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I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on

I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on the list that you can play. None of the games are ones that I care about. It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that feel half-baked (Hitman crashes on first boot and complains about a lack of a controller) and a bunch of indie games that feel like a sad attempt to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a middling title (the Hello Neighbor hide and seek game) and titles released half a decade ago (superhot). Minecraft is on every console imaginable—except Stadia. What about Roblox? Fortnite? Factorio? Among Us? Any Sid Meier's game? Any Paradox game? Every genre of game that I actually put time into is completely absent on their platform. Every game from the top 10 (perhaps 20 or more?) on Twitch right now is absent on Stadia. I don't know what they're doing, but whatever it is, it's wrong.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today. The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way to draw a bunch of people to Stadia outside of that... and if Google is unable to make the business justification to develop Stadia exclusives, neither will anyone else.
- bastawhiz 6y ago
  It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Right... I thought as an idea, it was perfectly sound. The types of technology required to make cloud gaming work seemed to play to Google's strengths. They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
    - hmage 6y ago
      Google had to solve same problem any new traditional gaming console has to solve -- get publishers interested in creating for that console. Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Architecturally, are Google's Stadia servers substantially different from a standard PC?
        bentcorner 6y ago
        AFAIK they run Linux, so porting games over isn't necessarily "free"
        TinkersW 6y ago
        They run linux and use Vulkan for rendering, so this is a potentially large port burden to force on devs.
        Qwertious 6y ago
        Potentially, but there's only one distro and only one set of hardware, so there's waaaay less QA than an actual Linux port. Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.
        craftinator 6y ago
        Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    > It's only been a failure because of the lack of games Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.
    - serial_dev 6y ago
      I get what you are saying, games are essential if you are building a gaming platform But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.
      - mmmBacon 6y ago
        I would argue that the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform since there are no games that people want to play. I guess given the very limited functionality it’s technically not a failure. But the whole point is to have games people want to play. Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success): Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to third-party game developers. Recently released consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered underwhelming sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers.[22] With initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment,[41] as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone, the company secured the launch of influential new games such as Ridge Racer and Mortal Kombat 3.[22][5]
        jonas21 6y ago
        > the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.
        awill 6y ago
        Succeeding here might require both. Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    > tech (at least to me) feels fine [...] it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken ... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.
    - romwell 6y ago
      Careful, this much sarcasm might break the website
  - notyourday 6y ago
    > It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. T ... which makes shutting down gaming studio part of it even weirder.
  - mey 6y ago
    Compare to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.
    - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
      Geforce Now library kinda sucks to me, not all that much better than Stadia but that's my opinion. Stadia has a few names (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) that GFN doesn't and vice versa.
      - lagadu 6y ago
        GFN offers something unique: you can connect to existing stores like steam and play many of the games you already own there over GFN. This is a big deal.
      - Jochim 6y ago
        It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction. I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
        orangeoxidation 6y ago
        > I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.
        Mindwipe 6y ago
        Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.
      - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
- hackcasual 6y ago
  Phil Harrison oversaw the PS3, XBox One, and Google Stadia. He's like a reverse oracle
- lumost 6y ago
  This is the really confusing part to me. For most of the major metro's of the world cloud gaming is completely feasible on today's internet. Playing on servers in NYC from Boston works flawlessly as a casual gamer, and really opened up the possibility for me to enjoy AAA titles. Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences which really flex the hardware - similarly the potential for multi-TB fast storage and 10 Gb connectivity could have enabled dramatically larger game worlds than we see today. But it's absolutely a go big or don't bother problem.
  - apozem 6y ago
    The dream of cloud gaming, for me, is everyone gets an amazing gaming PC. I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.
    - rolph 6y ago
      if you can allow users to load the code out of the cloud and or the user swarm ; onto thier machine and then dissconnect from the cloud, the potential efficiency is even more staggering.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        Huh? That brings us right back to “everyone needs a hefty at-home computing device that goes underutilized most of the time”?
        omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
        Maybe they're referring to using individual computers as part of the cluster of boxes providing streaming gaming, like distributed computing projects.
        6y ago
- ramphastidae 6y ago
  Serious question: does Google operate a single profitable business besides AdWords?
  - mckeed 6y ago
    Android, G-Suite, even YouTube (though that is also advertising)
    - ramphastidae 6y ago
      Huh? Android is OSS. YouTube has never posted a profit.
      - asiachick 6y ago
        It hasn't? https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
        jsploit 6y ago
        Perhaps I missed it, but that only seems to mention YouTube revenue - not profit.
        asiachick 6y ago
        Sure, so what evidence is there that youtube does not make a profit?
        ramphastidae 6y ago
        Google is highly incentivized to show profitability to shareholders. It will drive stock value. If they are purposefully choosing to hide YT financials in quarterly statements, it’s probably not because they are good. Just search for YouTube and profitability on Google. It’s a loss leader.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  If it helps, apparently the exec in charge of Stadia has left. Whether this is a "you're fired, but you can resign if you want" or a "ship's going down, why would I ride it to the bottom" situation, I don't know.
  - raymond_goo 6y ago
    Yeah, Jade Raymond.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      She ran one of the studios and wasn't in charge of Stadia as a whole.
      - pavel_lishin 6y ago
        Ah, damn, I'm not a good reader.
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  It's not confusing when you realize the owner of this product has his badge of releasing a "major google product" and probably a bonus. Who cares if it's successful or not, google certainly doesn't seem to care.
  - lmm 6y ago
    It gets Google's name in the tech news for something that isn't advertising/invasion of privacy. It's a success for Google-the-business even if it "fails".
- conk 6y ago
