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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#82
post #80
post #65

The problem wasn't trust at all. Nobody in the gaming industry trusts anyone. Customers don't trust developers, see "never pre-order anything." Developers don't trust publishers, "executive meddling via focus groups." Publishers don't trust each other. The difference is publishers have lawyers so they write legal contracts to fix that. Google, Did, Not, Produce, The, Goods. Full-stop. Their service was light on conte…

stadia would've worked if it didn't charge per title. A subscription, which allowed you access to the entire library of games in stadia, akin to netflix, is a compelling product.

I think I will say this for the 3rd time in HN and I look like a shill, but Xbox Cloud is awesome. It’s exactly what you described!

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#83
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"

How did they have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi AP in 2010, and how did you have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi client in 2010? Wi-Fi is barely 1Gbps over a decade later.

Dualband bonded 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi 4. No idea if it was effective speed or reported.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#84

I have some business stuff hosted on GCP. I'm actually starting to worry about that, I think it would be weird if GCP was discontinued but I don't know anymore?

I used to work in an small org running on GCP, and the most infuriating thing was they would very often deprecate services in favor of new ones. Almost every year we had to spend a few months migrating to a V2 of a service. That's months of resources being spent on work that the company didn't really need to do.

This was a couple of years ago, I don't know if they are better at it now. But a quick search shows this looks like it is still a thing.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#85

The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Teams who have been working on ports for months were blind-sided. Employees generally did not know. It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company w…

Reader, Wave, G+, Hangouts, Stadia and soon RCS. Never build a business on a Google project, only ever use Google as a side hustle.

What's happening with RCS?

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#86

The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Teams who have been working on ports for months were blind-sided. Employees generally did not know. It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company w…

Everybody at Google knew it was doomed but they still collected their $200k a year.[1][2]

[1] https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACk...

[2] https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-com...

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#87
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…

I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.

Something like Shadow PC makes way more sense, and is why I choose it. It’s just a cloud PC, and even supports SteamVR.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#88
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…

I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.

A 300-400 dollar console isn’t that much of a barrier compared to a 60 AAA video game. This market of people willing to pay premium prices for enthusiast products but is unwilling to pay for the hardware to run them I don’t think exists.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the paid app? I miss Google reader and all the blogs I used to subscribe to.

Reeder on macOS and ios. Allows you to locally host your RSS feeds so no servers required. I haven't checked recently but they usually make the (N-1)th version free.

I assume reeder 5? When I search reeder without the 5 it doesn’t show up…

Thanks for the recommendation to!

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#90
There are advantages to game streaming but Google never really did anything with them, instead they just made a worse version of a console.

The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a gaming console for free. You could buy a PS5 for $500 or you could play on Stadia for $0!" (In practice the free tier of Stadia didn't have the greatest quality but many people didn't even know Stadia had a free tier...)

Game streaming could have opened up new possibilities. Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. "Okay GodGamer420 spamming in chat, if you think this boss is so easy, now you have control. Show us how it's done."

Even the lowest hanging fruit. The biggest advantage of game streaming is that it works on any device but Stadia didn't even work on most Android phones at launch, and for many months after.

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