12 ms·

Stadia’s VP and head of product leaves Google

110 points by leephillips 6y ago

shiftpgdn 6y ago
Surely someone in Alphabets leadership understands the damage Google is doing to their brand by only giving projects a few months to "make it big" before pulling the rug out? Look at all the developers who post on here who will not use GCP because of the fear of Google removing or dropping support for important features with no warning!
- klodolph 6y ago
  I hear this from time to time, but how many people are actually choosing not to use GCP for that reason? Yes, Google keeps killing consumer products (Hangouts is reportedly getting the axe…), but Google Cloud seems to have a much more stable set of services, especially when you look at the core. Things like App Engine have been around forever. Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no?
  - alex_anglin 6y ago
    Part of the trouble here is that the Google brand spans their B2B and B2C offerings.
  - sova 6y ago
    Hangouts is now read-only for messages to/from phone numbers (as of December 2020 iirc), but you can still message people who are signed in to chat on Gmail. Effectively axed.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
    I'd say the fact that Google is the "0 support or human interaction, ever, once you need help with anything, forget it" company does not help either. When it comes to their paid products I hear mixed reports in my circles, some claim that they have good experiences with it. But ultimately the question is: Why risk it?
    - aroman 6y ago
      Virtually anyone who is using google cloud to run their business is surely paying for access to real human interaction. This costs as little as $100/mo for basic support all the way up to dedicated support. I agree with your pout for consumer, but GP is talking about b2b cloud, where google behaves very differently than their general “no there is no customer support” behavior.
  - kentonv 6y ago
    > Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no? Apparently not: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      It's no different than choosing a B2C startup for your company, and then having them go out of business. There are certain core services that I would expect Google to maintain, and others are gambles. It's important to know which is which.
  - qris 6y ago
    Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft — currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share — or risk losing funding. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260
    - klodolph 6y ago
      Read the top comment—the fact that they are setting deadlines & performance goals does not mean that services are getting shut down.
      - rblatz 6y ago
        But it raises the question in people’s minds. If you are building your company on a cloud platform why would you risk GCP after seeing that?
  - intergalplan 6y ago
    I try to isolate and minimize dependencies on Google due to their habit of abruptly banning entire accounts because one of their bots thinks it spotted something slightly odd on a single service that account is using. It's absolutely part of my risk-assessment at work, when selecting which services to use. Their fickle approach to services that aren't ads or search is just part of the problem. > Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no? Not differently enough, and I'm not directing enough of our services spending to Google to find out if that gets us over the line where they won't shit all over us without at least giving us a heads-up. Maybe it would be, maybe not, but why risk it when most of what they offer is far from unique and not much better-priced than alternatives, if at all.
    - syrgian 6y ago
      I have heard anecdotes of them linking accounts together and banning them all at once if one of the algorithms deems you unworthy. Unless you are really splitting them, by using a different IP and browser characteristics for each of them... But then you are very likely to have them banned separately, due to suspicious behavior.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  Are they already pulling out the rug? Seems like the investment they made so far in terms of time, money, hiring must have been massive. If they are killing stadia, that does maybe show that Google lacks "grit". The way they killed Google Plus was kind of stupid. They could have adjusted the formula and made it better, but instead they just gave up on it, it seems. It's like Google doesn't understand that it's normal not to have instant success? Maybe they should make a more active decision that here is a market segment they want to enter, and keep working at it, instead of just trying random things and giving up.
  - penagwin 6y ago
    Not officially _yet_ but between the VP leaving and some other signs, it does appear that Stadia isn't likely to last a ton longer.
    - andybak 6y ago
      What will happen to all the "purchases" people made? My immediate thought when Stadia was announced was "I'm never buying games at full price from Google if they are dependent on a service not being cancelled"
      - SirHound 6y ago
        Same - if it were a subscription service I may have tried it out. But knowing how these digital services tend to go and how quickly Google kills its services I was never going to “buy” a game from them.
      - dougmwne 6y ago
        I think the service is amazing and I even pay for GeforceNow and did a Stadia trial. There's no way I was going to spend a dime on content or hardware. It was just too likey to be killed off. By contrast I've spent tons of money on Steam and Oculus stores, so I have no problem buying digital content from a company I have confidence in. Google has seriously hurt their brand and I am always concerned they're going to pull the rug out from me on the ancillary G products I use. Many companies sunset products, but Google has an absolute knack for destroying my consumer confidence.
- rajacombinator 6y ago
  Surely they don’t or they wouldn’t have developed this reputation in the first place.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I think of all of Google that's not Search & Ads as "side projects" that they do kind of like a hobby. They'd like for them to succeed, but it's nowhere near the focus an org that lives or dies by the project has. So if gaming proves harder than expected, they move on to other fun things.
  - philsnow 6y ago
    With the way apple is leaning in terms of making life harder on advertisers, if they were to release a value phone ($200) with all their consumer privacy protections soon after a revelation in the news about how pervasive advertising companies are / how much they know about you, I wonder if it would make a dent in google's only real line of business. I'm probably projecting too much of my own privacy-mindedness onto the general populace, though.
- msoad 6y ago
