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Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." htt
by vyrotek 4y ago
Just a couple of months ago.
"Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro."
https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
- yellow_lead 4y agoSo that was a lie
- awill 4y agoProbably the reason they had to give refunds, or they'd get sued, and this would be evidence #1 against Google
- taytus 4y agoIt’s really a lie if everyone knows it is a lie thou?
- judge2020 4y agoWhat is the social media person supposed to say in this case? "we're working on a blog post about Stadia shutting down that'll be released in 2 months"? Even if Phil Harrison himself were the one running that Twitter account, he probably knew it was destined to shut down but didn't have anything official on when or the details of the shutdown.
- yellow_lead 4y agoHow about nothing?
- bccdee 4y agoSomething evasive in the vein of "Stadia represents a significant investment and Google has not announced any plans to scale back Stadia. We can't comment on rumours and speculation."
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> What is the social media person supposed to say in this case? If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.
- georgeecollins 4y ago"We're proud of our Stadia experience and we are working hard on projects for it." That would not be as misleading as we are not going anywhere. Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being paid not to realize the obvious.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoAfter negative news, it’s pretty safe to assume thr opposite when PR / Marketing says something like “we wont be shutting down” or when a CEO says “there wont be any layoffs”. If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.
- wil421 4y agoA company I worked for moved from the Suburbs to downtown in the city I live in. Local news broke the story right when the deal was signed with the building contractor. For weeks on end they denied it, until they didn’t. Surprise we were always lying to you!
- bink 4y agoThey usually couch it in weasel words such as "we have no plans to conduct layoffs at this time" rather than an outright lie.
- elil17 4y agoThat is an outright lie if they do have plans for layoffs.
- jedmeyers 4y agoOh no, they have a plan to create a plan for layoffs, but as of right now there is no plan to layoff employees.
- ConceptJunkie 4y agoMore realistically, "We don't have a plan for laying off employees at this time. Our plan is for laying off employees next month."
- hansvm 4y ago"at this time" just needs to refer to when the layoffs are happening rather than the existence of a plan.
- coldpie 4y agoYes. Stadia execs lied to their own employees. It's a pattern for the company. This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.” https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-studios-for-great-1846281384 https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-stu...
- hinkley 4y agoI'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits. But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit).
- Melatonic 4y agoAt least with the mushroom treatment though you end up with some very tasty and healthy products!
- hinkley 4y agoI am not a product.
- humanistbot 4y ago> I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits. That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with this case. It gives all of us (internal employees, outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of an Alphabet executive.
- rany_ 4y agoI doubt the social media guy even knew. They were posting promotional tweets just 2 days ago. Source: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566
- lupire 4y agoIt's an employee doing a job. The job was to lie to the public for short term gain. Don't have to blame the employee, do have to blame the management.
- hustwindmaple1 4y agoWhy would s/he? S/he is prob. 10 levels below the actual decision maker and sometimes is not even a fulltime employee.
- wpietri 4y agoI doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain. So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.
- canadianwriter 4y agoLike... maybe? Why does it have to be a lie instead of incompetence? They may have totally thought that back then, then changed their mind?
- mrguyorama 4y agoIt's Google. Everyone knew the second Stadia was announced that it would die. It wasn't even a particularly good example of a game streaming service. If you work for Google and were convinced that Stadia was secure for the future, you should reconsider the reality you live in.
- DashAnimal 4y agoSo... Just to get this correct, the social media person who probably isn't privvy to plans affecting their job in two months should have written something along the lines of "were told it's going to be ok, but who even knows with Google"?
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoThat would actually have been hilarious.
- mrguyorama 4y agoMaybe PR teams shouldn't get a free pass to say whatever they want. If your PR team can just lie to the public due to "ignorance" it becomes very very profitable to lie to your own PR team.
- lupire 4y agoThey could just say "we don't comment on future plans" instead of lying to increase sales, aka committing fraud.
- myko 4y agoI've used GeForce Now and Stadia was a lot better than it on my iPad/WiFi What service is better than Stadia at actually running games in the cloud?
- kyrra 4y agoGoogler, opinions are my own. I don't work on Stadia. From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.
- gilrain 4y ago> When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.” I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company which respects you; you’re worth it.
- johnnyanmac 4y agoTBF, if Mcdonalds paid people 100k at age 23 to flip burgers, employees would put up with a lot more BS as well. And that salary for a google newgrad is low balling.
