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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#451

Post by moomin »

_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…

Honestly you’re right there’s gaming specific reasons for the failure, but that itself is symptomatic of Google’s entry and exit of many markets: never really bothering to figure out what the market actually wanted and just hoping that high quality engineering will solve that.

Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#452

Post by ece »

If Stadia's core audience was supposed to be occasional gamers, then that audience didn't exist. Not to the extent Google thought anyway.

That's the nice way of putting it, but yeah, cancelling things people like and/or not providing enough value (if your internet is fast enough) is going to hold a service back too.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#453

Post by ghaff »

ahartmetz wrote: post #370
bombcar wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this was exactly it; Google saw a potential for something like this, wanted in on it, and when the whole market didn't pan out, abandoned it. Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitabl…

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.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#454

Post by thebruce87m »

narrator wrote: post #204
stingraycharles wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it make…

Larry and Sergei decided they are not interested in the business anymore. That's probably why Google has failed to innovate much lately. How great would Tesla or SpaceX be without Elon? Companies without the founders become too cautious and status quo oriented.

I don’t follow SpaceX, but a cautious Tesla sounds great. Dump the self driving, concentrate on quality.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#455

Post by tlb »

utopcell wrote: post #272
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Altavista was the one to use before Google. I'm not sure the search results were that much better to be honest when they launched, although they were good. Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.

What on good earth are you talking about ? Google results upon launch were miles ahead of anything else at the time. I personally Googled once and never went back.

Google was better if you were searching for something popular, because it showed highly linked-to pages for that query. AltaVisa was perfectly good if you were searching for something specific that would only have a few pages mentioning it. It was great for function names, error messages, names of professors, etc. So different people had different experiences.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#456

Post by amelius »

I'm not a gamer, but I was wondering what happens to games purchased by customers.

The Google support site says:

> We will be leaving the Stadia platform and game servers online until January 18, 2023, so you can continue to play games in your library.

How is this acceptable? If I purchased Stadia games for $40-$60, I would be furious.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#457

Post by HelloNurse »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #415
_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. 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. That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme. I agree with the…

  > That’s where the market is moving towards however.
That's where certain rent-seeking companies would like the market to move towards. But the market always has two sides.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#458

Post by Retric »

statictype wrote: post #405
chongli wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted. And that is just the difficulty of building…

It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted. This is what everyone thought in 1999. Search engines were a solved problem in a crowded market where there could be little room for new contender And whate…

Google didn’t solve really search, it solved an at the time fairly new and related problem of low quality websites. Arguing about the inadequacy of early search engine in that context is like arguing that email clients in 1985 should have included spam filters.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#459

Post by pragmatic »

wokwokwok wrote: post #197
_HMCB_ wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be curious as to the elevator pitch presented to Google execs and why they bought into it. Wasn’t anyone thinking about the issues you brought up? Seems like fundamental issues. To think they spent millions and millions on this service only to close it down in short order. Typical Google but what other company does this repeatedly with 4-year precision.

You’ve just got to look back through history and you’ll see the same thing play out, and controversially it’s not actually the worst play in the long run. 1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity 2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out 3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something. So for example, let’s look at dart. There was neve…

Is flutter going ok?

It’s a product I’ve shied away from because Google.

Angular (and angularjs before it) are typical Google engineering. (Too much rxjs solutioning in search of a problem to solve. Compare it to svelte using an observable interface to get 80% of the benefit with the rest of the absolute insanity that junior devs bounce off and make angular a dreaded framework compared to react, vue, svelte)

Google is an anti-brand at this point.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#460

Post by animitronix »

_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…

Agreed, it was a dumb idea from the get
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