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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 deal

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.
- wolco 7y ago
  Google's easy to sunset policy makes them an easy target in any industry that isn't ripe for change or that provide any setbacks. If the going gets tough Google exits. Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it.
  - kubanczyk 7y ago
    > Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it. Good for us consumers, isn't it?
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Like any tool it depends on how they use it. Leaving the abusive fiefdoms of others in place doesn't help consumers. It is a matter of nuance essentially. Google and all competitors may do things good, bad, or both for consumers and their size doesn't have much to do with it.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  I think/suspect/speculate that since Google has search/ads billions raining from the sky, nothing else it does really matters to them. So all side projects are done kinda like a hobby.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Makes sense to me. And I think another factor is that with ads, users are the product, not the customer. If customer service is the foundation of a business, it drives a certain attention on the individual experience of every user, and there's a real incentive to be a customer's #1 choice by the customer's own criteria. But Google's relationship with the userbase is statistical, not individual. As along as enough people look at their ads, that's good enough. They were never intending to please everybody, and so don't really have to pay attention to the details. So it's entirely unsurprising to me that they're failing at gaming, which is very much about delivering amazing individual experiences to one's chosen niche. Ditto their failure in social networking. In both cases they built something that sounded good on paper and could be adequate for some people, but never succeeded in being truly great for enough people to capture an audience.
jsnell 7y ago
You couldn't actually just use Gmail when it launched. You needed to get an invite for a fairly long time, which made it a little bit of status symbol. Google have tried repeating the same play a bunch of times since then, and it has always failed. For a while I did wonder whether they were trying it also with Stadia. The free "no subscription needed, just buy the game" tier of Stadia is the thing that should in principle be distinguishing them from the competition, and is actually kind of compelling from a consumer perspective. While the Stadia Pro just makes no sense as a product; it's targeting the people who least want this service and who are the most likely to already have huge game libraries on other platforms. How can it be that four months after launch, the tier that people might actuall want is still nowhere to be seen?
- capableweb 7y ago
  > The free "no subscription needed, just buy the game" tier of Stadia is the thing that should in principle be distinguishing them from the competition, and is actually kind of compelling from a consumer perspective Isn't that how every other game store works as well? Unreal's, Steam, Microsofts and others all work with that same idea. They also have additional subscription services, but by default it's just "no subscription needed, just buy the game"
  - jsnell 7y ago
    Yes. But for all of those you need to buy hardware that can actually play the games. (A few hundred for a console, a thousand for a PC). The promise of game streaming is that you can play AAA games on the low-powered laptop or phone that you already have. There's a few possible business models for streaming. E.g. with PS Now you have to pay a subscription, you get access to a games library, and can only play the games that are part of the library. (Not other PS4 games that you own). Or GeForce Now which in practice requires a subscription (the free tier is only 1 hour at a time) and allows you to play a limited set of games as long as you own them on the right platform (e.g. Steam). Xcloud seems quite likely to just be sold bundled together as part of another subscription. So the free tier of Stadia should have been interesting due to not requiring a large up-front investment, and not requiring an ongoing subscription. Which at least at this moment is unique. Or rather, would be unique, because 9 months after the announcement it still has not launched.
scarface74 7y ago
Is it really baffling that Google’s product marketing/business people have yet another failing initiative? Have they ever shone any ability to profitably diversify outside of advertising?
- armitron 7y ago
  No: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - arkitaip 7y ago
    No matter what happens with Stadia and its market, Google simply cannot afford to kill the projects in the next few years. It would be a huge blow to their already tarnished reputation wrt keeping services alive. They need to prove to the world that they can long-term commit to major challenges even if they are suffering in the short-term.
    - BigBubbleButt 7y ago
      Judging by Alphabet's stock price and their years of shuttering services at the cost of their reputation, it seems shareholders disagree with you.
      - fmajid 7y ago
        They're not mutually exclusive. Google's search and advertising cash cow is so profitable, the company grows despite its boneheaded mistakes in so many other areas. If you read the article, every single developer mentioned they have no trust in Google not canning the service, and who can blame them? At this point, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
        BigBubbleButt 7y ago
        > every single developer mentioned they have no trust in Google not canning the service I never said developers have faith in Google. I said shareholders do. My point is Google doesn't really care what developers think.
anon4242 7y ago
> 2. Appeal to the customers by giving away free games every week This is actually bigger than just appeal. I now have almost as many games on Epic as on Steam. This means that I start the Epic Games Launcher almost every day to see if there's something I want to play. In fact I now run the Epic Games Launcher more frequently than Steam. This exposes me to their store and I have started buying games from them. Before Epic started their free give away, the launcher was in the same category as the other non-Steam launchers I have, like Uplay or Origin. Something I virtually never start except when to play a game that requires them (and even then I'm reluctant). This means I'm never exposed to their stores and never entertain the idea of buying a game from them through those stores - out of sight, out of mind.
- Talanes 7y ago
  Yeah, the reluctance to open a client you don't use very often cannot be overstated. If you haven't played anything on a client for a year, then just opening it is likely to set off updates to the client, possibly updates to the game library, just a whole flurry of potential activity you might have to sit through.If you aren't fully committed to playing whatever is in there, it's very easy to just decide on something else.
SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
Epic's entry into the game storefront business has been a drama filled shit-show. It has not been well received by very vocal swaths of the gaming community. In fact, their strategy of buying out developers for exclusivity rights is one of the reasons they've drawn so much ire. See the controversy where Borderlands games were getting review bombed on Steam, because Epic secured exclusivity rights for Borderlands 3. https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-steam-over-epic-1833818454 https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-s... In the gaming world, you're basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. If Google had aggressively gone for exclusives, they'd be getting the same backlash that Epic has gotten/is getting. But since they didn't they might be getting an equal but opposite sort of backlash now.
