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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#511
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google practices because Google can't be wrong. My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google. It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But…

It’s easy to see from the outside that Google is incompetent when it comes to overall product and program management.

Since this is a technical audience, I guess I should clarify that “program management” doesn’t refer to software development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#512

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…

I mostly agree with you, but I downvoted your comment because > We devoted an entire month of resources to this project and thought that was enough! ...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it.

I can see where you're coming from.

I think it's appropriate enough to interpret the commenter in jest and see that their point is that google spent 1/nth of the required time/resources necessary for it to succeed.

In that light, it reads to me more like having some understanding for the people working on it that they were set up to fail, and the failure is not a reflection of their effort.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#513

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

That's still a lie from whichever individual or group of individuals you consider to have agency over the matter. Like sure, maybe the individual who physically typed the tweet had little or no agency, but it's still reasonable to call it a lie when the responsible agent was deliberately making a false statement.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#514
post #29

Google need to open source and unlock the controllers - otherwise they just created a mountain of e-waste.

I got one of the free promotional Controller + Chrome Cast Ultra "Premier Edition" bundles they were seeding to YouTube Premium customers out of sheer curiosity. I tried it for the free month, and hadn't taken the controller out of its box since (I do get a fair amount of use out of the Chromecast). The whole system is a _staggering_ technological achievement of (unnecessary) complexity getting a pile of devices clos…

It's a great controller, you're right! Very comfortable and my goto on emulators.

I also looked into the weird WiFi/Bluetooth hybrid protocol stack. It's really impressive, and as far as I know, not jailbroken. Also massively overengineered.

They tried really hard with Stadia, at least at the hardware and streaming level. It's just that no one wanted it. They are before their time; PS Plus and GeForce Go are seeing adoption for streaming games. I bet it'll be popular in 3-5 years, maybe sooner. It's just that Google isn't a reliable carrier for this service, and they don't have enough patience.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#515
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google practices because Google can't be wrong. My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google. It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But…

It's more like learning to government from Saudi Arabia or another gulf country.

The money printing machine obliterates all economic feedback loops.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#516

Translation, for those unfamiliar with internal Google politics: We have already promoted and transferred all the product managers and senior developers who created Stadia. None of them will suffer any ill effects from this disastrous waste of Alphabet resources. All our other struggling products, though: we're still fully committed to those. Really. You can believe us this time.

I would love to know how many promos and packages Stadia generated. Was it at last efficient by this measure? So many google projects seem to be quite inefficient in this regard - a handful of people get a promo and abandon the project, millions spent.

Maybe (probably not) this high profile disaster will finally make the leadership at Alphabet realize how ridiculously dysfunctional the organization is, and things will finally start to change. (doubt it)

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#517
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…

Destiny 2 is free on Stadia. you can launch it right now after the intro hop into a PvP match to try yourself.

Input lag was never a noticeable issue for the non-PCMasterRace population, which is the majority of gamers.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#518

Absolutely devastated about this. I love Stadia. I bought it for a friend last Christmas and we have been using it this year to play games together, she has a Macbook which cannot play a lot of PC games and the Stadia model works a lot better for us. Despite the lack of AAA titles, it had everything we wanted to play, we just started playing overcooked on it. Now I do not know what we will do. Geforce now will requir…

Though it does need a subscription, Xbox Game Pass plus their cloud gaming works very well, plus gives you a huge library of games to choose from.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#519
Happy Stadia user here. Can't say I didn't see it coming.

I'm just frustrated at how bad Google is at marketing a good product. For example, the Stadia front page didn't show anything enticing if you weren't using Chrome!

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#520
post #43

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

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

I agree wholeheartedly - I’m currently using google fi which hasn’t had an improvement of any real impact in over 3 years, and it still barely works on my iPhone. I suspect it will be shutting down soon - which is a shame, it was a fantastic idea but they launched and then promptly did nothing but let it slowly rot.
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