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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 noth

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.
      - akmarinov 5y ago
        For the free tier - yeah. The paid tier is way better on that front.
        strogonoff 5y ago
        I saw numerous posts from paying (or so they claim) GeForce Now users being annoyed at having to queue.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      I subscribe to Geforce Now. The tech works well but the business model is a bit niche. I pay a subscriber fee but still have to buy the games. If I already had a large game library then it's because I already had a computer that could play them. If I buy new games that my computer can't run then I will lose access to them once I stop my subscription. Not every game on my steam library is supported, in fact the library is missing a lot of the major publishers besides EA. As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library, bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt). Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down the service.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      nvidia recently doubled the price[1] and have basically done zero marketing for it. They seem to be as prosperous as they want to be. When publishers tried to extort GFN, nvidia just shrugged and kept going (and have been adding dozens of games weekly). [1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price, under the caveat that apparently if a single billing detail changes the price goes to the current market price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
      I would use geforce now, but for some insane reason, a lot of games got removed from there. My laptop doesn't handle monster hunter well (my desktop does), i wanted to play with my wife, but the game was pulled out. This make it challenging: I have a steam library, but I can't trust what I can and cannot play. In the end it's easier to buy another desktop. Well, unless crypto fucks up the chip world. Sigh.
      - number6 5y ago
        At least I can keep the games. For me it's an alternative for a windows gaming PC.
      - fragileone 5y ago
        Publishers removed their games because they want the platform to pay them to have their games on there eg Rockstar, Bethesda, EA, etc. It's disgusting since it's depriving the end-user who has already paid for their games to play on the hardware of their choice, all because they want to double-dip.
        lightgreen 5y ago
        Perhaps gamers should stop bending to game developers and platforms until they make the game available on their favorite platform. That’s exactly what I do: I picked a platform, and only play games available on it. Game developers and platforms refusing to publish a game on that platform are loosing my money.
    - fragileone 5y ago
      I pay for GFN because my main device is Linux, so if a game can't be run locally via Wine/Proton I can just play it on the cloud. My existing games library is decent so it makes far more sense to play my Steam games here than pay for a different subscription.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  As a consumer, I personally knew it was over when Google released the new Chromecast without Stadia support. They could have had an opportunity to shave a few more milliseconds off the lag with a bespoke device that paired with the Stadia controller for "The best streaming experience on any platform!" Instead they don't even support their own services. What a completly sad and broken company.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    If you are referring to Google TV chromecast, Stadia support is known to be coming in H1 this year. Stadia is a long gane play. Support is not urgent
    - birdyrooster 5y ago
      This is Google we are talking about. The company that does “moon shots” that are 20 years away but sells them off a few years later. They can’t focus on anything long term that doesn’t feed AdSense to the degree YouTube, Search, Maps and Gmail do. Stadia isn’t doing that and it will be gone in a couple years.
      - enos_feedler 5y ago
        Have you even read a Google earnings report in the last couple years? Or listened to an earnings call? Your failure to mention Google Cloud just shows how aging your perspective of the company is.
        birdyrooster 5y ago
        Totally forgot to mention GCP. I meant to get into GCP in this thread with regard to how it's part of Google's pathology. They have a hammer and everything looks like a nail ala Stadia even when the industry is pushing compute for experiences to the edge, Google is always looking to centralize.
        birdyrooster 5y ago
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Knew it was over? Double knew it was over? It ain’t over. The disruption is in the distribution (no consoles) not business model. Netflix of gaming won’t work. At best we will subscribe to studio channels ex) Ubisoft+
ska 5y ago
> but they lack proper marketing talent I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor at product development, partially because they don't really internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up somewhere great.
erik_seaberg 5y ago
One engineering problem they haven't solved is keeping an old service on life support. Nobody gets promoted for keeping their API stable indefinitely, so prohibitive maintenance costs are driving them to kill everything but huge hits.
- edoceo 5y ago
  It hurt itself in it's confusion.
mdoms 5y ago
The addressable market for stadia right now is vanishingly small compared to the market for every other platform. What proportion of gamers live in an area where it's available? Is it even a double digit percentage? I doubt it. Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.
anonuser123456 5y ago
I disagree here. They don't lack marketing talent. They lack executives with a cohesive view of 'Google' the company. It's just a bunch of hyper rational utility maximizers trying to meet whatever quarterly/yearly targets they have. By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes, if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast' prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not launch the product in the first place.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Lacking marketing talent vs poor marketing execution is a distinction without a difference.
  - swivelmaster 5y ago
    That’s not what’s happening. Google has a product strategy problem more than it has a marketing problem. Google can hire people to do marketing (and they do) but they can’t outsource product strategy.
    - karmakaze 5y ago
      Once again a distinction that's technically correct. If the product strategy is undermining marketing, how effective is their marketing be?
darth_avocado 5y ago
> Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform. Stadia is so bad, I have a founder’s edition controller sitting in my living room unopened. It’s not marketing that’s the problem. It’s that if your games can barely do 1080p on a 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.
- gerash 5y ago
  So have you used it if it's unopened? My experience with Stadia on a 100Mbps connection has been good
  - darth_avocado 5y ago
    Yes I have, the founder's edition is the extra controller I got thinking Stadia is gonna be around.
- lightgreen 5y ago
  Doing fine with ~50mbps WiFi. The issue is not the bandwidth but latency. Check the 99 percentile of ping, should be within ~20ms for comfortable gaming.
creamytaco 5y ago
Google's brand is poisonous for a lot of Gen Z. A lot of them are not willing to look past ad-peddling, data-siphoning and profile building.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Like Jamie larnier said in the book “you are not a gadget”, you don’t want a culture that is dominated by the vision and culture of advertising people.
  - DerekL 5y ago
    It's “Jaron Lanier”.
m-p-3 5y ago
Personally I'm not willing to invest in games I could lose access if they decides to pull the plug. I suppose they'd offer some kind of license transfer or some kind of compensation if that happened, but to me it seems like a risky deal from a consumer point of view. I'd be less worried if a purchased game was made available on alternative stores right off the bat. With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.
- lightgreen 5y ago
  I wouldn’t call purchasing games investing. Personally I don’t care if they pull the plug: it’s unlikely I’d want to play the same game again, and if I do, I have no problem purchasing it again.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Google is in the ads business. Anything that doesn’t align with that is not important to Google. In other words, if a new Google product/service doesn’t help Google making more money on ads, it will eventually be shut down.
- sidibe 5y ago
  Counterexample of Google Cloud shows this is obviously not true.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    Yep you are right. Good point.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Google excels at engineering? Interesting theory, not sure it applies to most of their products.
demarq 5y ago
It’s also because they try too hard to integrate everything they do into existing products, even when it just doesn’t make sense. They would have made more by developing or buying a game engine and tying their services into it. At this point google is to greedy for it’s own good. It wants the whole vertical from day one. A consistent Google scale hug of death.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> but they lack proper marketing talent I would disagree here, they are the largest advertising company... I doubt Stadia suffered from a lack of exposure, I just think that many don't like the model they are offering. There are other such services from Steam or NVidia and I don't think they are lacking compared to Stadia. And those did even get less exposure while Stadia was held up as a revolution. I hope Google doesn't neglect the tech in favor of marketeers. That industry is overheated as it is.

