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Stadia died because no one trusts Google
251–260 of 626 posts
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#252The 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…
>they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions. Google's refunding all Stadia game and hardware purchases. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Stadia.
IMO no need for a disclosure if you're just stating a single fact.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#253Stadia died because the business model made no sense. The service was squarely targeted at AAA gamers. However, it was a poor deal for AAA gamers and (much more importantly) a horrible deal for AAA game companies.
The deal for AAA companies was: Port your game for an entirely different OS/API, pay the Google tax and be subject to Google reviews. But you can't treat a game streaming service like a Play Store. AAA game companies have way more power and money than the typical mobile app developer, and will fight you even on mobile where GoogleApple is strong (see Epic). No way they want the Play Store experience when they can avoid it by going to the competition. So Google had to bribe and bribe. Eventually it became depply unprofitable, and Google had to pull the plug.
Was there any way to avoid that?
A) Make the service more accessible to casuals. Like by having a search bar, a subscription model and making some Windows compatibility layer so indies could more easily port. But there's no way Google's ego could accept a service not targeted at AAAAAA.
B) Make 1st party studios and show capabilities only cloud gaming could have. Force AAA companies to your service to compete. This requires investment for a good time with uncertain rewards and possibly no promotion. We're talking about Google here.
C) Pivot to a white-label service and give AAA companies a way better deal. This is what Google is trying to do. Of course, there's no reason to keep Stadia in that case.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#254More like becasue no one wants a DRM walled gaming service and because other streaming options allowed one to play already purchased games instead of requiring to buy them again.
Google should have provided an option to transfer games from Steam and GOG without buying them again, and run them for example using Wine if there was no native Linux version available. Then their service could have worked out. Their refusal to use Wine and stick to native games only was their major mistake that limited their catalog (in addition to that buying games again issue).
I think Amazon are already working on something like above and they are using Wine. They probably learned from Google's mistakes.
Instead of shutting down, Google should have addressed above issues. But in Google's usual fashion, they'd rather shut things down than fix them.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#255Here's what a cloud gaming service needs to take off:
* Allow me to use any controller the game natively supports on almost any device (phone, tablet, pc, stream box, etc.) and also as many game consoles as possible (probably 0 or 1)
* Give me access to hundreds of games when I subscribe just like Netflix gives me access to hundreds of shows and movies. Don't make me pay for the service and again for games. Gamers just want to pay one monthly fee for unlimited games access. (Probably only Microsoft, Sony, or a partnership between a major game publisher and Amazon or Apple could deliver on this due to consolidating IP portfolios)
* Build data centers close to your customers for low-latency rendering
* Use modern GPU hardware with ray tracing and dlss or the AMD equivalent.
* Work with game publishers to make a killer game so computationally demanding that it won't render with just one or two desktop graphics cards. Show the power of the cloud and market the hell out of it.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it make…
> When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
With android they had to get buy in from phones makers and other powerful parties. To do this they had to give up quite a bit of power and control. They never owned the ecosystem in nearly the same way. It was always a compromise.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#257It’s the final day of the free tier of Google Apps they promised they would never take away from me. I run a web search where the engine ignores my excluded terms[1]. Sad. But the I log into Gmail. Another redesign, thank goodness! Too bad I can’t XMPP message my friends to tell them about it. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=49ers+-football+-nfl
There is actually a free tier. I was confused too, but you have to insert payment and then change your subscription to the free one afterwards. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
I definitely didn't have to pretend to pay them when I elected this option, you just affirmed you were using the account for personal use and everything stayed the same basically.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d be curious as to the elevator pitch presented to Google execs and why they bought into it. Wasn’t anyone thinking about the issues you brought up? Seems like fundamental issues. To think they spent millions and millions on this service only to close it down in short order. Typical Google but what other company does this repeatedly with 4-year precision.
You’ve just got to look back through history and you’ll see the same thing play out, and controversially it’s not actually the worst play in the long run. 1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity 2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out 3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something. So for example, let’s look at dart. There was neve…
The counterpoint is that their strategy is burning trust in their brand. New products depend on early adopters to mature and grow. But I’ve been burned by Google’s product ADHD so many times now that I refuse to be an early adopter of any of their products. If gmail came out today, I’d assume it would be shut down in a few years and I wouldn’t touch it. The only Google products I’d use today are Android, Chrome, Search, Gmail and sometimes firebase or Meet. I think Google meet is the only thing in that list less than 10 years old. (And even then it’s just rebranded Hangouts).
Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#259This article feels like I’m being mansplained to. They’re clueless and are acting like an expert
I think it is just opportunism. The cool thing these days seems hating on Google, even if you have a really poor reason. It is just confirmation bias for those that have tried to convince themselves that Google is a failure despite their profits literally showing they are not failing as a business.
A business built around extracting a non-renewable resource can make record profits while still being doomed in the long-term. In this case, the resource Google may be unsustainably harvesting is consumer goodwill and partner trust.
Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t it (except maybe “controllers connecting to the network bypassing a computer or other client device”, which also doesn’t make sense in a Chromebook) all server-side tech plus existing a/v streaming?
I'm specifically thinking of a path to beefier applications that G Suite, but maybe it's mostly suited for gaming. For something like an IDE or Photoshop, how you offload work to the server looks different.
Oh, it (or something very similar) could definitely be used for desktop applications that run and store data remotely, I just don’t think that you’d need to add anything additional to Chromebooks to realize that. On desktop, it already uses Chrome as the software client component, so its already there.