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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

#431

Post by stordoff »

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…

> How do you pay out developers? I’m a developer, I make a game, I say I’m going to put it in Game Pass, a customer pays [you] $14.99 a month. How do you decide how much to pay me, the developer?

> [Phil Spencer, head of Xbox:] [In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk.

https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-int...

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

#432

Post by zajio1am »

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…

> If you're an old gamer who wants to play newer games but doesn't have a ton of time and don't want to drop $1k+

Or just pay $150 for a second-hand graphics card that is one or two generations behind current models but was top-end at its age, and put it to a basic desktop PC.

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

#433

Post by JeremyBanks »

mattlondon wrote: post #34

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.…

Ubisoft+ subscribers can play their games on Stadia: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/10248037

They should lean into that kind of thing.

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

#434

Post by jonas21 »

mmmBacon wrote: post #337
serial_dev wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform since there are no games that people want to play. I guess given the very limited functionality it’s technically not a failure. But the whole point is to have games people want to play. Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success): Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to…

> the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform

The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.

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

#435

Post by [deleted] »

rolph wrote: post #373
apozem wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream of cloud gaming, for me, is everyone gets an amazing gaming PC. I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.

if you can allow users to load the code out of the cloud and or the user swarm ; onto thier machine and then dissconnect from the cloud, the potential efficiency is even more staggering.

[deleted]

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

#436

Post by fuzxi »

rco8786 wrote: post #311
muppetman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It's almost as though

The sarcasm does not add anything to your comment.

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#437

Post by p1necone »

ceejayoz wrote: post #393
rolph wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you can allow users to load the code out of the cloud and or the user swarm ; onto thier machine and then dissconnect from the cloud, the potential efficiency is even more staggering.

Huh? That brings us right back to “everyone needs a hefty at-home computing device that goes underutilized most of the time”?

I suspect the comment was tongue in cheek. "Cloud gaming will eventually come full circle and we'll be gaming on native hardware locally again"

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

#438

Post by Bayart »

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'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this.

If you look at any of Google's project besides their core data-farming business, it's their usual mode of action : half-ass something cool and drop it.

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

#439

Post by cwyers »

fuzxi wrote: post #422
cwyers wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve also has shipped exactly one first-party game since Dota 2 in 2013, outside of VR stuff, and it's a card game. I don't think they're tops on the list of studios that could give Google a big hit game to put on their new cloud console.

Didn't they make that DOTA autochess game as well?

Huh, so they did. I don't think that materially changes my point, but, yes.

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

#440

Post by p1necone »

enos_feedler wrote: post #345
gsich wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xcloud or Geforcenow offer the best of both worlds. You "own" (in whatever sense you can "own" the game) the game and you have the choice where you want to play it. Not at home/cheap notebook? No problem. With Stadia you can only stream the game.

The question for me is if it works on a cheap notebook or on the road, why wouldn't you just want to play it this way even when you are at home? Why do I want to own anything? I just want to play the games I bought.

Because playing with video compression, a max of 60fps and added latency is not ideal.
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