Earlier quoted context omitted.
What ever happened to "fail fast"
But don't fail stupid.
And don't fail the same way over and over again
Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
781–790 of 834 posts
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#782I'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…
> The value for gamers is debateable at best
I don't have a PC or a console and I can play Cyberpunk - in fact the Stadia controller+Chromecast came free with it (because of a promotion).
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many Android and Switch games get published on GNU/Linux? Yep, it boils down to it.
Let's cool it with the hyperbole, okay? There are many reasons Android and Switch games don't get ported to Linux; having to rewrite the game from scratch is not one of them.
Which proves the point that even when games happen to be natively written against a Linux userland, with native support for Vulkan, it isn't economically viable to sell them on GNU/Linux.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stadia doesn't have a $10/mo cost or $75 upfront cost though. Stadia Pro is optional, and the client runs in Chrome on almost any device (not sure about iOS yet). I can go on the store and buy Cyberpunk 2077 and start playing on my phone if I wanted to.
> Stadia Pro is optional Last time I signed up the Stadia Pro upsell was mandatory (you had to provide a CC). This was annoying because I was interested just in Destiny 2, which is free.
This was me last night when I received this comment. I went to go try the free experience and was prompted to give them a CC. I closed and deleted the app in response. I really wanted to try the free experience, but it appeared they were going to add the friction of, “and don’t worry, we’ll automatically renew your subscription.” No thanks.
This seems like terrible UX.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
PC Games with the power of an always-upgraded PC. Maybe not 100% top of the line, but above average, always, with no upgrade cost. Plus you can play on your TV, mobile device, computer, etc, with the same game saves seamlessly moving between all of them. No initial $400+ cost. It offers a lot of the same benefits as consoles, including a monthly subscription that provides good, free games. The downsides are latency a…
Thanks for sharing. Can you only play select games in the subscription? Do they ever get removed? I'm just trying to see why it is struggling. It seems like a great concept
In general, you pay for games on Stadia, just like any console. They're only available digitally, of course.
They also offer a paid subscription (like XBL and PS Plus) that offers certain benefits (higher resolution, etc) as well as free games each month.
If you cancel your subscription, you can no longer play the games you got for free, and you can only play your paid-for games up to (IIRC) 1080p.
It's a great concept that a lot of people don't really see the point of, since they've already invested in PCs and/or consoles, and they don't really want to game remotely at all.
There's also very, very few exclusive games, and they're all pretty weak.
The system as a whole looks good until it's compared to other systems, and then the problems start to show up.
This was all made worse by them requiring that you buy $100+ of hardware to get started at launch, when one of the best use cases for it is people who can't afford to put much money up-front for a console. You can now play it for free, but that wasn't the case at launch when the hype as at its peak. They ruined their best marketing window, and they didn't trumpet the change loud enough when they finally made everything available to anyone.
They've basically screwed up marketing on this in every way possible, and now they aren't even committed to making first-party games, unlike every other console.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#786You'd think after OnLive's failure Google might have learned a few lessons. It just doesn't work. Not until we have 6G everywhere at very low cost and even then it won't be as good as running games off your own machine.
Why would 6G make it work and why would it be better than hard wired internet?
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 busine…
Thank you for the links. I have not read these before and there are some very interesting snippets of information I was unaware of. It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.
Feedburner similarly seems like something they could have monetized but nobody felt pressure to try very hard when the company was making so much money. It probably would have been a rounding error in their existing revenue stream but new markets don’t happen by accident.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Literally every single statistics out there on game ownership. In fact among high spenders there's a troubling statistics showing a lot of people buy games yet never even launch them :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/04/17/nearly-37-o...
>Nearly 37% Of All Registered Steam Games Have Never Been Played
Steam's most played games list tend to change very slowly over time, with a few slots occasionally taken by mediocre "throw away" titles that people consume once and then forget after a few months : https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ In the current month's list, almost all the games most launched on steam are games that are old and have high replay value. Counter Strike, Dota, PUBG, GTA5, PoE, Rocket League.
Outside of steam, one of the most played game of the world is League of Legends. It currently has a 115 million monthly player count, and a 50 millions peak daily logins. Yes, that little competitive PC game has seen more people playing it than the playstation 4 has seen buyers in its lifetime.
The best selling game console by the way only ever saw a few of its titles ever reaching a large player base : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video.... This is known as the Wii's tragedy. The best selling console in the world, but games barely ever sold on it, with people mostly sticking to a few Nintendo's first party games. You could say it's a tiny subgroup that kept financing literally every other games on the platform.
People tend to stick to a few game they consider worth their value and replay them. The people who keep buying new things over and over at $60+ and forget about them after they're ""done"" are a minority among gamers. They're a very attractive archetype for game developers as they tend to be a failsafe for when their games just can't appeal beyond very superficial characteristics but they're not the majority of gamers by far. Most games sold on the market don't sell that many millions and it's always the same group who keeps buying the new shiny thing. The average AAA game tries hard to become an experience akin to movies with their many cutscenes, dialogue and visuals because devs are trying to get the attention of that guy who just keeps buying new shit over and over and throws it away once done.
And that's without counting "casual" type of gamers who also tend to focus on their one or two game and forget about the rest. Of the casuals, the wealthier types who are willing to spend irrationally are what every single mobile game developers wish they had, because the ''whale'' archetype will spend countless grands on just the one game they always play. All the ""free"" video games that have paid for options rely on these people who show extreme loyalty toward the one game. The modern incarnation of Counter Strike subsists from people willing to keep spending insane money just to get a skin that says that they spent hundreds or grands on something that doesn't even give them a competitive advantage.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#789Earlier 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.
Why is it that all of the most competent people I've worked with have been humble and empathetic towards failure, while most of the mediocre to not so good people have had harsh attitudes towards others? It makes me sad.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
From the NYT article [1]:
>Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.
>Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.
It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...