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I mostly agree with you, but I downvoted your comment because > We devoted an entire month of resources to this project and thought that was enough! ...is not

I mostly agree with you, but I downvoted your comment because > We devoted an entire month of resources to this project and thought that was enough! ...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it.

lgats 4y ago
https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 @GoogleStadia "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions." Jul 29, 2022 2 Months ago
- permo-w 4y ago
  how is this relevant to what they said?
  - tofuahdude 4y ago
    When the people who make the product literally publicly lie (while being paid extremely well), comments like the OP's (that are obviously tongue in cheek) are certainly not "wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful".
    - johnnyanmac 4y ago
      It's not a lie if they believed it. And I don't see how this justifies calling the developers lazy.
    - endtime 4y ago
      Why would you conflate some VP with the PMs and SWEs who built the thing?
sbierwagen 4y ago
Imagine you go to work at Baby Mulching LLC. This company has existed for two decades, and is dedicated to dropping infants into industrial shredders. Everyone hates Baby Mulching LLC, and they're an enormous black stain on your resume, because there is one single thing they do, and it's grind up children. On your first day, you're asked to design a big toothed wheel. You ask your boss, will this be used to mulch babies? No no no, he says. It will be used to chop up entirely unrelated organic material. You spend three years on it, and once finished, it's immediately incorporated into the Baby Mulcher 3000, the next generation baby mulcher, which can puree one hundred toddlers per hour. Everyone starts yelling at you for building a baby mulcher. But it wasn't your decision! You spent years working on it! This is so unfair! Unfair, maybe. But was it unpredictable?
- yifanl 4y ago
  What relationship does this anecdote have to this scenario exactly, other than tenuously drawing a connection between Google and baby grinding?
  - literalAardvark 4y ago
    As a third party with no skin in the game: no idea but it was hilarious.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    I think what they're trying to say is that the stadia engineers should have seen the writing on the wall, coupled with the questionable history/actions of their employer when it comes to products regardless of their own good faith efforts as an employee.
- solardev 4y ago
  I'm still not really sure what the moral of this parable is, but thanks for the most enjoyable read I've seen here all week, lol.
chrsig 4y ago
I can see where you're coming from. I think it's appropriate enough to interpret the commenter in jest and see that their point is that google spent 1/nth of the required time/resources necessary for it to succeed. In that light, it reads to me more like having some understanding for the people working on it that they were set up to fail, and the failure is not a reflection of their effort.
exolymph 4y ago
It's exaggeration for rhetorical effect, an extremely common stylistic device.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  when everyone is "exaggerating" about how Google shuts every single thing under the sun down, it ceases to seem like a joke.
  - BbzzbB 4y ago
    When was it a joke to say Google sunset every side project of theirs?
dshpala 4y ago
Disrespectful is interpreting words in bad faith. Obviously OP didn't literally mean 1 month.
solardev 4y ago
Sorry, but as a player, I honestly can't tell where that effort went... feels like they abandoned it as soon as it launched. Even at the time of its death, crossplay, cross save etc. didn't work except for a tiny handful of games. The Stadia Plus Chrome extension made a bunch of improvements on their own. There was never a desktop app. No ultra wide support. No RTX. Never got vsync working right. In the years it was alive, what did they add? How come GeForce Now saw such activity and Stadia got... nothing? I wouldn't blame the people working on it, but some manager in Google really screwed that up.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  GeForce now also had the major advantage of being able to play games your already bought on Steam
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Some games, unfortunately. Lots of devs are choosing not to join it, which is very silly to me to be honest. It has absolutely no impact on their sales or development. I bought the game on steam, they have my money. Why do they care what machine I use to run it? Better yet, why do they require I use my hardware? Blizzard famously (famously in the GeForce Now/cloud gaming community that is) pulled WoW without notice when people started playing it in larger numbers. It’s very irritating.
  - solardev 4y ago
    Yeah, and it was a single switch that publishers could check on/off, instead of having to port their entire game to Linux and Vulkan (what a sibling post said)
    - boppo1 4y ago
      Oh, so that's what Vulkan is for. I've been wondering why it exists as I learn graphics programming. I've read that it's faster than OpenGL but also much harder to program for (which is saying something because OpenGL takes some not-insignificant mental gymnastics, at least for a beginner) or vice versa.
causi 4y ago
but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it. Something being tragic doesn't make it not a waste of time. The writing was on the wall since day one. Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down being offered by the most ADHD company in existence. If you chose to spend your time and energy working on that and expected to accomplish anything other than being paid you were a fool.
- endtime 4y ago
  The excerpt I quoted isn't about whether it was a waste of time or a savvy career move, just about the total amount of work that went into it.
- arrow7000 4y ago
  Ha, I literally described Google as having corporate ADHD just yesterday
- cruano 4y ago
  > Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down Eh that's true for Steam, Epic, GoG, et al. If anything, regular people trust Google way more than those other companies since they use the browser/search engine/mail/youtube every single day I do think it was doomed from the start, but only because the subset of people that have high speed internet, disposable income, like gaming and DON'T already own a PC or console is a very very small market
parkingrift 4y ago
>...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it. Fortunately you are here to be anonymously offended on their behalf.
- endtime 4y ago
  I'm not anonymous; it's easy to figure out my identify from my HN profile. I didn't work on Stadia, but I did work on Google Fiber for a couple years only to have almost all that work cancelled, and I'm still sad about it many years later. At the time, I really wouldn't have appreciated people on HN rubbing salt in the wound.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You both have a common enemy - nobody is blaming Google being Google on the employees - they also get abandoned without support and their project cancelled.
  - solardev 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I don't think anyone blames the engineers doing the work. That thought never even crossed my mind... In fact I think Google has some of the best engineers in the world. Sadly, they're handled by some of the worst management and leadership in history. Your CEO has no vision or charisma and the whole company is just spinning in place, waiting for something to happen. Your middle management looks like little fiefdoms actively working against each other in some eternal civil strife. Google is its own worst enemy. From the outside it looks like you guys are a bunch of really smart lab rats stuck in some perverse maze, being forced to run little Hunger Games style competitions to entertain some higher power. I wouldn't want to work there for a million dollars. It jumped the shark a decade ago. Fiber was just another tragedy in a long long list, another fight Google picked and then chickened out of. Google hasn't had a major success in recent memory, just a graveyard of half-assed attempts. But that's a bigger cultural problem at your company, not the fault of any engineer or single team. I sincerely feel for you, and I hope you got out and found something more constructive. Edit: Sorry, not Fi, Fiber.
doliveira 4y ago
Dude, they're making half a million dollars a year, they're gonna be fine
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

