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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

#731

Post by Mindwipe »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #682
selectodude wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. I think one of Google's big problems is that it has a finance division desperate to prove to the market how rational it is, with a huge mass of project managers and leaders from the Gmail days who believe you can launch any old crap and take five years to iterate it into something good.

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

#732

Post by Mindwipe »

Jochim wrote: post #430
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction. I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.

Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.

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

#733

Post by macspoofing »

cryptoquick wrote: post #197
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…

Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?

>Why are people still so surprised

Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.

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

#734

Post by macspoofing »

readams wrote: post #383
cryptoquick wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?

Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.

So as a third-party developer, apart from getting big subsidies, why should I publish on Stadia? Especially after Google has signaled they have no faith in their platform.

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

#735

Post by OOPMan »

Xelbair wrote: post #685
arkitaip wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sin…

You never heard of rollback netcode?

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

#736

Post by ourlordcaffeine »

krick wrote: post #305
gman83 wrote: post #78

This will probably be an unpopular opinion here, but I love Stadia. I have a gaming pc, but my GPU is getting old so the newer games don't run well. So I gave Stadia a go. My internet is good enough and the fact of not having to download a game before playing is just fantastic. Also I can play on my tablet in bed. I definitely think this is the future, if it's not from Google, then it'll be Amazon, Microsoft, or Epic…

I don't know how HN feels about Stadia, so a honest question: why is it unpopular? I personally find it absolutely astounding that anyone can question that this is the future. I'm absolutely confident this is the future. Except, unlike you, I don't mean it in a positive way: I find it to be a one more face of the impending doom, anti-utopian authoritarian future, where people will be forbidden to perform arbitrary co…

I'm pretty concerned that in the not too distant future it will be impossible to build your own PC without having to drop a ton of money for something subpar, since most are happy paying $50 per month to rent their PC from the cloud.

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

#737

Post by macspoofing »

readams wrote: post #490
acdha wrote: post #387

Earlier 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.

Totally agree this is what is happening and Google may be dense enough to believe this is a winning strategy (or a way to salvage their investment). But this is not how you create a competing gaming console, or gaming platform, or whatever Stadia is. Worse, this is a pivot, which also signals Google is ready write-off the entire exercise. That doesn't give consumer and publishers a lot confidence in viability of Stadia.

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

#738

Post by detaro »

macspoofing wrote: post #734
readams wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.

So as a third-party developer, apart from getting big subsidies, why should I publish on Stadia? Especially after Google has signaled they have no faith in their platform.

Same as for any other platform: because it's one place more you can sell your games.

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

#739

Post by w0utert »

anonymousab wrote: post #287
015a wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are n…

Valve did build out a lot of features like Remote Play and streaming on Steam, but just to a level of ok functionality. It's just clearly not their main interest. So I agree with your point, but it's not like Valve as a company is totally unaware of the opportunities. They are just... uninterested.

>> Valve did build out a lot of features like Remote Play and streaming on Steam, but just to a level of ok functionality.

I think Remote Play works brilliantly? I've finished multiple games using it, streaming from the PC at the other side of the house to the TV with SteamLink in the living room, using an Xbox One S controller. I hardly see a difference compared to sitting directly behind the PC (granted, this is limited to 1080p on the SteamLink hardware, but my eyes are old enough to not care about higher resolution anymore).

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

#740

Post by detaro »

Laforet wrote: post #632
acdha wrote: post #384

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. 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 grave…

> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.

What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.

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