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Three sure bets in life: * Death * Taxes * Google shutting down services Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for co

Three sure bets in life: * Death * Taxes * Google shutting down services Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for consumers who buy into googles promises and even a bit for the google engineers who may be out of work soon.

mrtree 4y ago
IDK, I have stadia and it works just fine. I have a 5G router at home, with fiber is even better. The offering is a bit limited but there are several really good games that are worth buying.
- adwww 4y ago
  Same, I thought for an occasional gamer like myself it was a good value service with a very low cost of entry. I am now pretty reluctant to pay to keep any games though with this rumour alive.
CSMastermind 4y ago
> Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning I don't see anything wrong with the premise of the service or even from what I understand the technical execution. Seems like the failure was around business development, marketing, community management, and brand reputation. I haven't followed to closely though so other would know better than me.
- tedivm 4y ago
  >Seems like the failure was around business development, marketing, community management, and brand reputation. To be fair that's normally the case for Google.
- unnouinceput 4y ago
  The failure was around tech. We are not there yet. Speed of light is what needs to be overcome in order for this kind of service to be viable. Until then no amount of money, business development, marketing, brand reputation will ever make this viable.
  - mountainb 4y ago
    Using the (discontinued) Steam remote dongle over wireless device to put a game from my computer in one room to a TV in the living room about 5-10 yards away introduced noticeable latency to a game. Obviously things like Stadia are a lot worse. There is only so much that can be done with this kind of technology. I think people are more tolerant of it for specific use cases like being able to play any game you want on a hotel internet connection while you're traveling for work, but given how affordable hardware is it doesn't really make sense as a home entertainment service except for the third world, which was not their target market anyway.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    The speed of light delay actually wasn't the main issue. It was only a small part of the total latency. Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue. Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds. They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    I've played like 400 hours of endgame destiny on it during the pandemic, it's fine. The criticism that you need to be near a major city may be valid, I don't know because I'm near a major city. The wifi latency is a bigger factor than the rest.
- sennight 4y ago
  > I don't see anything wrong with the premise of the service You will own nothing and be happy. Great.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  The technical side was initially plagued by lag in games that were ill suited for it but this has consistently approved. I think the real failing is what you stated - biz dev and brand reputation. Read the other replies and you will see folks say "There were no games" or "The selection was limited." Why in the world would a major game company hesitate to invest in google and google services? Well, if you have a reputation of killing off your services like the grim reaper, I imagine that would come up in an executive risk assessment. Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Consider Microsoft's reputation in the late mid to late 90's on slashdot and other forums compared to their reputation today. It took a lot of work but possible. Googles going to have to put down the scythe though.
  - jfoster 4y ago
    > Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Every time they take a decision like this one, they are making the hole deeper.
  - CaptainZapp 4y ago
    > Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly. I remember a poster proudly announcing that they will announce one year in advance when they plan to shut down a service on GCS. Maybe they should look what happens when a company like HP announces end of support for OpenVMS 5 - 10 years in advance (as just an example pulled out of my ass with some Wikipedia backing the statement up) there's a lot of wailing and howling amongst their enterprise customers. Those are the timescales big shops think in when it comes to their strategic IT decisions. Frankly, I don't see Google ever satisfying such requirements backed by iron clad guarantees.
    - krisoft 4y ago
      > To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly. I disagree. It is much easier to regain trust with enterprise customers than with end users. Enterprise costumers have contracts and lawyers on retainer. Google can draft a contract which binds them to performing a service. They can write in penalties with bite which shows to their enterprise customers that they mean it. That is assuming that they really want to. On the other hand this trick doesn't work with end users. They don't have lawyers to evaluate such an offer, and they have lot less of a chance of successfully suing google even if they would have favourable contracts.
- coremoff 4y ago
  most of the user commentary I remember, and certainly my thoughts on the matter, were that Google would grow bored and shut it down pretty quickly...
game-of-throws 4y ago
Does Google usually fire people when they shut down a service? I thought they were transferred internally to help build the next messaging app.
- rustqt6 4y ago
  Or transferred to the strategy department to decide what the next in thing is so they can build multiple versions of it, seeing as they are now bored of messaging.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Nah - they're only taking a temporary break from messaging apps... They'll be back at it in a year or two.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      They're not taking a break. I was just force-migrated from "hangouts" to "chat with gmail."
      - delecti 4y ago
        It's less of a migration and more of a rebranding. The same service has gone by the name Chat > Hangouts > Chat but has been pretty consistent through each step.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Usually everybody gets a chance to transfer. With a hiring freeze that'll be a lot harder.
- Lutger 4y ago
  I think youtube music is also due for a rewrite. I mean, it's almost finished!
- sulam 4y ago
