Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it, but because it could • Hacker News Board

Re: Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it, but because it could

#21

Post by 1123581321 » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

pull_my_finger wrote: post #9

etempleton wrote: post #8

The baffling thing about Stadia is that the business model never made sense for the product and that was apparent the minute they announced it. Why would anyone buy a game for a specific cloud service? Why wouldn’t you do what Microsoft had already telegraphed they were doing with GamePass? If Google had spent one more year thinking through how the business was going to work they may have had something, but instead t…

> Why would anyone buy a game for a specific cloud service? Isn't that what people do when they buy games on Steam?

Steam feels more permanent since the client and game downloads would be preserved, and any phoning home modded or simulated in the event Valve shut it down.

Theoretically, the Stadia system and the game content could be open sourced, but that isn’t something Google is likely to do, and since the games are entirely streamed, there aren’t any local copies floating around.

It would be great if Stadia developers got together and made a new self-hostable streaming application that could play their ports, or at least used the ports to help the community figure out a server that streamed the games close to spec.

Re: Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it, but because it could

#22

Post by Jyaif » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #12

Jyaif wrote: post #4

He's also saying that XBox Cloud and Luna have no future; not sure this will age well.

A big difference is that XBox developers hardly have to change anything, unless they want to offer a better experience regarding user controls, whereas Stadia required targeting a special Linux distribution, with the typical vi/emacs/gdb development experience, to a community used to Visual Studio. Even support for engines like Unity came on the second year, as the adoption was still quite lackluster, and even that d…

Yes it's a big difference, but not from the POV of his thread.

Re: Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it, but because it could

#23

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 12:47 AM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #18

pschuegr wrote: post #2

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

You could argue that the SunRay vision is what Eric Schmidt spent the next decade years or so implementing at Google and what Amazon did with AWS, just with browsers replacing SunRay hardware, racks of AMD/Intel boxes replacing the SPARC hardware, and with passwords/phone apps instead of the smartcards. The vision wasn't necessarily all that wrong, just the approach wasn't incremental enough. Also - it was a very dif…

[deleted]

Re: Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it, but because it could

#24

Post by xyzzy123 » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 12:51 AM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #15

pschuegr wrote: post #2

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

I disagree. This is terrible analysis: it's wrong about Sun and it's wrong about Stadia. 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…

Agree, huge demand for virtual desktops and centralised management overall... just not running Solaris.

Altho hn'ers are not very exposed to it, many large enterprises run with thousands of users on "virtual desktop farms", like, this is huge part of citrix / vmware business model.