  Well said! In contrast to Apple which gives its projects time. Apple Arcade is growing slowly but surely. People who have kids don't mind signing up for it because it makes sense. Apple can iterate on Arcade with their now impressive chip design advantage. They can come to the consoles market at some point. I personally use my Xbox only for FIFA. It's a game that can probably run on M1 with no problem. I don't mind not spending $500 for my next console and have access to my FIFA on my iPhone and Mac
- swiley 6y ago
  Google grew into the incoherent American corporation long ago and is totally beyond salvaging. Unfortunately their inertia will let them keep steamrolling over people for another century just like GE does.
easton 6y ago
Part of me wonders why they didn’t buy Zenimax instead of Microsoft, and make the games Stadia exclusives. Good library, Google could afford it, and it would show how powerful the platform was (since things like Doom are the high action games people usually think suck on streaming). It’s like they built the tech, which is probably some of the best stuff out there (Stadia had less stutter for me than GeForce Now), and then they forgot to hire a few good business people to actually run the product, and then they wondered why it didn’t work. Why wasn’t it all-you-can-eat? Why didn’t they produce a single first party game from beginning to end for the release? Nothing makes a lot of sense here.
- ibero 6y ago
  i imagine Google did not buy Zenimax because they seem to operate on a very compressed timeline for their new projects which makes any corporate courtship hard to pull off. so unless Google came with an obscene "instant yes" offer to Zenimax then both sides would have had to enter some kind of protracted negotiations and talks, which doesn't seem to jive with Google's half in/half out attitude towards new products.
- metiscus 6y ago
  Can you imagine the outrage over Google making the next Elder Scrolls Stadia exclusive? I think a move like that might displace EA at the top of the hate pyramid for a bit. Microsoft is going to have some issues if they make the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout permanently XBox exclusive, and that's a well established console franchise that is well accepted for using exclusives to differentiate from Sony etc.
s_dev 6y ago
Stadia was terribly implemented -- almost nothing appealed to gamers from the pricing to the games -- I can't think of a single killer game. I recall it being originally annouced thinking Google -- like Apple -- don't get gaming and probably never will. It's classic -- we're big -- so we have a chance thinking we just need time to make it work. Stadia would have been much better implemented by startups. Google simply can't do "small" anymore. To be fair they're just too big. Microsoft is the only FANG that remotely gets gaming.
- deleted 6y ago
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- mhh__ 6y ago
  Cyberpunk probably should've been that game, in the sense that it ran like shit, in the middle of a huge GPU drought, but it wasn't very good.
  - KingOfSheepX 6y ago
    Stadia and Geforce now were the only platforms that Cyberpunk ran great on when the game launched. Geforce customers had to wait in queue for a server so Stadia came out on top. Unfortunately, very few people know about it and Stadia didn't capitalize on marketing on the situation.
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  - caconym_ 6y ago
    I want to know what games the "cyberpunk wasn't good" crowd is playing instead that scratch the same itch. At this point it just seems like a throwaway line from people who don't like the kind of game it is, and haven't played it for any meaningful amount of time. It has significant flaws, but there is also a lot to like about it.
    - 6y ago
cletus 6y ago
Stadia is a project that should never gotten off the drawing board and it takes only two words to kill it. Input lag. That's not a technical problem. It's physics. In the very least it should've operated off existing launchers eg buy it in Stream and you can use it in Stadia. But honestly, the games where input lag isn't an issue is such a small subset that Stadia was only ever going to be a niche product.
- hacoo 6y ago
  Input lag while streaming is not that bad on a good connection. It won’t work for online FPS games (at least not if you want to win), but for slower FPS, RPGs, etc, it’s ok. This is based on my experience with Geforce Now, I haven’t tried Stadia. As for the business model though, you’re totally right. No way I’m going to buy a game and be locked into Stadia. Not only would I be prevented from playing locally, who knows how long Stadia will be around at this rate?
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  GeForce Now has shown that when you depend on existing launchers like Steam, your service's library is can change based on the whims of 3rd parties
  - dougmwne 6y ago
    That was mostly Stadia's fault for tying up exclusive streaming rights. If they die all the better for the industry.
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      The steam games that I'm thinking of (chiefly MS Flight Sim) aren't on Stadia
  - sgift 6y ago
    I really hope that there will be a court case that tells the game companies to stuff their objections where they belong and makes it clear that every game I've bought on Steam can be played on Geforce Now. I bought the game. I play it on a computer. The game companies should have zero rights to decide whether that computer sits under my desk or in a data center.
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jolux 6y ago
Google needs to release fewer products and maintain them longer. Simple as that.
- Fergusonb 6y ago
  I feel their strategy makes a lot of sense if each project is treated like a startup. Release the mvp, iterate quickly, shut it down if it isn't working... The problem is they attach the Google name for clout and then proceed to drag that name through the mud when they stop support. Google's name now isn't worth much to me if I'm considering an experimental product. They should not use the Google moniker unless they are willing to provide long term support.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    This was not a startup project. For Stadia to work they needed a lot of ties to the customer and games companies. > Release the mvp, iterate quickly, shut it down if it isn't working... This means that anyone integrating with your product takes huge gamble that you will be here in X months, why risk it? Google made none thinking that G factor is enough. Its basically Google+ 2.0 Throwing just some money into already occupied and competitive market and expecting things to happen is borderline fraud. Statia was a stillborn project sailing on a sinking ship made purely out of wishful thinking.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    Except startups usually has a couple of people with nothing to fall back on, who will fight tooth and nail to try and succeed. Your average Google VP is far too comfortable - and with nowhere near enough humility - to stoop to that level.