  Depends on the people. In the Stadia case there were people hired to build first party games in Montreal and some of the skills needed for that don’t have a natural place to go elsewhere inside of Google. I don’t know this for sure, but I expect many of those people were given a package and had to find new employers. People with transferable skills were moved onto other teams at Google depending on who needed those skills - effectively they were broken up for parts. And of course the enterprise service is still there and some of the people are still needed to keep it going. My impression is that Google has actually changed how new initiatives are funded from the exec layer, such that there’s less likelihood of completely overlapping products being created, such as a new messaging service. I could be wrong about that, and even if I’m right it might change again in the future, but at least for now I’d be surprised to see a new messaging service get launched.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I do feel bad for people who bought into it too. On the other hand they did not care about further normalizing not owning and running software themselves despite the negative influences streaming would have. Like excluding or monetizing and profiting from user content etc. Perhaps it is not their responsibility but I guess they accepted the risk in the first place. I don't think Google will kill the service anytime soon though and this rumor is probably wrong. Won't get too many new users with them around either.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  Rumor - true or false - is true. If the rumor is true, the service is killed off. If the rumor is false, well it sounds like something google would do, and consumers will hesitate to buy into it and businesses definitely won't. I've read and written my fair share of executive summaries before - I imagine this would make its way into it.
sithadmin 4y ago
I wouldn't call Stadia a joke. It does in fact work quite well. But it's not really positioned to compete with the other first-party console alternatives, nor does it have compelling features that make it a better choice than products let you DIY an experience (e.g. Parsec + self-hosted gaming rig, Steam Remote Play, GeForce Now, GPU-accelerated VDI as a service like Shadow...). For a while Google was literally giving away Stadia controllers, a Chromecast device to support using it with a TV, and games for free. Every power user/gamer type person I know that took them up on it fooled around with it, agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  It is a joke regardless of "technical" quality because it has been completely obvious from the first announcement that the only problem Stadia tackles is making your game depend on Google, relying on their traditional long-term loyalty to their own services and products.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  People like myself have been pointing out that they had no legitimate audience for years and no one listened. Zombie organization made a decision years ago and was the walking dead.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Stadia works quite well if you live in a big city adjacent to their data centers. It’s pretty ass otherwise.
  - unpopularopp 4y ago
    Did you try Xbox Cloud gaming? Cause I live in a pretty small town in Eastern Europe and it works flawlessly. Does Microsoft doing something better or Stadia was just that bad?
    - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
      I've used xbox cloud gaming before. The lag made it hard to use, but I appreciate having a way to 'test out a game' before downloading 50-70 gb of install media. For that purpose, if nothing else, its a win. The big difference, I think, for why google is made fun of for stadia but few people throw rocks at Microsoft is the game selection. Microsoft does not kill off their projects willy-nilly so game manufacturers, I assume, feel better about crawling into their bed than googles.
dougmwne 4y ago
You know, in this case I don’t think Stadia was a joke. I think it was a completely sincere effort to compete with a new kind of “console” in the game industry. They had hired a gaming industry executive to lead the effort, started several in-house game dev projects, and starting negotiating streaming exclusives with many studios (much to the annoyance of people who owned games on GeForce Now who had them removed). I even encountered paid social media marketer trying to generate hype for the service. But like everything Google these days, they made some poor initial choices, didn’t take in any customer feedback, dug in instead of pivoting, then slashed and burned when it failed to become a billion dollar business overnight. Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.
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- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  > Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products. No need. Sony and Microsoft have their own (quite good) tech for this. Sony's actually been in the game streaming game for nearly a decade. PS Now launched in 2014. I haven't used it personally, but I hear it's great. Microsoft xCloud has been available for almost two years, in preview for a year before that. I got home once and found my wife playing Dragon Age II. I sat and watched for a little, then she quit the game, and only then did I discover she had been streaming it. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea that it was being streamed. Truly impressive tech.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    I have not used Sony’s game streaming. I have used Xcloud and it is technically the weakest compared to Stadia and Nvidia. I find there are a lot of compression artifacts and that the quality tends to degrade over an hour or 2. I have used it on several different gigabit connections and devices. Latency has always been good. I suspect issues with the data center Xbox hardware/software, not the connection to Azure.
petesergeant 4y ago
Incredibly, some people still use GCP
- hnov 4y ago
  GCP has been fairly stable: a lot of the old App Engine APIs from 2008 still function more or less the same.
tootie 4y ago
Google is actually reviving a product they had left fallow for like 10 years. They acquired Feedburner like 15 years ago and stopped updating it almost immediately, but the other day it suddenly had Material UI applied.
deleted 4y ago
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mrtree 4y ago

IDK, I have stadia and it works just fine. I have a 5G router at home, with fiber is even better. The offering is a bit limited but there are several really good games that are worth buying.

adwww 4y ago
Same, I thought for an occasional gamer like myself it was a good value service with a very low cost of entry. I am now pretty reluctant to pay to keep any games though with this rumour alive.

