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

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

#821

Post by exikyut » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #774

exikyut wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions: - what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...? - was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak) - did the…

I was also there. G+ was born into an environment of fear. Google leadership had convinced themselves that Facebook would dominate tech forever in every product area because all you had to do to make something successful was make it social, and boom, it won. They were over-generalising from Facebook's success in photo hosting vs Picasa, as well as a few other products. The big fear was that Facebook would do email an…

Thanks for this insight and retrospective. It pretty much answers the questions that I didn't know how to articulate, behind the questions I actually asked. :)

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

#822

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

Xelbair wrote: post #762

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I play games on stadia, including shooters, and latency is not an issue. Latency is the reason you can't launch a Stadia competitor on AWS, but Google has a lot of infrastructure to build on. The latency issue is well handled at this point.

The problem with stadia for me is that gaming platforms are social networks and Stadia is relatively small. No one else I know has Stadia and for many games you can't even expect to find randos willing to play at all. Embr and GetPacked are basically useless.

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

#823

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

h0l0cube wrote: post #390

lumost wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the really confusing part to me. For most of the major metro's of the world cloud gaming is completely feasible on today's internet. Playing on servers in NYC from Boston works flawlessly as a casual gamer, and really opened up the possibility for me to enjoy AAA titles. Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences…

It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?

Stadia would have been a GINORMOUS investment decision. It's not Allo. It is probably thousands of engineering years of work.

Maybe they just couldn't get licensing deals they wanted and refused to let go of the idea until now? It seems like Stadia needs both heroic technical effort and really clever go to market and they just failed outright on the latter.

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

#824

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

spicyramen wrote: post #803

lumost wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

That's very true, pushing for new projects regardless they are successful or not is a path for success. I think eventually this leadership need a successful track history to prove is worth investing in this person/leader projects

Requiring a successful track record pushes people even harder to try to build one by launching new projects.

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

#825

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

asciident wrote: post #398

h0l0cube wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?

This is an ironic contrast as it appears next to the link on Hacker News about the 20-year anniversary of VideoLAN. A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.

Google kills a lot of shit, but comparing VideoLAN to Stadia is bogus on many levels. VideoLAN is literally UI on top of ffmpeg that grew slowly over time. Stadia is an entirely new platform stuffed into a zillion data centers to keep latency low. Compare stadia to Virtual Boy or Jaguar or Betamax.

If no one downloads VideoLAN for a year they won't burn a bunch of money, but also they had no chance at fundamentally changing the way people watch videos.

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

#826

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

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

Not if you factor in the cost of the Xbox and the cost of Stadia ($0).

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

#827

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

awill wrote: post #577

jonas21 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.

Succeeding here might require both. Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.

Given that they didn't launch a single game, I think SGE just regular old failed.

In top of that, after seeing Cyberpunk 2077 get the closest thing to an exclusive launch they could possibly hope for, I imagine they looked at the results decided that the problem is not going to be solved by one or two great games that only work on Stadia. They need many games and for that they need third party.

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

#828

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

aylmao wrote: post #660

ridaj wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

> I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch... I'd assume company politics. Steve Jobs described Apple like a "big startup" [1]— it had 0 committees, and instead had one person in charge of each of the things the company needed to do/care about. They all met weekly and talked about everything they were doing, and it yielded great collaboration.…

Absolutely yes. Also Google has had an explosion of upper management (director and vp) and the way they battle for turf is like game of thrones.

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

#829

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #698

fsloth wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?" Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. Presuming charitably everyone is doing their best etc. What happens for companies where no-one dares to start new projects? Yeah. So what is the correct number of new projects per risk? Everyone would like to choose only those that succeed. But the whole point of new development is that the information an…

> Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. If it's something completely new, then yeah, celebrate failure, because at least you learned something. But game streaming had been tried and failed spectacularly before (remember OnLive?). Stadia didn't add anything new except "this time it's Google, they know their network stuff". Turns out that isn't enough if the business model makes no sense.

Failures being celebrated is about being willing to try out a new thing to see if it's viable.

You don't celebrate failure and you certainly don't celebrate causing failure by having such a poor strategy that random cartoonists predicted your failure mode on launch day and then riding it into the ground.

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

#830

Post by hiptobecubic » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

stryker7001 wrote: post #814

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…

My sense is that they want to sell compute cycles to big gaming companies vs trying to nickel and dime consumers. Smart PMs figure out the value and pivot rapidly.

Smart PMs figure out value and pivot. Google uses trial and error.