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Google's ambitious push into gaming is floundering

• bingobob 7y ago
  Google used to use the term beta a lot in there past. I don't understand why Stadia wasn't tag with the beta or early access this would of put the problems and the media more at ease until the product was stable
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    The MBA took over and is afraid to show weakness with labels like "Beta".
• axaxs 7y ago
  I'm both bullish and bearish on cloud gaming, if that makes sense. I have Stadia, and the tech is really nice, but as pointed out, there are no games. Further, you have to buy/rebuy all your games just for Stadia, which may not exist soon(ish). Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win. But biggest of all, most of the games are just via Steam. So buy it once, play on PC or ShieldTV, your choice. This was, as it turns out, too good to be true. In the last month, at least two huge publishers pulled out, essentially disabling the ability to play a purchased Steam game via Geforce Now. Now their fate is looking questionable as well. One month ago, I would have said Geforce Now is absolutely the way to go. Today, I'd tell anyone curious just to wait and see what happens this year.
  • rodgerd 7y ago
    I picked up my first ever games console this year, and got upsold a few months of Microsoft's Game Pass with it, and it's gold: Netflix for gaming, across two of the major platforms (Windows and Xbox). Much like Netflix there's more stuff there than I know what to do with; from my perspective, it makes it harder to see what the value of Stadia is, exactly. Especially when an Xbox One S is about the price of the Stadia starter package these days, and I can stream games from Windows or an Xbox as well.
  • rapind 7y ago
    As a counter point to GeForce now and cloud gaming in general. I splurged on a shield tv 2 (maybe 3?) years ago and it was a configuration nightmare, especially to play your own games with. Getting controllers to do the right thing was horrendous, especially when you have young kids waiting for you to finish setting it up. Definitely planning to be a late (real late) adopter of this tech in the future. The Shield gathers dust while the Switch sees a ton of action.
    • izacus 7y ago
      GeForce Now didn't exist 2 or 3 years ago, so perhaps you mixed it up with the home streaming solution? GeForce Now works fine with Xbox controllers with no configuration needed. IIRC it also requires no configuration to work with Shield TV's controller.
      • rapind 7y ago
        I checked my receipts (email, easy to find). I purchased the ShieldTV in December of 2016. So just over 3 years ago. GeForce Now launched in October of 2015, but maybe just for Shield TV owners? Apparently they did a relaunch in 2020... not sure what that means. Better I guess?
        • axaxs 7y ago
          You're both right, kinda. Geforce Now was in a ..closed-ish beta (you could get in, but they made it seem exclusive) for years. I honestly don't remember if it was called that when it launched. The polished product is what recently 'launched', and configuration is super simple. In fact, it was the xbox controller's instructions I had to turn to to figure out how to put it in bluetooth detection mode.
  • asdff 7y ago
    Give it 5 years and xbox and playstation will have their equivalent cloud offerings, but far more refined and with their expansive and ever growing catalogs. The players in the market now are doomed, but at least it can be assured the industry giants pick up the pieces from when google inevitably cancels this project and make a better product like they tend to do.
    • Narishma 7y ago
      Playstation already has it and they've been operating it for many years.
      • asdff 7y ago
        I'm putting 5 years on when it overtakes buying the console in market share.
        • daemin 7y ago
          It will never overtake having a local device which you can play games on, and people that think so are delusional or are trying to sell you something on subscription. There will be people streaming the games they are playing, there will be people playing streaming games, but it won't ever overtake playing on a local device. (I include handheld consoles, phones, consoles, PCs in this).
    • mobilio 7y ago
      MS also have some cloud gaming solution right now.
    • hnick 7y ago
      As others have said these brands already have offerings. The difference is they're not pushing it hard since they know there's still work to be done.
  • d1zzy 7y ago
    > Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win. You can use "any" controller on Stadia too (I'm assuming by any you meant the popular consoles controller): https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9578631?hl=en https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9578631?hl=en There's a common misconception that because Stadia has its own controller and because playing Stadia through Chromecast requires that controller (because Chromecast has no Bluetooth so the only way to connect would be something like a wifi controller like the Stadia Controller) that you cannot use other controllers to play Stadia, that's incorrect.
    • axaxs 7y ago
      Sorry, I should have been more clear. I'm a stay at home, couch player. So the only method of playing for me is via the Chromecast, which only supports the Stadia controller. The controller is decent, but the battery life is not up to snuff with the Nvidia or Xbone ones.
    • wyqydsyq 7y ago
      Steam Controllers support both WiFi and Bluetooth connections, and yet Stadia does not support them
      • rossjudson 7y ago
        Is that possible? Presumably Valve controls the firmware on those devices.
        • denkmoon 7y ago
          As Microsoft control the firmware on the Xbox controller, and Sony the dualshock. Wifi controller is a bit of a dead concept, so I would understand not supporting that, but the bluetooth functionality of steam controllers works just like any other bluetooth controller by exposing a HID to the host.
  • twic 7y ago
    > In the last month, at least two huge publishers pulled out, essentially disabling the ability to play a purchased Steam game via Geforce Now. Do we know why they did that?
    • axaxs 7y ago
      People speculate 'the money', and I have to agree. This isn't a tech problem, as in, it was working last month, and gone this month. Basically, what incentive is there to let people play what they already own, when you can charge them for their 10th copy of Skyrim for Geforce. To name and shame, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. Ubisoft is pretty nearly keeping it alive at this point.
      • rodgerd 7y ago
        According to one of the authors of The Long Dark, which has also been pulled, it's because NVidia didn't bother asking, they just... put it online (source: https://twitter.com/RaphLife/status/1234181315840229376 https://twitter.com/RaphLife/status/1234181315840229376). Apparently they offered a graphics card by way of compensation, so...