  The value is great for casual gamers, no expensive hardware, no updates to install, just sit down and play a game. The only downside I’ve experienced is the limited catalogue of games.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  It might have gained more traction if it simply said "Hey, this is kind of like our usual compute engine, but it's gaming-optimized and you can access it through Chrome for low-latency streaming" And let people install whatever they want on it. There's probably a decent market for people with low/mid range hardware that would like to stream the newest games an ultimate settings. Others who'd just like a portable game library not tied to a specific PC, and a 3rd group that might use it through a chrome cast like a game console. I'm not sure how large of a market these groups would have been, but certainly much larger than whoever Stadia appeals to.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    Isn't that a lot closer to Geforce Now?
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Kind of, but Geforce Now made the mistake of trying to create something that looked kind of like a storefront that appeared to auto populate your game library from Steam, which pissed off publishers who thought GeForce was basically making money off of their games without giving them a cut. It's probably more of a semantic difference, but saying "Here's a VM, do what you want with it" is different than saying "Create a game library with us and we'll stream publisher X's games to you. We'll even put them in your GeForce library if you own it somewhere else!" So publishers got mad and many of the biggest pulled the most popular games. Had GeForce just said "Here's a gaming optimized VM" and let users do whatever they want, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, an very early version of GeForce now did exactly that, complete with a windows desktop.
      - raymond_goo 6y ago
        check out shadow.tech then...
- baby 6y ago
  How is it a bad idea? I want to play PC games but I don’t want to buy a desktop PC just for that. I’m currently travelling but I’m planning to get it once I settle. I had playstation Now before that and it was pretty dope.
  - dunreith 6y ago
    It's honestly not a bad idea, just a bad implementation. I use shadow.tech to achieve this and they do it well - instead of giving you game-specific VMs (or whatever Stadia is), they just give you a gaming VM with Windows and you install your own Steam / Epic / GOG / XBLive whatever on it.
- toephu2 6y ago
  > how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Have you ever worked for a tech company? They don't just fire PMs/leads because their project failed. We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private). It's the 10% that succeed that the company is going after (but you don't know that until after the fact of course). The PMs that drove this will simply move on to the next project and keep trying until they get a hit.
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    There is being human and there is being incompetent. Stadia did not fail because of bad luck. There were lots of obviously bad decisions made that went into this. If what you’re saying is true, then the decision makers moving on to other projects are just burning Google’s money without repercussions. Oh well, no one actually cares I guess.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - simonh 6y ago
    The problem with that is that it creates a culture of complacency. If failure is acceptable and even expected to be the norm, then don't be surprised when lots of projects you thought would be sure-fire hits or are executed successfully by competitors end up failing.
    - arkitaip 6y ago
      So how do you prevent mediocricy because every employee is afraid of failing because of the draconian consequences?
      - simonh 6y ago
        Why are you assuming the consequences should be draconian? There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  When I first heard of Google developing Stadia I thought it's for targeting Asia where mobile gaming is huge and since for majority of users from there smartphones are their first computer; Any 'AAA' game on mobile would be a new experience; But my assumption was proven wrong after seeing Stadia getting released only in North America & Europe where gamers are particular about their games.
  - ridaj 6y ago
    Arguably, Google already had a strong and successful platform in mobile gaming (Google Play Games). It's even present on TV these days, with game controllers too (Google TV Chromecast takes bluetooth game controllers with which one can play a range of made-for-TV-screen Android games). I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch for which they were obviously unable to get enough content commitments (not even talking about exclusives here, there just isn't even enough non-exclusive content).
    - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      Perhaps because to avoid confusion between mobile games & their PC counterparts; Say 'Call of Duty Mobile' vs 'Call of Duty' if both were on Google Play Games it would be very confusing and of course licensing headache.
    - aylmao 6y ago
      > I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch... I'd assume company politics. Steve Jobs described Apple like a "big startup" [1]— it had 0 committees, and instead had one person in charge of each of the things the company needed to do/care about. They all met weekly and talked about everything they were doing, and it yielded great collaboration. That's why everything "makes sense" and grows from the divisions/apps you'd expect. Google sounds more like Microsoft before it, with different teams doing work that might overlap and compete against one another. On top of that, afaik flashy "new" products play better for promotions than building upon something that exists. Hence Play Music and Youtube Music, Android and Chrome OS, Google Play and Stadia, etc. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5b4nn3ZEVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5b4nn3ZEVU
- melomal 6y ago
  Because of this man! https://x.company/team/astroteller/ https://x.company/team/astroteller/
- seanhunter 6y ago
  > Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Nothing succeeds like failure.. In my experience at multiple companies in tech and elsewhere, it is (sadly) frequently the case that the people responsible for the biggest failures are the ones who have the fastest career progression. It's a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome where they are holding their bosses captive because as they fail the stakes for the management get higher and higher and so they get more and more bought in. There's one person in particular that I remember from my time at Goldman. Lovely guy but every single thing he was involved in was an unmitigated disaster. Sure enough he failed his way to becoming an MD in record time.
- fsloth 6y ago
  "how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?" Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. Presuming charitably everyone is doing their best etc. What happens for companies where no-one dares to start new projects? Yeah. So what is the correct number of new projects per risk? Everyone would like to choose only those that succeed. But the whole point of new development is that the information and experience to build such a product does not exist and needs to be learned as the project progresses. Should companies take too many new risky projects or too few? If the reward for successful project is high, then it's obvious a company should take a few too many risky projects, rather than too few (and risk cancelling some hit in it's infancy). In aggregate if every new project fails and business is starting to look like Kodak or Xerox then that's bad. Failing one new project is just a large company trying to innovate and cutting it's losses when a project is not a success.
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    > Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. If it's something completely new, then yeah, celebrate failure, because at least you learned something. But game streaming had been tried and failed spectacularly before (remember OnLive?). Stadia didn't add anything new except "this time it's Google, they know their network stuff". Turns out that isn't enough if the business model makes no sense.
    - hiptobecubic 6y ago
      Failures being celebrated is about being willing to try out a new thing to see if it's viable. You don't celebrate failure and you certainly don't celebrate causing failure by having such a poor strategy that random cartoonists predicted your failure mode on launch day and then riding it into the ground.
- BoDlulu 6y ago
  > The value for gamers is debateable at best I don't have a PC or a console and I can play Cyberpunk - in fact the Stadia controller+Chromecast came free with it (because of a promotion).
  - hiptobecubic 6y ago
    If you didn't previously have a pc or a console, I think most would say you were not a "gamer." Stadia has huge value to new gamers, but it hasn't done a good job appealing to them.
- darepublic 6y ago
  I think it was a worthwhile project. The shame is abandoning it imo