- prostheticvamp 7y ago
  The epic approach gets a lot of hate from a vocal minority. Everyone else has had multiple storefronts for a while, and having -one- more is borderline meaningless. As long as they don’t jack up the price, how many people give a shit which executable they have to click on to launch a game?
  - imtringued 7y ago
    The Epic Store isn't supported on Linux. When they turn existing games on Steam into Epic store exclusives I can't play the games I have purchased.
    - prostheticvamp 7y ago
      > vocal minority > Linux gamer I fail to see the contradiction. Per Steam’s October 2019 user survey, all Linux distros together total 0.43% of their users. I am using the notably pro-Linux Steam as a benchmark for how many gamers are affected by this.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
Lazare 7y ago
Agreed, 100%. In retrospect, the Epic approach is obviously the right way to do it. It was pretty obvious before too, but I think most people would have discounted the "build a platform by throwing an enormous pile of money at it" approach as being impractical (if for no other reason than most people who want to build gaming platforms don't have enormous piles of money lying around). Epic showed that, no, actually, you can just go ahead and do the obvious thing. :) And I find it odd because first, Epic did all this before Stadia's dissapointing launch, so it's not like Google execs can claim they just literally had no idea you could build a gaming platform this way, and second, because (like Epic) Google can clearly afford it. It almost feels like Google doesn't want Stadia to succeed...? Or is this just a culture clash from Google's experience with ads, search, video, and webmail, where success seemingly just fell into their lap, and they're struggling to imagine needing to market a service? (I find the latter suggestion implausible since, actually, quite a lot of marketing went into making those a success, but man, I don't have a lot of other ideas.)
- ehsankia 7y ago
  To be fair, Epic's approach doesn't require many resources other than just money. Hell, for the longest time their store literally did not have even a "search" function, and I'm pretty sure it still doesn't even have a shopping cart. Software development takes time, but they mostly bypassed that and went straight into giving out free games. The games themselves already exist for PC, Epic didn't need to do much there. The case of Stadia is wildly different, because it requires a lot more engineering, both from Google and the developers. They also need a lot more resources per user, as each active user basically has their own dedicated cloud instance running the game. Scaling that up and giving that out for free isn't as trivial, even if money wasn't an issue. So I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison here. We'll see what the demo looks like once Stadia actually releases it, what we have so far is really more of an early access to test out the infrastructure.
  - meheleventyone 7y ago
    No wonder they’re having a hard time finding games then! A lower margin platform, with less customers and that requires significant engineering work is not at all attractive. It also shows a lack of understanding about the games industry.
jayd16 7y ago
They pay for original YouTube content and they paid for some exclusive VR games. Not sure why they're not doing that for Stadia but it has to be intentional. Maybe they don't think its really ready yet?
- drusepth 7y ago
  AFAIK, acquiring Typhoon Studios in December was their first public announcement of a first-party game studio. The exec in charge of Stadia said in an interview that she was planning on building out more [1]: "We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners." [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-24-google-is-making-a-spectrum-of-bets-on-stadia-content https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-24-google-is-...
  - lokedhs 7y ago
    The exec in charge of Stadia wouldn't be the one who makes the decision to drop it though. Her job is literally to keep the thing going until it's dropped.
nordsieck 7y ago
> Epic gets everyone who would buy that game on their platform (minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal) IMO, it's more about a game store's expected longevity. At this point I will probably never spend money on a game that's not on Steam (unless they go out of business) simply because: 1. I've gotten burned too many times by non-Steam stores that have later gone out of business. 2. Steam works really well. I suppose a few people might be outraged by exclusives. I think most people just want an experience at least as good as games-on-dvd.
- dmoy 7y ago
  Also important point 3: They've promised they'll let you download DRM free if they ever shut down steam. Yea yeah, promise from a corporation, but still.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    They can't keep that promise because publishers are free to implement third party DRM. You can't blame Valve for the shutdown but you can blame them for lying.
    - judge2020 7y ago
      Of course only Steam-based DRM (not that you need them to do it - removing steam DRM is fairly trivial and a shutdown would rapidly spread the tool for removing it).
    - uep 7y ago
      Steam does indicate on the store page when games have additional third party DRM.
- imtringued 7y ago
  I wonder if someone could create an Apache style foundation where companies can donate their game stores and game servers to it. It would also act as an archive for free games.
harikb 7y ago
This is the same company that released an amazing/life-changing email client called Google Wave and did not automatically make gmail content accessible in it. I got an “invite”, I invite my colleague who sits 10 ft from me, we logged in with the ability to connect only to each other. We looked at each other for a minute (irl) and closed the window.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nl 7y ago
  You couldn't actually read mail in Wave though, and it didn't use an email protocol.
jpalomaki 7y ago
If Google did that, it might raise some anti-trust questions. Using money from the search business to buy them a market share in another area might be seen as anti competitive move.
- vl 7y ago
  Yes, completely unlike Chrome browser, or Android OS, or gmail, or YouTube, or any other Google service.
  - jpalomaki 7y ago
    Android and Chrome are a bit different as they were started years ago and Google has been somewhat careful in not pushing then too hard (for example only allowing Chrome on YouTube). With Android and Google services they have already attracted some attention. Providing services like chat or webmail for free likely does not trigger any concerns. It has become accepted that this kind stuff does not cost anything to consumers so giving them free is not considered dumping. YouTube could be definitely a concern, but Google seems to be careful with it. For example their spending on YouTube exclusives feels quite modest.
- Talanes 7y ago
  Simply throwing money around to enter a new market is not anti-competitive. Throwing money at something unprofitable with the goal that growing user-share will drive future profits is a generally accepted business practice. Unless they come up with some truly outrageous predatory pricing scheme, or try and bundle it to some other Google product to push it, I don't think they'd run into any problems.
m463 7y ago
The annoying thing is that google dabbles in things. I suspect (but don't know) this might be related to the 20% time thing where employees can spend time on any project they want. But the thing is, google projects too far removed from the core advertising business don't seem to survive. Sometimes they develop an open source technology or pave the way for something, but other times they suck the air out of nascent niches.
