I'm having a hard time finding any info on what "SG&E" is despite a lot of searching. Can anyone provide some context?
"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.
And why would any 3rd party studio invest resources into a platform the platform owner isn't willing to invest in?
With SG&E shutting down Stadia is dead whether they admit it or not.
Why does a game need to be controversial to be compelling?
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.
Exactly. Some of the best selling games are games like Call of Duty, GTA or Mortal Kombat.
Any game like that would have a full on employee revolt as people demanded the team involved to be fired.
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 b…
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.
I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine. Unreal and Unity are both fantastic. Let your dev teams pick from one of those two and be done with it. Unless your doing something really special theirs no reason to build an engine( if your goal is shipping games )
> 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.
In Lumberyard's case, the engine is free but you're locked in to AWS for any cloud services
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.
the latest chromecast is the "Chromecast with Google TV", also called the 3rd-gen chromecast. The Chromecast ultra is the previous generation. https://store.google.com/ca/product/chromecast_google_tv
That is one of the most obnoxious sales pages I have seen in a while. WTF is up with the scrolling?
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…
Google basically sounds like a large scale startup incubator where every successful project is doomed to fail.
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.…
Imagine buying health insurance from someone for whom it's a hobby.
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 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.…
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.
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.
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.
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. The…
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.