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We worked for 4 months to build a port for Stadia and today we finished it

376 points by babuskov 4y ago

eloff 4y ago
An I wrong to think they could theoretically sue Google for knowingly publishing false information about how likely they are to cancel Stadia? Stadia execs said a few months ago that they will not cancel Stadia, but I'm sure the internal conversations and meetings were very different. Like get your numbers up by next quarter or it's over. These conversations would be found in discovery probably. It seems that lie caused many people to invest in Stadia when they otherwise wouldn't have. However, I say theoretically, because you'd need an insane amount of money and five to ten year timeframe to get anywhere with it. That's no small risk if you lose, and there's always the chance you do. A class action lawsuit on the other hand might be worthwhile.
Havoc 4y ago
This is why I consider ability to lift & shift when building anything on google. They're just not trustworthy as a foundation so being able to take your toys elsewhere becomes a primary consideration. See also them pulling the rug out from people that built on IoT core about a month ago.
hericium 4y ago
Cost of doing business with Google.
shapefrog 4y ago
Best thing to ever happen to them. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/ Write a postmortem, publish it to gamedeveloper dot com and capitalize on all the Stadia drama while it's hot to boost sales for your original game release. Make a YouTube video talking about the pain you went through, all the things you learned that you didn't get to give to people, and see what kind of hype you can salvage. Or just get it on HN and tell people where they can buy your game?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- swores 4y ago
  No way the exposure from this outweighs the 5 months of wasted dev time. It's salvaging a silver lining from a shitty situation, nowhere near a good thing yet alone "best thing to ever happen to them". edit: Elaborated on this in a reply to a reply, here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034563
  - djmips 4y ago
    Honestly, it might. Marketing is expensive and very unpredictable.
  - ajross 4y ago
    Actually this is the game industry. Very reasonable indie titles die on Steam with sales in the dozens, all the time. Everything is about marketing and buzz, everything. So yes, I think this absolutely has made the game more successful than it would have been given its very-neear-zero median expectation.
    - swores 4y ago
      I'm speaking with 15+ years experience in the games industry, often explicitly in marketing. It's very possible that I'm wrong: obviously we don't have the knowledge of what their expectations from Stadia were, nor is it possible for anyone to now know how successful or not their Stadia launch would've been if Google had decided to keep trying to make Stadia work, nor do we know how many sales the game will get from this exposure. But I still stand by my view despite agreeing with your first few sentences about the industry generally. edit: It's mainly coming from gut instinct, so I've tried to think more about why my gut says that. I think the main thing is that the exposure is going to people who are interested in games industry business, or tech industry, or Google specifically. That's what everyone is discussing, not whether or not the game is actually worth playing (and unlike if it was some planned PR, there's not even any subtle suggestion within the story that the game is worth playing - nor to be fair that it's not worth playing). Sure, a few people might click onto the steam page out of curiosity, or buy the game out of sympathy to the poor people getting screwed by this situation, but it would be surprising (to me at least) if the amount of people converting is more than if they actually just had a marketing person spend a day writing a piece of content for Hacker News / GamesIndustry.biz with the goal of being both interesting tech content and featuring mentions of what makes the game worth playing. And that's just thinking about doing targeted marketing to not-very-good target audiences (for promoting indie games - sure there are some areas where HN traffic is incredible and businesses that would love a front page post, indie games not so much). SteamDB's data on the game doesn't seem to suggest that I'm wrong here, but maybe with time I'll become wrong. (Side note, while writing this comment I couldn't remember the name of the game we're talking about, so I had to go look it up... because the name of the game wasn't the interesting bit when I read about this earlier!) https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/ https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/
asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
I really can't stand how Google has handled the whole stadia thing. Just want to get that that of the way. I don't want to excuse google here. But I do question the wisdom of porting this game to Stadia. It has only a single user review on Steam after having been out on that platform for four months. Even if only one in a thousand people leave reviews, that suggests a revenue of only $2500 or so, or more like $1750 after steam takes their cut. How can it possibly make financial sense to spend nearly half a year porting this game to an even smaller platform?
- xdfgh1112 4y ago
  > After watching ReviewTechUSAs video on it, another Developer working on a Stadia port explained that apparently Google Stadia was paying the Developers for the amount of Gameplay Stadia users played their game. So it was enough for them to decide it was worth the investment to focus on porting their game as they would be making a bare minimum.
