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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#521

Post by Godel_unicode »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #476
throwastream4 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming works for movies and TV, it will work for games. It was a shitty platform to develop for, end of story. I’m the games industry, there are 100 more failures that look like that. Specifically Vulkan is bad, and Linux is worse. The solution is obvious and done by the extant and thriving streaming services.

>Streaming works for movies and TV, it will work for games. Latency isn't an issue for movies or TV. Streaming will never work for games in the same way playing a game locally does.

Streaming RTS games is virtually indistinguishable from playing locally, except for lack of fan noise and constant need of needing to patch. There are tons of games that stream well, just not twitchy games.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#522

Post by rizzaxc »

fatjokes wrote: post #443

Stadia was prepared for a future that was promised and not delivered on time: ubiquitous (mmWave) 5G. A lot of folks point out that Stadia doesn't make sense because you'd be tied to locations with stable Internet. That wasn't suppose to be a problem anymore. Google misjudged the telcos who had promised 5G and delivered the weak, low coverage form we have today. Had the gamble paid off, it would've been strategically…

not the reason. stadia isn't the only offering in this space; both GamePass and GFN are doing fine

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#523

Post by shakna »

hedora wrote: post #513
shakna wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ten…

Were there stadia exclusives? What were people doing to make it ready? I can “launch” (pun intended) AAA title on a cloud VM in the time it takes for steam to download the game. I haven’t used stadia; honestly curious.

I honestly don't know. But every developer I've seen talking about publishing on Stadia, also talked about working with the team, so there were definite considerations that they needed to take into account.

There's stories like this [0] which suggests that the performance for Stadia was different than other platforms you might deploy for. The threading behaviour is a little bit different than just a VM, which is to be expected, but can come out surprising. So there's probably Stadia-specific patching for different games.

[0] "Stadia Adventures in slow server code on Unity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-SpWSEWYbU

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#524

Post by hedora »

monlockandkey wrote: post #369
bastard_op wrote: post #46

I tried to use Stadia, as a long-time paid user with a gsuite account I use for my personal account, they wouldn't let me as an "enterprise user". I spit on their future grave then, and I spit on it now - it was destined to die. Steam actually embraces linux with Proton to make windows games work. As a full-time linux user for ~20 years, bless Valve's soul.

Linux is what killed stadia. They have to get developers onboard to port their games. Getting big games ported cost them millions upon millions. If they embraced windows, they would have a huge library just like Geforce now. Linux killed stadia imo.

Surely, they just used proton, right? Source code is here:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#525

Post by nomel »

sofixa wrote: post #491
nomel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like Shadow PC makes way more sense, and is why I choose it. It’s just a cloud PC, and even supports SteamVR.

> It’s just a cloud PC With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.

The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows, and Steam/whatever popular store games.

> manually logging in

You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#526

Post by aeturnum »

Thorrez wrote: post #202
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…

>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.

Yes, but what I am talking about is the professional side. Sibling comments are talking about the Nov 1st launch games who were in the dark. Obviously Google can make it right - but that doesn't seem like what they are going to do.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#527

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Facebook wasn't early. Social networks had been going on for decades before them, and even the code around them is freely available these days. They had a harvard.edu gimmick and it paid off. Facebook was advertising.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#528

Post by hedora »

ndiddy wrote: post #12
bamboozled wrote: post #9

I have some business stuff hosted on GCP. I'm actually starting to worry about that, I think it would be weird if GCP was discontinued but I don't know anymore?

You might want to look into migrating: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

I used to hear about their hard deadline more often. Will be curious to see if they follow through, and how many months they give small tenants to migrate off.

They have no hope of meeting the 2023 deadline. They are at 10% market share, growing 1% YoY and half of number 2 (azure).

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#529

Post by hedora »

rhtgrg wrote: post #489
softwaredoug wrote: post #486

There certainly is a product management lesson in here It’s not enough to launch a product, you need conviction, and skin in the game, that the product is a good idea. And when your bets don’t pay off, you need to pivot like your life depends on it. Google could never succeed with stadia (or other big bets) if there’s little downside risk for those involved to its failure. Instead of digging deep and getting creative…

> You can’t give people amazing comfort and stability then expect them to take outsized risks. This statement doesn't make any sense to me. Who's going to try crazy new maneuvers on the trapeze, the person with the safety net or the one without? Perhaps you meant to say that you can't expect people to iterate on their business model like their life depends on it...well, I'm sorry to inform you but that rarely happens…

What is the upside at google if the thing you got promoted for three years ago (and are no longer working on) takes off this year?

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#530

Post by bombcar »

ghaff wrote: post #453
ahartmetz wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his book "The Road Ahead", which was full of bad predictions by the way, Bill Gates wrote something about the competition between computers and TVs and about set-top boxes. The original Xbox makes sense in that context. It was a bottom-up project initially, but its approval probably had something to do with Bill Gates' set-top box ideas. Microsoft Bob was another related development (cf. the Xbox dashboard, comput…

Go back to the 90s or maybe early 2000s, and there was definitely this widespread vision of a media hub connected to the TV in the living room as the primary home entertainment device (or even more broadly home control). People weren't necessarily in broad agreement about the nature of such a device but it was certainly a more centralized view of the world than what ultimately has ended up playing out.

If you replace “TV” with mobile phone we actually got pretty close to the predictions.
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