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.
    - akmarinov 5y ago
      For the free tier - yeah. The paid tier is way better on that front.
      - strogonoff 5y ago
        I saw numerous posts from paying (or so they claim) GeForce Now users being annoyed at having to queue.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    I subscribe to Geforce Now. The tech works well but the business model is a bit niche. I pay a subscriber fee but still have to buy the games. If I already had a large game library then it's because I already had a computer that could play them. If I buy new games that my computer can't run then I will lose access to them once I stop my subscription. Not every game on my steam library is supported, in fact the library is missing a lot of the major publishers besides EA. As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library, bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt). Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down the service.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    nvidia recently doubled the price[1] and have basically done zero marketing for it. They seem to be as prosperous as they want to be. When publishers tried to extort GFN, nvidia just shrugged and kept going (and have been adding dozens of games weekly). [1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price, under the caveat that apparently if a single billing detail changes the price goes to the current market price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
    I would use geforce now, but for some insane reason, a lot of games got removed from there. My laptop doesn't handle monster hunter well (my desktop does), i wanted to play with my wife, but the game was pulled out. This make it challenging: I have a steam library, but I can't trust what I can and cannot play. In the end it's easier to buy another desktop. Well, unless crypto fucks up the chip world. Sigh.
    - number6 5y ago
      At least I can keep the games. For me it's an alternative for a windows gaming PC.
    - fragileone 5y ago
      Publishers removed their games because they want the platform to pay them to have their games on there eg Rockstar, Bethesda, EA, etc. It's disgusting since it's depriving the end-user who has already paid for their games to play on the hardware of their choice, all because they want to double-dip.
      - lightgreen 5y ago
        Perhaps gamers should stop bending to game developers and platforms until they make the game available on their favorite platform. That’s exactly what I do: I picked a platform, and only play games available on it. Game developers and platforms refusing to publish a game on that platform are loosing my money.
  - fragileone 5y ago
    I pay for GFN because my main device is Linux, so if a game can't be run locally via Wine/Proton I can just play it on the cloud. My existing games library is decent so it makes far more sense to play my Steam games here than pay for a different subscription.
dougmwne 5y ago
As a consumer, I personally knew it was over when Google released the new Chromecast without Stadia support. They could have had an opportunity to shave a few more milliseconds off the lag with a bespoke device that paired with the Stadia controller for "The best streaming experience on any platform!" Instead they don't even support their own services. What a completly sad and broken company.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  If you are referring to Google TV chromecast, Stadia support is known to be coming in H1 this year. Stadia is a long gane play. Support is not urgent
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    This is Google we are talking about. The company that does “moon shots” that are 20 years away but sells them off a few years later. They can’t focus on anything long term that doesn’t feed AdSense to the degree YouTube, Search, Maps and Gmail do. Stadia isn’t doing that and it will be gone in a couple years.
    - enos_feedler 5y ago
      Have you even read a Google earnings report in the last couple years? Or listened to an earnings call? Your failure to mention Google Cloud just shows how aging your perspective of the company is.
      - birdyrooster 5y ago
        Totally forgot to mention GCP. I meant to get into GCP in this thread with regard to how it's part of Google's pathology. They have a hammer and everything looks like a nail ala Stadia even when the industry is pushing compute for experiences to the edge, Google is always looking to centralize.
      - birdyrooster 5y ago
enos_feedler 5y ago
Knew it was over? Double knew it was over? It ain’t over. The disruption is in the distribution (no consoles) not business model. Netflix of gaming won’t work. At best we will subscribe to studio channels ex) Ubisoft+