ukyrgf 7y ago
Epic brute forced their way into this space and still have an inferior product. Your comment might be one of the few times I’ve ever seen someone speak halfway positively about them.
- polytely 7y ago
  Well I get the outrage and all that, but that's mainly hard-core enthusiasts who pay attention to the industry. I also was kinda pissed when Control and Outer Worlds went exclusive, but in the end my love for those developers won out against epic's business practices. I just think it's very impressive how they leveraged their sudden hoard of cash from Fortnite and their developer contacts via the unreal engine into a seemingly(?) successful steam competitor. I'm not really a business-oriented-guy but it seems to me like it is an amazingly clever and well executed move. I remember that when the orange box launched a lot of people (at least on the messageboards) where opposed to steam because it sucked and was basically DRM disguised as a store it's only because of the passing of time that it's now considered good. The orange box was in hindsight also a masterful move. I guess the lesson is, if you have content people REALLY want, you can get them onto your platform despite the outrage.
me551ah 7y ago
Epic and Google are vastly different systems. Epic can get away with paying much less because the effort required by game developers is minimal. But for a game to be featured on Google, the game developers have to port it to Vulkan and Linux. This only makes sense for game developers if the cost of development/porting is going to be less than the money that they would make from the google stadia store. And given the less number of people who are using Stadia, game developers are shying away. And users are shying away because of lack of games. It's a classic chicken and egg problem which is unique to Google stadia. Geforce Now supports Windows games and xCloud uses microsoft's xbox library.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Not only that, it appears to be bare bones Linux development experience without some nice games related SDK. http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-games-for-the-cloud/ http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-gam...
- leadingthenet 7y ago
  To be honest, that actually makes me want to use Stadia more, not less.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Just like Android and ChromeOS games, that doesn't mean GNU/Linux will get any of it.
  - buttersbrian 7y ago
    Agreed. Having more games built on linux and vulkan seems lik ea nice benefit.
hkmurakami 7y ago
It's not just Epic. (1) was part of MSFT's playbook with the original XBOX.
- polytely 7y ago
  I just remembered that steam made a similar move with the orange box (half-life 2, HL2:episode 1, HL2:episode 2, portal & Team Fortress 2 for 60 bucks, but you have to install steam to play) also amazingly clever. Still the best gaming deal I've ever made if you look at price v quality of games.
p1necone 7y ago
> minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal I wouldn't be outraged by a "we'll help fund development in exchange for exclusivity" deal, but I am outraged (equally at Epic and the developer of the game) for making exclusivity deals after the game has been made, and seemingly in a lot of cases making it specifically a "you can release anywhere but steam" deal rather than an actual exclusivity deal. I also wouldn't be outraged if it was just devs choosing not to release on steam because they get a better cut from actual game sales than they do on steam. I'm just outraged by Epic throwing fistfuls of money around to convince devs that have already finished their game not to release on Steam specifically.
ksec 7y ago
>Compare it to the Gmail or Chrome Chrome was built out of the frustration of Firefox didn't get any faster. And at the time they have a real need to compete with IE which was holding back the web, their search engine, and hence their ad money. Gmail was built by an employee as their 20% project, got traction within the company, improved the Spam filter for their own use before it was open to public ( or invite ). Both of them were born from product mentality, where they see a problem, have real frustration and have vision of where it should be. It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea rather than real needs. ( That goes the same with Apple Arcade, although one can argue it was designed for kids ) And whether there is a market for it remains to be seen. Despite all the criticism Apple gets, and all the flaws it has lately, they are still very much a product mentality company, and possibly the only one out of the big corps. Google on the other hand, is more like a one off success. I cant even remember a Google product on top of my head that are not from acquisition or 20% project and was born out of a product mentality. Edit: Ok there is one, Google Map.
- LatteLazy 7y ago
  I thought chrome and Gmail (and android and maps) were built specifically to gather user data. That's why they launched Gmail for free literally months after Hotmail (outlook) started moving towards a charging model. The big plan for Google has been user data since at least 2000. They realised that's what would make them "more than a search engine". And they were right, and ahead of the curb by at least a decade. Im not sure how or whether other services Stadia fit in to that. Maybe the fact they don't is why they get cancelled so easily? But I don't think it's accurate to say Chrome and Gmail were just standalone projects solving single issues, they were part of a wider strategy that has paid off.
- 01100011 7y ago
  > It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea I'm guessing the cloud gaming stuff is planned as a way to generate revenue with spare GPU capacity in their server farms. They're already spending a ton on GPUs and network bandwidth, so why not sprinkle some kubernetes on top and run games on it when it's not running training datasets?
Yhippa 7y ago
The only interaction I have with the Epic Store is hoarding free games "just in case". I see no reason to buy a game there unless it's cheaper than the other stores.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
> 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. The whole thing felt like a rushed impulse idea out of Hooli (HBO's Silicon Valley) that didnt get researched further before jumping in. They could of made a decent Steam competitor. In fact they would of known that Nvidia has dwelled into this space and could of hired them for consulting on the matter. It had ideas that sounded next gen and worthwhile such as playing from where a YouTube video leaves off at.
rswail 7y ago
Sounds like the Uber model with an actual ability to scale.
fergie 7y ago
I feel like Google is not really competing to make killer products anymore. Its more like managers in Google are competing to move up in the organization, and whether or not products and services actually succeed is fairly incidental.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I wouldn't call EPICs store a success story. Many enthusiast gamers were repelled by exclusivity of titles that aren't from the developer/publisher itself. A good reason in my opinion, because this is pretty consumer hostile, you just get baited with some free stuff to sign up. They had the capital and wanted to buy market share. Sad to see really, since EPIC certainly has one of the best game engines to develop against. But in my circle, nobody jumped on that train. They will have a certain demographic though. Overall I still doubt they could have solved the problem with money.
pier25 7y ago
Google did give a bag of money to some developers at least. For example to Robot Entertainment (devs of Orcs Must Die).

