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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

#301

Post by ethbr0 »

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.

> tech (at least to me) feels fine [...] it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken

... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.

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

#302

Post by hmage »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #268
bastawhiz wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right... I thought as an idea, it was perfectly sound. The types of technology required to make cloud gaming work seemed to play to Google's strengths. They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.

Google had to solve same problem any new traditional gaming console has to solve -- get publishers interested in creating for that console.

Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.

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

#303

Post by enos_feedler »

m00x wrote: post #280
enos_feedler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Stadia makes more sense when you frame it against game consoles. The easiest users to steal from the console market are the ones that buy only 1 or 2 console games which are traditionally reserved for those consoles (NFL Madden is the latest promotion and a good example). For these users, there is massive experience shift going from buying a ps4, ps online, just to play the same game all the time. I am one of…

It's actually way cheaper to buy the console if you're just gonna play one game. You get a PS5 for $550 these days, so that's $330 total for a AAA game ($630). Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200). Even cheaper if you go for the PS4.

You aren't including the network service to play games online. Factor in another $60 * 10 years. That nearly squares things up. Then you have to think about intangibles. Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. The $630 you paid for that ps5 and AAA game is frozen in time. You've bought no future value. You can also play anywhere without having to carry around a 4.5kg box that computes math.

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

#304

Post by FredFS456 »

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…

GeForce Now can be used with Steam quite seamlessly. In fact, GeForce Now's value is to play the games you already own on various platforms on their hardware. They're not trying to be another games store.

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

#305

Post by krick »

gman83 wrote: post #78

This will probably be an unpopular opinion here, but I love Stadia. I have a gaming pc, but my GPU is getting old so the newer games don't run well. So I gave Stadia a go. My internet is good enough and the fact of not having to download a game before playing is just fantastic. Also I can play on my tablet in bed. I definitely think this is the future, if it's not from Google, then it'll be Amazon, Microsoft, or Epic…

I don't know how HN feels about Stadia, so a honest question: why is it unpopular? I personally find it absolutely astounding that anyone can question that this is the future.

I'm absolutely confident this is the future. Except, unlike you, I don't mean it in a positive way: I find it to be a one more face of the impending doom, anti-utopian authoritarian future, where people will be forbidden to perform arbitrary computations without a special permission. But that's that kind of wild socio-philosophical predictions that nobody discusses seriously, and nobody even thinks you are serious for suggesting something as preposterous (but then it happen anyway and nobody is really surprised).

On the technical matter, though, it is so much better than owning your own hardware, that it's hard to imagine how that could fail. I mean, obviously, Google will not succeed in making their own games (never could have). And of course current state of Stadia may not suit the "real gamer" (always a minority), because you can have a better performance on your own hardware.

But these problems will be solved, eventually. Better studios will make better games for this kind of platform, eventually it won't be games only, but the whole workspace. CAD running on Stadia will perform better than it could have on your upper-middle-range laptop you paid a shitload of money for, and that still lags and overheats when running your 100-tab browser on it. Your client device will be cheap, completely silent, low-temperature and will run on a battery for several days (that is, with no power-battery technology improvement). Light and portable. It will be unbreakable, compared to your current PC. Basically just a good display, a networking card, and some input device. There is absolutely no way your software won't run better on a shared hardware than you can buy for the same amount of money it will cost Google (or whoever will succeed with this).

I don't know if latency will ever be low enough for every human-use application (which again makes me wonder why are they starting with games: probably the most latency-sensitive thing an average customer uses), but it is surprisingly good right now, and there's still some room for improvement: computation servers will be more evenly distributed (CDN-style), and last-mile latency (the biggest problem, anyway) will improve in the upcoming years, especially on mobile.

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

#306

Post by anonymousab »

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…

I can't imagine anyone seeing it as a good sign of confidence if Sony or Microsoft abandoned all first party game development for their platforms. Not even just exclusives development. Not just selling off or divesting their studios, but shuttering them altogether.

Stadia being good tech is just another sign that Stadia deserved better than Google.

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

#307

Post by rco8786 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #299
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.

The amount of times in my life that I've gone back to play an old game I've already played is like...three. I'm not a curator or collector, I just want to play some games here and there.

If owning games forever is important for you, then buy the hardcopy. For me, being able to play games now on the devices I already own is a huge win.

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

#308

Post by arthurcolle »

Traster wrote: post #189
im3w1l wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that disentangling a project from all proprietary dependencies is very expensive.

It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.

Couldn't the spun out company just license the centralized compute infrastructure and subsequently migrate as needed?

Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here

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

#309

Post by partiallypro »

enos_feedler wrote: post #276
partiallypro wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. Yes, but apply this to 90% of their new products. Google's planning in the current age is about as bad as Microsoft's in the 2004-2012 era.

At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.

Yeah, but Microsoft also shutdown retail stores in part because of the global pandemic, a few other companies followed.

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

#310

Post by Thaxll »

offtop5 wrote: post #246
Thaxll wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UE is a generic engine, it's not good at specialized games like open words. Unity is pretty much none existent in AAA, it's mostly a mobile engine.

HDRP begs to differ https://youtu.be/cQvW0SdprQE I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .

Name a single AAA game in Unity? Everyone can do a shiny scene with good lighting, making a $50M game with it is another story.
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