CSMastermind 4y ago

> Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning I don't see anything wrong with the premise of the service or even from what I understand the technical execution. Seems like the failure was around business development, marketing, community management, and brand reputation. I haven't followed to closely though so other would know better than me.

tedivm 4y ago
>Seems like the failure was around business development, marketing, community management, and brand reputation. To be fair that's normally the case for Google.
unnouinceput 4y ago
The failure was around tech. We are not there yet. Speed of light is what needs to be overcome in order for this kind of service to be viable. Until then no amount of money, business development, marketing, brand reputation will ever make this viable.
- mountainb 4y ago
  Using the (discontinued) Steam remote dongle over wireless device to put a game from my computer in one room to a TV in the living room about 5-10 yards away introduced noticeable latency to a game. Obviously things like Stadia are a lot worse. There is only so much that can be done with this kind of technology. I think people are more tolerant of it for specific use cases like being able to play any game you want on a hotel internet connection while you're traveling for work, but given how affordable hardware is it doesn't really make sense as a home entertainment service except for the third world, which was not their target market anyway.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The speed of light delay actually wasn't the main issue. It was only a small part of the total latency. Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue. Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds. They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I've played like 400 hours of endgame destiny on it during the pandemic, it's fine. The criticism that you need to be near a major city may be valid, I don't know because I'm near a major city. The wifi latency is a bigger factor than the rest.
sennight 4y ago
> I don't see anything wrong with the premise of the service You will own nothing and be happy. Great.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
The technical side was initially plagued by lag in games that were ill suited for it but this has consistently approved. I think the real failing is what you stated - biz dev and brand reputation. Read the other replies and you will see folks say "There were no games" or "The selection was limited." Why in the world would a major game company hesitate to invest in google and google services? Well, if you have a reputation of killing off your services like the grim reaper, I imagine that would come up in an executive risk assessment. Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Consider Microsoft's reputation in the late mid to late 90's on slashdot and other forums compared to their reputation today. It took a lot of work but possible. Googles going to have to put down the scythe though.
- jfoster 4y ago
  > Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. Every time they take a decision like this one, they are making the hole deeper.
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  > Google can fix their reputation but its going to take a lot of work. To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly. I remember a poster proudly announcing that they will announce one year in advance when they plan to shut down a service on GCS. Maybe they should look what happens when a company like HP announces end of support for OpenVMS 5 - 10 years in advance (as just an example pulled out of my ass with some Wikipedia backing the statement up) there's a lot of wailing and howling amongst their enterprise customers. Those are the timescales big shops think in when it comes to their strategic IT decisions. Frankly, I don't see Google ever satisfying such requirements backed by iron clad guarantees.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > To regain trust with enterprise customers (that's where the money is) it would take at least a decade of cleaning up their act very thoroughly. I disagree. It is much easier to regain trust with enterprise customers than with end users. Enterprise costumers have contracts and lawyers on retainer. Google can draft a contract which binds them to performing a service. They can write in penalties with bite which shows to their enterprise customers that they mean it. That is assuming that they really want to. On the other hand this trick doesn't work with end users. They don't have lawyers to evaluate such an offer, and they have lot less of a chance of successfully suing google even if they would have favourable contracts.
coremoff 4y ago
most of the user commentary I remember, and certainly my thoughts on the matter, were that Google would grow bored and shut it down pretty quickly...

game-of-throws 4y ago

Does Google usually fire people when they shut down a service? I thought they were transferred internally to help build the next messaging app.

rustqt6 4y ago
Or transferred to the strategy department to decide what the next in thing is so they can build multiple versions of it, seeing as they are now bored of messaging.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Nah - they're only taking a temporary break from messaging apps... They'll be back at it in a year or two.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    They're not taking a break. I was just force-migrated from "hangouts" to "chat with gmail."
    - delecti 4y ago
      It's less of a migration and more of a rebranding. The same service has gone by the name Chat > Hangouts > Chat but has been pretty consistent through each step.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Usually everybody gets a chance to transfer. With a hiring freeze that'll be a lot harder.
Lutger 4y ago
I think youtube music is also due for a rewrite. I mean, it's almost finished!
sulam 4y ago
Depends on the people. In the Stadia case there were people hired to build first party games in Montreal and some of the skills needed for that don’t have a natural place to go elsewhere inside of Google. I don’t know this for sure, but I expect many of those people were given a package and had to find new employers. People with transferable skills were moved onto other teams at Google depending on who needed those skills - effectively they were broken up for parts. And of course the enterprise service is still there and some of the people are still needed to keep it going. My impression is that Google has actually changed how new initiatives are funded from the exec layer, such that there’s less likelihood of completely overlapping products being created, such as a new messaging service. I could be wrong about that, and even if I’m right it might change again in the future, but at least for now I’d be surprised to see a new messaging service get launched.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