lgats 4y ago

https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 @GoogleStadia "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions." Jul 29, 2022 2 Months ago

permo-w 4y ago
how is this relevant to what they said?
- tofuahdude 4y ago
  When the people who make the product literally publicly lie (while being paid extremely well), comments like the OP's (that are obviously tongue in cheek) are certainly not "wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful".
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    It's not a lie if they believed it. And I don't see how this justifies calling the developers lazy.
  - endtime 4y ago
    Why would you conflate some VP with the PMs and SWEs who built the thing?

sbierwagen 4y ago

Imagine you go to work at Baby Mulching LLC. This company has existed for two decades, and is dedicated to dropping infants into industrial shredders. Everyone hates Baby Mulching LLC, and they're an enormous black stain on your resume, because there is one single thing they do, and it's grind up children. On your first day, you're asked to design a big toothed wheel. You ask your boss, will this be used to mulch babies? No no no, he says. It will be used to chop up entirely unrelated organic material. You spend three years on it, and once finished, it's immediately incorporated into the Baby Mulcher 3000, the next generation baby mulcher, which can puree one hundred toddlers per hour. Everyone starts yelling at you for building a baby mulcher. But it wasn't your decision! You spent years working on it! This is so unfair! Unfair, maybe. But was it unpredictable?

yifanl 4y ago
What relationship does this anecdote have to this scenario exactly, other than tenuously drawing a connection between Google and baby grinding?
- literalAardvark 4y ago
  As a third party with no skin in the game: no idea but it was hilarious.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  I think what they're trying to say is that the stadia engineers should have seen the writing on the wall, coupled with the questionable history/actions of their employer when it comes to products regardless of their own good faith efforts as an employee.
solardev 4y ago
I'm still not really sure what the moral of this parable is, but thanks for the most enjoyable read I've seen here all week, lol.

chrsig 4y ago

I can see where you're coming from. I think it's appropriate enough to interpret the commenter in jest and see that their point is that google spent 1/nth of the required time/resources necessary for it to succeed. In that light, it reads to me more like having some understanding for the people working on it that they were set up to fail, and the failure is not a reflection of their effort.

