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Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

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Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#221

Post by meheleventyone »

ketzo wrote: post #150
hn8788 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 o…

Cloud native is another concept that’s grossly oversold. It’s just GaaS with an extra step.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#222

Post by ocdtrekkie »

lrae wrote: post #162
Jare wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thing…

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…

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.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#223

Post by username90 »

notatoad wrote: post #119
crucifiction wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#224

Post by s3r3nity »

rodgerd wrote: post #165
klipklop wrote: post #66

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.

That is true. Google alt-righties would riot at anything that was controversial in a gaming sense (like having women as protagonists).

More likely, people losing their minds over what the protagonist in a Star Wars game looks like. [1]

https://etcanada.com/news/548672/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order...

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#225

Post by alasdair_ »

wlesieutre wrote: post #115
LegitShady wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#226

Post by drusepth »

hn8788 wrote: post #72
ketzo wrote: post #7

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 min…

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…

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.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#227

Post by Clewza313 »

_zamorano_ wrote: post #199
bastawhiz wrote: post #185

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 fe…

I don't think they had the slightest chance of Valve partering with them

Why not? Valve is not in the hardware business.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#228

Post by hobofan »

offtop5 wrote: post #219
hobofan wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enabling that for in-browser/mobile spectators without needing to install the game wouldn't be exactly trivial, though.

Why. Twitch plays Pokemon worked fine .

What does that have to do with anything? TPP was a bog standard Twitch stream, with no ability for custom per-viewer spectator cameras.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#230

Post by jeremyjh »

bastawhiz wrote: post #185

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 fe…

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).
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