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Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches Their Noses

105 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

riku45100 5y ago
IF everything is fine, then why do I get a connection problem when am using a wired connection and have a 1GB net connection, which my average is 800mb, if they mean fine what does that mean.
- hluska 5y ago
  That's where marketing folk trot out phrases like "we're continuing to add value to the entire ecosystem for each of our stakeholder groups". When you convert that from marketing to English it means "you're SOL."
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Because the actual usage in your region is high enough that the edge servers they use there are saturated? Which is a problem in the way that selling out a concert venue is a problem.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    No, it's a problem in the way that overselling a concert is a problem.
alpaca128 5y ago
A more interesting question would be: "How long will it stay fine?" If Google is (officially) that confident Stadia is doing well why don't they officially commit to support the product for the next X years?
- jsnell 5y ago
  Because a promise to support the product for X years would just be twisted to "the product will be killed in X years" headlines. You can't fight a double standard like that, the best you can do is avoid feeding it.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Even so, will be killed in 5 years makes me more confident in trying it than knowing it could be killed at any moment or in 6 months. 5 years is the life of a game console.
    - dontblink 5y ago
      For you maybe. For many of the rest of us we would avoid it like the plague.
      - MattGaiser 5y ago
        But likely for reasons that have little to do with how long it will last.
      - zamadatix 5y ago
        I'd be curious how many of that demographic aren't already avoiding it like the plague for the originally stated reasoning though. I.e. it's not likely the lack of any guarantee is making many in that group any more confident the service will be here in 6 years in the first place.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    But at least it would give clarity. Right now both dev studios and gamers are very cautious because they have no idea whether Stadia will exist for 5 more weeks or 5+ years. In a time when courts are trying to decide whether an online "purchase" is actually a purchase or if the company can just make it inaccessible over night this is not a good situation. The way Google communicates does not help, on one hand they say everything is fine, on the other hand they just closed their dev studio days after telling their employees everything's fine. It's hard for them to make Stadia seem even riskier than it looks right now.
- gregmac 5y ago
  This. Google must be well aware of their reputation. It boggles my mind why they keep repeating the same pattern. Maybe it's just my bubble (HN, tech twitter, like-minded friends) but it certainly seems like everyone in it is loathe to adopt new Google stuff, precisely because they have a reputation going back 15+ years of mercilessly killing anything they release, no matter how great it is. I would bet if they commit to maintaining a product for x years (and continually extend that timeline) they'd see a lot more use.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
916 days to go. http://stadiacountdown.com http://stadiacountdown.com
refulgentis 5y ago
Is the article conflating creating 1st party games for an empty service versus choosing _not_ to create 1st party games for a busy service? I don't 100% grok this, i.e. it seems like good news where the article implies bad news, but other media outlets mentioned there's a 4x spike in gamepad usage in last 6 weeks on the web, and it correlates to Stadia's free tier release: https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/1916 https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popula...
- creshal 5y ago
  4x increase compared to what baseline? And will these curious people trying it out convert to paying customers or will people give up on it again, like they apparently did in April 2020?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Jabbles 5y ago
Google spent tens of millions of dollars bringing big games to their platform The gaming industry has >$100 billion of revenue per year. Surely these kinds of costs are/were expected. Microsoft famously lost money on every Xbox sold for many years.
- Fede_V 5y ago
  Microsoft almost certainly still loses money on the Xbox itself.
  - creshal 5y ago
    Every console loses money on the hardware, because you'll immediately make up for it with software sales. Stadia's still struggling with the latter part.
    - dbish 5y ago
      Yeah, generally gaming hardware is a loss leader
    - woutifier 5y ago
      Microsoft recently confirmed that they have always lost money on their consoles (during the Apple vs Epic proceedings). In contrast, Nintendo usually makes a profit on selling their hardware.
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      AFAIK Nintendo is not necessarily in the business of losing money on hardware, especially if you count accessories like their controllers. I'd need to see numbers to believe that they lose money on the Switch, I suspect that thing is profitable.
      - majewsky 5y ago