        • axaxs 7y ago
          Do you disagree? Why do they need permission? You own the game on Steam, or buy it on Steam, and they just give you a VM to play it on. I don't need their permission to get a new computer, do I?
          • rodgerd 7y ago
            I'm not invested one way or another, and I certainly don't know what the legal position is. It does, however, suggest that Nvidia are rather vulnerable to any one of Microsoft, Steam, or game dev/publishers putting them under the microscope.
  • IkmoIkmo 7y ago
    The great thing about GeForce Now is that it's a great proof of value. I don't know whether it will succeed because the politics of it have to make sense. But the tech is there. On wifi it is 95% of the time good, with 5% stutter, which sucks. On ethernet the reviews are that it's perfect, I haven't tried it yet, but the reviews are great. Unfortunately the library is not great yet. Not bad either, but I'm missing some favs. Plus while most people play a few popular titles, most people also have an obscure title only they play. And you can't run those, which keeps me going back to wanting to run my own hardware.
  • SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    GeForce now has too much friction to launch a game right now. It has to spawn this weird stripped down windows shell, where you then have to log in to steam (my steam password is cumbersome to type, because I use strong passwords and a password manager, and copy/paste doesn't seem to work between my desktop and the vm), and then you have to launch your game. This whole process takes about 5 minutes.
    • axaxs 7y ago
      At least via shield tv, typing is the absolute worst, I agree. However, I've only had to log in to steam once, now it just does it behind the scenes. It's actually kinda hacky, you can see it launch Steam, launch the window, then maximize. That said, it only takes about 5 seconds to launch a game this way.
  • Baeocystin 7y ago
    n=1, but my video card got stuck at 405MHz last week, and I've been using Geforce Now to play World of Tanks while I wait for the replacement to arrive. The performance is shockingly good. The latency just hasn't been an issue, which is something I am genuinely surprised by.
• polytely 7y ago
  It's really interesting if you compare it to Epic's entry into the game selling business. What they did was: 1. Appeal to developers by making exclusivity deals with them (e.g: we give you a bag of money upfront if you only sell your game via our store for a year) which is really beneficial for developers as the game business is quite risky. The developer gets guaranteed cash and Epic gets everyone who would buy that game on their platform (minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal) 2. Appeal to the customers by giving away free games every week. Epic pays developers for you, so you get a free game while the developer also gets paid. Epic wants you to have a library on their platform so you keep coming back, and because you need to visit the store to claim the free games they literally train their customers to use the store, from there it's a small step to convert them to paying customers with good deals. It's absolutely baffling to me Google didn't do anything like this, they have literally more money then they could spend, yet they didn't do anything to get people to actually use their service. Compare it to the Gmail or Chrome launch suddenly there was this 'free' product you could jump onto, it was technologically superior and exciting and it came out of nowhere. Imagine if they did that with Stadia, just suddenly release it without fanfare, all your favorite games are on there and you can play X hours a week for free or something like that.
  • lainga 7y ago
    Was it a different team within Google doing high-level strategy, maybe?
  • CommieBobDole 7y ago
    Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place". I think Google has to some extent been crippled by their search success - they built something and everybody came and uses it with little or no promotion or support, and its fantastic profitability has colored their view of everything else they try - if it's not an immediate massive success (and at Google, something that makes a hundred million in profit every year is generally not even worth the trouble), they lose interest and the people internally working on it disperse to other projects with better prospects. They have the best hammer in the world, and it's cost them the ability to see anything that's not a nail.
• WoahNoun 7y ago
  Google has consistently been terrible at large corporate deal making. It's the same reason I have no faith in Google Cloud as a future product. Their tech may be interesting, but they can't court and maintain strong relationships with other large corporations. And Stadia's success will ultimately come down to their ability to make deals with the largest publishers.
• willis936 7y ago
  Google has a growing track record of ambitious half-measure projects. Game streaming is very appealing to me on paper for competitive games. Compared to the traditional dedicated server scenario, cloud multiplayer gaming could nearly halve the player to player latency.
  • smileybarry 7y ago
    The problem is trading server latency for input latency, which is much worse. Most console gamers probably wouldn't mind it as much as they're used to TV latency, but the higher you go in competitive games, input/display latency becomes much more important. And if you count PC gamers it's much more of an uphill battle as display latency there is miniscule compared to consoles & televisions. > Compared to the traditional dedicated server scenario, cloud multiplayer gaming could nearly halve the player to player latency. There's still the network latency from your streaming edge to the game server, and yours to the streaming edge. You can just use the same optimized routing to reach the shared game server. Improving routing or using multi-pathing solutions can achieve a similar result. Things like Haste, which offer optimized routes to supported games and shoot your packets across 4+ of them at once for redundancy, can cut your lag tremendously. Haste is a particularly good example because, at least from my packet capture, it looks like they're partnering with ISPs and putting their edge nodes in ISP datacenters.
    • willis936 7y ago
      The problem cloud gaming would solve is having all players be presented the same game state at the same time. No other topology I know of would have all clients agree on the game state at the same real-world time.
      • tmpz22 7y ago
        You're being downvoted because what you're suggesting is fundamentally impossible and not at all how game netcode works. You're also ignoring many other latency bottlenecks from controller input, monitor refresh rate, client CPU/GPU, server CPU/GPU, the network, and probably others I'm completely unaware of. At best Google is handling most of the graphics rendering, but those graphics are still being encoded/decoded client side by different hardware. All the other bottlenecks also remain. 50-250ms latencies are game breaking in many contexts and game genres. Google does not sync these latencies between clients because that would also be game breaking. If you're interested in reading more on these topics checkout some of the gamedev literature for Doom and similar "early" FPS titles. They're filled with fascinating hacks for making clients seem like they are in sync when the truth is anything but.
