28 ms·
When will Google shut down Stadia?
- MrRadar 7y agoFYI this is run by the incorrigible Jason Scott of textfiles.com/BBS Documentary/Archive Team fame: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1196447880728453120 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1196447880728453120
- textfiles 7y agoEntirely incorrigible.
- RocketSyntax 7y agoThis is a prototype for thin client. It's a more advanced chromebook.
- juped 7y agoWith Stadia's "negative latency" technology, it's like it's already shut down.
- aeyes 7y agoFPS games have had this for a looong time. In Quake 3 it's called timenudge and you can have it set to a negative value which means that the client will predict the opponents movement before receiving the next packet from the server. The CPMA mod then came up with even better adaptive prediction in their netcode. Without some prediction opponent movement would be jerky depending on the other players ping. The downside is that sometimes shots don't register which are a clear hit on your screen and sometimes weird flick shots hit which are far off the target.
- whateveracct 7y agoFighting games too via things like GGPO. Not to mention even fighting games like Melee have a little local input lag, which you can then remove and use to hide network latency online.
- coldpie 7y agoReally good article on this topic: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighting-games-use-delay-based-and-rollback-netcode/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...
- escapecharacter 7y agoIf it was true negative latency the product would be cancelled before it was announced
- haolez 7y agoAlthough Stadia might fail, I see cloud gaming (i.e. streaming A/V) as a revolution for multiplayer games. We can now have all kinds of complicated physics and particle engines, since all players are known to experience the exact same “world model”. It might help a lot with anti-cheat technology as well. It’s pretty exciting!
- jimbob45 7y agoThis is the problem with modern gaming. Everyone wants to fix all the problems that aren't the core problem we have with gaming: microtransactions. No one cares about how nice your game looks or how low-latency your game is if you designed it around microtransactions with pay-to-win gameplay and a laughably greedy content update schedule.
- deminature 7y agoMicrotransactions are a pet peeve of the hardcore crowd, but ask any average gamer and it probably doesn't rate in the top 10 disagreements with modern gaming. It's an artifact of the hardcore gamer filter bubble online, not a widespread grievance. The problems Stadia addresses - eliminating 100GB downloads and constant 10-20GB patch downloads that might take hours to pull down, removing the cost of entry in the form of a console, being able to play AAA games on your phone - these are things the average non-hardcore gamer cares about.
- meheleventyone 7y agoBut it replaces multi gigabyte downloads with multi gigabyte per hour downloads.
- deminature 7y agoIt allows instant-play on 10mbit connections, where you would need to wait 10-20hrs otherwise to play. Even on gigabit connections, you're going to wait ~1hr to play AAA games as opposed to starting immediately. Instant gratification is powerful.
- irrational 7y agoHonestly, as soon as Google announces a new product, my first thought is to wonder how long until it is shut down. Google has completely lost my trust in relying on any of their products. Even when they come out and claim that this product will not be cancelled, for reals this time, pinky promise, etc. I simply can't believe them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fatnoah 7y ago>Honestly, as soon as Google announces a new product, my first thought is to wonder how long until it is shut down Same here. I hesitate to invest any time or money in something they make until it's been around and looks like it's going to stick around.
- throwaway35784 7y agoAside: Costumers, er prospects rather, love my products until the end when they ask, "so... how many people work there?" As though that would indicate how likely it is that the product will have a long life. They are telling me with that question they want my software for a long time. But when they hear the answer they bail. I still don't know how to get over that hump.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoMy company payed once for an outlook plugin written by, near as we can figure, a single guy and has been using it for over a decade and it continues to get updates for free. The hump you have to get over, I think, is the one where your product doesn't explode the second you disappear. That's tough with web stuff, but easy for native.
- _ah 7y ago"Most companies are bloated and would require a huge staff of N to maintain this product, but I'm able to do it with N/10 because we've invested heavily in the very best intelligent automation. I've staked my entire life on this project so I cannot afford to let it fail."
- Karunamon 7y agoI wouldn't be surprised if it's gone in 2 years or less. Stadia's launch has been nothing short of disastrous.
- buboard 7y agoyou should change it to a bidding war. would be fun to watch as the predictions change every day
- gnrlst 7y agoI kinda want this to turn into a game. Maybe by being able to buy a ticket and bet that it is X days before/after the D-day. Whoever is closest at the time of the actual shutdown will win the whole prize pool.
- duncan-donuts 7y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if you could bet on it in Vegas
- MaximumMadness 7y agoA dead pool for Stadia so to speak.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoThis won't be shutdown and I'm betting on it now. If it ends up doing badly, they will pivot chrome into another gaming platform similar to steam and the browser will become a Swiss army knife app where you do almost everything.
- roland35 7y agoThis makes me shed a solitary tear for Google Reader :'( And another solitary tear from the other eye for Google Inbox :,(
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoThis comment is extremely frustrating. You can't shed multiple "solitary" tears. Even if its one tear per eye. You wouldn't say "I have two solitary eyes" would you?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoGoogle's missteps are someone else's opportunity. I use FastMail, NewsBlur, etc, all so I don't have to use Google. Vote with your wallet and choices. Use non-Google tooling whenever possible.
- neilobremski 7y agoYay, FastMail! I've been using them for going on three years with no end in sight. Gmail adds all the "cool" features but us old men appreciate not being told how to reply ...
- usuallymatt 7y ago
- netsharc 7y agoHah, excellent joke/insight! If this goes viral it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy - people realizing Google likes to kill their services will say "Stay away from Stadia, it'll hurt if you get into it and they kill it".
