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Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

128 points by Impossible 7y ago

smt88 7y ago
This was predictable both specifically and in general. Google does not support their products, period. They stop updating them meaningfully -- years before announcing that they're terminated -- and they refuse to have a human customer service team. G Suite is possibly the only exception.
- teruakohatu 7y ago
  I would never buy in because I just know they will kill the product in a couple of years. If they have been having moments of weakness regarding GCP I find it hard to imagine that management will keep a cloud gaming service around. Someday someone is going to write a Management book about short term thinking and it will feature Google.
- lurker2823 7y ago
  exactly my thought when I read the headlines, "these people have obviously never dealt with Google before"
- sp332 7y ago
  Yeah but Stadia just barely launched. They usually wait until there's a solid user base before flushing all the data.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  I'm sorry, but 4 weeks, 2 of weeks were the holidays, is by NO means "not supporting their products". What company releases an update faster than every 4 weeks?
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    What company leaves their hyped up product mostly useless for 4 weeks after launch?
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      > mostly useless What? The product works just fine, people use it and can play games. How is it useless? Just because brand new flashy features weren't released doesn't make it "useless".
  - smt88 7y ago
    If radio silence (and ignoring users) were abnormal for them, sure. I could give them the benefit of the doubt. With the context of Google's history though, this looks exactly like what it is: Google underestimating the amount of support and reassurance users need. They had years to plan for the months after launch. They have 110k+ employees around the world with different holiday schedules. It's not like the holiday season took them by surprise. Google is not a hapless toddler of a company. They've been around for 21 years, they have $40B in annual revenue, and they should figure out how selling things to humans works. This is a company that fails at absolutely everything except ads, which is a dubious business to begin with.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Closer to 6 weeks. 40 days, not 4 weeks. And for a platform that under-delivered so dramatically on its launch and who postponed so many features, being radio silent for over 2/3 of its lifespan is not a good sign. People put down a lot of money for the right to purchase games at higher-than-normal (compared to a PC) prices. I can certainly understand the ire at the radio silence.
- sipos 7y ago
  Customer service for G Suite us terrible too. We have a file on Google Drive that cannot be opened, and have been waiting months for support to resolve it. We have backups independent of Google, but, without them, we'd have basically just lost our data, and their support seems to be doing basically nothing. As someone who helps support it in a medium sized business, do not use G Suite in your business.
newnewpdro 7y ago
It would be more newsworthy if Google weren't behaving this way.
- Animats 7y ago
  Right. The same thing happened with Spatial OS from Improbable, a back-end system for big-world MMOs. They announced a deal with Google where you have to host on Google's servers. Expensively. The AAA title people then totally lost interest, and two of the major indy games shut down. The Worlds Adrift people wrote: "The network of Worlds Adrift is built on top of SpatialOS, a proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside of SpatialOS’s infrastructure. This requirement prevents us from making it P2P or allowing players to host their own servers." In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you can now go with the other evil empire. (There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really. That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out. Land and in-world items are really expensive.)
tmpz22 7y ago
1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competitors are really active during the Christmas season because thats when so many sales are, but you see other studios like Dice's Battlefield V go utterly dark during this time. 2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise 3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against "reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you will. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_officially_gone_40_days_without_a_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_o...
- afarrell 7y ago
  What does "excuse" mean here, as opposed to "reason"?
  - slg 7y ago
    Excuse implies a value judgement that the explanation is acceptable and therefore blame should be reduced or completely forgiven. A reason is simply the explanation with no judgement of acceptability or blame.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Little bit silly about how on one end people stand united with gamedevs about the poor work/life balance and excruciating crunch time, yet they will complain when a company doesn't release any update during the holidays.
  - rndmize 7y ago
    You're conflating two different sides of the industry (as is the parent comment.) A game dev studio is not expected to have monthly updates for any but the largest games. A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content. Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away several games a month for a couple years now. Once a month updates at a $10 subscription is table stakes here.
kristofferR 7y ago
In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for Google to do so too. They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.
- awad 7y ago
  At this point it feels cultural and engrained in their DNA. There's no way this can keep happening otherwise.
  - kristofferR 7y ago
    No doubt, but it was engrained in Valve's culture too, yet they managed to fix it.
    - afarrell 7y ago
      How large is Valve?
      - kristofferR 7y ago
        Around 800. It's not really a relevant factor though, the size of teams shouldn't impact the quality of their communication work.