• rodgerd 7y ago
  The article throws up two problems: the obvious one is that no-one trusts Google not to lose interest in a year or two and flush everything into the Google Sewer that all sorts of other killer products have been dumped into. The other, though, is even harder for Google to solve: it's their culture of contempt for creators. Google's most successful products are all founded on the idea that content is worthless, and that whatever Google brings to the party is so valuable that paying in exposure, or the opportunity to participate in surveillance capitalism via advertising, ought to be enough to make you happy. Search increasingly repackages other people's work, and Google are happy to leverage their monopoly to delist you if you don't like it; AMP ditto. News is wholesale the same story. YouTube spent years turning a blind eye to rampant copyright violation (particularly for music videos) to build itself into a monopoly. Google Scholar, Google Books - almost every Google success story is based on the same formula: take other people's work, repackage it, tell them you'll see them in court if they don't like it, and drop you from search (hell, at one point, Google banned a news outlet for a story about concerns with Google Maps' privacy aspects, if you want to understand how freely they'll use their monopoly). Here, though, the creators have many outlets competing for their output, and an audience who are well-engaged with Steam, the Windows Store/Xbox, PlayStation Store, and so on. But Google's culture appears to be too arrogant to actually recognise the value of creators.
  • perl4ever 7y ago
    "tell them you'll see them in court if they don't like it, and drop you from search" You tack on "drop you from search" as if it were an afterthought. But the "copyright violation" or "taking other peoples' work" is the process of making it searchable. What logical possibility is there other than doing it or not doing it?
• carapace 7y ago
  No visible content with JS disabled. Bleah.
• smt88 7y ago
  Still an accurate headline if you replace "gaming" with... - music streaming - chat - phone hardware - ISP - health As far as I know, they have two profitable products: ads and G Suite.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    And according to many reports, they are losing market share with GSuite... http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-365-usage-goes-and-leaving-g-suite-behind-says-research/ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3...
• _bxg1 7y ago
  Google is an engineer-driven company. They're great at building solutions, but terrible at packaging them up as products. Making them desirable, and easy to understand, and just having any kind of unifying vision at all. Nobody who understands this fact is the least bit shocked about how Stadia is turning out.
  • kubmit 7y ago
    This is a ridiculous comment. They make products people enjoy and use every day: Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Chrome, Google Photos. Billions of people who aren't technically savvy use the products. Google makes some bad products too. Stadia happens to be one of them imo.
    • jay_kyburz 7y ago
      None of the products are original idea. They are all better clones of somebody else's product.
      • joshuamorton 7y ago
        So is everything.
  • martin-adams 7y ago
    I agree with this, but only for their consumer products. I gave up on the Google Home and went back to Alexa. It was like they just don’t try to use their own products themselves, and once they tick the box of releasing, improvements seem to be nonexistent. Admittedly, most of my issues were because I have a GSuite account, but when it can’t read my own calendar or set a reminder, you realise they just don’t care. Alexa can read my GSuite calendar just fine. I always approach Google products with caution.
    • D2187645 7y ago
      Could it be possible that employees designing the google home ecosystem can't actually afford homes in the bay area? If everyone is renting, then they likely have to make do, and just imagine what owning a home might be like.
• pfdietz 7y ago
  Shouldn't a potential user of this service just expect it to be unceremoniously discontinued, like so many other Google products?
  • asdff 7y ago
    Yep, but then you can switch to xbox cloud in a couple years and it will probably be excellent with a huge catalog of current and legacy titles and supported until the end of time, or whenever you can no longer afford $10 a month.
  • djohnston 7y ago
    yep, i wouldn't want to buy the product, let alone spend effort developing content for it
• Shank 7y ago
  I have Stadia! Here are a few impressions: 1. The game catalog is totally the most important thing and they don't have any really big games. I'm not a Fortnite person, but they don't have that, nor Apex, nor PUBG. Battle Royale may not be the biggest thing in gaming anymore, but this is the type of game that at least a lot of people enjoy and they have none on the platform. 2. They sold Stadia as being able to achieve higher quality than local hardware at a fraction of the cost. Yet it's been shown multiple times that the games running on Stadia are running at less than promised quality, with techniques like upscaling being used for 4K instead of native 4K: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-addresses-complaints-of-sub-4k-image-quality-on-stadia/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-addresses-comp.... 3. As a person who wants to play with a keyboard and a mouse on a computer, I get really frustrated that the Stadia output resolution is fixed. You can't output 1440p to a monitor at all, and 4K is only available if you have a Chromecast. Why? I've also tried Shadow and GeForce now. Shadow is easily the best in terms of quality, because you can run at arbitrary resolutions and pump the bandwidth up to a max of 70Mbps down, which is astoundingly good looking compared to what Stadia offers. GeForce Now is great too, but point 3 applies to it: you can't run at non-preset resolutions, which really stinks if you have a bigger monitor with a higher native resolution. However, both Shadow and GeForce Now leverage existing game libraries, look better, and are generally more approachable than Stadia's "rebuy everything, run at lower quality, and lack significant features" plan.
  • SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    > However, both Shadow and GeForce Now leverage existing game libraries, look better, and are generally more approachable than Stadia's "rebuy everything, run at lower quality, and lack significant features" plan. The old joke when you read a fortune cookie out loud, is to say "in bed" afterwards - "Things will look up soon... in bed." When talking about the performance of game streaming services you need a similar qualifier at the end... "for me". "<x> streaming services performs better than <y>.... for me" That's because experiences with the various streaming services can't be generalized so easily. GeForce now is an absolutely miserable experience... for me. However, Stadia is fantastic... for me.
