FWIW, I paid for and played RDR2, AC Odyssey and Valhalla on Stadia, and thoroughly enjoyed them both, on my outdated laptop. I'm old enough not to worry about microsecond lag, as my reaction times are by far the biggest factor.
I'd be sad if Stadia was eventually shuttered, but I haven't invested a significant amount of money, compared to building a rig, and have no intention of replaying games that I've already run through.
Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
381–390 of 834 posts
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
but up until now they did apparently have funding to be running an internal studio? seems like those funds could have been better spent bribing tv companies like the parent is suggesting.
Google is a company of engineers. Engineers solve problems by building stuff, not by bribing companies. I think the main exception is Android and Ads, which also happens to be the main parts of Google I disagree with...
Building successful platforms isn't about engineering - many well-engineered platforms were market failures.
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#383I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on the list that you can play. None of the games are ones that I care about. It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that fe…
Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?
Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the same about reader.
I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one…
> I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.
None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market.
Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. Yes, but apply this to 90% of their new products. Google's planning in the current age is about as bad as Microsoft's in the 2004-2012 era.
At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.
> At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year.
You're really selling me on using Microsoft over Google here: If I'm using a product/service, I'd prefer that it stay around as long as possible even if the company decides that it's a failure. Bonus points for being a "cloud" company so that users are totally screwed the moment the company pulls support.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are n…
GeForce Now can be used with Steam quite seamlessly. In fact, GeForce Now's value is to play the games you already own on various platforms on their hardware. They're not trying to be another games store.
I don't think this is true anymore after publishers pulled back.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?
Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.
Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.
Compare to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.
They'll both let you play games you already paid for but Stadia makes you buy them again, unless that changed?
To me, that put Stadia in an odd place where only the more casual players without a gaming device would sign up, or those with enough money to pay twice because they spend a lot of time away (but with good internet).
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is true. Google alt-righties would riot at anything that was controversial in a gaming sense (like having women as protagonists).
More likely, people losing their minds over what the protagonist in a Star Wars game looks like. [1] https://etcanada.com/news/548672/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order...
"Redhead erasure" is, in my experience, a talking point for "great replacement" types, who I would think tend to overlap heavily with the "women can't have muscles", "there are two genders, men and political", and similar mindsets that are the incumbent position in gamer culture.
Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today. The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way…
This is the really confusing part to me. For most of the major metro's of the world cloud gaming is completely feasible on today's internet. Playing on servers in NYC from Boston works flawlessly as a casual gamer, and really opened up the possibility for me to enjoy AAA titles. Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences…
It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?