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.

wolco 7y ago
Google's easy to sunset policy makes them an easy target in any industry that isn't ripe for change or that provide any setbacks. If the going gets tough Google exits. Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it.
- kubanczyk 7y ago
  > Google's size gives them a big advantage that they never figure out how to use it. Good for us consumers, isn't it?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Like any tool it depends on how they use it. Leaving the abusive fiefdoms of others in place doesn't help consumers. It is a matter of nuance essentially. Google and all competitors may do things good, bad, or both for consumers and their size doesn't have much to do with it.
BurningFrog 7y ago
I think/suspect/speculate that since Google has search/ads billions raining from the sky, nothing else it does really matters to them. So all side projects are done kinda like a hobby.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Makes sense to me. And I think another factor is that with ads, users are the product, not the customer. If customer service is the foundation of a business, it drives a certain attention on the individual experience of every user, and there's a real incentive to be a customer's #1 choice by the customer's own criteria. But Google's relationship with the userbase is statistical, not individual. As along as enough people look at their ads, that's good enough. They were never intending to please everybody, and so don't really have to pay attention to the details. So it's entirely unsurprising to me that they're failing at gaming, which is very much about delivering amazing individual experiences to one's chosen niche. Ditto their failure in social networking. In both cases they built something that sounded good on paper and could be adequate for some people, but never succeeded in being truly great for enough people to capture an audience.

