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Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways. Developers didn't onboard because they were afra

Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways. Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.

berz01 4y ago
well said, literally it's getting old. no one trusts amazon/google/fb new ventures. atleast fb is going all in on vr
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  Facebook is dumping money into VR to try and push their boulder of a terrible idea (the "metaverse") up a hill. Except the hill is a solid 90 degree angle cliff Nobody wants to go to Walmart in VR and artificially grocery shop. That's a dystopian misery. But Facebook is happy to try! Their counterparts at places like VRchat meanwhile realized that just making a sandbox environment for people to do whatever they wanted is far more enticing to users. Valve meanwhile is happy to chug along and putter out critically acclaimed games to go with their own bespoke hardware releases
  - vhold 4y ago
    For those who have not seen the Walmart VR demo, it's really something else. Something is going very very wrong at Meta if they thought this looked enticing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw
    - fooker 4y ago
      This is as horrible as I expected, thanks!
- rjh29 4y ago
  They are losing stupid amounts of money on VR (as part of the R&D thing) in the hope that people will use it for work. The awesome value of Oculus Quest 2 will probably never be seen again.
worldsayshi 4y ago
They could mitigate this by always releasing the source code for shut down projects so that it could be self hosted or third parties could continue the work.
- jedberg 4y ago
  That wouldn't work because their tooling is so custom you could never run it. Also the code is probably in an embarrassing state, especially if the product is getting shut down.
scarmig 4y ago
It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason. I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut those products down in such a way that it's generated far more backlash and ill will than anyone else. Just brainstorming, but perhaps a large company, when launching a new product, could establish some kind of dedicated trust to provide credible assurances that e.g. the product would be supported for at least 10 years.
- csydas 4y ago
  > What's the best way to launch new, risky things? To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible. I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature. With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes. With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it: - It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in - It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp". So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's interest. Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google) [0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stadia-low-change-porting/?sh=7bb6b1804816 https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stad...
coldpie 4y ago
I remember every single article when they first announced contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was doomed from the start.
- Animats 4y ago
  Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google product that isn't ad-supported dies, with very few exceptions. Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. "Google Cloud is now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but Google's ad business is likely to subsidize it for the foreseeable future."[1] AWS makes money in that business, but Google does not. So, don't depend on Google Cloud for anything critical. Only a few months ago, Google was saying they were not going to shut down Stadia. So, any PR statement about Cloud not shutting down can't be believed. Stadia, after all, was a cloud service.
  - _fat_santa 4y ago
    Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will just kill it in years time.
    - eknkc 4y ago
      I deployed stuff on GCP but we moved to AWS after stability issues and horrendous support experience on GCP. And that was easy because we did not commit to any GCP exclusive services (because they tend to shut down all thr time). On AWS we prefer using things like DynamoDB and that further locks us into AWS. GCP is a joke.
      - DangitBobby 4y ago
        Funny, we use GCP extensively and never have any issues. I can't speak to the support issues because we've never needed any. AWS is a bit of a mess, and I always dread having to use it.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down, we'll refund all your purchases"
- dicomdan 4y ago
  They are refunding purchases to users. But developers aren't getting their time back.
- josefresco 4y ago
  Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might kill it. If they promised me a refund I would have probably spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a pro membership.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Yes it was a decent investment to get started, too much for a whim. I seriously thought about it but ended up scoring an Xbox and game pass and my main reason was I have to buy the games at full price for Stadia and google will deffo shut it down sooner rather than later so too risky. Game pass is amazing for someone who isn’t a hardcore call of duty type gamer! I’ve been away from gaming since playing tiger woods on the OG Xbox so being able to play so many different types of games is awesome. I like forza horizons!
    - sylens 4y ago
      Google's mistake was not choosing to go with a Game Pass type model - but then again, they didn't have the content as they have had to work to get each of the games offered running on Linux. It's why they have had to pay millions to developers to make Stadia versions available.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbarre 4y ago
    Just for clarity, they are refunding hardware and software purchases but not membership fees.
Hamuko 4y ago
I'd say the biggest effect was that consumers didn't trust Google to actually keep their purchases alive for more than two years. Techwise Stadia was actually very good and it could have been a good alternative to a full-blown gaming PC for people who are not gaming enthusiasts.
- agrippanux 4y ago
  People who are not gaming enthusiasts are pretty happy with mobile gaming. I honestly don’t know what Stadia’s target market was.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware. This would have given enthusiasts a lot less to hate about Stadia. It would have given customers a lot more confidence in the long-term viability of their purchases. It would have highlighted the flexibility offered by Google's streaming platform without making putting up with its drawbacks a requirement to enjoy your games. A player could start out only streaming their games, then upgrade to a real PC down the road to get an even better gameplay experience out of their existing library. For many enthusiasts, the product Google actually launched felt like an existential threat to their hobby. They feared games could go streaming exclusive. Publishers could use it as a form of extra draconian DRM, or start designing their games around the limitations of streaming. As a result this turned many of the biggest gaming enthusiasts, the people casual players will often ask for advice on what to buy, into ant-Stadia evangelists.