    • 7y ago
• m0zg 7y ago
  I bet at least one googler's ambitious push into becoming a director or a VP is succeeding though.
• agoodthrowaway 7y ago
  Gaming is hard. It’s hard to disrupt when we have PlayStation, XBox, and Nintendo. Xbox was able to break in because they had Halo. Nintendo has tons of games people love. PlayStation has a great ecosystem. You need more than just a Google name to break in.
  • rodgerd 7y ago
    Xbox also had Live, an easier dev story, and a willingness to persist - it's been around since 2001. And it took a long time losing money!
    • Macha 7y ago
      And Microsoft were already in the gaming space, both as a publisher and via PC technologies like DirectX.
      • rodgerd 7y ago
        Yes, and I imagine they learned from their involvement with the Dreamcast, as well.
        • ThrowawayB7 7y ago
          That's a persistent myth; the team that launched the Xbox was an entirely different set of people in a different division from the team that worked on the Dreamcast collaboration with Sega.
  • sogen 7y ago
    and Apple Arcade, with a flat monthly fee
• tcd 7y ago
  It's hilarious. Many people commented on how long it would take before it ended up in killedbygoogle.com. I don't trust a single product they launch these days. Usually it's best to wait 5 years and get a sense for its longevity. What products do Google make that last longer these days? I feel the majority of new stuff ends up canned because it just doesn't hold up to the tech debt and costs for running the service at such huge scale.
  • moneromoney 7y ago
    Stadia is already dead. I don't know anyone in Europe who is using it.
• remir 7y ago
  Let's say I'm a casual gamers, without a console or a gaming PC and I briefly heard of Stadia. I imagine this is their target audience. I went to stadia.google.com and there's no catalog with the available games on the platform. There's nothing that show me, with trailers, videos, what's on there and why I should buy this. Remember, I am a casual gamers, so I don't know much about what is out there in terms of games. What I see is some images of games that tells me nothing, a link to buy the service and links to both App stores. That's it. Basically, this is Google assuming, once again, that because they're Google, that people would be tripping over themselves to sign up for this. Total lack of empathy. I ended up closing the tab.
  • 100-xyz 7y ago
    I visited the page. Pathetic. I think someone did that page in an hour?
• iamthepieman 7y ago
  I think I'm one of the target markets for stadia. A big time gamer in my teenss and college/early post college days before career and family made me feel out more casual games. I only play a few AAA title to completion in a year now but have a large library of games on Steam, Epic and GoG that I never had the time or interest to finish. I was excited about Stadia when I first heard of it but needing to buy hardware for a service that will likely be languishing in a year and sunsetted in two just didn't interest me. I'm more likely to spend money on a 8 times more expensive VR set than a cheap piece of hardware that will be collecting dust in a drawer soon. Google's reputation for discontinuing projects already influences me. Is this something that people outside the HN bubble think about?
  • SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    You don't need to buy hardware for Stadia (sort of). At the moment, I do think you need to be invited by an existing member, to get an activation code , without buying the "founder's edition" - which is a controller and a chromecast ultra. But in general, you don't need either of those things to play games on stadia. You can use any controller (or kb/m, and any device that runs chrome, AFAIK).
    • georgemcbay 7y ago
      I don't think this is a good defense of the service, in fact quite the opposite. The fact that you can't just buy access to it without buying the chromecast ultra hardware bundle just shows how half-baked the whole thing is. Especially since the chromecast ultra doesn't support non-Stadia controllers, so if you do want to play with say an Xbox controller google is bundlefucking you with hardware you will never use, which certainly doesn't make the service look any more attractive to people who might otherwise be interested.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    >needing to buy hardware for a service that will likely be languishing in a year and sunsetted in two Just use your old rig. I used the same CPU for 7 years and it was never the bottleneck. The only reason I upgraded was because a bad PSU killed my GPU after 5 years. You order the GPU from your local online shop (Amazon is overpriced), remove 3 screws to open the case and plop in the new card. This doesn't take more than 15 minutes and you're good to go.
• seemslegit 7y ago
  As with every area where google didn't have a dominant offering in place before strong competitors existed. Android being a possible exception because device vendors rallied around it so as not to be extinguished by apple.
• pjmlp 7y ago
  No surprise here, even their Android game related tooling is a joke compared with what Apple offers on iOS SDK. SpriteKite, SceneKit and MetalKit aren't without their share of bugs, however on Android's side they are just inexistent. At any GDC, or IO, the only thing Google seems to be able to talk about is PlayServices, even the Vulkan support on Android is a joke, asking developers to clone github repositories and compile shaderc from scratch. They just don't know how to talk to game developers.
• sdinsn 7y ago
  I just don't see the market for this. Powerful computers are becoming cheaper and cheaper; the PC game market is continuing to expand. I don't see the comparison to other cloud media services like Netflix or Hulu- on Stadia, you have to pay for the service AND the individual items, instead of just the service. As far as I know, there isn't any other business like this. I don't think this is appealing to consumers.
  • bobbyz 7y ago
    If the coronavirus becomes a sustained pandemic, supply chain issues will push PC component prices up until Stadia becomes an attractive option.
    • gbear605 7y ago
      Google has to buy graphics cards too (or manufacture them), so their costs will go up with general PC components.
