34 ms·

Stadia died because no one trusts Google

• summerlight 4y ago
  Oh no, Stadia failed because its business model doesn't really make sense. And Phil doesn't really understand where Stadia's real potential can thrive. He definitely is an expert of the traditional gaming market, but he doesn't really understand how network effects in Google work or where online gaming service is heading. For the user side, you need decent internet connections and to pay $40~$60 per title. The value proposition is that you can play on a powerful machine in the cloud without paying significant upfront costs, but its inventory is extremely limited and at the moment Google decided to take an intentionally ambiguous position on its commitment, so there was a risk that you're going to lose your ownership on those games. And you also cannot sell your titles on used markets. The pay-per-title model only works if this grants you full control of the title. I think only subscription models like game pass make sense for this kind of streaming service, but Phil looked afraid of bringing too much disruptions to traditional game publishers' business model so made lots of compromises here. This is definitely the first reason of Stadia's failure. And for developers, they made a significant mistake; instead of making it a plausible platform for everyone, they simply put tons of cash to a handful of AAA developers. This didn't work of course because they're going to release their games on other consoles and Google doesn't have enough negotiation power to have them exclusive on Stadia. The result is a simple failure; overall inventory became much smaller than it could be while it failed to deliver any significant exclusive titles. Compared to this, Nintendo did it very well on making Switch a developer platform. It's not fully open but still it's considerably more open than what they did in previous consoles. And this gives Switch a very unique value proposition of being the only handheld gaming console (at least before Steam deck) which can play a significant fraction of indie/small developer's games. There are lots of example cases where an interesting indie game gets skyrocketed by midnight thanks to some big name streamers who decided to play it. What if Stadia was able to have one of them (limited time) exclusive to their platform. Google owns YT so it is in a much better position of negotiating with those creators. And they could integrate ads and payment systems so gaming could be just one click away and developers can get a very precise performance of their ads and attribution from creators. I still also don't understand why they didn't really plan to integrate the Play store and Android ecosystem. There are significant demands of playing mobile games with a keyboard, a mouse or a controller and on a big screen. The mobile gaming market is dominant not because it's convenient to play but because the mobile market is big. AAA title developers still don't consider it an option because of its form factor and limited controls (and some minor technical issues but not really a fundamental blocker), but Stadia could solve that problem and deliver the Play store to every possible form factors. But they didn't do that. I heard that Google will keep streaming infrastructure and its team that runs Stadia, so there might be some hope that this idea could be realized in the Play store though.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  These shutdowns are a calculated cover for the day the DOJ shows up and slaps them with a monopoly tag for their dominant (and money printing) products. "Monopoly? Us? Look how many times we've failed. Any dominant marketshare we have could easily disappear. Look how many times we've failed..." Put another way, certainly Google is aware of the perception impact of these shutdowns. And yet, like clockwork, they persist. It's either intentional, or they're devoid of data about perceptions of the brand. It can't be the latter, can it?
  • Our_Benefactors 4y ago
    Yes, google plans projects, spins them up spending millions or billions in dev costs over multiple years, then executes the final phase of the plan and kills them. All so their hypothetical attorneys can make a hypothetical point in a hypothetical court case. Really???
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Yup. Is that not what happens? Consistently?? As for the hypothetical court case. Again, there's history for that as well. What's your explanation then? The mighty Google with some of the best and brightest minds in the world...is consistently incompetent? That it goes into markets outside its core competence, dumps a ton of resources, and then again and again surrenders prematurely? Really? Seems that your theory sounds more ridiculous than mine (which btw is inpired by Thiel and Zero to One).
      • Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        My explanation is that they want to make money on these projects and immediately cancel them when they fail to meet some lofty goals. Not that these projects are from-inception used as pawns in some abstract legal posturing.
        • chiefalchemist 4y ago
          I agree with you. That is what is happening. Where we part ways is why. The fact that it happens over, over, and over again, then for a company of that status, that's strategy. It's intentional. Else, we're suggesting that Google cannot learn from previous mistakes. That simply doesn't hold water. Again, see Thiel for more details.
• birdyrooster 4y ago
  Stadia was not good because of physics. Like GeforceNow, it is laggy and artifacty. It’s not a real business because they don’t actually have a significant target audience. It doesn’t matter who runs it. I’ve been saying this for years and predicting this exact scenario but not because of trust. People trust Google enough to be swayed but this product sucked.
  • helsinki 4y ago
    Yeah, the article is simply wrong, in my opinion. People don’t factor in whether or not Google will support it in n years when deciding to use one or their services. Nobody used the product because it sucked.
  • ajvs 4y ago
    As a GFN user for the past 14 months I disagree. It's more than acceptable performance even when playing competitive multiplayer games like League of Legends and Planetside 2. I do agree however that Stadia sucked as a product. Nobody was going to buy into their ecosystem if they can't opt to download the games onto their own PCs like Steam. Too much lock-in without that aspect, and without any guarantees that they were going to refund customers if Stadia ever sunk it just made it DOA
    • Aerroon 4y ago
      But that's not the perception GeforceNow has. If I ask around what people think it would be then most of the gamers I know wouldn't even consider it unless they had no other option. Games are already fiddly when it comes to latency. Adding another fiddling layer inbetween just sounds more painful.
  • t-writescode 4y ago
    I’ve played PS Now enough to know that the latency is perfectly fine and the artifact count isn’t bad. I’m very happy with those services and they can be done well.
  • silisili 4y ago
    It's all where you live, and your home network. I had about 15 to 20ms latency to nearest POP, and Stadia honestly played just as well as a PS5 or such. Moved to a different city, and latency wasn't near as good because of ISP routing, mainly. Still playable, but definite pretiming everything. I think latency there was 50ish ms.
• 6510 4y ago
  Now that search is not working anymore I'm starting to realize how wonderful it really was. You don't know what you have until it is gone.
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    >You don't know what you have until it is gone. Still grieving for Google Reader.
    • SanjayMehta 4y ago
      Same here, but on the bright side it forced me to switch to a paid app which is infinitely better.
      • goblinux 4y ago
        Which app?
        • chrisweekly 4y ago
          Not OP but Readwise is fantastic, and they finally opened up Readwise Reader (https://read.readwise.io https://read.readwise.io). Highly recommended.
        • SanjayMehta 4y ago
          Reeder on macOS and IOS
      • philliphaydon 4y ago
        What’s the paid app? I miss Google reader and all the blogs I used to subscribe to.
        • SanjayMehta 4y ago
          Reeder on macOS and ios. Allows you to locally host your RSS feeds so no servers required. I haven't checked recently but they usually make the (N-1)th version free.
• puyoxyz 4y ago
  This article feels like I’m being mansplained to. They’re clueless and are acting like an expert
  • encryptluks2 4y ago
    I think it is just opportunism. The cool thing these days seems hating on Google, even if you have a really poor reason. It is just confirmation bias for those that have tried to convince themselves that Google is a failure despite their profits literally showing they are not failing as a business.
    • lern_too_spel 4y ago
      They can be incompetent and still successful. Look at Android. Its competition is an absolute joke, but Android still can't get dominant market share in the US even though it is cheaper than free to use in products. That's just bad management.
    • YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
      A business built around extracting a non-renewable resource can make record profits while still being doomed in the long-term. In this case, the resource Google may be unsustainably harvesting is consumer goodwill and partner trust.