me551ah 6y ago
Unlike other cloud gaming services like Geforce Now and xCloud , Stadia chose to use a platform which had very few existing native games i.e Linux. So it was in effect like the launch of a new console, since developers had to port their game to the new platform . But developers didn't have much of an incentive to since there weren't many users on Stadia. And users didn't have much of an incentive to use Stadia, since there were few games and their friends were on other platforms. It's a classic chicken and egg scenario.
- ruph123 6y ago
  The biggest difference (and problem for Stadia) was that you have to buy Stadia games as “Stadia games”. You cannot transfer them out, they are locked into a platform run by a company which is famous for shutting services down rather often. Why would anyone choose Stadia then? The nice thing about Geforce Now is that you can just run your already bought games on it. Just connect your account to Steam/Epic and you are good to go. You are just renting their hardware essentially.
  - darkwizard42 6y ago
    This is truly the most baffling thing. Google could have truly just built a very tight end-to-end cloud hosted "streaming" product that would have leveraged all their Cloud infra to help you play YOUR games... just on any device through their UI. Pay a small hourly or monthly rate (think spot rate for cloud GPUs) and there... you have a business. Other people have done it sure and maybe that is why Stadia tried to go even bigger, but if they just launched a simple product like that I think it would have been a big hit (and truly hit the market of people who want to play the latest games at full settings but don't have the hardware to do so)
    - EveYoung 6y ago
      Is renting out data centre GPUs for cloud gaming currently financially feasible? Considering how much GCP charges for GPUs, I would be surprised if they would be able to offer it at an atractive price (~$10/month). Other providers' services look quite experimental and not ready for mass adoption as well.
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Sakos 6y ago
I am so glad that Stadia is floundering, if not failing. It's one of the worst things I've seen in the industry for consumers regarding consumer rights and freedom, and it's any publisher's wet dream. Imagine a platform where users can't mod in their own content or modify (or even improve) the experience in any way. They can go nuts with DLC and microtransactions. They can ensure we only get the experience they decide on. It's a nightmare for consumers and I hope it never gets off the ground.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  > Imagine a platform where users can't mod in their own content or modify (or even improve) the experience in any way. I don’t like Stadia, but doesn’t this describe most if not all major consoles?
  - kuschku 6y ago
    Every console was hacked to allow mods. e.g. the smash bros community built mods such as Project M for the modded gamecube and Wii, and even mods of smash ultimate for the Switch.
    - chaostheory 6y ago
      Nothing is preventing anyone from hacking Stadia either, but the percentage of people who jail break their consoles is really low due to the complexity (most aren't techies), the amount of work involved, and because online multiplayer will most likely no longer work long term; or in Stadia's case - you can no longer access your games. I feel the parent comment was referring to PC gaming, where you don't need to do anything crazy to customize the games that you paid for.
- Ashanmaril 6y ago
  Stadia's death doesn't mean the death of game streaming. There's other competition in that area on the market (GeForce Now, XCloud, PS Now), and unfortunately it seems pretty much inevitable at this point (as much as I also hate the idea of it) But I can at least say I'm glad Google isn't getting a foothold in yet another area of technology
ziml77 6y ago
2020 was Stadia's best chance due to lockdown and GPU/console shortages and yet it's not doing very well. For a company that is known for shutting down services I don't understand why they went with a model that would cause all your games to disappear if they closed down Stadia. I think they would have stood a much better chance if they had used the GeForce Now model of your purchase just being a standard PC game or if they had gone with the Game Pass model where the games are part of the subscription.
- local_dev 6y ago
  Imagine if Google partnered with Valve to bring your steam library to Stadia. That would have instantly won over millions of gamers. I would have bought into Stadia so I could play my games while traveling. To me, someone that has been playing games for 30+ years, Stadia couldn't have been handled worse. They tried to pull a Microsoft and enter the gaming world, but forgot to have the killer app like Halo.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    I imagine Valve could just build their own game streaming service. They have a massive advantage over Google there.
sneak 6y ago
Fun Stadia story: pulled in by the lie of Google 4k cloud gpu gaming, I preordered a Stadia "founder's edition" controller + chromecast ultra setup kit for ~$100 + shipping. A couple days later, I got a notification from Google telling me my order had been cancelled, with no explanation or remediation/reorder path. The founder's edition pack was no longer available for sale. I gave up. A few weeks later, from Google: get a free Stadia founder's edition pack, just pay shipping! So, I did. It arrives, and you can't enable it without a) an app, and b) giving them all sorts of permissions. It also has an abysmal selection of games, and rarely in 4k. Now, they will presumably cancel it soon. This is too-much-money-itis.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  Sounds like that android box a few years back. I forget the name, they kick started a crazy amount of money. Promised so much. Right before shipping it out they change it to require a credit card and too much info to turn the thing on. Ended up in the bin.
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    > Sounds like that android box a few years back. I forget the name, they kick started a crazy amount of money. Promised so much. Right before shipping it out they change it to require a credit card and too much info to turn the thing on. Ended up in the bin. You mean OUYA. But no, OUYA was a complete disaster, one could argue that Stadia actually works, the problem is the business model and the weird way Google manages its products.
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      It was good until it launched. Ouya. The changes just before launch killed the project IMO.
  - bschwindHN 6y ago
    Are you thinking of the Ouya?
