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When will Google shut down Stadia?

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Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#81

Post by PaulHoule »

carrozo wrote: post #26

Brutal, but fair given the track record of so much out of Mountain View. I’ve always detected a certain sense of tragicomedy about Google; their money-printing ad machine is something they’ve always seemed to feel deep shame about, which drives (and also pays for) all these other things that they give up on when they realise they’ll never come close to that kind of commercial success again.

Something similar is true about Microsoft in that it's had a few core products that have been big hits (Windows, Office, ...) and then to satisfy investor's growth expectations they plow the profits into other lines of business which often fail (Windows Phone, Hololens, Microsoft Band, ...) or stagger on marginally (XBox).

Azure is the latest big hit.

Somehow Microsoft has adapted to this reality with some grace, they even balance it with the "Who moved my cheese?" attitude of its customers.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#82

Post by JohnFen »

Analemma_ wrote: post #28
netsharc wrote: post #17

Hah, excellent joke/insight! If this goes viral it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy - people realizing Google likes to kill their services will say "Stay away from Stadia, it'll hurt if you get into it and they kill it".

Joking aside, this self-fulfilling prophecy issue is turning into a serious problem for Google that needs attention from the C-suite. Killing a product is no longer isolated to that product alone but is reflecting badly on the entire company and kneecapping completely unrelated teams. It's especially bad in the cloud: there are tons of enterprises that won't even look at GCP because of Google's flighty reputation.

I think Google has reached the size and power that their execs probably think "We don't care. We don't have to."

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#83

Post by username90 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #72
username90 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already do, just with different consequences. Our brains are very good at mitigating input latency since it deals with it all the time, so we adapt quickly to 80ms. Compare that to the current system where what you see on screen is not what actually happens in the game. You get used to it, but every game solves it differently and it always feels bad. So I think that a lot of players would actually prefer this kin…

> Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it This is just straight up not true in the slightest. There's a reason HDMI ALLM exists, and it's not because "nobody notices hundreds of ms." 80ms is very noticeable, it's like moving around in sludge. hundreds of ms is straight up unplayable. This is no where close to what consoles &…

I didn't say that specific people didn't notice it, just that a most people are surprised if you tell them that they have hundreds of ms latency when they play on their console because they thought it was practically instant because their brains tricked them.

The fact that console gaming is so popular despite it having such horrendous latency is proof that latency is not an issue for streaming services to go mainstream. I'd look more at unreliable latency and data caps, people definitely notice 100ms latency spikes.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#84

Post by juped »

inetknght wrote: post #39
fjabre wrote: post #25

Google’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or deprecating APIs and products like this on a whim. They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.

> They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades. Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.

Gmail cannot even do threading, and it makes threads burst into flame when a threaded mailreader tries to interact with people using gmail.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#86

Post by SanchoPanda »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #20

My theory is this was a ploy to make use of idle cloud resources Google invested in for GCP. If that is the case I have much less fear of it just being shut down since its just gravy on top.

I think the core insight here is right, that as far as they were concerned it seemed silly to miss out on a chance to sell their "google-scale" experience and know-how in many cloud/distributed contexts.

But similair things were true for lots of dead products, and google's willingness to launch a large number of products and only keep the ones that gain massive market traction shows just as much paranoia about ending up with a stable full of lqggards and weak brands.

If user growth flattens out after two years, be nervous.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#87

Post by meheleventyone »

deminature wrote: post #50
jimbob45 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem with modern gaming. Everyone wants to fix all the problems that aren't the core problem we have with gaming: microtransactions. No one cares about how nice your game looks or how low-latency your game is if you designed it around microtransactions with pay-to-win gameplay and a laughably greedy content update schedule.

Microtransactions are a pet peeve of the hardcore crowd, but ask any average gamer and it probably doesn't rate in the top 10 disagreements with modern gaming. It's an artifact of the hardcore gamer filter bubble online, not a widespread grievance. The problems Stadia addresses - eliminating 100GB downloads and constant 10-20GB patch downloads that might take hours to pull down, removing the cost of entry in the form…

But it replaces multi gigabyte downloads with multi gigabyte per hour downloads.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#89

Post by kupiakos »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #69
robbrown451 wrote: post #51

Sorry, but pet peeve. Shutdown is not a verb. (should be "shut down") http://notaverb.com/shutdown

Sure it is. And I'd rather take it from Merriam-Webster than someone's belabored "notaverb.com" hobby horse. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shutdown First known use of shut down as verb: 1779. If your issue is merely with the lack of a space, then it just seems petty to me, like getting technical about raincoat vs rain coat.

I'm unsure what you mean - they said that there should be a space there and Merriam-Webster seems to support that. They put "shut down" and "shutdown" in the same page, and state that the verb version is "shut down". In the "First Known Use" section, it looks like it's just going with what the name of the whole page is.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#90

Post by kllrnohj »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #33

Nice joke and nice irony. I actually think that Stadia will be very successful in the long run, and I think Google will never shut it down. Same for GCP. (Just IMHO, and not much to substantiate my prediction.)

> I actually think that Stadia will be very successful in the long run

So far nobody has come up with a viable revenue model for cloud gaming that people are willing to pay for. People are already complaining about Stadia's $10/mo just to then pay full price for old games. And there's no way even that is covering Google's costs to run the service.

The biggest hurdle is not Google gets bored and canning it. It's at what point does Google decide Stadia needs to at least be revenue neutral and prices double if not quadruple, with the free tier eliminated entirely. Is the service still viable at that point? Will anyone stick with it?

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