- hinkley 4y agoUnfortunately there's a reason teams and people get put on "Double Secret Probation". If consumers find out the team might get shut down they start relying on them less, at which point the probation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise. They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover. That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.
- __david__ 4y agoIt depends on when they made the decision. Changing your mind doesn't mean you previously lied, it just means you were wrong. Lying needs intent.
- lupire 4y agoThis is an extremely dangerous attitude. Truth matters, not just whatever feels good.
- laserlight 4y agoIf we collectively stopped believing non-binding statements with no skin in the game, these bullshitters would stop bullshitting.
- rvz 4y agoYep, damage control that is: "It's okay if your head's in the clouds. There are video games here." We all saw though that, and we knew it was a sinking ship. But this wasn't really a surprise since this information was given to me from the future [0] and I said exactly was was going to happen and predicted it a year before [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255
- unicornmama 4y agoFrom a cynical ex-Google employee, this would have translated to “Stadia still has more promotions to squeeze out”. Today’s message signals that it’s done its squeezing, permanently.
- timmg 4y agoI mean, it was probably a lie. But, also, things may have changed. It's not like Google didn't just go through a big hiring freeze and budget process.
- sbarre 4y agoIt's likely that the person tweeting this believed it, because it's what they were told.. I'm going to bet most of the Stadia team found out at the same time as, or shortly before, everyone else.
- gilrain 4y agoThey really don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to abandoning products.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoEverybody here knew it wasn't going to play out that way, so surely everybody in Google knew it too. Or should have known. Either they were lying, or were effectively brainwashed by the corporate environment (a real possibility.)
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is a really low-stakes prediction, for us to guess that Google is going to cancel a product. Internally I bet they had people making good-faith arguments in both directions.
- buttersbrian 4y agoNot a pay product though. How many pay products have they shut-down cold-turkey, with no new service/product to migrate to?
- bee_rider 4y agoMy point is less that we are more likely to be correct, and more that without seeing the sunk costs first hand it is easier to say "lol it is google they will cancel things!"
- LatteLazy 4y agoIn the UK, you know a minister will be sacked soon when the Prime Minister publicly announced they "have her full confidence"...
- tomschwiha 4y agoSame for German politicans
- drcongo 4y agoAnd football managers.
- Psychoshy_bc1q 4y agowrong. german parasites can literally do what they want. they get away with (almost) everything.
- ConceptJunkie 4y agoThis is Google we're talking about. They shut everything down eventually.
- krossitalk 4y agoDoes anyone think we'll ever see the sunsetting of something huge like YouTube or GMail?
- transfire 4y agoYes.
- 1123581321 4y agoNot unless the products start failing or human population grows 10x and they don’t keep up relative to other Google products. Google takes products seriously when they have huge user counts and huge user counts relative to their competition. Their problem is their inability to seriously commit to growing valuable new products to that size.
- wvenable 4y agoNope. Huge products will be fine as long as they stay huge. Google doesn't support new products enough to become huge and don't seem to have a cohesive plan to support a range of products in the long term. I'm probably someone who could have benefited from Stadia but I feel like they never marketed to me in a way that even got me to try it. And the fear that this was just another experiment by Google didn't have me seeking it out on my own especially for the up front costs.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoIn 1997, I'm not sure anyone could imagine an Internet without GeoCities.
- pvarangot 4y agoFor GMail? yes. For YouTube I think it would be something like it will slowly turn into CNGooGSNBC and be heavily editorialized where you need to work with an AI assisted nebulous entity for weeks before you can upload content.
- ren_engineer 4y agoGoogle needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their cash cow, Google is in trouble
- akira2501 4y ago> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.
- scarface74 4y agoYou can’t blame this on Google’s size. Neither Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon (Disclaimer: I work at AWS) have this problem. Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile. Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid. Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.
- ryanbrunner 4y agoIt's less size and more lack of competition. As dominant as the companies you listed are, none of them completely capture a market to the degree that Google does with search and ads. Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.
- scarface74 4y ago
- Forge36 4y agohttps://twitter.com/BlueFireDemon44/status/1553062979884748801 https://twitter.com/BlueFireDemon44/status/15530629798847488... >I mean we could wait till September 24 too Not bad missed the estimate by 5 days.
- Yhippa 4y agoI should have known when they cancelled the Pixelbook that this was next.
- ravenstine 4y agoThough I'm not suggesting lying/malice on The Google's part here, it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of corporate PR. Whenever a company insists it's not going to do something, I assume they're doing damage control and that the opposite is more likely to be true (much like Bettridge's Law). If a company makes a positive statement in PR, I assume their statements won't live up to their promise or, even worse, come with a deal breaking caveat.
- Sebb767 4y ago> it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of corporate PR. If you look at the discussions about the shutdown rumor, hardly believed PR. I was on the defensive side and my argument was that spreading this rumor was basically a free point.
- sva_ 4y ago> Just a couple of months ago. This was exactly 2 months ago (July 29th).
- throw_m239339 4y agoarchived for posterity: https://archive.ph/W3F3g https://archive.ph/W3F3g
- 6etxdyuve 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Xeoncross 4y agoThe first reply to that tweet: "When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months could you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the controller first? It's a good controller and I'd like to be able to use it." - https://twitter.com/josh_ross/status/1553465786634604544 https://twitter.com/josh_ross/status/1553465786634604544
- DSingularity 4y agoGold
- bornfreddy 4y agoI am guessing they didn't release the drivers?
- zerocrates 4y agoMy understanding is that it uses Bluetooth just for pairing, so I'd assume that it's not so much an issue of "drivers" but more of controller firmware to get it to send inputs over Bluetooth at all.
- ThatPlayer 4y agoYes, the way it normally functions is directly connected to the Stadia server over wifi. It does show up as a controller connected over USB too. But Bluetooth is just for setting up the wifi connection. I don't even want to call it pairing because the way you pair the controller to your game session is to enter in a 5 button combination that is displayed on your TV.
- willtemperley 4y agoIt works nicely as a controller over USB, I’m using my stadia controller with OpenEMU
- tmpz22 4y agoI have empathy for their team on this topic. If they release bluetooth drivers they are committed to some minimal quality and compatibility standard and controller owners unaware of a larger OSS effort will be frustrated if it isn't actively maintained.
- furyofantares 4y agoWhat I think happens in situations like these (from experience) is that the team is trying as hard as they can to prevent shutting down. And they either believe they'll succeed, or believe they can't succeed without boosting the expectation that they'll succeed by explicitly claiming they aren't shutting down. If you say, both to the public and to the team, that you might shut down but you're not sure yet, that's as good as shutting down. And if there are rumors about shutting down, because it's close to happening, then you may have to address it. And you may believe that the only chance you have of not shutting down is to tell everyone that you aren't shutting down.
- Diesel555 4y agoI like this statement. It doesn't imply ill-will such as intentional lying or selfish intent as most other posts do. This statement simply shows that people are trying to make their projects succeed in a complicated environment. From my experiences, most people are doing what they think is right. We should take more time understanding why people think what they are doing is right, even when we may perceive the action as immoral or wrong.
- makeitdouble 4y agoYes. There's a Japanese podcast (rebuild.fm) where one of the recurring guest (Hak) is from a game dev background and was probably assigned to Stadia. He never said it explicitely but from the conversation you would guess. One of their discussion was on how much commitment was crucial in the game dev world. Devs on all sides (platform, libraries, actual game) would put their skin in the game and gamble time and money but also personal energy to make something successful, and there was an expectation that all participant would stick together even as the future gets bleaker (what comes to my mind is Nintendo supporting and pushing the Wii U for a while, even as it was a clear failure, or Sony keeping the Vita alive as much as they could) Your reputation as a platform maker gets a serious hit if you're ready to quit the minute your forecast gets dark, and game devs never really forget this kind of things, unlike other more opportunistic ecosystems. I kinda hope the Stadia team could move on outside of Google to a more fitting company..
- crazygringo 4y agoThat tweet was surely from the Stadia team, and teams generally do not plan on shutting down. I think we can assume that was 100% honest at the time, and the team was doing everything it could to keep going. And that upper management (VP/director/etc.) probably finally made the decision to shut it down just a couple of weeks ago or even less. So while ironic... it's highly unlikely Google was lying, as multiple people here are suggesting. Nobody knows for sure that a product/team will be shut down until it actually is. Not even upper management knows until they see the newest numbers. Having had some experience at large companies, many teams' whole existence is on the line every ~3 months as the product manager presents updates to the VP and associates, and then waits a week to find out later if the team a) gets new employees / higher budget, b) gets no new employees and no increased budget, or c) gets cancelled so start looking for an internal transfer.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoI don't think folks really care much if it was an outright lie, or if it was a George Costanza "It's not a lie if YOU believe it" lie. Just another data point on why people rightfully think PR posts like this are BS.
