Google is shutting down Stadia • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#361

Post by IntelMiner » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

_visgean wrote: post #316

keewee7 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not market it at all I noticed that too. Google never adversises its producta. Google is almost like the startup founder who thinks their side project is so good it doesn't need marketing or sales.

I remember a talk given by chief of czech google at our highschool, she told us that we are one of the few countries where they had to use marketing to compete with for search market (I remember seeing ads for Google chrome in metro when it was new. ).. I think as a monopoly they just usually dont feel the need for marketing when there is no else running ads...

I've been seeing ads for Chrome around northern Seattle (Shoreline) area

At first I was baffled why they would possibly need to advertise Chrome in the US. But in retrospect it might just be feather ruffling in Edge (Microsofts) backyard?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#362

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

dweekly wrote: post #300

You know, the day Stadia launched, someone very cynically set up http://stadiacountdown.com/ and it won't end up very far off from the truth. sigh Honestly, I'm glad Google was willing to take a bet this big - they had a lot of serious infrastructure innovations to make this work that may end up paying off in other ways, and a company that's not willing to make big bets has a 0% chance of having a new bet land...

Funny, the stadiacountdown.com counter had actually been over-optimistic, by almost a full year, saying there are 414 days left (extrapolated based on [0]), but with the new announcement of a shutdown date of January 18, 2023, there are only 111 days to go. May it rest in peace.

As for whether Google should be taking bets that they might not be able to support, I'm actually very much against this. I would suggest that they pour their money into supporting independent start-ups, e.g. via GV[1], and then possibly acquiring them if things go well, rather than further tarnishing the Google brand.

[0] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/ [1] https://www.gv.com/ (formerly Google Ventures)

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#363

Post by MichaelCollins » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #119

yellow_lead wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that was a lie

What is the social media person supposed to say in this case? "we're working on a blog post about Stadia shutting down that'll be released in 2 months"? Even if Phil Harrison himself were the one running that Twitter account, he probably knew it was destined to shut down but didn't have anything official on when or the details of the shutdown.

> What is the social media person supposed to say in this case?

If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#364

Post by jerf » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #157

yellow_lead wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that was a lie

After negative news, it’s pretty safe to assume thr opposite when PR / Marketing says something like “we wont be shutting down” or when a CEO says “there wont be any layoffs”. If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.

Companies, governments, and politicians do not say things to inform you about what is happening or what they are doing. They say things to produce in the listener the state they desire, whatever that may be, and they have few limitations as to what they will say to do that. (Not quite "zero", but definitely "few".)

The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more information. And the amount of time that "more information" outright contradicts the nominal content of the statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the nominal content.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#365

Post by paxys » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

I'm glad that they are refunding customers, but it must suck for all the game studios that spent a lot of development hours (which could have gone towards other improvements) to add Stadia support for their games.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#366

Post by lmkg » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #164

dekhn wrote: post #74

When I rejoined Google (working in the hardware division), my managers tried to get me to work on stadia and I refused (this was shortly before it launched). I looked at it, said "this won't be successful, and google will eventually get rid of it". My managers simply couldn't understand that. They said "the leadership thinks this will be successful and we should build it" and then I realized they were sheeple.

Or maybe your managers understood, but were tasked with finding workers for the project and were hoping you were sheeple?

That's even worse because it's malicious, wolves in sheeple clothing.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#367

Post by jamesgeck0 » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

solardev wrote: post #223

Google's product strategy.. Google: We're going to launch a fancy new product in an already-crowded field, not market it at all, and everyone will jump on board and love it! Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon. Google: No we won't, we're fully dedicated to this thing Everyone else: No way, they haven't added meaningful features in years and they're going…

> Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon.

I’ve seen a few developers (Ryan Gordon, IIRC?) saying that the Stadia SDK was actually great. It was basically just a bog standard Vulkan/Linux environment with much fewer unpleasant surprises than consoles.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#368

Post by foobiekr » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #28

This is a great example of why you can never trust PR statements. They outright lie. We're not working on X. We won't shut down Y. Bald faced lies. Edit: Missed that they're doing refunds. That part's good. EDIT2: Why I'm calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on a whim. They're made months if not years in advance. A public company making public statements about how you're not shutting something down while yo…

As a rule, with corporations, official denials can be thought of as unofficial confirmations. Occasionally this is not true, but for the most part they wouldn't be responding unless the issue was credible and at least a few parties had strong reason to believe whatever it is they're denying.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#369

Post by timmg » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

oramit wrote: post #227

I was expecting there to be some satisfaction at this news as I (and many others clearly from the comments) predicted this would happen. But honestly it just feels kind of sad at this point. Google used to be, at least from an outside perspective, one of the most innovative and forward thinking companies, constantly releasing new and interesting products. Not everything was good, of course, but I was always eager to…

> Google used to be, at least from an outside perspective, one of the most innovative and forward thinking companies, constantly releasing new and interesting products.

Honestly, I think the change from a SWE CEO (Schmidt -- and less so Larry) to a PM CEO, Sundar, is probably the main reason.

I get why, though. At the time of Sundar's rise, it was clear that Apple was way better at making "products". (Now they're just a lot better :)

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#370

Post by LegitShady » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

KMnO4 wrote: post #191

TillE wrote: post #17

You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that. I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.

I’ll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99% (99.9%?) of cases. Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms. I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag. I’v…

the 10ms or whatever the real amount is, is in addition to tbe monitor lag, etc.

i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.