- faller_slive 4y ago
  Since there were much fewer games on Stadia, your game had a much bigger chance of getting discovered. And if they got their game into Stadia Pro (subscription) they would benefit from its generous revenue share. Hundred Days - Winemaking Simulator made 25% of their revenue from Stadia. https://twitter.com/YvesHohler/status/1519966206169649152/photo/1 https://twitter.com/YvesHohler/status/1519966206169649152/ph...
  - isk517 4y ago
    I imagine there were a lot of small developers hoping for a repeat of the early days of the Switch.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - danbolt 4y ago
    It kind of reminds me a bit of how TowerFall's standout success on the Ouya helped pave the way for Celeste.
glandium 4y ago
Waiting for stories like "I was at company A, we relied on Google product X, and they pulled the plug and we went under. Then I moved to company B, which relied on Google product Y, and they pulled the plug. Then I moved to company C, which relies on Google product Z, and they're pulling the plug." (aka "serially killed by Google")
- pmontra 4y ago
  Nearly completed a project that was using Google's Conversational Actions when Google announced that they'll retire them in 12 months and support only App Actions for its Assistant. The customer froze that half of the project immediately: there will be only the software that interfaces Alexa. https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Plan on Google to kill a product more than keep a product.
- netsharc 4y ago
  The nex t Google product/feature launch press release should be rewritten from e.g. "Google introduces Badonkadonk Land Cruiser" to "Google might shutdown Badonkadonk Land Cruiser within 2 years", and the contents also adjusted to say "Since Google has a poor track record with keeping services running, users are understandbly wary about using this new Land Cruiser, meaning it is already on life support and might be cancelled in about 2 years."
AlexandrB 4y ago
If Google tries to enter the gaming market again any time soon, they're going to have a bad time. What developer is going to trust them to stick around? It's also interesting to contrast Stadia to the original Xbox and how Microsoft stuck to it while losing money for years.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
IMHO: Google is handling a bunch of things, including Stadia, and including GCP, in a very poor way. GCP: copycat of AWS, but with less high margin, higher level services, so have been losing money since the beginning (ask some of Alphabet's board members, if you can, and watch their eyes rolling). The only thing that could have given them the advantage - not, not Kubernetes, although K was and is a great thing to fund - was a "cloud in a box" product, so companies could install a rack of GCP in their existing Data Centers, and use it. See "The Cloud Wars of 2017", written by me [0] six years ago. Stadia: you can't build Stadia without getting into account that the market has one big monopoly (Steam), and a few huge other ones (Xbox, Epic, etc). The strategy has simply been to ignore this simple fact. It's like Netflix building a streaming service, without a huge investment into content as well. Doomed to fail from the get go. Small rant, no horses in this game on my part; just a pity that two huge opportunities were wasted like this. [0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac9f352911a2 https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac...
- outworlder 4y ago
  > GCP: copycat of AWS I don't think it's fair. Compute and networking are still ahead of AWS, although the gap is narrowing. GKE was great from the get go, but today it's not much of a differentiator.
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  Steam is anything but a monopoly, there's a reason EGS got as far as it did.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Yes, entering a market with a huge war-chest and dumping an absolute fuckton of free product is one way to attack a monopoly. There's a reason they had to do that to gain any traction. I've paid for one game on there. It was an exclusive and is the only reason I finally installed the damn thing. I think I'm up to about 150 games on Epic, and I didn't even get in near the beginning and have missed a few since. What they've managed to buy from me, with that, is a +1 in their install-base stat because the free games every couple weeks keep me from uninstalling it, but I still buy everything on GoG or Steam. I don't even care if epic has a lower price, I use one of those. If Stadia had taken the same approach, the average account would have spent $100 or less but would "have" $3000+ worth of games.
ydc123 4y ago
RektBoy 4y ago
Wait, I though shutting down of Stadia was a public knowledge for months now?
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 "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." July 29, 2022.
  - rvz 4y ago
    It was obvious the moment the VP of Stadia left, and already knew it was over a year before. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202
treis 4y ago
They've probably got a case based on promissory estoppel. Roughly Google made promises that Stadia wouldn't shut down. The devs work on a port based on that promise. Thus Google is liable for their effort. But then again probably there's some sort of "eat shit and die" clause in the agreement developers have with Google.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  Pragmatically, my mental model of the legal system is "he who has the most lawyers wins" combined with even the definition of "win" is kind of fuzzy given how many years the appeal process can drag on
- CodeWriter23 4y ago
  Pretty sure Google's army of lawyers made sure they promised nothing other than a chance at The Golden Ticket.
