Stadia died because no one trusts Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#391

Post by ekiourk » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

tb_technical wrote: post #45

What the heck? Stadia failed because it sucked, and not everyone lives in a town with a fibre uplink and a local server farm!

You are completely wrong, you don't need fiber and you don't need to be next to a datacenter. I leave in London but I am using it when I am traveling even to countries that officially stadia is not supported. I know people on unsupported regions that can play just fine through VPN! Stadia is a tech marvel with great user experience, just Google execs never cared to spend enough money to make it a commercial success

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#392

Post by Huh1337 » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #389

Huh1337 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely could zoom in any way you wanted, because otherwise the non-responsive desktop websites wouldn't be readable on the 240x320 display. Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.

The sever didn’t provide the full sized images on large pictures, so you couldn’t zoom in the phone simply didn’t have that information. The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a d…

That was one of the reasons why I didn't use Opera Turbo at all.

Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#393

Post by ayewo » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

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."

This is what CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) systems were designed for. If certain tests exceed the performance budget of a low-resource environment in CI/CD, the engineer responsible will be required to fix it before a release can ship.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#394

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:54 AM UTC

Stadia died because the product doesn't make sense.

Stadia is essentially trying to replace a gaming PC. To offer this service you will have to charge users enough money to:

1. buy a gaming PC every 3-5 years

2. run it at ~250W for average play time (4-8 hrs a day)

3. pay for all of the bandwidth on your end

And then you can offer the user a worse service than if they had spent that money on a PC themselves.

Where's the value add for the average user here? Does Google get computer hardware that's optimized for games several times cheaper than average users? Is their bandwidth free? Free electricity?

Ultimately Stadia is trying to offer a service that's very similar to what already exists. They have to do something much better to have a chance or they have to have a stable offering that slowly builds up more users.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#395

Post by kibibu » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

Aerroon wrote: post #394

Stadia died because the product doesn't make sense. Stadia is essentially trying to replace a gaming PC. To offer this service you will have to charge users enough money to: 1. buy a gaming PC every 3-5 years 2. run it at ~250W for average play time (4-8 hrs a day) 3. pay for all of the bandwidth on your end And then you can offer the user a worse service than if they had spent that money on a PC themselves. Where's…

4-8 hrs per day? Is that really how much time the average game player spends? (not "gamer", but stadia target customer)

I enjoy games but if be hard pressed to spend that much time a week.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#396

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

ajvs wrote: post #6

birdyrooster wrote: post #3

Stadia was not good because of physics. Like GeforceNow, it is laggy and artifacty. It’s not a real business because they don’t actually have a significant target audience. It doesn’t matter who runs it. I’ve been saying this for years and predicting this exact scenario but not because of trust. People trust Google enough to be swayed but this product sucked.

As a GFN user for the past 14 months I disagree. It's more than acceptable performance even when playing competitive multiplayer games like League of Legends and Planetside 2. I do agree however that Stadia sucked as a product. Nobody was going to buy into their ecosystem if they can't opt to download the games onto their own PCs like Steam. Too much lock-in without that aspect, and without any guarantees that they w…

But that's not the perception GeforceNow has. If I ask around what people think it would be then most of the gamers I know wouldn't even consider it unless they had no other option.

Games are already fiddly when it comes to latency. Adding another fiddling layer inbetween just sounds more painful.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#397

Post by MomoXenosaga » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:59 AM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #187

ttty wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

r/nintendoswitch: 4.2m r/ps5: 2.6m r/steamdeck: 230k r/stadia: 119k What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.

Chasing casuals isn't a bad idea. Nintendo does it Pokémon and Animal crossing.

Stadia relied on casuals who happen to have a stable fiber optic cable internet connection.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#398

Post by mattlondon » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:02 AM UTC

It died because you could not access your steam (...or epic or uplay or gog) libraries.

Nothing else matters IMO.

It was good tech, bad badly integrated into the ecosystem.

I happily pay for geforce now which can access those things (in an albeit limited way - I think technically it can play anything but there are legal tings that prevent a lot of games from being playable which sucks for the user)

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#399

Post by MikePlacid » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:07 AM UTC

utopcell wrote: post #190

h0l0cube wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Low hanging fruit ? There were 10 search engines when Google launched, and a megalith called Yahoo dominating the Internet.

I do not know about the rest of you, but me - I was hanging pretty low indeed. All what was needed for me to switch from Altavista was a start page without any advertising and small non-intrusive text ads on search results. They were even relevant often.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#400

Post by esskay » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:08 AM UTC

I'd never, ever trust Google with something important. At some point everything closes.

That being said Sadias failure was only partially the Google closure effect. It ws a terrible business model. Had they gone down a Gamepass style system it would've likely worked. But making you pay full price for a game with zero actual ownership of it, and being 100% reliant on a strong internet connection was always going to cause this to be a flop.

If it hadn't died now it would've happened eventually. With Gamepass expanding and offering an absolutely massive library of games, combined with Origin it's a far superior service, and easier to accept the price.