        > I suspect that thing is profitable. According to a Bloomberg article from January 2017 (just before the release of the Switch) concerning Nintendo's yearly earnings report, > While game consoles are usually sold at a loss early in their life cycles, the Switch will be profitable from the start, Nintendo said. Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170131084504/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/nintendo-beats-profit-lifts-forecast-on-pokemon-ahead-of-switch https://web.archive.org/web/20170131084504/https://www.bloom... (the URL also works without web.archive.org, but the current version contains a paywall)
ajross 5y ago
Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten. Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain great. Play a AAA game on a $180 chromebook with basically identical resource consumption to watching Netflix. But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution. The indie folks couldn't be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn't going to match Valve's creator services community. Google isn't willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives... Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve. A Steam/Stadia would rule the world.
- liaukovv 5y ago
  It's not like the proposition is good from user point of view either. You "buy" a right to rent games, which right can be terminated by google for any reason, or no reason at all. Even if you really bought a game and google would give it back to you when they inevitably shut down the service, you still wouldnt be able to play it, since the whole point of stadia is to not own the hardware.
  - creshal 5y ago
    Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind. It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …
    - dvdkon 5y ago
      The main difference to me is that Steam is an established platform with a reputation for not pulling games for no reason and also the fact that there's always "extralegal" ways to play that same game if Steam does pull it. That's not the case with streaming-exclusive games (and sometimes iOS games, sadly).
      - WesleyHale 5y ago
        Exactly, and steam isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so I don't have to worry more about the game itself becoming dated or unsuccessful and pulling down their servers way before Steam decides does.
fnord77 5y ago
messaging in big corporate entities is like soviet totalitarian states. they'll swear up and down everything is great, even as the radiation detectors are off the scale.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  "CDPR execs laughing when asked about Stadia share of sales. Not great not terrible."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
franczesko 5y ago
One of the biggest problems Google has is that they excel at engineering, but they lack proper marketing talent. Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform. During covid time that's truly a lost opportunity. I'm wondering how many of their products were killed just because of the fact, that there was no plan beyond letting it out in the market.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gretch 5y ago
  Disclosure: work at google, not on stadia Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the “Netflix of gaming”. I double knew it was over when I watched Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can’t make moves like that, you aren’t going to outcompete
  - toast0 5y ago
    You have to pay for the games and you can't take them with you and we know Google will shut this down eventually. It would be different if you could use your existing licenses, or even if you could buy on Stadia and play on something else too. License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have more than one frame of latency to start with.
    - akmarinov 5y ago
      There’s GeForce Now, where you still pay for the games but can take them with you (Steam) and it’s not like that’s super prosperous.
      - strogonoff 5y ago
        I heard people have to queue for a while in order to be able to play GeForce Now. The demand is very much exceeding the supply here.
piger 5y ago
I jumped on Stadia with Resident Evil 8: on PC (Win 10) I had constant frame drops with Chrome, fixed by installing Chrome Canary. Not a great start, but after that the game played perfectly. Then I got the chromecast ultra + pad bundle, too bad by the time it arrived I already completed Resident Evil; the onboarding is kinda silly, having to download one app to set up the chromecast and one to set up the controller, logging in to Google twice.. but the real problem is the selection of available games. Very very few recent/new games, a bunch of random indie games, a bag of generic old shooters… and that’s it
gman83 5y ago
This is such a bad faith article.
causality0 5y ago
It's grimly hilarious that Google picked a business model that was so bad they couldn't make Stadia a success in a time period that could not be more suited to it. Hardware costs are insane. Consoles are nearly impossible to get. The GPU market is destroyed by semiconductor shortages and crypto miners. Yet Google's reputation is so god-fucking-awful people still won't bite on their "we promise we won't treat this service like we've treated literally everything else we've ever made" product. It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet anymore.
- SimeVidas 5y ago
  > Yet Google’s reputation is so god-fucking-awful Where? In the HN bubble? Ok.
  - theonemind 5y ago
    Yes. That matters immensely. This is not just any bubble, but the bubble of the people who drive technology adoption...by writing articles on tech, by having friends trust their judgment, and so on. It is a leading indicator, not a lagging one.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      Gmail has well over a billion users. The number of people who search with Google is in the multiple billions. The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter at all to the general public who just want to accomplish their communication and search tasks. HN isn't even a blip on the radar.