  • drusepth 7y ago
    Some of the most exciting potentials for cloud streaming for me are some of the things they've toted as not possible on consumer hardware. Most of these are just related to scale (like 1,000-person Battle Royales, 500-car races, MMOs that don't have to shard players in the same area into separate "worlds", etc), but there's other features that'd be exciting to see when games have effectively unlimited resources (instead of having to worry about what's available on each consumer's PC); Google's got a lot of resources in NLP and language recognition/generation they could apply to NPC dialogues, massive amounts of resources could make enemy/npc AI way more impressive than what you'd see on local hardware (I'd love to play against DeepMind's Dota 2 bots!), or even something as mundane as Maps-like navigation as a first-party feature to help you navigate through game worlds. I'm less excited about some of the streaming-based features they've advertised (streamers being able to share save-states with viewers that viewers can click to start playing from, viewers being able to instantly jump in and play live with streamers, being easier to stream at 4K while also playing in 4K, etc), but I guess those are probably appealing to some people also.
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  It's interesting to me how a company like Google can still do things so half-assedly. You'd kind of expect with their resources, they'd to flirt with an idea, then if they commit, to do it fully. Like, wildly cheap, subsidized gaming solution until they own the market and then turn up the price. The only answer I can come up with is, "this _is_ their version of flirting with an idea." In which case I think the problem is nobody else realises that given the scale and price tag.
  • abvdasker 7y ago
    Maybe this is silly given Google's vast resources, but I do worry about the future of a company that seems to consistently fall short when it comes to marketing and product management. Google probably still has a lot of the best engineering talent in the world, but without coherent product strategy and marketing what good does it do? When was the last time Google made a big bet that achieved the same level of success as their earlier products? Does Google's inability to diversify its revenue stream make it more vulnerable to disruption than say, Amazon, in the long run?
    • lmm 7y ago
      > Does Google's inability to diversify its revenue stream make it more vulnerable to disruption than say, Amazon, in the long run? Yes. If ads went away, Google would collapse. Google's core search experience is not that good any more, though it's still the best in town; you have to wonder what would happen if Amazon or Facebook decided to actually go after search in a serious way.
      • dodobirdlord 7y ago
        They do. It is deeply irritating to Amazon that people mostly search Amazon's product catalogue via Google, and only actually navigate to an Amazon controlled page when they go specifically to the product page. Amazon has thrown tremendous resources into building a search experience over their own databases and it still sucks compared to the one Google produced by scraping their website.
• anonymouswacker 7y ago
  Google needs to just give up and realize they're an ad and marketing company, and continue to be very, very good at it.
  • fenwick67 7y ago
    Honestly their work on fringe projects like this seem more like PR than anything. It makes them look like an innovative company with consumer-facing products, rather than an ad company.
    • anonymouswacker 7y ago
      Interesting idea. It would be sad to be an engineering team working on these poorly managed products, then.
      • lmm 7y ago
        Having worked in a company that was more of a PR exercise than something intended to actually generate revenue, it's an interesting mix. You get the time to engineer everything really well, you're encouraged to use the latest technology, go to conferences, and improve your own skills. At its best, it's the same kind of "blue-sky engineering" that you hear about people having done at Xerox Parc or Bell Labs. But without that bit of pressure to actually deliver something, it's very easy to get lost in overengineered architecture, and if someone high up makes a bad design decision it's very hard for the consequences to be brought to bear in a way that matters.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  Looks like they underestimates the power exclusive AAA titles to bring people in their platforms. Platforms like Steam and Epic without exclusive games is like buying bananas from the super market, I get them which ever is convenient. Having exclusives is like traveling, it brings people to you because certain things only that locale has and you must be there
• freeflight 7y ago
  This whole sector is currently just super weird. GeForce NOW has been somewhat successful but has had support from both Bethesda and Activision recently pulled. Meanwhile, Google is just kinda half-arsing it around, even tho they would easily have the money and infrastructure to create something like a "killer-app" for the scalability of gaming in the cloud. But apparently there isn't any attempt at something like that, so what's even the point?
• crazygringo 7y ago
  This article seems misguided. It's assuming Stadia is "floundering" because it doesn't have a ton of indie titles, assuming those are "critical" for success. But are they? The article is clear that Google is working with "EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft, 2K Games, and Rockstar Games". Google is obviously consciously choosing a product strategy of starting with major publishers rather than indie ones. Now I don't personally know if that's the right strategy. But it's clearly the strategy Google is pursuing, so they should be judged on whether that's working. Judging solely on the presence of indie titles just seems weird.
  • iandanforth 7y ago
    I paid for the Founders Edition, eagerly awaited its release, played a couple games for a few hours and haven't touched it since. I want to play games like I watch Netflix, free with lots of variety. Indie game makers would keep me coming back for no other reason than I want to try new things regularly and I have zero interest in paying $60 for titles I've already played or had no interest in in the first place. Dr. Kate Compton articulates what I want well in this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1197227916158996481 https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1197227916158996481
    • setpatchaddress 7y ago
      Twitter won’t load for me right now, but it sounds like you want Apple Arcade.
      • SanchoPanda 7y ago
        Twitter will load differently for me depending upon referrer; try reloading by selecting url and hitting enter to make it a direct thing.
      • iandanforth 7y ago
        I'd totally try that if it didn't try to force me to upgrade my OS. Looks interesting though!
  • 7y ago
• akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I do genuinely wonder what the appeal was to build an entirely new and slightly different hardware platform (using AMD hardware, like PS4/Xbox) when they could have easily licensed Gamestream like what Shadowplay did? Was NVIDIA not willing? Google probably already has massive data centers full of Nvidia GPUs. Stadia is DOA, because of its absurd pricing and rollout, really strange design decisions (usb controller for select phones, but wireless for Chromecast?)
  • agildehaus 7y ago
    I already own a Chromecast Ultra. Why would I want to pay for another one? I have no idea why I can't buy a controller by itself for $69. It will be interesting to see how they treat paying customers when they inevitably shut this thing down.