- stryker7001 6y ago
  My sense is that they want to sell compute cycles to big gaming companies vs trying to nickel and dime consumers. Smart PMs figure out the value and pivot rapidly.
  - hiptobecubic 6y ago
    Smart PMs figure out value and pivot. Google uses trial and error.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  > Everyone knew this was a bad idea No. It was an excellent idea, with very bad execution on the supply side.
cryptoquick 6y ago
Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?
- adamc 6y ago
  I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.
  - ortusdux 6y ago
    I thought the same about reader.
    - Laforet 6y ago
      I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that. Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
      - acdha 6y ago
        > I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market. Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
_zamorano_ 6y ago
I don't think they had the slightest chance of Valve partering with them
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Why not? Valve is not in the hardware business.
  - _zamorano_ 6y ago
    A successfull private company, with the best video game catalog, already king in PC gaming... I don't see much for them to gain and plenty to lose if they let google build a big customer base.
    - asddubs 6y ago
      yeah, valve has its own ecosystem it wants to lock people into
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      Valve has the games and tried to build their own console and failed. Google has now effectively built their own console and doesn't have the games.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        Valve only came up with Steam Boxes (and it's whole Linux push for that matter) as a defensive response to the Windows Store and the, at the time very real-seeming, possibility that Windows would become an entirely walled-garden they'd be beholden to. They put much effort into Steam Boxes, they were just a PC with Valve's Ubuntu derivative distro. Fortunately for Linux users though they did continue to put a lot of effort into making Linux gaming actually viable, thus insuring that they'll always have an out if Microsoft goes stupid.
  - kenhwang 6y ago
    Valve has the Stream Link and VIVE. Steam Link is pretty much Stadia using your computer instead of the cloud. They're very much in the hardware business.
enos_feedler 6y ago
I think Stadia makes more sense when you frame it against game consoles. The easiest users to steal from the console market are the ones that buy only 1 or 2 console games which are traditionally reserved for those consoles (NFL Madden is the latest promotion and a good example). For these users, there is massive experience shift going from buying a ps4, ps online, just to play the same game all the time. I am one of these users. If they can find these 1 or 2 games that activate each segment of users, they will take cohorts from the console market. This won't get the entire console gamer market, but it's a great place to start.
- m00x 6y ago
  It's actually way cheaper to buy the console if you're just gonna play one game. You get a PS5 for $550 these days, so that's $330 total for a AAA game ($630). Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200). Even cheaper if you go for the PS4.
  - enos_feedler 6y ago
    You aren't including the network service to play games online. Factor in another $60 * 10 years. That nearly squares things up. Then you have to think about intangibles. Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. The $630 you paid for that ps5 and AAA game is frozen in time. You've bought no future value. You can also play anywhere without having to carry around a 4.5kg box that computes math.
    - mehlmao 6y ago
      >Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. Has Stadia improved since launch? The PS5 and Xbox Series X are both more powerful than Stadia instances, not to mention modern PCs. Has Google announced any timeframe for powering up their instances to match? Will I have to pay more to access instances with the power of next-generation consoles? Will those be available for all the games I purchased, or on a title-by-title basis?
    - yyyk 6y ago
ksec 6y ago
> Google's lack of planning on this Seriously, When did Google ever planned anything? It is only in recent years, they fall out of the Media's flavour did people start to look at them rationally.
jeremyjh 6y ago
I like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental model like Stadia's).
- pkage 6y ago
  I signed up for GeForce Now, and truly the killer feature is bringing the games you already own. On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription, and Luna (Amazon's offering) is similar in that you can sign up for game "channels" (iirc). With GeForce Now, you can just play the stuff you already own without sinking money into games that play on a platform that might not even exist in a few years. I bet in another year or so Stadia will shut down and all those games that you paid for on the platform will disappear.
  - enos_feedler 6y ago
    Stadia supports the UBISoft+ channel just as Luna does. It's in beta now.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Nvidia and Luna both took the shortcut of just running a windows VM and running the game as is. Stadia is the only one that actually requires games to integrate with its API, similar to Steam with Steamworks, and this allows them to provide a far more integrated experience, with friend lists, friend invites, voice chat, achievements, and so on. None of the other services can provide that. Well GFN does but that's just running Steam. In the short term it will slow down adoption, but in the long term the experience is night and day, imo. Being thrown into a VM instance where you have to login to Steam is nothing like pressing one button and being thrown right into a game. Also, yes if you already have a huge Steam collection, the thought of buying games on a different store is not great, but I don't think Stadia is aimed at people with a PC gaming rig and 1000 steam games, it's aimed at people who don't have a gaming PC or console, and want to play the latest EA Sports or AAA game. Having to just pay 60$ is far better than paying 60$ + 500$ fo a console + waiting for shipping and installation.
partiallypro 6y ago
> I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. Yes, but apply this to 90% of their new products. Google's planning in the current age is about as bad as Microsoft's in the 2004-2012 era.
- User23 6y ago
  This has been true for a decade. Gmail had nothing to do with management for example. Google has some really smart engineers but their management has never been better than mediocre.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.
  - partiallypro 6y ago
    Yeah, but Microsoft also shutdown retail stores in part because of the global pandemic, a few other companies followed.
    - SkyPuncher 6y ago
      And, those retail stores gave people an opportunity to play with and become comfortable with their surface form factor.
      - enos_feedler 6y ago
        Expensive way to achieve that goal, IMO.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
adamc 6y ago
To sell me on buying a stadia game -- at full price -- you have to convince me that this is the platform of the future, that Google is committed. Google starts with a handicap there because of prior behavior. This effectively kills Stadia as a service. If they were only willing to try for a couple of years... let's just say people were right to doubt that Google can be counted on for a service.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  That is a fair perspective given the history of Google. I still think this needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Google doesn't want to kill things off, they just realize the ROI doesn't make sense in terms of profits they can capture. I think specifically in the case of Stadia, there are lots of things in Google's favor that make this something they will succeed at and capture lots of profit/value from. The market is huge too. It also is a beachhead into a consumer product (TV) that Apple hasn't really invested in yet. Console-class couch/TV gaming is an important use case that Apple, Amazon and Google will battle for in their "home" product lines. This transformation is only beginning so as long as Google sticks with it they'll do fine.
015a 6y ago
> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are not. There is no amount of money they could pay Valve to make that partnership happen that would not pay dividends. Valve/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap, and the fact that they're still the most popular platform (and its not close) speaks volumes about whether the CloudStreamingGamePass-way things are going is actually the right one. Its reasonable to believe that people who identify as "gamers" right now are not interested in that stuff, and the strategy Google/Amazon/etc have of "Netflix for gaming, no console, convert non-gamers to gamers" won't work. Time will tell, but maybe Valve's traditionalism is the right one long-term. You know where Valve is investing their money? VR and Linux. God damn do I love that company.
- dfgdghdf 6y ago
  Valve can do this stuff because they are a private company. Gabe has publicly stated that he does not believe in game streaming services, because he thinks computation is best done at the edge.
  - ilikehurdles 6y ago
    If Valve fully backed cloud gaming, that would have downstream effects on publishers and PC gaming as a platform. Who would sign on to publish a competitive, reaction driven game if the market is segmented between the high-latency cloud where anyone can play, and physical hardware only purchased by a relatively diminishing market? The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with it so would one competitive advantage of PC gaming. Might be tautological, but the games that thrive in the cloud are games designed not to need a PC to be played.
    - lutte 6y ago
      Moreover Valve's hardest push in the past years was in VR. They are literally the only major (not indie or AA, and not doing a bad port of an already existing game, like Bethesda) developer to make a full game's worth of content for the platform that makes full use of the platform. Alyx was a breath of fresh air for anyone who wanted something out of VR that didn't feel like an incomplete experience. And VR is inherently incompatible with the design goals of cloud computing. The slightest of latencies destroy the illusion in VR. Valve is not going to support a world that doesn't encourage people to own the hardware necessary to run VR.
anonymousab 6y ago
It seemed pretty obvious to everyone. Use a gamepass model so that less content stretches further, or offer a compelling variety of content - especially exclusive content - to make up for users paying full price every time. They did neither and it's utterly boggling. They were clearly aware of their shortcomings when they dodged the more direct questions in early interviews. I don't know if it was just hubris, or an unwillingness at the top to understand. Or maybe the project started out too big to steer well and they just accepted it because, hey, high level paycheck. There are probably a lot of now ex-googlers with a ton of I-told-them-so stories.
pid_0 6y ago
Google is REALLY bad at marketing. I have no idea who runs their product teams, must be college interns, because they have no clear goal. Stadia still is missing basic features like pagination or searching, but the EXPERIENCE is great. I don't know why you are having issues, but Hitman 2+3 work amazing for me with the stadia controller. 60fps, 4k, etc. They also have Ubisoft+ integration and with this news they seem to be pushing for more integrations like that which will make the platform even better. Twitch will never be on Stadia as they compete with Youtube Gaming, which has direct integration with Stadia.
IkmoIkmo 6y ago
The game library was the big issue for me, most playtime was quite smooth for me. But to a large extent it's publishers' faults, Geforce Now has the same problem with games they had before getting removed because publishers/devs opted-out. I think Stadia had hoped that it could become big enough quickly, with the backing of Google's name and capital, that it could negotiate some good deals and build a big library quickly, to the point that there's so many gamers on Stadia that you can't not publish there anymore without losing a lot. Netflix and Spotify did it, too.
29athrowaway 6y ago
They threw away millions of dollars in ad money and they will see no return on investment. Usually ads can be equally or more expensive than development and production.
zapdrive 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the idea of a diversity hire.
- boltzmann_brain 6y ago
  underrated comment
- daamsie 6y ago
  Because bad decisions are never made by able-bodied white males?
cwyers 6y ago
I agree with most of this, but the Superhot game that's on Stadia Pro is a new release. (It's basically a Superhot roguelike, and I don't like it, but it is a new game.
deleted 6y ago
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Bayart 6y ago
>I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. If you look at any of Google's project besides their core data-farming business, it's their usual mode of action : half-ass something cool and drop it.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing Why would Valve partner with anyone? They don’t even need to make games anymore. They could fire the majority of their company and run on a skeleton crew and still be making a fortune years later. Literally don’t think Google can afford them. The offer would be “hey wanna go from doing almost zero work and making a fortune to making a little more and having to work a lot harder and give up autonomy“
- jayd16 6y ago
  I think the parent thinks Google or Valve can wave a wand and suddenly all these games will be ported to a new platform despite no user base, little incentive to be first on the platform, and murky licensing.
AceJohnny2 6y ago
I've been playing Destiny 2 on Stadia for 2 months, and I love it. It's been stable, pretty, lag-free & fluid (60fps). Even though D2 is a shooter and would thus be particularly susceptible to lag, I found the experience to be practically perfect. That said, I have Comcast Business Internet which is stable, and everything's connected over ethernet. Stadia's voice party system works well, and while I've been playing on a TV (Chromecast Ultra & Stadia controller), I've run raids with folks playing on their phones, iPads, & Chromebooks. Maybe because it's still a small and new community, but I've found it generally friendly and good quality.
deleted 6y ago
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danudey 6y ago
It feels as though the games which are on Stadia right now are games which, with few exceptions, are games which Google paid a significant amount of money to during development to support Stadia as well as other platforms. I'm guessing that if you look at an existing title along the lines of any of the ones you mentioned, the team has to balance between ongoing development of the game and porting it to Stadia, and they may just not have the resources or inclination to do the porting even when huge cheques are involved.
de6u99er 6y ago
If Google didn't make tons of money with ads through it's search engine, the comoany would IMO already be bankrupt. It's almost as if Google product development stops a v0.8. Maybe time to have the company run by engineers instead of PhD's.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Well, ads does afford them the luxury of trying new things, develop new products and revenue sources. Google is just pretty poor at developing new products. It is actually pretty fascinating, short of cloud computing, and Gsuite, Google doesn't appear to be able to produce products that people will actually pay for. It's not that Google doesn't have success stories, they do, Android for instance. They just don't seem to be able to sell anything.
baby 6y ago
When the PS2 came out there were like 10 games available.
- Bigpet 6y ago
  It could also play almost all PS1 games and it was the year 2000. It is no longer the year 2000
  - baby 6y ago
    So you buy a PS2 the month it was launched to play PS1 games? K
    - Bigpet 6y ago
      At least you had a back-catalog. The amount of games you can play on Stadia is just what you see. I bought a PS5 last year and have not bought a PS5 game. Mostly played PS4 games and some of what came in PSPlus.
ramblerman 6y ago
Google has more money than they know what to do with. I don't know if the quality of their hires has been dropping, but it feels like they just can't execute new ideas. They throw money at problems, and mostly they are really all over the place.
_the_inflator 6y ago
Oh well, seems like there will be another entry here soon: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
habosa 6y ago
The lack of search or pagination on the games list shocked me. I really have to scroll past every single Destiny pack to get down to NBA 2K1?
- arianvanp 6y ago
  The games page also takes around 35 seconds to load on my pixel 5.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today. The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way to draw a bunch of people to Stadia outside of that... and if Google is unable to make the business justification to develop Stadia exclusives, neither will anyone else.