I do feel bad for people who bought into it too. On the other hand they did not care about further normalizing not owning and running software themselves despite the negative influences streaming would have. Like excluding or monetizing and profiting from user content etc. Perhaps it is not their responsibility but I guess they accepted the risk in the first place. I don't think Google will kill the service anytime soon though and this rumor is probably wrong. Won't get too many new users with them around either.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
Rumor - true or false - is true. If the rumor is true, the service is killed off. If the rumor is false, well it sounds like something google would do, and consumers will hesitate to buy into it and businesses definitely won't. I've read and written my fair share of executive summaries before - I imagine this would make its way into it.

sithadmin 4y ago

I wouldn't call Stadia a joke. It does in fact work quite well. But it's not really positioned to compete with the other first-party console alternatives, nor does it have compelling features that make it a better choice than products let you DIY an experience (e.g. Parsec + self-hosted gaming rig, Steam Remote Play, GeForce Now, GPU-accelerated VDI as a service like Shadow...). For a while Google was literally giving away Stadia controllers, a Chromecast device to support using it with a TV, and games for free. Every power user/gamer type person I know that took them up on it fooled around with it, agreed that it was a good experience...and then pretty much never touched it again.

HelloNurse 4y ago
It is a joke regardless of "technical" quality because it has been completely obvious from the first announcement that the only problem Stadia tackles is making your game depend on Google, relying on their traditional long-term loyalty to their own services and products.
birdyrooster 4y ago
People like myself have been pointing out that they had no legitimate audience for years and no one listened. Zombie organization made a decision years ago and was the walking dead.
falcolas 4y ago
Stadia works quite well if you live in a big city adjacent to their data centers. It’s pretty ass otherwise.
- unpopularopp 4y ago
  Did you try Xbox Cloud gaming? Cause I live in a pretty small town in Eastern Europe and it works flawlessly. Does Microsoft doing something better or Stadia was just that bad?
  - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
    I've used xbox cloud gaming before. The lag made it hard to use, but I appreciate having a way to 'test out a game' before downloading 50-70 gb of install media. For that purpose, if nothing else, its a win. The big difference, I think, for why google is made fun of for stadia but few people throw rocks at Microsoft is the game selection. Microsoft does not kill off their projects willy-nilly so game manufacturers, I assume, feel better about crawling into their bed than googles.

dougmwne 4y ago

You know, in this case I don’t think Stadia was a joke. I think it was a completely sincere effort to compete with a new kind of “console” in the game industry. They had hired a gaming industry executive to lead the effort, started several in-house game dev projects, and starting negotiating streaming exclusives with many studios (much to the annoyance of people who owned games on GeForce Now who had them removed). I even encountered paid social media marketer trying to generate hype for the service. But like everything Google these days, they made some poor initial choices, didn’t take in any customer feedback, dug in instead of pivoting, then slashed and burned when it failed to become a billion dollar business overnight. Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.

deleted 4y ago
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VyseofArcadia 4y ago
> Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products. No need. Sony and Microsoft have their own (quite good) tech for this. Sony's actually been in the game streaming game for nearly a decade. PS Now launched in 2014. I haven't used it personally, but I hear it's great. Microsoft xCloud has been available for almost two years, in preview for a year before that. I got home once and found my wife playing Dragon Age II. I sat and watched for a little, then she quit the game, and only then did I discover she had been streaming it. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea that it was being streamed. Truly impressive tech.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I have not used Sony’s game streaming. I have used Xcloud and it is technically the weakest compared to Stadia and Nvidia. I find there are a lot of compression artifacts and that the quality tends to degrade over an hour or 2. I have used it on several different gigabit connections and devices. Latency has always been good. I suspect issues with the data center Xbox hardware/software, not the connection to Azure.

petesergeant 4y ago

Incredibly, some people still use GCP

hnov 4y ago
GCP has been fairly stable: a lot of the old App Engine APIs from 2008 still function more or less the same.

tootie 4y ago

Google is actually reviving a product they had left fallow for like 10 years. They acquired Feedburner like 15 years ago and stopped updating it almost immediately, but the other day it suddenly had Material UI applied.

deleted 4y ago

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