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Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

kotaku.com

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

#641

Post by melomal »

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…

Because of this man! https://x.company/team/astroteller/

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

#642

Post by ridaj »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #639
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…

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.

Arguably, Google already had a strong and successful platform in mobile gaming (Google Play Games). It's even present on TV these days, with game controllers too (Google TV Chromecast takes bluetooth game controllers with which one can play a range of made-for-TV-screen Android games). I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch for which they were obviously unable to get enough content commitments (not even talking about exclusives here, there just isn't even enough non-exclusive content).

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

#643

Post by pjmlp »

That was to be expected, Google definitely has no idea how to talk with game studios.

Every time they do talks, it is all about KPI, Play console and user acquisition (marketing), almost never about SDKs, rendering techniques, tools, anything that what Intel, AMD, ARM, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo regularly do at GDC and their own conferences.

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

#644

Post by Bombthecat »

maest wrote: post #425
mey wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.

Man, I'm so salty about GFN - they have a great product and an economic model that makes sense but, for whatever reason, they gave in to publishers' pressure to remove some games from their service. This is doubly upsetting, as publishers should have no say on where I play the games I've already purchased - whether it's on a computer I physically own or on a computer I rent in the cloud.

They didn't gave in.

Publishers changed their licence agreement to exclude streaming or cloud.

Since you are free to change the licence at anytime you like, they did. My bet is we will see white labelled streaming services from Blizzard and co.

We will have dozens of gaming streaming services, much like film streaming services...

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

#645

Post by jasonkester »

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…

Ugh. Google Plus.

My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book.

So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.

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

#646

Post by CyberRabbi »

toephu2 wrote: post #636
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…

> 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…

There is being human and there is being incompetent. Stadia did not fail because of bad luck. There were lots of obviously bad decisions made that went into this. If what you’re saying is true, then the decision makers moving on to other projects are just burning Google’s money without repercussions. Oh well, no one actually cares I guess.

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

#647

Post by depressedpanda »

pjmlp wrote: post #640
pdpi wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Porting a game to Linux and Vulkan does not require rewriting it from scratch.

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

#649

Post by Epskampie »

rco8786 wrote: post #198

This is totally the right move. I am a (very happy) user of Stadia. If you haven't tried it, you really should...it's an amazing piece of tech. I can find myself with 20-30 minutes worth of downtime during the day, fire up Cyberpunk 2077 or Hitman or Assassin's Creed in moments from my browser *on a macbook* and play at high settings with no noticeable lag. Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for…

This is the problem for Stadia, it’s target audience is gamers who don’t have a lot of time to game. That is not a fruitful market.

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

#650

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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

But there's no reason Google couldn't have done these things! They just... didn't.
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