      - alexpetralia 5y ago
        Early adopters matter early in the adoption curve, not late.
      - interestica 5y ago
bartread 5y ago
I like playing games. I like playing them a lot but the reality is that these days I don't do it that much. I'm about as far from a hardcore gamer as it's possible to get, although the games I tend to play overlap significantly with what more "serious" gamers might choose to play (I'm not really at all into the category of games generally described as "casual" these days). That community is full to the gunwales with people who will complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine), polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so, I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly - online shooters and racers. Why do I bring this up? Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection. If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16 frames of latency in the worst case. Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true. But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to, where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore" games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great playing experience. Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to make for a pretty annoying gaming experience. Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the dinosaurs in The Sound of Thunder: it's already dead but it's too stupid to realise it.
edent 5y ago
It is such a confusing proposition to buy. I got a discount offer for the Stadia (£60) but I couldn't find an official list of what games are available, or how much they cost! Then I found out that if I wanted the 4K streaming it'd be an extra tenner a month! At which point it is cheaper to buy a 2nd hand PS4. And, that way, I can buy 2nd hand games if I want.
27182818284 5y ago
I gave Stadia a try a while back. It worked really well, but I was instantly disappointed by the game selection. When you advertise being able to play the latest, coolest games to me, I expect there to be a selection of the coolest, latest, games. I was really thinking I'd be able to play the latest, Doom incarnation and such. If I recall correctly, Doom was there but at a separate additional cost that made it very unattractive to me. I think I did the free trial plus one addition month of paid before I gave up on it.
- gundmc 5y ago
  The game selection has improved a lot, but is still the weak point. Resident Evil, Cyberpunk, Madden, FIFA, etc were huge wins. Ubisoft seems all in on Stadia and streaming more broadly. If they can work out a deal to get the upcoming Division Battle Royale as a true free to play on Stadia that could breathe life into the user base.
MintsJohn 5y ago
I tried stadia, didn't convince me at all, it was rather a let down. The most jarring was the sound, it stuttered. The video was fluent enough, but seemed horribly compressed (washed out and artifacts) and low res (but I have a 4k monitor). Yet when I hear others talk about it its nearly the same as running a game local, or even better when, like me, you don't have the latest and greatest videocard. I suppose the bottleneck was my Internet connection, a "lowly" 30 Mbps, but then again, it's good enough for everything else, and the stadia test thingy said I should expect a high quality experience.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  I have a 2080, and I don't see a difference on Stadia. I have a really good connection though.
gman83 5y ago
I hope it sticks around. I have a Mac and a Nintendo Switch for the kids so I don't really have a good way to play games, unless I buy a console. I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia and it's been great. No downloads is great. I honestly don't really care if they shut it down in a couple of years, personally once I beat a game I don't really go back to it. In the meantime they're giving me a super powerful gaming PC for basically nothing.
- mr_tristan 5y ago
  I'm in a similar boat: if Stadia isn't here, I'm pretty much praying that Luna continues, because honestly, the other option is mobile games. A gaming PC or console does not interest me any more. It's a different kind of lifestyle, really. But my approach to games is very similar - once I play it through I rarely go back to it. Outside of some strategy games like Civilization, of course. It really feels like Stadia could have led to a new kind of gaming market, but they didn't. And they don't seem to have the leadership to make that happen.
emptysongglass 5y ago
I love Stadia and hope it doesn't go anywhere. Playing Destiny 2 with my wife during Corona with free controllers we got for preordering Cyberpunk was an awesome experience. Playing Cyberpunk and then RE7: Biohazard during quick breaks, anywhere, on a potato laptop, convinced me that this is the way we're all going to be playing games not long from now. Looking forward to playing Resident Evil 8: Village once I finish Biohazard.
- supergirl 5y ago
  that potato laptop costs more than the latest playstation though. and it can't really be a potato laptop. you need a good internet connection and good video decoding
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Almost every processor made in the last 10 years has the power to decode 1080p 30fps. That's an entry-level feature on a phone, let alone a tablet or laptop.
  - esturk 5y ago
    A chromebook costs half of a PS5.
- smnscu 5y ago
  I finished RE8 on Stadia on launch day; it looks great on PC but for some reason it looks even better on a TV with the CCU. As someone who's put hundreds of £s and hours into Stadia, I'm quite content with it, I wish it had more games though, most of the free titles that come with Stadia Pro are ridiculous (though, to be fair, they did help me discover gems such as The West of Loathing).
