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Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

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Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#491

Post by athrowaway23524 »

alm1 wrote: post #416

I'm surprised at all the negative comments equating closure of the _game stuido_ to Stadia not doing well. Google is not known for good content production. Only example I can think of are Youtube Originals which hardly stand out. I read the announcement as Google doubling down on title acquisition which probably worked out well. Cyberpunk was the largest game release last year (last 5 years?) and seemingly very popul…

My read is that Google has soured on Stadia but needs to wind it down slowly to manage their image, and because Gamers are notorious for taking bad news badly.

The studio goes now. Hedged with a commitment to bringing you yesterday's games next year, from a skeleton crew of portfolio managers.

Next, the GPU clusters will track GCP usage, not the PC hardware hype cycle. Cloud GPU users only need commodity compute; Gamers want ray tracing cores, AI processors, the latest DirectX features, yadda yadda. The enthusiast hardware market is a well-oiled marketing machine. Stadia, by virtue of running on a platform that only buys workhorse cores, will become increasingly hostile towards gaming use-cases. Studios won't waste time porting an unreleased game to oddball hardware. Stadia probably doesn't have the subscriber numbers to make the juice worth the squeeze.

Last comes the email that your Stadia games will be accessible until June 202X.

Alternatively, they might actually think they have a chance to succeed from the publisher & platform angle. Everything will look fine internally until the fund dries up because publisher bets are multi-year affairs and exclusivity is expensive.

Best case, they have a hit and people subscribe long enough to play it. Now find another hit, no big deal. Most likely case, they don't find a hit in time. These kinds of publisher funds only get funded once.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#492

Post by drusepth »

pkage wrote: post #244
jeremyjh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental m…

I signed up for GeForce Now, and truly the killer feature is bringing the games you already own. On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription, and Luna (Amazon's offering) is similar in that you can sign up for game "channels" (iirc). With GeForce Now, you can just play the stuff you already own without sinking money into games that play on a platform that might not even exist…

>On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription

FWIW, the subscription is optional (with these perks [1]). You can also just buy the game you want to play and play it, no subscription needed.

[1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9798345?hl=en

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#493

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #185

I'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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#494

Post by ehsankia »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #479
ehsankia wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing There is literally no way Google shuts down Stadia and doesn't refund people their money and let them export their save files (you can already do the latter). So no, the worst worst case is that you got to play on Stadia for free and if you really want the game again you can use that money to buy it somewhere else.

Like all those people who paid for Google music for years and then when it was killed and replaced with YouTube music lost out because some stuff wasn’t on there, or wasn’t available in their country, etc right?

All my purchased music was properly transferred to YTM, and the analogy isn't quite 1:1 since I can download the mp3s I bought too and store them on my computer. There may have been some cases where specific songs licenses weren't available (I'd like to see the percentage), though the help page says that once they get the license, the song will re-appear in your library too. Over the past year I have found their licensing has gotten better and I run much less into missing albums anymore.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#495

Post by mckeed »

ramphastidae wrote: post #396
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #195

Earlier 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…

Serious question: does Google operate a single profitable business besides AdWords?

Android, G-Suite, even YouTube (though that is also advertising)

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#496

Post by riversflow »

baron816 wrote: post #394
apozem wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream of cloud gaming, for me, is everyone gets an amazing gaming PC. I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.

I bought an Xbox just so I could play Red Dead Redemption 2. Had Stadia been around, or had I been interested in Cyberpunk, I would certainly play on that. I still think it’s a good idea, with a lot of people falling into the “who is this for” camp, and very well could eventually be very successful. My impression is that it just needs more time to mature. If we were talking about some saas product, those rough edges…

I don’t think Stadia is truly an MVP. It’s a Google MVP, it doesn’t have to be truly viable, only viable to google middle management looking for a promotion.

That’s what people are lamenting, you can’t role out a competitive gaming platform with such a small catalog of titles.