babuskov 4y ago
Just to be clear to some commenters: This isn't my game and I never developed anything for Stadia. I only develop for Steam and Nintendo Switch and you can find my games in my HN profile. I just found an interesting thread on game development Reddit today and wanted to share. I don't have anything to gain or lose here. I agree that it's debatable whether that game really required 4 months of work to port. It does look simple. So, maybe the developer isn't that competent. Or maybe the whole integration process takes a lot of effort? Idk. Thanks.
- baud147258 4y ago
  Maybe it took not 4 months of work, but 4 months of back and forth with Google? Like the devs sent a build, Google takes 2 or more weeks to make a list of issues, send those, the devs take 2 weeks to fix them, rinse and repeat until four months are gone and Stadia is dead.
znpy 4y ago
> Nobody is to blame. X doubt. At the very least google is to blame, and the stadia exec that assured stadia wasn’t going to shut down.
incrudible 4y ago
These aged really well, didn't they? https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Google blindsided the entire Stadia team. https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_harrison_thats_3_failed_launches_for/iqe3cdv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_...
- jks 4y ago
  How about this one https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1196447880728453120 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1196447880728453120
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
haunter 4y ago
"I'm actually not a big gamer" - Sundar Pichai on the Stadia reveal event https://youtu.be/nUih5C5rOrA?t=120 https://youtu.be/nUih5C5rOrA?t=120 The whole industry is there and this is how you start a keynote. Not surprised that most people weren't confident about Stadia. But it's also baffling when there were so many running services and standalone products already. Steam Link, Nvidia Geforce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Playstation Remote Play, Parsec etc. It's not like Google had a brand new open field ahead of them and no idea what to do
- bergenty 4y ago
  He’s being honest. I’d prefer that to some Ballmeresk character coming out and just lying about what the crowd wants to hear.
  - effingwewt 4y ago
    Did you mean Ballmer-esque? Or did I read it wrong? No one's mentioned it, so I have a feeling it may be the latter, and if so I apologize. If you did mean Ballmer- as in Steve, then may I ask what you mean by saying what the crowd wants to hear? I'd always thought he was honest in the face of strong opposition. Thanks in advance!
    - bergenty 4y ago
      I did mean Ballmeresque. To be honest, it was the first over the top sales person I could think of, I don’t necessarily know if he lied.
      - effingwewt 4y ago
        Right on, appreciate the clarification, have a good one!
danielvaughn 4y ago
Google has to realize that the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" method isn't going to end well for them. They need vested users to make their products successful, and now it's almost a foregone conclusion that anything new coming out of Google these days will get the axe eventually, so why bother?
klik99 4y ago
I truly hate this way of sunsetting projects, esp platforms that others materially depend on. Even if you don’t want to say you’re cancelling it, an attitude of reduced pressure so they’re not crunching to finish the port. A friend was about to close on a house a couple weeks before layoffs happened, and an in the know manager just said “hey you may want to hold off on that for a few weeks.” Of course google can’t sunset projects over time because advancement is so competitive and based on novelty that if anyone knew they were working on a dead end project they’d be gone immediately. If only advancement was based on stewardship and responsible work and not just leading new projects…
scarface74 4y ago
I wish I could take credit for this observation. But Ben Thompson summed it up best in the Dithering podcast this morning. An ad company is incapable of selling things to consumers. The entire organization is built around giving things to people for free and selling ads. Everything else that Google has done has been a failure. Microsoft and Apple have decades of experience with selling stuff to people.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  This completely falls apart when you look at Android.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Not really. Depending on the estimates you believe, Google is only selling 800K to 1.2 Million Pixels a quarter https://9to5google.com/2022/05/19/pixel-6-us-market-q1-2022/ https://9to5google.com/2022/05/19/pixel-6-us-market-q1-2022/ That’s about the number of phones Apple sells in a couple of days in a down quarter. Also Google isn’t “selling” Android. It’s giving the operating system away to support advertising. Microsoft sold billions of dollars worth of Windows and DOS licenses over the years. It never had to give them away to get uptake.
  - hbrn 4y ago
    Unlike Stadia, Android was acquired.
    - hbn 4y ago
      Eh, they acquired it when it was going to be an OS for digital cameras, and had no uptake. The point doesn't really stand here. The better point in favor of the "Google can't sell anything" argument is that they don't really sell Android to end users. The OEMs do all the selling, and they just get taken along for the ride while they offer a platform where they also sell ads and gather user data to target ads better. The devices they actually sell (Nexus, Pixel) have never really had that much success outside of enthusiast communities.
chem83 4y ago