bastawhiz 6y ago
It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Right... I thought as an idea, it was perfectly sound. The types of technology required to make cloud gaming work seemed to play to Google's strengths. They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
  - hmage 6y ago
    Google had to solve same problem any new traditional gaming console has to solve -- get publishers interested in creating for that console. Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Architecturally, are Google's Stadia servers substantially different from a standard PC?
      - bentcorner 6y ago
        AFAIK they run Linux, so porting games over isn't necessarily "free"
      - TinkersW 6y ago
        They run linux and use Vulkan for rendering, so this is a potentially large port burden to force on devs.
        Qwertious 6y ago
        Potentially, but there's only one distro and only one set of hardware, so there's waaaay less QA than an actual Linux port. Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.
        craftinator 6y ago
        Ah, always wonderful seeing a multi billion dollar company leverage OSS in an attempt to launch a negative sum product as an internal political promotion move only to kill it off a year later. Such shall be recorded in the history of the Net.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > It's only been a failure because of the lack of games Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.
  - serial_dev 6y ago
    I get what you are saying, games are essential if you are building a gaming platform But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.
    - mmmBacon 6y ago
      I would argue that the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform since there are no games that people want to play. I guess given the very limited functionality it’s technically not a failure. But the whole point is to have games people want to play. Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success): Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to third-party game developers. Recently released consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered underwhelming sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers.[22] With initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment,[41] as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone, the company secured the launch of influential new games such as Ridge Racer and Mortal Kombat 3.[22][5]
      - jonas21 6y ago
        > the project never got far enough to tell if it was a successful gaming platform The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.
        awill 6y ago
        Succeeding here might require both. Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > tech (at least to me) feels fine [...] it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken ... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.
  - romwell 6y ago
    Careful, this much sarcasm might break the website
- notyourday 6y ago
  > It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. T ... which makes shutting down gaming studio part of it even weirder.
- mey 6y ago
  Compare to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.
  - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    Geforce Now library kinda sucks to me, not all that much better than Stadia but that's my opinion. Stadia has a few names (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) that GFN doesn't and vice versa.
    - lagadu 6y ago
      GFN offers something unique: you can connect to existing stores like steam and play many of the games you already own there over GFN. This is a big deal.
    - Jochim 6y ago
      It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction. I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
      - orangeoxidation 6y ago
        > I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.
      - Mindwipe 6y ago
        Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.
    - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
hackcasual 6y ago
Phil Harrison oversaw the PS3, XBox One, and Google Stadia. He's like a reverse oracle
lumost 6y ago
This is the really confusing part to me. For most of the major metro's of the world cloud gaming is completely feasible on today's internet. Playing on servers in NYC from Boston works flawlessly as a casual gamer, and really opened up the possibility for me to enjoy AAA titles. Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences which really flex the hardware - similarly the potential for multi-TB fast storage and 10 Gb connectivity could have enabled dramatically larger game worlds than we see today. But it's absolutely a go big or don't bother problem.
- apozem 6y ago
  The dream of cloud gaming, for me, is everyone gets an amazing gaming PC. I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.
  - rolph 6y ago
    if you can allow users to load the code out of the cloud and or the user swarm ; onto thier machine and then dissconnect from the cloud, the potential efficiency is even more staggering.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Huh? That brings us right back to “everyone needs a hefty at-home computing device that goes underutilized most of the time”?
      - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
        Maybe they're referring to using individual computers as part of the cluster of boxes providing streaming gaming, like distributed computing projects.
        6y ago
ramphastidae 6y ago
Serious question: does Google operate a single profitable business besides AdWords?
- mckeed 6y ago
  Android, G-Suite, even YouTube (though that is also advertising)
  - ramphastidae 6y ago
    Huh? Android is OSS. YouTube has never posted a profit.
    - asiachick 6y ago
      It hasn't? https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
      - jsploit 6y ago
        Perhaps I missed it, but that only seems to mention YouTube revenue - not profit.
        asiachick 6y ago
        Sure, so what evidence is there that youtube does not make a profit?
        ramphastidae 6y ago
        Google is highly incentivized to show profitability to shareholders. It will drive stock value. If they are purposefully choosing to hide YT financials in quarterly statements, it’s probably not because they are good. Just search for YouTube and profitability on Google. It’s a loss leader.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
If it helps, apparently the exec in charge of Stadia has left. Whether this is a "you're fired, but you can resign if you want" or a "ship's going down, why would I ride it to the bottom" situation, I don't know.
- raymond_goo 6y ago
  Yeah, Jade Raymond.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    She ran one of the studios and wasn't in charge of Stadia as a whole.
    - pavel_lishin 6y ago
      Ah, damn, I'm not a good reader.
sergiotapia 6y ago
It's not confusing when you realize the owner of this product has his badge of releasing a "major google product" and probably a bonus. Who cares if it's successful or not, google certainly doesn't seem to care.
- lmm 6y ago
  It gets Google's name in the tech news for something that isn't advertising/invasion of privacy. It's a success for Google-the-business even if it "fails".
conk 6y ago
The value is great for casual gamers, no expensive hardware, no updates to install, just sit down and play a game. The only downside I’ve experienced is the limited catalogue of games.
ineedasername 6y ago
It might have gained more traction if it simply said "Hey, this is kind of like our usual compute engine, but it's gaming-optimized and you can access it through Chrome for low-latency streaming" And let people install whatever they want on it. There's probably a decent market for people with low/mid range hardware that would like to stream the newest games an ultimate settings. Others who'd just like a portable game library not tied to a specific PC, and a 3rd group that might use it through a chrome cast like a game console. I'm not sure how large of a market these groups would have been, but certainly much larger than whoever Stadia appeals to.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  Isn't that a lot closer to Geforce Now?
