Google is shutting down Stadia • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#831

Post by hbn » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #768

autoexec wrote: post #693

Everybody is talking about how terrible Google and their culture is, so I'll just put it out there that this is great news for gamers. Cloud-based gaming services are a terrible deal for gamers. Gamers shouldn't cede so much control to some 3rd party who will be watching over their shoulder and collecting every scrap of data on them and their friends while they play. We don't need our performance in games being used…

I think you miss a really important use-case for stadia and cloud based gaming: infrequent players. Such players usually use consoles, which are no better than cloud based gaming for forcing updates to content. I jump into a match of apex legends every 3-4 weeks, maybe I get an afternoon to play because my partner has decided to go out with her friends. What usually happens is that I launch my PlayStation and it spen…

People who play 1 match of 1 game 1 time per month seems like bad demographic to target for a gaming service.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#832

Post by i_love_cookies » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #753

ren_engineer wrote: post #411

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…

To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI, etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is, which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for the…

It's a shame their platform choices prevented a decent stream of content, stadia was easier to use but I subscribe GFN due to the content

on the whole I feel like they were to focused on potential vs. offering something desirable right away

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#833

Post by symlinkk » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

dqpb wrote: post #766

Google: "Would you like to waste the best years of your life?" Engineer: "No..." Google: "What if I pay you slightly above average and give you free food?" Engineer: "Deal!"

Slightly above average?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#834

Post by timsneath » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #152

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.

This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google, Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.

(Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.)

For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as having overtones of the Baghdad Bob meme. And indeed, why should you trust my word?

The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish.

Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.

Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that.

Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).

We're working hard on lots of fun new stuff right now, including a rewrite of our graphics rendering engine. If you haven't seen it, check out https://wonderous.app, which is using the new engine on iOS. We think it shows the potential of Flutter well!

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#835

Post by hbn » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #824

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…

This [1] guy got it right to the year (3 years ago when Stadia started): >It also doesn't help that it's from Google. They've lost a lot of good will in the last couple of years and honestly most people expect Stadia to be EOL'd in 24-36 months once Google gets bored with it. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e1l9j4/comment/f8ru...

It was many more people than that one guy. Myself and others were calling a shut down in 2-3 years literally the day Stadia was announced.

Those of us who were bucked off at the Google rodeo enough times eventually learned our lesson and realized it's never gonna change.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#836

Post by Sebb767 » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #477

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

Though I'm not suggesting lying/malice on The Google's part here, it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of corporate PR. Whenever a company insists it's not going to do something, I assume they're doing damage control and that the opposite is more likely to be true (much like Bettridge's Law). If a company makes a positive statement in PR, I assume their statements won't live up to their promise or, even…

> it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of corporate PR.

If you look at the discussions about the shutdown rumor, hardly believed PR. I was on the defensive side and my argument was that spreading this rumor was basically a free point.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#837

Post by avereveard » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

Surprising no one,

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#838

Post by singron » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

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…

Cloud has had over 135-153% YoY revenue growth every quarter since they started reporting Cloud revenue 11 quarters ago. It's amazingly consistent high growth.

TAC (traffic acquisition costs) have exploded over this time frame. If you subtract TAC from Services revenue, the growth is merely good. Cloud revenue also seems a lot less sensitive to the recent economic downtown so far, but we'll really know after Q3.

The operating losses for Cloud are also shrinking quickly. Building data centers should be capex, but I'm guessing they count R&D as opex, which makes the losses higher now even though it will pay off later like an investment. They could probably start to have operating income any time in the next 3 years.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#839

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

CPLNTN wrote: post #782

autoexec wrote: post #693

Everybody is talking about how terrible Google and their culture is, so I'll just put it out there that this is great news for gamers. Cloud-based gaming services are a terrible deal for gamers. Gamers shouldn't cede so much control to some 3rd party who will be watching over their shoulder and collecting every scrap of data on them and their friends while they play. We don't need our performance in games being used…

How is a terrible deal? I would literally need to spend at least a 1000 dollars for a gaming pc, and that is 4 years of GeForce now, without considering maintenance, the space, etc. I’m playing cyberpunk 2077 max settings on a 2cm thick MacBook Pro, I don’t have a bulky pc to move every time I move, and most importantly, if I ever get bored I’ll simply stop paying instead of having a pc collecting dust

[deleted]

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#840

Post by p1necone » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

foepys wrote: post #409

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…

My personal problem with Stadia was the lock-in. You were required to buy a game at full price on Stadia and were only allowed to play it on Stadia, a service for which you would've eventually had to pay a subscription fee. One can tell people that a PC is much more expensive upfront and that you could play for years on Stadia for the same money but the risk of it being shut down and losing access to all the full pri…

Yeah, and people will shout about Steam being the same level of vendor lockin but they're ignoring the trust factor. Steam has been around for decades and rightly or wrongly people mostly consider it a given that their Steam games will never disappear. Google needed to acknowledge that and actually provide an appealing alternative.

Instead they tried to charge full retail price on games from a tiny library on a product that nobody believed they weren't going to sunset in a couple of years time. I suspect if they'd gone with a subscription cost only model they probably would have been a lot more successful.