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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

#771

Post by rco8786 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #506
rco8786 wrote: post #198

This is totally the right move. I am a (very happy) user of Stadia. If you haven't tried it, you really should...it's an amazing piece of tech. I can find myself with 20-30 minutes worth of downtime during the day, fire up Cyberpunk 2077 or Hitman or Assassin's Creed in moments from my browser *on a macbook* and play at high settings with no noticeable lag. Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for…

I tried it and was far less impressed. It was a novelty that quickly grew stale playing on my phone, that aspect seemed questionable at best. If I wanted to actually do some gaming on the TV, it was quite inferior to the (now quite old) PS4 Pro. That leaves it in an awkward middle ground. Where I'm both on my laptop, but I also happen to have better input devices handy. Since if I'm going to get up to go fetch a cont…

> on my phone

Yea, I can't imagine that playing AAA (or even indie) games designed for full sized screens is going to translate well on a phone sized screen.

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

#772

Post by Laforet »

detaro wrote: post #740
Laforet wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any. The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same grave…

> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.

Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities.

Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.

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

#773

Post by depressedpanda »

pjmlp wrote: post #746
account42 wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graphics backend is really not such a big cost for most games, especially with existing cross-platform engines. Also the grahics APIs are really not that different as they all model the same GPUs. DirectX vs. OpenGL had some annoying things but most of them are only a problem when you have to translate and can't modify the calling code at all. DirectX 12 vs. Vulkan is even less of a difference.

How many Android and Switch games get published on GNU/Linux? Yep, it boils down to it.

Let's cool it with the hyperbole, okay?

There are many reasons Android and Switch games don't get ported to Linux; having to rewrite the game from scratch is not one of them.

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

#774

Post by thu2111 »

exikyut wrote: post #600
zestyping wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water. Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.

A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions: - what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...? - was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak) - did the…

I was also there. G+ was born into an environment of fear. Google leadership had convinced themselves that Facebook would dominate tech forever in every product area because all you had to do to make something successful was make it social, and boom, it won. They were over-generalising from Facebook's success in photo hosting vs Picasa, as well as a few other products.

The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move.

After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.

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

#775

Post by detaro »

Laforet wrote: post #772
detaro wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.

Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabiliti…

True, letting you access posts from before you subscribed (if that's what you mean) was unique (as far I know) to Reader.

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

#777

Post by Laforet »

acdha wrote: post #761
Laforet wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any. The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same grave…

Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates. On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/ “ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the busine…

Thank you for the links. I have not read these before and there are some very interesting snippets of information I was unaware of.

It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.

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

#778

Post by craftinator »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #623
craftinator wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.

Google isn't the company I would lodge this complaint at. They contribute a lot of code back as well.

Google is a company large enough that you can always find fringes that contradict their main philosophies a business model within the same company. They do not contribute proportionally to their revenue nearly as much as the other FAANG companies.

Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.

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

#779

Post by macspoofing »

sofixa wrote: post #767
macspoofing wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a step back. Stadia, as a product and service, has been out for over a year. It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing and now we have an announcement that Google isn't going to bother releasing games for the platform (even though they went to the effort of buying and setting up full fledged gaming studios to do just that - which isn't cheap). So I'm…

> It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing Recently Ubisoft came on board and all of their recent titles are available on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly great to play on Stadia, and i've read about a lot of people that got Stadia for it ( there was a promo, pre-order Cyberpunk and get a free Stadia controller and Chromecast Ultra). Those are not pretty s…

I guess I was wrong. Stadia is clearly a success.
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