Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 834 posts

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

#291

Post by mdoms »

drusepth wrote: post #125

I know it's cool to hate on Stadia still (but less so than it used to be, now that everyone seems to just use it as a Cyberpunk console...) but this move makes sense to me. 1. First-party AAA games are a huge investment (in time and money), especially for a company without any experience in building them. Starting a first-party game studio is a huge risk (financial and planning) that I'm not surprised didn't pan out.…

> I know it's cool to hate on Stadia still

What is up with the Stadia people thinking anyone on Earth gives them a single moment of thought whatsoever? No one who doesn't use it cares enough to Stadia to hate it, trust me.

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

#292

Post by enos_feedler »

oivey wrote: post #279
enos_feedler wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NVidia model sounds like more hassle than it's worth. Might as well continue buying PCs. If you could afford them before you can probably still afford them. Latency will be lower and experience will be better (no waiting in a queue). The benefit of Stadia is actually it's simplicity. It's about bringing in new gamers who may have come from console world, but don't have the Steam libraries, etc. I wrote this in an…

I’m unsure how Nvidia’s approach is worse. On GeForce now you can play games from Steam or Epic, right? Isn’t Stadia the same except you are locked into only Google’s store? That’s pretty significantly worse.

I'll repeat what I said: "the value prop needs to focus on the job at hand: playing a _specific_ game which happens to be your favorite game you play mostly. Thinking of it as some kind of a gaming platform is not the way."

By considering Steam and Epic, you are already looking at this from the perspective of a platform. I am simply saying Stadia is better if the game you love is already there. NFL Madden is the latest Stadia promo right now. If most of your gaming time is consumed playing Madden, Stadia is probably the way to pay for it.

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

#293

Post by anonymousab »

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…

It seemed pretty obvious to everyone. Use a gamepass model so that less content stretches further, or offer a compelling variety of content - especially exclusive content - to make up for users paying full price every time.

They did neither and it's utterly boggling. They were clearly aware of their shortcomings when they dodged the more direct questions in early interviews. I don't know if it was just hubris, or an unwillingness at the top to understand. Or maybe the project started out too big to steer well and they just accepted it because, hey, high level paycheck.

There are probably a lot of now ex-googlers with a ton of I-told-them-so stories.

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

#294

Post by jlawer »

danbolt wrote: post #173
macspoofing wrote: post #101

Typical Google half-assery. If they wanted Stadia to succeed, they should have been investing in game studios years before so at launch they would some games to demonstrate the concept of cloud gaming and actually drive sales. After all, it's really all about the games. And third-parties are never going to do it. But there was no plan. They just did it and hoped success would just happen.

Yeah, I feel like they should have looked how Microsoft more or less lucked out with Bungie producing a killer app for them. [1] Successfully creating a game service requires content, content, and more content. That said, there's still space for Stadia's infrastructure to compete with Xbox/Azure. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwqjg3/the-complete-untold-h...

Yeah luck was involved, but Microsoft was at least smart enough to buy a company with a good looking game which had been in development for a while. This brought down the timeline. Bungie had showed off halo at MacWorld and was initially targeted at Mac (with an expected port to PC).

Google could do this, or pay even bigger $ for a timed exclusive from a AAA publisher. Instead google started their own studios, which would likely pay off in the long run, but google doesn't have the attention span to operate like that.

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

#295

Post by FalconSensei »

bastawhiz wrote: post #258
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today. The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way…

It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.

> It's only been a failure because of the lack of games

Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.

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

#296

Post by chaostheory »

015a wrote: post #271
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…

> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are n…

> Valve/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap

Valve is not behind in VR

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

#297

Post by easton »

Jochim wrote: post #275
kenhwang wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has the Stream Link and VIVE. Steam Link is pretty much Stadia using your computer instead of the cloud. They're very much in the hardware business.

Valve have their own VR headset, the Valve Index. Steam Link was previously a hardware dongle but has been replaced by android/smart TV apps with the same name. I'm surprised Nvidia didn't attempt to partner with them rather than developing GeForce Now as a separate product, they could have taken advantage of Valve's developer relationship/client/store front and handled the actual running of the hardware, which Valve…

They are partnered, it's just not exclusive.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

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

#298

Post by mdoms »

oivey wrote: post #289
mdoms wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are? Their latest flagship game literally only works on their hardware.

Are you talking about Half Life: Alyx? It works on basically any VR headset as far as I know. I think they just need to be SteamVR compatible which basically everything is.

Maybe, as soon as I heard it was VR only I stopped paying attention. But the point still stands - Valve is very much a hardware business, has been for years.

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

#299

Post by FridgeSeal »

rco8786 wrote: post #198

This is totally the right move. I am a (very happy) user of Stadia. If you haven't tried it, you really should...it's an amazing piece of tech. I can find myself with 20-30 minutes worth of downtime during the day, fire up Cyberpunk 2077 or Hitman or Assassin's Creed in moments from my browser *on a macbook* and play at high settings with no noticeable lag. Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for…

> Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for Stadia to shine, but I'd guess that the HN crowd skews towards that.

Sad Australian internet noises.

> don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia.

Or, or, do buy the gaming rig, because it will still work and you’ll still have the games 3 years after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing.

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

#300

Post by ljm »

StillBored wrote: post #183
causality0 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks. Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?

I'm sure Alphabet was really a restructuring to optimise tax returns
Post reply on HN