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Kind of, but Geforce Now made the mistake of trying to create something that looked kind of like a storefront that appeared to auto populate your game library from Steam, which pissed off publishers who thought GeForce was basically making money off of their games without giving them a cut. It's probably more of a semantic difference, but saying "Here's a VM, do what you want with it" is different than saying "Create a game library with us and we'll stream publisher X's games to you. We'll even put them in your GeForce library if you own it somewhere else!" So publishers got mad and many of the biggest pulled the most popular games. Had GeForce just said "Here's a gaming optimized VM" and let users do whatever they want, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, an very early version of GeForce now did exactly that, complete with a windows desktop.
    - raymond_goo 6y ago
      check out shadow.tech then...
baby 6y ago
How is it a bad idea? I want to play PC games but I don’t want to buy a desktop PC just for that. I’m currently travelling but I’m planning to get it once I settle. I had playstation Now before that and it was pretty dope.
- dunreith 6y ago
  It's honestly not a bad idea, just a bad implementation. I use shadow.tech to achieve this and they do it well - instead of giving you game-specific VMs (or whatever Stadia is), they just give you a gaming VM with Windows and you install your own Steam / Epic / GOG / XBLive whatever on it.
toephu2 6y ago
> how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Have you ever worked for a tech company? They don't just fire PMs/leads because their project failed. We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private). It's the 10% that succeed that the company is going after (but you don't know that until after the fact of course). The PMs that drove this will simply move on to the next project and keep trying until they get a hit.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  There is being human and there is being incompetent. Stadia did not fail because of bad luck. There were lots of obviously bad decisions made that went into this. If what you’re saying is true, then the decision makers moving on to other projects are just burning Google’s money without repercussions. Oh well, no one actually cares I guess.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 6y ago
  The problem with that is that it creates a culture of complacency. If failure is acceptable and even expected to be the norm, then don't be surprised when lots of projects you thought would be sure-fire hits or are executed successfully by competitors end up failing.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    So how do you prevent mediocricy because every employee is afraid of failing because of the draconian consequences?
    - simonh 6y ago
      Why are you assuming the consequences should be draconian? There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
When I first heard of Google developing Stadia I thought it's for targeting Asia where mobile gaming is huge and since for majority of users from there smartphones are their first computer; Any 'AAA' game on mobile would be a new experience; But my assumption was proven wrong after seeing Stadia getting released only in North America & Europe where gamers are particular about their games.
- ridaj 6y ago
  Arguably, Google already had a strong and successful platform in mobile gaming (Google Play Games). It's even present on TV these days, with game controllers too (Google TV Chromecast takes bluetooth game controllers with which one can play a range of made-for-TV-screen Android games). I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch for which they were obviously unable to get enough content commitments (not even talking about exclusives here, there just isn't even enough non-exclusive content).
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    Perhaps because to avoid confusion between mobile games & their PC counterparts; Say 'Call of Duty Mobile' vs 'Call of Duty' if both were on Google Play Games it would be very confusing and of course licensing headache.
  - aylmao 6y ago
    > I'm not sure why they didn't grow that to support server side rendering instead of starting a platform from scratch... I'd assume company politics. Steve Jobs described Apple like a "big startup" [1]— it had 0 committees, and instead had one person in charge of each of the things the company needed to do/care about. They all met weekly and talked about everything they were doing, and it yielded great collaboration. That's why everything "makes sense" and grows from the divisions/apps you'd expect. Google sounds more like Microsoft before it, with different teams doing work that might overlap and compete against one another. On top of that, afaik flashy "new" products play better for promotions than building upon something that exists. Hence Play Music and Youtube Music, Android and Chrome OS, Google Play and Stadia, etc. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5b4nn3ZEVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5b4nn3ZEVU
melomal 6y ago
Because of this man! https://x.company/team/astroteller/ https://x.company/team/astroteller/
seanhunter 6y ago
> Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Nothing succeeds like failure.. In my experience at multiple companies in tech and elsewhere, it is (sadly) frequently the case that the people responsible for the biggest failures are the ones who have the fastest career progression. It's a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome where they are holding their bosses captive because as they fail the stakes for the management get higher and higher and so they get more and more bought in. There's one person in particular that I remember from my time at Goldman. Lovely guy but every single thing he was involved in was an unmitigated disaster. Sure enough he failed his way to becoming an MD in record time.
fsloth 6y ago
"how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job?" Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. Presuming charitably everyone is doing their best etc. What happens for companies where no-one dares to start new projects? Yeah. So what is the correct number of new projects per risk? Everyone would like to choose only those that succeed. But the whole point of new development is that the information and experience to build such a product does not exist and needs to be learned as the project progresses. Should companies take too many new risky projects or too few? If the reward for successful project is high, then it's obvious a company should take a few too many risky projects, rather than too few (and risk cancelling some hit in it's infancy). In aggregate if every new project fails and business is starting to look like Kodak or Xerox then that's bad. Failing one new project is just a large company trying to innovate and cutting it's losses when a project is not a success.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  > Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. If it's something completely new, then yeah, celebrate failure, because at least you learned something. But game streaming had been tried and failed spectacularly before (remember OnLive?). Stadia didn't add anything new except "this time it's Google, they know their network stuff". Turns out that isn't enough if the business model makes no sense.
  - hiptobecubic 6y ago
    Failures being celebrated is about being willing to try out a new thing to see if it's viable. You don't celebrate failure and you certainly don't celebrate causing failure by having such a poor strategy that random cartoonists predicted your failure mode on launch day and then riding it into the ground.
BoDlulu 6y ago
> The value for gamers is debateable at best I don't have a PC or a console and I can play Cyberpunk - in fact the Stadia controller+Chromecast came free with it (because of a promotion).
- hiptobecubic 6y ago
  If you didn't previously have a pc or a console, I think most would say you were not a "gamer." Stadia has huge value to new gamers, but it hasn't done a good job appealing to them.
darepublic 6y ago
I think it was a worthwhile project. The shame is abandoning it imo
stryker7001 6y ago
My sense is that they want to sell compute cycles to big gaming companies vs trying to nickel and dime consumers. Smart PMs figure out the value and pivot rapidly.
- hiptobecubic 6y ago
  Smart PMs figure out value and pivot. Google uses trial and error.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> Everyone knew this was a bad idea No. It was an excellent idea, with very bad execution on the supply side.

