Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus • Hacker News Board

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

#761

Post by acdha » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

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…

Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates.

On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but:

https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/

“ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”

“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”

http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.

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

#762

Post by Xelbair » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #748

Xelbair wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are TVs with more than 100ms of latency, and there are strategies using state rollback and replay that can further reduce the impact of the latency besides. Latency isn't Stadia's hardest problem.

It is, as it is input latency stacked on top of display latency, stacked on top of internet latency!

Not to mention that 100ms of latency in TVs is constant usually, it isn't the case with network latency.

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

#763

Post by Xelbair » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

hamilyon2 wrote: post #705

Xelbair wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you people realise the there are whole generes of games,where beautiful graphics is a serious advantage, but low latency is not? Like, 600 ms latency is still 100% acceptable and enjoyable. And not only graphics. Turn-based strategy genre can also benefit from gigantic ram and cpu resources - all to make ai smarter, more enjoyable to beat the ever. I think stadia and cloud gaming in general is a gold mine. But it…

Oh there are games where input latency does not matter. You can usually run them on toaster too.

You can make amazing AI that beats humans 100% of time pretty easily, the hard part is making it challenging enough for people to have chance to beat it... It also just needs game state, without all the cruft of stadia(visual side, sounds, graphics, inputs etc).

Also did google partner with any of developers of such games?

Did they develop their own? or even formed any form of partnership for them?

No. They went for action titles, or titles with great graphics.

It was disaster from business perspective no matter how you look at it. Do not expect game developers to just bend over for google just because they release a new platform(and where are doubts about sustainability and quality of that platform from the beginning).

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

#764

Post by cuban-frisbee » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #137

czhiddy wrote: post #24

I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players. Hopefully the games that SG&E do finish showcase what's possible when a developer targets Stadia's strengths.

Why is that sort of game only possible with cloud rendering vs some dedicated server architecture? I think you'd need to go much higher in terms of how many unpredictable, latency dependent objects are needed on screen before you'd start hitting issues with client side rendering.

Synchronising the game state in games now is exceptionally hard even with 64 players for any sort of latency dependent game. It's a constant grievance in most gaming communities today. If you just have to point a gpu view into the world, then it just depends on how many gpu's you can attach to the server.

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

#765

Post by KaoruAoiShiho » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

oivey wrote: post #426

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly better UX is the raison d'etre of companies like sony, apple, zoom, slack, etc. It matters a lot.

The level of inconvenience is on the same level as having to log into Gmail on my iPhone. That doesn’t stop me from using Gmail or buying an iPhone. UX matters a lot, but not that much. Steam is free by the way, since I guess I didn’t point that out in my last post. You just have to buy the games, same as Stadia.

Nah, I need to type in my password every single time into steam. My password manager doesn't work. Since I have a very long password, it's almost impossible for me to play GFN.

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

#766

Post by acdha » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

PicassoCTs wrote: post #754

throwawayzRUU6f wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineering side did a great job on a complex technical task. It's satisfactory, kind of works, not great, not terrible. What boggles the mind is that nobody is able to formulate who is Stadia even meant for. Who are the target customers? Draw a Venn diagram of people who: - care about gaming - are OK paying full price for their games - are OK paying 10 euros a month subscription - are OK buying an extra controll…

Stadia could be a way into gaming for crowds who cant afford top-notch machines.. which is 5/6 of the population on this planet.

I think the person you’re replying to had the right analysis of why that doesn’t match the product they built: not owning a high-end PC, instant install/patching, etc. are a decent pitch but Stadia charges full price and doesn’t credit anything you already own.

I think it’d make a lot more sense if they didn’t charge full price, allowed rental/trial periods, or cut a deal to recognize your existing Steam/Epic/GOG purchases - making it a good deal for people who are traveling, don’t want to fire up a desktop at the moment, etc. – and worked on some unique features like hitting GCP strong points – AI at a new level or massive scaling for things like Sim-style games, etc. — so the value pitch wasn’t so narrow.

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

#767

Post by sofixa » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #755

detaro wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming. FWIW, most people I know using Stadia are not the core gamers, but people who do not want to invest in a gaming PC or console (or worse, a gaming PC/console for each of the kids!). And they seem really happy with it, specifically because its a streaming thing, so I'm not as negative about it. (For myself, yeah, Gamepass would win…

Let's take a step back. Stadia, as a product and service, has been out for over a year. It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing and now we have an announcement that Google isn't going to bother releasing games for the platform (even though they went to the effort of buying and setting up full fledged gaming studios to do just that - which isn't cheap). So I'm…

> It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing

Recently Ubisoft came on board and all of their recent titles are available on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly great to play on Stadia, and i've read about a lot of people that got Stadia for it ( there was a promo, pre-order Cyberpunk and get a free Stadia controller and Chromecast Ultra). Those are not pretty significant growth points.

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

#768

Post by lumost » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

spicyramen wrote: post #562

awill wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Ads making so much money has destroyed Google, because they can make mistake after mistake and still be profitable. Most companies think this is good, but it's actually a curse. When decisions don't have consequences, people don't care. Google doesn't care if Stadia fails. What surprises me more is why people trusted Google enough to invest in Stadia in the first place. Had they let you import Steam games (lik…

This and Google internal promotion process focused on launches. Launch something, make a big splash of it and you will get more $$$. Recipe for disaster. In Enterprise world specifically in Cloud this still haunt them

In a large organization it's difficult to track if launches really were successful or not. "Striking while the iron is hot" is the expected behavior for leaders, and the folks who want to grow need to immediately look at the next big thing.

I haven't seen a good model for incentivizing staying with a product or team in a large company. Most of the time the "ops" work or incremental growth work will never appear as significant as a new launch (particularly if 2 years on the product isn't performing to the launch teams projections)

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

#769

Post by lumost » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

Mindwipe wrote: post #729

Osiris wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but a) they were willing to keep investing billions and billions for years, and it appears Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let Google do that any more and b) they considered it a tactical must to do so. As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told. Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but th…

Ironically the "invest a decade of money" market is undertapped due to a myopic quarter on quarter focus of most businesses for ~50 years.

Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.

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

#770

Post by rco8786 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #464

rco8786 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of times in my life that I've gone back to play an old game I've already played is like...three. I'm not a curator or collector, I just want to play some games here and there. If owning games forever is important for you, then buy the hardcopy. For me, being able to play games now on the devices I already own is a huge win.

You're a tiny minority among the people who spend money on games. Every single gamer I have ever known has at least a few high replay value games that they come back to every few years or games that they don't finish and revisit later. Beyond that, it's not about "owning games forever" it's about owning what you purchase on your own terms not on the basis of a capricious corporation's disposable business model.

> You're a tiny minority among the people who spend money on games.

Source?