atkbrah 6y ago
A while ago I gave stadia a try figuring it was a netflix kind of service in which you pay a monthly fee for all the content. Turns out that in addition to that, you are supposed to actually purchase the games. Taken into account of google constantly pulling the plug on their services, that's not something I'm willing to do, so I cancelled my subscription.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  It's free to use for games you purchase. The membership comes with a bunch of free games and discounts for purchases.
- axaxs 6y ago
  This is where Microsoft has won. Gamepass is that. I don't even have to buy games anymore, there's so much available 'free' to play.
auiya 6y ago
Alphabet treats their toys much like a child does. They play with them for a few months, then quickly lose interest and let them languish until mom comes along and tosses them out. Why anyone would want to work there outside of their core product line is beyond me.
darkwizard42 6y ago
I think the scope of Stadia was just too damn big. Why launch with their own platform that requires you to buy Stadia games only... This could have easily been Google legitimizing streaming gaming by simply letting users pay an hourly/monthly fee to get a cloud machine and stream their own library to their device. Some level of optimization to make sure it works with various devices, latencies etc. and voila you probably have a GREAT product. THEN maybe a year out once you have a super engaged userbase try to build out the Stadia as a unique platform and get people to use and buy games for that natively. Just feels like a typical Google promo effort that wasn't thought out and brute forced in. Of course the people who worked on this launch will get their promos and no one will be around to help clean up the mess/improve it to a sustainable state.
standeven 6y ago
http://stadiacountdown.com/ http://stadiacountdown.com/ That countdown is starting to feel optimistic...
pier25 6y ago
Well... the good thing if Stadia shuts down is that Orcs Must Die 3 will definitely come to PC.
aboringusername 6y ago
I feel sorry for anyone who has brought into Stadia in any way, shape or form. This is soon to be headed to the dustbin of history and a prominent display in killedbygoogle.com. Many people predicted such things the moment it was announced - such is Google's terrible reputation - that they simple cannot be trusted to launch a new product and commit to it for years. I decided that I'd give ANY new Google project a minimum of 2-3 years (up to 5) before investing. If it shuts down in that time nothing has been lost. I do look forward to the rage when it just ups and dies and you're left with nothing, while I still have my ISOs and other media that cannot be taken by anyone, ever. What a farce.
- camel_Snake 6y ago
  Why? Stadia let me play games with friends I wouldn't have been able to otherwise on my 7 year old macbook air. Not everyone has a gaming pc and gaming consoles. I played Destiny (which is free) for a few months to try out the service, and it works fine for me. The community is easily way better than any other platform's community. It's a lot of casual/older players who just want to play a bit, not hardcore gamers who stream and watch streams. So. much. less. toxicity. It's wonderful. For the games I bought - I expect Stadia to shut down at some point. I never really replay games once I've beaten them, so I don't care if they end up disappearing from the library at some point. I've easily gotten my money's worth. Stadia definitely isn't for everyone, but I'm very glad it existed.
gre 6y ago
Rebrand it as Google Games.
rvz 6y ago
I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard. The fact no-one cared about their free trials, their own studios closing, Apple still barring Stadia and now many of the Stadia team leaving should be enough to tell you that Stadia's existence is almost over. How is it that people are 'still' waiting and scrambling for PS5's and Xbox Series X|S consoles since last year rather than going for Stadia's 'no-hardware' cloud gaming platform? If you can't grow during last year's strange times then you're really off to a slow start. So I'll sit back, relax and go back to my PC/console device?
- leetrout 6y ago
  > If you can't grow during last year's strange times then you're really off to a slow start. Exactly this
- ozten 6y ago
  I would argue that part of this was execution. I signed and then cancelled 20 minutes later as their catalog didn't have anything I wanted to play. I saw many similar comments on HN back then. It inspired me to setup my own EC2 Windows GPU box and buy some games on steam. Neat, but a PITA so I didn't continue with my DIY setup. Lastly Shadow cloud gaming PC has a lot of users (filed bankruptcy and recently acquired). https://shadow.tech/ https://shadow.tech/
- EveYoung 6y ago
  I tried it out when Stadia was launched but never got it to work reliably. Despide a wired 1gb fiber connection, I still got frame drops and lags quite frequently. While I wouldn't call it unplayable, it really doesn't compare well to dedicated consoles. Even for a very casual gamer myself, I feel an Xbox Series S is a better purchase.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    You played on wifi, right?
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
What a missed opportunity. It's a hard nut to crack, for sure, but Google doesn't seem to have the chops or the product mentality to innovate beyond... Search, really. Even GCP, despite being a multi-billion dollar #3 in the cloud wars, is still far away from being profitable. I'd say there's a chance that it will not survive many years.
1_person 6y ago
Cloud gaming is not a business venture, it's industry conspiracy to distort the market and capture exaggerated profits by raping the customer and calling it love. I have been following the technologies (direct frame buffer capture and inline encode) for a long time because they are also the enabling technologies for high performance locally clustered visualization. The features were at one point completely unrestricted in the driver, then one day cloud gaming was the next big thing and you had to buy a $10,000 GPU or be Steam to access those APIs. If you are interested in remote collaboration or scalable visualization you'll just have to hold your breath and wait to see if nVidia and others can strong arm children into economic exploitation, because the technologies are currently being held hostile while industry works through various lubrication formulations for the slope they intend to shove us down.
yrgulation 6y ago
“This latest departure is just another sign that Google's game-streaming service is circling the drain.”. Good. Hopefully Apple Arcade follows. Such services are a hindrance to indie game development and horrible to ownership rights.
akmarinov 6y ago
At this point it’ll be killed off before it launches in my Eastern European country

