261–270 of 1001 posts
Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
I mean, it was probably a lie. But, also, things may have changed. It's not like Google didn't just go through a big hiring freeze and budget process.
Funny I just plugged in my Stadia controller and played around to see if the service was still active. It's sad, I really liked the service for a few reasons: 1. I don't have a gaming console, and this allowed me to easily (with the help of my Chromecast) add gaming to my living room. 2. It's way easier than Steam Link/Controllers which always require an element of "massage" to get and keep working. Downsides: My lib…
For those of you who haven't tried it, it is the real deal. I've tried Xbox live, playstation streaming, etc. and Stadia's performance blows every single one out of the water. Even on 4g, performance is unbelievable. You don't even need hardware or any account. You can play destiny for free. It saddens me that this is going away but like most people, I'm not surprised. I just hope that the technology doesn't go to wa…
The hardware though, the platform.. it was an interesting linux machine which could have been a cracking base going forward. The whole thing had so much promise, it is such a shame they half arsed the game licensing/ownership side of things.
Another Google example of great potential sunken by bad/terrible execution. Why didn't it launch as a true "Netflix for Games" solution? Similar to what Microsoft is doing now with its Gamepass. Sure the gaming partnerships needed to be built but could've easily leveraged huge library of Android games. Ultimately will be curious to see how many heads will roll for this. It must've been a huge investment for both hard…
If other HN commenters with (allegedly) insight into Google's politics are to be believed, none.
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.
Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways. Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.
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…
To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible.
I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature.
With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes.
With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it:
- It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in
- It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses
My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp".
So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's interest.
Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google)
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stad...
When I rejoined Google (working in the hardware division), my managers tried to get me to work on stadia and I refused (this was shortly before it launched). I looked at it, said "this won't be successful, and google will eventually get rid of it". My managers simply couldn't understand that. They said "the leadership thinks this will be successful and we should build it" and then I realized they were sheeple.
Or maybe your managers understood, but were tasked with finding workers for the project and were hoping you were sheeple?
When I rejoined Google (working in the hardware division), my managers tried to get me to work on stadia and I refused (this was shortly before it launched). I looked at it, said "this won't be successful, and google will eventually get rid of it". My managers simply couldn't understand that. They said "the leadership thinks this will be successful and we should build it" and then I realized they were sheeple.
I purchased cyberpunk combo pack few years ago. I wonder if the controller can be used on pc/osx for other games.
Anyone?