ska 5y ago

> but they lack proper marketing talent I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor at product development, partially because they don't really internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up somewhere great.

erik_seaberg 5y ago

One engineering problem they haven't solved is keeping an old service on life support. Nobody gets promoted for keeping their API stable indefinitely, so prohibitive maintenance costs are driving them to kill everything but huge hits.

edoceo 5y ago
It hurt itself in it's confusion.

mdoms 5y ago

The addressable market for stadia right now is vanishingly small compared to the market for every other platform. What proportion of gamers live in an area where it's available? Is it even a double digit percentage? I doubt it. Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.

anonuser123456 5y ago

I disagree here. They don't lack marketing talent. They lack executives with a cohesive view of 'Google' the company. It's just a bunch of hyper rational utility maximizers trying to meet whatever quarterly/yearly targets they have. By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes, if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast' prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not launch the product in the first place.

karmakaze 5y ago
Lacking marketing talent vs poor marketing execution is a distinction without a difference.
- swivelmaster 5y ago
  That’s not what’s happening. Google has a product strategy problem more than it has a marketing problem. Google can hire people to do marketing (and they do) but they can’t outsource product strategy.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    Once again a distinction that's technically correct. If the product strategy is undermining marketing, how effective is their marketing be?

darth_avocado 5y ago

> Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform. Stadia is so bad, I have a founder’s edition controller sitting in my living room unopened. It’s not marketing that’s the problem. It’s that if your games can barely do 1080p on a 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.

gerash 5y ago
So have you used it if it's unopened? My experience with Stadia on a 100Mbps connection has been good
- darth_avocado 5y ago
  Yes I have, the founder's edition is the extra controller I got thinking Stadia is gonna be around.
lightgreen 5y ago
Doing fine with ~50mbps WiFi. The issue is not the bandwidth but latency. Check the 99 percentile of ping, should be within ~20ms for comfortable gaming.

creamytaco 5y ago

Google's brand is poisonous for a lot of Gen Z. A lot of them are not willing to look past ad-peddling, data-siphoning and profile building.

elzbardico 5y ago
Like Jamie larnier said in the book “you are not a gadget”, you don’t want a culture that is dominated by the vision and culture of advertising people.
- DerekL 5y ago
  It's “Jaron Lanier”.

m-p-3 5y ago

Personally I'm not willing to invest in games I could lose access if they decides to pull the plug. I suppose they'd offer some kind of license transfer or some kind of compensation if that happened, but to me it seems like a risky deal from a consumer point of view. I'd be less worried if a purchased game was made available on alternative stores right off the bat. With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.

lightgreen 5y ago
I wouldn’t call purchasing games investing. Personally I don’t care if they pull the plug: it’s unlikely I’d want to play the same game again, and if I do, I have no problem purchasing it again.

mbrodersen 5y ago

Google is in the ads business. Anything that doesn’t align with that is not important to Google. In other words, if a new Google product/service doesn’t help Google making more money on ads, it will eventually be shut down.

sidibe 5y ago
Counterexample of Google Cloud shows this is obviously not true.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Yep you are right. Good point.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Google excels at engineering? Interesting theory, not sure it applies to most of their products.

demarq 5y ago

It’s also because they try too hard to integrate everything they do into existing products, even when it just doesn’t make sense. They would have made more by developing or buying a game engine and tying their services into it. At this point google is to greedy for it’s own good. It wants the whole vertical from day one. A consistent Google scale hug of death.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> but they lack proper marketing talent I would disagree here, they are the largest advertising company... I doubt Stadia suffered from a lack of exposure, I just think that many don't like the model they are offering. There are other such services from Steam or NVidia and I don't think they are lacking compared to Stadia. And those did even get less exposure while Stadia was held up as a revolution. I hope Google doesn't neglect the tech in favor of marketeers. That industry is overheated as it is.