5 ms·
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 bu
by 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 agoRight... 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 agoGoogle 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 agoArchitecturally, are Google's Stadia servers substantially different from a standard PC?
- bentcorner 6y agoAFAIK they run Linux, so porting games over isn't necessarily "free"
- TinkersW 6y agoThey run linux and use Vulkan for rendering, so this is a potentially large port burden to force on devs.
- Qwertious 6y agoPotentially, 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 agoAh, 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 agoGoogle isn't the company I would lodge this complaint at. They contribute a lot of code back as well.
- craftinator 6y agoGoogle 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 agoIf anyone is going to compete with Microsoft, of all companies, I'd expect it to be Google.
- pdpi 6y agoExcept 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 agoAnd not forcing studios to rewrite their games from scratch to a snowflake platform.
- depressedpanda 6y agoPorting a game to Linux and Vulkan does not require rewriting it from scratch.
- pjmlp 6y agoIt 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoSucceeding 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 agoCareful, 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 agoCompare 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 agoGeforce 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 agoGFN 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 agoIt 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 agoLegally 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