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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#931
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

Ah, I remember that tweet. I was astounded not long ago when Stadia came up for discussion on when there were still users on HN using it to try to convince me that Google, whatever their long term plans, could not possibly be shutting it down in the immediate future. Especially since there were games— FIFA preorder even being taken— scheduled for release.

Unfortunately Google didn’t even have the courtesy to tell all of the developers about it, and some just got the news that their games set to launch in the next few days were, on stadia at least, already dead.

At this point, unless it’s ads, you’re looking at the world through rose tinted lenses if think there isn’t at least a chance Google is about to kill almost of its products.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#934

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…

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…

The law of large numbers. Nothing other than the core ad products makes a difference to Google. The next biggest "successes" are just things that build a moat around the core ad product.

What's embarrassing is that they keep trying other random things.

Give the money back to the shareholders and let them invest in new founders. Small team success is great for the world but impossible to care about at a Google scale.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#935

A lot of AAA games presumably got ported to Linux so that they would run on Stadia. Were those efforts funded by Google? I wonder if we saw more proper Linux game client releases as a result, and whether we'll see fewer Linux ports in the future.

I remember faintly that among the leaks from Capcom this year, there was a marketing document about Capcom receiving stipends from Google for developing for Stadia.

Aside from marketing efforts, Google seems to have also supported developers with technology efforts, as indicated with the GDC presentation below:

https://schedule2019.gdconf.com/session/first-light-bringing...

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Thanks for taking the time to address concerns here. Much appreciated!

Most of the anxiety and concern isn't from the Flutter project itself so I wholly empathize, but from Google's history in the dev space. Virtually anyone who had an AngularJS codebase knows what it means to depend on a Google OSS product that Google uses internally.

> 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.

IIRC, when the AngularJS team came out with a brand new JS framework and called it "Angular", I believe the team explained how they automated migration of most of Google's "millions of lines" of complex internal codebase from AngularJS to Angular in a relatively short time, thanks to Google's internal infrastructure and tooling.

You could do dependency analysis, build ASTs across projects, at "Google scale", and have special tooling, transpilers, compilers to migrate code across Ads and verticals in a fortnight. Google has the talent, tools, cash to take such grand measures and come to conferences to showcase how they did it.

So the several million devs using Flutter are still undertaking a risk if Google deems targeting each new iOS version UX is too expensive, freezes contributions from internal devs, and starts internally migrating codebases to native with some shiny, new internal tooling.

EDIT: If such a scenario does come to pass internally, I think the Flutter community would very much appreciate project leaders being upfront about it.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#937

A lot of AAA games presumably got ported to Linux so that they would run on Stadia. Were those efforts funded by Google? I wonder if we saw more proper Linux game client releases as a result, and whether we'll see fewer Linux ports in the future.

I am surprised to see that this quite Linux centric community missing the obvious. With Stadia support 'cleaned up' from game engines it is a game over for Linux desktop gaming.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#938

I'm honestly astonished at full refunds for everything purchased via Google -- not just software but hardware too. I know most of the comments here are focusing on "Google shuts down yet another thing as everybody expected" but this is really doing right by consumers. I think they deserve a lot of credit here. With so many (usually valid) warnings about how you don't really own digital content in the cloud or hardwar…

They deserve no credit here. Barely more than weeks ago they were officially announcing that Stadia wasn’t going anywhere and there were more great games to come. Refunds were simply the best way to preempt the inevitable class action lawsuit so that same amount of money could go towards refunds rather than lawyers. It’s not noble, it’s not laudable, it just another financial calculation that refunds are cheaper than the lawsuit combined with a corresponding few years of bad press highlighting their awful failure continuously every time the case hit a major milestone working its way through the courts and embarrassing internal communications revealed just how delicate the entire house of cards was from day 1.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#939
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Google we're talking about. They shut everything down eventually.

Somehow Blogger persists almost 20 years post-acquisition.

It's probably running in some PHP server somewhere that pings but nobody knows where it is

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#940
This sounds bad for the legion of devs who worked on it, but does anyone here actually use Stadia? The bad thing here isn't that stadia was canceled, but rather such a big company like Google is unable to pivot te incredible underlying technology
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