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It works really well, it's really a very convincing experience. It's particularly attractive now that Google throws cash at you in the form of free controller + Chromecast.
butz 5y ago
On one hand game streaming is great, as it reduces hardware requirements, but not having actual game files on your PC might not give some gamers a chance to experience game modding or "hacking", that usually leads to learning how games are built, and even how computers work.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It's not different from consoles for that.
oblak 5y ago
After seeing the news about a Quake 3 client hitting the front page, I can't help but ask my fellow shooter fans who have tried stadia or another such service: how bad was it?
- Jyaif 5y ago
  Well unfortunately there's no equivalent to Quake 3 on Stadia, nowadays the FPS are all controller-friendly crap. The controller friendly crap works well on Stadia.
- dsissitka 5y ago
  I think it's alright for casual gaming. It's limited to 60 FPS and even in games like Orcs Must Die! 3 it struggles to maintain that. There are compression artifacts. If you've got a gaming rig with an NVIDIA GPU Moonlight performs much better.
kossTKR 5y ago
http://shadow.tech http://shadow.tech is still way better - you get your own PC so can run all games and work related software, stream 4k with 10ms latency from datacenters near you, it's almost impossible to discern a difference from running locally. All for 12$ a month, a stupid low price. Sadly this has made them go bankrupt - but have been bought out recently so the future is uncertain. Point being the market is more than ripe for this tech to accelerate - and shadow has had 1 year waiting lists, for years, so it's weird to me that more money isn't poured into this space.
- danielbln 5y ago
  You also get to deal with game downloads, updates, system maintenance and all the other stuff that I really don't want to deal with if I just want to quickly play a streamed game. (and that's if you can even get a shadow box before the end of the year).
  - kossTKR 5y ago
    True, but personally i haven't had any hassle. Blazing fast connection speeds so you just install steam or another client and download your games, updates are super fast too. But yeah, the perfect platform would be 1-click games - but then you can't mod and have way less games available because publishers as in the film industry just cant figure out licensing.
- hocuspocus 5y ago
  The business plan submitted by OVH to the bankruptcy court says the monthly subscription will need to be raised to $25 in hope for profitability within 3 years. It seems inherently complicated to provide the required CPU and GPU resources in an elastic way, when most gamers play at the same peak hours.
hedora 5y ago
I imagine these streaming game services would be much more successful if the model was “stream an arbitrary gaming desktop to your random device,” but then they couldn’t double dip by charging for the service and also the games.
angus-prune 5y ago
The original Xbox lost $5-7 billion in 5 years Epic games has lost $593m on the Epic Game Store in 3 years Apple invested $500m in Apple Arcade (and that was on an existing hardware install base). I couldn't find how much Google has spent on Stadia, but it doesn't seem to have approached it as the long-term, expensive investment that it required.
jollybean 5y ago
Nobody cares about 'Stadia'. They care about the titles. Give people a 'Halo' exclusive, or go home. 80% of the business plan relies on hard hitting amazing exclusive titles. And of course massively subsidized hardware. And a long term vision. It's sad because the model looked kind of cool, I'll never get to try it out ...
nailer 5y ago
Stadia user here. Purchased Cyberpunk on Stadia and saw first hand it was broken. Never got past the intro mission. Stadia flat refused to give me a refund.
esturk 5y ago
Stadia could be more than just gaming. Imagine every software that people have complained doesn't work on a chromebook like Photoshop. Now imagine when you can stream those apps through Stadia such that essentially Chromebook + Stadia => every PC Which is to say, Google can always pivot enterprise apps.
drumhead 5y ago
I use Stadia, its actually very good, its fantastic technically, but it should have been a subscription service with Google doing what Epic did by throwing money at developers to get games on their platform, they should also have used it as a way of showcasing demo's of games. Im not going to buy anymore games on it now, its probably going to be shuttered in before the end of the year, which is a tragedy, because it could have been something special.
- ChrisLTD 5y ago
  FWIW, they do offer free games to Pro subscribers. It’s just not even close to as generous as what you get from GamePass.
elzbardico 5y ago
Frankly. I was afraid of Stadia because I don’t want an advertising company being a dominant force in gaming. Google and Facebook are toxic companies. I am far more comfortable with the traditional players in this space: Sony, Steam and Microsoft not to f* gaming like Facebook and google f* the web
jhanschoo 5y ago
I wonder if the partnerships just fundamentally don't work if you aren't NVIDIA. Running games on servers require more expensive GPUs/performance from NVIDIA than their consumer GeForce cards. And Google faces another disadvantage: NVIDIA has leverage with game companies that use their technology, Microsoft publishes games, but Google doesn't have such leverage with popular games.

