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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#871
post #766

Google: "Would you like to waste the best years of your life?" Engineer: "No..." Google: "What if I pay you slightly above average and give you free food?" Engineer: "Deal!"

Slightly above average?

Well, average definitely depends on where you live.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#872
post #43

Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

That tweet was surely from the Stadia team, and teams generally do not plan on shutting down. I think we can assume that was 100% honest at the time, and the team was doing everything it could to keep going. And that upper management (VP/director/etc.) probably finally made the decision to shut it down just a couple of weeks ago or even less. So while ironic... it's highly unlikely Google was lying, as multiple peopl…

But the language they used wasn't ambiguous. They said they were committed to it. If they want to give themselves wiggle room to backtrack on decisions based on performance, they need to find a way of being enthusiastic without making it sound like they are going long on the tech and the platform.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#873
post #43

Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

Sundar Pichai has been destroying the company from inside out since he took over as CEO.

But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that.

But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on).

Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Google we're talking about. They shut everything down eventually.

Does anyone think we'll ever see the sunsetting of something huge like YouTube or GMail?

youtube is backed by ads. Google has issues making anything that is not ad based.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization…

Has there been a lack of direction, mission and purpose since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#876
post #43

Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

Android has not shut down yet :-)

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#878
post #43

Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…

There are 2 sides of the same company working against each other. There's the side that wants to create new products and then there's the side that wants to tighten costs and improve earnings. New products will always be a cost and not being able to show a profit or fast growth will mark it for closure.

I suspect that starting a new project inside google is comfortable enough that the thirst to grow and show a profit is muted. Also, I bet, the politics between departments makes it hard to do what's need to succeed.

Google should consider extracting companies into their own entities rather than closing them. Or creating an incubator where they keep a big percentage of the company and let the companies grow or die as the market dictates.

Google's primary job should be to provide resources to scale up business models that are working like they did with YouTube.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#879
post #40

Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways. Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.

I'm pretty sure it also got bad initial response because of their pricing plan. I have no idea why Google thought it was a good idea to charge both a subscription fee and a purchase fee per game in a world where services like Game Pass only charge the subscription fee; it's like they just assumed there was no competition.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#880
post #409
post #242

Feels like the writing was on the wall almost as soon as they launched. It seems telling to me that Stadia couldn't get any traction even during one of the most protracted GPU shortages/crypto manias in history; connectivity requirements and lag issues aside, I think a lot of gamers just aren't interested in outsourcing the hardware side of things the way these corporations might expect. Building and maintaining your…

My personal problem with Stadia was the lock-in. You were required to buy a game at full price on Stadia and were only allowed to play it on Stadia, a service for which you would've eventually had to pay a subscription fee. One can tell people that a PC is much more expensive upfront and that you could play for years on Stadia for the same money but the risk of it being shut down and losing access to all the full pri…

real-time multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible to play competitively

I understand that everyone has different tolerances, but I can’t stand even slightest lags (ms range), irregularities and visual bugs in games. Had to fight my way through hardware settings on a real PC at last update, now it’s smooth and immersive.

I don’t play multiplayer games at all, but have a hard time understanding why someone would think “ah, I’m playing single player anyway, so enormous input lags are okay”. How do you play parrying (witcher, souls), shooting 2+ targets quickly (hitman, ghost recon), tight racing with such delays?

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