Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 834 posts

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

#681

Post by Duralias »

lutte wrote: post #528
ilikehurdles wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Valve fully backed cloud gaming, that would have downstream effects on publishers and PC gaming as a platform. Who would sign on to publish a competitive, reaction driven game if the market is segmented between the high-latency cloud where anyone can play, and physical hardware only purchased by a relatively diminishing market? The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with…

Moreover Valve's hardest push in the past years was in VR. They are literally the only major (not indie or AA, and not doing a bad port of an already existing game, like Bethesda) developer to make a full game's worth of content for the platform that makes full use of the platform. Alyx was a breath of fresh air for anyone who wanted something out of VR that didn't feel like an incomplete experience. And VR is inhere…

With technologies like re-projection or whatever specifically the Oculus Quest uses, wireless local streaming isn't that bad, It can easily be a terrible experience if you do not know what you are doing, but its fine most of the time, the latency honestly isn't noticeable, unless you play beat saber.

Although doing over-the-internet streaming is definitely a terrible idea because of how many out-of-your-control factors exist.

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

#682

Post by v7p1Qbt1im »

selectodude wrote: post #571
GioM wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Except Azure is the new thing that makes MS untold amounts of money via the same lock-in effect created by windows/office. It‘s adjacent business basically.

Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature.

A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused.

Otherwise your stock is getting destroyed.

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

#683

Post by [deleted] »

arkitaip wrote: post #680
simonh wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you assuming the consequences should be draconian? There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.

Because grand parents mentioned firing people...

[deleted]

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

#684

Post by bostik »

simonh wrote: post #667
toephu2 wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem with that is that it creates a culture of complacency. If failure is acceptable and even expected to be the norm, then don't be surprised when lots of projects you thought would be sure-fire hits or are executed successfully by competitors end up failing.

This reads like a classic Dilbert strip.

Sure, we all know 9 out of 10 projects fail. Let's make sure we only ever begin the 1 that doesn't.

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

#685

Post by Xelbair »

arkitaip wrote: post #680
simonh wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you assuming the consequences should be draconian? There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.

Because grand parents mentioned firing people...

Well to be fair Stadia was an idiotic project that was doomed to fail due to physical constraints(getting sub 80ms latency, and that's VERY generous for input latency that people are used to), which are unsolvable. No ML does not fix that, because if game predicts your inputs are you even playing it, not to mention the frustration when it mispredicts.

That's the sort of thing you have engineers for - so you don't sink money in something so idiotic. Not to mention that they picked the worst possible business model: pay price for title and pay a subscription at once.

The one who greenlit it, and proposed it should be under scrutiny.

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

#686

Post by themacguffinman »

comex wrote: post #654
themacguffinman wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people won't have to "get over" latency because they're not used to or sensitive to low latency in the first place. I'm not saying their eyes aren't good enough or something, but the fact is that a majority of them either can't or won't spend on gear necessary for the performance you're claiming. Steam's own hardware survey indicates that the most basic, cheap monitors are the norm with 1080p or lower being the…

The problem is that the 8ms figure is wrong. If it were really 8ms of added end-to-end latency compared to local, then it would be a complete non-issue – even in the twitchiest fighting games and shooters, unless you’re a literal pro-level player, as you mentioned. Most people would not be able to tell the difference even if they were specifically looking for it. It would even be tolerable for VR. Unfortunately, the…

You're right it's likely closer to 80-120ms of difference, though that doesn't change much. It's still apparent that people are used to some pretty high latency (I remember that Digital Foundry counter-intuitively found that Stadia's overall latency is actually lower than the Xbox One X in a particular game) and elevated latency on that magnitude isn't a critical issue for a majority of players and games.

And again, that's not to say that they can't notice the difference or something, it's just not the dealbreaker that it seems to be for some vocal people. I can definitely tell the difference but it's not intolerable for me. I'm definitely happy to trade it for better convenience in many cases just like many are evidently happy to trade it for cheaper hardware.

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

#687

Post by _the_inflator »

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…

Oh well, seems like there will be another entry here soon: https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

#688

Post by bashwizard »

xxs wrote: post #674
bashwizard wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Stadia this christmas and while I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed. Everyone says that it runs well, no input lag, great picture quality and so on. But that was a lie. While playing Destiny 2 and Hitman on a laptop running Ubuntu and over wifi with a controller, it felt ok-ish. Almost on par with playing on a Xbox Series X but not quite there. However, when I tried the same games on my gaming rig, on a 1 Gbi…

>Almost on par with playing on a Xbox Series X That's pretty low bar to clear

Exactly, meaning it's not good if comparing it to PC.

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

#689

Post by v7p1Qbt1im »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #355
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.

Geforce Now library kinda sucks to me, not all that much better than Stadia but that's my opinion. Stadia has a few names (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) that GFN doesn't and vice versa.

This is probably what prevented the Stadia team from doing the same thing. Lot‘s of people saying: „why not partner with valve/steam for their library“. Because it‘s not Valves library to begin with. This was inevitable. No publisher cared about GFN playing their games in the cloud in the beginning. Just like studios sold off their content to Netflix for pennies in the beginning. It was free money and they didn‘t have a use for them anyways.

Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.

That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.

But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.

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

#690

Post by aspaceman »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #142

Fundamentally these big tech companies just don’t understand game development. AAA games cost a lot of money, so these companies think that if you come with a bunch of money, you will end up with a AAA game. My company was pitched by both Google (for stadia) and Amazon to create games for them and it was totally clear they had no idea what they were doing, and no idea what they were even trying to achieve. The funny…

I love to imagine the interactions between professional artists and engineers / executives at Google. Moreso executives. I think a lot of folks have never had to work with an artist.
Post reply on HN