Not saying that this is anyone's fault, but it does sound awful that people have to pull in all-nighters like that to be successful in the indie game (or any game) scene. I imagine that news a small company like theirs can't control, like a major platform is shutting down, or a target market is now under international embargo would not feel like such blow had they managed and been allowed to execute at a calm, healthy and sane pace.
fisherjeff 4y ago
I don’t understand why Google doesn’t ever try to sell these aborted projects off rather than just killing them. Stadia is (was) a means to make recurring revenue off other people’s games! I’m sure margins are thin but I also don’t doubt that there are some scrappier businesses out there would love to take a crack at it.
- sowbug 4y ago
  Google projects are built on Google's proprietary tech stack. Which itself has at least two of everything. So not only is it hard to separate a software project from Google, but it's also hard even to separate a project from the specific team that built it.
  - fisherjeff 4y ago
    Sure, I get that - it’s not zero cost to spin them out. But neither is issuing a bunch of refunds, for example. And at this point, they must know that memory holing projects is costing them a ton of credibility when it comes to launching new products.
Phenomenit 4y ago
At least they can release an update for the controller so you can use it with other platforms. What a waste of earth's resources.
- gl0wa 4y ago
  You can actually use it with any game when plugged over USB. There's also a hack which allows to use it wirelessly outside of Stadia https://github.com/helloparthshah/StadiaWireless https://github.com/helloparthshah/StadiaWireless
raverbashing 4y ago
How do Stadia ports even worked? Do you target a generic Linux platform or it is more specific?
- w4rh4wk5 4y ago
  While the details are confidential here's what can be considered public knowledge: Stadia instances run some Linux distribution and use Vulkan as graphics API. You are given a proprietary library (SDK) from which you get inputs (mouse/keyboard and controller) among a few other things. Executables are created using a clang-based cross-compilation toolchain.
bko 4y ago
Maybe a stupid question, but why doesn't Google just sell the services they no longer want to support? Spin it off. It's gotta be worth something and they likely have an enviable amount of users just from the name.
- jayd16 4y ago
  They plan to white label the tech. If that's the goal it doesn't make sense to let Stadia live as a competitor to any would be buyer.
- timeon 4y ago
  At least they sold the Skethup.
- jmull 4y ago
  It probably doesn't have any value. Google probably no longer wants to support it because it's losing money and they see no feasible plan that will make it profitable. You can still sell companies like that, if they have valuable assets. But the buyer would still shut down the service and make money off the valuable assets (typical by selling them to someone who can use them). In this case, I think there are valuable assets -- some of the tech, and the people -- but Google has a use for these themselves, so no need to get a buyer involved. That is, they are doing directly what a buyer would do anyway: shut down the money-losing service and making use of the remaining valuable assets.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
Since both are Linux/Vulkan environments, how big is the difference between targeting Stadia and Steam runtime?
dqpb 4y ago
> Nobody is to blame. This isn't the result of some freak natural event. Literally every action taken was the direct result of a decision made by a person. A lot of people are to blame.
shmerl 4y ago
Well, now release the native Linux version on Steam and GOG. Thanks :)
tebruno99 4y ago
I thought google announced a long time ago that Stadia was a failure and they were taking it enterprise only or something. This post doesn’t make a lot of sense to Me, I’ve not talked to anyone who thought Stadia was still an active consumer product
richliss 4y ago
There is no way I'd ever build anything that relies on anything by Google no matter how good it is - everything they build is marked for cancellation. Flutter looks good! Would I use it - no chance there's alternatives that will be probably survive. What is mad is that most people don't realise that Google's search engine doesn't go past about 25 pages of results anymore - it says "millions of search results" but you can't access them so it's actually a search engine now that's probably less useful than Lycos or Excite were. There's a video online about Google deleting the internet - watch it and repeat the experiment yourself. It's crazy.
Animats 4y ago
What would it take to develop a library to emulate Stadia on Nvidia GeForce Go? GeForce Go is a cloud gaming system that offers roughly what Stadia did, but with a different API. (Cloud gaming, in this context, means the game is running on a remote server and sending just video to the client. So the client only needs to have enough power to run a video player. This approach supports phones, Chromebooks, and "smart" TVs as well as desktops, and simplifies onboarding. But you're renting an entire computer with GPU in a data center for each logged in user.) NVidia makes and sells GPUs, so renting them is in line with their primary business. Although with Stadia gone, NVidia might raise the price on GeForce Go. Originally both Stadia and GeForce GO were $5/month, and everybody was losing money. Then they both went to $10/month. NVidia also has a premium version with a better GPU at $10/month. There is some question as to whether anybody can make money in cloud gaming. The cloud gaming services that are independent companies, such as Shadow, charge about $30/month. They're basically reselling AWS. Several of those have gone bust. Anyone looked at the economics?

