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> Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon. I’ve seen a few developers (Ryan Gordon, IIRC?) saying th

> Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing Google, they're going to sunset it soon. I’ve seen a few developers (Ryan Gordon, IIRC?) saying that the Stadia SDK was actually great. It was basically just a bog standard Vulkan/Linux environment with much fewer unpleasant surprises than consoles.

gilrain 4y ago
Aside from the unpleasant surprise of there not being an audience.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
The whole stack was great. Google engineers worked their asses off on it. Very smart people throughout. The management was awful though. In the 10 years I was at Google I never really had to face a "crunch" situation but there I was right before Christmas working til midnight on the very tiny bit of Stadia I had somehow been dragged into despite telling my manager I didn't want to be anywhere near it because it was radioactive (My rule learned the hard way was always stay away from the "hot" project at a company like Google. It just becomes a feeding frenzy of empire building and egos, and steady incremental contribution will get you nowhere.) I had it much better than most though. If I recall: The original app setup (integrated into the existing Home app) was tossed at the last minute. The entire out of box process for the controller redone in the process. In literally the last few weeks before ship date. The controller folks I knew were heroes. It's sad to see their hard work thrown away. There's no way Stadia in its entire existence made enough revenue to cover the sheer number of SWE-hours put into it, especially the spent SWE-hours caused by last minute product changes; which nobody further up ever had to pay a consequence for.
- radiKal07 4y ago
  Do you think Google will unlock the Bluetooth for the controllers so we can still use them? Maybe a firmware update or open sourcing the drivers.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
solardev 4y ago
VS GeForce Now, where you check a box saying "I want my game to be streamable" and then... you're done. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  Yup... until one day the game is taken off the story and that checkbox removed. Big business is rough.
  - solardev 4y ago
    Then you lost the 15 minutes you took filling out that form? And your players can still stream it elsewhere, like Shadow or Luna? Doesn't seem terrible. VS the days/weeks/months it took you to port to Stadia, only to have the entire service shut down. The point is that there are many PC streaming services that are basically "no porting required", whereas Stadia opted for a strange sort-of-console, sort-of-not model (despite PSNow and XCloud already being able to stream actual console games already) that required you to spend dev hours porting your game. It backfired because most devs didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) port their x86 game targeting Windows to some tiny proprietary platform, ESPECIALLY when it's Google hosting it. Of the few that did (Orcs Must Die), Google arranged some exclusivity deal with them, lying that Stadia could do things no gaming PC or cloud streaming service could do due to Stadia's special scale or something. It was a lie. When the exclusivity expired, it showed up on Steam and GeForce Now and ran perfectly fine, and got a lot more players to boot. Stadia had some really awesome tech -- namely the UX of being able to boot straight into a game without waiting for Steam Big Picture -- and some nifty (but relatively useless) side features like being able to capture a memory snapshot and resume that later, emulator-style. But I don't think their management really understood the PC gaming culture and what was truly important to its user base, and failed to take years of pleading and feedback into consideration. They just arrogantly did... something else (or nothing much? I can't really tell)... with Stadia and drove it into the ground. So sorry for all the engineers who worked on it and had to see it nosedive like that due to managerial incompetence. None of this was a surprise to any gamer actually watching this space. Stadia came late, delivered less, and exited early. Google's product culture doomed it from the get-go.

gilrain 4y ago

Aside from the unpleasant surprise of there not being an audience.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

The whole stack was great. Google engineers worked their asses off on it. Very smart people throughout. The management was awful though. In the 10 years I was at Google I never really had to face a "crunch" situation but there I was right before Christmas working til midnight on the very tiny bit of Stadia I had somehow been dragged into despite telling my manager I didn't want to be anywhere near it because it was radioactive (My rule learned the hard way was always stay away from the "hot" project at a company like Google. It just becomes a feeding frenzy of empire building and egos, and steady incremental contribution will get you nowhere.) I had it much better than most though. If I recall: The original app setup (integrated into the existing Home app) was tossed at the last minute. The entire out of box process for the controller redone in the process. In literally the last few weeks before ship date. The controller folks I knew were heroes. It's sad to see their hard work thrown away. There's no way Stadia in its entire existence made enough revenue to cover the sheer number of SWE-hours put into it, especially the spent SWE-hours caused by last minute product changes; which nobody further up ever had to pay a consequence for.

radiKal07 4y ago
Do you think Google will unlock the Bluetooth for the controllers so we can still use them? Maybe a firmware update or open sourcing the drivers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

solardev 4y ago

VS GeForce Now, where you check a box saying "I want my game to be streamable" and then... you're done. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

johnnyanmac 4y ago
Yup... until one day the game is taken off the story and that checkbox removed. Big business is rough.
- solardev 4y ago
  Then you lost the 15 minutes you took filling out that form? And your players can still stream it elsewhere, like Shadow or Luna? Doesn't seem terrible. VS the days/weeks/months it took you to port to Stadia, only to have the entire service shut down. The point is that there are many PC streaming services that are basically "no porting required", whereas Stadia opted for a strange sort-of-console, sort-of-not model (despite PSNow and XCloud already being able to stream actual console games already) that required you to spend dev hours porting your game. It backfired because most devs didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) port their x86 game targeting Windows to some tiny proprietary platform, ESPECIALLY when it's Google hosting it. Of the few that did (Orcs Must Die), Google arranged some exclusivity deal with them, lying that Stadia could do things no gaming PC or cloud streaming service could do due to Stadia's special scale or something. It was a lie. When the exclusivity expired, it showed up on Steam and GeForce Now and ran perfectly fine, and got a lot more players to boot. Stadia had some really awesome tech -- namely the UX of being able to boot straight into a game without waiting for Steam Big Picture -- and some nifty (but relatively useless) side features like being able to capture a memory snapshot and resume that later, emulator-style. But I don't think their management really understood the PC gaming culture and what was truly important to its user base, and failed to take years of pleading and feedback into consideration. They just arrogantly did... something else (or nothing much? I can't really tell)... with Stadia and drove it into the ground. So sorry for all the engineers who worked on it and had to see it nosedive like that due to managerial incompetence. None of this was a surprise to any gamer actually watching this space. Stadia came late, delivered less, and exited early. Google's product culture doomed it from the get-go.