- Analemma_ 7y agoJoking aside, this self-fulfilling prophecy issue is turning into a serious problem for Google that needs attention from the C-suite. Killing a product is no longer isolated to that product alone but is reflecting badly on the entire company and kneecapping completely unrelated teams. It's especially bad in the cloud: there are tons of enterprises that won't even look at GCP because of Google's flighty reputation.
- JohnFen 7y agoI think Google has reached the size and power that their execs probably think "We don't care. We don't have to."
- SanchoPanda 7y agoThe question I assme they ask themselves is "If we no longer let small teams build and release interesting products, what do we miss out on?" The answer probably has a lot to do with employee motivation and retention as well.
- sorenjan 7y agoThe constant cancelling of products combined with the risk of having my Google account banned in one service and then locking me out from all others are the main reasons I don't even try out new Google services. The data collection would be one other reason, but they already know everything about me.
- sl1ck731 7y agoMy theory is this was a ploy to make use of idle cloud resources Google invested in for GCP. If that is the case I have much less fear of it just being shut down since its just gravy on top.
- SanchoPanda 7y agoI think the core insight here is right, that as far as they were concerned it seemed silly to miss out on a chance to sell their "google-scale" experience and know-how in many cloud/distributed contexts. But similair things were true for lots of dead products, and google's willingness to launch a large number of products and only keep the ones that gain massive market traction shows just as much paranoia about ending up with a stable full of lqggards and weak brands. If user growth flattens out after two years, be nervous.
- mciancia 7y agoStadia uses custom hardware that they had to make specifically for this, so this is at least unlikely ;)
- sorenjan 7y agoGoogle Stadia games needs to be customized for Stadia. For how long will developers continue to make Stadia versions of their games? What will happen to the service when the people first involved have moved on and they have trouble finding engineers wanting to work on something that's not brand new? Wasn't that why they cancelled Reader?
- mattkevan 7y agoLet's make it a sweepstakes. Everyone choose a date and put in $1. Person closest to the date wins the pot.
- martin-adams 7y agoJust don't organise it on Google Hangouts as that'll probably be shutdown before Stadia.
- fnordsensei 7y agoIndeed: https://gcemetery.co/google-hangouts/ https://gcemetery.co/google-hangouts/
- fjabre 7y agoGoogle’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or deprecating APIs and products like this on a whim. They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.
- inetknght 7y ago> They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades. Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.
- leoh 7y agoWhat?
- inetknght 7y agoGoogle has a vested interest in reading your email. Google lets users think that setting up a mail server is difficult, that email is a dead end communication medium compared to walled gardens, and that phishing is difficult to combat effectively.
- shadowgovt 7y agoFWIW though, setting up a mail server is difficult. Setting up a mail client with reasonable spam filtering to make email usable is also difficult. Compare the list of steps on either of those tasks to the list for getting email via Gmail: "1) Sign up to a Google account, 2) visit gmail.com"; it's obvious almost all users are going to do the latter (or its equivalent at a Google competitor).
- inetknght 7y agoSetting up a mail server isn't difficult. It's about as easy as installing and configuring a web server, and just about as technical. Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult. Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.
- carrozo 7y agoBrutal, but fair given the track record of so much out of Mountain View. I’ve always detected a certain sense of tragicomedy about Google; their money-printing ad machine is something they’ve always seemed to feel deep shame about, which drives (and also pays for) all these other things that they give up on when they realise they’ll never come close to that kind of commercial success again.
- PaulHoule 7y agoSomething similar is true about Microsoft in that it's had a few core products that have been big hits (Windows, Office, ...) and then to satisfy investor's growth expectations they plow the profits into other lines of business which often fail (Windows Phone, Hololens, Microsoft Band, ...) or stagger on marginally (XBox). Azure is the latest big hit. Somehow Microsoft has adapted to this reality with some grace, they even balance it with the "Who moved my cheese?" attitude of its customers.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoNice joke and nice irony. I actually think that Stadia will be very successful in the long run, and I think Google will never shut it down. Same for GCP. (Just IMHO, and not much to substantiate my prediction.)
- HelloNurse 7y agoStadia is a throwaway project, far smaller than e.g. Google+ and in a risk-averse market of gamers who don't want to buy bricks and game studios who don't want to invest in a dead Platform (except as a token of friendliness, or maybe of protection racket, to Google).
- kllrnohj 7y ago> I actually think that Stadia will be very successful in the long run So far nobody has come up with a viable revenue model for cloud gaming that people are willing to pay for. People are already complaining about Stadia's $10/mo just to then pay full price for old games. And there's no way even that is covering Google's costs to run the service. The biggest hurdle is not Google gets bored and canning it. It's at what point does Google decide Stadia needs to at least be revenue neutral and prices double if not quadruple, with the free tier eliminated entirely. Is the service still viable at that point? Will anyone stick with it?
- tempsy 7y agoWhat is going on with Google? I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management is/was. Now I have no clue what they are thinking with their product launches as of late. All of their products (and marketing) invoke this conservative, risk-adverse blandness that tries to appeal to everyone and in turn appeals to no one.
- dopamean 7y agoMaybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products? Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which then results in shutting things down.
- perlgeek 7y agoI think good had (and maybe still) good product teams. For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier. What's missing is the company-level portfolio management.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago> For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier. While I generally agree that Maps is a great and amazing product, I really feel that it is now suffering "peak product" syndrome like MS Word circa late 90s/early 00s. That is, I think Maps was probably "optimal" about 2 or 3 years ago, but since then there has been so much organizational pressure to do something new and add features than each successive version gets worse overall with feature bloat. Yes, some of those new features are useful, but overall I have less and less screen real estate taken up by the actual map and more and more taken up by shit I usually don't care about.