    - anotherman554 4y ago
      "Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware." Nvidia already has a product like that called Geforce Now. Instead of having it's own store it integrates with Steam and GOG. There's still the problem that is a hypothetical customer wants to game enough to pay for Stadia but doesn't have the funds for a gaming PC... why don't they just buy the $300 dollar Xbox Series S?
candiddevmike 4y ago
This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google, Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate to bet that they'll keep going with it.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone might be interested enough to pick it up. https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 (thread) Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's caught on since when it was announced in July 2020. https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far
    - phillipcarter 4y ago
      The wonderful thing about making everything OSS, and also why execs hate it, is it gives up a degree of control to kill something at a moment's notice. And so Dart/Flutter are in a good place!
      - busterarm 4y ago
        It's an important point to understand that it's not the flexibility to kill it but the flexibility to divert its resources elsewhere. You lose that with OSS projects because you eventually end up with people screaming down your door and the visibility that brings. Also being assigned to work on these projects internally is career death. Both of these problems happened to Google Cloud's Terraform provider at some point and it was a headache for the company and the community. Luckily Terraform adoption is out of Google's hands. They're just forced to play ball. OTOH, Google could easily kill off Flutter via other means.
eis 4y ago
Yup and at least my friends and family are extra cautious when it is a service where you "buy" something which can be taken away from you at any moment. Google is building a too strong reputation of an unreliable company. Doesn't help when an AI is in charge of banning people from accessing their critical stuff like emails and stored files.
blihp 4y ago
Google's reputation is, and has been for years, so bad on this front that most of their initiatives are stillborn for this reason pretty much from the day they are announced. Three years ago we had this regarding Stadia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 (even before this, I recall lots of skepticism re: Stadia on the day it was announced)
kabdib 4y ago
Years back, I received quite a few contacts from Google recruiters about interviewing to work on an unannounced gaming product (which was Stadia, of course). Google's reputation for canceling projects was bad, even back then. Never gave it serious thought. You could see the writing on the wall, even before they built the thing.
lrae 4y ago
> Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded. One of the reasons why they launched and bought studios for exclusive content. Which they then shut down early, only a bit over a year after launch of Stadia (?).
phao 4y ago
Super sincere question. > Google's reputation for not supporting things long term I didn't know Google had such a reputation. I mostly use drive and gmail, so it was fine to me. Does google really have such a reputation? Any place I can read more on this?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- misthop 4y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Lists the lifetime and EOL of everything Google has killed, along with a short blurb about the termination
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kalmi10 4y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I miss Google Reader and Google Wave the most.
  - nitrixion 4y ago
    I really miss Google Play Music. For my needs, it was the perfect streaming service. Youtube Music is a huge step back. Spotify is far too playlist and recommendation happy, I want to listen to albums not curated lists. Tidal is decent, but similar to Spotify. Apple Music is the one I haven't tried for more than a couple of days and I don't recall what I didn't like about it.
    - bobsmooth 4y ago
      I don't understand this comment. You can listen to whole Albums on Spotify.
      - 4y ago
rinze 4y ago
Honestly, at this point in time if you don't know that investing your time in a Google product is probably going to be a waste... it's on you.
pie_flavor 4y ago
Developers didn't onboard because it was Vulkan-only. You can release for GOG as an afterthought, but you had to build for Stadia as Another Separate Platform, and they somehow managed to make their SDK requirements more onerous than Xbox's. They might still of joined if there were any customers, but customers didn't join because of the prospect of needing to buy their existing games again, then pay for a subscription service to play them, on top of the already-not-so-big group of people with great internet but not so great hardware. Though they might of still joined if there were any games. The primary thing Google got wrong was assuming everyone would flock to their service in droves for the promise of the other side of the service, thus forming it. They didn't anticipate that all the roadblocks they installed from the start would prevent any kind of flocking. HN posters will talk about Google's graveyard, but it is not a factor for businesses; Google's history of shuttering perfectly good services doesn't extend to services you actually fork over cash for. And this won't affect that, as it was nowhere near a perfectly good service and was doomed before it was released.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Google's GDC talks regarding Android and Stadia are kind of proofs of how they lack any kind of sensibility how to talk with game developers. While Sony, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, NVidia do cool tech sessions, Google is all about analytics and Play Store. Then they expect developers used to devkits and Visual Studio plugins, to use classical UNIX like development experience to target Stadia, while hoping Stadia will stay around.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  Yeah, if it was truly a cheap port that was just putting the game on another store and plugging in some API calls, devs would have flocked to it. But it involved a pretty involved linux ports instead. Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 cost tens of millions to get working on Stadia. sucks to hear as someone who wants linux gaming to get more prominance, but I guess for now the current direction is to WINE it out.
dawnbreez 4y ago
I'm pretty sure it also got bad initial response because of their pricing plan. I have no idea why Google thought it was a good idea to charge both a subscription fee and a purchase fee per game in a world where services like Game Pass only charge the subscription fee; it's like they just assumed there was no competition.
hot_gril 4y ago
I think starting this kind of service also requires decades of prior buy-in to the gaming market. Google went in with no game studios, no relationships with game studios, no special IP, and no exclusives. That's a recipe for failure even if they had a solid reputation. Their competitors were Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony...

