20 ms·

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 crea

by _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.
    - nomel 4y ago
      I think you misunderstand Shadow. It’s just a cloud PC. Any games you buy are unrelated to Shadow. You can stop paying whenever you want, and the games are still yours. You just reinstall them when you start up you Shadow subscription again. This is what I do. If you buy a physical gaming PC at any point, you just install your games into it, rather than Shadow. And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time. And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        I know what Shadow PC is. But they now have an 'activation fee' that costs 1 month of use - $30 (currently waived but it will be imposed soon). That means if you just want to use it for 1 month (e.g. during a holiday) you will have to pay for 2 months. It applies every time you reactivate a paused account too! And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > It’s just a cloud PC With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.
    - nomel 4y ago
      The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows, and Steam/whatever popular store games. > manually logging in You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login. You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).
      - sofixa 4y ago
        > You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login. You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with. > there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions. I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.
        nomel 4y ago
        > you want to play games with. Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.
- impalallama 4y ago
  A 300-400 dollar console isn’t that much of a barrier compared to a 60 AAA video game. This market of people willing to pay premium prices for enthusiast products but is unwilling to pay for the hardware to run them I don’t think exists.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    When I buy a console I usually wait until it’s had some price drops and then there’s really only a few games I want to play. And because I waited so long these too are at a steep discount. These days, that means there’s so much content with DLCs and the base game that it could take me over a year to finish a AAA title. If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.
    - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
      Now that I think about it, Stadia launched into an extremely favourable market where both GPUs and next-gen consoles were unobtainium and 'price drops' are a thing of legend, but they still couldn't make it work. Any other time without that advantage and they'd have failed even harder.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
        They barely tried though. Did they expect to rival Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo in 2 years with their shitty reputation and without a AAA exclusive game? Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?
        sofixa 4y ago
        > Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all? They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform. Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Do the kinds of people shelling out $60 for a game find the $500 console a big barrier?
  - smelendez 4y ago
    I think so: People who played video games as kids, don't really have much time for them now, and don't really want to go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up, but occasionally get curious about a particular game. Maybe they don't even have an obvious place in the house for a console, if they only have wall-mounted smart TVs with nothing hooked up to them, or maybe they don't want to give their own young kids console games yet, which is hard to do with a PlayStation in the living room. It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?
    - threeseed 4y ago
      > go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up. They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        Not only are there only three consoles, I bet I could set up any of the three faster than setting up stadia.
      - delecti 4y ago
        Modern consoles take way longer to setup than they used to. Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches. I think you're giving consoles too much credit for ease of use.
        threeseed 4y ago
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  This model has been tried many times in gaming, and has never succeeded
- jayd16 4y ago
  But who has good enough internet for this service and no console?
  - brianbreslin 4y ago
    I bought it, heavily discounted, after having sold my ps4 and wanting something to play very infrequently. The service was spotty despite having gigabit fiber and mesh wifi in my house. As an infrequent gamer, I'm likely the worst possible customer archetype for google.
    - mesh 4y ago
      That was my experience. (I tried it for a free trial). Graphics were poor and input lag was abysmal (and made a lot of types of games unplayable).
      - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
        I never had much trouble with input lag or dropouts. Perhaps region-specific? I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't. Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-to-haunt-it-in-class-action-lawsuit/ https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    I have college friends on the east coast who all said it worked great for them. The they all commented that it was better on ethernet. The mesh Wi-Fi kits that everyone loves now add noticeable latency.
- jjav 4y ago
  > I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console. But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  But you need a high quality internet connection instead.
- mstipetic 4y ago
  If I were to rent a game for say 10 dollars play it and be done with it that would make me jump on it. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense
3746648 4y ago
bitexploder 4y ago
Steam games I bought a decade ago are still in my library. Steam is trusty. Google is not.
- echelon 4y ago
  Nevermind Steam, nevermind Google, nevermind Apple. I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another. I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer. If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam. The whole walled garden "app store" system sucks.
  - seabriez 4y ago
    Yeah, thats a HUGE downside to Apple, because they locked you into their AppStore you now suddenly have no rights to use the app on anything outside of an Apple device. That is very anti consumer and detrimental to everyone involved... except Apple.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      There is no requirement to use the App Store on a Mac. And yet those programs do not magically work on Windows or Linux because that's not how computers work. Developers have to specifically target and build their programs for the devices they wish to support. And many apps (in particular SaaS ones) allow you to buy one license and use their program on whatever device they support. App Store doesn't stop you.
