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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

#461

Post by ehsankia »

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.

Nvidia literally throws you in a VM, where you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer. You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit. It also again assumed you have a Steam/Epic account to begin, or else that's another layer you have to deal with.

With Stadia, you press one button and you're in the game 5s later. It also has deep integration, allowing friends list, voice chat, game invites, achievements, etc. Nvidia relies on Steam for those (Epic doesn't have most of it). That's just the surface level integration too. By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.

If you've used both, it's night and day experience. Again obviously for you and me, we're used to PC gaming, but for average people wanting to play some AAA game, GFN is a complete no-go.

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

#463

Post by drusepth »

ece wrote: post #234
jonathannorris wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get all the doom and gloom about this announcement, but it's exactly what I would be doing if I ran Stadia. Don't waste money trying to build first-party games when you don't have scale, spend all your money on scaling. Specifically: - Spend budget on getting more AAA titles released on Stadia on launch day. (like they did with Cyberpunk) - Spend budget giving huge discounts on AAA titles to attract more users. - S…

These are all things that consoles and existing game stores do extremely well already, and the last two are net deficits for Stadia if you have an ISP or router that's not up to the job. Amazon Luna, GeForce Now, Shadow, running Parsec in the cloud and paying by the minute, xCloud, and PS Now all better Stadia by offering game subscriptions or more features or are more sustainable by being cheaper in the case of GeFo…

>the last two are net deficits for Stadia if you have an ISP or router that's not up to the job.

If we're speaking in net good/bad, I'd wager the last two end up being net positives when you consider how many people think their ISP/router isn't up to the job (and therefore don't try Stadia at all) compared to how many actually aren't up to the job.

The minimum speed Stadia requires is 10 Mbps, or 35 Mbps for 4K streaming; I'd personally recommend at least 20 Mbps without 4K though, since it's "playable" below that at the cost of graphics artifacting. To put these numbers into context though, Speedtest/Ookla reported an average USA broadband speed of 135 Mbps and an average worldwide broadband speed of 64 Mbps for 2019 [1], rising every year.

It's a lot harder to measure latency, though, which is the biggest variable IMO for whether Stadia works for you. It doesn't work well on my parents' HughesNet satellite internet, but I regularly got I'd wager that the the subset of [people Stadia would work well for but they think their connection isn't good enough so they don't try it] is larger than the subset of [people that would try Stadia but don't have a good enough connection for it].

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/global-index-2019-in...

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

#464

Post by root_axis »

rco8786 wrote: post #307
FridgeSeal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're a tiny minority among the people who spend money on games. Every single gamer I have ever known has at least a few high replay value games that they come back to every few years or games that they don't finish and revisit later. Beyond that, it's not about "owning games forever" it's about owning what you purchase on your own terms not on the basis of a capricious corporation's disposable business model.

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

#465

Post by p1necone »

5d749d7da7d5 wrote: post #401
delecti wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphics cards have ranged across the price spectrum for the past 20 years. The first GeForce "Titan" card was $1000 and came out right in the middle of that time range (2013). I'm not sure what PC market you were watching for the past 20 years, but it's not the one I remember.

Titan was the most premium card available and probably not representative of a typical build.

As are the modern cards that cost $1000. You can spend significantly less that that and still play all the modern titles at high settings and 1080p60fps easily. (Or 4k if you're willing to make the same compromises on framerate that consoles do)

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

tclancy wrote: post #102
causality0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate. The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as…

Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by Jochim »

mdoms wrote: post #298
oivey wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't characterise them as a hardware business, their main focus is on software and they happen to be willing to produce hardware when they feel they need to.

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

#468

Post by d0gbread »

yodon wrote: post #111
onion2k wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stadia Games & Entertainment." It's Google's in-house content dev studio. Shutting it down means Stadia will need external support to work. If it's gets that then it'll be great. If it doesn't then it'll get killed off.

And why would any 3rd party studio invest resources into a platform the platform owner isn't willing to invest in? With SG&E shutting down Stadia is dead whether they admit it or not.

I've seen this comment a few times now across HN and article comments. Can you say more about why you hold this opinion?

It seems clear to me that Google deciding not to focus on game development is showing a level of awareness we should want to see. In fact, by redirecting those resources they are directly investing in the platform instead of content for it that, let's be honest, probably would have flopped.

I've been a happy Stadia Pro subscriber for about six months and in that time all I've heard from the community is "we want AAA, we want game x, y, and z" and with Google's decision, they're likely freeing resources to do just that.

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

#469

Post by AceJohnny2 »

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've been playing Destiny 2 on Stadia for 2 months, and I love it. It's been stable, pretty, lag-free & fluid (60fps). Even though D2 is a shooter and would thus be particularly susceptible to lag, I found the experience to be practically perfect. That said, I have Comcast Business Internet which is stable, and everything's connected over ethernet.

Stadia's voice party system works well, and while I've been playing on a TV (Chromecast Ultra & Stadia controller), I've run raids with folks playing on their phones, iPads, & Chromebooks.

Maybe because it's still a small and new community, but I've found it generally friendly and good quality.

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

#470

Post by ehsankia »

wronglebowski wrote: post #94
guardiangod wrote: post #22

I know Google/Stadia recently partnered with LG to bundle the Stadia app with LG TVs, but I wonder why Google doesn't do this with every TV manufacturers (save Sony.) If I were Stadia's marketing chief, I'd 1. Bribe the TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app 2. Advertise that the TV includes _a game console_ during TV commercials. 3. Allow the TV users to pay a bit extra ($20?) to buy a basic game controller. 4.…

There was recently an article about Stadia where a developer from a decent sized studio claimed they were approached by Google for Stadia. What did Google offer for the developer to bring the game to Stadia? Almost nothing. The figure was in the tens of thousands. For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost. Sometimes millions of dollars…

1. What's the effort required for the port? If a game already has Linux support, it basically is compatible with Stadia, whereas if you have to port it to Xbox, that requires a lot more time and resources.

2. Was the offer to be a timed exclusive like with Epic, or just to add integration for Stadia? I would assume the offers money to be very different depending on that.

3. Are we comparing similarly sized games? "one prominent indie developer" is kinda vague. Again not sure how comparable it is with Epic/Microsoft deals.

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