110 points by leephillips 6y ago

Surely someone in Alphabets leadership understands the damage Google is doing to their brand by only giving projects a few months to "make it big" before pulling the rug out? Look at all the developers who post on here who will not use GCP because of the fear of Google removing or dropping support for important features with no warning!

klodolph 6y ago
I hear this from time to time, but how many people are actually choosing not to use GCP for that reason? Yes, Google keeps killing consumer products (Hangouts is reportedly getting the axe…), but Google Cloud seems to have a much more stable set of services, especially when you look at the core. Things like App Engine have been around forever. Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no?
- alex_anglin 6y ago
  Part of the trouble here is that the Google brand spans their B2B and B2C offerings.
- sova 6y ago
  Hangouts is now read-only for messages to/from phone numbers (as of December 2020 iirc), but you can still message people who are signed in to chat on Gmail. Effectively axed.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
  I'd say the fact that Google is the "0 support or human interaction, ever, once you need help with anything, forget it" company does not help either. When it comes to their paid products I hear mixed reports in my circles, some claim that they have good experiences with it. But ultimately the question is: Why risk it?
  - aroman 6y ago
    Virtually anyone who is using google cloud to run their business is surely paying for access to real human interaction. This costs as little as $100/mo for basic support all the way up to dedicated support. I agree with your pout for consumer, but GP is talking about b2b cloud, where google behaves very differently than their general “no there is no customer support” behavior.
- kentonv 6y ago
  > Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no? Apparently not: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    It's no different than choosing a B2C startup for your company, and then having them go out of business. There are certain core services that I would expect Google to maintain, and others are gambles. It's important to know which is which.
- qris 6y ago
  Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft — currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share — or risk losing funding. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Read the top comment—the fact that they are setting deadlines & performance goals does not mean that services are getting shut down.
    - rblatz 6y ago
      But it raises the question in people’s minds. If you are building your company on a cloud platform why would you risk GCP after seeing that?
- intergalplan 6y ago
  I try to isolate and minimize dependencies on Google due to their habit of abruptly banning entire accounts because one of their bots thinks it spotted something slightly odd on a single service that account is using. It's absolutely part of my risk-assessment at work, when selecting which services to use. Their fickle approach to services that aren't ads or search is just part of the problem. > Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no? Not differently enough, and I'm not directing enough of our services spending to Google to find out if that gets us over the line where they won't shit all over us without at least giving us a heads-up. Maybe it would be, maybe not, but why risk it when most of what they offer is far from unique and not much better-priced than alternatives, if at all.
  - syrgian 6y ago
    I have heard anecdotes of them linking accounts together and banning them all at once if one of the algorithms deems you unworthy. Unless you are really splitting them, by using a different IP and browser characteristics for each of them... But then you are very likely to have them banned separately, due to suspicious behavior.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
Are they already pulling out the rug? Seems like the investment they made so far in terms of time, money, hiring must have been massive. If they are killing stadia, that does maybe show that Google lacks "grit". The way they killed Google Plus was kind of stupid. They could have adjusted the formula and made it better, but instead they just gave up on it, it seems. It's like Google doesn't understand that it's normal not to have instant success? Maybe they should make a more active decision that here is a market segment they want to enter, and keep working at it, instead of just trying random things and giving up.
- penagwin 6y ago
  Not officially _yet_ but between the VP leaving and some other signs, it does appear that Stadia isn't likely to last a ton longer.
  - andybak 6y ago
    What will happen to all the "purchases" people made? My immediate thought when Stadia was announced was "I'm never buying games at full price from Google if they are dependent on a service not being cancelled"
    - SirHound 6y ago
      Same - if it were a subscription service I may have tried it out. But knowing how these digital services tend to go and how quickly Google kills its services I was never going to “buy” a game from them.
    - dougmwne 6y ago
      I think the service is amazing and I even pay for GeforceNow and did a Stadia trial. There's no way I was going to spend a dime on content or hardware. It was just too likey to be killed off. By contrast I've spent tons of money on Steam and Oculus stores, so I have no problem buying digital content from a company I have confidence in. Google has seriously hurt their brand and I am always concerned they're going to pull the rug out from me on the ancillary G products I use. Many companies sunset products, but Google has an absolute knack for destroying my consumer confidence.
rajacombinator 6y ago
Surely they don’t or they wouldn’t have developed this reputation in the first place.
BurningFrog 6y ago
I think of all of Google that's not Search & Ads as "side projects" that they do kind of like a hobby. They'd like for them to succeed, but it's nowhere near the focus an org that lives or dies by the project has. So if gaming proves harder than expected, they move on to other fun things.
- philsnow 6y ago
  With the way apple is leaning in terms of making life harder on advertisers, if they were to release a value phone ($200) with all their consumer privacy protections soon after a revelation in the news about how pervasive advertising companies are / how much they know about you, I wonder if it would make a dent in google's only real line of business. I'm probably projecting too much of my own privacy-mindedness onto the general populace, though.
msoad 6y ago
Well said! In contrast to Apple which gives its projects time. Apple Arcade is growing slowly but surely. People who have kids don't mind signing up for it because it makes sense. Apple can iterate on Arcade with their now impressive chip design advantage. They can come to the consoles market at some point. I personally use my Xbox only for FIFA. It's a game that can probably run on M1 with no problem. I don't mind not spending $500 for my next console and have access to my FIFA on my iPhone and Mac
swiley 6y ago
Google grew into the incoherent American corporation long ago and is totally beyond salvaging. Unfortunately their inertia will let them keep steamrolling over people for another century just like GE does.

