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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Sear…

Yes, completely agree, same here. I don't touch Google products any more, and it's mostly because I don't trust they will remain available.

I only use the products that are very unlikely to go away quickly. Search, Gmail and Android. I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain. And I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, no, Altavista was the dominant player before Google and it had plenty of competition. Google's key innovations were leveraging PageRank to extract signal from what other webpages were saying, instead of relying on naive keyword search etc, and then figuring out a way to monetize search with targeted keyword ads when Yahoo and co were stuck with banner impressions.

Yep, Altavista was the one to use before Google. I'm not sure the search results were that much better to be honest when they launched, although they were good. Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.

What on good earth are you talking about ? Google results upon launch were miles ahead of anything else at the time. I personally Googled once and never went back.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#273

Hats off to Stadia engineers for the engineering marvel that they created. I'm certain they'll be sought after both internally at Google and externally. Also, hats off to Google for refunding all hardware(!) and software purchases. I don't remember any parallel to this from a large company. Essentially, gamers participated in a wonderful large-scale experiment which cost them nothing (except maybe the occasional mont…

Has any other company been in a position where they'd have to offer refunds though? The combination of a hardware device that relies entirely on an external service and requires "purchases" rather than rentals, and said service being discontinued after only three years and the company in question still being solvent seems like it'd be a black swan.

Google is refunding everything, not just hardware.

Contrast this to Amazon for instance, where movies/tv shows you have bought just disappear from your account when Amazon loses the license to serve them.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Altavista was the one to use before Google. I'm not sure the search results were that much better to be honest when they launched, although they were good. Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.

What on good earth are you talking about ? Google results upon launch were miles ahead of anything else at the time. I personally Googled once and never went back.

You are probably right, I honestly can't remember. I do remember really liking the uncluttered page though!

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually have something to add to the discussion? Or you just want to take potshots at me? You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.

You can write your code on a nice fast machine. A dev machine should be as fast as possible. Those devs with their big fast machines should be required to run and test on much lower spec machines though. Testing only in a VM on a beefy dev box leads to terribly performing software on customer machines. There's a multitude of performance problems that only come up when a system starts paging to disk, a machine has a H…

Preach my friend

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#276
No, it died because it was mismanaged as a product. There were technical issues when it launched but more importantly, there never was a good strategy for content. So, the catalogue was a combination of expensive and lacking in titles. I tried it out briefly because on paper it wasn't a bad idea. Except the free games were mostly not worth the money and the paid games were the same price as actually buying the games. But without the option of actually installing and owning them. And the one game I tried disconnected after a few minutes. So, I pulled the plug on the free trial.

Google has had a long history of messing up on the content front. They've made a lot of false starts with Youtube to get into paid content and it just never took off. Netflix is raking in billions from paid subscriptions. Not so much with Youtube. Few people pay for the premium content because there hardly is any worth paying for.

Where Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix and others succeeded, Google failed repeatedly to get a compelling offering of content together. It's a blind spot they have; they seem unable to come up with a coherent plan. They can do the tech but not the content. I'm not sure what it is. On paper the tech is a lot harder and they do have deep pockets. But when it comes to content they are a combination of stupid and frugal and somehow refuse to spend money on good content to lure in customers.

With Stadia, they had the right idea and all they would have had to do was two things: fix the bugs and get some amazing games in there. They dropped the ball on both fronts. So, it failed because they never gave it a proper chance to begin with.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#277
Oh no, Stadia failed because its business model doesn't really make sense. And Phil doesn't really understand where Stadia's real potential can thrive. He definitely is an expert of the traditional gaming market, but he doesn't really understand how network effects in Google work or where online gaming service is heading.

For the user side, you need decent internet connections and to pay $40~$60 per title. The value proposition is that you can play on a powerful machine in the cloud without paying significant upfront costs, but its inventory is extremely limited and at the moment Google decided to take an intentionally ambiguous position on its commitment, so there was a risk that you're going to lose your ownership on those games. And you also cannot sell your titles on used markets. The pay-per-title model only works if this grants you full control of the title. I think only subscription models like game pass make sense for this kind of streaming service, but Phil looked afraid of bringing too much disruptions to traditional game publishers' business model so made lots of compromises here. This is definitely the first reason of Stadia's failure.

And for developers, they made a significant mistake; instead of making it a plausible platform for everyone, they simply put tons of cash to a handful of AAA developers. This didn't work of course because they're going to release their games on other consoles and Google doesn't have enough negotiation power to have them exclusive on Stadia. The result is a simple failure; overall inventory became much smaller than it could be while it failed to deliver any significant exclusive titles.

Compared to this, Nintendo did it very well on making Switch a developer platform. It's not fully open but still it's considerably more open than what they did in previous consoles. And this gives Switch a very unique value proposition of being the only handheld gaming console (at least before Steam deck) which can play a significant fraction of indie/small developer's games.

There are lots of example cases where an interesting indie game gets skyrocketed by midnight thanks to some big name streamers who decided to play it. What if Stadia was able to have one of them (limited time) exclusive to their platform. Google owns YT so it is in a much better position of negotiating with those creators. And they could integrate ads and payment systems so gaming could be just one click away and developers can get a very precise performance of their ads and attribution from creators.

I still also don't understand why they didn't really plan to integrate the Play store and Android ecosystem. There are significant demands of playing mobile games with a keyboard, a mouse or a controller and on a big screen. The mobile gaming market is dominant not because it's convenient to play but because the mobile market is big. AAA title developers still don't consider it an option because of its form factor and limited controls (and some minor technical issues but not really a fundamental blocker), but Stadia could solve that problem and deliver the Play store to every possible form factors. But they didn't do that. I heard that Google will keep streaming infrastructure and its team that runs Stadia, so there might be some hope that this idea could be realized in the Play store though.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#278
post #90

There are advantages to game streaming but Google never really did anything with them, instead they just made a worse version of a console. The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a…

>Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. This is very true, and it sounds really good on paper, but it seems like anything that attempts to transition content consumers to participants fail. For example,…

Also there is the whole scaling issue. What if you have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of viewers who want to take control? That just seems unworkable. Actual stream interaction has to be build from ground up and even then it usually takes away from the game when not in place.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#279
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who has good enough internet for this service and no console?

I bought it, heavily discounted, after having sold my ps4 and wanting something to play very infrequently. The service was spotty despite having gigabit fiber and mesh wifi in my house. As an infrequent gamer, I'm likely the worst possible customer archetype for google.

That was my experience. (I tried it for a free trial). Graphics were poor and input lag was abysmal (and made a lot of types of games unplayable).

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up. They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.

Yeah, and it seems stadia was more difficult to setup than a console.
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