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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#231

Post by cbozeman »

n8cpdx wrote: post #25

At what point does working for Google (on anything released after 2008) go from being prestigious to embarrassing?

You're being downvoted, and I have no idea why.

It is embarrassing. It's not just embarrassing, it's fucking embarrassing.

Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in this country - poor broadband Internet service.

But... oh God, if only... if only Google had something they could use... something they could do to solve this problem!?

Oh... wait, yeah. They have their own fucking fiber ISP! Google could have ponied up money and started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.

But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you're stupid and/or naïve enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and Verizon and Charter and AT&T are just going to let you waltz in and steal their customers (and yes, these ISPs do think this way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you should never have entered into the ISP business in the first place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.

If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, """""""lobby""""""" all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials - they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP's territories, laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.

But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems: fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success. The road to becoming America's best ISP will be a long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but when you've got literally billions of dollars of cash at your disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors... or you could build something that would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of revenue in a decade or two.

Too bad they're focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#232

Post by dleslie »

josefresco wrote: post #163
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #33

lol, props to Google for refunding the costs of the hardware, games, and DLC, though. I might've actually bought one, except that I didn't want to be stranded with an outlay of hundreds of dollars for a bricked streaming device. If I'd known up front that they'd have refunded my costs (or even a percentage of them) if they shut down the service in some timeframe, I'd have totally bought one.

Same. If they told me "we'll refund you 100% if we shut down go nuts" I would have gone nuts as the service was solid. The funny thing is it would have helped their "uptake" numbers and might have stalled or prevented the shutdown!

This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their purchases.

Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital things like trading cards and stickers, and before many games were heavily dependent on the continuation of online services.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#233

Post by faller_slive »

beoberha wrote: post #12

Anyone here use Stadia? Not much of a gamer but very interested in the tech of cloud gaming.

I've used it almost exclusively for gaming since it was released. I've occasionally had issues with poor connection over WiFi but most of the time it has worked flawlessly. I know the latency is higher than a locally running game but I'm not doing side by side comparisons so I don't notice it. With this news I guess I'll be switching to GeForce Now which supports higher quality and framerates but a worse UX in my experience. In my opinion the business case for GeForce Now makes less sense than Stadia but I guess the numbers of overs makes more of a difference.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#234

Post by dougmwne »

solardev wrote: post #223

Google's product strategy.. Google: We're going to launch a fancy new product in an already-crowded field, not market it at all, and everyone will jump on board and love it! Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon. Google: No we won't, we're fully dedicated to this thing Everyone else: No way, they haven't added meaningful features in years and they're going…

There must have been hardly anyone stupid enough to buy many games. It’s probably not even much money to refund.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#235

Post by Apocryphon »

wpietri wrote: post #216
candiddevmike wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google, Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.

Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate to bet that they'll keep going with it.

It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone might be interested enough to pick it up.

https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 (thread)

Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's caught on since when it was announced in July 2020.

https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#236

Post by least »

anthonybsd wrote: post #42
TillE wrote: post #17

You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that. I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.

I disagree. The fastest human reaction time is something around 100ms. ( https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime ). I've just measured, and mine is 230ms. As such 10ms lag wouldn't make any difference. I've used Shadow Tech PC for a while during pandemic. With good upstream and downstream bandwidth it was a fairly decent experience, even for playing something like competitive Overwatch. I noticed the difference…

Human reaction times have nothing to do with perceived input latency. There is a latency budget that is different for every individual that determines whether or not something will be an acceptable experience. This budget is divided between everything in the signal chain like the input devices, the computer/console, the monitor/tv, and any other processors along the signal path. Streaming games adds additional latency to the signal chain. Generously if your target is 60fps and you have a round trip latency to their server of 8ms, that's a half frame of added latency. On its own it's almost certainly imperceptible to most people, but it's not working in a vacuum and most people don't live right next to the datacenter. It can very easily go over the threshold for what is acceptable to most people.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#237

Post by [deleted] »

scottyah wrote: post #78
falcolas wrote: post #28

This is a great example of why you can never trust PR statements. They outright lie. We're not working on X. We won't shut down Y. Bald faced lies. Edit: Missed that they're doing refunds. That part's good. EDIT2: Why I'm calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on a whim. They're made months if not years in advance. A public company making public statements about how you're not shutting something down while yo…

Or the PR teams are just misinformed? Some intern doing customer support on twitter isn’t going to be invited to long term strategy/budget meetings

[deleted]

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#238

Post by pb7 »

the_snooze wrote: post #175
scarmig wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason. I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut…

>What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Slow-roll invite-only launch to establish a core user base, work out the bugs, show staying power, and build from there. Exactly what Google did in 2004 with Gmail.

The same strategy that failed with Google+. It's not as foolproof as you're making it out to be.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#239

Post by sgtnasty »

I really liked Stadia, it worked well for me and played lots of AC and Destiny. Never had much of an issue and things worked well. Im bummed, but not surprised. No one seems to mention the real potential of cloud gaming: which is massive worlds and players on the same "server"; and I mean MASSIVE, the likes home PC's would never have enough power/graphics/memory/storage to handle.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#240

Post by unsafecast »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #154

Streaming is not sexy for gamedevs. We all know that latency is going to suffer. I don't understand the pain point they are trying to solve for end-users. Gamers are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games. This is again a case of a solution looking for a problem.

> Gamers are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games.

I think you meant “Gamers that have the money to spare are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games”.

You can get a subscription for $10/mo. That's $120 every year. That's a hell of a deal for a casual gamer that doesn't want to spend the money on a PC.

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