Google's attention span is so short that it can't not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
621–630 of 834 posts
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sounds like a regular kid with free access to a good computer.
IMO the only outstanding part there is that he gets up at 7am
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google isn't the company I would lodge this complaint at. They contribute a lot of code back as well.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#624Earlier 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…
> no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end. > profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way. > they provided essentially no featur…
> Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity
How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
check out shadow.tech then...
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#626Earlier 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…
If it helps, apparently the exec in charge of Stadia has left. Whether this is a "you're fired, but you can resign if you want" or a "ship's going down, why would I ride it to the bottom" situation, I don't know.
Yeah, Jade Raymond.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?
And on the other hand, Microsoft lost billions on Xbox (I can't find a citation, so I'm going from memory) and Xbox 360. They stuck with it for decades and have turned it into a great product.
But the original xbox launched with great exclusives like halo. There have been no hyped, got to play it game, that launched on stadia.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#628Earlier 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.
Since 2013 they're released three first party games: DOTA Underlords Artifact Half-Life:Alyx The first was well received but died off the rest of auto-battlers, the second was terrible but is being reworked, and the third was critically acclaimed and the probably the most important VR game released besides BeatSaber. I know you said not counting VR but I feel like skipping Half-Life:Alyx, a game in a well beloved fra…
> I know you said not counting VR but I feel like skipping Half-Life:Alyx, a game in a well beloved franchise that was very highly rated, is a little disingenuous
How? Stadia doesn't support VR.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making a new game takes at a minimum a year for a simple game, more likely 2-4 years. So no, that is terrible planning on their part once again.
Obviously the planning was bad. This is about what you do when you’ve made bad plans. We’ve all made bad plans and we generally stick with them longer than we really should. I know I have.
The sunk cost fallacy only applies when it hurts.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#630Earlier 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.
This understates the impact of the move. Everyone already was aware that Google was better at running cloud infrastructure than at making AAA games when they started their internal studios. This looks considerably worse than having never tried to make games in internal studios.
Something like Stadia requires customers to believe that it won't go away. Google, given their long history of mediocre commitment to projects, already had considerable skepticism for Stadia from Day 1. Shuttering their internal studios is just one more signal to skeptical customers that Google really doesn't know what they are doing and doesn't care.