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You would really hope there would be some far reaching repercussions for senior leadership at Google on this one. There are lots of projects that Google has tri

You would really hope there would be some far reaching repercussions for senior leadership at Google on this one. There are lots of projects that Google has tried and failed on, and sure, that happens. But this one is probably the clearest, obvious failure of execution. There is an absolutely crystal clear playbook of a Tech company forcing its way into the Gaming business. So how Google has managed to enter, completely fuck up, screw around partners, screw around customers and then leave all within the span of 3 years is just fantastic. And it's not just that, because Google's reputation for giving up on anything remotely difficult, no one bought into it in the first place. I would wager there are entire market segments that Google can just never enter now since they have done such a good job at branding themselves unreliable. It reminds me of a Petrostate where a country has huge wealth because of what they're sitting on, but that same wealth destroys their ability to develop anything meaningfully different.

jeffbee 4y ago
Do you think senior leadership was involved? It seems just as likely that some platforms engineers figured they could mess around with hardware on the edge and got it shipped from the bottom up.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  No, they had a huge push behind it at one point, they even had internal game development studios and hired inhouse game devs, which they then proceeded to fire less than 18 months later. That's right, from new platform to fired in less than 18 months. It's a shameful way to run a company.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I know they put the full force of the machine behind it, it's just not obvious to me that the reason they did it came from the top, or was even known to the top, versus just being an emergent phenomenon. I think people ascribe way too much agency to corporate executives.
macspoofing 4y ago
>But this one is probably the clearest, obvious failure of execution ... There is an absolutely crystal clear playbook of a Tech company forcing its way into the Gaming business. I'm not sure this was an 'obvious failure of execution'. They wanted to build a gaming cloud-streaming-only service, and they built one. I don't think you can build a better one because the problems with cloud-streamed gaming are with the concept not execution. The streaming service provided by Xbox is on par with Stadia, in that it suffers from the same latency, and graphical downscaling issues as Stadia did. On the Xbox it is part of my subscription (so technically 'free') and I don't want to use it because the experience is bad (although it is nice to quickly sample a game without needing to wait for download and install).
- jsnell 4y ago
  Oh, there definitely were obvious failures of execution. Not on the core streaming tech side, but on the business and product aspects. The product should have been quite compelling: a way of playing current gen console games with basically no up front hardware investment and no ongoing subscription. That's what the "free" version of Stadia was. But then they muddied things up with Stadia Pro, making people think it was actually supposed to a "Netflix for games" subscription service, and crucially making Stadia Pro the only SKU for a very long time. So rather than the really appealing entry point to console gaming that people could have easily tried, they ended up targeting the exact people for whom Stadia was the worst fit (hardcore gamers with existing console owners and large game libraries).
  - bdefore 4y ago
    Absolutely agree. XBox Cloud gaming took the "Netflix for games" strategy and with inferior quality was able to decently establish itself. How to fund the development of a risky but long-term valuable new platform? Whomever was calling the shots on that question failed spectacularly and in a way that technology companies usually don't. You're already losing hundreds of millions making the tech, why not spend a few more loss-leading the user growth?
ohgodplsno 4y ago
No. In fact, the incompetent people at the head of those projects fail upwards. Take Phil Harrison, who is at the head of Stadia (not Stadia Games and Studios): - Worked at Sony Entertainment, handling the software side of things, was there to help for the massive fuckup that was the PS3 launch. - Got fired (or "resigned" in C-level speak), joined Infogrames (soon to become Atari) and majorly fucked up, saying that single player games would become increasingly rare as well as contributing to running the company into the ground while taking massive dividends. - Got fired from Atari and joins Gaikai (another game live streaming service that failed miserably and was picked up later by Sony for Playstation Now). - (Most likely got fired from Gaikai, but no news from this anywhere) and joins Microsoft, just in time to utterly fuck up the Xbox One launch and making the branch he was a director of produce... absolutely fuck all ? - Got fired from Microsoft and gets named vice president at Google, before heading the Stadia team as a product manager, utterly fucking up its launch, closing down Stadia Games and Studios (that actually managed to build up a pretty talented team), and soon, closing down Stadia. This clown just gets paid to fail. He's got the reverse Midas touch, short anything he touches.
- robertakarobin 4y ago
  We call that a Shit Midas, where everything they touch turns to shit.
  - _1 4y ago
    Or the Mierdas Touch
- cinericius 4y ago
  One of the reasons for this is probably that all (minus Stadia, it seems) of the products you've mentioned might have had bad starts but ended up gigantic successes: >PS3 performed extremely well, beating Xbox 360 by a fairly thin margin. >Gaikai sold for $380M USD to Sony (most people consider this a success, even if you think it should have been more.) >Xbox One lost to the PS4 by a factor of two but was still successful (50 million est. lifetime sales) Even if every single thing he was in charge of failed catastrophically, anyone who isn't looking closely is going to see someone with a huge amount of industry expertise working on some of the largest and most successful products to ever exist full stop (not just in gaming.)

jeffbee 4y ago

Do you think senior leadership was involved? It seems just as likely that some platforms engineers figured they could mess around with hardware on the edge and got it shipped from the bottom up.

