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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#121
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."

This is what CI can be used for

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#122

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.

It's a matter of tact. They could say, "Here are your 32GB RAM machines. Your old one? You get to keep it too. Make sure Chrome works perfectly on your old machine."

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.

Do the kinds of people shelling out $60 for a game find the $500 console a big barrier?

I think so: People who played video games as kids, don't really have much time for them now, and don't really want to go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up, but occasionally get curious about a particular game. Maybe they don't even have an obvious place in the house for a console, if they only have wall-mounted smart TVs with nothing hooked up to them, or maybe they don't want to give their own young kids console games yet, which is hard to do with a PlayStation in the living room.

It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#125
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a specific example of latency incompetency that immediately came to mind while reading this: Chrome. Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one. When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome…

I was just whining how when Chrome-based browsers first open up on my 5400rpm hdd, I paste in the URL and press Enter, then it loads the default home page and wipes out what I pasted... "you're goin' nowhere!"

That's far from being only a Chrome problem. That extremely irritating behavior is going to be with us until OS developers see the light and we get hard/soft realtime GUIs.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#126
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?

If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.

A 300-400 dollar console isn’t that much of a barrier compared to a 60 AAA video game. This market of people willing to pay premium prices for enthusiast products but is unwilling to pay for the hardware to run them I don’t think exists.

When I buy a console I usually wait until it’s had some price drops and then there’s really only a few games I want to play. And because I waited so long these too are at a steep discount. These days, that means there’s so much content with DLCs and the base game that it could take me over a year to finish a AAA title.

If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nevermind Steam, nevermind Google, nevermind Apple. I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another. I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer. If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam…

Yeah, thats a HUGE downside to Apple, because they locked you into their AppStore you now suddenly have no rights to use the app on anything outside of an Apple device. That is very anti consumer and detrimental to everyone involved... except Apple.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#129
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…

Maybe reading real reviews from real users will help too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xsyr8x/i_am_really_...

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#130
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…

Agreed. Feeling of not owning games, being locked into a service, and dependent forever on connectivity, seemed a very bad idea and a bad deal.

Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.

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