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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

#571

Post by selectodude »

GioM wrote: post #547
selectodude wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google basically has Dutch disease.

Interesting. Could you comment a little further? I can see the analogy here to advertising making their other products appear less competitive internally, but it sounds like you may have further thoughts.

It doesn't go too much further than that. The value of their employees is best spent on facilitating more ad clicks so without a decree from the top stating "we are pivoting" and having the political capital to follow through with that, they're stuck.

Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.

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

#572

Post by partiallypro »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #317
partiallypro wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was sad to see them go because it was a quick way to get a Surface replacement, but you can demo Surface at Best Buy. Most of their stores have Microsoft kiosks that accomplish near the same thing in terms of demoing and it costs Microsoft virtually nothing.

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

#573

Post by lmm »

enos_feedler wrote: post #261
jeremyjh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental m…

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…

Google doesn't have a great history when it comes to chat/social functionality.

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

#574

Post by Qwertious »

TinkersW wrote: post #543
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architecturally, are Google's Stadia servers substantially different from a standard PC?

They run linux and use Vulkan for rendering, so this is a potentially large port burden to force on devs.

Potentially, but there's only one distro and only one set of hardware, so there's waaaay less QA than an actual Linux port.

Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.

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

#575

Post by acdha »

readams wrote: post #490
acdha wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?

Running a cloud infrastructure is something Google is good at. Making AAA games is not. It is entirely consistent with a deep belief in the product for them to reallocate resources toward partnerships rather than trying to spin up a AAA game studio internally.

That's not wrong but I think they've put themselves in a tricky position here: this requires companies to make a non-trivial commitment to their platform. There haven't been any new deals or increased partnerships announced to make this look less like they're just giving up on the idea, and anyone thinking about partnering with them has to be wondering about the odds of getting much return on their investment relative to the risk of Google changing direction again.

Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.

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

#576

Post by alisonkisk »

vadym909 wrote: post #556
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.

Opposite. My kid built a gaming PC and uses it for school from home and gaming from 7am-9pm or 90% of his waking hours

That doesn't sound healthy.

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

#577

Post by awill »

jonas21 wrote: post #434
mmmBacon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Succeeding here might require both.

Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.

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

#578

Post by Judgmentality »

zestyping wrote: post #559
ruined wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively bann…

I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water. Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.

Can you tell us any more about what happened?

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

#579

Post by yyyk »

enos_feedler wrote: post #303
m00x wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves.

That's the scary thing for some people. The 'continuous improvement' may just as well be taking away stuff you 'own' or spying on you.

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

#580

Post by ineedasername »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #195
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…

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 might have gained more traction if it simply said "Hey, this is kind of like our usual compute engine, but it's gaming-optimized and you can access it through Chrome for low-latency streaming"

And let people install whatever they want on it. There's probably a decent market for people with low/mid range hardware that would like to stream the newest games an ultimate settings. Others who'd just like a portable game library not tied to a specific PC, and a 3rd group that might use it through a chrome cast like a game console.

I'm not sure how large of a market these groups would have been, but certainly much larger than whoever Stadia appeals to.

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