21 ms·

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

• 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.
            • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
              Google isn't the company I would lodge this complaint at. They contribute a lot of code back as well.
              • craftinator 6y ago
                Google is a company large enough that you can always find fringes that contradict their main philosophies a business model within the same company. They do not contribute proportionally to their revenue nearly as much as the other FAANG companies. Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.
      • bastawhiz 6y ago
        If anyone is going to compete with Microsoft, of all companies, I'd expect it to be Google.
        • pdpi 6y ago
          Except Microsoft is investing heavily in first party games, buying loads of studios and letting them retain a lot of independence. They’re approaching the streaming service as an extension of the Xbox experience. It’s a much more robust strategy all around
          • pjmlp 6y ago
            And not forcing studios to rewrite their games from scratch to a snowflake platform.
            • depressedpanda 6y ago
              Porting a game to Linux and Vulkan does not require rewriting it from scratch.
              • pjmlp 6y ago
                It does because 99% of the game studios don't care about Linux, nor are that much into Vulkan, unless they are targeting Android or Switch.
                • account42 6y ago
                  The graphics backend is really not such a big cost for most games, especially with existing cross-platform engines. Also the grahics APIs are really not that different as they all model the same GPUs. DirectX vs. OpenGL had some annoying things but most of them are only a problem when you have to translate and can't modify the calling code at all. DirectX 12 vs. Vulkan is even less of a difference.
                  • 6y ago
  • 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.