easton 6y ago

Part of me wonders why they didn’t buy Zenimax instead of Microsoft, and make the games Stadia exclusives. Good library, Google could afford it, and it would show how powerful the platform was (since things like Doom are the high action games people usually think suck on streaming). It’s like they built the tech, which is probably some of the best stuff out there (Stadia had less stutter for me than GeForce Now), and then they forgot to hire a few good business people to actually run the product, and then they wondered why it didn’t work. Why wasn’t it all-you-can-eat? Why didn’t they produce a single first party game from beginning to end for the release? Nothing makes a lot of sense here.

ibero 6y ago
i imagine Google did not buy Zenimax because they seem to operate on a very compressed timeline for their new projects which makes any corporate courtship hard to pull off. so unless Google came with an obscene "instant yes" offer to Zenimax then both sides would have had to enter some kind of protracted negotiations and talks, which doesn't seem to jive with Google's half in/half out attitude towards new products.
metiscus 6y ago
Can you imagine the outrage over Google making the next Elder Scrolls Stadia exclusive? I think a move like that might displace EA at the top of the hate pyramid for a bit. Microsoft is going to have some issues if they make the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout permanently XBox exclusive, and that's a well established console franchise that is well accepted for using exclusives to differentiate from Sony etc.

s_dev 6y ago

Stadia was terribly implemented -- almost nothing appealed to gamers from the pricing to the games -- I can't think of a single killer game. I recall it being originally annouced thinking Google -- like Apple -- don't get gaming and probably never will. It's classic -- we're big -- so we have a chance thinking we just need time to make it work. Stadia would have been much better implemented by startups. Google simply can't do "small" anymore. To be fair they're just too big. Microsoft is the only FANG that remotely gets gaming.

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mhh__ 6y ago
Cyberpunk probably should've been that game, in the sense that it ran like shit, in the middle of a huge GPU drought, but it wasn't very good.
- KingOfSheepX 6y ago
  Stadia and Geforce now were the only platforms that Cyberpunk ran great on when the game launched. Geforce customers had to wait in queue for a server so Stadia came out on top. Unfortunately, very few people know about it and Stadia didn't capitalize on marketing on the situation.
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- caconym_ 6y ago
  I want to know what games the "cyberpunk wasn't good" crowd is playing instead that scratch the same itch. At this point it just seems like a throwaway line from people who don't like the kind of game it is, and haven't played it for any meaningful amount of time. It has significant flaws, but there is also a lot to like about it.
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cletus 6y ago

Stadia is a project that should never gotten off the drawing board and it takes only two words to kill it. Input lag. That's not a technical problem. It's physics. In the very least it should've operated off existing launchers eg buy it in Stream and you can use it in Stadia. But honestly, the games where input lag isn't an issue is such a small subset that Stadia was only ever going to be a niche product.

hacoo 6y ago
Input lag while streaming is not that bad on a good connection. It won’t work for online FPS games (at least not if you want to win), but for slower FPS, RPGs, etc, it’s ok. This is based on my experience with Geforce Now, I haven’t tried Stadia. As for the business model though, you’re totally right. No way I’m going to buy a game and be locked into Stadia. Not only would I be prevented from playing locally, who knows how long Stadia will be around at this rate?
Rebelgecko 6y ago
GeForce Now has shown that when you depend on existing launchers like Steam, your service's library is can change based on the whims of 3rd parties
- dougmwne 6y ago
  That was mostly Stadia's fault for tying up exclusive streaming rights. If they die all the better for the industry.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    The steam games that I'm thinking of (chiefly MS Flight Sim) aren't on Stadia
- sgift 6y ago
  I really hope that there will be a court case that tells the game companies to stuff their objections where they belong and makes it clear that every game I've bought on Steam can be played on Geforce Now. I bought the game. I play it on a computer. The game companies should have zero rights to decide whether that computer sits under my desk or in a data center.

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jolux 6y ago

Google needs to release fewer products and maintain them longer. Simple as that.

Fergusonb 6y ago
I feel their strategy makes a lot of sense if each project is treated like a startup. Release the mvp, iterate quickly, shut it down if it isn't working... The problem is they attach the Google name for clout and then proceed to drag that name through the mud when they stop support. Google's name now isn't worth much to me if I'm considering an experimental product. They should not use the Google moniker unless they are willing to provide long term support.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  This was not a startup project. For Stadia to work they needed a lot of ties to the customer and games companies. > Release the mvp, iterate quickly, shut it down if it isn't working... This means that anyone integrating with your product takes huge gamble that you will be here in X months, why risk it? Google made none thinking that G factor is enough. Its basically Google+ 2.0 Throwing just some money into already occupied and competitive market and expecting things to happen is borderline fraud. Statia was a stillborn project sailing on a sinking ship made purely out of wishful thinking.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Except startups usually has a couple of people with nothing to fall back on, who will fight tooth and nail to try and succeed. Your average Google VP is far too comfortable - and with nowhere near enough humility - to stoop to that level.

