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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 st

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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
  - nickthegreek 5y ago
    At this point, I'm worried that the service wont be around for when my pre-order of baldur's gate 3 goes live.
  - t0mbstone 5y ago
    This is the whole reason why I absolutely refused to buy a single game on Stadia while I was subscribed. I simply redeemed my free games every month. I was willing to pay $9 every month or whatever and get a couple of games that may or may not have been worth that much, but no way am I dropping $60 on a game when I know the entire service might disappear next year (given Google's track record).
- camel_Snake 5y ago
  I'm a stadia subscriber, so I've been hearing this forever. It may be true, but given the number of games they've launched recently, the Stadia Makers program, etc. it seems they're chugging along just fine. FWIW, I do expect Stadia to be canned at some point, I just don't think it's in the next year or two.
crowbahr 5y ago
They've killed off their in house game studio. The VP of Stadia is leaving. They recently (a few months ago before killing their studio) had a major "Sign up for stadia trial to get a free stadia controller and chromecast ultra" deal. Sounds a lot like inventory liquidation, flagging adoption and them giving up. It can take years to be an overnight success but they seem to have lost that vision.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  I mean, you could also see that as a pivot with a new type of product, as they see which market actually uses it. I along with others questioned why they were targeting hardcore gamers (who already have consoles and PCs) right out of the gates when the value it offers is to a more casual market.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > I along with others questioned why they were targeting hardcore gamers They didn't seem to know why they did anything with this product. Apparently they offered laughably low sums of money to developer studios for porting games to the Stadia platform (Google permabanning the Terraria developer's account while they were working on a Stadia port didn't boost the popularity either[0]), launched the thing pretending it's a finished product while beta versions of competitors were more stable, lied to consumers (4k resolution etc.), and had a pricing model that anyone familiar with the gaming market would have recognised as overly optimistic beforehand. Google shutting down products quickly is a problem, but not the one which prevented Stadia's success in the first place. [0] https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696 https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696
    - jsnell 5y ago
      > Apparently they offered laughably low sums of money to developer studios for porting games to the Stadia platform The reporting from Jason Schreier is that they were paying tens of millions of dollars per game for ports of AAA games. The data from the Capcom hack corraborates that. That is the opposite of laughably small. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-26/google-video-game-unit-stadia-struggled-to-be-googley-enough https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-26/google-vi...
an_opabinia 5y ago
Maybe. Maybe a bunch of people tried the game made at their studio, and it was bad. And if the first 1,000 enthusiasts used to trying new stuff don't like your game, the next 1,000,000 people aren't going to like it either. It's better for these people's careers to shutdown immediately and move onto something else, before you release something crummy. Isn't that what startups do anyway?
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  That's all fine and good when you are a company that merely provides a service, but it's a little different when you are selling actual software and games for $60 a pop that will evaporate into thin air if you shut down. Imagine if you bought a car from a dealership and the car stopped working when the dealership went out of business. Nobody would accept that as being OK!
runawaybottle 5y ago
Interestingly they are spending extra time on self driving tech with Waymo. I wonder if Google has a culture of taking ‘serious tech’ more seriously than say ... video games, and certainly over social.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Waymo has certainly been given a lot of latitude especially as fully autonomous has gone from "right around the corner" in the minds of many (admittedly in part because of what organizations like Waymo were saying) to something that may not be fully achieved for a long time.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
It's part Google's shitty product culture, but also part insurmountable technological barriers. Streaming games is not going to reach mainstream adoption because the latency of the Internet is too large. There's no coding around that. Barring some new material that allows light to travel faster through it, game streaming just isn't happening.
- philsnow 5y ago
  At least in the united states, the majority of people are in urban centers. Additionally the market for games skews young, just like the populations of urban centers. The vast majority of people in the united states are within 2 light-milliseconds (372 miles) of some urban area, and data centers are generally located in places with good connectivity to urban areas. I don't think latency is as big an issue for streaming gaming as you think.
  - tmpz22 5y ago
    Right but if your games only work great in urban centers, don't launch your games outside of that. Part of the problem with Stadia was the hubris they had at launch as shown through their marketing and pricing of the product. They came out like this was an A+ product when it was in fact a C product. If Stadia had come out slowly with a few key indie games, closed beta, natural growth, and humility, they wouldn't have an ounce of the vitriol they've received.
- ses1984 5y ago
  One thing google does pretty well is performance monitoring. They have loads and loads of clients connected to their services and they know exactly the performance they’re getting. Another thing google is good at is building data centers. They have them all over the place and they’re building more.
- bspammer 5y ago
  If you live in a major city (i.e. close to a datacenter) the latency is perfectly playable. Especially when you consider that the market for Stadia is not counterstrike pros who care about every millisecond. I really believe that the reason Stadia hasn't taken off yet is the limited game selection, and non-existent marketing. Technically it's really good, but there's only like 3 games on there that I have even a vague interest in playing. Everyone hates epic for buying out exclusive rights for a bunch of games, but it's certainly a strategy that has worked out for them. The Epic store is now a genuine competitor to Steam.