      • encryptluks2 4y ago
        I don't think so. Firefox has been on a mission for some time to try to market itself as the safe browser despite Chromium being open source and have roughly the same telemetry enabled by default in both. Shutting down a consumer service like Stadia isn't all bad.. in all honesty I think it is the most disappointing to people who used it on a regular basis and not some person to come by and give their two cents about how they feel Google wronged them for something unrelated. People liked Stadia and that is why this is hard on some people but the are not going to jump on the Google hate train over every dramatic event that is often just hyperbole. They'll remember Google for creating something awesome and ahead of it's time, and Google may actually revamp that to scale to personal gaming that runs on local hardware instead. I believe a lot of game services streaming services just aren't that profitable. The hardware required to stream games to consumers in HD or 4k is expensive. Heck, just a few months ago I was looking at graphics cards and the lower end were still priced around $600 for a modern consumer graphics card. Then having a bunch of servers and ways to dedicate those to users using some form of graphics sharing and doing to with very little latency cost a fortune and probably didn't produce the revenue because of that. I'd people are leaving Google or this then they can certainly try make an appealing argument about how Stadia damaged them but that Netflix, Hulu, etc don't ever pivot their plans and pricings
• labster 4y ago
  It’s the final day of the free tier of Google Apps they promised they would never take away from me. I run a web search where the engine ignores my excluded terms[1]. Sad. But the I log into Gmail. Another redesign, thank goodness! Too bad I can’t XMPP message my friends to tell them about it. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=49ers+-football+-nfl https://www.google.com/search?q=49ers+-football+-nfl
  • pram 4y ago
    There is actually a free tier. I was confused too, but you have to insert payment and then change your subscription to the free one afterwards. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
    • cwillu 4y ago
      There's actually a button on the “show me the options” page that lets you declare you're actually a person, without entering CC info.
    • jfengel 4y ago
      I'm not so sure. I used that months ago, and they're still sending me $0 bills that sure look like they're about to become real bills. I just clicked your link and it says "you already have the no cost option". So we'll see what happens next month.
    • zerocrates 4y ago
      I definitely didn't have to pretend to pay them when I elected this option, you just affirmed you were using the account for personal use and everything stayed the same basically.
  • cwillu 4y ago
    I swear the excluded terms are interpreted as “not this word, but still related to it”
  • modeless 4y ago
    Are you talking about the free lifetime Google Apps for Your Domain? They did announce that they were canceling it, but they reversed course and you can still keep it by pressing this button: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120 https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120 I actually closed my account when they first announced the cancellation, which made things more difficult and I had to contact support to get it back (I was successful). But if you haven't done that, I believe all you need to do is press that button.
• bamboozled 4y ago
  I have some business stuff hosted on GCP. I'm actually starting to worry about that, I think it would be weird if GCP was discontinued but I don't know anymore?
  • IronWolve 4y ago
    Make a business failover plan now, I already migrated everything off google, its just not worth losing your company over googles inability to be business friendly. Also a backup/failover plan to migrate to any vendor can also mean you can migrate to save money or outage. Or they ban your account by mistake, which on google seems to happen way to often, if you link it to your developer account, or your personal account.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      This is a good practice for anything you depend on. And if you find something that you’re absolutely dependent on; either try to mitigate that or accept it and be aware.
  • ndiddy 4y ago
    You might want to look into migrating: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
    • metaltyphoon 4y ago
      I got tons of downvote by saying "I would put one service on GCP just out of principle". Wow, I guess I wasn't so crazy.
      • gumby 4y ago
        I guess you deleted your comment because I can’t see the context. What principle would that be?
• MarkusWandel 4y ago
  This is kind of an anti chicken/egg situation! What happened first, the chicken got run over so no more eggs, or the egg got smashed so no more chicken? To clarify the analogy: Nobody trusts Google not to cancel a new thing, so they don't invest any money or effort in the new thing, so it gets cancelled.
  • glandium 4y ago
    Self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    It's a vicious cycle, for which the blame falls solely on them. Should be a cautionary tale for all companies.
    • quicklime 4y ago
      I'm hearing it a lot less after the recent tech backlash, but a few years ago it was fashionable to say things like "take risks" and "embrace failure". But the cautionary tale that most companies are going to take from this is to take fewer risks and to avoid failure at all costs, which I think is a bad outcome. Google shouldn't stop cancelling products that fail to get traction, they just need to learn to fail gracefully without leaving customers and developers who've built on top of their platforms in the lurch.
      • Dalewyn 4y ago
        The moral is moderation. Too much risk and too little risk are both bad. Take risks, but only risks which you can actually afford. It's like how both too little and too much dihydrogen monoxide is bad for you.
      • adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        the problem isn't that Google cancels risky projects, it's that they will make 3 different chat apps, cancel all 3, and make 3 more. any remotely sensible company would when making a new messenging app throw their eggs in one basket to take advantage of network effects rather than intentionally fracturing the market with multiple products.
• aeturnum 4y ago
  The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Teams who have been working on ports for months were blind-sided. Employees generally did not know. It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company with the absurd revenue that Google gets. It feels like a double warning: Google will withdraw suddenly, whenever they like, and they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions.
  • cududa 4y ago
    Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"
    • Dalewyn 4y ago
      For a specific example of latency incompetency that immediately came to mind while reading this: Chrome. Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one. When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome only runs properly from second execution onwards after the underlying operating system has cached most of the stuff Chrome wants in RAM in anticipation of subsequent executions. I want to say this is optimization for ever more powerful hardware, but I'm inclined to say it's also sheer incompetency that Chrome literally can't fallback gracefully if it doesn't get data as quickly as it wants.
      • polio 4y ago
        In the first-boot-on-HDD scenario, why would latency make the program fail to start at all? I'd expect it to just start slowly.
• j-kent 4y ago
  Imagine if you had a Netflix subscription, and still had to pay for every movie you watched. This is what Stadia felt like to me.
  • ThatPlayer 4y ago
    I think that was a failure on their marketing: you didn't actually need to pay for the subscription for the games.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      Which made me trust it even less. How is it a sustainable business model for them to run the hardware and platform for the next 10 years without recurring revenue.
      • Dalewyn 4y ago
        For large corporations and companies, it is entirely reasonable to have a couple businesses run red ink which are propped up by other businesses running surplus black ink. For a non-Google example: Costco and their roasted whole chickens they sell for $5 USD each. There is no fucking way Costco makes a profit, let alone break even, on those, but they do it and run the red ink anyway because the customers that come to buy them will also grab other stuff on the way out, generating black ink to offset and surpass the red ink.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • utopcell 4y ago
        It was akin to the freemium model: You could play your games at 1080p and subscribe to play them at higher 4k quality.
      • solardev 4y ago
        To be fair, 10 years in human time is like 1.5 years in Google time.
  • 4y ago
• linsomniac 4y ago
  Personally, I got an offer of a free Stadia controller from Google, took them up on it. It also included an offer for several games free. I searched through the list of games and, honestly, couldn't tell one from the other. They all seemed to be basically the same thing, some sort of FP adventure. My Stadia controller never ended up showing up, but the games were so uninteresting that I never pursued it. My BIL ordered a free one the same time I did, he ended up getting his. He played it for a few weeks then offered to send it to me because he wasn't that into it either. He's a HUGE game fan. So, I think Stadia died for reasons other than trust of Google.
  • bushbaba 4y ago
    Game developers lacked trust in Google, and didn't want to invest on the platform. So lack of trust also prevented Google from getting that huge game library.
    • cced 4y ago
      Sounds like Google is finally reaping the benefits of all those shutdowns.
  • HollywoodZero 4y ago
    You could also just use an Xbox controller, right? I mean, I'd rather use that than the Stadia controller.
    • brirec 4y ago
      If you streamed Stadia to your web browser, sure, you could use an Xbox controller. The real feature of the Stadia controller was that it connected directly to the Stadia servers to minimize latency (and load on your computer), instead of connecting to your computer using USB or Bluetooth and having your browser relay inputs. You’d initially set the controller up using your phone and Bluetooth to bootstrap a Wi-Fi connection, and from then on it would talk to the servers over Wi-Fi and TCP/IP. As far as I understand it, Amazon Luna’s official controller does the same thing.