exolymph 4y ago

It's exaggeration for rhetorical effect, an extremely common stylistic device.

johnnyanmac 4y ago
when everyone is "exaggerating" about how Google shuts every single thing under the sun down, it ceases to seem like a joke.
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  When was it a joke to say Google sunset every side project of theirs?

dshpala 4y ago

Disrespectful is interpreting words in bad faith. Obviously OP didn't literally mean 1 month.

solardev 4y ago

Sorry, but as a player, I honestly can't tell where that effort went... feels like they abandoned it as soon as it launched. Even at the time of its death, crossplay, cross save etc. didn't work except for a tiny handful of games. The Stadia Plus Chrome extension made a bunch of improvements on their own. There was never a desktop app. No ultra wide support. No RTX. Never got vsync working right. In the years it was alive, what did they add? How come GeForce Now saw such activity and Stadia got... nothing? I wouldn't blame the people working on it, but some manager in Google really screwed that up.

robotnikman 4y ago
GeForce now also had the major advantage of being able to play games your already bought on Steam
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Some games, unfortunately. Lots of devs are choosing not to join it, which is very silly to me to be honest. It has absolutely no impact on their sales or development. I bought the game on steam, they have my money. Why do they care what machine I use to run it? Better yet, why do they require I use my hardware? Blizzard famously (famously in the GeForce Now/cloud gaming community that is) pulled WoW without notice when people started playing it in larger numbers. It’s very irritating.
- solardev 4y ago
  Yeah, and it was a single switch that publishers could check on/off, instead of having to port their entire game to Linux and Vulkan (what a sibling post said)
  - boppo1 4y ago
    Oh, so that's what Vulkan is for. I've been wondering why it exists as I learn graphics programming. I've read that it's faster than OpenGL but also much harder to program for (which is saying something because OpenGL takes some not-insignificant mental gymnastics, at least for a beginner) or vice versa.

causi 4y ago

but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it. Something being tragic doesn't make it not a waste of time. The writing was on the wall since day one. Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down being offered by the most ADHD company in existence. If you chose to spend your time and energy working on that and expected to accomplish anything other than being paid you were a fool.

endtime 4y ago
The excerpt I quoted isn't about whether it was a waste of time or a savvy career move, just about the total amount of work that went into it.
arrow7000 4y ago
Ha, I literally described Google as having corporate ADHD just yesterday
cruano 4y ago
> Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down Eh that's true for Steam, Epic, GoG, et al. If anything, regular people trust Google way more than those other companies since they use the browser/search engine/mail/youtube every single day I do think it was doomed from the start, but only because the subset of people that have high speed internet, disposable income, like gaming and DON'T already own a PC or console is a very very small market

parkingrift 4y ago

>...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working on it. Fortunately you are here to be anonymously offended on their behalf.

endtime 4y ago
I'm not anonymous; it's easy to figure out my identify from my HN profile. I didn't work on Stadia, but I did work on Google Fiber for a couple years only to have almost all that work cancelled, and I'm still sad about it many years later. At the time, I really wouldn't have appreciated people on HN rubbing salt in the wound.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You both have a common enemy - nobody is blaming Google being Google on the employees - they also get abandoned without support and their project cancelled.
- solardev 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I don't think anyone blames the engineers doing the work. That thought never even crossed my mind... In fact I think Google has some of the best engineers in the world. Sadly, they're handled by some of the worst management and leadership in history. Your CEO has no vision or charisma and the whole company is just spinning in place, waiting for something to happen. Your middle management looks like little fiefdoms actively working against each other in some eternal civil strife. Google is its own worst enemy. From the outside it looks like you guys are a bunch of really smart lab rats stuck in some perverse maze, being forced to run little Hunger Games style competitions to entertain some higher power. I wouldn't want to work there for a million dollars. It jumped the shark a decade ago. Fiber was just another tragedy in a long long list, another fight Google picked and then chickened out of. Google hasn't had a major success in recent memory, just a graveyard of half-assed attempts. But that's a bigger cultural problem at your company, not the fault of any engineer or single team. I sincerely feel for you, and I hope you got out and found something more constructive. Edit: Sorry, not Fi, Fiber.

doliveira 4y ago

Dude, they're making half a million dollars a year, they're gonna be fine

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]