- 7y ago
- alephnan 7y agoThe timer is based on historical averages of Google products. Seems like a decent heuristic, except niche products like Youtube app for the Nintendo 3DS is included https://gcemetery.co/youtube-nintendo-3ds/?ref=lifespanrecent/ https://gcemetery.co/youtube-nintendo-3ds/?ref=lifespanrecen...
- robbrown451 7y agoSorry, but pet peeve. Shutdown is not a verb. (should be "shut down") http://notaverb.com/shutdown http://notaverb.com/shutdown
- hombre_fatal 7y agoSure it is. And I'd rather take it from Merriam-Webster than someone's belabored "notaverb.com" hobby horse. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shutdown https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shutdown First known use of shut down as verb: 1779. If your issue is merely with the lack of a space, then it just seems petty to me, like getting technical about raincoat vs rain coat.
- robbrown451 7y agoWebster agrees with me, it should be two words, not a single word. That was my point (and is the point of the "notaverb" site).
- JohnFen 7y agoLanguage is defined by how people actually use it. If people are generally using and understanding "shutdown" as a verb (which has been true in the computer industry for at least 30 years), then it's a verb regardless of what language prescriptionists say.
- kupiakos 7y agoIn the present participle, it's "shutting down", not "shutdowning". Or, "she shuts down the computer", not "she shutdowns the computer". "shutdown" is a verb as much as "alot" is a word. It's just a common typo.
- robbrown451 7y agoI'm generally a descriptivist vs. a precriptionist, but this is a different thing. Is there anyone arguing that, just because many people write "there" when they mean "their", that we should consider it correct? To me this is the same. Can you show me anywhere "shutdown" is used as a verb (in the computer industry or otherwise) where it appears as a choice rather than a simple error? Like in the title of a well circulated article, or otherwise in something that has been subject to professional editing? https://twitter.com/apstylebook/status/1087717834975789056?lang=en https://twitter.com/apstylebook/status/1087717834975789056?l...
- Lagogarda 7y agoGonna share this on my Google+!
- iamsb 7y agoA good model will be to start working on a new startup with a competing product as soon as google launches something. In couple of years when they shut down, provide migration paths. Swim in $$$.
- kozhevnikov 7y agoSunset Chasers™
- iamsb 7y agoJust dont sell the startup to google again and keep building the same product over and over again. :)
- macinjosh 7y agoThe worlds first recursive startup.
- notmyaccount 7y agoBecome Trillionaire??!!
- TMWNN 7y agoTell that to Craig Walker[1]: * Founds telephony company Dialpad, sells to Yahoo. (I think it was the basis of Yahoo's search-via-phone-call service.) * Founds telephony company Grand Central, sells to Google, is basis of Google Voice. * Founds telephony company Dialpad (he bought back the name and domain). [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-voice-founders-raised-50-million-to-scale-dialpad-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-voice-founders-raised...
- marricks 7y agoI wonder about the damage Google does to any potential start ups in a field. How much buzz can you get when everyone’s first thought is “how could this be any good? Google already tried that and failed...”
- jahrichie 7y agoThis title is such click bait lol. Granted this service was a terrible idea in the first place, and WILL be shutdown, but this is a hypothesis, extrapolated over hundreds of companies that have nothing to do with each other.
- NullPrefix 7y ago>extrapolated over hundreds of companies that have nothing to do with each other What are you talking about? The hypothesis was extrapolated over hundreds of Google's products.
- MaximumMadness 7y agoI appreciate the sentiment here, but this feels incredibly reactive and preliminary. Stadia should have more clearly set launch expectations: there are only a few games worth playing for, most of the cool cloud features aren't there, etc, etc But that doesn't mean all of those things aren't coming? For all intents and purposes, this was a soft launch. Sure Google is going to burn a ton of consumers by launching before the true value-adds are there, but it doesn't mean that one-day Stadia won't be worth buying.
- tux1968 7y agoThat isn't the issue -- it isn't a comment about the quality of Stadia today or even what is possible. It's a comment about Google's propensity to lose interest in products and services and shut them down.
- MaximumMadness 7y agoI think the two are inherently connected, no? By assuming Stadia is a failed product out of the box, we just label it as another Google product that is waiting to be shut down. Google is on the hook for a bunch of titles and features they haven't delivered yet, if they were to "lose interest" in the next six months to a year I'd be pretty suprised
- radium3d 7y agoI have zero interest in Stadia personally and I would consider myself a gamer. I just feel like I want less latency and video over internet doesn't seem like it's going to catch up with a 4-6ft video cable direct to my monitor / TV. If Stadia is successful I can see it being a way to pay for new data centers for Google's cloud infrastructure. If you consider that most consoles last a 4-5 years, they cost ~$299-500 over that period, that's ~$39-$125 per year for the generation. Instead of the users owning the machine locally, Google installs a consoles worth of power in a data center. Once the generation is over, the data center is still there and Google has put all that money into a semi-new server datacenter infrastructure that can be rolled into Google's Cloud service offerings. "Kids" / Gaming money then pays for "Adults" / Cloud Server infrastructure. The idea sounds great as long as there are enough gamers who don't mind the latency. I am unfamiliar with the lifespan of a Google data center but I imagine it's around 5+ years.
- koala_man 7y agoA console and a Google project has a similar life expectancy, but when the console EoLs, you can continue to use it indefinitely for free if you want.
- radium3d 7y agoYes, that is another reason I prefer local hardware too. But Google can't sell enterprise priced cloud services with the console in your house (yet).
- mopsi 7y ago> I just feel like I want less latency and video over internet doesn't seem like it's going to catch up with a 4-6ft video cable direct to my monitor / TV. It's already close, I've gotten stable <20 ms over 100 m distance with Steam Link in standard 1 gigabit ethernet LAN without any tweaks (QoS etc). This is enough to play slower performance-heavy games like citybuilders without noticing any difference compared to playing on a local computer.
- radium3d 7y ago
- gilrain 7y agoThe criticism of Google Stadia and the defense of its concept in this thread are correct. There is a successful future in cloud gaming and nobody denies that. However, it's extremely likely to be delivered by a company with both the technical chops and industry chops, including a deep existing library. Google only has one of those, and they didn't even nail the technical side convincingly. Look toward Microsoft or Sony instead; all the pieces are there for them to waltz in and drink Stadia's milkshake. And we know they're working on it. It's Disney+ all over again.
- macspoofing 7y agoI agree. If Google was really serious about Stadia, they should have invested in first-party and second-party dev studios to show off the platform (instead of relying on disinterest third parties to port their old games). They should also subsidize the service (and the games) and lose money on it while they educate the public on the benefits of cloud gaming. And yes, they should also forge deeper relationships with third-party developers and sign license deals to maybe turn this into an Xbox-GamePass-Type service (i.e. Netflix for games), or just experiment with other types of business models (maybe something like Audible, where subscription gets you one free game a month). But they did none of it. The focused on the technology with no thought on the value prop and the business and consequently decided on the easisest and worst model where the customer pays full price for old games. Typical Google.
- nvrspyx 7y agoI’m not a huge fan of it either and I agree with some of your points, but: 1. They are investing in first-party studios, but I’m not sure about second-party 2. Most of the launch games available to Founders are up to 50% off and included 2 free games (although that’s just like Free Games with Gold so I wouldn’t necessarily say it sets them apart) 3. They’ve worked with other studios getting their games on Stadia. For example, they sent engineers to Bungie for 6 months to help port Destiny 2. 4. It took MSFT years to develop Game Pass and the relationships with the developers to do so 5. Not many, if any, AAA companies are going to agree to put their new game on a subscription service, which is why Game Pass only has old games and Microsoft’s first-party games (although there might be a couple of exceptions) 6. It’s the developers that are choosing to sell the games for full price. Google definitely could eat some of the cost though
- juancn 7y agoCloud gaming is solution looking for a problem. It's not customer demand driven. Nobody want's cloud gaming (at least not yet). They haven't shown anything compelling why this would be a game changer for end users. The games are not more fun or unique than on any other platforms. Any of the cloud arguments also hold for consoles or PCs on internet connected games. I think the site may be a bit optimistic.
- davidcbc 7y agoEvery time someone posts "Nobody wants cloud gaming" half a dozen people come in and say "Actually, I want cloud gaming" Don't mistake the fact that you don't want cloud gaming for nobody wanting cloud gaming
- wccrawford 7y agoNot only that, but the pre-orders for Stadia were so intense that they couldn't hit day 1 deliveries with orders that were placed within hours of going on sale. So clearly there are plenty of people who want this and are even willing to risk it being total crap at $130 each.
- sipos 7y agoWere there lots of pre-ordered, or are they just launching slowly? The fact that pre-order customers can not invite friends immediately, who do not need hardware, suggests it is about limiting users to avoid overloading servers/support/ops.
- Mindwipe 7y ago> Don't mistake the fact that you don't want cloud gaming for nobody wanting cloud gaming Also don't mistake half a dozen people on a tech forum as being indicative of a mass audience that's commercially sustainable for something. Especially given HN is rather prone to imagine a product as turning out in a utopian perfect way rather than the more realistic "compromised by the requirement to be economically plausible" one.
- 7y ago
- adamzapasnik 7y agoVery surprised of general negative sentiment towards Stadia. Why is it like this? Because it's Google, the evil company? Seriously, if any startup launched it in its current state, people would be cheering and blaming it on a new tech/new challenges. But cause it's a very big corporation with top talent it means that they have to release top quality product every time? What the hell... I'm very excited about the project, although not really interested in it at the moment. I don't think its target audience is hardcore gamers, so why all of you are so over dramatic? Possibly, feeling happy that "real" gaming isn't going anywhere anytime soon? Obviously, there are problems and challenges, but I'm pretty sure that sooner or later it will get better. That's what the MVP is for, isn't it?
- Topgamer7 7y agoI think people are critical of google in general, not that that is a bad thing. Although for Stadia's case, I think Gamers Nexus shows why people are negative towards it off the bat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6dyrtnLU_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6dyrtnLU_w
- zabzonk 7y ago> Because it's Google, the evil company? Yes - they have closed down so many services that people depended on. > with top talent I don't see much evidence of this in their service provisions.
- adamzapasnik 7y agoSorry, but I don't see it as a good enough reason for this very negative response. I do agree that it speaks volumes how Google's PR team isn't doing a good job recently, though.
- idank 7y agoThis is honestly out right depressing to think there are people who extract joy out of these kinds of messages. I know this whole thing is meant to be a joke, but come on, people need to get over themselves. You can live life, have good moments, enjoy and have a good laugh about things without it coming at someone else's expense. People have spent a good portion of their working life to put this product out there. It has flaws and it's not perfect on day one, sure. It might even get cancelled a year from now. None of that matters nor does it mean we need to make a mockery of their work. So much negativity around us these days. It doesn't have to be this way.
- DevKoala 7y agoStadia will stay. Google needs this to happen since they need one more revenue stream. There is no way it gets shut down. All of the other products that Google was quick to cancel didn’t represent long term key businesses for Google. To shut down Stadia would be akin to shut down their self driving division. Microsoft lost billions with the Xbox before it was profitable and the brand stablished itself in the market. Google recognizes it will be that kind of marathon with Stadia.
- thekyle 7y agoGoogle+ didn't represent a long term key business for Google? From what I've heard the general attitude at Google for a while was that Google+ was the future of the company. That's why they integrated it into everything that they could (YouTube, Drive, GMail) and shut down any service that might remotely compete with it (Reader, Wave). If Google could kill Google+ then they can kill this.
- DevKoala 7y agoGoogle+ was active for at least 8 years until it eventually folded. Stadia's biggest issues, network latency and lack of exclusive content, are problems that will disappear over time. If Google was able to support a social network with no reason to exist for 8 years, they can support a gaming service until it succeeds.
- miguelmota 7y agoGame streaming requires tens of gigabytes worth of data downloaded every hour, resulting in choppy gameplay because of the latency. Their production product seems more like a beta release. They may be too early to market and could see them shutting it down relatively soon.
- shadowgovt 7y agoIn general, Google runs its operation like a family of startups still (even given their new departmentalized org chart), and for any new Google product, I consider the operational expected life to be the operational expected life of a startup company announcement. Google doesn't have a process internally (AFAIK) equivalent to series funding, but the processes they do have are functionally equivalent; if management decides a project isn't worth investing in, teams get re-assigned and that's it. And companies that can offer a 10+-year support cycle on their products announce fewer new initiatives a year.
- dimino 7y agoSo like, what is the counterargument? Google keeps projects alive that drain resources for longer? I guess I don't understand what people want here.
- dageshi 7y agoIt's the daily hate on google thread. It doesn't really matter what specifically google is or isn't doing you'll see the same litany of complaints repeated over and over. HN has become painful in that regard.
- innagadadavida 7y agoHas anyone implemented an AI based prediction for this? OR is it as simple as saying "in 45 months" ?
- II2II 7y agoThis should say more about treating software as a service than Google itself. Many companies have created then cancelled products, been bought out then had their products cancelled, or simply went out of business. We simply don't talk about it as much with other companies since they are either smaller or, in the case of larger companies, they were slower in transitioning to online services so products simply lost support rather than no longer being available.
- 40acres 7y agoI understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader. Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development. Stadia will require a substantial engineering effort from Google to make this work. The latency and network requirements are a great test to gauge network requirements as we move into 5g, AR, and self driving cars. Gaming is huge and if Google can be the first to provide (viable) steaming as a service they can really threaten some of the incumbents like Twitch, Sony, Microsoft, etc. Obviously Google doesn't have the best track record here but I'm excited to see them tackle this challenge.
- smolder 7y agoMoving every last thing people do with computers into the cloud so their activities can be thoroughly data mined is innovative?
- mempko 7y agoYou do realize that streaming games is an old idea and has been tried many times and Google's competitors do or will have similar services. Google isn't doing anything new here. They don't have any first-move advantage. The only advantage they have is infrastructure and scale. Whether that is enough, we shall see.
- 40acres 7y agoI do understand that this is an old idea. My TV actually has a steaming service for games built in but I have never used it because I doubt the performance would be up to standard. The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has reached a point of viability and it's very exciting to see them tackle the challenge. Obviously there are concerns with the products. Specifically paying for games, the games itself, etc. But generally I'm excited for this effort.
- m3kw9 7y ago$$. When it doesn’t make enough, shut down. That’s what they are all about, bets. They don’t hold onto the bag too long.
- 131012 7y agoI feel that we are a little bit too hard on the big G on this one. They simply have their own inner startups, which they kill if product gains no traction. We should look at how many startups from YC die within 4 years and make the comparison. I might be wrong, but the ratio could be very similar. Still, Stadia will fail for sure ^^
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago"No traction" for a Google product just means it's not the next Search or Gmail. It doesn't mean that zero people use it. Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes. If big YC companies all got shut down if they failed to turn into another letter in the FAANG acronym, maybe people would become reluctant to use services from YC companies. I still use some Google services, but I check out my data on a regular basis, I'm not buying a Fitbit, and I'm not subscribing to Stadia because I want those things to last longer than I think Google will keep them around.
- pytester 7y ago>Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes. Other than google reader I doubt any of these would have gotten traction at all without big g behind them.
- specialp 7y agoThey wouldn't have true but that isn't the point. The point here is that Google is willing to kill products that are successful by all other metrics and burn the users because it just isn't enough for them. They are acting like a startup but not putting in the dedication or caring enough about more modest gains that a start-up would do. So if Google is going to launch something under the Google brand they either have to be happier with things that aren't making 10s of billions, or not make so many efforts and burning their users/customers/devs at every step. Why as someone downstream do I want to dedicate my time and money to their product when they've shown that unless it becomes a massive success it will be folded?
- m3kw9 7y agoQ10 shows big $$ lost from Stadia, investors brings heat to the CEO. Shit rolls down hill
- 29athrowaway 7y agoThe ads are unappealing, reviews are not favorable, the name does not really sound like an entertainment product. A dead on arrival product.
- Rickvst 7y agoI think that this project has the economics to work, so, even if Google abandons it, somebody should eventually build it. Why I think streaming games is a powerful thing: Piracy. It will be more difficult to get a ilegal copy of a game that was never released to the public, only run on servers. But yes, kind of sucks to who wants to test games or live in third world countries.
- gameswithgo 7y agoGamers Nexus has a scathing review of Stadia that is amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6dyrtnLU_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6dyrtnLU_w
- miklax 7y agoCounter is optimistic :D
- trulyrandom 7y agoAlso worth checking out: the "near death" page on the Google cemetery website: https://gcemetery.co/tag/near-death/ https://gcemetery.co/tag/near-death/. Lots of obscure products you probably haven't even heard of.
- zerocrates 7y ago"Google kills all their products" is a bit of an overused meme trotted out at any launch... But for Stadia it's a pretty legitimate concern, I'd say. The model where you're still "buying" the games ties you to the ongoing operation of the service much more strongly than in many of their services where an eventual migration might be a little painful, but it's still possible. The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago> The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record. Exactly, in fact, Stadia is really just a way for Google to subsidize their cloud GPU buildout. Do you think those expensive GPUs are sitting idle in the meantime? No way! They're crunching numbers or spot instances for AI/ML workloads.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoThat's...probably not true at this moment. They're using AMD GPUs, which generally support the sorts of workloads folks need, and AFAIK they haven't opened up support for AMD GPU spot instances to users. The OpenCL ML ecosystem is really lacking at the moment.
- earhart 7y agoPlaidML? (Disclaimer -- I'm one of the devs. Even though we were bought by Intel a year or so ago, we've been pretty good about keeping the AMD / OpenCL support intact.)
- akhilcacharya 7y agoPlaidML is super cool, but it's not used by Google.
- summerlight 7y agoMost of those products killed without any transition path are actually consumer products without revenue. So my rule of thumb: if Stadia manages a chunk of other Google business to depend on itself (which makes it much harder to be deprecated), then probably it's okay to use it. Integration into Youtube or Ads would be a good sign of their commitment.
- arcturus17 7y agoI really don’t get the hate... I’m reading that in general UX is pretty good. I only have a Switch so haven’t been able to play RDR2 or AC Odissey... The solution seems perfect for me given the price point and I’m seriously considering picking it up. When I worked for Nintendo we broadly called the segment I’m in “lapsed gamer” and it’s actually a pretty big niche... What I read between the lines is that people are pissed that Stadia doesn’t address the “core gamer” demographic well (this kind of reaction is recurrent - see the Wii!), but might this not be a great go-to-market strategy?
- jmkni 7y agoThat describes me as well, as a kid and a teenager I was mad into gaming, lost interest as I entered my 20's, now in my 30s and want to get back into it.
- Havoc 7y ago>I really don’t get the hate... Not really hate but more people are so dazed by google's "product" zigzagging that it's hard to take it seriously anymore. Google managed to induce massive amounts of cynicism in their users. e.g. Remember Google+? The thing that got shut down? Couple weeks ago I get a corporate email saying please update your profile pic on google+. 1. I thought it's dead. 2. What profile? Did you guys create a profile for me on a dead product? 3. Or did they keep the corporate version alive? 4. What about google currents? Google+ pages? Different things? Same thing but renamed? I don't bloody know. And no I'm not updating my profile pic dear HR. Google will kill it in 3 months time and/or launch 2 clones or relaunch it with a lick of paint anyway. It's the same with all their other stuff too. Their chat thing I use every day? It's got 3 different interfaces with different functionality and I don't even know what it's currently called. Hangouts? Meet? Google Chat?
- ctroein89 7y agoIf you are looking for specific games and already have a Switch for portable gaming, I would suggest that you buy an Xbox One S All-Digital Edition during the Black Friday sale, which I've seen announced for $150 [1]. That's on par with Stadia's hardware costs, doesn't need a subscription for single player games, and has a much larger library of games. [1] https://www.onmsft.com/news/you-can-grab-an-xbox-one-s-all-digital-edition-for-150-with-microsofts-black-friday-sale https://www.onmsft.com/news/you-can-grab-an-xbox-one-s-all-d...
- raxxorrax 7y agoI fear that Stadia could bring change to gaming as publishers might decide that streaming is the way to go against piracy, technical difficulties of users and distribution costs. Maybe it would allow them to externalize support to Google even. Another step to take software away from the user. It would restrict things like modding and user modifications of games, which I value rather highly. The fear that I suddenly loose access to software is also present since I certainly am one of these backwards hoarders. I saw people loosing some of their digital media when GFWL shut down. Still, in context of this page I believe that there is life in the old dog yet, even if the dog isn't old at all.
- robertoandred 7y ago*Shut Down
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoTo be frank, I don't want and don't think Google Stadia will go down. I don't want it to go down because, I'm sure Google will lobby with ISPs to improve their latency and ISPs in many countries have long hidden their pathetic latency behind bandwidth/data numbers. I don't think it will go down, because once latency issue is fixed there's no debilitating issue with stadia and western reviewers who are bearish about Stadia are forgetting how big mobile gaming is in Asia. Many of those mobile gamers haven't owned a console let alone a computer and Stadia in their cheap android mobile would be first console quality game they experience.
- fedups 7y agoIn the source they cite (https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/), do they consider only products that have died? Or do they track all products that have started? (hopefully they have right censoring, otherwise it seems they're underestimating the average lifespan). I'm having a hard time finding the data in tabular format.
- _ah 7y agoThere's an easy product fix for this. Offer every game purchase with the option for a one-time key conversion, ideally managed through the game publisher. In the event of a Stadia shutdown you could easily port your purchase over to another single platform of your choice. This stragegy de-risks the platform and would go a long way toward alleviating consumer fears. We saw similar strategies around the launch of Steam. Sure you're just buying a download code, but if you send us $5 for postage we'll mail you a physical disc to go with it. Same concept.