- lupire 4y agoReckless disregard for truth is as bad as lying. Claiming to definitively know things you don't know, is lying.
- Zhyl 4y agoBut the language they used wasn't ambiguous. They said they were committed to it. If they want to give themselves wiggle room to backtrack on decisions based on performance, they need to find a way of being enthusiastic without making it sound like they are going long on the tech and the platform.
- HelloNurse 4y ago"I'm committed" can imply "my boss isn't".
- Sakos 4y agoI'm Jack's complete lack of surprise. Also, there's this tidbit: > Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia’s technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed,” he wrote. I assumed they'd do a pivot towards offering it as a service for game publishers to build on, something like GCS just for game streaming. I wonder when we'll see an announcement for that.
- barbariangrunge 4y agoSome people were mean to me when I said I wasn’t going to port my game to stadia. I said, “google will probably cancel it within the next few years, so I’m not even considering it,” and they got really offended by my prediction. Well… it was a little rude to make a prediction like that, but it was based on research and past history. It was just way too big a risk. I wonder if it’s a bit self fulfilling at this point: timid users lead to poor adoption which leads to cancellations which leads to timid users?
- princevegeta89 4y agoThat's why you should always take corporate promises with a tablespoon of salt. After seeing so many big companies promise things and only screw those over along the course of last couple of decades, this is of no surprise to me
- goldenManatee 4y agoThis is what drives my hesitancy toward subscribing any Google paid product. The company is very short-term focused and fickle on measuring the success of a product. They have the cash to throw at new problems, but they lack the stamina for any of their products to weather-out a storm. Google itself has the reputational problem of being weak on product longterm visions; that makes it a non-starter for buying into their mercurial fantasies.
- sjs382 4y agoI used Stadia super casually, despite buying the Founder's Edition as soon as it was available. I bought maybe 5 games at very steep discounts and maybe played them for 1-4 hours each. With that said, the way they're handling this shutdown gives me LESS hesitancy re: consumer entertainment purchases. Granting full, automatic refunds is the vest way this can be handled, period. Now, developer services are another story... Winding down a service that I rely on (rather than just being entertained by) would cause me more work, on their schedule. But still, I have slightly more trust that they'll handle similar things well in the future.
- Aeolun 4y agoIt’s amazing since, ever since I stopped using any Google product, nothing I use has shut down any more.
- msabalau 4y agoYou've got to turn the lemons into lemonade. Take advantage of the fact that they are likely to close things. I got to play Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when that was the best and most reliable way to play that game. Now I'm getting a full refund. I should have bought more games!
- remram 4y agoIn July they had the gall to make fun of the rumor that it was getting shut down: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440 Google killing products left and right is bad enough, this amount of lying is just unbearable. Google's lack of object permanence is probably the reason people didn't sign up for Stadia in the first place.
- corobo 4y agoYup, didn't even bother with it because Google. It sounded right up my alley but.. turns out I wasn't wrong, lol.
- mysterydip 4y agoEven worse, there are developers with games due to come out in a few weeks or months who are just hearing about this from the articles. https://twitter.com/sfbtom/status/1575558078367690752?s=21&t=tgFC3npM7ha8M5xZ1Aklvg https://twitter.com/sfbtom/status/1575558078367690752?s=21&t... https://twitter.com/burgerbecky/status/1575585277594066945?s=21&t=tgFC3npM7ha8M5xZ1Aklvg https://twitter.com/burgerbecky/status/1575585277594066945?s...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- matheusmoreira 4y agoWelp. I don't even understand why anyone would ever trust Google at this point.
- ineedasername 4y agoAh, I remember that tweet. I was astounded not long ago when Stadia came up for discussion on when there were still users on HN using it to try to convince me that Google, whatever their long term plans, could not possibly be shutting it down in the immediate future. Especially since there were games— FIFA preorder even being taken— scheduled for release. Unfortunately Google didn’t even have the courtesy to tell all of the developers about it, and some just got the news that their games set to launch in the next few days were, on stadia at least, already dead. At this point, unless it’s ads, you’re looking at the world through rose tinted lenses if think there isn’t at least a chance Google is about to kill almost of its products.