jsnell 7y ago

You couldn't actually just use Gmail when it launched. You needed to get an invite for a fairly long time, which made it a little bit of status symbol. Google have tried repeating the same play a bunch of times since then, and it has always failed. For a while I did wonder whether they were trying it also with Stadia. The free "no subscription needed, just buy the game" tier of Stadia is the thing that should in principle be distinguishing them from the competition, and is actually kind of compelling from a consumer perspective. While the Stadia Pro just makes no sense as a product; it's targeting the people who least want this service and who are the most likely to already have huge game libraries on other platforms. How can it be that four months after launch, the tier that people might actuall want is still nowhere to be seen?

capableweb 7y ago
> The free "no subscription needed, just buy the game" tier of Stadia is the thing that should in principle be distinguishing them from the competition, and is actually kind of compelling from a consumer perspective Isn't that how every other game store works as well? Unreal's, Steam, Microsofts and others all work with that same idea. They also have additional subscription services, but by default it's just "no subscription needed, just buy the game"
- jsnell 7y ago
  Yes. But for all of those you need to buy hardware that can actually play the games. (A few hundred for a console, a thousand for a PC). The promise of game streaming is that you can play AAA games on the low-powered laptop or phone that you already have. There's a few possible business models for streaming. E.g. with PS Now you have to pay a subscription, you get access to a games library, and can only play the games that are part of the library. (Not other PS4 games that you own). Or GeForce Now which in practice requires a subscription (the free tier is only 1 hour at a time) and allows you to play a limited set of games as long as you own them on the right platform (e.g. Steam). Xcloud seems quite likely to just be sold bundled together as part of another subscription. So the free tier of Stadia should have been interesting due to not requiring a large up-front investment, and not requiring an ongoing subscription. Which at least at this moment is unique. Or rather, would be unique, because 9 months after the announcement it still has not launched.

scarface74 7y ago

Is it really baffling that Google’s product marketing/business people have yet another failing initiative? Have they ever shone any ability to profitably diversify outside of advertising?

armitron 7y ago
No: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- arkitaip 7y ago
  No matter what happens with Stadia and its market, Google simply cannot afford to kill the projects in the next few years. It would be a huge blow to their already tarnished reputation wrt keeping services alive. They need to prove to the world that they can long-term commit to major challenges even if they are suffering in the short-term.
  - BigBubbleButt 7y ago
    Judging by Alphabet's stock price and their years of shuttering services at the cost of their reputation, it seems shareholders disagree with you.
    - fmajid 7y ago
      They're not mutually exclusive. Google's search and advertising cash cow is so profitable, the company grows despite its boneheaded mistakes in so many other areas. If you read the article, every single developer mentioned they have no trust in Google not canning the service, and who can blame them? At this point, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
      - BigBubbleButt 7y ago
        > every single developer mentioned they have no trust in Google not canning the service I never said developers have faith in Google. I said shareholders do. My point is Google doesn't really care what developers think.

anon4242 7y ago

> 2. Appeal to the customers by giving away free games every week This is actually bigger than just appeal. I now have almost as many games on Epic as on Steam. This means that I start the Epic Games Launcher almost every day to see if there's something I want to play. In fact I now run the Epic Games Launcher more frequently than Steam. This exposes me to their store and I have started buying games from them. Before Epic started their free give away, the launcher was in the same category as the other non-Steam launchers I have, like Uplay or Origin. Something I virtually never start except when to play a game that requires them (and even then I'm reluctant). This means I'm never exposed to their stores and never entertain the idea of buying a game from them through those stores - out of sight, out of mind.

