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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#101

Post by HollywoodZero »

linsomniac wrote: post #28

Personally, I got an offer of a free Stadia controller from Google, took them up on it. It also included an offer for several games free. I searched through the list of games and, honestly, couldn't tell one from the other. They all seemed to be basically the same thing, some sort of FP adventure. My Stadia controller never ended up showing up, but the games were so uninteresting that I never pursued it. My BIL order…

You could also just use an Xbox controller, right? I mean, I'd rather use that than the Stadia controller.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#102

Post by pie_flavor »

Tech people talk about the tech they killed, but that isn't related to game developers' incentives - especially considering nearly all the tech they killed was free and they don't have a history of rolling on actual customers.

The actual problem for game developers was that the architecture was home-grown (Vulkan-only), with little tooling, annoying licensure requirements, and not enough profit incentive to dedicate the effort. Companies have no (financial) problem releasing for GOG, which has fewer users than Stadia, because you barely have to take any effort to do so, but porting to Stadia took the effort of porting to Xbox. This both counted as a direct incentive not to port to Stadia, as well as the writing on the wall for how well-managed this product would be.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#103

Post by Spooky23 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #76
mkl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3, it seems [1], but less than a third the size of AWS and less than half of Azure. [1] https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/2afswwuvis94wy12r320w/... , https://www.ciodive.com/news/aws-microsoft-google-cloud-mark...

Cloud is bigger than Azure. "Azure" includes Office 365 so MSFT can pretend Azure is 3x bigger than it is: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techtarget.com/searchcloudc...

They all play tricks. Google does flat rate ELAs, so customer retention and recurring spend is something to look for information on. Microsoft does alot of SaaS bundling and uses the EAs to drive revenue. (Buy an azure gift card vs. true up of whatever)

At some point it becomes like a “no true Scotsman” argument. They’re all big, and all use their niche to drive spend. IMO HN commentators comparing GCP to Stadia are missing the boat. Likewise, MS will figure out how to monetize the bazillion O365 users with Azure.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#104

Post by bitexploder »

_zgx0 wrote: post #66

I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused. As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that. Compare that to paying the same price for a regular PC game which you can play via streaming using a…

Steam games I bought a decade ago are still in my library. Steam is trusty. Google is not.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#105

Post by shakna »

skybrian wrote: post #34
aeturnum wrote: post #14

The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Teams who have been working on ports for months were blind-sided. Employees generally did not know. It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company w…

The announcement seems sudden but actually it's with about three months notice. It does seem a little short, but how much would it help to drag it out further? How much time do you want to spend on a project that's shutting down?

There were games preparing to launch on November 1st.

Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#106

Post by cududa »

bluedino wrote: post #96
cududa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"

You'd think everyone working from home where they have real-world internet speeds would fix that.

Well people weren't working from home in 2010

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#107

Post by Our_Benefactors »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #94
cududa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made some offhanded comment about Chrome perf on Twitter earlier this year and a Google friend replied something like "Well, pretty much the whole Chrome team just got upgraded to local test machines with at least 32gb of RAM. Godspeed everyone."

Makes you wonder what would happen if companies occasionally did the exact opposite to their engineers. "Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."

What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#108

Post by gsich »

herpderperator wrote: post #71
cududa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"

How did they have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi AP in 2010, and how did you have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi client in 2010? Wi-Fi is barely 1Gbps over a decade later.

Wouldn't matter much for the usecase that was presented in parent. Latency can still be at ~1ms.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#109

Post by cududa »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #107
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes you wonder what would happen if companies occasionally did the exact opposite to their engineers. "Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."

What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.

You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. Windows Vista devs with 8GB of DDR2 when real world customers had 512mb of DDR learned this lesson hard.

EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.

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