• tb_technical 4y ago
  What the heck? Stadia failed because it sucked, and not everyone lives in a town with a fibre uplink and a local server farm!
  • Melchizedek 4y ago
    Or in Europe or East Asia where most people have good broadband.
  • ekiourk 4y ago
    You are completely wrong, you don't need fiber and you don't need to be next to a datacenter. I leave in London but I am using it when I am traveling even to countries that officially stadia is not supported. I know people on unsupported regions that can play just fine through VPN! Stadia is a tech marvel with great user experience, just Google execs never cared to spend enough money to make it a commercial success
• bastard_op 4y ago
  I tried to use Stadia, as a long-time paid user with a gsuite account I use for my personal account, they wouldn't let me as an "enterprise user". I spit on their future grave then, and I spit on it now - it was destined to die. Steam actually embraces linux with Proton to make windows games work. As a full-time linux user for ~20 years, bless Valve's soul.
  • monlockandkey 4y ago
    Linux is what killed stadia. They have to get developers onboard to port their games. Getting big games ported cost them millions upon millions. If they embraced windows, they would have a huge library just like Geforce now. Linux killed stadia imo.
    • hedora 4y ago
      Surely, they just used proton, right? Source code is here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/
      • monlockandkey 4y ago
        Proton I don't think existed with Stadia. Or there might be a latency overhead translating DX to vulkan
        • hedora 4y ago
          That sounds self-inflicted then; they could have filled their library with 1,000's of games by collaborating with steam.
• jasonlotito 4y ago
  Sounds about right. Pretty much every single gamer (across multiple circles of friends, most outside of tech) I knew joked about this. Most also commented on why would they need it when they already have a PC/console and performance (though Nvidia and PS Now users were quick to speak up on the quality). In general. I'm not saying this was the only reason, but this was one of the reasons every dismissed it. Even the gaming press was pretty harsh on this in general.
• duxup 4y ago
  Google didn’t seem to trust it. The early announcements hardly explained what it was. There seemed to be little outreach to gamers. Gaming press folks described constantly having to fiddle with getting access as they normally would expect / consistently. I don’t doubt people were trying, but it looked like a half hearted effort from the start as far as google goes.
• urthor 4y ago
  The problem wasn't trust at all. Nobody in the gaming industry trusts anyone. Customers don't trust developers, see "never pre-order anything." Developers don't trust publishers, "executive meddling via focus groups." Publishers don't trust each other. The difference is publishers have lawyers so they write legal contracts to fix that. Google, Did, Not, Produce, The, Goods. Full-stop. Their service was light on content and offered terrible value for money.
  • chii 4y ago
    stadia would've worked if it didn't charge per title. A subscription, which allowed you access to the entire library of games in stadia, akin to netflix, is a compelling product.
    • inerte 4y ago
      I think I will say this for the 3rd time in HN and I look like a shill, but Xbox Cloud is awesome. It’s exactly what you described!
      • hedora 4y ago
        Yeah; but I can’t be bothered to log into my xbox. It invariably takes me over 45 minutes of reading forum posts and poking around obscure microsoft sites. It would probably be better if I plugged it in more often, but it pisses me off so much I usually stick it back in a box once it accepts my password.
        • solardev 4y ago
          You don't need an Xbox for the subscription. You can play it on a PC or stream games to a browser. It's like Stadia, just better.
    • zarzavat 4y ago
      Games require a lot of upfront investment. Games are not like music where top hits are routinely created in a day or two. Nobody is making a game on the off-chance that they will collect enough pennies from plays on a streaming service. Anybody making a game, be it indie or AAA, is investing years and $$$, and they need that big payday on release. Even Netflix mostly funds their own content. A “Netflix for games” would involve Google funding exclusive games to be made for their platform.
• _zgx0 4y ago
  I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused. As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that. Compare that to paying the same price for a regular PC game which you can play via streaming using a streaming service, but also play locally, and know that you can take that game with you through multiple hardware decides and streaming services. With Stadia, if I move somewhere with bad internet, there is no way to recover the value of my games I purchased. There is no other gaming system like that. All other systems either have an offline possibility or are pure streaming where you aren't making a game purchase investment, like Xbox Gamepass or Luna. It just doesn't make sense except to a really small niche and is not competitive to the average gamer.
  • vmoore 4y ago
    I imagine, as with all Google products, it wasn't a suitable data point for them and didn't feed in some way to their ADs cash cow. Google nukes things that don't feed their ADs beast.
  • klodolph 4y ago
    I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.
    • nomel 4y ago
      Something like Shadow PC makes way more sense, and is why I choose it. It’s just a cloud PC, and even supports SteamVR.
      • GekkePrutser 4y ago
        But that's really focused on long term commitments. First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee. For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it. Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile. I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.
• sp332 4y ago
  I mean that's part of it, but Google really worked to kill it too. Like they spun up a whole game studio, hired people to work on games for two years, then cancelled the whole studio. That's not just negligence or trust issues, they took years of work from developers working on games for the platform and threw it in the trash.
  • sva_ 4y ago
    I would hate it if I worked on something for n years and then it just gets binned. I imagine that if you work on such stuff at Google, you probably need the attitude that you're only there to earn money. If you get too involved, it would suck big time if it got thrown out. So I would think that devs not getting too involved with what they work on, will probably reflect in product quality.
• system2 4y ago
  I can't believe people even discuss this. Input Lag gaming will never pick up. It is supposed to be the opposite. Remove lag further instead of adding them for strange services like this.
  • password54321 4y ago
    You never tried it or your connection is bad. The tech itself works.
    • system2 4y ago
      I tried Stadia on a Gigabit Fiber + 5ghz wifi. It is significantly noticeable. You cannot change the laws of physics.
• KVFinn 4y ago
  There are advantages to game streaming but Google never really did anything with them, instead they just made a worse version of a console. The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a gaming console for free. You could buy a PS5 for $500 or you could play on Stadia for $0!" (In practice the free tier of Stadia didn't have the greatest quality but many people didn't even know Stadia had a free tier...) Game streaming could have opened up new possibilities. Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. "Okay GodGamer420 spamming in chat, if you think this boss is so easy, now you have control. Show us how it's done." Even the lowest hanging fruit. The biggest advantage of game streaming is that it works on any device but Stadia didn't even work on most Android phones at launch, and for many months after.
  • TobyTheDog123 4y ago
    >Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. This is very true, and it sounds really good on paper, but it seems like anything that attempts to transition content consumers to participants fail. For example, Mixer had incredible low-latency technology and game integration, yet failed because (at least, I think) a lot of it was banking on that consumers would want to take control. For me, at least, this would never be the case. If I'm watching my favorite Twitch streamer, I don't really want to play, I want to watch them play and see their reactions. If I wanted to play the game they're playing, I would do so (in fact, I just bought Railbound because I saw the Twitch streamer Atrioc playing it) I think the line a lot of people have are small tokens of support (bits, donations, subscriptions), because many people don't want to be that involved.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
• Kukumber 4y ago
  The world uses google search and trust their email service even for their professional and civil uses, that journalist is dishonest on purpose, shame Stadia died due to: - business model - cloud only - conjuncture and anti-competitive nature of their competitors cloud gaming is 20years too early anyways, i'm not saying it's pointless, i am saying it shouldn't be your sole offering they own android and they didn't capitalize on it, instead they went rogue with web only a dedicated handheld gaming console with cloud capabilities would have been 1000x better and smarter strategy to penetrate the premium gaming market
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > world uses google search and trust their email service These are core services. Google is trusted for their core services. Everything else faces an uphill battle for coming from Google.
    • GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Even Google search is going downhill. Most searches contain a lot of sponsored crap at the top. And it's often returning worse results than duckduckgo.
      • alexb_ 4y ago
        I was actually searching some terms on Google about a week ago and straight up had crypto scams and "Click Allow To Prove You Are Not A Robot" on the front page. Past the first 3 results Google Search has become insanely shit.