berz01 4y ago

well said, literally it's getting old. no one trusts amazon/google/fb new ventures. atleast fb is going all in on vr

IntelMiner 4y ago
Facebook is dumping money into VR to try and push their boulder of a terrible idea (the "metaverse") up a hill. Except the hill is a solid 90 degree angle cliff Nobody wants to go to Walmart in VR and artificially grocery shop. That's a dystopian misery. But Facebook is happy to try! Their counterparts at places like VRchat meanwhile realized that just making a sandbox environment for people to do whatever they wanted is far more enticing to users. Valve meanwhile is happy to chug along and putter out critically acclaimed games to go with their own bespoke hardware releases
- vhold 4y ago
  For those who have not seen the Walmart VR demo, it's really something else. Something is going very very wrong at Meta if they thought this looked enticing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw
  - fooker 4y ago
    This is as horrible as I expected, thanks!
rjh29 4y ago
They are losing stupid amounts of money on VR (as part of the R&D thing) in the hope that people will use it for work. The awesome value of Oculus Quest 2 will probably never be seen again.

worldsayshi 4y ago

They could mitigate this by always releasing the source code for shut down projects so that it could be self hosted or third parties could continue the work.

jedberg 4y ago
That wouldn't work because their tooling is so custom you could never run it. Also the code is probably in an embarrassing state, especially if the product is getting shut down.

scarmig 4y ago

It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason. I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut those products down in such a way that it's generated far more backlash and ill will than anyone else. Just brainstorming, but perhaps a large company, when launching a new product, could establish some kind of dedicated trust to provide credible assurances that e.g. the product would be supported for at least 10 years.

csydas 4y ago
> What's the best way to launch new, risky things? To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible. I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature. With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes. With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it: - It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in - It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp". So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's interest. Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google) [0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stadia-low-change-porting/?sh=7bb6b1804816 https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stad...

coldpie 4y ago

I remember every single article when they first announced contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was doomed from the start.