• dreamcompiler 7y ago
  "This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." There it is, right there. Nobody takes Google seriously on any new initiative outside their core wheelhouse. We've all been burned too many times.
  • ehsankia 7y ago
    I find this point so overplayed lately. Can someone here name "so many other (paid) services" that Google has killed? And even for free ones, how many major services can you name of the scale of Stadia? G+ is really the only one, and maybe Allo. Hangouts is still not killed though its future is uncertain, GPM is apparently being migrated and Inbox was mostly a UI over Gmail. Other than those, almost every other item in those cemetery site is a trivial side project, not even close to being comparable to Stadia.
    • Analemma_ 7y ago
      The thing is, it doesn’t really matter if it’s overplayed: this is one of those times when perception is reality. If people avoid new Google products because they‘re afraid of it getting shut down— and according to the article that definitely seems to be happening here—then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a positive feedback cycle on top of that.
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • 72deluxe 7y ago
      Out of interest, what is the alternative to Hangouts from Google? I have Duo but I don't want to video call all the time. I would like to IM and send pictures (without WhatsApp). Does Google have an alternative or are they just ditching it for no purpose?
      • ehsankia 7y ago
• stopads 7y ago
  Ambitious or half-assed? You'd have to know literally nothing about gaming to call Stadia ambitious.
• torgian 7y ago
  I think the other problem with Stadia, and why both consumers and developers are wary of it, is simply due to its streaming idea. Even within major cities, internet connectivity can suck a lot. Couple that with data caps, and streaming games becomes a chore to play. Nobody wants to play a game that “buffers”( we already have to deal with loading screens! ) I don’t think this is feasible in the States, and even other western countries. The exception would be Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, where there are no data caps and internet is much faster and cheaper. The market is different, however, so I don’t think there would be much success. And then there’s the ownership argument.
• reilly3000 7y ago
  Despite its failings, Stadia has few complaints about its killer feature: streaming at decently high FPS. Whether Google pulls it off or not ultimately isn't the question- the question is whether game streaming over the web will be the norm in 10 years, and I think that Stadia's initial rollout has proven the tech out. I'm rather fond of physical game media. I like the way it looks on a shelf, and how I can always trade it at a local store for something else. I like that I can demo titles via Redbox. I like that I own my hardware and can get some value out of it if I sell it. Downloadable games don't have those qualities, but at least they can (generally) be played offline and still allow for permanent ownership. That said, all of those qualities have essentially vanished with music and video streaming and gaming isn't fundamentally different than those mediums. Look at home stereo systems over the past 50 years, where audiophile quality has given way to convenient delivery almost universally. Any player in the game streaming business needs to have big metal, fat pipes, and money to burn on acquisition, so it does seem like a somewhat of a natural monopoly.
  • sixothree 7y ago
    My experience with the technology supporting YouTube TV being so lackluster, I am reluctant to ever consider Stadia. By lackluster I mean buffering on episode load, waiting for the rewind feature to start working.
• shmerl 7y ago
  I'm surprised Google still didn't use something like Wine (+dxvk) to bring more games to Stadia sooner, while the library of native Linux/Vulkan games is gradually growing (which isn't going to be super fast process). Is there a reason for that?
  • ehsankia 7y ago
    You can't just "bring games to Stadia". First off you need the approval from the devs. We've seen Blizzard and Bethesda pulling out their games from GeForce Now. Next, the way Stadia is designed, it requires actual porting to use its APIs, which is a non-trivial amount of work required from the devs. You can argue if it's the right design or not, but as it is, it takes time and effort to move games to Stadia, so it's not as trivial as just running them on Wine.
    • shmerl 7y ago
      Adding support for Stadia SDK (for remote input and video streaming and such) is not as difficult, as writing a Vulkan renderer in the first place, for a game that doesn't have it. Incentives are measured against the difficulty of the whole work. I'm sure, using Wine+dxvk as a first step for existing games is a lot easier than writing native Vulkan renderer. In this sense, Google can actually provide one level of incentives for native games (higher one), and another for Wine use case. I.e. developers can first release it in Wine (phase 1), and then make a native version for example (phase 2) to improve performance. What Google could do, is to provide integration of their SDK with Wine for phase 1 above.
• johnwheeler 7y ago
  At the end of the day, I think it boils down to simple arrogance and entitlement. When you’re the owner of a successful indie game company and you’ve got some partnerships exec treating you like “big me little you” because I work at Google and you’re an indie who needs me and will work for free, it’s a real turn off.
• eximius 7y ago
  If they really want to reach gamers, they should buy Discord and integrate it into their platform. And then we can make fun of them for having yet another chat app. It's a win-win.
• flipgimble 7y ago
  Google is now starting to feel the economic impact of being a known "mercurial company" that cannot be trusted with any long term strategic partnerships. see https://gcemetery.co https://gcemetery.co As a customer, why would I "buy" a game that I will never own, on a service that is likely to close on a whim. As a game developer why would I invest time and effort supporting a new platform from a company without a proven track record in the game industry. This will severely limit their impact on the industry, and the executives have nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of trust.
• me551ah 7y ago
  IMO the biggest mistake they made was going with Linux instead of Windows. They were aiming to be Netflix for gaming but while Netflix could add any title to it's service as soon as they got the rights for it, developers need to port their games to Linux(& Vulkan) to run on Stadia. This is not an easy feat. For Destiny 2 Google had to depute a couple of its developers to work out of Bungie's office for over 6 months. https://ajit.dhiwal.com/2020/01/google-stadia-shouldve-used-windows.html https://ajit.dhiwal.com/2020/01/google-stadia-shouldve-used-...
