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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

#631

Post by mulmen »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #624
eitland wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Privacy from other users, not privacy from big G.

I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.

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

#632

Post by Laforet »

acdha wrote: post #384
Laforet wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one…

> I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline…

What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any.

The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.

The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.

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

#633

Post by CaptainZapp »

mulmen wrote: post #631
CaptainZapp wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Privacy from other users, not privacy from big G. I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.

Thanks for the clarification.

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

#634

Post by TheKarateKid »

ruined wrote: post #550
mckeed wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.

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…

Actually, G+ was full force UNTIL there was an agreement for Google to back off in exchange for Facebook not competing with certain ads products.

All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.

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

#635

Post by CaptainZapp »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #526
aeturnum wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Goog's history on this, I read this announcement as them soft-killing Stadia. They aren't going to admit defeat, but unless they put real resources behind paying people to use it, they aren't going to see any use of it as an API and are effectively mothballing it.

The article says that they’re reassigning 150 people who worked on internal games. If they were betting the future of the platform on the number and quality of games that can be turned out by 150 people, then this never made any sense. Major game studios are hundreds or thousands of people, so this is just Google admitting that nobody in-house can come up with any good games. I don’t think it says much about the futu…

I'm not sure that I would invest significant cash to buy games for a platform, which may be killed on a whim. That's apart from all its other disadvantages, namely a lack of choice.

> I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.

We probably disagree here, but to me that's an ear piercing yell about the confidence Google puts into Stadia and its future.

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

#636

Post by toephu2 »

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 does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?

Have you ever worked for a tech company? They don't just fire PMs/leads because their project failed. We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private). It's the 10% that succeed that the company is going after (but you don't know that until after the fact of course). The PMs that drove this will simply move on to the next project and keep trying until they get a hit.

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

#637

Post by mullingitover »

eitland wrote: post #610
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…

> 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 wrt to other users

They required real names at first (slavishly copying FB in that regard), and then later as they were obviously failing they tried offering the option to use a pseudonym. I tried it, and they rejected my handle for no reason given. This was the day I started to really have deep-rooted negative feelings for Google, it was just insulting to have my time wasted by an also-ran social network.

That was the last straw for me and I burned my G+ account to the ground.

I think Google suffers from something akin to the oil curse. They're throwing out dilettante efforts to diversify but never accomplishing anything noteworthy outside their core business. In that regard they're making the world worse, because they're soaking up top-tier talent and then producing garbage with it.

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

#638

Post by h0l0cube »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #634
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…

Actually, G+ was full force UNTIL there was an agreement for Google to back off in exchange for Facebook not competing with certain ads products. All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.

Is there a source you can point to, or is it hearsay?

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

#639

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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…

When I first heard of Google developing Stadia I thought it's for targeting Asia where mobile gaming is huge and since for majority of users from there smartphones are their first computer; Any 'AAA' game on mobile would be a new experience; But my assumption was proven wrong after seeing Stadia getting released only in North America & Europe where gamers are particular about their games.

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

#640

Post by pjmlp »

pdpi wrote: post #603
bastawhiz wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone is going to compete with Microsoft , of all companies, I'd expect it to be Google.

Except Microsoft is investing heavily in first party games, buying loads of studios and letting them retain a lot of independence. They’re approaching the streaming service as an extension of the Xbox experience. It’s a much more robust strategy all around

And not forcing studios to rewrite their games from scratch to a snowflake platform.
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