Animats 4y ago
Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google product that isn't ad-supported dies, with very few exceptions. Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. "Google Cloud is now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but Google's ad business is likely to subsidize it for the foreseeable future."[1] AWS makes money in that business, but Google does not. So, don't depend on Google Cloud for anything critical. Only a few months ago, Google was saying they were not going to shut down Stadia. So, any PR statement about Cloud not shutting down can't be believed. Stadia, after all, was a cloud service.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will just kill it in years time.
  - eknkc 4y ago
    I deployed stuff on GCP but we moved to AWS after stability issues and horrendous support experience on GCP. And that was easy because we did not commit to any GCP exclusive services (because they tend to shut down all thr time). On AWS we prefer using things like DynamoDB and that further locks us into AWS. GCP is a joke.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      Funny, we use GCP extensively and never have any issues. I can't speak to the support issues because we've never needed any. AWS is a bit of a mess, and I always dread having to use it.

Rebelgecko 4y ago

Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down, we'll refund all your purchases"

dicomdan 4y ago
They are refunding purchases to users. But developers aren't getting their time back.
josefresco 4y ago
Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might kill it. If they promised me a refund I would have probably spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a pro membership.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Yes it was a decent investment to get started, too much for a whim. I seriously thought about it but ended up scoring an Xbox and game pass and my main reason was I have to buy the games at full price for Stadia and google will deffo shut it down sooner rather than later so too risky. Game pass is amazing for someone who isn’t a hardcore call of duty type gamer! I’ve been away from gaming since playing tiger woods on the OG Xbox so being able to play so many different types of games is awesome. I like forza horizons!
  - sylens 4y ago
    Google's mistake was not choosing to go with a Game Pass type model - but then again, they didn't have the content as they have had to work to get each of the games offered running on Linux. It's why they have had to pay millions to developers to make Stadia versions available.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sbarre 4y ago
  Just for clarity, they are refunding hardware and software purchases but not membership fees.

Hamuko 4y ago

I'd say the biggest effect was that consumers didn't trust Google to actually keep their purchases alive for more than two years. Techwise Stadia was actually very good and it could have been a good alternative to a full-blown gaming PC for people who are not gaming enthusiasts.

agrippanux 4y ago
People who are not gaming enthusiasts are pretty happy with mobile gaming. I honestly don’t know what Stadia’s target market was.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware. This would have given enthusiasts a lot less to hate about Stadia. It would have given customers a lot more confidence in the long-term viability of their purchases. It would have highlighted the flexibility offered by Google's streaming platform without making putting up with its drawbacks a requirement to enjoy your games. A player could start out only streaming their games, then upgrade to a real PC down the road to get an even better gameplay experience out of their existing library. For many enthusiasts, the product Google actually launched felt like an existential threat to their hobby. They feared games could go streaming exclusive. Publishers could use it as a form of extra draconian DRM, or start designing their games around the limitations of streaming. As a result this turned many of the biggest gaming enthusiasts, the people casual players will often ask for advice on what to buy, into ant-Stadia evangelists.
  - anotherman554 4y ago
    "Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware." Nvidia already has a product like that called Geforce Now. Instead of having it's own store it integrates with Steam and GOG. There's still the problem that is a hypothetical customer wants to game enough to pay for Stadia but doesn't have the funds for a gaming PC... why don't they just buy the $300 dollar Xbox Series S?

candiddevmike 4y ago

This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google, Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.

wpietri 4y ago
Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate to bet that they'll keep going with it.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone might be interested enough to pick it up. https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 (thread) Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's caught on since when it was announced in July 2020. https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    The wonderful thing about making everything OSS, and also why execs hate it, is it gives up a degree of control to kill something at a moment's notice. And so Dart/Flutter are in a good place!
    - busterarm 4y ago
      It's an important point to understand that it's not the flexibility to kill it but the flexibility to divert its resources elsewhere. You lose that with OSS projects because you eventually end up with people screaming down your door and the visibility that brings. Also being assigned to work on these projects internally is career death. Both of these problems happened to Google Cloud's Terraform provider at some point and it was a headache for the company and the community. Luckily Terraform adoption is out of Google's hands. They're just forced to play ball. OTOH, Google could easily kill off Flutter via other means.