Talanes 7y ago
Yeah, the reluctance to open a client you don't use very often cannot be overstated. If you haven't played anything on a client for a year, then just opening it is likely to set off updates to the client, possibly updates to the game library, just a whole flurry of potential activity you might have to sit through.If you aren't fully committed to playing whatever is in there, it's very easy to just decide on something else.

SmirkingRevenge 7y ago

Epic's entry into the game storefront business has been a drama filled shit-show. It has not been well received by very vocal swaths of the gaming community. In fact, their strategy of buying out developers for exclusivity rights is one of the reasons they've drawn so much ire. See the controversy where Borderlands games were getting review bombed on Steam, because Epic secured exclusivity rights for Borderlands 3. https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-steam-over-epic-1833818454 https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-s... In the gaming world, you're basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. If Google had aggressively gone for exclusives, they'd be getting the same backlash that Epic has gotten/is getting. But since they didn't they might be getting an equal but opposite sort of backlash now.

prostheticvamp 7y ago
The epic approach gets a lot of hate from a vocal minority. Everyone else has had multiple storefronts for a while, and having -one- more is borderline meaningless. As long as they don’t jack up the price, how many people give a shit which executable they have to click on to launch a game?
- imtringued 7y ago
  The Epic Store isn't supported on Linux. When they turn existing games on Steam into Epic store exclusives I can't play the games I have purchased.
  - prostheticvamp 7y ago
    > vocal minority > Linux gamer I fail to see the contradiction. Per Steam’s October 2019 user survey, all Linux distros together total 0.43% of their users. I am using the notably pro-Linux Steam as a benchmark for how many gamers are affected by this.
    - deleted 7y ago
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Lazare 7y ago

Agreed, 100%. In retrospect, the Epic approach is obviously the right way to do it. It was pretty obvious before too, but I think most people would have discounted the "build a platform by throwing an enormous pile of money at it" approach as being impractical (if for no other reason than most people who want to build gaming platforms don't have enormous piles of money lying around). Epic showed that, no, actually, you can just go ahead and do the obvious thing. :) And I find it odd because first, Epic did all this before Stadia's dissapointing launch, so it's not like Google execs can claim they just literally had no idea you could build a gaming platform this way, and second, because (like Epic) Google can clearly afford it. It almost feels like Google doesn't want Stadia to succeed...? Or is this just a culture clash from Google's experience with ads, search, video, and webmail, where success seemingly just fell into their lap, and they're struggling to imagine needing to market a service? (I find the latter suggestion implausible since, actually, quite a lot of marketing went into making those a success, but man, I don't have a lot of other ideas.)

ehsankia 7y ago
To be fair, Epic's approach doesn't require many resources other than just money. Hell, for the longest time their store literally did not have even a "search" function, and I'm pretty sure it still doesn't even have a shopping cart. Software development takes time, but they mostly bypassed that and went straight into giving out free games. The games themselves already exist for PC, Epic didn't need to do much there. The case of Stadia is wildly different, because it requires a lot more engineering, both from Google and the developers. They also need a lot more resources per user, as each active user basically has their own dedicated cloud instance running the game. Scaling that up and giving that out for free isn't as trivial, even if money wasn't an issue. So I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison here. We'll see what the demo looks like once Stadia actually releases it, what we have so far is really more of an early access to test out the infrastructure.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  No wonder they’re having a hard time finding games then! A lower margin platform, with less customers and that requires significant engineering work is not at all attractive. It also shows a lack of understanding about the games industry.

jayd16 7y ago

They pay for original YouTube content and they paid for some exclusive VR games. Not sure why they're not doing that for Stadia but it has to be intentional. Maybe they don't think its really ready yet?

drusepth 7y ago
AFAIK, acquiring Typhoon Studios in December was their first public announcement of a first-party game studio. The exec in charge of Stadia said in an interview that she was planning on building out more [1]: "We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners." [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-24-google-is-making-a-spectrum-of-bets-on-stadia-content https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-24-google-is-...
- lokedhs 7y ago
  The exec in charge of Stadia wouldn't be the one who makes the decision to drop it though. Her job is literally to keep the thing going until it's dropped.

