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Google is shutting down Stadia
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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#632Google search when?
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#633Just 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
What I think happens in situations like these (from experience) is that the team is trying as hard as they can to prevent shutting down. And they either believe they'll succeed, or believe they can't succeed without boosting the expectation that they'll succeed by explicitly claiming they aren't shutting down.
If you say, both to the public and to the team, that you might shut down but you're not sure yet, that's as good as shutting down. And if there are rumors about shutting down, because it's close to happening, then you may have to address it. And you may believe that the only chance you have of not shutting down is to tell everyone that you aren't shutting down.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#634Earlier 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…
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization…
Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for companies that are decently strong and have stable growth.
I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up.
In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't someone else there who would screw up more.
They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth stable".
There is no requirement about "solving existing issues" because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough" and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose everything.
Why this profile for CEOs?
These days, everything is amplified and the smallest mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad attention.
If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything up".
That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1]
The danger could be that the companies may become complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the JD) – and they buy out any competitors that get too haughty, as needed.
[1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ), he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones, such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#635Earlier 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…
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization…
I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.
Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#636Earlier 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…
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization…
On the other hand, Google still just prints money with ads. Everything else is just a talent retention program.
'Success hides all problems', but exactly what real problems does Google have making money?
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#637Feels like the writing was on the wall almost as soon as they launched. It seems telling to me that Stadia couldn't get any traction even during one of the most protracted GPU shortages/crypto manias in history; connectivity requirements and lag issues aside, I think a lot of gamers just aren't interested in outsourcing the hardware side of things the way these corporations might expect. Building and maintaining your…
I will happily pay Nvidia to be able to play my Steam games in the cloud when I am out of state with no access to a gaming PC. But Google wanted me to buy a separate copy [!] at full market price [!!] while also paying them a subscription service [!!!]. And then there's no games, because they thought they could impose a specific graphics API instead of just porting D3D like Steam did, and in reality ports take time and nobody wants spend just as much money as any other console port takes in order to sell to a platform with a fiftieth of the users.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#638Earlier 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…
I'm not sure how bad this is. I think it's good that they like to try new things. They couldn't do that if they committed to supporting everything they start indefinitely.
try new things under a different brand name that doesn't taint everything related to Google if you want to experiment
Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#639Earlier 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…
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization…
I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs want to work on new and exciting shit, so google continuously mints projects and kills them off when they are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working as intended.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say the biggest effect was that consumers didn't trust Google to actually keep their purchases alive for more than two years. Techwise Stadia was actually very good and it could have been a good alternative to a full-blown gaming PC for people who are not gaming enthusiasts.
People who are not gaming enthusiasts are pretty happy with mobile gaming. I honestly don’t know what Stadia’s target market was.
Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware.
This would have given enthusiasts a lot less to hate about Stadia. It would have given customers a lot more confidence in the long-term viability of their purchases. It would have highlighted the flexibility offered by Google's streaming platform without making putting up with its drawbacks a requirement to enjoy your games. A player could start out only streaming their games, then upgrade to a real PC down the road to get an even better gameplay experience out of their existing library.
For many enthusiasts, the product Google actually launched felt like an existential threat to their hobby. They feared games could go streaming exclusive. Publishers could use it as a form of extra draconian DRM, or start designing their games around the limitations of streaming. As a result this turned many of the biggest gaming enthusiasts, the people casual players will often ask for advice on what to buy, into ant-Stadia evangelists.