105 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

IF everything is fine, then why do I get a connection problem when am using a wired connection and have a 1GB net connection, which my average is 800mb, if they mean fine what does that mean.

hluska 5y ago
That's where marketing folk trot out phrases like "we're continuing to add value to the entire ecosystem for each of our stakeholder groups". When you convert that from marketing to English it means "you're SOL."
dragonwriter 5y ago
Because the actual usage in your region is high enough that the edge servers they use there are saturated? Which is a problem in the way that selling out a concert venue is a problem.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  No, it's a problem in the way that overselling a concert is a problem.

alpaca128 5y ago

A more interesting question would be: "How long will it stay fine?" If Google is (officially) that confident Stadia is doing well why don't they officially commit to support the product for the next X years?

jsnell 5y ago
Because a promise to support the product for X years would just be twisted to "the product will be killed in X years" headlines. You can't fight a double standard like that, the best you can do is avoid feeding it.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Even so, will be killed in 5 years makes me more confident in trying it than knowing it could be killed at any moment or in 6 months. 5 years is the life of a game console.
  - dontblink 5y ago
    For you maybe. For many of the rest of us we would avoid it like the plague.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      But likely for reasons that have little to do with how long it will last.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      I'd be curious how many of that demographic aren't already avoiding it like the plague for the originally stated reasoning though. I.e. it's not likely the lack of any guarantee is making many in that group any more confident the service will be here in 6 years in the first place.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  But at least it would give clarity. Right now both dev studios and gamers are very cautious because they have no idea whether Stadia will exist for 5 more weeks or 5+ years. In a time when courts are trying to decide whether an online "purchase" is actually a purchase or if the company can just make it inaccessible over night this is not a good situation. The way Google communicates does not help, on one hand they say everything is fine, on the other hand they just closed their dev studio days after telling their employees everything's fine. It's hard for them to make Stadia seem even riskier than it looks right now.
gregmac 5y ago
This. Google must be well aware of their reputation. It boggles my mind why they keep repeating the same pattern. Maybe it's just my bubble (HN, tech twitter, like-minded friends) but it certainly seems like everyone in it is loathe to adopt new Google stuff, precisely because they have a reputation going back 15+ years of mercilessly killing anything they release, no matter how great it is. I would bet if they commit to maintaining a product for x years (and continually extend that timeline) they'd see a lot more use.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

916 days to go. http://stadiacountdown.com http://stadiacountdown.com

refulgentis 5y ago

Is the article conflating creating 1st party games for an empty service versus choosing _not_ to create 1st party games for a busy service? I don't 100% grok this, i.e. it seems like good news where the article implies bad news, but other media outlets mentioned there's a 4x spike in gamepad usage in last 6 weeks on the web, and it correlates to Stadia's free tier release: https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/1916 https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popula...

creshal 5y ago
4x increase compared to what baseline? And will these curious people trying it out convert to paying customers or will people give up on it again, like they apparently did in April 2020?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Jabbles 5y ago

Google spent tens of millions of dollars bringing big games to their platform The gaming industry has >$100 billion of revenue per year. Surely these kinds of costs are/were expected. Microsoft famously lost money on every Xbox sold for many years.

Fede_V 5y ago
Microsoft almost certainly still loses money on the Xbox itself.
- creshal 5y ago
  Every console loses money on the hardware, because you'll immediately make up for it with software sales. Stadia's still struggling with the latter part.
  - dbish 5y ago
    Yeah, generally gaming hardware is a loss leader
  - woutifier 5y ago
    Microsoft recently confirmed that they have always lost money on their consoles (during the Apple vs Epic proceedings). In contrast, Nintendo usually makes a profit on selling their hardware.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    AFAIK Nintendo is not necessarily in the business of losing money on hardware, especially if you count accessories like their controllers. I'd need to see numbers to believe that they lose money on the Switch, I suspect that thing is profitable.
    - majewsky 5y ago
      > I suspect that thing is profitable. According to a Bloomberg article from January 2017 (just before the release of the Switch) concerning Nintendo's yearly earnings report, > While game consoles are usually sold at a loss early in their life cycles, the Switch will be profitable from the start, Nintendo said. Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170131084504/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/nintendo-beats-profit-lifts-forecast-on-pokemon-ahead-of-switch https://web.archive.org/web/20170131084504/https://www.bloom... (the URL also works without web.archive.org, but the current version contains a paywall)

ajross 5y ago

Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten. Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain great. Play a AAA game on a $180 chromebook with basically identical resource consumption to watching Netflix. But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution. The indie folks couldn't be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn't going to match Valve's creator services community. Google isn't willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives... Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve. A Steam/Stadia would rule the world.

