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Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

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Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#31
When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the computing power and software infrastructure for large scale simulation, which at present is limited to some big university, corporations and large government organization.

But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of users.

Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other products.

This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable.

I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#32
I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#34
post #5

1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competito…

Meanwhile on Switch eShop: 10 to 20 new games released every single week of the year (many of them mediocre, but still).

When you’re a massive global video game streaming service, you’re supposed to plan ahead a bit, don’t you think. This is not a mom and pop store.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#35
post #5

1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competito…

Little bit silly about how on one end people stand united with gamedevs about the poor work/life balance and excruciating crunch time, yet they will complain when a company doesn't release any update during the holidays.

You're conflating two different sides of the industry (as is the parent comment.) A game dev studio is not expected to have monthly updates for any but the largest games. A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content.

Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away several games a month for a couple years now. Once a month updates at a $10 subscription is table stakes here.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How large is Valve?

Around 800. It's not really a relevant factor though, the size of teams shouldn't impact the quality of their communication work.

It's relevant towards how much institutional momentum there is to overcome if you want you team to do something Different From Usual.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#38

On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time: https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.

Related - I think instead of Stadia being pitched as a competitor to cutting edge gaming platforms it would have been interesting if they had started out with offering "classic" gaming content. A cloud service which offered me the ability to switch between (for example) Atari 2600, SNES, NeoGeo, Dreamcast and old school PC games is something I might consider depending on the price model. Yes, emulators exist but they can be fiddly to setup depending on the platform and not everyone is comfortable with downloading ROMs of questionable legality. Presumably, Google engineers could get older games running pitch-perfect on their server hardware and we could stream the results.

Once people were comfortable with "game streaming" they could move forward with new/exclusive content. Which is basically what Netflix has been doing. I appreciate licensing old games is probably a nightmare, but a service offering opportunities to play old classics would have got a lot more goodwill than this mess.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#39

In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for Google to do so too. They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.

Try asking the CSGO community whether or not Valve manages to communicate at all. It's a very common refrain in that area about how silent Valve is and the lack of attention the game gets, despite being the most played game on Steam.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#40
post #5

1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competito…

Meanwhile on Switch eShop: 10 to 20 new games released every single week of the year (many of them mediocre, but still). When you’re a massive global video game streaming service, you’re supposed to plan ahead a bit, don’t you think. This is not a mom and pop store.

It's tough to compare a company's first few steps into gaming to the established machine that is Nintendo.
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