  • danaris 4y ago
    "The world uses Google" and "the world trusts Google" are not the same thing.
• HungSu 4y ago
  As Google Stadia's target user, in my opinion a stronger reason Stadia died is because GeForce Now was a competing and better product. GeForce Now allowed me to play the games I already own with a more powerful machine than I could buy myself, for just $10/month. Artifacts were noticeable but not enough for me to care. If I bought my own gaming PC later, I would be able to continue playing the game there. GeForce Now offered "Hey, you're playing Cyberpunk at 720p@25fps? Wanna play at 1080p@60fps for $10? And you can leave any time" And I said heck yes. Stadia would have denied me the ability to continue playing on my own machine while charging me even more money. There are a bunch of stories of people with saved games trapped in Stadia. Google made no attempt to be better than the competition. It's like they're unaware of anything other than themselves.
  • brianbreslin 4y ago
    Wouldn't XBOX with gamepass for $25/month all in be a more compelling competition?
    • dmix 4y ago
      It is yes arguably a better service in most ways and better integrated with both game studios, a TV console, and all the benefits of Xbox live community. Nut Nvidia's is arguably a closer direct competition to Stadia. Being a purely PC game (slash arcade) platform. As much as Xbox is trying to evolve and games being cross-console/PC is getting far more common the Xbox cloud platform is still largely just an extension of Xbox games. For ex: with Divinity and Pathfiner: WOTR they all had to release "Enhanced Editions" to support Xbox and it takes many years after the PC release to get a lot of PC games. It's not one-to-one. That said I see Xbox Cloud completely dominating this space. Their library, pricing, and service quality is A+
    • coolspot 4y ago
      It is actually line $35/year (for GP Ultimate) if you know magic words “conversion deal”.
    • ThatPlayer 4y ago
      It would depend on the games you play. For example Stadia got games like Assassin's Creed and Cyberpunk 2077 that Xbox Game Pass still doesn't. Their streaming service is still limited to Game Pass games only.
• pie_flavor 4y ago
  Tech people talk about the tech they killed, but that isn't related to game developers' incentives - especially considering nearly all the tech they killed was free and they don't have a history of rolling on actual customers. The actual problem for game developers was that the architecture was home-grown (Vulkan-only), with little tooling, annoying licensure requirements, and not enough profit incentive to dedicate the effort. Companies have no (financial) problem releasing for GOG, which has fewer users than Stadia, because you barely have to take any effort to do so, but porting to Stadia took the effort of porting to Xbox. This both counted as a direct incentive not to port to Stadia, as well as the writing on the wall for how well-managed this product would be.
• Fricken 4y ago
  My premise at the outset was that if Google isn't committed enough to invest in a AAA launch exclusive for it's gaming platform, then I won't be committing to anything either.
• peanut_worm 4y ago
  Google has really fallen far since Pichai took over.
  • tokamak 4y ago
    Agree. He is not bad of a manager, but there is no vision in him.
• eftychis 4y ago
  To augment the article's perspective: To add: Trust (lack of it) played a big role also, in the sense that to capitalize with Stadia, one needed to produce a quite different port of their game. I can imagine that making the decision to invest your developers' time on a new port and that being a product that its known track record is "https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/." But also google, as other sibling comments have pointed out also, did not integrate at all with their other products, did not offer more than some free games, had no offline offering -- I would pay 110% the price for physical + online access to the game for life. They could have actually been a serious Steam competitor, they have the money to do so. Instead of supporting linux gaming, they went with their own approach. They did not offer a console, or hardware, besides the initial giveaway. Minute point, but doesn't help, when competition in the space gives weekly games, deep discounts and has a great API and track record. Everyone knew they would fail, and they did, despite their resources, which tells us a lot. I think it is high time and paramount to retrospect and learn.
• snapetom 4y ago
  Man, that display with the Dreamcast, Power Glove, and E.T... Amazing no one at Google yelled, "STOP!" at the marketing department.
• jonhohle 4y ago
  I didn’t try Stadia, but recently tried Luna after coming across a controller at a thrift shop. I was happy to find Earthworm Jim in the section of included games, but it ended up being unplayable. I didn’t take the time to determine what the latency cause was - Luna itself, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display path - but there is so much in that game that requires tight timing that it was unplayable. I was surprised they’d use that to advertise their service. Modern games are built with an understanding of controller and display latency that just didn’t exist in the analog era, and I’m sure most cloud adapted games don’t mind a few dozen milliseconds of round trip latency. It’s remarkable that nearly 30 years later, retro games that could be easily emulated locally in any streaming device give these services a hard time.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  Gaming is such a highly competitive market, I wouldn't try breaking into it unless I had something revolutionary, like Myst and DOOM were when they appeared.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    Microsoft threw billions at it and became the third player. Sony also threw tons of money at it and succeeded. You don't need revolutionary ideas as a hardware publisher, you need the willingness to lose money for a long time to get a foothold.
    • ffggvv 4y ago
      sony has decades of relationships built in the industry with its consoles. microsoft has the same with oc gaming. google has zero relationships
      • HWR_14 4y ago
        Sony has the decades of relationships now, but not when the PS1 came out. Which is what I was referring to. (And the original XBox)
    • YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
      Willingness to lose money is necessary but not sufficient. You still need to do something that nintendon't. Sony was lucky in that Sega completely bungled their entries into the 32-bit era, and Nintendo chose a cartridge-based system at a time when cartridges were on the way out, so in reality, the Playstation was the only competently-executed CD-based console available at the time. Similarly, the XBOX was kind-of revolutionary. If anything, it was ahead of its time. It had a built-in HDD, its controllers were logically USB even if they had a proprietary form-factor, and it had built-in networking, and it didn't use any fancy nonstandard architecture. These are all features that would eventually become standard, so MS definitely had good ideas, and by doing them first they were well-positioned to do them right again. If MS had brought literal nothing to the table, I doubt the 360 would have been able to capitalise on the PS3's various shortcomings. EDIT: "Doing something nintendon't" might be more literal than I thought. If the real market for Stadia is casuals, then what does the Stadia do that the Switch doesn't? I guess from reading the Reddit thread linked elsewhere, that the main market was ex-PC-gaming dads whose wives wouldn't let them get a new gaming PC. Which makes sense, as those people aren't interested in playing Mario or Zelda. But that's not a big niche to be targeting.
• dehrmann 4y ago
  I wonder if any Stadia tech will get rolled up into Chromebooks.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    Isn’t it (except maybe “controllers connecting to the network bypassing a computer or other client device”, which also doesn’t make sense in a Chromebook) all server-side tech plus existing a/v streaming?
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      I'm specifically thinking of a path to beefier applications that G Suite, but maybe it's mostly suited for gaming. For something like an IDE or Photoshop, how you offload work to the server looks different.
      • dragonwriter 4y ago
        Oh, it (or something very similar) could definitely be used for desktop applications that run and store data remotely, I just don’t think that you’d need to add anything additional to Chromebooks to realize that. On desktop, it already uses Chrome as the software client component, so its already there.
  • wishfish 4y ago
    Probably not. Google has beta support for Steam on a handful of new (and new-ish) Chromebooks. Will probably make that mainstream on the Intel / AMD models eventually. Unsupported Chromebooks can install Steam via Linux as long as they're not ARM based. Plus, much of the existing game streaming services works on Chromebooks. Either through a web interface or through an Android app. And there's a ton of games and emulators available via Android. I think that gives enough gaming options for Chromebooks that Stadia tech won't continue in Chrome OS. I could be wrong though. Would be amusing if it was integrated somehow.
