Google is shutting down Stadia

My very first TGIF after my noogler one, I sat behind some disgruntled employee who kept yelling at the stage about how the execs were lying to us.

I thought it was fairly rude and also I thought the execs were simply using careful language. After attending a bunch more TGIFs, I finally realized that nearly every exec had a very specific way of presenting things that sort of made their work sound perfect, even if it was shit. You can see an example in "An Update On Google Reader" or "Advancing our Amazing Bet on Google Fiber", or even this one.

IMO streaming games still has a lot of potential. Too bad Google couldn't pull it off.

The Youtube stuff is only the surface of what would be possible.

Not having to keep up with hardware is pretty much the main selling point of games as a service and it's still not worth the tradeoffs.

I'm what they call a patient gamer anyway. I'm often 10 or 15 years behind, but I've never once run out of games to play and the savings are substantial.

Consoles (which have many of the same problems Stadia did) aren't usually terribly expensive if you're willing to be a generation behind and used console games are insanely cheap with the exception of certain franchises (Nintendo titles and JRPGs are notorious for staying expensive. Castlevania Symphony of the Night came out in 1997 and can still go for well over $100 for a copy!) but thankfully emulation covers a lot of that. By the time I picked up a PS3 I was picking up 10-15 games for the same cost as just one game at release.

As a bonus, waiting a few years to play the latest title means that everyone else has finished beta testing it for you and the entire experience is much improved. You can also usually get all (or most) the DLC included with the already low price of the game.

Point being, you don't have to spend a fortune or have a blazing fast video card to have a nearly endless selection of exceptional games.

Wonder if the CEOs can be made to sign (and stand behind) such statements, like CEOs/CFOs were made to stand behind financial statements.

Although I guess financial statements are quarterly, PR statements are dime a dozen.

I’ve realized only recently a way to interpret what’s going on at Google economically-speaking: as companies grow and as economies grow as well (e.g. to be more automated and industrialized), this always results in greater bureaucracy [1]. However, Google while it did add more bureaucracy, tried to instead turn these new less-purposeful jobs and bloat into widescale attempts at “innovation”.

Partly legitimate, but partly to maintain culture and a semblance of being an innovative company, in spite of the fact that they are a monopoly that, at the end of the day, is not really incentivized to innovate (e.g. M&A is much more practical for monopolies, as is competitor sabotage, sales and marketing, which of course they’ve also done).

I guess Peter Thiel for example said this long ago (in a convo with Eric Schmidt iirc): that Google is actively anti-competitive. And this is always, always the case for monopolies. They’ve just done such a good job of marketing and creating sideshows to make it appear otherwise. Not to say that they haven’t made some legitimate tech breakthroughs since being a monopoly, but also that tech is solely to serve their ads monopoly, rather than to serve the general public (e.g. what do you think their ML investments are for? It’s not to create C-3PO…)

[1] see e.g. Max Weber for how industrialization leads to bureaucracy, or more recently, David Graeber’s bullshit jobs talk or book for a more fun, anecdotal take.