When will Google shut down Stadia? • Hacker News Board

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#261

Post by pytester » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #222

131012 wrote: post #184

I feel that we are a little bit too hard on the big G on this one. They simply have their own inner startups, which they kill if product gains no traction. We should look at how many startups from YC die within 4 years and make the comparison. I might be wrong, but the ratio could be very similar. Still, Stadia will fail for sure ^^

"No traction" for a Google product just means it's not the next Search or Gmail. It doesn't mean that zero people use it. Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes. If big YC companies all got shut down if they failed to turn into another letter in the FAANG acronym, maybe people would become reluctant to use services from YC co…

>Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes.

Other than google reader I doubt any of these would have gotten traction at all without big g behind them.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#262

Post by inetknght » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #217

inetknght wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up a mail server isn't difficult. It's about as easy as installing and configuring a web server, and just about as technical. Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult . Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.

The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. That it's easy and cheap on a marginal basis for them to add one more inbox to their millions doesn't mean the overall infrastructure is easy to keep running.

> The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc.

Can you provide specific numbers to the count of people devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc? I suspect the number's a lot smaller than you think. I also suspect the peoples' duties are less devoted than you think.

If Google, for example, truly worked to tackle spam then it wouldn't have a spam problem today. If Yahoo truly worked to tackle reputation, people wouldn't have trouble sending email using an email client instead of a browser.

I'll grant you that uptime does have dedicated people. But it's not to tackle spam or reputation. It's because offline services don't make a profit.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#263

Post by juped » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

ben_jones wrote: post #220

juped wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has a Google product ever been good? - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing") - Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)

Some of the Google Cloud Products are quite good in my opinion. Spanner, BigQuery, GKE. They have pretty high price points, but that's what you get to have with a good product. With GCP Google gets to show off what it is actually top of the world at, with these one-off consumer products Google Employees are just being naive to what their strengths really are.

I can believe this (I only use AWS so I don't know firsthand).

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#264

Post by effingwewt » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

40acres wrote: post #238

mempko wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that streaming games is an old idea and has been tried many times and Google's competitors do or will have similar services. Google isn't doing anything new here. They don't have any first-move advantage. The only advantage they have is infrastructure and scale. Whether that is enough, we shall see.

I do understand that this is an old idea. My TV actually has a steaming service for games built in but I have never used it because I doubt the performance would be up to standard. The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has rea…

There is ZERO innovation here. This is simply google trying to lock more people in to a service they will later try to pivot, which will then be canceled. I'm glad you are excited for this, and I hope to be proven wrong, but like all others I see a google service and wonder how long until EOL

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#265

Post by charwalker » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

gilrain wrote: post #118

The criticism of Google Stadia and the defense of its concept in this thread are correct. There is a successful future in cloud gaming and nobody denies that. However, it's extremely likely to be delivered by a company with both the technical chops and industry chops, including a deep existing library. Google only has one of those, and they didn't even nail the technical side convincingly. Look toward Microsoft or So…

Take MSFT game pass and back it on cloud servers. Almost all the games run on Windows, their own OS, and can be optimized for whatever datacenters are on the way out from enterprise apps but with some GPUs tossed in.

I'm over simplifying but I'm sure MSFT has a plan out there if they wanted to move forward after seeing how Stadia works out.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#266

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #21

haolez wrote: post #3

Although Stadia might fail, I see cloud gaming (i.e. streaming A/V) as a revolution for multiplayer games. We can now have all kinds of complicated physics and particle engines, since all players are known to experience the exact same “world model”. It might help a lot with anti-cheat technology as well. It’s pretty exciting!

Hardcore gamers may not like it, but it's hard to argue against the observation that the overall trend everywhere is towards hosted services. Yes, there are some limitations imposed by physics but applications requiring specific high-performance local [client] hardware are going to be increasingly niche. (As, arguably, a lot of the most hardware-intensive gaming already is in the scheme of the population as a whole.)

[deleted]

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#267

Post by minikites » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

ddtaylor wrote: post #229

gameswithgo wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is trying something really innovative This kind of thing has been around for nearly 10 years.

Yup. OnLive tried it with similar results. There are many markets where 10ms - 20ms latency doesn't matter that much, but realtime gaming isn't one of them. It's extremely disorienting to play a game with even the slightest framebuffer lag.

I think Stadia could be super cool for simulation games like Cities: Skylines. The lag isn't nearly as much of a problem and the ability to have an extremely powerful computer simulate many more "agents" would be fantastic.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#268

Post by 0xffff2 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #15

haolez wrote: post #3

Although Stadia might fail, I see cloud gaming (i.e. streaming A/V) as a revolution for multiplayer games. We can now have all kinds of complicated physics and particle engines, since all players are known to experience the exact same “world model”. It might help a lot with anti-cheat technology as well. It’s pretty exciting!

Not until the world's internet gets a heck of a lot better. There's no beating the laws of physics here. RTT in normal installed titles with modest system requirements is already an issue for gamers, let alone the latency this requires. Maybe in a few years when something like Starlink is in wide use, this can be revisited. I really don't get who Google's target market is for this. A flat monthly fee I can see, that'…

Starlink also has to contend with the laws of physics (in particular, the maximum density of ground stations is quite low). It's a service for rural customers and a select few urban/suburban customers at best. It's not a mass-market technology that's going to put cable/fiber ISPs out of business.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#269

Post by aeturnum » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

adamzapasnik wrote: post #123

Very surprised of general negative sentiment towards Stadia. Why is it like this? Because it's Google, the evil company? Seriously, if any startup launched it in its current state, people would be cheering and blaming it on a new tech/new challenges. But cause it's a very big corporation with top talent it means that they have to release top quality product every time? What the hell... I'm very excited about the proj…

>if any startup launched it in its current state, people would be cheering and blaming it on a new tech/new challenges

I'd direct you to a review of Onlive, a previous startup doing exactly what you say[1]. The take away is exactly what I've heard about Stadia:

"OnLive's streaming game system is a really cool concept, and the ability to access a library of games with no downloads, discs or storage worries is definitely cause for excitement. Some gamers will be put off by the occasional lag, though, and the list of currently available games isn't hugely tempting.

Still, OnLive is an exciting proposition, and it costs nothing to try it out. It probably won't suit you if you're pernickety about lag and image quality, but we'd recommend checking it out nevertheless."

I personally think that, after seven years, Google seems to be in the same place as a much smaller company, speaks to why it feels disappointing to me.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/onlive-review/

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#270

Post by balls187 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

juped wrote: post #93

dopamean wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products? Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which the…

Has a Google product ever been good? - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing") - Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)

Over it's history, Google has created many good products, and released a several great ones.

Search and Gmail transformed the web.

Google Docs and Sheets brought standalone office suite online.

App Engine was ahead of it's time for cloud based applications.

Google Big Query still is an amazing cloud based way to analyze TB/PB of data cheaply.

I'm critical of some of their business practices, but denying quality of Google's products is myopic.