>I bought an Xbox to play Red Dead Redemption 2 . . . lots of people falling into the “who this is for” camp

Those people appear to be “casual/occasional gamers”? I am very doubtful that this group will really turn into a cash cow. $10.00/month is enough that few are going to keep a subscription after they are done playing. If you amortize a console over a lifetime of 4 years it would be considerably cheaper than paying for stadia if you consider the current $75 upfront cost.

So the way I see it, for stadia to be viable there would have to be a steady stream of AAA titles(because otherwise the need for cloud compute is questionable) produced by 3rd party studios...this just doesn’t exist, titles like RDR2 & CP2077 are an exception. We only saw a handful of titles that demanding and hyped come from a non-Microsoft, non-Sony published studio in the last decade. I’m not in the game dev world, but producing these types of titles seems to be exceptionally difficult, and the trend seems to be less and less AAA titles per year as the complexity compounds.

Combined with stadia’s limited selection, Google’s history of product abandonment, and that you often have to purchase stadia specific versions of titles to play them on the platform. It’s a difficult pill to swallow. Nvidia’s product, GeForce Now, where titles are portable seems like a much more viable product to me.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#497

Post by p1necone »

ahelwer wrote: post #481
p1necone wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As are the modern cards that cost $1000. You can spend significantly less that that and still play all the modern titles at high settings and 1080p60fps easily. (Or 4k if you're willing to make the same compromises on framerate that consoles do)

The minimum card you need to play current games on 1080p/60fps/high settings is about a GTX 1070, a four-year-old card which goes for $300 used. Remember we're comparing this to the cost of using a game streaming service.

Obviously at least over the short term the streaming service ends up cheaper (although with stadia charging for games it depends on how many you buy and how much more they are there than on steam, especially with sales). I was just calling out the implication that the standard price for a GPU that runs modern titles well was more than a current gen console, it's not.

(Amusingly I'm running the exact card you mentioned, and I did buy it for about $450 NZD used, although the going rate is more like $350 now on the local used market).

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#498

Post by camel_Snake »

ehsankia wrote: post #484
Timpy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I had to buy Stadia to Pro to play any game. This isn't the case. There was a game I wanted to play, it doesn't run on Linux, I bought it 50% off on Stadia and I'm a happy user. I'm not going all in on Stadia of course; I realize that there's a good chance Stadia will disappear eventually. For the convenience and quality I'm getting now I don't mind buying this game on Steam again later if it happens that S…

I honestly don't see how Stadia could go away without refunding users for their games. So yes the worst case if you just have to buy it on Steam with the refund you get.

what do you mean? why would they? Does it indicate anywhere in the ToS that refunds will be made if your account is disabled?

I'm a happy Stadia user and I'd love for this to be the case, but I think it's incredibly unrealistic. If Stadia shuts down we'll be lucky to get 3 months warning, let alone refunds.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#499

Post by kllrnohj »

jeremyjh wrote: post #230
bastawhiz wrote: post #185

I'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…

I like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental m…

nvidia's model is also the least likely to withstand the test of time. Once you have to pay enough for nvidia to break even much less make a profit, everyone is going to bail.

At least with xcloud & stadia's approach there's both subscription fees (passive income if people don't play), as well as the 30% store cut to offset some of the cost.

Although none of these are remotely close to being priced at break-even prices, so this is also likely going to end up with even more IAP-based games on these platforms if this ever "takes off" at all. Which, yuck. This is obviously a bait & switch strategy for everyone involved. Just dressed up as "subsidized during user acquisition" instead so they can feel less evil about it.

Re: Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

#500

Post by danudey »

bastawhiz wrote: post #185

I'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…

It feels as though the games which are on Stadia right now are games which, with few exceptions, are games which Google paid a significant amount of money to during development to support Stadia as well as other platforms.

I'm guessing that if you look at an existing title along the lines of any of the ones you mentioned, the team has to balance between ongoing development of the game and porting it to Stadia, and they may just not have the resources or inclination to do the porting even when huge cheques are involved.

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