• pbj1968 4y ago
  I’m reading a lot of shoulda, woulda, coulda in here but it was a very, very nice product that worked disturbingly well in my experience. When they went to free timed trials of AAA games, I figured they were on the edge. This thing was ahead of its time and we were witnessing the inevitable death of consoles. I say this as someone with more systems that I can count that are actively played in my household.
• oxff 4y ago
  It died because it's complete dog shit.
• uejfiweun 4y ago
  Google needs to be in the business of revolutionizing things. Not this incremental, competitively priced bullshit. If Google wanted to really succeed in the gaming space, they'd be out there offering this service for free. They invented innovative technology that could have made it possible to play a AAA game on a piece of shit, and they hid it behind so many subscription services and fees that nobody ever even got to experience it. Then they went with, depending on who you ask, either no marketing at all, or in my experience the most bland, soulless corporate marketing I've ever seen. It's like they don't understand anything about the market they are entering into. What on earth even happened with this product? It was literally a punchline before it even released. The product & marketing people in charge of this should be ashamed of themselves.
• utopcell 4y ago
  Hats off to Stadia engineers for the engineering marvel that they created. I'm certain they'll be sought after both internally at Google and externally. Also, hats off to Google for refunding all hardware(!) and software purchases. I don't remember any parallel to this from a large company. Essentially, gamers participated in a wonderful large-scale experiment which cost them nothing (except maybe the occasional monthly fee). I am a happy Stadia user, I am sad to see it sunset.
  • YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    Has any other company been in a position where they'd have to offer refunds though? The combination of a hardware device that relies entirely on an external service and requires "purchases" rather than rentals, and said service being discontinued after only three years and the company in question still being solvent seems like it'd be a black swan.
    • utopcell 4y ago
      Google is refunding everything, not just hardware. Contrast this to Amazon for instance, where movies/tv shows you have bought just disappear from your account when Amazon loses the license to serve them.
  • ekiourk 4y ago
    I agree completely with you, thats how I am seeing the whole situation. Even if I knew the outcome I would be part of it again and I could even spend more money and time. But on the other hand Google could do much better and stadia could be luckier if it was managed by someone else
• achow 4y ago
  It is kinda puzzling why Stadia was not sold off to Netflix. It would be a win situation for all - Google makes money, Netflix doesn't have to start from scratch for their next strategic move, Stadia gamers are not left stranded. Same as when Google sold Sketchup. 2012. Google’s sale of 3D modeling software SketchUp, to Trimble, is its first divestment in years, ..the search giant made a profit, as it sold SketchUp for more than it bought it for back in 2006. https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/sketchup-google-first-divestment/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/sketchup-google-first-dive...
• a1371 4y ago
  I'm sure there are some managers at Google who are patting each other on the back reciting "fail fast fail often" boasting about how much they learned launching Stadia, and looking for the next thing because Google should not be bogged down with things that don't turn the world upside down. I don't think Google should become a maintenance company and I understand what the sunk cost fallacy is but I must ask... Did no one at Google find the grit to ask for more money and try new things? They understand that we have stopped believing in their new products because they display no belief in those themselves, right?
  • trophycase 4y ago
    This. I remember when Stadia came out and then you'd see press from Google backpedalling on their own product. You knew it would die before it even launched so why bother investing money and time into it? Like why should I show commitment into Stadia if Google is already cutting their budget before it launches?
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• yyyk 4y ago
  Stadia died because the business model made no sense. The service was squarely targeted at AAA gamers. However, it was a poor deal for AAA gamers and (much more importantly) a horrible deal for AAA game companies. The deal for AAA companies was: Port your game for an entirely different OS/API, pay the Google tax and be subject to Google reviews. But you can't treat a game streaming service like a Play Store. AAA game companies have way more power and money than the typical mobile app developer, and will fight you even on mobile where GoogleApple is strong (see Epic). No way they want the Play Store experience when they can avoid it by going to the competition. So Google had to bribe and bribe. Eventually it became depply unprofitable, and Google had to pull the plug. Was there any way to avoid that? A) Make the service more accessible to casuals. Like by having a search bar, a subscription model and making some Windows compatibility layer so indies could more easily port. But there's no way Google's ego could accept a service not targeted at AAAAAA. B) Make 1st party studios and show capabilities only cloud gaming could have. Force AAA companies to your service to compete. This requires investment for a good time with uncertain rewards and possibly no promotion. We're talking about Google here. C) Pivot to a white-label service and give AAA companies a way better deal. This is what Google is trying to do. Of course, there's no reason to keep Stadia in that case.
  • xxs 4y ago
    > Make 1st party studios and show capabilities only cloud gaming could have They started with 1st party game studios, they shut the bit more than a year after the launch.
• shmerl 4y ago
  More like becasue no one wants a DRM walled gaming service and because other streaming options allowed one to play already purchased games instead of requiring to buy them again. Google should have provided an option to transfer games from Steam and GOG without buying them again, and run them for example using Wine if there was no native Linux version available. Then their service could have worked out. Their refusal to use Wine and stick to native games only was their major mistake that limited their catalog (in addition to that buying games again issue). I think Amazon are already working on something like above and they are using Wine. They probably learned from Google's mistakes. Instead of shutting down, Google should have addressed above issues. But in Google's usual fashion, they'd rather shut things down than fix them.
• test6554 4y ago
  Here's what a cloud gaming service needs to take off: * Allow me to use any controller the game natively supports on almost any device (phone, tablet, pc, stream box, etc.) and also as many game consoles as possible (probably 0 or 1) * Give me access to hundreds of games when I subscribe just like Netflix gives me access to hundreds of shows and movies. Don't make me pay for the service and again for games. Gamers just want to pay one monthly fee for unlimited games access. (Probably only Microsoft, Sony, or a partnership between a major game publisher and Amazon or Apple could deliver on this due to consolidating IP portfolios) * Build data centers close to your customers for low-latency rendering * Use modern GPU hardware with ray tracing and dlss or the AMD equivalent. * Work with game publishers to make a killer game so computationally demanding that it won't render with just one or two desktop graphics cards. Show the power of the cloud and market the hell out of it.
  • xxs 4y ago
    > Use modern GPU hardware with ray tracing and dlss or the AMD equivalent. DLSS, upscaling - but why? Just so the company can save costs. You should be able to get 60 frames without, and you won't get more than 60fps/4k with any latency. Upscaling will be even worse due to compression artifacts of the streaming. So in short - DLSS is useless. I guess nvidia ad division has a true power.
  • shmerl 4y ago
    You don't need upscaling for a streaming gaming service. DLSS is pointless for it because you can't possibly have framerates that would force you to upscale anyway.
    • solardev 4y ago
      What do you mean?
      • shmerl 4y ago
        Upscaling is useful if for whatever reason you need a target framerate that your GPU can't sustain at your desired resolution. I.e. roughly, you reduce target resolution which allows GPU to render more frames in the same time period, then you upscale the result to counteract that resolution reduction. That way you trade image quality for higher framerate. In the network case (i.e. "streaming"), you are limited by the bandwidth and latency of the network itself. I.e. you will sooner bottleneck by the network than by GPU being unable to render frames faster than that. So upscaling is just pointless for it.
