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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

#311

Post by rco8786 »

muppetman wrote: post #204
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…

Great that it works where you are, I assume the US. Here in New Zealand of course it's not launched. So while I can pick one of any other consoles/devices to play games on, Stadia isn't one of them. If you can't reach more than one country, why would anyone want to develop for it?

> If you can't reach more than one country, why would anyone want to develop for it?

Stadia is in a bunch of countries and rolling out to more. It's almost as though it's a new product and didn't immediately launch at global scale.

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

#314

Post by Arelius »

wlesieutre wrote: post #20
tmpz22 wrote: post #4

For context, Amazon is also struggling to make first party games [1]. I think it was hubris that these large companies didn't start with smaller scoped games and instead jumped head first into building their own engines and ips. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...

They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Ama... This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great dea…

> They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that.

If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place.

Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment.

edit:

To add links to the code:

ly framework, clearly core engine systems unrelated to cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...

Gems, the non crytek plugin system: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...

A big dump of cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...

Which we can see has been dramatically shrunken in the time since the initial commit: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEn...

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

#315

Post by serial_dev »

FalconSensei wrote: post #295
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.

> 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.

I get what you are saying, games are essential if you are building a gaming platform

But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.

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

#316

Post by Laforet »

ortusdux wrote: post #290
adamc wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.

I thought the same about reader.

I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.

Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that.

Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...

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

#317

Post by SkyPuncher »

partiallypro wrote: post #309
enos_feedler wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And, those retail stores gave people an opportunity to play with and become comfortable with their surface form factor.

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

#318

Post by chrisseaton »

clavalle wrote: post #277
chrisseaton wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's in it for Valve?

Access to people that don't want to buy a gaming PC. Or can't, these days, considering how strangled the GPU market is.

If Valve wanted to do that why wouldn't they build it themselves instead? They have the server expertise.

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

#319

Post by rco8786 »

anonymousab wrote: post #306
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.

> 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.

Apples to Oranges IMO. Stadia is a PC game streaming service, not a physical game console. Google doesn't own the PC game platform, they're just facilitating it.

If Google had never attempted a game studio and launched Stadia as a standalone platform (as it will now be), no one would have said "ok but it's a bad sign that Google isn't getting into the game development business"

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

Probably true. I wish it were a standalone company also, but it's not.

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