      - 8note 4y ago
        If you get some windows app, it's possible that you will be able to run it on Linux. If I can get it to run, licensing shouldn't be another road block
        4y ago
_HMCB_ 4y ago
I’d be curious as to the elevator pitch presented to Google execs and why they bought into it. Wasn’t anyone thinking about the issues you brought up? Seems like fundamental issues. To think they spent millions and millions on this service only to close it down in short order. Typical Google but what other company does this repeatedly with 4-year precision.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I think some of Google's strategy is identifying new markets and potential rivals, and then throwing their resources at them until they dominate the market or buy/crush the competition. Building a sustainably profitable product is ancillary to that and not much of a factor initially.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I suspect this was exactly it; Google saw a potential for something like this, wanted in on it, and when the whole market didn't pan out, abandoned it. Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitable in its own right.
    - ahartmetz 4y ago
      In his book "The Road Ahead", which was full of bad predictions by the way, Bill Gates wrote something about the competition between computers and TVs and about set-top boxes. The original Xbox makes sense in that context. It was a bottom-up project initially, but its approval probably had something to do with Bill Gates' set-top box ideas. Microsoft Bob was another related development (cf. the Xbox dashboard, computing appliance).
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Go back to the 90s or maybe early 2000s, and there was definitely this widespread vision of a media hub connected to the TV in the living room as the primary home entertainment device (or even more broadly home control). People weren't necessarily in broad agreement about the nature of such a device but it was certainly a more centralized view of the world than what ultimately has ended up playing out.
ttty 4y ago
Maybe reading real reviews from real users will help too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xsyr8x/i_am_really_sad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xsyr8x/i_am_really_...
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  r/nintendoswitch: 4.2m r/ps5: 2.6m r/steamdeck: 230k r/stadia: 119k What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    Chasing casuals isn't a bad idea. Nintendo does it Pokémon and Animal crossing. Stadia relied on casuals who happen to have a stable fiber optic cable internet connection.
    - taeric 4y ago
      Neither Pokemon nor Animal Crossing strike me as casual. I think of Candy Crush and all the games like that. Not games with a story that start off with a tutorial.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        It's a spectrum, not a binary. They're way more casual than, say, Half-Life or GTA.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    I disagree with this use of metric completely. I game a lot, and I own multiple devices on your list above yet subscribe to 0 of the subreddits. People subscribe to the subreddits of _games_. You didn't even count /r/nintendo instead. If anything, I think the fact that these subreddits have so many people is actually a point against what you're arguing about the size of the casual market. I do agree with you on the larger point though, stadia had no product/market fit
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Agreed. Feeling of not owning games, being locked into a service, and dependent forever on connectivity, seemed a very bad idea and a bad deal. Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.
h0l0cube 4y ago
> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success. Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.
  - x0x0 4y ago
    I think the point is that Google nailed search so well -- and the $ chased eyes -- that they never really had to learn to build products that aren't constructed in the face of early, overwhelming demand. All the hard work of listening to customers, listening to prospects, teaching them that they should want the thing you built or are going to build, accepting feedback, etc.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    > When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
midislack 4y ago
Of course, there's also the inherent added lag.
haxorito 4y ago
100% agree with your opinion, the business model didn’t make any sense. Also as platform it wasn’t that grate either: lags, graphics quality and many more issues (not it’s not my internet). I’m glad they tried but suits failed the project.
mrich 4y ago
H
Shorel 4y ago
It makes sense for their intended use: Google wants googlers and high school students to not use Windows for any reason, and only use chromebooks. Stadia was a way for people with a chromebook to play Windows games.
- yyyk 4y ago
  That would make sense if Stadia was targeted at casuals (high school students probably can't afford AAA). However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.
  - cma 4y ago
    Highschool students are a primary demographic for AAA.
  - vermilingua 4y ago
    AAA games are targeted at casuals.
    - fellellor 4y ago
      Exactly but the barrier to entry is price. Most indie games targeted at non casual gamers will run on potato PCs.
    - discardable_dan 4y ago
      No, phone games are targeted at casuals. AAA games are targeted at people who have some 40-60 hours of spare time over the next three weeks to spend on video games. This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.