liaukovv 5y ago
It's not like the proposition is good from user point of view either. You "buy" a right to rent games, which right can be terminated by google for any reason, or no reason at all. Even if you really bought a game and google would give it back to you when they inevitably shut down the service, you still wouldnt be able to play it, since the whole point of stadia is to not own the hardware.
- creshal 5y ago
  Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind. It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    The main difference to me is that Steam is an established platform with a reputation for not pulling games for no reason and also the fact that there's always "extralegal" ways to play that same game if Steam does pull it. That's not the case with streaming-exclusive games (and sometimes iOS games, sadly).
    - WesleyHale 5y ago
      Exactly, and steam isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so I don't have to worry more about the game itself becoming dated or unsuccessful and pulling down their servers way before Steam decides does.

fnord77 5y ago

messaging in big corporate entities is like soviet totalitarian states. they'll swear up and down everything is great, even as the radiation detectors are off the scale.

Mindwipe 5y ago
"CDPR execs laughing when asked about Stadia share of sales. Not great not terrible."

deleted 5y ago

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franczesko 5y ago

One of the biggest problems Google has is that they excel at engineering, but they lack proper marketing talent. Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform. During covid time that's truly a lost opportunity. I'm wondering how many of their products were killed just because of the fact, that there was no plan beyond letting it out in the market.

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gretch 5y ago
Disclosure: work at google, not on stadia Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the “Netflix of gaming”. I double knew it was over when I watched Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can’t make moves like that, you aren’t going to outcompete
- toast0 5y ago
  You have to pay for the games and you can't take them with you and we know Google will shut this down eventually. It would be different if you could use your existing licenses, or even if you could buy on Stadia and play on something else too. License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have more than one frame of latency to start with.
  - akmarinov 5y ago
    There’s GeForce Now, where you still pay for the games but can take them with you (Steam) and it’s not like that’s super prosperous.
    - strogonoff 5y ago
      I heard people have to queue for a while in order to be able to play GeForce Now. The demand is very much exceeding the supply here.

piger 5y ago

I jumped on Stadia with Resident Evil 8: on PC (Win 10) I had constant frame drops with Chrome, fixed by installing Chrome Canary. Not a great start, but after that the game played perfectly. Then I got the chromecast ultra + pad bundle, too bad by the time it arrived I already completed Resident Evil; the onboarding is kinda silly, having to download one app to set up the chromecast and one to set up the controller, logging in to Google twice.. but the real problem is the selection of available games. Very very few recent/new games, a bunch of random indie games, a bag of generic old shooters… and that’s it

gman83 5y ago

This is such a bad faith article.

causality0 5y ago

It's grimly hilarious that Google picked a business model that was so bad they couldn't make Stadia a success in a time period that could not be more suited to it. Hardware costs are insane. Consoles are nearly impossible to get. The GPU market is destroyed by semiconductor shortages and crypto miners. Yet Google's reputation is so god-fucking-awful people still won't bite on their "we promise we won't treat this service like we've treated literally everything else we've ever made" product. It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet anymore.

SimeVidas 5y ago
> Yet Google’s reputation is so god-fucking-awful Where? In the HN bubble? Ok.
- theonemind 5y ago
  Yes. That matters immensely. This is not just any bubble, but the bubble of the people who drive technology adoption...by writing articles on tech, by having friends trust their judgment, and so on. It is a leading indicator, not a lagging one.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Gmail has well over a billion users. The number of people who search with Google is in the multiple billions. The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter at all to the general public who just want to accomplish their communication and search tasks. HN isn't even a blip on the radar.
    - alexpetralia 5y ago
      Early adopters matter early in the adoption curve, not late.
    - interestica 5y ago

bartread 5y ago

I like playing games. I like playing them a lot but the reality is that these days I don't do it that much. I'm about as far from a hardcore gamer as it's possible to get, although the games I tend to play overlap significantly with what more "serious" gamers might choose to play (I'm not really at all into the category of games generally described as "casual" these days). That community is full to the gunwales with people who will complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine), polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so, I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly - online shooters and racers. Why do I bring this up? Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection. If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16 frames of latency in the worst case. Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true. But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to, where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore" games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great playing experience. Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to make for a pretty annoying gaming experience. Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the dinosaurs in The Sound of Thunder: it's already dead but it's too stupid to realise it.