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    1) Microsoft has no incentive to cut a deal with or assist Google since they have their own online gaming service. 2) Google would be highly unenthusiastic about using Windows both culturally and because of the need to hire large numbers of engineers with deep Windows expertise.
• FillardMillmore 7y ago
  > But where are the dozens of indie hits that helped bolster the libraries of Sony's PlayStation 4, Microsoft's Xbox One, and Nintendo's Switch? Where are the games like "Bloodstained," "Shovel Knight," "Dead Cells," and "Untitled Goose Game" — the blockbuster indie games that sell millions of copies and inspire sequels? I think this points to a somewhat more important problem for Google. As the article points out, to incentivize developers and their studios to do the work to move their games to the Stadia platform, Google would need to offer to them the benefit of a base of dedicated users. If we consider that many prospective users may already be using Steam or home gaming consoles, the question becomes: how does Google attract these users to their platform? In my opinion, as someone who has played games from an early age, the best way to do that would be to either develop a game for the platform themselves (however feasible that may be) or hire a studio to produce a game for the platform with at least a temporary exclusivity deal. I've known many young kids throughout my childhood who were inspired to go out and get a game system simply because there's that one game that can't be played anywhere else. Whether it's Mario on Nintendo, Halo on Microsoft, or Uncharted on Sony, every gaming platform has historically had exclusive games that can't be played anywhere else. Imagine if Google Stadia had secured Fortnite as an exclusive game - Fortnite would probably have not been as successful as it is now, but Stadia may likely have received a serious boost in consumer attention, all things staying the same.
  • parineum 7y ago
    And that's exactly how steam was introduced, via half life 2
• ineedasername 7y ago
  Unless it's a game I really, really want to play right NOW, I wishlist it and wait for deep discounts, then purchase. This leaves me with a large back catalog of games I haven't played yet, from which I choose when I'm done with one game and want to choose another. Given the frequent discount sales model popularized by Steam (and maybe Humble Bundle was first to that?) I think a lot of avid gamers are in a similar position. As a result, game streaming services that doesn't let me bring my own games is a complete non-starter for me. Especially for a sales model like Stadia where I really don't own it. GoG is an excellent storefront to safeguard your library with DRM free games and archiveable installers. Even Steam has made sounds about finding a way to let you keep your library if they were ever to go under. But past failures like Onlive have left gamers bereft of purchases. I think I lost some games when Direct2Drive had some issues or transfer of ownership years ago. If Google really wants to make a viable product, they should be looking at integrating Stadia streaming tech into compute instances that let me install Steam or any other storefront or stand alone game. If you're looking for such a service, you could do worse than Shadow or Paperspace. I demoed GeForce Now and liked it better, but they're also running into some trouble over not firming up publisher agreements, so I'd wait for the dust to settle there in the next months.
  • ehnto 7y ago
    The frequent discount model is popular in most retail now. Many people don't shop for clothing unless it is on sale because they have been trained that it will be on sale soon enough.
    • ineedasername 7y ago
      Very true. I know I can get work casual clothes from the usual shops if I wait a few weeks at a 30-40% discount.
  • hnick 7y ago
    It sounds like you might be more into a Netflix style model, which has a large (possibly rotating) back catalogue to catch up on everything you missed. I don't think anyone is trying to do that, but it's also the only model I'd possibly be willing to pay.
• fourmyle 7y ago
  The main issue is streaming services have too much latency to attract core gamers. I barely find Steam Link playable on my home network. Nothing breaks immersion more than lag. It’s like page load times. The occasional jitter matters. The lag spikes and compression artifacts are killers not the average latency.
• mmsmatt 7y ago
  I rent a Shadow instance for $35 a month, and play my entire Steam library on a MacBook Air. New games, old games, whatever. It just works, given good broadband and an Ethernet cable. I think the future of "cloud gaming" looks a lot more like Shadow than Stadia.
  • p1necone 7y ago
    Don't underestimate the importance of marketing. History is full of very successful products that are dogshit compared to competitors but have flashy marketing and celebrity endorsements.
• p1necone 7y ago
  I don't know about anyone else, but if any of these cloud gaming services want me as a customer they need to give me access to my existing Steam/GOG/Epic/Whatever library on their cloud system. I'd also much rather build my own system though, unless they put a datacenter in my suburb I don't see this ever being a better experience than my own machine.
• Animats 7y ago
  "This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." That's a terrible reputation for any company to have. In addition to Stadia, it seems to be killing off Improbable's Spatial OS, which is a back-end system for very large world MMOs. Originally, that had to run on Google Cloud. Three of the first games shut down, partly because the costs for that service are high. Nobody big is using it.
  • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    Its so much worse in this case than other google services. Normally when google kills a service you just move to an alternative, no big deal. But now google is holding on to hundreds to thousands of your dollars in game purchases. They obviously wont keep running a server for you for free forever so eventually if you use stadia you will lose your games. Its just a matter of when.
    • Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
      This is the thing that baffles me the most. You pay the full price for games you don't even own? At least with Steam there's the possibility of downloading your library in case Steam ever goes away for whatever reason. The other thing is - they must, must be playing the multi-year long game here. Infrastructure around the world just isn't ready for game streaming. Having said that, from what I hear GeForce Now is giving people a FAR better experience than Stadia. Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out? I never got the impression anyone was dying to get their hands on it. They could have given it another year of polish at least and nobody would have complained, surely? I'd love to hear Google's internal rationale for why they thought this pricing model was a good idea.