cryptoquick 6y ago

Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?

adamc 6y ago
I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.
- ortusdux 6y ago
  I thought the same about reader.
  - Laforet 6y ago
    I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that. Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
    - acdha 6y ago
      > I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market. Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.

_zamorano_ 6y ago

I don't think they had the slightest chance of Valve partering with them

Clewza313 6y ago
Why not? Valve is not in the hardware business.
- _zamorano_ 6y ago
  A successfull private company, with the best video game catalog, already king in PC gaming... I don't see much for them to gain and plenty to lose if they let google build a big customer base.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    yeah, valve has its own ecosystem it wants to lock people into
  - bastawhiz 6y ago
    Valve has the games and tried to build their own console and failed. Google has now effectively built their own console and doesn't have the games.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      Valve only came up with Steam Boxes (and it's whole Linux push for that matter) as a defensive response to the Windows Store and the, at the time very real-seeming, possibility that Windows would become an entirely walled-garden they'd be beholden to. They put much effort into Steam Boxes, they were just a PC with Valve's Ubuntu derivative distro. Fortunately for Linux users though they did continue to put a lot of effort into making Linux gaming actually viable, thus insuring that they'll always have an out if Microsoft goes stupid.
- kenhwang 6y ago
  Valve has the Stream Link and VIVE. Steam Link is pretty much Stadia using your computer instead of the cloud. They're very much in the hardware business.

enos_feedler 6y ago

I think Stadia makes more sense when you frame it against game consoles. The easiest users to steal from the console market are the ones that buy only 1 or 2 console games which are traditionally reserved for those consoles (NFL Madden is the latest promotion and a good example). For these users, there is massive experience shift going from buying a ps4, ps online, just to play the same game all the time. I am one of these users. If they can find these 1 or 2 games that activate each segment of users, they will take cohorts from the console market. This won't get the entire console gamer market, but it's a great place to start.

m00x 6y ago
It's actually way cheaper to buy the console if you're just gonna play one game. You get a PS5 for $550 these days, so that's $330 total for a AAA game ($630). Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200). Even cheaper if you go for the PS4.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  You aren't including the network service to play games online. Factor in another $60 * 10 years. That nearly squares things up. Then you have to think about intangibles. Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. The $630 you paid for that ps5 and AAA game is frozen in time. You've bought no future value. You can also play anywhere without having to carry around a 4.5kg box that computes math.
  - mehlmao 6y ago
    >Stadia is a live platform that continuously improves. Has Stadia improved since launch? The PS5 and Xbox Series X are both more powerful than Stadia instances, not to mention modern PCs. Has Google announced any timeframe for powering up their instances to match? Will I have to pay more to access instances with the power of next-generation consoles? Will those be available for all the games I purchased, or on a title-by-title basis?
  - yyyk 6y ago

ksec 6y ago

> Google's lack of planning on this Seriously, When did Google ever planned anything? It is only in recent years, they fall out of the Media's flavour did people start to look at them rationally.

jeremyjh 6y ago

I like NVidia's model. Basically its bring your own game to their cloud hardware, but they integrate Steam, Epic store and one or two other distributors really well so that it is easy for someone to move to their platform rather than replace an aging gaming PC. I'm not sure who Stadia is for or how it competes with that and PS Now, which has a ton of popular games as well as Playstation exclusives (more of a rental model like Stadia's).

pkage 6y ago
I signed up for GeForce Now, and truly the killer feature is bringing the games you already own. On Stadia, you have to buy the games separately on top of the streaming subscription, and Luna (Amazon's offering) is similar in that you can sign up for game "channels" (iirc). With GeForce Now, you can just play the stuff you already own without sinking money into games that play on a platform that might not even exist in a few years. I bet in another year or so Stadia will shut down and all those games that you paid for on the platform will disappear.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  Stadia supports the UBISoft+ channel just as Luna does. It's in beta now.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Nvidia and Luna both took the shortcut of just running a windows VM and running the game as is. Stadia is the only one that actually requires games to integrate with its API, similar to Steam with Steamworks, and this allows them to provide a far more integrated experience, with friend lists, friend invites, voice chat, achievements, and so on. None of the other services can provide that. Well GFN does but that's just running Steam. In the short term it will slow down adoption, but in the long term the experience is night and day, imo. Being thrown into a VM instance where you have to login to Steam is nothing like pressing one button and being thrown right into a game. Also, yes if you already have a huge Steam collection, the thought of buying games on a different store is not great, but I don't think Stadia is aimed at people with a PC gaming rig and 1000 steam games, it's aimed at people who don't have a gaming PC or console, and want to play the latest EA Sports or AAA game. Having to just pay 60$ is far better than paying 60$ + 500$ fo a console + waiting for shipping and installation.

partiallypro 6y ago

> I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. Yes, but apply this to 90% of their new products. Google's planning in the current age is about as bad as Microsoft's in the 2004-2012 era.

User23 6y ago
This has been true for a decade. Gmail had nothing to do with management for example. Google has some really smart engineers but their management has never been better than mediocre.
enos_feedler 6y ago
At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.
- partiallypro 6y ago
  Yeah, but Microsoft also shutdown retail stores in part because of the global pandemic, a few other companies followed.
  - SkyPuncher 6y ago
    And, those retail stores gave people an opportunity to play with and become comfortable with their surface form factor.
    - enos_feedler 6y ago
      Expensive way to achieve that goal, IMO.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

adamc 6y ago

To sell me on buying a stadia game -- at full price -- you have to convince me that this is the platform of the future, that Google is committed. Google starts with a handicap there because of prior behavior. This effectively kills Stadia as a service. If they were only willing to try for a couple of years... let's just say people were right to doubt that Google can be counted on for a service.

enos_feedler 6y ago
That is a fair perspective given the history of Google. I still think this needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Google doesn't want to kill things off, they just realize the ROI doesn't make sense in terms of profits they can capture. I think specifically in the case of Stadia, there are lots of things in Google's favor that make this something they will succeed at and capture lots of profit/value from. The market is huge too. It also is a beachhead into a consumer product (TV) that Apple hasn't really invested in yet. Console-class couch/TV gaming is an important use case that Apple, Amazon and Google will battle for in their "home" product lines. This transformation is only beginning so as long as Google sticks with it they'll do fine.

015a 6y ago

> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are not. There is no amount of money they could pay Valve to make that partnership happen that would not pay dividends. Valve/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap, and the fact that they're still the most popular platform (and its not close) speaks volumes about whether the CloudStreamingGamePass-way things are going is actually the right one. Its reasonable to believe that people who identify as "gamers" right now are not interested in that stuff, and the strategy Google/Amazon/etc have of "Netflix for gaming, no console, convert non-gamers to gamers" won't work. Time will tell, but maybe Valve's traditionalism is the right one long-term. You know where Valve is investing their money? VR and Linux. God damn do I love that company.

dfgdghdf 6y ago
Valve can do this stuff because they are a private company. Gabe has publicly stated that he does not believe in game streaming services, because he thinks computation is best done at the edge.
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  If Valve fully backed cloud gaming, that would have downstream effects on publishers and PC gaming as a platform. Who would sign on to publish a competitive, reaction driven game if the market is segmented between the high-latency cloud where anyone can play, and physical hardware only purchased by a relatively diminishing market? The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with it so would one competitive advantage of PC gaming. Might be tautological, but the games that thrive in the cloud are games designed not to need a PC to be played.
  - lutte 6y ago
    Moreover Valve's hardest push in the past years was in VR. They are literally the only major (not indie or AA, and not doing a bad port of an already existing game, like Bethesda) developer to make a full game's worth of content for the platform that makes full use of the platform. Alyx was a breath of fresh air for anyone who wanted something out of VR that didn't feel like an incomplete experience. And VR is inherently incompatible with the design goals of cloud computing. The slightest of latencies destroy the illusion in VR. Valve is not going to support a world that doesn't encourage people to own the hardware necessary to run VR.

anonymousab 6y ago

It seemed pretty obvious to everyone. Use a gamepass model so that less content stretches further, or offer a compelling variety of content - especially exclusive content - to make up for users paying full price every time. They did neither and it's utterly boggling. They were clearly aware of their shortcomings when they dodged the more direct questions in early interviews. I don't know if it was just hubris, or an unwillingness at the top to understand. Or maybe the project started out too big to steer well and they just accepted it because, hey, high level paycheck. There are probably a lot of now ex-googlers with a ton of I-told-them-so stories.

pid_0 6y ago

Google is REALLY bad at marketing. I have no idea who runs their product teams, must be college interns, because they have no clear goal. Stadia still is missing basic features like pagination or searching, but the EXPERIENCE is great. I don't know why you are having issues, but Hitman 2+3 work amazing for me with the stadia controller. 60fps, 4k, etc. They also have Ubisoft+ integration and with this news they seem to be pushing for more integrations like that which will make the platform even better. Twitch will never be on Stadia as they compete with Youtube Gaming, which has direct integration with Stadia.

IkmoIkmo 6y ago

The game library was the big issue for me, most playtime was quite smooth for me. But to a large extent it's publishers' faults, Geforce Now has the same problem with games they had before getting removed because publishers/devs opted-out. I think Stadia had hoped that it could become big enough quickly, with the backing of Google's name and capital, that it could negotiate some good deals and build a big library quickly, to the point that there's so many gamers on Stadia that you can't not publish there anymore without losing a lot. Netflix and Spotify did it, too.

29athrowaway 6y ago

They threw away millions of dollars in ad money and they will see no return on investment. Usually ads can be equally or more expensive than development and production.

zapdrive 6y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the idea of a diversity hire.

boltzmann_brain 6y ago
underrated comment
daamsie 6y ago
Because bad decisions are never made by able-bodied white males?

cwyers 6y ago

I agree with most of this, but the Superhot game that's on Stadia Pro is a new release. (It's basically a Superhot roguelike, and I don't like it, but it is a new game.

deleted 6y ago

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Bayart 6y ago

>I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. If you look at any of Google's project besides their core data-farming business, it's their usual mode of action : half-ass something cool and drop it.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing Why would Valve partner with anyone? They don’t even need to make games anymore. They could fire the majority of their company and run on a skeleton crew and still be making a fortune years later. Literally don’t think Google can afford them. The offer would be “hey wanna go from doing almost zero work and making a fortune to making a little more and having to work a lot harder and give up autonomy“

jayd16 6y ago
I think the parent thinks Google or Valve can wave a wand and suddenly all these games will be ported to a new platform despite no user base, little incentive to be first on the platform, and murky licensing.

AceJohnny2 6y ago

I've been playing Destiny 2 on Stadia for 2 months, and I love it. It's been stable, pretty, lag-free & fluid (60fps). Even though D2 is a shooter and would thus be particularly susceptible to lag, I found the experience to be practically perfect. That said, I have Comcast Business Internet which is stable, and everything's connected over ethernet. Stadia's voice party system works well, and while I've been playing on a TV (Chromecast Ultra & Stadia controller), I've run raids with folks playing on their phones, iPads, & Chromebooks. Maybe because it's still a small and new community, but I've found it generally friendly and good quality.

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danudey 6y ago

It feels as though the games which are on Stadia right now are games which, with few exceptions, are games which Google paid a significant amount of money to during development to support Stadia as well as other platforms. I'm guessing that if you look at an existing title along the lines of any of the ones you mentioned, the team has to balance between ongoing development of the game and porting it to Stadia, and they may just not have the resources or inclination to do the porting even when huge cheques are involved.

de6u99er 6y ago

If Google didn't make tons of money with ads through it's search engine, the comoany would IMO already be bankrupt. It's almost as if Google product development stops a v0.8. Maybe time to have the company run by engineers instead of PhD's.

mrweasel 6y ago
Well, ads does afford them the luxury of trying new things, develop new products and revenue sources. Google is just pretty poor at developing new products. It is actually pretty fascinating, short of cloud computing, and Gsuite, Google doesn't appear to be able to produce products that people will actually pay for. It's not that Google doesn't have success stories, they do, Android for instance. They just don't seem to be able to sell anything.

baby 6y ago

When the PS2 came out there were like 10 games available.

Bigpet 6y ago
It could also play almost all PS1 games and it was the year 2000. It is no longer the year 2000
- baby 6y ago
  So you buy a PS2 the month it was launched to play PS1 games? K
  - Bigpet 6y ago
    At least you had a back-catalog. The amount of games you can play on Stadia is just what you see. I bought a PS5 last year and have not bought a PS5 game. Mostly played PS4 games and some of what came in PSPlus.

ramblerman 6y ago

Google has more money than they know what to do with. I don't know if the quality of their hires has been dropping, but it feels like they just can't execute new ideas. They throw money at problems, and mostly they are really all over the place.

_the_inflator 6y ago

Oh well, seems like there will be another entry here soon: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

habosa 6y ago

The lack of search or pagination on the games list shocked me. I really have to scroll past every single Destiny pack to get down to NBA 2K1?

arianvanp 6y ago
The games page also takes around 35 seconds to load on my pixel 5.