        6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
        It's relevant towards how much institutional momentum there is to overcome if you want you team to do something Different From Usual.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Except the 2nd most popular post on /r/Games is about how Artifact hasn't had any updates in over a year now... So 4 weeks in the middle of the holidays seems a lot more trivial.
yingw787 7y ago
On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time: https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.
- tracer4201 7y ago
  My family couldn’t afford a PS2 or N64. I certainly can now - my library of games over the past few years has been all PS2, N64, and Dreamcast games. Aside from The Witcher 3, I have had a hard time finding great games in the newer generation of consoles and PC games. The older games have character, beautiful animations, tons of creativity. I’m sure not all new games are bad, but just doing a direct comparison I don’t see the creativity of the games in the previous generations. During the holidays, I spent some time playing Star Wars Knights of the old Republic. What a fantastic set of simple mechanisms and amazing story telling- I’m not even much of a Star Wars fan. But I don’t see these kind of games these days.
  - dangus 7y ago
    Don’t forget section bias. There were a lot of trash games in the PS2 era and before, and worst of all, many of them barely functioned on a technical level compared to today’s games. Of course KOTOR is good, it was probably the best RPG of its half decade and it won GOTY awards all over the place. The same year KOTOR came out, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was also released. And besides abysmal games like that, a lot of relatively forgettable games that might not stand up to another go-around in 2020 were critically acclaimed: perhaps selections like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, or even the original Call of Duty, depending on your point of view.
    - P_I_Staker 7y ago
      I found this to some degree with Vice City. I didn't end up getting very far in it and didn't enjoy it like San Andreas... Which I loved, and could probably even still play. I think it was something about the gameplay being frustrating. This wasn't exactly recent either, I played in between San Andreas and GTAIV. Sands of time, however, was different. If memory serves, it holds up okay. I played it around the same time. It's an old game, so you have to factor that in, but I recall it being pretty decent. COD type games tend to suffer, due to their draw being state of the art shooters, vs. true "creativity". For some reason, I don't feel that way about UT2004, CS:Source, and others. Maybe that's just bias.
ageofwant 7y ago
Google, a company that sells adds for a living, has absolutely no marketing skills whatsoever. Anyone that uses any of Google's products, you are living on borrowed time. This has been illustrated over and over and over. Its not even a meme anymore. I wanted to say that I fear for the "do no evil" Google, but that company has long since disappeard.
scotth 7y ago
I've been following this situation somewhat, and although Google's outreach has been lacking, there are signs that they're working hard behind the scenes. Apparently they have over 100 games launching this year [1], have been consistent in releasing new games with the pro subscription [2], and are delivering a number of talks at the upcoming GDC [3]. I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the community hasn't been particularly happy with any kind of news. Not to be derisive, but I don't really understand the tribal fanaticism both for and against the service. Yes, the service is missing promised features, but it's actually pretty good. For someone like me (in my 30s, don't want another box that I have to keep upgraded), I've been enjoying it for what it is — with a decent internet connection, you can play a modern looking game with very little effort. Google did promise more, but I still haven't given up on their ability to deliver. Seems like a lot of moving parts, and maybe only their community management is missing. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-stadia-120-games-2020-10-exclusives-4k-controller https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-stadia-12... 2. https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro-february-2020-metro-exodus-gylt https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro... 3. https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-its-games-developer-summit-at-gdc-2020/ https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-it...
- 013a 7y ago
  Hype is truly a double-edged sword, and its surprising to me that companies are so cavalier about it, especially in the gaming industry where the consumers are so brutal and unforgiving. Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn't (yet). It very much smells like a disconnect between their business/marketing and the product development.
  - tjpnz 7y ago
    >They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Yes they better because their advertising was at best misleading.
Crash0v3rid3 7y ago
They made a post on /r/stadia a few hours ago announcing some free games for the month which has been well received. I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new pasttime here. Does anyone else feel like we're just becoming a predictable echo chamber?
- v7x 7y ago
  When you are as big and as powerful as Google, the more your every action will be scrutinized. Thats the way it should be, as any move an entity of their size makes will cause waves the world over. Is all the criticism justified? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact that people are criticising is only beneficial.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Yep, Google has over delivered by giving two free games per months instead of the promised one. Yes, since they are more of a tech company and don't do crunches, updates can be a bit slower, but 4 weeks is nowhere close to "abandoning a product"...
  - craftinator 7y ago
    * Ad company
- arkitaip 7y ago
  HN has always been an echo chamber but this time it seems like the Stadia community is the one that's having issues with Google.
- rchaud 7y ago
  > I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new pasttime here. I see similar comments on stories about WeWork, or Apple, or Facebook, or Amazon.