SilverBirch 4y ago
No, they had a huge push behind it at one point, they even had internal game development studios and hired inhouse game devs, which they then proceeded to fire less than 18 months later. That's right, from new platform to fired in less than 18 months. It's a shameful way to run a company.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  I know they put the full force of the machine behind it, it's just not obvious to me that the reason they did it came from the top, or was even known to the top, versus just being an emergent phenomenon. I think people ascribe way too much agency to corporate executives.

macspoofing 4y ago

>But this one is probably the clearest, obvious failure of execution ... There is an absolutely crystal clear playbook of a Tech company forcing its way into the Gaming business. I'm not sure this was an 'obvious failure of execution'. They wanted to build a gaming cloud-streaming-only service, and they built one. I don't think you can build a better one because the problems with cloud-streamed gaming are with the concept not execution. The streaming service provided by Xbox is on par with Stadia, in that it suffers from the same latency, and graphical downscaling issues as Stadia did. On the Xbox it is part of my subscription (so technically 'free') and I don't want to use it because the experience is bad (although it is nice to quickly sample a game without needing to wait for download and install).

jsnell 4y ago
Oh, there definitely were obvious failures of execution. Not on the core streaming tech side, but on the business and product aspects. The product should have been quite compelling: a way of playing current gen console games with basically no up front hardware investment and no ongoing subscription. That's what the "free" version of Stadia was. But then they muddied things up with Stadia Pro, making people think it was actually supposed to a "Netflix for games" subscription service, and crucially making Stadia Pro the only SKU for a very long time. So rather than the really appealing entry point to console gaming that people could have easily tried, they ended up targeting the exact people for whom Stadia was the worst fit (hardcore gamers with existing console owners and large game libraries).
- bdefore 4y ago
  Absolutely agree. XBox Cloud gaming took the "Netflix for games" strategy and with inferior quality was able to decently establish itself. How to fund the development of a risky but long-term valuable new platform? Whomever was calling the shots on that question failed spectacularly and in a way that technology companies usually don't. You're already losing hundreds of millions making the tech, why not spend a few more loss-leading the user growth?

ohgodplsno 4y ago

No. In fact, the incompetent people at the head of those projects fail upwards. Take Phil Harrison, who is at the head of Stadia (not Stadia Games and Studios): - Worked at Sony Entertainment, handling the software side of things, was there to help for the massive fuckup that was the PS3 launch. - Got fired (or "resigned" in C-level speak), joined Infogrames (soon to become Atari) and majorly fucked up, saying that single player games would become increasingly rare as well as contributing to running the company into the ground while taking massive dividends. - Got fired from Atari and joins Gaikai (another game live streaming service that failed miserably and was picked up later by Sony for Playstation Now). - (Most likely got fired from Gaikai, but no news from this anywhere) and joins Microsoft, just in time to utterly fuck up the Xbox One launch and making the branch he was a director of produce... absolutely fuck all ? - Got fired from Microsoft and gets named vice president at Google, before heading the Stadia team as a product manager, utterly fucking up its launch, closing down Stadia Games and Studios (that actually managed to build up a pretty talented team), and soon, closing down Stadia. This clown just gets paid to fail. He's got the reverse Midas touch, short anything he touches.

robertakarobin 4y ago
We call that a Shit Midas, where everything they touch turns to shit.
- _1 4y ago
  Or the Mierdas Touch
cinericius 4y ago
One of the reasons for this is probably that all (minus Stadia, it seems) of the products you've mentioned might have had bad starts but ended up gigantic successes: >PS3 performed extremely well, beating Xbox 360 by a fairly thin margin. >Gaikai sold for $380M USD to Sony (most people consider this a success, even if you think it should have been more.) >Xbox One lost to the PS4 by a factor of two but was still successful (50 million est. lifetime sales) Even if every single thing he was in charge of failed catastrophically, anyone who isn't looking closely is going to see someone with a huge amount of industry expertise working on some of the largest and most successful products to ever exist full stop (not just in gaming.)