• Markoff 4y ago
  my take from headline since I can't open link due to some shady Yahoo consent redirect - so people didn't want to use it because they were afraid Google will kill it, so Google killed it? story old as Google especially when it comes to messaging apps, never use messaging app from Google
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• jpeter 4y ago
  What I don't understand. Why didn't they push stadia on mobile more? Why didn't they make a switch like controller for phones and sold it? And when you installed the stadia app, the first you see is a popup that forces you to buy the premium subscription.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  No, it died because it was mismanaged as a product. There were technical issues when it launched but more importantly, there never was a good strategy for content. So, the catalogue was a combination of expensive and lacking in titles. I tried it out briefly because on paper it wasn't a bad idea. Except the free games were mostly not worth the money and the paid games were the same price as actually buying the games. But without the option of actually installing and owning them. And the one game I tried disconnected after a few minutes. So, I pulled the plug on the free trial. Google has had a long history of messing up on the content front. They've made a lot of false starts with Youtube to get into paid content and it just never took off. Netflix is raking in billions from paid subscriptions. Not so much with Youtube. Few people pay for the premium content because there hardly is any worth paying for. Where Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix and others succeeded, Google failed repeatedly to get a compelling offering of content together. It's a blind spot they have; they seem unable to come up with a coherent plan. They can do the tech but not the content. I'm not sure what it is. On paper the tech is a lot harder and they do have deep pockets. But when it comes to content they are a combination of stupid and frugal and somehow refuse to spend money on good content to lure in customers. With Stadia, they had the right idea and all they would have had to do was two things: fix the bugs and get some amazing games in there. They dropped the ball on both fronts. So, it failed because they never gave it a proper chance to begin with.
  • dutchbrit 4y ago
    It’s a reoccurring event though, people don’t trust Google because they kill so many services.
    • jillesvangurp 4y ago
      They kill so many products because they mismanage them and they then fail to get a lot of users. A lot of the things they kill simply aren't very good. Trust has nothing to do with it.
      • llampx 4y ago
        Lots of products they killed had millions of users. Reader, Orkut, Picasa are a few that come to mind.
• mm007emko 4y ago
  I happily used GeForce Now when I couldn't get a new GPU (and later could get but couldn't afford it). It made sense because the games were bought through Steam and GoG and I paid just for the streaming service. Now I don't have to re-buy the games and even kept saves.
• frouge 4y ago
  This: "To be honest I would be relieved if they screwed up Gmail so badly that I had no choice but to switch"
• mugivarra69 4y ago
  i agree with broad theme. the people who work on games, are not really fan of big corps owning things. most game devs want their thing to be reflection of them and share the joy with people, rather than siloing it and milking people. that is my experience, personally.
• crmrc114 4y ago
  Killing google reader. This for me was their turning point.
  • olifante 4y ago
    The day they killed Google Reader was the day they publicly renounced their “Don’t Be Evil” motto. From TFA: > the turning point was the assassination of Google Reader — for which I will never forgive them, and try to regularly exert a small vengeance by mentioning it
• Geee 4y ago
  I think this tech would work for very well for game demos. Google could repurpose this tech, so that people could play game demos integrated in ads.
  • elrobinto 4y ago
    They did this with Resident Evil Village - I thought that would be an awesome experience to play it on my underpowered work laptop - it just didn't work though, not sure if it didn't like my browser or their servers were overloaded.
• v7p1Qbt1im 4y ago
  It‘s really a pity. Unfortunately the gaming market is so difficult to penetrate. It took MS decades and endless amounts of money. And it’s really shitty for cloud gaming prospects. Likely MS will take it all over the long term and there will be a lack of competition in the space. Stadia was so far ahead technically. They just needed to invest 15 years and 100 billion in studios and a sub model. Gaming and cloud will be the future. And now they lost one them. I get that it’s really difficult to justify loss leaders for that long but you kind a have to in this case. It’s funny that Google became so risk averse over the years while MS is just taking massive gambles and spending like they don’t have a care in the world. And MS seems to be doing the right things for them somehow.
• isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  Stadia dying proves why people shouldn’t trust Google.
• threatripper 4y ago
  What is the technical reason why streaming is much better than having your own hardware? So far I don't really see it for most people. I could imagine it's better for business because you can gate-keep access to your game and nobody can copy it. It's easier and faster to develop because you just have to optimize it for a few datacenters with a limited scope of hardware. (But is hardware support even a big problem today?) For the user they don't have to care for anything. Just click "START" in the browser and you're good to go. Optionally transfer some money for a day pass for premium games. (But is it that easy?) So I think it's supposed to make sense from a business and UX perspective but technically it still falls short. Whoever has enough internet also has enough hardware. Both get cheaper. Whoever develops a game with a big budget could also develop a custom streaming solution.
• deleted 4y ago
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• flohofwoe 4y ago
  IMHO it wasn't just Google (and if then only in the sense that they picked the wrong people), Stadia was lead by an "old guard" from the traditional game console business (and weren't even particularly successful there). Trying to shoehorn the console business model into a streaming service is essentially like trying to create an awesome technology for streaming movies, but then still forcing people to buy movie tickets and go to the cinema for watching those streamed movies.
• Rathseg 4y ago
  It wasn't a matter of lack of trust. Oddly, the article kind of refutes itself by providing plenty of examples of it just being a bad product. Stadia was a solution in search of a problem. No one wanted it and it wasn't a good product. It was also a case of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Google did everything in the cloud and already had cloud compute services that were good technically but under utilized because of Google's low-touch business models. Add in the appeal of that sweet, sweet recurring revenue model that drives the MBA types wild and it became very easy rationalize that it was a good idea. They likely never considered if it was going to be appealing to gamers or to developers because they were blinded by their their own desires.
• ggnall 4y ago
  Matthew Ball had a great angle on why streaming gaming generally and what niche (and kinds of games)it would actually serve. The (current) top comment here is spot on that this product didn’t make sense to any particular gamer audience.
• ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Stadia died because they mismanaged it and didn't put in enough / the right resources. It took them two years to add a search bar to the service. When I first decided to try it last year, I couldn't even sign in and access game pages without it making me sign up to a pro trial, I had too find a free to play game and go to that page and then go to other games from there. It was crazy. Completely unclear what the service was and how it worked for most people until recently. Even now with all the media coverage, i've seen large publications miswrite how the service worked and that you needed a pro subscription and to buy the games. If they weren't going to put in the resources to get the triple titles, then they should have marketed it as a more casual gaming service. Used youtube to market it, have a bunch of party games on the subscription service and then it would have gotten more traction. They should of marketed it in the play store and to android users more. It could have worked, but they did nothing. Casual players don't have a problem trusting Google, as they are not aware they shouldn't trust Google. Only tech people and people in the know, know that and this was Stadias real problem. Tech people knew that Stadia existed, those people into games already had big gaming PC's and thought Stadia was a joke since it didn't have big triple A titles and they already had the hardware needed, the people that could have benefited the most for the service, didn't know it existed and if they did due to Stadias poor UX had no idea how it worked / that it could be useful for them. The fact that Google's management could not see this, when it is so clear is silly, all they needed to do is pivot and relaunch the service and fix a few issues, they did all the hard work and then just gave up, it's insane.
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  No, stadia died because Google did not earn trust. A subtle but important distinction. Google had a chance to commit to this and really hold the line until wider adoption.
  • lofaszvanitt 4y ago
    You really think the average player has long term memory, reads multiple newspapers on a daily basis and knows all the shenanigans of Google? NO! They only care about themselves and the bottom line. Gimme the game as fast as possible with as low of a cost possible and goodbye.
    • imwillofficial 4y ago
      Wrong, if that were true the cheapest console would always be dominant. And the market easily disrupted. Sometimes that’s the case, sometimes it isn’t. So clearly average gamers know enough about companies to factor in reputation into the mix. Otherwise those $50 emulators would outsell everything else on the planet.
• npteljes 4y ago
  Partially I agree, but to me, the offering haven't made sense. I'd pay for the service, and then I'd buy the games themselves, which are then tied to the service. With GeForce Now, I had to only pay for the service, and use my already existing library - so effectively I'm renting hardware, that makes sense. With Xbox Game Pass, I'd pay to rent a dynamic library of games, that also makes sense. But this hybrid kind of thing what Google offered, I just felt was the worst value on the market.
• whirlwin 4y ago
  I tried Stadia this year, and it was full of indie games and just a few AAA games. Didn't work for me.