ErikAugust 7y ago
From /u/GraceFromGoogle's response: "While I don't have product updates to share right at this second, I can promise you that I have been, and will continue taking feedback posted to r/Stadia and other channels, like the Stadia Community Forum, back to the Stadia team." They can't even scrape together an update for a thread of thousands of people who paid good money and are foaming at the mouth. Gaming, community, and customer service could not be further from Google's DNA.
- arkitaip 7y ago
  This was my main concern when Stadia was launched. I knew that Google could figure out the tech but their product development and customer support would be their Achilles heel, especially when it comes to gaming. Gamers go all in with their passion and if you as a company aren't heavily* community oriented, their passion can quickly turn destructive. * Their reputation for prematurely closing down products too but that's not something they can directly affect.
api 7y ago
Good. I really hope Stadia fails. Gaming is one of the major drivers of continued demand for "real computers" at the edge. Take that away and we'll lose even more momentum there.
- ac29 7y ago
  On the other hand, its an inefficient allocation of resources for infrequent gamers (who might play games 100 hours a year or less) to need to own expensive consoles or PCs to play games. I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.
  - yread 7y ago
    You can just sign up for Geforce NOW beta, it's free for now, you automatically get all the games you have on Steam, it works and it probably won't go away anytime soon.
- hacym 7y ago
  I doubt Stadia will replace computers for people who take gaming more seriously than the average gamer. It's a large market segment that isn't going away. Anecdotally, as someone who games regularly, I never even looked at the Stadia. It was of 0 interest to me. I suspect most people in my position feel the same.
dragonsh 7y ago
When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the computing power and software infrastructure for large scale simulation, which at present is limited to some big university, corporations and large government organization. But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of users. Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other products. This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable. I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Another example of how google index it’s criticism and use it’s PR mechanical turks or staff to downvote critical comments.
lspears 7y ago
I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  My problem is that I don’t know who to trust. Clearly I can’t trust Googles marketing or Sales copy after how it handled this initial launch. There are a lot of videos and reviews that mark it as a poor product I.e. it’s launch title Destiny having an impossibly small player population for multiplayer activities. And then there are people who give it shining reviews such as yourself who seems like a reasonable human but is still only one data point. So I’ll wait and remember this consumer experience for every google product that gets pitched to me.
rodgerd 7y ago
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
andrewstuart 7y ago
I'm sort of surprised anyone bought Stadia. What problem does it really solve?
- risho 7y ago
  There are a number of things it offers. Being able to play high end triple A games on a chromebook or a cheap computer would be a huge boon. Not everyone wants to(or has the means to) spend 1300+ dollars on a gaming computer. Also there is also the casual market. Even the people who do want to play games and have the money, it's hard to justify the cost if you just play like 1 or 2 games per year. Another huge boon is the ability to switch between devices and places. Going from your television to your office to your laptop, or from your house to a hotel, to a friends house, or whatever has huge amounts of utility.
- Shorel 7y ago
  It solves the problem that Chromebooks can't run good games. It is only a problem if you work for Google.
- fulafel 7y ago
  It lets you play a selection of current games without buying & maintaining expensive on-prem gaming systems, and works on the go as well. It also promises to have longevity while following latest hardware developments, without having to upgrade your pc or replace your console with this year's hw generation. Of course the uncertainty about the longevity of the Stadia service counters this somewhat.. but the model technically solves longevity which is cool.
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  I totally understand the draw. No need for equipment, and works on any platform, everywhere. Steam streaming was an interesting game-changer for me, until I gave on it, due to performance concerns. You could play it in every room, on any machine, and it worked pretty darn well; I was impressed.
Jamwinner 7y ago
Did people not see this project as clearly stillborn? The radio silence (when it comes to fixes, issues) is not new, nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service. This feels like investors and users alike got scammed by a product not ready for prime time. Did they assume they could fix it after boot? I really, really hate this trend of building the plane in flight with passengers present (paying customers), and coasting on expectation of fixes.
- kalado 7y ago
  I had the same impression since the first announcement. Stadia is an enthusiast product (for now), but enthusiast don't need it. Stadia might become lucrative in a few years with slow adoption and improvements but if you get into it right now, you just pay to be a beta tester.
- mrep 7y ago
  > nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service. Really? I have it and it works just as well as when I had a xbox and gaming pc. You can look through some of the other stadia threads here and on reddit and find plenty of other people who think it works well too.
thrownaway954 7y ago
can't say we didn't see this coming. unfortunately this a pattern that google has exhibited again and again with consumer based products. you think that people would have learned after the google glass fiasco, but i guess not.
wmeredith 7y ago
Google and silence+lack of support go together like peanut butter and jelly

128 points by Impossible 7y ago

This was predictable both specifically and in general. Google does not support their products, period. They stop updating them meaningfully -- years before announcing that they're terminated -- and they refuse to have a human customer service team. G Suite is possibly the only exception.

teruakohatu 7y ago
I would never buy in because I just know they will kill the product in a couple of years. If they have been having moments of weakness regarding GCP I find it hard to imagine that management will keep a cloud gaming service around. Someday someone is going to write a Management book about short term thinking and it will feature Google.
lurker2823 7y ago
exactly my thought when I read the headlines, "these people have obviously never dealt with Google before"
sp332 7y ago
Yeah but Stadia just barely launched. They usually wait until there's a solid user base before flushing all the data.
ehsankia 7y ago
I'm sorry, but 4 weeks, 2 of weeks were the holidays, is by NO means "not supporting their products". What company releases an update faster than every 4 weeks?
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  What company leaves their hyped up product mostly useless for 4 weeks after launch?
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    > mostly useless What? The product works just fine, people use it and can play games. How is it useless? Just because brand new flashy features weren't released doesn't make it "useless".
- smt88 7y ago
  If radio silence (and ignoring users) were abnormal for them, sure. I could give them the benefit of the doubt. With the context of Google's history though, this looks exactly like what it is: Google underestimating the amount of support and reassurance users need. They had years to plan for the months after launch. They have 110k+ employees around the world with different holiday schedules. It's not like the holiday season took them by surprise. Google is not a hapless toddler of a company. They've been around for 21 years, they have $40B in annual revenue, and they should figure out how selling things to humans works. This is a company that fails at absolutely everything except ads, which is a dubious business to begin with.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Closer to 6 weeks. 40 days, not 4 weeks. And for a platform that under-delivered so dramatically on its launch and who postponed so many features, being radio silent for over 2/3 of its lifespan is not a good sign. People put down a lot of money for the right to purchase games at higher-than-normal (compared to a PC) prices. I can certainly understand the ire at the radio silence.
sipos 7y ago
Customer service for G Suite us terrible too. We have a file on Google Drive that cannot be opened, and have been waiting months for support to resolve it. We have backups independent of Google, but, without them, we'd have basically just lost our data, and their support seems to be doing basically nothing. As someone who helps support it in a medium sized business, do not use G Suite in your business.

newnewpdro 7y ago

It would be more newsworthy if Google weren't behaving this way.

Animats 7y ago
Right. The same thing happened with Spatial OS from Improbable, a back-end system for big-world MMOs. They announced a deal with Google where you have to host on Google's servers. Expensively. The AAA title people then totally lost interest, and two of the major indy games shut down. The Worlds Adrift people wrote: "The network of Worlds Adrift is built on top of SpatialOS, a proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside of SpatialOS’s infrastructure. This requirement prevents us from making it P2P or allowing players to host their own servers." In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you can now go with the other evil empire. (There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really. That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out. Land and in-world items are really expensive.)

tmpz22 7y ago

1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competitors are really active during the Christmas season because thats when so many sales are, but you see other studios like Dice's Battlefield V go utterly dark during this time. 2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise 3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against "reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you will. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_officially_gone_40_days_without_a_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_o...

afarrell 7y ago
What does "excuse" mean here, as opposed to "reason"?
- slg 7y ago
  Excuse implies a value judgement that the explanation is acceptable and therefore blame should be reduced or completely forgiven. A reason is simply the explanation with no judgement of acceptability or blame.
ehsankia 7y ago
Little bit silly about how on one end people stand united with gamedevs about the poor work/life balance and excruciating crunch time, yet they will complain when a company doesn't release any update during the holidays.
- rndmize 7y ago
  You're conflating two different sides of the industry (as is the parent comment.) A game dev studio is not expected to have monthly updates for any but the largest games. A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content. Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away several games a month for a couple years now. Once a month updates at a $10 subscription is table stakes here.

kristofferR 7y ago

In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for Google to do so too. They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.

awad 7y ago
At this point it feels cultural and engrained in their DNA. There's no way this can keep happening otherwise.
- kristofferR 7y ago
  No doubt, but it was engrained in Valve's culture too, yet they managed to fix it.
  - afarrell 7y ago
    How large is Valve?
    - kristofferR 7y ago
      Around 800. It's not really a relevant factor though, the size of teams shouldn't impact the quality of their communication work.
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
        It's relevant towards how much institutional momentum there is to overcome if you want you team to do something Different From Usual.
ehsankia 7y ago
Except the 2nd most popular post on /r/Games is about how Artifact hasn't had any updates in over a year now... So 4 weeks in the middle of the holidays seems a lot more trivial.

yingw787 7y ago

On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time: https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.

tracer4201 7y ago
My family couldn’t afford a PS2 or N64. I certainly can now - my library of games over the past few years has been all PS2, N64, and Dreamcast games. Aside from The Witcher 3, I have had a hard time finding great games in the newer generation of consoles and PC games. The older games have character, beautiful animations, tons of creativity. I’m sure not all new games are bad, but just doing a direct comparison I don’t see the creativity of the games in the previous generations. During the holidays, I spent some time playing Star Wars Knights of the old Republic. What a fantastic set of simple mechanisms and amazing story telling- I’m not even much of a Star Wars fan. But I don’t see these kind of games these days.
- dangus 7y ago
  Don’t forget section bias. There were a lot of trash games in the PS2 era and before, and worst of all, many of them barely functioned on a technical level compared to today’s games. Of course KOTOR is good, it was probably the best RPG of its half decade and it won GOTY awards all over the place. The same year KOTOR came out, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was also released. And besides abysmal games like that, a lot of relatively forgettable games that might not stand up to another go-around in 2020 were critically acclaimed: perhaps selections like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, or even the original Call of Duty, depending on your point of view.
  - P_I_Staker 7y ago
    I found this to some degree with Vice City. I didn't end up getting very far in it and didn't enjoy it like San Andreas... Which I loved, and could probably even still play. I think it was something about the gameplay being frustrating. This wasn't exactly recent either, I played in between San Andreas and GTAIV. Sands of time, however, was different. If memory serves, it holds up okay. I played it around the same time. It's an old game, so you have to factor that in, but I recall it being pretty decent. COD type games tend to suffer, due to their draw being state of the art shooters, vs. true "creativity". For some reason, I don't feel that way about UT2004, CS:Source, and others. Maybe that's just bias.

ageofwant 7y ago

Google, a company that sells adds for a living, has absolutely no marketing skills whatsoever. Anyone that uses any of Google's products, you are living on borrowed time. This has been illustrated over and over and over. Its not even a meme anymore. I wanted to say that I fear for the "do no evil" Google, but that company has long since disappeard.

scotth 7y ago

I've been following this situation somewhat, and although Google's outreach has been lacking, there are signs that they're working hard behind the scenes. Apparently they have over 100 games launching this year [1], have been consistent in releasing new games with the pro subscription [2], and are delivering a number of talks at the upcoming GDC [3]. I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the community hasn't been particularly happy with any kind of news. Not to be derisive, but I don't really understand the tribal fanaticism both for and against the service. Yes, the service is missing promised features, but it's actually pretty good. For someone like me (in my 30s, don't want another box that I have to keep upgraded), I've been enjoying it for what it is — with a decent internet connection, you can play a modern looking game with very little effort. Google did promise more, but I still haven't given up on their ability to deliver. Seems like a lot of moving parts, and maybe only their community management is missing. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-stadia-120-games-2020-10-exclusives-4k-controller https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-stadia-12... 2. https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro-february-2020-metro-exodus-gylt https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro... 3. https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-its-games-developer-summit-at-gdc-2020/ https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-it...

013a 7y ago
Hype is truly a double-edged sword, and its surprising to me that companies are so cavalier about it, especially in the gaming industry where the consumers are so brutal and unforgiving. Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn't (yet). It very much smells like a disconnect between their business/marketing and the product development.
- tjpnz 7y ago
  >They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Yes they better because their advertising was at best misleading.

Crash0v3rid3 7y ago

They made a post on /r/stadia a few hours ago announcing some free games for the month which has been well received. I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new pasttime here. Does anyone else feel like we're just becoming a predictable echo chamber?

v7x 7y ago
When you are as big and as powerful as Google, the more your every action will be scrutinized. Thats the way it should be, as any move an entity of their size makes will cause waves the world over. Is all the criticism justified? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact that people are criticising is only beneficial.
ehsankia 7y ago
Yep, Google has over delivered by giving two free games per months instead of the promised one. Yes, since they are more of a tech company and don't do crunches, updates can be a bit slower, but 4 weeks is nowhere close to "abandoning a product"...
- craftinator 7y ago
  * Ad company
arkitaip 7y ago
HN has always been an echo chamber but this time it seems like the Stadia community is the one that's having issues with Google.
rchaud 7y ago
> I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new pasttime here. I see similar comments on stories about WeWork, or Apple, or Facebook, or Amazon.

ErikAugust 7y ago

From /u/GraceFromGoogle's response: "While I don't have product updates to share right at this second, I can promise you that I have been, and will continue taking feedback posted to r/Stadia and other channels, like the Stadia Community Forum, back to the Stadia team." They can't even scrape together an update for a thread of thousands of people who paid good money and are foaming at the mouth. Gaming, community, and customer service could not be further from Google's DNA.

arkitaip 7y ago
This was my main concern when Stadia was launched. I knew that Google could figure out the tech but their product development and customer support would be their Achilles heel, especially when it comes to gaming. Gamers go all in with their passion and if you as a company aren't heavily* community oriented, their passion can quickly turn destructive. * Their reputation for prematurely closing down products too but that's not something they can directly affect.

