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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#241

Post by alasdair_ »

klodolph wrote: post #74
_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…

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

But you need a high quality internet connection instead.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#242

Post by ffggvv »

HWR_14 wrote: post #223
WalterBright wrote: post #148

Gaming is such a highly competitive market, I wouldn't try breaking into it unless I had something revolutionary, like Myst and DOOM were when they appeared.

Microsoft threw billions at it and became the third player. Sony also threw tons of money at it and succeeded. You don't need revolutionary ideas as a hardware publisher, you need the willingness to lose money for a long time to get a foothold.

sony has decades of relationships built in the industry with its consoles. microsoft has the same with oc gaming.

google has zero relationships

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#243

Post by arduinomancer »

zarzavat wrote: post #135
chii wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stadia would've worked if it didn't charge per title. A subscription, which allowed you access to the entire library of games in stadia, akin to netflix, is a compelling product.

Games require a lot of upfront investment. Games are not like music where top hits are routinely created in a day or two. Nobody is making a game on the off-chance that they will collect enough pennies from plays on a streaming service. Anybody making a game, be it indie or AAA, is investing years and $$$, and they need that big payday on release. Even Netflix mostly funds their own content. A “Netflix for games” wou…

What do you mean, it already exists?

Xbox Gamepass or Playstation Plus

Or 3rd party via Amazon Luna

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#244

Post by wfh »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #158
HollywoodZero wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The stadia controller was actually the best thing of the service. It's solid, feels good in hand and it's really responsive. I really hope they make a Bluetooth update so it can be used with a PC.

I use my Stadia controller over a USB-C cable to my PC. Plays Elden Ring fine :)

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#245

Post by shakna »

rippercushions wrote: post #233
shakna wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big companies are quite paranoid about leaking shutdowns even internally, because they don't want the press to know, customers to start asking questions, team members leaving, etc etc. I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know whe…

That's true... But when you act as a publisher, then you're required to take the risk of leaking something's final days.

When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#246

Post by Pelam »

vkou wrote: post #59
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…

> Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming When you're making a decision like this, you have to go full steam ahead until you decide to stop. Because not going full steam ahead compromises you in the event that you choose not to cancel. It's like a negotiation. If you're thinking of completely folding to your counterparty, the last thing you ever want to do is tell them that they have you on…

And like in any game of minds, it goes into a guessing game: ”Are they thinking of X? They would never admit, but perhaps this and that can be interpreted as signal for X.”

This is fine for some situations, like games, and can even be fun.

It is not ”fun” if you are a paying customer and and X is ”Suddenly kill the service I’m using.”

The only remedy to this is trust. (Which a simple short term zero sum game theoretic analysis does not account for.)

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#247

Post by jrockway »

h0l0cube wrote: post #131
_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…

> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of und…

I don't think people at Google have a problem innovating or understanding product/market fit. Rather, they have 100,000 employees (think about that for a second, how long it would take to count that many people), and not everyone's project is a good idea. That doesn't mean people don't try hard, it just means that there isn't necessarily a business just because they want there to be.

I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business.

The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#248

Post by cududa »

calderwoodra wrote: post #240
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."

32gb is hilariously low for Google, my machine has 196gb of ram.

bragging about having 196GB in a thread about real world performance is exactly why this thread happened

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#249

Post by mrich »

_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…

H

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#250

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

HWR_14 wrote: post #223
WalterBright wrote: post #148

Gaming is such a highly competitive market, I wouldn't try breaking into it unless I had something revolutionary, like Myst and DOOM were when they appeared.

Microsoft threw billions at it and became the third player. Sony also threw tons of money at it and succeeded. You don't need revolutionary ideas as a hardware publisher, you need the willingness to lose money for a long time to get a foothold.

Willingness to lose money is necessary but not sufficient. You still need to do something that nintendon't. Sony was lucky in that Sega completely bungled their entries into the 32-bit era, and Nintendo chose a cartridge-based system at a time when cartridges were on the way out, so in reality, the Playstation was the only competently-executed CD-based console available at the time.

Similarly, the XBOX was kind-of revolutionary. If anything, it was ahead of its time. It had a built-in HDD, its controllers were logically USB even if they had a proprietary form-factor, and it had built-in networking, and it didn't use any fancy nonstandard architecture. These are all features that would eventually become standard, so MS definitely had good ideas, and by doing them first they were well-positioned to do them right again. If MS had brought literal nothing to the table, I doubt the 360 would have been able to capitalise on the PS3's various shortcomings.

EDIT: "Doing something nintendon't" might be more literal than I thought. If the real market for Stadia is casuals, then what does the Stadia do that the Switch doesn't? I guess from reading the Reddit thread linked elsewhere, that the main market was ex-PC-gaming dads whose wives wouldn't let them get a new gaming PC. Which makes sense, as those people aren't interested in playing Mario or Zelda. But that's not a big niche to be targeting.

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