• pjmlp 4y ago
  Same fate awaits Flutter and Dart, unless Fuchsia really takes Android place. Dart only reason to stay around is to write Flutter apps. Flutter, well, it has enough competition with frameworks based on programming languages that aren't tied to a single purpose.
• MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Nobody trusts Microsoft but they kept pouring money into Xbox until it worked. Google just wanted to half ass their entry into the games industry. It's a warning to Amazon and Apple.
• Aerroon 4y ago
  Stadia died because the product doesn't make sense. Stadia is essentially trying to replace a gaming PC. To offer this service you will have to charge users enough money to: 1. buy a gaming PC every 3-5 years 2. run it at ~250W for average play time (4-8 hrs a day) 3. pay for all of the bandwidth on your end And then you can offer the user a worse service than if they had spent that money on a PC themselves. Where's the value add for the average user here? Does Google get computer hardware that's optimized for games several times cheaper than average users? Is their bandwidth free? Free electricity? Ultimately Stadia is trying to offer a service that's very similar to what already exists. They have to do something much better to have a chance or they have to have a stable offering that slowly builds up more users.
  • kibibu 4y ago
    4-8 hrs per day? Is that really how much time the average game player spends? (not "gamer", but stadia target customer) I enjoy games but if be hard pressed to spend that much time a week.
  • thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
    >run it at ~250W for average play time (4-8 hrs a day) I think this is the important aspect. If you're only using it for a few hours a day, the hardware can be used for someone else while you're not playing. So it runs into the same issue as autonomous taxis: the hardware is only useful in a narrow region and most users want to have their go at the same time.
• mattlondon 4y ago
  It died because you could not access your steam (...or epic or uplay or gog) libraries. Nothing else matters IMO. It was good tech, bad badly integrated into the ecosystem. I happily pay for geforce now which can access those things (in an albeit limited way - I think technically it can play anything but there are legal tings that prevent a lot of games from being playable which sucks for the user)
• esskay 4y ago
  I'd never, ever trust Google with something important. At some point everything closes. That being said Sadias failure was only partially the Google closure effect. It ws a terrible business model. Had they gone down a Gamepass style system it would've likely worked. But making you pay full price for a game with zero actual ownership of it, and being 100% reliant on a strong internet connection was always going to cause this to be a flop. If it hadn't died now it would've happened eventually. With Gamepass expanding and offering an absolutely massive library of games, combined with Origin it's a far superior service, and easier to accept the price.
  • hbn 4y ago
    > Had they gone down a Gamepass style system it would've likely worked Isn't that what they did? You got a handful of games every month when you were on their Pro subscription, and I think you kept them as long as you paid your subscription. Just they didn't have as good of offerings, cause their library was lacking.
• eloisant 4y ago
  And they proved everyone right by killing it. They have the means to keep the product alive and keep trying until they make it, if they really believe in the vision and if it was part of their long term strategy. Look at Microsoft, Bing have been struggling for years but they're still sticking with it. They waited until it was clear that it couldn't be salvaged before killing Windows phone. And XBOX also had a tough start, and was bleeding money for years. Half of the problem is that Google kills product before giving them a chance. The other half is that they launch new product randomly "to see what sticks", instead of focusing on a strategy.
• invader 4y ago
  It died because it solved the problem nobody really had. It's Startup 101. Who said hardware is the problem? Modern consoles are relatively cheap, especially considering modern $60 price tags on games. So why Stadia tried to solve that? I'm sure Google has a lot of brilliant engineers who can build a state-of-the-art streaming platform that can leverage existing Google cloud infrastructure. But that's all it is - a brilliant piece of technology nobody really needs. And not that innovative as well - I've met a bunch of game streaming startups back at Jan 2016 CES, something like two years prior the launch of Stadia, so the idea has been around for quite a while. Hardcore gamers are buying a lot of overpriced gaming gear all the time. I can't see how people spending thousands of $ on tuned hardware suddenly would want to change all that on a faceless streaming platform. Ownership and belonging is a big part of that subculture. Stadia could make sense for a casual gamer who doesn't want to invest into expensive hardware. But games a casual player plays are not GPU-heavy and work fine on any relatively modern platform. Too basic for a hardcore gamer, too powerful and demanding for a casual one. The Stadia's fate was sealed.
  • ktzar 4y ago
    Sporadic gamers who don't have the space or money to have a $400 console permanently using space in their living rooms. I played RDR2 on Stadia for 2 months. Then didn't use it again until I got my next game, a few months later. I rather pay a bit more for games without the burden of having a console, or a gaming pc to be honest. It solved a problem for me. Until my kids are not old enough to have a PS (whatever the number is in 6 years) I won't have a console able to run top tier games
    • ddorian43 4y ago
      > Sporadic gamers who don't have the space or money to have a $400 console permanently Do you not have a computer/laptop? That's supposed to also play games. Maybe you chose the wrong computer (apple).
      • killerstorm 4y ago
        Imagine people don't want a big expensive bulky hot laptop to play games, but want something smaller for work, and pay for a service to play a game without hearing fan noise.
• jwilk 4y ago
  Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://archive.today/7ONLu https://archive.today/7ONLu
• wafriedemann 4y ago
  They made a service for casuals, but a lot of casual games where not available on the platform. Basically no f2p game that, as I assume, casuals love.
• fatjokes 4y ago
  Stadia was prepared for a future that was promised and not delivered on time: ubiquitous (mmWave) 5G. A lot of folks point out that Stadia doesn't make sense because you'd be tied to locations with stable Internet. That wasn't suppose to be a problem anymore. Google misjudged the telcos who had promised 5G and delivered the weak, low coverage form we have today. Had the gamble paid off, it would've been strategically perfect. Cloud-based intensive computing, which is exactly Google's forté, would've taken off and Stadia's infrastructure could've been extended beyond gaming. And the pitch would've been easy: don't buy $500 impossible-to-find consoles and $2k graphics cards. You'd also be able to play your games anywhere. Traveling for work? Log in and play on your crappy work laptop or Chromebook.
  • rizzaxc 4y ago
    not the reason. stadia isn't the only offering in this space; both GamePass and GFN are doing fine
• ctvo 4y ago
  > At its best, Stadia was better than its competitors and almost magical in how it fulfilled the promise of going from zero to in-game in one second. I was an early adopter of Stadia. I swapped to GeForce Now because it supported higher resolutions, had better refresh rates, and had lower latency. The author tried to push the narrative that technically Google did well but it was other factors causing this failure. No, technically they didn’t do well either.
• pragmatic 4y ago
  No one trusts Google to keep any new service alive. Or not to randomly close their account. Or to do anything good at this point quite honestly.
• ece 4y ago
  If Stadia's core audience was supposed to be occasional gamers, then that audience didn't exist. Not to the extent Google thought anyway. That's the nice way of putting it, but yeah, cancelling things people like and/or not providing enough value (if your internet is fast enough) is going to hold a service back too.
• amelius 4y ago
  I'm not a gamer, but I was wondering what happens to games purchased by customers. The Google support site says: > We will be leaving the Stadia platform and game servers online until January 18, 2023, so you can continue to play games in your library. How is this acceptable? If I purchased Stadia games for $40-$60, I would be furious.
• HeavyStorm 4y ago
  What a naive article. Can't believe it made to hn top.
• tristor 4y ago
  I buy almost every tech gadget related to gaming. I didn’t buy Stadia. The reasons are pretty much as below, in order. 1. Google is not a reliable vendor. Anything they launch is highly likely to be cancelled and you are left holding the bag. 2. Game streaming is fundamentally inferior to local play, and the structure of the Stadia market didn’t account for this. 3. XBox Game Pass exists, which is superior to Stadia in every way, and comes from a reliable vendor. I’m more surprised that anyone bought Stadia than I am that it got canceled.
• tlhunter 4y ago
  The Steamdeck also helped kill Stadia. If I want to game on the go then I can simply access my established Steam library from the Deck. At that point, why buy into another library?