api 7y ago

Good. I really hope Stadia fails. Gaming is one of the major drivers of continued demand for "real computers" at the edge. Take that away and we'll lose even more momentum there.

ac29 7y ago
On the other hand, its an inefficient allocation of resources for infrequent gamers (who might play games 100 hours a year or less) to need to own expensive consoles or PCs to play games. I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.
- yread 7y ago
  You can just sign up for Geforce NOW beta, it's free for now, you automatically get all the games you have on Steam, it works and it probably won't go away anytime soon.
hacym 7y ago
I doubt Stadia will replace computers for people who take gaming more seriously than the average gamer. It's a large market segment that isn't going away. Anecdotally, as someone who games regularly, I never even looked at the Stadia. It was of 0 interest to me. I suspect most people in my position feel the same.

dragonsh 7y ago

When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the computing power and software infrastructure for large scale simulation, which at present is limited to some big university, corporations and large government organization. But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of users. Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other products. This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable. I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

dragonsh 7y ago
Another example of how google index it’s criticism and use it’s PR mechanical turks or staff to downvote critical comments.

lspears 7y ago

I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.

tmpz22 7y ago
My problem is that I don’t know who to trust. Clearly I can’t trust Googles marketing or Sales copy after how it handled this initial launch. There are a lot of videos and reviews that mark it as a poor product I.e. it’s launch title Destiny having an impossibly small player population for multiplayer activities. And then there are people who give it shining reviews such as yourself who seems like a reasonable human but is still only one data point. So I’ll wait and remember this consumer experience for every google product that gets pitched to me.

rodgerd 7y ago

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

andrewstuart 7y ago

I'm sort of surprised anyone bought Stadia. What problem does it really solve?

risho 7y ago
There are a number of things it offers. Being able to play high end triple A games on a chromebook or a cheap computer would be a huge boon. Not everyone wants to(or has the means to) spend 1300+ dollars on a gaming computer. Also there is also the casual market. Even the people who do want to play games and have the money, it's hard to justify the cost if you just play like 1 or 2 games per year. Another huge boon is the ability to switch between devices and places. Going from your television to your office to your laptop, or from your house to a hotel, to a friends house, or whatever has huge amounts of utility.
Shorel 7y ago
It solves the problem that Chromebooks can't run good games. It is only a problem if you work for Google.
fulafel 7y ago
It lets you play a selection of current games without buying & maintaining expensive on-prem gaming systems, and works on the go as well. It also promises to have longevity while following latest hardware developments, without having to upgrade your pc or replace your console with this year's hw generation. Of course the uncertainty about the longevity of the Stadia service counters this somewhat.. but the model technically solves longevity which is cool.
P_I_Staker 7y ago
I totally understand the draw. No need for equipment, and works on any platform, everywhere. Steam streaming was an interesting game-changer for me, until I gave on it, due to performance concerns. You could play it in every room, on any machine, and it worked pretty darn well; I was impressed.

Jamwinner 7y ago

Did people not see this project as clearly stillborn? The radio silence (when it comes to fixes, issues) is not new, nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service. This feels like investors and users alike got scammed by a product not ready for prime time. Did they assume they could fix it after boot? I really, really hate this trend of building the plane in flight with passengers present (paying customers), and coasting on expectation of fixes.

kalado 7y ago
I had the same impression since the first announcement. Stadia is an enthusiast product (for now), but enthusiast don't need it. Stadia might become lucrative in a few years with slow adoption and improvements but if you get into it right now, you just pay to be a beta tester.
mrep 7y ago
> nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service. Really? I have it and it works just as well as when I had a xbox and gaming pc. You can look through some of the other stadia threads here and on reddit and find plenty of other people who think it works well too.

thrownaway954 7y ago

can't say we didn't see this coming. unfortunately this a pattern that google has exhibited again and again with consumer based products. you think that people would have learned after the google glass fiasco, but i guess not.

wmeredith 7y ago

Google and silence+lack of support go together like peanut butter and jelly