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Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

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Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#391

Post by KerrAvon »

bushbaba wrote: post #366
Workaccount2 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stoppe…

Sundar is doing what the shareholders want. Grow ads revenue while distracting regulators from a google anti trust lawsuit.

Good tech CEOs also plan for the long term. Google needs a near-death experience to get some management discipline.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#392

Post by activitypea »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #192
SilverBirch wrote: post #66

You would really hope there would be some far reaching repercussions for senior leadership at Google on this one. There are lots of projects that Google has tried and failed on, and sure, that happens. But this one is probably the clearest, obvious failure of execution. There is an absolutely crystal clear playbook of a Tech company forcing its way into the Gaming business. So how Google has managed to enter, complet…

No. In fact, the incompetent people at the head of those projects fail upwards. Take Phil Harrison, who is at the head of Stadia (not Stadia Games and Studios): - Worked at Sony Entertainment, handling the software side of things, was there to help for the massive fuckup that was the PS3 launch. - Got fired (or "resigned" in C-level speak), joined Infogrames (soon to become Atari) and majorly fucked up, saying that s…

I don't feel it's fair to say Gaikai failed miserably. They were on par with other competitors such as OnLive. That whole first generation of game streaming created a new market, but was ultimately too early -- the internet infrastructure they were betting on didn't come soon enough to enable their product to take off. At that point, getting acquired by the biggest dog in the gaming industry is the best possible outcome.

Phil Harrison is an absolute tool though.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#393

Post by [deleted] »

sulam wrote: post #111
game-of-throws wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google usually fire people when they shut down a service? I thought they were transferred internally to help build the next messaging app.

Depends on the people. In the Stadia case there were people hired to build first party games in Montreal and some of the skills needed for that don’t have a natural place to go elsewhere inside of Google. I don’t know this for sure, but I expect many of those people were given a package and had to find new employers. People with transferable skills were moved onto other teams at Google depending on who needed those s…

[deleted]

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#394

Post by anonymousab »

lelandfe wrote: post #298
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #15

"there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down." It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show. This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.

> Q: If the Stadia service is discontinued, do we know what (if anything) will happen with game purchases? > Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product: > We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :) > The same happened to Mov…

The best part is how he just completely avoided actually answering the question. They simply refused to ever give a clear answer. Because they know the answer, and we know the answer, and it's all bad for them. Rather than engineer a system where the answer could be more positive, they stick their fingers in their ears (the most charitable interpretation).

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#395

Post by camel_Snake »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #15

"there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down." It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show. This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.

I absolutely buy that Stadia might be getting shut down, but I really don't think the underlying tech is going anywhere. Google wants to white-label the service as Google Stream or something similar - they've done this already with T-Mobile[0].

If I had to guess, they'll shut down Stadia as a platform but keep the tech alive, rebrand, give everyone new URLs to play the games they've already purchased. Kinda similar to how they migrated everyone's songs/purchases from Google Play Music to Youtube Music when they shut down GPM.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/21/22738550/arkham-knight-g...

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#396

Post by prox »

lelandfe wrote: post #298
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #15

"there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down." It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show. This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.

> Q: If the Stadia service is discontinued, do we know what (if anything) will happen with game purchases? > Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product: > We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :) > The same happened to Mov…

3 years is “years to come”

I am slowly moving all my customers/clients away from Google Analytics, mostly to Matomo. Couldn’t be happier. Some clients can also diversify their ad spending to other platforms. Google needs to start feeling what “customer service” means, for now it has none.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#397

Post by FerociousTimes »

Gareth321 wrote: post #310
lelandfe wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Q: If the Stadia service is discontinued, do we know what (if anything) will happen with game purchases? > Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product: > We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :) > The same happened to Mov…

I literally just dusted off this same bookmark and lo and behold, you beat me to it by four minutes.

Great minds think alike

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#398

Post by bones-jones »

jfim wrote: post #332
ctvo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors. They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Go…

I'd phrase it differently. Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.

Nobody understands where oil comes from. Anyone who did would have drilled there already and would be a new letter in FAANG (maybe MANGA instead now that FB -> Meta?).

Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.

Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.

Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).

In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#400

Post by ChildOfChaos »

swozey wrote: post #271
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, used this before Stadia and it was rubbish. No where near as good and as stable as Stadia, also the monthly fee is a pain. With Stadia you can just buy the game and then play when you want, I don't think there is anything else like that.

It's come a long way since pre-Stadia that's for sure. Can't get around the monthly fee though.

Is performance better now? I was in the beta when there wasn't a limited selection of games and my friend used the free version once it came out of beta about a year and a half ago.
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