• smallerdemon 4y ago
  When Google first appeared on the tech scene, a lot of us were excited to have a great tool for search that actually kicked back relevant things you needed. And they toyed with great experiments, most of which are all dead except for the most boring of them: the traditional productivity suite of email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. (For the record, I have never seen or heard of a single person in my entire knowledge of Google ever use Slides.) Of course, Chromebooks and Chrome as well (but...). Their missteps are so public and feel so egregious, and that's what this article is underscoring. Great and fun things that clearly they are not able to monetize, no matter how much they throw into it. Yet the things that they go all in on are usually things no one actually needs or wants, such as Google Plus and Stadia. Instead, as again pointed out by the article, Google puts out great experiments that people love, and the management and marketing at Google simply are never able to get their shit together to monetize those things in ways to make the products profitable enough to keep around, such as the article-mentioned Reader (which I am also still bitter about), and just destroying other great tools like Picasa to hoist less useful web-based generic experiences upon the user base they build up. Google is really, truly, at this point so many years into their existence, an afterthought for most end users. When non-tech people say Google they mean Chrome almost 100% of the time. They mean a web browser. People still have and use yahoo.com and aol.com emails more than anyone thinks, and gmail might be Google's second most successful product after Chrome, but for a grand majority, Google = Chrome. The Google Graveyard site exists for a reason. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  • tester756 4y ago
    what? I'd say that when people say Google they mean search, youtube, android/gmail, maps
    • hedora 4y ago
      Google Search is dying. Last night I tried to identify a baby rattlesnake (?) in our living room. On my wife’s phone, many of the pictures were for ratsnakes. Of course, I didn’t notice it while I was waving brooms around, and of course I can’t reproduce the issue while logged out. YouTube, Android: Fair point, though android is shrinking in developed markets. Gmail and maps are commodities with minimal network effects and differentiation.
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  There certainly is a product management lesson in here It’s not enough to launch a product, you need conviction, and skin in the game, that the product is a good idea. And when your bets don’t pay off, you need to pivot like your life depends on it. Google could never succeed with stadia (or other big bets) if there’s little downside risk for those involved to its failure. Instead of digging deep and getting creative with the model, they can shrug and give up. You can’t give people amazing comfort and stability then expect them to take outsized risks.
  • rhtgrg 4y ago
    > You can’t give people amazing comfort and stability then expect them to take outsized risks. This statement doesn't make any sense to me. Who's going to try crazy new maneuvers on the trapeze, the person with the safety net or the one without? Perhaps you meant to say that you can't expect people to iterate on their business model like their life depends on it...well, I'm sorry to inform you but that rarely happens even in the startup world. People routinely shrug and give up, some return money to investors, and everyone moves on.
    • hedora 4y ago
      What is the upside at google if the thing you got promoted for three years ago (and are no longer working on) takes off this year?
    • softwaredoug 4y ago
      The better metaphor is if there’s always a safety net it doesn’t matter whether you stay on the tight rope. You can give up whenever you want.
• djhworld 4y ago
  Trust plays a big part of it, especially in the gaming industry. - Trust from consumers - Trust (and buy-in) from game developers/publishers Getting that trust is a long and often winding path, just look at Microsoft's track record with the Xbox. There were moments along the way where it could have all fallen apart, but at least they seem to genuinely believe in the product/platform. I never really got that impression from Stadia, I tend to follow a lot of games media and Stadia never really got that much of a mention. That might be a fault of the outlets I follow, but you'd think Stadia PR team would be the ones out there working the circuit to drum up positive coverage. Stadia hired Phil Harrison as the leader, he's had a long history of working in the industry, but tbh I don't think google put the resources behind him.
• Asooka 4y ago
  And now that it was shut down with no prior notice given to studios, that were actively working on ports of their games to the platform, no-one will ever trust Google with their business again. That honestly has to be the worst platform shutdown I've ever witnessed.
• sngz 4y ago
  As a gamer. I didnt even know what stadia was until I read this thread. Lack of advertising might be why they failed.
• stevenalowe 4y ago
  Never heard of Stadia until now <== might also be a factor
• Krisando 4y ago
  I tried Stadia, but the input latency was frustrating. I tried to play games that ran okay, but didn't want to upgrade my computer. Most noticeably to me, Destiny 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 ran poorer and worse input lag. I have gigabit fiber and sub 10ms latency to all the major datacenters in Europe. I didn't stop using Stadia because I didn't trust Google, I stopped using Stadia because the experience sucked every time I tried it.
• foxyv 4y ago
  I have to admit, I would have bought into Stadia if I had any confidence in Google not killing things willy nilly. I like the idea of cloud services like this and not having to play keep up with my computer upgrades. However they canceled Google Play Music, Hangouts, and a couple other things. Then all the customer support issues. Then the content moderation SNAFU on YouTube. They are kind of like that psychotic cat owner that refuses to get their cats fixed. They just keep having kittens and drowning them in the lake or letting them run wild because they don't want to take care of them.
• sally1620 4y ago
  Game streaming technology has been ready for a long time now. It is not the technology or leadership of companies that make game streaming; it is the game studios that block game streaming from becoming main-stream.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  Stadia failed because it wasn't an identity, it was just a piece of hardware. If you stand in line to buy a Playstation 5, you're part of an exclusive club of PS5-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform. If you buy an Xbox you're part of an exclusive club of Xbox-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform. If you buy a Nintendo Switch, you're part of a (not-so) exclusive club of Switch-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform. If you buy a gaming PC, you're part of the "PCMR" and you can play exclusive games for that platform (and brag about how much RAM you have or whatever). If you buy a Stadia, you can play some games that already exist on other platforms. This whole situation isn't surprising. Big tech has a particular disease where they think that other industries are trivial and they can just muscle their way in with their superior intellect and size. Just look at how every MAANGA company is trying to disrupt healthcare right now, has a self-driving car division, etc. (There's some business antipattern, or psychological effect, but I can't remember the term right now). This is why YCombinator exists, because startups do a deeper dive into their markets and don't usually fall for ego traps like this.
• alenonimo 4y ago
  As someone who lived through the Google Reader era, there was no way in hell that I would trust Google with my money on a service like Stadia. It's the kind of situation where you only get burned once by a company. Stadia was dead on arrival for me. I live in a 3rd world country so they didn't ever bothered trying to sell the hardware over here. The internet also probably wouldn't be able to handle the needed downstream of a high quality gameplay footage, and even if it could it would have a ridiculous lag without servers in the region. Even if they managed to solve all of those problems, they were literally asking me to buy games that not only I wouldn't own but couldn't install or mod in my own way and trust that enough people would do the same so they wouldn't cancel the entire thing and run with the money? It's too much to ask. Heck, is the promised refund actual money back into the bank account or "gift cards" to spend on Google services? Wouldn't surprise me if it's the latter. I don't think Google was ever all that much successfull with products that only attend certain small regions. For Stadia to have a better chance, it would need at least be coupled with a service similar to Steam or Epic Games, where bought games are ran on client machines and that could be operated worldwide. A simple game store would make the service much more reliable. I think the biggest problem of Google now is how much they try to *control* their users. Google+ was really annoying to use because they kept making demands like real name and surname, not giving proper API so people could automatize posts with little effort, etc. They literally killed Google Reader just so people would stop using feeds and use their proprietary stuff instead. Stadia demanded the user not just to relinquish the ownership of the game but also the machine where it ran and how it was installed, so you couldn't modify games or manipulate saves. They also demanded people to use Chrome even though they could make it run on any web browser. It's all about control, control, control. I'm at a point where I don't even use Google Chrome. I know they will fuck it up somehow by being too "controlley". Oh wait, they're already trying to get rid of Ad Blockers, aren't they? That will surely work and in no way make people just use other browsers like Firefox, I'm sure... /s