nordsieck 7y ago

> Epic gets everyone who would buy that game on their platform (minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal) IMO, it's more about a game store's expected longevity. At this point I will probably never spend money on a game that's not on Steam (unless they go out of business) simply because: 1. I've gotten burned too many times by non-Steam stores that have later gone out of business. 2. Steam works really well. I suppose a few people might be outraged by exclusives. I think most people just want an experience at least as good as games-on-dvd.

dmoy 7y ago
Also important point 3: They've promised they'll let you download DRM free if they ever shut down steam. Yea yeah, promise from a corporation, but still.
- imtringued 7y ago
  They can't keep that promise because publishers are free to implement third party DRM. You can't blame Valve for the shutdown but you can blame them for lying.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Of course only Steam-based DRM (not that you need them to do it - removing steam DRM is fairly trivial and a shutdown would rapidly spread the tool for removing it).
  - uep 7y ago
    Steam does indicate on the store page when games have additional third party DRM.
imtringued 7y ago
I wonder if someone could create an Apache style foundation where companies can donate their game stores and game servers to it. It would also act as an archive for free games.

harikb 7y ago

This is the same company that released an amazing/life-changing email client called Google Wave and did not automatically make gmail content accessible in it. I got an “invite”, I invite my colleague who sits 10 ft from me, we logged in with the ability to connect only to each other. We looked at each other for a minute (irl) and closed the window.

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nl 7y ago
You couldn't actually read mail in Wave though, and it didn't use an email protocol.

jpalomaki 7y ago

If Google did that, it might raise some anti-trust questions. Using money from the search business to buy them a market share in another area might be seen as anti competitive move.

vl 7y ago
Yes, completely unlike Chrome browser, or Android OS, or gmail, or YouTube, or any other Google service.
- jpalomaki 7y ago
  Android and Chrome are a bit different as they were started years ago and Google has been somewhat careful in not pushing then too hard (for example only allowing Chrome on YouTube). With Android and Google services they have already attracted some attention. Providing services like chat or webmail for free likely does not trigger any concerns. It has become accepted that this kind stuff does not cost anything to consumers so giving them free is not considered dumping. YouTube could be definitely a concern, but Google seems to be careful with it. For example their spending on YouTube exclusives feels quite modest.
Talanes 7y ago
Simply throwing money around to enter a new market is not anti-competitive. Throwing money at something unprofitable with the goal that growing user-share will drive future profits is a generally accepted business practice. Unless they come up with some truly outrageous predatory pricing scheme, or try and bundle it to some other Google product to push it, I don't think they'd run into any problems.

m463 7y ago

The annoying thing is that google dabbles in things. I suspect (but don't know) this might be related to the 20% time thing where employees can spend time on any project they want. But the thing is, google projects too far removed from the core advertising business don't seem to survive. Sometimes they develop an open source technology or pave the way for something, but other times they suck the air out of nascent niches.

ukyrgf 7y ago

Epic brute forced their way into this space and still have an inferior product. Your comment might be one of the few times I’ve ever seen someone speak halfway positively about them.

polytely 7y ago
Well I get the outrage and all that, but that's mainly hard-core enthusiasts who pay attention to the industry. I also was kinda pissed when Control and Outer Worlds went exclusive, but in the end my love for those developers won out against epic's business practices. I just think it's very impressive how they leveraged their sudden hoard of cash from Fortnite and their developer contacts via the unreal engine into a seemingly(?) successful steam competitor. I'm not really a business-oriented-guy but it seems to me like it is an amazingly clever and well executed move. I remember that when the orange box launched a lot of people (at least on the messageboards) where opposed to steam because it sucked and was basically DRM disguised as a store it's only because of the passing of time that it's now considered good. The orange box was in hindsight also a masterful move. I guess the lesson is, if you have content people REALLY want, you can get them onto your platform despite the outrage.

me551ah 7y ago

Epic and Google are vastly different systems. Epic can get away with paying much less because the effort required by game developers is minimal. But for a game to be featured on Google, the game developers have to port it to Vulkan and Linux. This only makes sense for game developers if the cost of development/porting is going to be less than the money that they would make from the google stadia store. And given the less number of people who are using Stadia, game developers are shying away. And users are shying away because of lack of games. It's a classic chicken and egg problem which is unique to Google stadia. Geforce Now supports Windows games and xCloud uses microsoft's xbox library.