me551ah 6y ago

Unlike other cloud gaming services like Geforce Now and xCloud , Stadia chose to use a platform which had very few existing native games i.e Linux. So it was in effect like the launch of a new console, since developers had to port their game to the new platform . But developers didn't have much of an incentive to since there weren't many users on Stadia. And users didn't have much of an incentive to use Stadia, since there were few games and their friends were on other platforms. It's a classic chicken and egg scenario.

ruph123 6y ago
The biggest difference (and problem for Stadia) was that you have to buy Stadia games as “Stadia games”. You cannot transfer them out, they are locked into a platform run by a company which is famous for shutting services down rather often. Why would anyone choose Stadia then? The nice thing about Geforce Now is that you can just run your already bought games on it. Just connect your account to Steam/Epic and you are good to go. You are just renting their hardware essentially.
- darkwizard42 6y ago
  This is truly the most baffling thing. Google could have truly just built a very tight end-to-end cloud hosted "streaming" product that would have leveraged all their Cloud infra to help you play YOUR games... just on any device through their UI. Pay a small hourly or monthly rate (think spot rate for cloud GPUs) and there... you have a business. Other people have done it sure and maybe that is why Stadia tried to go even bigger, but if they just launched a simple product like that I think it would have been a big hit (and truly hit the market of people who want to play the latest games at full settings but don't have the hardware to do so)
  - EveYoung 6y ago
    Is renting out data centre GPUs for cloud gaming currently financially feasible? Considering how much GCP charges for GPUs, I would be surprised if they would be able to offer it at an atractive price (~$10/month). Other providers' services look quite experimental and not ready for mass adoption as well.

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Sakos 6y ago

I am so glad that Stadia is floundering, if not failing. It's one of the worst things I've seen in the industry for consumers regarding consumer rights and freedom, and it's any publisher's wet dream. Imagine a platform where users can't mod in their own content or modify (or even improve) the experience in any way. They can go nuts with DLC and microtransactions. They can ensure we only get the experience they decide on. It's a nightmare for consumers and I hope it never gets off the ground.

chaostheory 6y ago
> Imagine a platform where users can't mod in their own content or modify (or even improve) the experience in any way. I don’t like Stadia, but doesn’t this describe most if not all major consoles?
- kuschku 6y ago
  Every console was hacked to allow mods. e.g. the smash bros community built mods such as Project M for the modded gamecube and Wii, and even mods of smash ultimate for the Switch.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Nothing is preventing anyone from hacking Stadia either, but the percentage of people who jail break their consoles is really low due to the complexity (most aren't techies), the amount of work involved, and because online multiplayer will most likely no longer work long term; or in Stadia's case - you can no longer access your games. I feel the parent comment was referring to PC gaming, where you don't need to do anything crazy to customize the games that you paid for.
Ashanmaril 6y ago
Stadia's death doesn't mean the death of game streaming. There's other competition in that area on the market (GeForce Now, XCloud, PS Now), and unfortunately it seems pretty much inevitable at this point (as much as I also hate the idea of it) But I can at least say I'm glad Google isn't getting a foothold in yet another area of technology

ziml77 6y ago

2020 was Stadia's best chance due to lockdown and GPU/console shortages and yet it's not doing very well. For a company that is known for shutting down services I don't understand why they went with a model that would cause all your games to disappear if they closed down Stadia. I think they would have stood a much better chance if they had used the GeForce Now model of your purchase just being a standard PC game or if they had gone with the Game Pass model where the games are part of the subscription.

local_dev 6y ago
Imagine if Google partnered with Valve to bring your steam library to Stadia. That would have instantly won over millions of gamers. I would have bought into Stadia so I could play my games while traveling. To me, someone that has been playing games for 30+ years, Stadia couldn't have been handled worse. They tried to pull a Microsoft and enter the gaming world, but forgot to have the killer app like Halo.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  I imagine Valve could just build their own game streaming service. They have a massive advantage over Google there.

sneak 6y ago

Fun Stadia story: pulled in by the lie of Google 4k cloud gpu gaming, I preordered a Stadia "founder's edition" controller + chromecast ultra setup kit for ~$100 + shipping. A couple days later, I got a notification from Google telling me my order had been cancelled, with no explanation or remediation/reorder path. The founder's edition pack was no longer available for sale. I gave up. A few weeks later, from Google: get a free Stadia founder's edition pack, just pay shipping! So, I did. It arrives, and you can't enable it without a) an app, and b) giving them all sorts of permissions. It also has an abysmal selection of games, and rarely in 4k. Now, they will presumably cancel it soon. This is too-much-money-itis.

philliphaydon 6y ago
Sounds like that android box a few years back. I forget the name, they kick started a crazy amount of money. Promised so much. Right before shipping it out they change it to require a credit card and too much info to turn the thing on. Ended up in the bin.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Sounds like that android box a few years back. I forget the name, they kick started a crazy amount of money. Promised so much. Right before shipping it out they change it to require a credit card and too much info to turn the thing on. Ended up in the bin. You mean OUYA. But no, OUYA was a complete disaster, one could argue that Stadia actually works, the problem is the business model and the weird way Google manages its products.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    It was good until it launched. Ouya. The changes just before launch killed the project IMO.
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  Are you thinking of the Ouya?

atkbrah 6y ago

A while ago I gave stadia a try figuring it was a netflix kind of service in which you pay a monthly fee for all the content. Turns out that in addition to that, you are supposed to actually purchase the games. Taken into account of google constantly pulling the plug on their services, that's not something I'm willing to do, so I cancelled my subscription.