edent 5y ago

It is such a confusing proposition to buy. I got a discount offer for the Stadia (£60) but I couldn't find an official list of what games are available, or how much they cost! Then I found out that if I wanted the 4K streaming it'd be an extra tenner a month! At which point it is cheaper to buy a 2nd hand PS4. And, that way, I can buy 2nd hand games if I want.

27182818284 5y ago

I gave Stadia a try a while back. It worked really well, but I was instantly disappointed by the game selection. When you advertise being able to play the latest, coolest games to me, I expect there to be a selection of the coolest, latest, games. I was really thinking I'd be able to play the latest, Doom incarnation and such. If I recall correctly, Doom was there but at a separate additional cost that made it very unattractive to me. I think I did the free trial plus one addition month of paid before I gave up on it.

gundmc 5y ago
The game selection has improved a lot, but is still the weak point. Resident Evil, Cyberpunk, Madden, FIFA, etc were huge wins. Ubisoft seems all in on Stadia and streaming more broadly. If they can work out a deal to get the upcoming Division Battle Royale as a true free to play on Stadia that could breathe life into the user base.

MintsJohn 5y ago

I tried stadia, didn't convince me at all, it was rather a let down. The most jarring was the sound, it stuttered. The video was fluent enough, but seemed horribly compressed (washed out and artifacts) and low res (but I have a 4k monitor). Yet when I hear others talk about it its nearly the same as running a game local, or even better when, like me, you don't have the latest and greatest videocard. I suppose the bottleneck was my Internet connection, a "lowly" 30 Mbps, but then again, it's good enough for everything else, and the stadia test thingy said I should expect a high quality experience.

benhurmarcel 5y ago
I have a 2080, and I don't see a difference on Stadia. I have a really good connection though.

gman83 5y ago

I hope it sticks around. I have a Mac and a Nintendo Switch for the kids so I don't really have a good way to play games, unless I buy a console. I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia and it's been great. No downloads is great. I honestly don't really care if they shut it down in a couple of years, personally once I beat a game I don't really go back to it. In the meantime they're giving me a super powerful gaming PC for basically nothing.

mr_tristan 5y ago
I'm in a similar boat: if Stadia isn't here, I'm pretty much praying that Luna continues, because honestly, the other option is mobile games. A gaming PC or console does not interest me any more. It's a different kind of lifestyle, really. But my approach to games is very similar - once I play it through I rarely go back to it. Outside of some strategy games like Civilization, of course. It really feels like Stadia could have led to a new kind of gaming market, but they didn't. And they don't seem to have the leadership to make that happen.

emptysongglass 5y ago

I love Stadia and hope it doesn't go anywhere. Playing Destiny 2 with my wife during Corona with free controllers we got for preordering Cyberpunk was an awesome experience. Playing Cyberpunk and then RE7: Biohazard during quick breaks, anywhere, on a potato laptop, convinced me that this is the way we're all going to be playing games not long from now. Looking forward to playing Resident Evil 8: Village once I finish Biohazard.

supergirl 5y ago
that potato laptop costs more than the latest playstation though. and it can't really be a potato laptop. you need a good internet connection and good video decoding
- michaelt 5y ago
  Almost every processor made in the last 10 years has the power to decode 1080p 30fps. That's an entry-level feature on a phone, let alone a tablet or laptop.
- esturk 5y ago
  A chromebook costs half of a PS5.
smnscu 5y ago
I finished RE8 on Stadia on launch day; it looks great on PC but for some reason it looks even better on a TV with the CCU. As someone who's put hundreds of £s and hours into Stadia, I'm quite content with it, I wish it had more games though, most of the free titles that come with Stadia Pro are ridiculous (though, to be fair, they did help me discover gems such as The West of Loathing).
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It works really well, it's really a very convincing experience. It's particularly attractive now that Google throws cash at you in the form of free controller + Chromecast.

butz 5y ago

On one hand game streaming is great, as it reduces hardware requirements, but not having actual game files on your PC might not give some gamers a chance to experience game modding or "hacking", that usually leads to learning how games are built, and even how computers work.

benhurmarcel 5y ago
It's not different from consoles for that.

oblak 5y ago

After seeing the news about a Quake 3 client hitting the front page, I can't help but ask my fellow shooter fans who have tried stadia or another such service: how bad was it?

