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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#301

Post by wpietri »

dougmwne wrote: post #198

I am more entertained by this than I should be. Back when Stadia launched I was in a Reddit thread saying that the blatant double-dip business model of subscriptions + purchase stunk and that I had no faith in Google to not shut this storefront down shortly. I was immediately roasted by a flock of obvious astroturfers telling me that this was an absolutely serious move by Google to dominate the console games market a…

> The paid astroturfing felt very weird coming from Google.

I don't doubt you at all, but how does one tell paid astroturfing from rabid fanboys?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#302

Post by dekhn »

MrWiffles wrote: post #269
dekhn wrote: post #74

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.

When you looked at it, what was it that tipped you off to its eventual failure? Was it a flaw in the technical design or something? How did you know it would eventually fail? (Looking to learn how to spot things like that, here!)

My google failure sensors were honed on reader and google plus. In fact I just rejoined a company I worked at before Google and they had adopted Currents- Google's workspace version of Google Plus. Folks tried to get me to use it and all I could say was: I will never use Google Plus again. We are shutting down our Currents because... nobody ever uses it.

There's several factors at play. First, Google simply does not have any ability to compete in the consumer gaming space because they don't understand it. Second, to make the project work required an enormous expenditure across hardware, software, deployment, and game studios. If the product wasn't absurdly successful, it would be a failure simply because its profit margins would be low. Third, there's no real way to make money doing machine learning on gamer behavior (the way this works in mobile, where many games including ads) so the profit margin would be low. Fourth, I saw a number of preeminent engineers who worked on the project leave shortly after it was launched, or some time later (when it first started becoming obvious the project wasn't a hit). Fifth, leadership pitched this as something that only Google could do, that Google's unique hardware and physical presence in POPs meant they would have significant advantages was obviously wrong (multiple companies always had the technical acumen and production infrastructure to make this happen).

What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is becoming to something that Google would have to cancel because they can't get the profit margins to compare to ads.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#303

Post by jrpt »

Even if it wasn’t massively popular as a gaming platform, I thought it could be pretty profitable as marketing for games, where you can actually demo the game from a web browser and try it before buying it. This could be either directly on e-commerce sites or ads on Google.com. I’m surprised that they didn’t do more with that before killing it. If you could show having a Stadia demo increases conversion rates and sales, it would be really useful even if gamers don’t acquire Stadia gaming libraries.

I wonder if they could’ve sold it off to Netflix or something instead of killing it.

I have a Stadia and actually liked it even though I thought the go to market execution was bad. Also the latency made it problematic for multiplayer games, so I just played single player content.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#304

Post by theptip »

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.

That works great for a service where costs scale with users so you can run lean in beta.

Unfortunately I don’t think Stadia fits that description well; you need to build hardware, network PoPs, license games, etc.

Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it’s hard to make a splash like that.

I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not have mattered.

It just ended up not being a game-changer economically, people still want to buy consoles etc.

The model of thin-client gaming might win long-term but it’s just not a clear winner yet.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#305

Post by MichaelCollins »

I wonder if, in future months/years, we'll still see comments complaining that Google's reputation for killing products is unfair and exaggerated by a loud minority who are bitter about Google Reader. I recall a few comments making this argument in defense of Stadia's long-term viability.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#306

Post by rizzaxc »

scottyah wrote: post #92
n8cpdx wrote: post #25

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

Why are so many of you here so bitter against this company?

Because they started out good ("dont be evil" and all), providing an exceptional yet fundamental internet service but somewhere along the way they lost the plot. They now hoard enormous wealth by shoving ads to our faces yet have done nothing with the money. Not to mention their engineering culture goes directly against the spirit of this site (rest'n vest vs startup's hustle culture). They're the hero turned villain all start ups fear they'll become

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#307

Post by _fat_santa »

Animats wrote: post #210
coldpie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember every single article when they first announced contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was doomed from the start.

Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google product that isn't ad-supported dies, with very few exceptions. Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. "Google Cloud is now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but Google's ad business is likely to subsidize it for the foreseeable future."[1] AWS makes money in that business, but Google does not. So, don't depend on Google Cloud for anythin…

Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will just kill it in years time.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#308

Post by julienreszka »

josefresco wrote: post #93

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…

You can probably use shadow.tech as an alternative

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#309

Post by _ea1k »

cletus wrote: post #291

Story time. I left Google in 2017 after Fiber (which I worked on) was unceremoniously mothballed. I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode. Before leaving one of the teams some of us considered joining was the then unlaunched Stadia team. This was an effort out of Cloud I guess to create value added GCP services. Ultimately it never went anywhere because the team didn't…

Don't they have competitors that are doing better than Stadia? Eg, geforce now?

TBH, I played quite a bit of Madden on Stadia and input lag wasn't really an issue. I think there are a lot of games that actually worked really well there.

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