376 points by babuskov 4y ago

An I wrong to think they could theoretically sue Google for knowingly publishing false information about how likely they are to cancel Stadia? Stadia execs said a few months ago that they will not cancel Stadia, but I'm sure the internal conversations and meetings were very different. Like get your numbers up by next quarter or it's over. These conversations would be found in discovery probably. It seems that lie caused many people to invest in Stadia when they otherwise wouldn't have. However, I say theoretically, because you'd need an insane amount of money and five to ten year timeframe to get anywhere with it. That's no small risk if you lose, and there's always the chance you do. A class action lawsuit on the other hand might be worthwhile.

Havoc 4y ago

This is why I consider ability to lift & shift when building anything on google. They're just not trustworthy as a foundation so being able to take your toys elsewhere becomes a primary consideration. See also them pulling the rug out from people that built on IoT core about a month ago.

hericium 4y ago

Cost of doing business with Google.

shapefrog 4y ago

Best thing to ever happen to them. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/ Write a postmortem, publish it to gamedeveloper dot com and capitalize on all the Stadia drama while it's hot to boost sales for your original game release. Make a YouTube video talking about the pain you went through, all the things you learned that you didn't get to give to people, and see what kind of hype you can salvage. Or just get it on HN and tell people where they can buy your game?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
swores 4y ago
No way the exposure from this outweighs the 5 months of wasted dev time. It's salvaging a silver lining from a shitty situation, nowhere near a good thing yet alone "best thing to ever happen to them". edit: Elaborated on this in a reply to a reply, here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034563
- djmips 4y ago
  Honestly, it might. Marketing is expensive and very unpredictable.
- ajross 4y ago
  Actually this is the game industry. Very reasonable indie titles die on Steam with sales in the dozens, all the time. Everything is about marketing and buzz, everything. So yes, I think this absolutely has made the game more successful than it would have been given its very-neear-zero median expectation.
  - swores 4y ago
    I'm speaking with 15+ years experience in the games industry, often explicitly in marketing. It's very possible that I'm wrong: obviously we don't have the knowledge of what their expectations from Stadia were, nor is it possible for anyone to now know how successful or not their Stadia launch would've been if Google had decided to keep trying to make Stadia work, nor do we know how many sales the game will get from this exposure. But I still stand by my view despite agreeing with your first few sentences about the industry generally. edit: It's mainly coming from gut instinct, so I've tried to think more about why my gut says that. I think the main thing is that the exposure is going to people who are interested in games industry business, or tech industry, or Google specifically. That's what everyone is discussing, not whether or not the game is actually worth playing (and unlike if it was some planned PR, there's not even any subtle suggestion within the story that the game is worth playing - nor to be fair that it's not worth playing). Sure, a few people might click onto the steam page out of curiosity, or buy the game out of sympathy to the poor people getting screwed by this situation, but it would be surprising (to me at least) if the amount of people converting is more than if they actually just had a marketing person spend a day writing a piece of content for Hacker News / GamesIndustry.biz with the goal of being both interesting tech content and featuring mentions of what makes the game worth playing. And that's just thinking about doing targeted marketing to not-very-good target audiences (for promoting indie games - sure there are some areas where HN traffic is incredible and businesses that would love a front page post, indie games not so much). SteamDB's data on the game doesn't seem to suggest that I'm wrong here, but maybe with time I'll become wrong. (Side note, while writing this comment I couldn't remember the name of the game we're talking about, so I had to go look it up... because the name of the game wasn't the interesting bit when I read about this earlier!) https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/ https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/

asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago

I really can't stand how Google has handled the whole stadia thing. Just want to get that that of the way. I don't want to excuse google here. But I do question the wisdom of porting this game to Stadia. It has only a single user review on Steam after having been out on that platform for four months. Even if only one in a thousand people leave reviews, that suggests a revenue of only $2500 or so, or more like $1750 after steam takes their cut. How can it possibly make financial sense to spend nearly half a year porting this game to an even smaller platform?

xdfgh1112 4y ago
> After watching ReviewTechUSAs video on it, another Developer working on a Stadia port explained that apparently Google Stadia was paying the Developers for the amount of Gameplay Stadia users played their game. So it was enough for them to decide it was worth the investment to focus on porting their game as they would be making a bare minimum.
faller_slive 4y ago
Since there were much fewer games on Stadia, your game had a much bigger chance of getting discovered. And if they got their game into Stadia Pro (subscription) they would benefit from its generous revenue share. Hundred Days - Winemaking Simulator made 25% of their revenue from Stadia. https://twitter.com/YvesHohler/status/1519966206169649152/photo/1 https://twitter.com/YvesHohler/status/1519966206169649152/ph...
- isk517 4y ago
  I imagine there were a lot of small developers hoping for a repeat of the early days of the Switch.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- danbolt 4y ago
  It kind of reminds me a bit of how TowerFall's standout success on the Ouya helped pave the way for Celeste.