eis 4y ago

Yup and at least my friends and family are extra cautious when it is a service where you "buy" something which can be taken away from you at any moment. Google is building a too strong reputation of an unreliable company. Doesn't help when an AI is in charge of banning people from accessing their critical stuff like emails and stored files.

blihp 4y ago

Google's reputation is, and has been for years, so bad on this front that most of their initiatives are stillborn for this reason pretty much from the day they are announced. Three years ago we had this regarding Stadia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 (even before this, I recall lots of skepticism re: Stadia on the day it was announced)

kabdib 4y ago

Years back, I received quite a few contacts from Google recruiters about interviewing to work on an unannounced gaming product (which was Stadia, of course). Google's reputation for canceling projects was bad, even back then. Never gave it serious thought. You could see the writing on the wall, even before they built the thing.

lrae 4y ago

> Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded. One of the reasons why they launched and bought studios for exclusive content. Which they then shut down early, only a bit over a year after launch of Stadia (?).

phao 4y ago

Super sincere question. > Google's reputation for not supporting things long term I didn't know Google had such a reputation. I mostly use drive and gmail, so it was fine to me. Does google really have such a reputation? Any place I can read more on this?

MichaelCollins 4y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
misthop 4y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Lists the lifetime and EOL of everything Google has killed, along with a short blurb about the termination
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kalmi10 4y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I miss Google Reader and Google Wave the most.
- nitrixion 4y ago
  I really miss Google Play Music. For my needs, it was the perfect streaming service. Youtube Music is a huge step back. Spotify is far too playlist and recommendation happy, I want to listen to albums not curated lists. Tidal is decent, but similar to Spotify. Apple Music is the one I haven't tried for more than a couple of days and I don't recall what I didn't like about it.
  - bobsmooth 4y ago
    I don't understand this comment. You can listen to whole Albums on Spotify.
    - 4y ago

rinze 4y ago

Honestly, at this point in time if you don't know that investing your time in a Google product is probably going to be a waste... it's on you.

pie_flavor 4y ago

Developers didn't onboard because it was Vulkan-only. You can release for GOG as an afterthought, but you had to build for Stadia as Another Separate Platform, and they somehow managed to make their SDK requirements more onerous than Xbox's. They might still of joined if there were any customers, but customers didn't join because of the prospect of needing to buy their existing games again, then pay for a subscription service to play them, on top of the already-not-so-big group of people with great internet but not so great hardware. Though they might of still joined if there were any games. The primary thing Google got wrong was assuming everyone would flock to their service in droves for the promise of the other side of the service, thus forming it. They didn't anticipate that all the roadblocks they installed from the start would prevent any kind of flocking. HN posters will talk about Google's graveyard, but it is not a factor for businesses; Google's history of shuttering perfectly good services doesn't extend to services you actually fork over cash for. And this won't affect that, as it was nowhere near a perfectly good service and was doomed before it was released.

pjmlp 4y ago
Google's GDC talks regarding Android and Stadia are kind of proofs of how they lack any kind of sensibility how to talk with game developers. While Sony, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, NVidia do cool tech sessions, Google is all about analytics and Play Store. Then they expect developers used to devkits and Visual Studio plugins, to use classical UNIX like development experience to target Stadia, while hoping Stadia will stay around.
johnnyanmac 4y ago
Yeah, if it was truly a cheap port that was just putting the game on another store and plugging in some API calls, devs would have flocked to it. But it involved a pretty involved linux ports instead. Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 cost tens of millions to get working on Stadia. sucks to hear as someone who wants linux gaming to get more prominance, but I guess for now the current direction is to WINE it out.

dawnbreez 4y ago

I'm pretty sure it also got bad initial response because of their pricing plan. I have no idea why Google thought it was a good idea to charge both a subscription fee and a purchase fee per game in a world where services like Game Pass only charge the subscription fee; it's like they just assumed there was no competition.

hot_gril 4y ago

I think starting this kind of service also requires decades of prior buy-in to the gaming market. Google went in with no game studios, no relationships with game studios, no special IP, and no exclusives. That's a recipe for failure even if they had a solid reputation. Their competitors were Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony...