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People didn’t trust stadia to deliver and to not stop delivering. And I believe their pricing model played to their weakness and against their strength.
But of course I want to play cyber punk on max res on my Nintendo switch. What a silly thing to say consumers don’t want that.
He's also saying that XBox Cloud and Luna have no future; not sure this will age well.
Even support for engines like Unity came on the second year, as the adoption was still quite lackluster, and even that did not help, one of their talks at GDC this year was how they were rebooting the development stack.
https://stadia.dev/blog/join-stadia-at-the-google-for-games-...
Apply named "How to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch".
It lacked the titles, game play wasn't smooth, and just wasn't what people wanted.
So I would say that it failed to meet market demands, and failed to deliver on what it said it would.
Wow, this is good analysis and very prescient. I don't necessarily condemn this as a strategy, if you can afford it - there's always a chance of an interesting pivot. The problem is when people know your company doesn't commit to products long-term and don't care if people love them (cough Reader cough), it starts to affect their interest in engaging and committing their time. /xoogler
Sunray failed not because people didn't want utility computing. They clearly do - utility computing kiosks are absolutely everywhere. Sunray failed because the Sunos/solaris userspace wasn't adequate to provide a utility computing experience people wanted. In fact it was total garbage. You can see it there in the screenshots. CDE, a desktop only a mother could love. No applications worth a damn except Lotus. I worked as a contractor at a large bank and when Novell refused to say that Lotus 123 was y2k compliant they ripped out 2 sun workstations from every trader's desktop and replaced them with windows boxes. They literally had a skip/dumpster outside the building where you could go pick up sun hardware they had chucked out. The only good userspace tooling on Solaris around 1998 was for developers and even there the sun workshop debugger was pretty sketchy[1]. I speak as someone who owned a Spark 5 at home and had solaris workstations on my desk at multiple jobs. I really wanted to love Sun and kind of did love Sun hardware, but their userspace was always severely lacking.
Likewise Stadia didn't fail because people don't want cloud gaming. The success of Nvidia GForce Now and Nintendo's new stream-things-to-switch architecture for several new games proves that[2]. Logitech is also about to come out with a cloud-based mobile gaming device (although that may struggle to compete with Steam Deck which is a device you own for about the same price point). Stadia failed because Google completely failed to look at competitive offerings like GamePass and offer something compelling as an alternative. Instead they did a full-price cash grab on the games and just said "trust us" to keep the service running (which everyone knew they would not honour and they did not honour).
[1] This debugger has the unique distinction of being the only debugger to ever core dump on me when I was trying to load the core dump of the program I was trying to debug.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would anyone buy a game for a specific cloud service? Isn't that what people do when they buy games on Steam?
Not really, you're buying access to a game which you can download an unlimited amount of times and play on your own hardware, often even offline. They're not entirely dissimilar, but they're definitely different models.
> They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?". Precisely - as Steve Jobs observed, sometimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Stadia does seem like a solution in search of a problem. For Microsoft a relevant problem is "How can we enable smartphone (or other non-console, non-PC computing device) gamers…
Technologically, the model of subsidizing consoles to put great hardware in your living room for not much money is a good one. You get ultra-low latency, games can work offline if need be, the experience is predictable and robust once installed and you can actually own the games. In practice it requires a willingness to commit to big expensive CDNs, download optimization, and smooth updates that Microsoft just don't seem willing to make. Streaming would appear to fix that regardless of other merits.
That said, I never looked at Stadia. We (me+fiancé) just don't play enough games to warrant changing anything right now, and we tend to pick the platform based on the game not the other way around.
Wow, this is good analysis and very prescient. I don't necessarily condemn this as a strategy, if you can afford it - there's always a chance of an interesting pivot. The problem is when people know your company doesn't commit to products long-term and don't care if people love them (cough Reader cough), it starts to affect their interest in engaging and committing their time. /xoogler
Also - it was a very different and opposite approach to what Java was doing at the time. Java didn't have any notion of UI streaming like NeWS. It ran UI locally, always. So it's pretty unclear how much Sun really bought into the SunRay vision. They certainly didn't align everything around it.
> They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?". Precisely - as Steve Jobs observed, sometimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Stadia does seem like a solution in search of a problem. For Microsoft a relevant problem is "How can we enable smartphone (or other non-console, non-PC computing device) gamers…
It could in theory have solved the Xbox problem of: every time I want to play a game the console insists on downloading 20GB of updates from Xbox Live, which appears to be capped at 50MBit/sec on a good day, thus wasting all the time I had available for actually playing something. Technologically, the model of subsidizing consoles to put great hardware in your living room for not much money is a good one. You get ult…
You can also purchase games on your phone and send a request to your console to download and install it so that it's ready when you want to play.