hanniabu 6y ago
It's free to use for games you purchase. The membership comes with a bunch of free games and discounts for purchases.
axaxs 6y ago
This is where Microsoft has won. Gamepass is that. I don't even have to buy games anymore, there's so much available 'free' to play.

auiya 6y ago

Alphabet treats their toys much like a child does. They play with them for a few months, then quickly lose interest and let them languish until mom comes along and tosses them out. Why anyone would want to work there outside of their core product line is beyond me.

darkwizard42 6y ago

I think the scope of Stadia was just too damn big. Why launch with their own platform that requires you to buy Stadia games only... This could have easily been Google legitimizing streaming gaming by simply letting users pay an hourly/monthly fee to get a cloud machine and stream their own library to their device. Some level of optimization to make sure it works with various devices, latencies etc. and voila you probably have a GREAT product. THEN maybe a year out once you have a super engaged userbase try to build out the Stadia as a unique platform and get people to use and buy games for that natively. Just feels like a typical Google promo effort that wasn't thought out and brute forced in. Of course the people who worked on this launch will get their promos and no one will be around to help clean up the mess/improve it to a sustainable state.

standeven 6y ago

http://stadiacountdown.com/ http://stadiacountdown.com/ That countdown is starting to feel optimistic...

pier25 6y ago

Well... the good thing if Stadia shuts down is that Orcs Must Die 3 will definitely come to PC.

aboringusername 6y ago

I feel sorry for anyone who has brought into Stadia in any way, shape or form. This is soon to be headed to the dustbin of history and a prominent display in killedbygoogle.com. Many people predicted such things the moment it was announced - such is Google's terrible reputation - that they simple cannot be trusted to launch a new product and commit to it for years. I decided that I'd give ANY new Google project a minimum of 2-3 years (up to 5) before investing. If it shuts down in that time nothing has been lost. I do look forward to the rage when it just ups and dies and you're left with nothing, while I still have my ISOs and other media that cannot be taken by anyone, ever. What a farce.

camel_Snake 6y ago
Why? Stadia let me play games with friends I wouldn't have been able to otherwise on my 7 year old macbook air. Not everyone has a gaming pc and gaming consoles. I played Destiny (which is free) for a few months to try out the service, and it works fine for me. The community is easily way better than any other platform's community. It's a lot of casual/older players who just want to play a bit, not hardcore gamers who stream and watch streams. So. much. less. toxicity. It's wonderful. For the games I bought - I expect Stadia to shut down at some point. I never really replay games once I've beaten them, so I don't care if they end up disappearing from the library at some point. I've easily gotten my money's worth. Stadia definitely isn't for everyone, but I'm very glad it existed.

gre 6y ago

Rebrand it as Google Games.

rvz 6y ago

I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard. The fact no-one cared about their free trials, their own studios closing, Apple still barring Stadia and now many of the Stadia team leaving should be enough to tell you that Stadia's existence is almost over. How is it that people are 'still' waiting and scrambling for PS5's and Xbox Series X|S consoles since last year rather than going for Stadia's 'no-hardware' cloud gaming platform? If you can't grow during last year's strange times then you're really off to a slow start. So I'll sit back, relax and go back to my PC/console device?

leetrout 6y ago
> If you can't grow during last year's strange times then you're really off to a slow start. Exactly this
ozten 6y ago
I would argue that part of this was execution. I signed and then cancelled 20 minutes later as their catalog didn't have anything I wanted to play. I saw many similar comments on HN back then. It inspired me to setup my own EC2 Windows GPU box and buy some games on steam. Neat, but a PITA so I didn't continue with my DIY setup. Lastly Shadow cloud gaming PC has a lot of users (filed bankruptcy and recently acquired). https://shadow.tech/ https://shadow.tech/
EveYoung 6y ago
I tried it out when Stadia was launched but never got it to work reliably. Despide a wired 1gb fiber connection, I still got frame drops and lags quite frequently. While I wouldn't call it unplayable, it really doesn't compare well to dedicated consoles. Even for a very casual gamer myself, I feel an Xbox Series S is a better purchase.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  You played on wifi, right?

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

What a missed opportunity. It's a hard nut to crack, for sure, but Google doesn't seem to have the chops or the product mentality to innovate beyond... Search, really. Even GCP, despite being a multi-billion dollar #3 in the cloud wars, is still far away from being profitable. I'd say there's a chance that it will not survive many years.

1_person 6y ago

Cloud gaming is not a business venture, it's industry conspiracy to distort the market and capture exaggerated profits by raping the customer and calling it love. I have been following the technologies (direct frame buffer capture and inline encode) for a long time because they are also the enabling technologies for high performance locally clustered visualization. The features were at one point completely unrestricted in the driver, then one day cloud gaming was the next big thing and you had to buy a $10,000 GPU or be Steam to access those APIs. If you are interested in remote collaboration or scalable visualization you'll just have to hold your breath and wait to see if nVidia and others can strong arm children into economic exploitation, because the technologies are currently being held hostile while industry works through various lubrication formulations for the slope they intend to shove us down.

yrgulation 6y ago

“This latest departure is just another sign that Google's game-streaming service is circling the drain.”. Good. Hopefully Apple Arcade follows. Such services are a hindrance to indie game development and horrible to ownership rights.

akmarinov 6y ago

At this point it’ll be killed off before it launches in my Eastern European country