Jyaif 5y ago
Well unfortunately there's no equivalent to Quake 3 on Stadia, nowadays the FPS are all controller-friendly crap. The controller friendly crap works well on Stadia.
dsissitka 5y ago
I think it's alright for casual gaming. It's limited to 60 FPS and even in games like Orcs Must Die! 3 it struggles to maintain that. There are compression artifacts. If you've got a gaming rig with an NVIDIA GPU Moonlight performs much better.

kossTKR 5y ago

http://shadow.tech http://shadow.tech is still way better - you get your own PC so can run all games and work related software, stream 4k with 10ms latency from datacenters near you, it's almost impossible to discern a difference from running locally. All for 12$ a month, a stupid low price. Sadly this has made them go bankrupt - but have been bought out recently so the future is uncertain. Point being the market is more than ripe for this tech to accelerate - and shadow has had 1 year waiting lists, for years, so it's weird to me that more money isn't poured into this space.

danielbln 5y ago
You also get to deal with game downloads, updates, system maintenance and all the other stuff that I really don't want to deal with if I just want to quickly play a streamed game. (and that's if you can even get a shadow box before the end of the year).
- kossTKR 5y ago
  True, but personally i haven't had any hassle. Blazing fast connection speeds so you just install steam or another client and download your games, updates are super fast too. But yeah, the perfect platform would be 1-click games - but then you can't mod and have way less games available because publishers as in the film industry just cant figure out licensing.
hocuspocus 5y ago
The business plan submitted by OVH to the bankruptcy court says the monthly subscription will need to be raised to $25 in hope for profitability within 3 years. It seems inherently complicated to provide the required CPU and GPU resources in an elastic way, when most gamers play at the same peak hours.

hedora 5y ago

I imagine these streaming game services would be much more successful if the model was “stream an arbitrary gaming desktop to your random device,” but then they couldn’t double dip by charging for the service and also the games.

angus-prune 5y ago

The original Xbox lost $5-7 billion in 5 years Epic games has lost $593m on the Epic Game Store in 3 years Apple invested $500m in Apple Arcade (and that was on an existing hardware install base). I couldn't find how much Google has spent on Stadia, but it doesn't seem to have approached it as the long-term, expensive investment that it required.

jollybean 5y ago

Nobody cares about 'Stadia'. They care about the titles. Give people a 'Halo' exclusive, or go home. 80% of the business plan relies on hard hitting amazing exclusive titles. And of course massively subsidized hardware. And a long term vision. It's sad because the model looked kind of cool, I'll never get to try it out ...

nailer 5y ago

Stadia user here. Purchased Cyberpunk on Stadia and saw first hand it was broken. Never got past the intro mission. Stadia flat refused to give me a refund.

esturk 5y ago

Stadia could be more than just gaming. Imagine every software that people have complained doesn't work on a chromebook like Photoshop. Now imagine when you can stream those apps through Stadia such that essentially Chromebook + Stadia => every PC Which is to say, Google can always pivot enterprise apps.

drumhead 5y ago

I use Stadia, its actually very good, its fantastic technically, but it should have been a subscription service with Google doing what Epic did by throwing money at developers to get games on their platform, they should also have used it as a way of showcasing demo's of games. Im not going to buy anymore games on it now, its probably going to be shuttered in before the end of the year, which is a tragedy, because it could have been something special.

ChrisLTD 5y ago
FWIW, they do offer free games to Pro subscribers. It’s just not even close to as generous as what you get from GamePass.

elzbardico 5y ago

Frankly. I was afraid of Stadia because I don’t want an advertising company being a dominant force in gaming. Google and Facebook are toxic companies. I am far more comfortable with the traditional players in this space: Sony, Steam and Microsoft not to f* gaming like Facebook and google f* the web

jhanschoo 5y ago

I wonder if the partnerships just fundamentally don't work if you aren't NVIDIA. Running games on servers require more expensive GPUs/performance from NVIDIA than their consumer GeForce cards. And Google faces another disadvantage: NVIDIA has leverage with game companies that use their technology, Microsoft publishes games, but Google doesn't have such leverage with popular games.