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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#721

Post by pjmlp »

pie_flavor wrote: post #609
jedberg wrote: post #40

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.

Developers didn't onboard because it was Vulkan-only. You can release for GOG as an afterthought, but you had to build for Stadia as Another Separate Platform, and they somehow managed to make their SDK requirements more onerous than Xbox's. They might still of joined if there were any customers, but customers didn't join because of the prospect of needing to buy their existing games again, then pay for a subscriptio…

Google's GDC talks regarding Android and Stadia are kind of proofs of how they lack any kind of sensibility how to talk with game developers.

While Sony, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, NVidia do cool tech sessions, Google is all about analytics and Play Store.

Then they expect developers used to devkits and Visual Studio plugins, to use classical UNIX like development experience to target Stadia, while hoping Stadia will stay around.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#722

Post by camel_Snake »

pie_flavor wrote: post #637
faefox wrote: post #242

Feels 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 a…

The subscription is optional. I loved Stadia because I only really play one game, Destiny, and I could play it year round for just the annual season pass and 0 hardware investment. Came to ~$100 a year for all my gaming needs and it was perfect.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#723

Post by mooman219 »

There's a lot of animosity on this thread, but I think Stadia shutting down is distressing and we should talk about that.

The concept of a 3rd party game streaming platform is another foot into the grave with Stadia shutting down, and that should be cause for alarm. I think most people in this thread can agree that the licensing model for Stadia was less than stellar, but it feels like getting favorable licensing requires being an existing behemoth (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Sony PlayStation Now, Nvidia GeForce Now) to have any chance of a AAA title being on your streaming platform. Blade filed for insolvency just last year, and has since been remarketed as Shadow.tech which functionally is just expensive Windows VMs.

A lot of people on here will happily argue that they want to own their games (Which I want too!), while also rejoicing that cloud gaming is increasing narrowing to fewer and fewer companies. Licensing is getting increasingly harder, and I'm worried at some point we'll be left with a monopoly and it'll be too late.

This is hacker news, what's the answer here for startups going forward? Is becoming a 1st party powerhouse (Like Netflix) while getting licensing agreements with as many indie games as you can (Like Epic Games?) the only option? How do you make this model succeed when you have no negotiating power? If Sony is suing Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on their platform, what chance does a startup have?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#724

Post by spir »

I was a happy Stadia customer for a while. And then an unhappy customer. And now I own relics of history (Stadia controller+purchased games).

In my view, the root problem here may be that Google is too accustomed to having a monopoly position in the market and not actually treating customers that well, whereas gaming is hypercompetitive and Google doesn't have the customer centricity in their DNA to compete successfully.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#725

Post by AtNightWeCode »

Stadia always would fail. Most sane people knew this. Same as with Google+. But sometimes companies need to be bold for the sake of it.

The most worrying trend with Google is the search engine. The quality of the search results has declined over the years but it seems it has become multiple times worse over the last couple of months. Many top results for simple queries result in pages that directly send one into a redirect loop that ends on porn or casino sites.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#726

Post by ugjka »

drcongo wrote: post #176
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…

This is also a great example of why you can never trust Google.

They shut down everything that does not "print" money for them. I guess they were expecting to beat Steam and that didn't happen so... bye bye

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#727

Post by steve_john »

its cloud streaming service for video games, in light of low adoption rates among users, the company announced Thursday on its news portal, The Keyword. Players will be able to access their Stadia game libraries until Jan. 18, 2023.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#728

Post by parkingrift »

endtime wrote: post #418
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…

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.

>...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it.

Fortunately you are here to be anonymously offended on their behalf.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#729

Post by vhold »

IntelMiner wrote: post #313
berz01 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well said, literally it's getting old. no one trusts amazon/google/fb new ventures. atleast fb is going all in on vr

Facebook is dumping money into VR to try and push their boulder of a terrible idea (the "metaverse") up a hill. Except the hill is a solid 90 degree angle cliff Nobody wants to go to Walmart in VR and artificially grocery shop. That's a dystopian misery. But Facebook is happy to try! Their counterparts at places like VRchat meanwhile realized that just making a sandbox environment for people to do whatever they wante…

For those who have not seen the Walmart VR demo, it's really something else. Something is going very very wrong at Meta if they thought this looked enticing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#730

Post by dgs_sgd »

ren_engineer wrote: post #411
vyrotek wrote: 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…

Something I'm still hung up on about the "promotion then bounce" strategy is wouldn't having a history of launches followed by fizzle-outs actually look bad on your resume?

Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further growth, when people can see that they have been leading failed projects?

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