penagwin 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- nickthegreek 5y ago
  At this point, I'm worried that the service wont be around for when my pre-order of baldur's gate 3 goes live.
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  This is the whole reason why I absolutely refused to buy a single game on Stadia while I was subscribed. I simply redeemed my free games every month. I was willing to pay $9 every month or whatever and get a couple of games that may or may not have been worth that much, but no way am I dropping $60 on a game when I know the entire service might disappear next year (given Google's track record).
camel_Snake 5y ago
I'm a stadia subscriber, so I've been hearing this forever. It may be true, but given the number of games they've launched recently, the Stadia Makers program, etc. it seems they're chugging along just fine. FWIW, I do expect Stadia to be canned at some point, I just don't think it's in the next year or two.

crowbahr 5y ago

They've killed off their in house game studio. The VP of Stadia is leaving. They recently (a few months ago before killing their studio) had a major "Sign up for stadia trial to get a free stadia controller and chromecast ultra" deal. Sounds a lot like inventory liquidation, flagging adoption and them giving up. It can take years to be an overnight success but they seem to have lost that vision.

minsc__and__boo 5y ago
I mean, you could also see that as a pivot with a new type of product, as they see which market actually uses it. I along with others questioned why they were targeting hardcore gamers (who already have consoles and PCs) right out of the gates when the value it offers is to a more casual market.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > I along with others questioned why they were targeting hardcore gamers They didn't seem to know why they did anything with this product. Apparently they offered laughably low sums of money to developer studios for porting games to the Stadia platform (Google permabanning the Terraria developer's account while they were working on a Stadia port didn't boost the popularity either[0]), launched the thing pretending it's a finished product while beta versions of competitors were more stable, lied to consumers (4k resolution etc.), and had a pricing model that anyone familiar with the gaming market would have recognised as overly optimistic beforehand. Google shutting down products quickly is a problem, but not the one which prevented Stadia's success in the first place. [0] https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696 https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696
  - jsnell 5y ago
    > Apparently they offered laughably low sums of money to developer studios for porting games to the Stadia platform The reporting from Jason Schreier is that they were paying tens of millions of dollars per game for ports of AAA games. The data from the Capcom hack corraborates that. That is the opposite of laughably small. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-26/google-video-game-unit-stadia-struggled-to-be-googley-enough https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-26/google-vi...

an_opabinia 5y ago

Maybe. Maybe a bunch of people tried the game made at their studio, and it was bad. And if the first 1,000 enthusiasts used to trying new stuff don't like your game, the next 1,000,000 people aren't going to like it either. It's better for these people's careers to shutdown immediately and move onto something else, before you release something crummy. Isn't that what startups do anyway?

t0mbstone 5y ago
That's all fine and good when you are a company that merely provides a service, but it's a little different when you are selling actual software and games for $60 a pop that will evaporate into thin air if you shut down. Imagine if you bought a car from a dealership and the car stopped working when the dealership went out of business. Nobody would accept that as being OK!

runawaybottle 5y ago

Interestingly they are spending extra time on self driving tech with Waymo. I wonder if Google has a culture of taking ‘serious tech’ more seriously than say ... video games, and certainly over social.

ghaff 5y ago
Waymo has certainly been given a lot of latitude especially as fully autonomous has gone from "right around the corner" in the minds of many (admittedly in part because of what organizations like Waymo were saying) to something that may not be fully achieved for a long time.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

It's part Google's shitty product culture, but also part insurmountable technological barriers. Streaming games is not going to reach mainstream adoption because the latency of the Internet is too large. There's no coding around that. Barring some new material that allows light to travel faster through it, game streaming just isn't happening.

philsnow 5y ago
At least in the united states, the majority of people are in urban centers. Additionally the market for games skews young, just like the populations of urban centers. The vast majority of people in the united states are within 2 light-milliseconds (372 miles) of some urban area, and data centers are generally located in places with good connectivity to urban areas. I don't think latency is as big an issue for streaming gaming as you think.
- tmpz22 5y ago
  Right but if your games only work great in urban centers, don't launch your games outside of that. Part of the problem with Stadia was the hubris they had at launch as shown through their marketing and pricing of the product. They came out like this was an A+ product when it was in fact a C product. If Stadia had come out slowly with a few key indie games, closed beta, natural growth, and humility, they wouldn't have an ounce of the vitriol they've received.
ses1984 5y ago
One thing google does pretty well is performance monitoring. They have loads and loads of clients connected to their services and they know exactly the performance they’re getting. Another thing google is good at is building data centers. They have them all over the place and they’re building more.
bspammer 5y ago
If you live in a major city (i.e. close to a datacenter) the latency is perfectly playable. Especially when you consider that the market for Stadia is not counterstrike pros who care about every millisecond. I really believe that the reason Stadia hasn't taken off yet is the limited game selection, and non-existent marketing. Technically it's really good, but there's only like 3 games on there that I have even a vague interest in playing. Everyone hates epic for buying out exclusive rights for a bunch of games, but it's certainly a strategy that has worked out for them. The Epic store is now a genuine competitor to Steam.