- sipos 7y agoThis. I would buy games on it in a heartbeat if they did this. The problem is that, to move them to a new platform, for example Steam, they need to pay the platform's cut of the sale price. To give users the option to do this in future, they would need to keep all of the revenue they get from selling games in reserve to possibly do this in future. They would have to do this by charging users what it cost. I think it'd still be attractive though.
- polynomial 7y agoThis may be the first Betteridge exception I've seen.
- polynomial 7y agoself-reply: post title was edited.
- dageshi 7y agoThe end goal for google with this tech isn't stadia, it's something completely new. It's loading and playing a game as easily as you load and watch a youtube video right now. Stadia's just the beta test to get the hardware running, tested and get developers familiar with the backend platform they need to develop for/port too. Video games are one of the few really massive and lucrative markets which Google can move into and make a dent on their balance sheets. So yeah Stadia will probably get canned at some point, but the technology will probably go onto bigger and better things.
- winrid 7y agoThey already blew it with the name...
- dghughes 7y agoDon't forget there is already https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- geddy 7y agoIt blows my mind that anyone would support something like this. You're spending full price on a _streamed game_ that will be instantly remove when a) Google deems the service not profitable and closes the doors, rendering your money wasted, b) rights expire for certain games, c) some PR nightmare occurs from a CEO of a game company or something and they respond by removing affiliations. Digital games are bad enough in that they can be pulled out out of the respective stores whenever, but when you can't even have it downloaded to your own console? Get out of here. What utter nonsense.
- jonny_eh 7y agoI imagine if the service shuts down, they'd provide full refunds for any purchased games. Microsoft did that when they shut down their ebook store.
- mananvaghasiya 7y agoI have no idea how it works, but it would be fascinating to learn about how the video is encoded/decoded in such a latency sensitive environment.
- helen___keller 7y agoAfter all the bad PR I decided to sit down, put aside emotions, and honestly evaluate with myself how I felt about Stadia as a video gamer. I realized that I actually would really like video game streaming. It would be really neat to pop open whatever game I'm playing on a tv in another room, or on a chromebook or some other non-gaming device. The problem is Stadia also wants to control the game library and the hardware. I'm not okay with either of those. Really, I just want to stream from the ps4 in one room to the TV in the other room. And, I bet there's a way to do that already (going to look more into it later). Either way, it's not a multibillion dollar venture, so I think that's why google wants to be streaming, renting a computer, and owning your game library, all in one. I don't care about the other two services. I have hardware and I have game libraries.
- spuz 7y agoI don't see what you've said as a criticism of Stadia. Stadia was never meant to do what you want and never claimed to either. I personally would rather Google managed my game library because I can't be bothered to download a 10gb game only to play it for 10mins before deleting it. If Google can let me jump in and out easily then it will make discovery much easier for me.
- helen___keller 7y agoIt wasn't intended to be a criticism, more of just an evaluation of why I'm personally not interested in it. I like the concept of streaming, just not the bundled steam and the bundled cloud compute. If I could run Stadia with a game installed locally on my LAN in addition to content from the internet (like how chromecast works) I would give it a try, maybe buy a TV for my bedroom which is currently devoid of technology save an iPad.
- ivankirigin 7y agoI tried Stadia and had a wonderful first experience on my Mac. Mac is relevant here because it's still worse for gaming, with access to fewer titles. If the product is good, I'll pay for it. With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business.
- aylmao 7y ago> With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business. I do wonder if this would be profitable though. Is Google operating at a profit even with the current model? NOTE: I got way into writing this comment. I have things to do, but I thought I'd do some napkin math instead haha. I'm probably way off, but it's an interesting thought experiment. My guess is it isn't. I'd be surprised if Google is selling the hardware at a profit right now, simply because the volume is not too high and they definitely want to reduce the barrier of entry. On the software side, game companies probably don't want to lose margins and it sounds like right now they have leverage since this is a nascent platform. My guess is they're taking around 70% of the game sale (wild guess from the "digital sales" info in these Ubisoft slides [1]). Let's ignore Stadia Pro for now and just assume the $10 a month go towards the the free games, or the extra compute for the 4k games / surround sound, or the discounts. If we go with $60 as the average price of a game, this napkin math tells us Google is making like $18 per game and that this their main source of revenue. How long is a game? It varies widely, depending on the game (and the player) [4]. Let's say people spend an average of 20 hours on a game though. An hour and a half a day for two weeks. Can Google stream games, HD at 60fps, for less than 90¢ an hour? Of course, this is Google so they're just employing their existing developers infrastructure, etc. The scale probably means they can probably get RTX 2080s in bulk at a discount. It's perfectly plausible they can. Im again, also certainly way off in my numbers. But it is a huge investment— the promise is it could open the doors of an industry for Google, but if it doesn't, is it worth it? To be clear, I'm not calling doom on Stadia just yet— YouTube operated [2] (operates?) without profit and there's still old services that have stuck around. Google Voice still exists in spite of many calling its doom years ago [3]. Just wrote this for the analysis, not really to make a point one way or another. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_retail_game_margins_are_55_vs_70_digital/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_reta... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f... [3]: https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-1632920573 https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-... [4]: http://www.gamelengths.com http://www.gamelengths.com
- RenRav 7y agoThe idea of game streaming seems sound... at least for certain genres. But having to buy games exclusive to that device is ridiculous, especially when considering Google's graveyard. There is just a whole lot of doubt shadowing it. If anyone can do game streaming correctly, it will end being Steam or something, a platform where most gamers already have games purchased.