      • ansq 7y ago
        A few possible reasons: 1. You can't foresee competition, why give up early. 2. It's a big market, worth a shot even if it fails. 3. Someone thought the project would be good for their promotion. This happens more frequently than you might think :)
• LatteLazy 7y ago
  I feel a bit like the world needed this in the 90s. I remember when you needed to constantly upgrade kit to play the latest games. Processors, RAM and the GPU all had a lifespan of about 2 years before they were obsolete. That was part of what pushed consoles: you knew you'd get 5 plus years of Sony PS? games even if they looked a bit blocky by year 4. But hardware has out run gaming needs now. My 6 year old PC plays the latest games and streams 1080p at the same time without issue. I could probably mine some crypto in the background. If I was constantly upgrading, a "rental" service like this would make sense. But I'm not. I'm struggling to justify any changes to my setup. So why would I pay to rent someone else's? And thats without the fact that Steam already offers games virtually on demand or that consoles have a big chunk of the market sewn up...
• otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  Wow, what a surprise. /s
• valas 7y ago
  The article does not support the title. The facts also do not support the article. Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon (Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some clearly do. Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few articles to that extent. They know how to run business. Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are imaginary? Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.
  • bootloop 7y ago
    > if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? They simply don't want to burn bridges with Google. There is nothing to win by doing so. Everyone knows Google has enough money to throw it against their problems if they decide to do so.
  • fiblye 7y ago
    3 indie games is not exactly a lot. 3 indie games is what's launched on Steam any given 10 minutes. If you mean huge indie games, Steam gets about one or more of those a day. And it seems like the Steamworld developer is quite serious about porting games to Stadia, since 4 games out of the 10 you mentioned are all related to Steamworld in some way. That doesn't strike me as a healthy indie market if it's so heavily sustained by one developer. And announcing 4 more indie titles coming soon doesn't leave me with any confidence. It's not much.
    • 7y ago
• Karishma1234fff 7y ago
  As a gamer I have bigger issues with Google. I would rather prefer Japanese or Chinese companies to be better custodians of gaming industry than Google. Microsoft too in my opinion has done a better job. It is only matter of time before some google snowflake would call a game transphobic or "too violent" etc. and write lengthy posts that the game be pushed off Stadia. Right now this is not a problem but if google becomes 1st or 2nd largest player this would be increasingly a problem. I am a big lover of violent video games and Google is not good for such games IMO.
• remote_phone 7y ago
  I’m glad to see that Google is finally paying for their actions by having market forces reject them for retreating so quickly. Anything they try can’t be just a toe-dip now. They need to actually invest heavily otherwise no one will trust them. Good. They have fucked over way too many developers by dangling a promise and then cutting support quickly.
• Kiro 7y ago
  Stadia works surprisingly well but has literally 0 games I'm interested in. Considering cancelling my Pro subscription soon.
• anonytrary 7y ago
  Well, username checks out, since many people considered Stadia to be a physically impossible endeavor. The napkin math/physics behind Stadia barely checks out, but I still think it's worth continuing development on it.
• Razengan 7y ago
  Can’t someone go take a look at the Commodore 64/Amiga and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and make a new programmable games console for the modern age? Even something like a Raspberry Pi inside a keyboard enclosure would be good.
• Rainymood 7y ago
  Google Stadia reminds me of the old adage: "Good business can save bad tech, but good tech can not save bad business."
• techntoke 7y ago
  I think Stadia would make a good platform for virtual desktops running a fun blown Linux OS with Android App support. Almost every app you'd need for Windows has an Android app that is comparable. Maybe they could even support Windows too as a paid add-on.
• 2wrist 7y ago
  Shame, they have such an opportunity on so many fronts. I am actually very intrigued by the hardware, a powerful linux box which may make a cracking console in it's own right. Wouldn't mind one of those at home.
• buttersbrian 7y ago
  Google doesn't really kill pay services. So while projects and random free services are killed all the time (too often probably), it's kinda unfair to apply that reputation to Stadia.
• numlock86 7y ago
  Early adopter of Stadia here. Even I am surprised they haven't shut down the service yet. I wonder when they'll pull the plug.
• Haga 7y ago
  Stadias core audience is poor.
• mensetmanusman 7y ago
  Starlink implementation (best case scenarios) will be the only thing that saves Stadia’s latency issue. Maybe Google knows something...
• lostgame 7y ago
  I don’t get the concept of buying a console or using a service that streams the games, meaning I cannot play them offline (I play games mostly in Transit, buses, subways, etc that don’t have wifi) - and meaning I ultimately don’t own the games I buy, and when Google predictably shuts this service down as it is notorious for doing, I don’t have anything to show for my investment? I would never buy a serious console game on anything but hard media. In a couple years, all the money people spent on games for Stadia will literally have been completely wasted - and my Sega Genesis I got when I was six, and the games I paid for 20 years ago will probably still work (I’ll admit bitrot is a concern, but that’s a hugely different issue), along with my PS5 or whatever I’m using at that point. This is a zero-value, long-term net-loss concept for me. It boggles the mind.
• golf3 7y ago
  The correct word is foundering.
• guest 7y ago
  wait a minute you mean that super mega corp doesn't have any more competence than super mega bank? this is unfucking believable, pay my interest now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el6g_REXHoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el6g_REXHoo
• Farbodkhz 7y ago
  There is always the risk of failure in this risky business world but there is no denying that cloud gaming is the future. Whether anyone agree or not, it's coming. Maybe not this year or even 5 but when it does, having a foot in the game from the beginning is gonna make a huge difference for Google. Gaming industry has made more profit than movie and music industry combined in tje past years and that's why I don't think google is gonna drop this. With Google and Microsoft both promoting their cloud gaming and with Google penetrating the market first, I think we're gonna see some interesting and innovative developments over the years to come.