Perhaps it will not see any of the necessary investments either.
Anyone have insights into how Apple Arcade is doing? It seems to have a lot more games than Stadia, but the variety is limited and it's hard to see the compelling reason is to use it as opposed to simply getting games in the app store.
I'm wondering why a company like Microsoft didn't try this who I feel is far better poised to create something like Stadia. They already have publishers for both Windows and XBox so they could support anyone one of those platforms on cloud infrastructure so that it's no cost to the publishers. Microsoft also has the necessary cloud infrastructure as well as a player base. So, if this product makes sense, what's holding them back?
FWIW, I paid for and played RDR2, AC Odyssey and Valhalla on Stadia, and thoroughly enjoyed them both, on my outdated laptop. I'm old enough not to worry about microsecond lag, as my reaction times are by far the biggest factor.
I'd be sad if Stadia was eventually shuttered, but I haven't invested a significant amount of money, compared to building a rig, and have no intention of replaying games that I've already run through.
Initially I thought some straightforward fun first party games would be great. Make them cheap / free with platform, do some of the standards (a runner, a platformer, etc etc). Keep them pretty simple. That would have been nice - show off a bit what the platform can do, but be a fast follower for some popular genres.
What engine was SGE using? When I heard AWS wasn't just going to do something like license Epic I thought - uh oh... here we go!
As a game developer, Stadia does not in any way excite me because of my prior experiences with the Android App Store.
That is to say, if somehow Stadia is successful then I expect a long term outcome where games are nearly all freemium adware or grind-to-win, with a few poorly-performing notable exceptions; mashing out the same three or four proven-successful concepts with new skins ad nauseum. The margins will be so razor-thin that there won't be any room to risk on innovation.
This is because they don't care to improve discovery on their store front. It's always been awful, it will continue to be awful. There will be virtually no quality control to speak of, with sudden and opaque decisions to remove products, and so on...
Recall that in the very early days of the Android app store it was flush with $20 games, and effectively absent of stolen content, adware and spyware. Look at it now.
The two major improvements that it might have over the App Store experience would be an absence of asset-ripped "clones" (read: your APK is ripped, minorly re-branded, and re-uploaded with a similar name), and perhaps far less malicious software, because access to the local device will be limited.
Honestly,
As someone who lives 3000+ km from the closest cloud
data centre (cable length is closer to 4000 km) I hope that this technology fails. It would really suck if a significant amount of games ended up being exclusively available through streaming.
I am completely out of the loop on games. The only game-related thing that is of the slightest interest to me is Microsoft's new flight simulator. Is it in the cards that it will become available on a streaming platform?
I think a cloud game-platform should focus on allowing avatars jumping between the games, you know multi-dimensional star-ports. When and enemy is chasing you in one game, you could perhaps escape into another.
This should be a warning to anyone thinking of buying games locked up in a service that is subject to the poor strategic roll out & eventual cancellation that Google will probably announce in a year or so.
I am really happy this didn't succeed. Google is the type of company with the wrong incentives to screw up the whole gaming industry turning them into marketing data mining, microtransactions ad machines.
Gamestonk should buy them & raise some Google Ventures funds to see how far they can take it. Both Stadia and Geoforce Now, while not for most of the games I play, do have their place.
They forgot one thing, hardcore gamers that play AAA titles already have PCs or consoles.. and next gen consoles just got released. It's a good idea, just too early for the market.
Google Stadia was a move in the right direction but it didn't go far enough. We need to deploy edge compute nodes in every home. We'll call them "consoles".
Google doesn't know how to compete. They're used to just releasing something and having hundreds of millions of customers overnight. It seems like if that doesn't happen, the leadership immediately blames the product rather than themselves.
This is the main reason I hate Google. They're one of the largest corporations in the world, they have immense resources and power to move the human race forward. Yet they don't. Some might attribute it to laziness, or stupidity. And maybe it's both, but those are symptoms, and the root cause is the lack of competition allowed to fester by the flaccid noodle that is our government.
Last year Google axed the Chromecast Ultra specifically so they could re-introduce it but with Stadia support. Given that context, this move is shocking.
What an embarrassment. They showed off so many groundbreaking features that are only possible playing via the cloud then turned it into just another game streaming service.
Google will continue to operate the Stadia gaming service and its $10 monthly Stadia Pro service. It’s unclear how many, if any, exclusive games will still come to the service, though the company has indicated that it can still sign new games and will bring more third-party releases to the platform. It nevertheless will look to many like a draw down of the plan to have Stadia run as a bona fide competitor to console platforms.
I would agree if their service was a way you could play games you own on google's computers, but stadia is more of an another player in console wars, with its upsides and downsides.
And we know that consoles without exclusives lose, I bet product managers at google know that too.
So they are cancelling the part that actually costs money and creates draw to the platform?
Sounds like tey are putting service on life support with no plans of expansion
What are your thoughts on market fit for Stadia? It seems like Nintendo made something that people really want with the Switch [1]. Do you know if Stadia is being used much?
Computing devices with dedicated graphical processors
Survey says... nobody wants what you're selling Google, and nobody with half a brain trusts you to maintain services long term anyways. Stadia is doomed and riddance.
> With the increased focus on using our technology platform for industry partners, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Google to pursue other opportunities.
I'm wondering why they didn't think of this from the very beginning.
The idea of running a game on the cloud and letting users play it from any device as long as they have an internet connection is surely interesting. But if you want to convince gamers who have already spent lots of money for their beefy gaming machines to switch, you'd better provide them with content - especially exclusive titles.
And, let's be honest, the content was extremely scarce, and in many cases it wasn't anything that you wouldn't already find for standard PC.
Google tried to play both the part of the platform developer and game producer without having any experience on the latter, and it expectedly failed.
When Stadia was announced I remember that my first reaction was "why don't they just provide the platform to gaming companies and let them develop their titles, instead of trying to do everything in-house?" Now, more than one year later, it seems that they've reached the exact same conclusion.
Love how the same community that trashes Google for killing their products is also trashing them on every single attempt at building one. It doesn't work in my country which means it sucks. It doesn't have whatever game I want which means it sucks. It doesn't work on my crap WIFI (although they explicitly say you need a powerful internet connection) which means it sucks, and so on.
I think Stadia is one of the few really innovative products released in the gaming world in years. Everyone else is just pumping their money into sales & marketing and you keep buying their products year after year, even though there's nothing new to them.
Perhaps they wouldn't kill more than half of the projects they start if you'd give them some real feedback on how to improve them instead of constantly throw shit at them like they owe you something.
It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that feel half-baked (Hitman crashes on first boot and complains about a lack of a controller) and a bunch of indie games that feel like a sad attempt to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a middling title (the Hello Neighbor hide and seek game) and titles released half a decade ago (superhot).
Minecraft is on every console imaginable—except Stadia. What about Roblox? Fortnite? Factorio? Among Us? Any Sid Meier's game? Any Paradox game? Every genre of game that I actually put time into is completely absent on their platform. Every game from the top 10 (perhaps 20 or more?) on Twitch right now is absent on Stadia. I don't know what they're doing, but whatever it is, it's wrong.