glandium 4y ago

Waiting for stories like "I was at company A, we relied on Google product X, and they pulled the plug and we went under. Then I moved to company B, which relied on Google product Y, and they pulled the plug. Then I moved to company C, which relies on Google product Z, and they're pulling the plug." (aka "serially killed by Google")

pmontra 4y ago
Nearly completed a project that was using Google's Conversational Actions when Google announced that they'll retire them in 12 months and support only App Actions for its Assistant. The customer froze that half of the project immediately: there will be only the software that interfaces Alexa. https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

Plan on Google to kill a product more than keep a product.

netsharc 4y ago
The nex t Google product/feature launch press release should be rewritten from e.g. "Google introduces Badonkadonk Land Cruiser" to "Google might shutdown Badonkadonk Land Cruiser within 2 years", and the contents also adjusted to say "Since Google has a poor track record with keeping services running, users are understandbly wary about using this new Land Cruiser, meaning it is already on life support and might be cancelled in about 2 years."

AlexandrB 4y ago

If Google tries to enter the gaming market again any time soon, they're going to have a bad time. What developer is going to trust them to stick around? It's also interesting to contrast Stadia to the original Xbox and how Microsoft stuck to it while losing money for years.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

IMHO: Google is handling a bunch of things, including Stadia, and including GCP, in a very poor way. GCP: copycat of AWS, but with less high margin, higher level services, so have been losing money since the beginning (ask some of Alphabet's board members, if you can, and watch their eyes rolling). The only thing that could have given them the advantage - not, not Kubernetes, although K was and is a great thing to fund - was a "cloud in a box" product, so companies could install a rack of GCP in their existing Data Centers, and use it. See "The Cloud Wars of 2017", written by me [0] six years ago. Stadia: you can't build Stadia without getting into account that the market has one big monopoly (Steam), and a few huge other ones (Xbox, Epic, etc). The strategy has simply been to ignore this simple fact. It's like Netflix building a streaming service, without a huge investment into content as well. Doomed to fail from the get go. Small rant, no horses in this game on my part; just a pity that two huge opportunities were wasted like this. [0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac9f352911a2 https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac...

outworlder 4y ago
> GCP: copycat of AWS I don't think it's fair. Compute and networking are still ahead of AWS, although the gap is narrowing. GKE was great from the get go, but today it's not much of a differentiator.
MisterSandman 4y ago
Steam is anything but a monopoly, there's a reason EGS got as far as it did.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Yes, entering a market with a huge war-chest and dumping an absolute fuckton of free product is one way to attack a monopoly. There's a reason they had to do that to gain any traction. I've paid for one game on there. It was an exclusive and is the only reason I finally installed the damn thing. I think I'm up to about 150 games on Epic, and I didn't even get in near the beginning and have missed a few since. What they've managed to buy from me, with that, is a +1 in their install-base stat because the free games every couple weeks keep me from uninstalling it, but I still buy everything on GoG or Steam. I don't even care if epic has a lower price, I use one of those. If Stadia had taken the same approach, the average account would have spent $100 or less but would "have" $3000+ worth of games.

ydc123 4y ago

RektBoy 4y ago

Wait, I though shutting down of Stadia was a public knowledge for months now?

zimpenfish 4y ago
https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 "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." July 29, 2022.
- rvz 4y ago
  It was obvious the moment the VP of Stadia left, and already knew it was over a year before. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202

treis 4y ago

They've probably got a case based on promissory estoppel. Roughly Google made promises that Stadia wouldn't shut down. The devs work on a port based on that promise. Thus Google is liable for their effort. But then again probably there's some sort of "eat shit and die" clause in the agreement developers have with Google.

mdaniel 4y ago
Pragmatically, my mental model of the legal system is "he who has the most lawyers wins" combined with even the definition of "win" is kind of fuzzy given how many years the appeal process can drag on
CodeWriter23 4y ago
Pretty sure Google's army of lawyers made sure they promised nothing other than a chance at The Golden Ticket.