pjmlp 7y ago
Not only that, it appears to be bare bones Linux development experience without some nice games related SDK. http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-games-for-the-cloud/ http://thedebuglog.com/2019/11/06/episode-102-developing-gam...
leadingthenet 7y ago
To be honest, that actually makes me want to use Stadia more, not less.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Just like Android and ChromeOS games, that doesn't mean GNU/Linux will get any of it.
- buttersbrian 7y ago
  Agreed. Having more games built on linux and vulkan seems lik ea nice benefit.

hkmurakami 7y ago

It's not just Epic. (1) was part of MSFT's playbook with the original XBOX.

polytely 7y ago
I just remembered that steam made a similar move with the orange box (half-life 2, HL2:episode 1, HL2:episode 2, portal & Team Fortress 2 for 60 bucks, but you have to install steam to play) also amazingly clever. Still the best gaming deal I've ever made if you look at price v quality of games.

p1necone 7y ago

> minus the people who are outraged by the exclusivity deal I wouldn't be outraged by a "we'll help fund development in exchange for exclusivity" deal, but I am outraged (equally at Epic and the developer of the game) for making exclusivity deals after the game has been made, and seemingly in a lot of cases making it specifically a "you can release anywhere but steam" deal rather than an actual exclusivity deal. I also wouldn't be outraged if it was just devs choosing not to release on steam because they get a better cut from actual game sales than they do on steam. I'm just outraged by Epic throwing fistfuls of money around to convince devs that have already finished their game not to release on Steam specifically.

ksec 7y ago

>Compare it to the Gmail or Chrome Chrome was built out of the frustration of Firefox didn't get any faster. And at the time they have a real need to compete with IE which was holding back the web, their search engine, and hence their ad money. Gmail was built by an employee as their 20% project, got traction within the company, improved the Spam filter for their own use before it was open to public ( or invite ). Both of them were born from product mentality, where they see a problem, have real frustration and have vision of where it should be. It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea rather than real needs. ( That goes the same with Apple Arcade, although one can argue it was designed for kids ) And whether there is a market for it remains to be seen. Despite all the criticism Apple gets, and all the flaws it has lately, they are still very much a product mentality company, and possibly the only one out of the big corps. Google on the other hand, is more like a one off success. I cant even remember a Google product on top of my head that are not from acquisition or 20% project and was born out of a product mentality. Edit: Ok there is one, Google Map.

LatteLazy 7y ago
I thought chrome and Gmail (and android and maps) were built specifically to gather user data. That's why they launched Gmail for free literally months after Hotmail (outlook) started moving towards a charging model. The big plan for Google has been user data since at least 2000. They realised that's what would make them "more than a search engine". And they were right, and ahead of the curb by at least a decade. Im not sure how or whether other services Stadia fit in to that. Maybe the fact they don't is why they get cancelled so easily? But I don't think it's accurate to say Chrome and Gmail were just standalone projects solving single issues, they were part of a wider strategy that has paid off.
01100011 7y ago
> It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea I'm guessing the cloud gaming stuff is planned as a way to generate revenue with spare GPU capacity in their server farms. They're already spending a ton on GPUs and network bandwidth, so why not sprinkle some kubernetes on top and run games on it when it's not running training datasets?

Yhippa 7y ago

The only interaction I have with the Epic Store is hoarding free games "just in case". I see no reason to buy a game there unless it's cheaper than the other stores.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

> 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. The whole thing felt like a rushed impulse idea out of Hooli (HBO's Silicon Valley) that didnt get researched further before jumping in. They could of made a decent Steam competitor. In fact they would of known that Nvidia has dwelled into this space and could of hired them for consulting on the matter. It had ideas that sounded next gen and worthwhile such as playing from where a YouTube video leaves off at.

rswail 7y ago

Sounds like the Uber model with an actual ability to scale.

fergie 7y ago

I feel like Google is not really competing to make killer products anymore. Its more like managers in Google are competing to move up in the organization, and whether or not products and services actually succeed is fairly incidental.

raxxorrax 7y ago

I wouldn't call EPICs store a success story. Many enthusiast gamers were repelled by exclusivity of titles that aren't from the developer/publisher itself. A good reason in my opinion, because this is pretty consumer hostile, you just get baited with some free stuff to sign up. They had the capital and wanted to buy market share. Sad to see really, since EPIC certainly has one of the best game engines to develop against. But in my circle, nobody jumped on that train. They will have a certain demographic though. Overall I still doubt they could have solved the problem with money.

pier25 7y ago

Google did give a bag of money to some developers at least. For example to Robot Entertainment (devs of Orcs Must Die).