4 ms·

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

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...
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Just a few AAA games that already exist on most other platforms won't attract many though, especially if people have to pay full price for them individually without any trust that those games will still be accessible in a few years. Even less so after Google already broke promises on the first day to a degree they might face a class action lawsuit. Indie games and other smaller projects are also relevant to many, and there Google's offers were apparently so unattractive studios just dismissed them. There's a reason Google has to pay tens of millions to large studios while MS or Sony rarely do aside from exclusivity deals. The tendency to shut down products on such a regular basis killed any trust in Google supporting anything other than their ads and tracking; gamers don't know if Stadia will just disappear overnight with their games, studios don't know if they'll ever get their investment back, even if the service continues to run. > "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2?r=DE&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
  - tmpz22 5y ago
    Compared to the hundreds of millions the Epic Game Store spent to get exclusives, tens of millions is still very small.
    - jsnell 5y ago
      This is tens of millions *per game*. Not in total. Epic did notn pay hundreds of millions for any exclusive. But in addition to that, these are totally different cases and deal structures. Epic was giving minimum revenue guarantees, which they needed to do to offset the lost revenue from other platforms. Stadia was paying for ports, not for exclusivity. The publishers did not lose the opportunity to sell the games on Steam. (And they were paying it outright, not as an advance.) Seriously people. These are eye-popping amounts to pay for a port. Whatever the many product and business failures of Stadia were, an unwillingness to pay developers was not among those failures.

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...
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Just a few AAA games that already exist on most other platforms won't attract many though, especially if people have to pay full price for them individually without any trust that those games will still be accessible in a few years. Even less so after Google already broke promises on the first day to a degree they might face a class action lawsuit. Indie games and other smaller projects are also relevant to many, and there Google's offers were apparently so unattractive studios just dismissed them. There's a reason Google has to pay tens of millions to large studios while MS or Sony rarely do aside from exclusivity deals. The tendency to shut down products on such a regular basis killed any trust in Google supporting anything other than their ads and tracking; gamers don't know if Stadia will just disappear overnight with their games, studios don't know if they'll ever get their investment back, even if the service continues to run. > "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2?r=DE&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
- tmpz22 5y ago
  Compared to the hundreds of millions the Epic Game Store spent to get exclusives, tens of millions is still very small.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    This is tens of millions *per game*. Not in total. Epic did notn pay hundreds of millions for any exclusive. But in addition to that, these are totally different cases and deal structures. Epic was giving minimum revenue guarantees, which they needed to do to offset the lost revenue from other platforms. Stadia was paying for ports, not for exclusivity. The publishers did not lose the opportunity to sell the games on Steam. (And they were paying it outright, not as an advance.) Seriously people. These are eye-popping amounts to pay for a port. Whatever the many product and business failures of Stadia were, an unwillingness to pay developers was not among those failures.