babuskov 4y ago

Just to be clear to some commenters: This isn't my game and I never developed anything for Stadia. I only develop for Steam and Nintendo Switch and you can find my games in my HN profile. I just found an interesting thread on game development Reddit today and wanted to share. I don't have anything to gain or lose here. I agree that it's debatable whether that game really required 4 months of work to port. It does look simple. So, maybe the developer isn't that competent. Or maybe the whole integration process takes a lot of effort? Idk. Thanks.

baud147258 4y ago
Maybe it took not 4 months of work, but 4 months of back and forth with Google? Like the devs sent a build, Google takes 2 or more weeks to make a list of issues, send those, the devs take 2 weeks to fix them, rinse and repeat until four months are gone and Stadia is dead.

znpy 4y ago

> Nobody is to blame. X doubt. At the very least google is to blame, and the stadia exec that assured stadia wasn’t going to shut down.

incrudible 4y ago

These aged really well, didn't they? https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1553080498938941440 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Hamuko 4y ago
Google blindsided the entire Stadia team. https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_harrison_thats_3_failed_launches_for/iqe3cdv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_...
jks 4y ago
How about this one https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1196447880728453120 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1196447880728453120

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

haunter 4y ago

"I'm actually not a big gamer" - Sundar Pichai on the Stadia reveal event https://youtu.be/nUih5C5rOrA?t=120 https://youtu.be/nUih5C5rOrA?t=120 The whole industry is there and this is how you start a keynote. Not surprised that most people weren't confident about Stadia. But it's also baffling when there were so many running services and standalone products already. Steam Link, Nvidia Geforce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Playstation Remote Play, Parsec etc. It's not like Google had a brand new open field ahead of them and no idea what to do

bergenty 4y ago
He’s being honest. I’d prefer that to some Ballmeresk character coming out and just lying about what the crowd wants to hear.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Did you mean Ballmer-esque? Or did I read it wrong? No one's mentioned it, so I have a feeling it may be the latter, and if so I apologize. If you did mean Ballmer- as in Steve, then may I ask what you mean by saying what the crowd wants to hear? I'd always thought he was honest in the face of strong opposition. Thanks in advance!
  - bergenty 4y ago
    I did mean Ballmeresque. To be honest, it was the first over the top sales person I could think of, I don’t necessarily know if he lied.
    - effingwewt 4y ago
      Right on, appreciate the clarification, have a good one!

danielvaughn 4y ago

Google has to realize that the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" method isn't going to end well for them. They need vested users to make their products successful, and now it's almost a foregone conclusion that anything new coming out of Google these days will get the axe eventually, so why bother?

klik99 4y ago

I truly hate this way of sunsetting projects, esp platforms that others materially depend on. Even if you don’t want to say you’re cancelling it, an attitude of reduced pressure so they’re not crunching to finish the port. A friend was about to close on a house a couple weeks before layoffs happened, and an in the know manager just said “hey you may want to hold off on that for a few weeks.” Of course google can’t sunset projects over time because advancement is so competitive and based on novelty that if anyone knew they were working on a dead end project they’d be gone immediately. If only advancement was based on stewardship and responsible work and not just leading new projects…

scarface74 4y ago

I wish I could take credit for this observation. But Ben Thompson summed it up best in the Dithering podcast this morning. An ad company is incapable of selling things to consumers. The entire organization is built around giving things to people for free and selling ads. Everything else that Google has done has been a failure. Microsoft and Apple have decades of experience with selling stuff to people.

Larrikin 4y ago
This completely falls apart when you look at Android.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Not really. Depending on the estimates you believe, Google is only selling 800K to 1.2 Million Pixels a quarter https://9to5google.com/2022/05/19/pixel-6-us-market-q1-2022/ https://9to5google.com/2022/05/19/pixel-6-us-market-q1-2022/ That’s about the number of phones Apple sells in a couple of days in a down quarter. Also Google isn’t “selling” Android. It’s giving the operating system away to support advertising. Microsoft sold billions of dollars worth of Windows and DOS licenses over the years. It never had to give them away to get uptake.
- hbrn 4y ago
  Unlike Stadia, Android was acquired.
  - hbn 4y ago
    Eh, they acquired it when it was going to be an OS for digital cameras, and had no uptake. The point doesn't really stand here. The better point in favor of the "Google can't sell anything" argument is that they don't really sell Android to end users. The OEMs do all the selling, and they just get taken along for the ride while they offer a platform where they also sell ads and gather user data to target ads better. The devices they actually sell (Nexus, Pixel) have never really had that much success outside of enthusiast communities.

chem83 4y ago

Not saying that this is anyone's fault, but it does sound awful that people have to pull in all-nighters like that to be successful in the indie game (or any game) scene. I imagine that news a small company like theirs can't control, like a major platform is shutting down, or a target market is now under international embargo would not feel like such blow had they managed and been allowed to execute at a calm, healthy and sane pace.

