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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

#581

Post by hakfoo »

ineedasername wrote: post #580
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 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…

Isn't that a lot closer to Geforce Now?

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

#583

Post by SquareWheel »

A12-B wrote: post #181
ketzo wrote: post #7

I think this might get the “oh, Google shuts down another area after a few years, color me surprised” crowd going, but for me this is totally the right move. There are a LOT of videogame developers out there. Many of them are quite good at what they do. The cloud gaming space, while much better than it used to be, has plenty of room for improvement — it’s not remotely mainstream yet, and there’s still time yet to min…

When google tries to make a product that is new and could go either way, i forgive them for dropping it. You have to make mistakes and some products just don't work. But stadia is different. You could see it was never going to work, the infrastructure is just too wonky. I don't respect them for taking on a project they knew they couldn't do, or for deluding themselves into thinking they could.

What do you mean? They're not shutting down Stadia, but two internal game studios.

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

#584

Post by ineedasername »

hakfoo wrote: post #581
ineedasername wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't that a lot closer to Geforce Now?

Kind of, but Geforce Now made the mistake of trying to create something that looked kind of like a storefront that appeared to auto populate your game library from Steam, which pissed off publishers who thought GeForce was basically making money off of their games without giving them a cut.

It's probably more of a semantic difference, but saying "Here's a VM, do what you want with it" is different than saying "Create a game library with us and we'll stream publisher X's games to you. We'll even put them in your GeForce library if you own it somewhere else!"

So publishers got mad and many of the biggest pulled the most popular games. Had GeForce just said "Here's a gaming optimized VM" and let users do whatever they want, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, an very early version of GeForce now did exactly that, complete with a windows desktop.

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

#585

Post by baby »

cush wrote: post #407
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.

Have you ever tried stadia? It's incredible 99.9% of the time. But that 0.1%... I thought I could put up with a few frame drops in Metro, but it just sucks you out of the game.

Like when your own computer starts lagging?

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

#586

Post by baby »

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…

How is it a bad idea? I want to play PC games but I don’t want to buy a desktop PC just for that. I’m currently travelling but I’m planning to get it once I settle. I had playstation Now before that and it was pretty dope.

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

#587

Post by yyyk »

The problem with Stadia is the its value proposition is in conflict with its technical direction and in conflict with its business strategy - the former is manageable, the latter will kill Stadia.

Stadia has an decent proposition for cheap casual gamers, everywhere else you have a better option. These are however the lowest value gamers for most game companies, at least the ones that build AAA games. However, the technical direction is overbuilt for some (mostly unused as of yet) special capabilities. So the companies that go for casual gamers have to port/build their product with no support. Result: both casual and AAA companies just go for different more profitable platforms.

In addition, the type of gamers with the most benefit from Stadia are the ones least likely to hear about it. Google doesn't market it directly anywhere as much as it could. That means you need some kind of external support for marketing - like, say, Android's many many resellers. The game equivalent would be exclusives. But there's no good reason for an AAA company to agree (again, relatively low-value gamers).

In short, Google needs to either admit Stadia is a casual platform and manage it appropriately - or pivot into a very different type of platform focused on things only cloud gaming could do, which may well require making its own games if others don't care about the capabilities.

Closing its own studios probably kills the latter option, but it's not enough to make a pivot into casual. Since Google is unlikely to do it (casual is a lower status thing), I expect Stadia to be closed within 3-5 years.

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

#588

Post by baby »

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 remember a time where new consoles would launch with like 10 games available. It was fine, more games came later.

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

#589

Post by baby »

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…

When the PS2 came out there were like 10 games available.

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

#590

Post by craftinator »

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.

Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.
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