- frostyj 7y agomake it shorter
- dreamer_soul 7y agoI'm still bitter about them closing Google trips
- m0zg 7y agoConsider Stadia for what it is: it's someone gaming the system (if you pardon the pun) to become a VP. Once that position is secure, and once all the rest of top brass on the project is promoted, it will begin its inexorable march towards shutdown. So I give it a couple of years. The only way of avoiding this fate is if it gets viral and Google starts making at least a billion a year on it (their official threshold for caring about a business), chances of which seem infinitesimally slim.
- bookofjoe 7y agoJust in: Google kills Cloud Print https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006
- totaldude87 7y agoHonestly, i cant even name one google hardware product that had a typical industry longevity.. Smart watches were here and there long before Apple jumped in and made it main stream, and just like iPhone they made an industry out of it. Google should stick with what it does best, like Android model (even wear OS model). Let the market for a new product starts maturing, then use the its software&services to beat the crap out of others.
- cjf4 7y agoInteresting parallel story about Sun's "Sun Blade". https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762 https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762 Summary: they solved a technical problem without a clear user story, and were ultimately too early. Sounds a lot like Stadia.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tasty_freeze 7y agoThis is a grammatical nitpick, but I see it over and over and over. The title says "When Will Google Shutdown Stadia?" It should be "Shut Down", which is a verb phrase. A "Shutdown" is a noun, eg, "There will be a shutdown in March." Another common example of this: You need to log in. (long in == verb) What is your login. (login == noun)
- gilrain 7y agoEmbrace descriptivism or be forever an annoyed curmudgeon.
- nguoi 7y agoI don't understand the internet's new obsession with descriptivism. Yes, it's English, in a circular-argument kind of way, but that doesn't make it good style. The whole takeaway from it seems to be that self-described descriptivists intentionally use non-standard definitions of words then blame the other party for misunderstanding, making the writer fail at the primary goal of communication. And that is literally ridiculous.
- tandr 7y ago"I think your post has a grammatical error."
- edsammy 7y agoWhen will they shutdown Waymo?
- mouzogu 7y agoI feel like this product is just a trojan horse for Google to gather and sell customer data in some form. I'm just not convinced that Google has any real interest in the video game industry itself at least not in the same way as a Sony, MS or Nintendo. Further to that, this offering just feels so half hearted that it almost certainly will go the same way as most Google "experiments" - I would avoid putting any money into their budding gaming ecosystem as a consumer.
- ibdf 7y agoI hope this service grows, but right now there are no incentives to jump in. Pay $130 to play old games + pay full price for more old games.
- refik 7y agoIt sure sucks to invest in a product and then see it shut down. However, I like the idea of a company that constantly tries new things, iterates and is not afraid to pull the plug if it doesn't work rather then have hundreds of zombie products that suck the profits.
- Mindwipe 7y agoI honestly wonder what it will take at this point to change Google's culture of how they launch products. They haven't had a success in a while, bluntly. Perhaps the "Google way" of launching a half finished product over vague windows and iterating after that doesn't actually work? Or if it ever worked, doesn't work now when Google isn't a plucky underdog and the products aren't competing with other unfinished platforms but often mature, feature complete alternatives?
- pkulak 7y agoWow, it's really amazing me how much people hate Stadia. It's a perfect storm of Google + subscription gaming, so I guess it's not surprising, but I do wonder if there's a whole bunch of people behind the ones with the pitch forks who like the idea, even a bit.
- techntoke 7y agoThere are a lot of people that want Google to fail, and will try to manipulate public opinion without any substance to their complaints against Google. You'll see this with Chrome/Chromium as well.
- auiya 7y agoI don't know why everyone is so pessimistic about Stadia. All my Google+ circles are super excited about it.
- xyst 7y agoHaven’t tried Stadia, but I imagine the input lag problem is not resolved. FPS games will likely be unplayable. I tried Steams version which steams a video from your gaming pc to another pc on local host and the input lag is still noticeable
- daveguy 7y agoThis seems like it will be a more difficult one to shut down since it is a subscription service from the start. More likely to be profitable early.
- llolz 7y agoWho the fuck are you? And what can you possibly know about business processes and analytics? Not to mention, the amount of nonsense herein; it will be extremely stupid to think that you can achieve anything from here. If ANYTHING, this is post is a massive joke. I will show my fellow law classmates about this and will laugh at it at lunch.
- salvagedcircuit 7y agoNot all heroes wear capes. Props to the developer who made this. This is perfect.
- broknbottle 7y agoI give it 2021 https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/issues/444 https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/issues/444
- reustle 7y agoI (half) surprised to see there are more than one Google product cemetery sites https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
- hipjiveguy 7y agoGoogle understands that the Xbox is what keeps Windows alive, and making $$$ for MS. They want to get into the gaming industry, but take a gordian knot solution. They don't want to compete against consoles. They want to be a console for computers, regardless of OS. Do they kill things? Yes. But, if those things are making billions. Video games make billions. Survey says?
- musicale 7y agoI liked the halloween google graveyard: https://twitter.com/leftoblique/status/1179476277549400064 https://twitter.com/leftoblique/status/1179476277549400064
- musicale 7y agoPerhaps they will switch to an LTS model for some services, committing to at least 5 years of support. For comparison in the game industry, Sony has publicly committed to 10 years of support for each numbered PlayStation console generation, and that seems to have worked out pretty well, with generations spaced about 7 years apart. (Sadly the PSVita/PSTV didn't get that support, nor did some services like PlayStation Vue, PlayStation Home, or Qore; also many multiplayer game servers have shut down after a couple of years, rendering the games unplayable online.)