fisherjeff 4y ago

I don’t understand why Google doesn’t ever try to sell these aborted projects off rather than just killing them. Stadia is (was) a means to make recurring revenue off other people’s games! I’m sure margins are thin but I also don’t doubt that there are some scrappier businesses out there would love to take a crack at it.

sowbug 4y ago
Google projects are built on Google's proprietary tech stack. Which itself has at least two of everything. So not only is it hard to separate a software project from Google, but it's also hard even to separate a project from the specific team that built it.
- fisherjeff 4y ago
  Sure, I get that - it’s not zero cost to spin them out. But neither is issuing a bunch of refunds, for example. And at this point, they must know that memory holing projects is costing them a ton of credibility when it comes to launching new products.

Phenomenit 4y ago

At least they can release an update for the controller so you can use it with other platforms. What a waste of earth's resources.

gl0wa 4y ago
You can actually use it with any game when plugged over USB. There's also a hack which allows to use it wirelessly outside of Stadia https://github.com/helloparthshah/StadiaWireless https://github.com/helloparthshah/StadiaWireless

raverbashing 4y ago

How do Stadia ports even worked? Do you target a generic Linux platform or it is more specific?

w4rh4wk5 4y ago
While the details are confidential here's what can be considered public knowledge: Stadia instances run some Linux distribution and use Vulkan as graphics API. You are given a proprietary library (SDK) from which you get inputs (mouse/keyboard and controller) among a few other things. Executables are created using a clang-based cross-compilation toolchain.

bko 4y ago

Maybe a stupid question, but why doesn't Google just sell the services they no longer want to support? Spin it off. It's gotta be worth something and they likely have an enviable amount of users just from the name.

jayd16 4y ago
They plan to white label the tech. If that's the goal it doesn't make sense to let Stadia live as a competitor to any would be buyer.
timeon 4y ago
At least they sold the Skethup.
jmull 4y ago
It probably doesn't have any value. Google probably no longer wants to support it because it's losing money and they see no feasible plan that will make it profitable. You can still sell companies like that, if they have valuable assets. But the buyer would still shut down the service and make money off the valuable assets (typical by selling them to someone who can use them). In this case, I think there are valuable assets -- some of the tech, and the people -- but Google has a use for these themselves, so no need to get a buyer involved. That is, they are doing directly what a buyer would do anyway: shut down the money-losing service and making use of the remaining valuable assets.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

Since both are Linux/Vulkan environments, how big is the difference between targeting Stadia and Steam runtime?

dqpb 4y ago

> Nobody is to blame. This isn't the result of some freak natural event. Literally every action taken was the direct result of a decision made by a person. A lot of people are to blame.

shmerl 4y ago

Well, now release the native Linux version on Steam and GOG. Thanks :)

tebruno99 4y ago

I thought google announced a long time ago that Stadia was a failure and they were taking it enterprise only or something. This post doesn’t make a lot of sense to Me, I’ve not talked to anyone who thought Stadia was still an active consumer product

richliss 4y ago

There is no way I'd ever build anything that relies on anything by Google no matter how good it is - everything they build is marked for cancellation. Flutter looks good! Would I use it - no chance there's alternatives that will be probably survive. What is mad is that most people don't realise that Google's search engine doesn't go past about 25 pages of results anymore - it says "millions of search results" but you can't access them so it's actually a search engine now that's probably less useful than Lycos or Excite were. There's a video online about Google deleting the internet - watch it and repeat the experiment yourself. It's crazy.

Animats 4y ago

What would it take to develop a library to emulate Stadia on Nvidia GeForce Go? GeForce Go is a cloud gaming system that offers roughly what Stadia did, but with a different API. (Cloud gaming, in this context, means the game is running on a remote server and sending just video to the client. So the client only needs to have enough power to run a video player. This approach supports phones, Chromebooks, and "smart" TVs as well as desktops, and simplifies onboarding. But you're renting an entire computer with GPU in a data center for each logged in user.) NVidia makes and sells GPUs, so renting them is in line with their primary business. Although with Stadia gone, NVidia might raise the price on GeForce Go. Originally both Stadia and GeForce GO were $5/month, and everybody was losing money. Then they both went to $10/month. NVidia also has a premium version with a better GPU at $10/month. There is some question as to whether anybody can make money in cloud gaming. The cloud gaming services that are independent companies, such as Shadow, charge about $30/month. They're basically reselling AWS. Several of those have gone bust. Anyone looked at the economics?