      - insightcheck 4y ago
        Casual is a nebulous term, but perhaps "widely accessible" is easier to evaluate. We can measure accessibility by games sold. By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2. So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up. You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers. [1] https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/ https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/
atoav 4y ago
I mean you are right, but on top of that I would not have trusted google to keep that service going. Generally I guess it is very unwise to trust any streaming service to keep going indefinitely, because there will always come a point where some old game is more work to support than it is worth. If we gave some gamer the funds to run the gaming equivalent of archive.org I might have more trust in the service. Earning money and archiving cultural goods for future generations are not easily compatible goals.
csydas 4y ago
I get what you're saying but I don't think it's about gamer focus so much as just gaming in general. I wrote this on another article comment but I don't think it's just about Google not understanding gamers, but gaming in general. - People who play games are fickle and distrustful (and rightfully so, cause gaming in general has a sordid history of screwing the player-base repeatedly). Google didn't understand this and seem to have understood it as "built it and they will come", ignoring the handful of failed consoles that claimed to revolutionize gaming - People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly). Google didn't understand this and thought it would be enough to just put platform out there and everyone would switch over - Developers understand the resource allocation for making a game pretty well, and they constantly are missing deadlines and/or releasing half-baked games. Google didn't understand this and just released a platform that was costly to port to and might as well have been another console - The games that were the showcase of Stadia were not games you want to just pick up and play on the go, they're something you sit down and put a few hours into. Google didn't understand this and apparently just thought "well, AAA game X is popular, let's get that on our platform" - Google already _has_ a platform for gaming called Android, and they didn't seem to understand what makes it work and what doesn't, or how to use that as a base for their idea, and instead tried to make a whole new platform - Stadia was a new gaming platform no matter how you slice it, but Google seemed to have the idea that Stadia was just something everyone would love and convert to immediately no matter how complex it was to put games on it. Developers even as late as 2022 still had trouble porting games to Stadia and if it's hard to port, naturally they're not going to develop something specifically for it The list can go on, but really Google just didn't understand what they were trying to do. The tech was pretty neat, but they didn't understand that what they were offering simply wasn't the way people wanted to play games or develop games for. Combine this with the fact that _everyone_ (devs and players alike) knew that it had a limited window to be successful before Google shut it down due to lack of $$$, and not having a strong showing from day 1 was not even a nail in the coffin, it was shoveling dirt atop the platform the moment it arrived. Google was never poised to disrupt gaming in my opinion -- what they were poised to do was to provide the datacenter and audience for developers to create their own vision of what Stadia should have been, but Google tried to make a video game platform, and instead made another entry in the "Failed Video Game console/platforms" lists that will be content for Youtube in the future.
password54321 4y ago
It’s not just the default prices but the sales which are quite competitive on both steam and the ps store.
mmcnl 4y ago
I think the reason is even simpler: lack of games and exclusives.
muststopmyths 4y ago
Gamasutra/gdmag has an article from the industry perspective. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stadia-was-not-inevitable https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stad...
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> 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. That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme. I agree with the article. Stadia was an interesting offer. The revolving free games coming with the pro subscription was a good deal and the idea of being able to keep playing games at their rendering best without having to fuss and constantly upgrade a PC - by far the worst platform to game for occasional players like me - sounded great. Stadia issue was for most it wasn’t offering what it claimed to offer. Games didn’t look that good on the free tier for exemple and as pointed no one trusts Google so I didn’t want to invest more than the strict minimum. Apparently I have played Cyberpunk for free so that’s nice.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  > That’s where the market is moving towards however. That's where certain rent-seeking companies would like the market to move towards. But the market always has two sides.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's exactly the right read in a way that is important here. Sure, if you buy a game on Steam or EGS, you're still kinda just "renting" it since if they go away, you can't play the game because of DRM. That said, I have a lot more faith that Valve will be able to keep offering Steam, since it's so lightweight, relative to the clear amount of cost inherent in running Stadia. It's a lot harder to build a walled garden from scratch as a late-comer, and even harder when you're building it in a swamp where people are less confident about moving in.
ghaff 4y ago
The "average" gamer/consumer doesn't want to fuss with any special gamer hardware or upgrading PCs. They may not even know what a GPU is. And they probably accept that there are lots of things that they can't do with bad internet most of which they care about a lot more than games. The idea of Stadia made a lot of sense to me when I first heard of it. I guess the implementation wasn't very good though.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  In fact, that’s such the case that the average gamer just uses a tablet or phone.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    They tend to be playable offline, but yes. The average player has zero interest in having a gaming PC. Of course, the average consumer has also never heard of Stadia. I've barely heard of it and I was at the Google Cloud event where they either launched it or gave it a lot of air time.
wafriedemann 4y ago
>You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. Like any other console.
taauji 4y ago
how stadia stood our for me was that i did not have to pay a subscription to play my game anywhere. once i bought the game i could take it anywhere and play it for free. with nvidia it was ~10$/month after purchasing the game
moomin 4y ago
Honestly you’re right there’s gaming specific reasons for the failure, but that itself is symptomatic of Google’s entry and exit of many markets: never really bothering to figure out what the market actually wanted and just hoping that high quality engineering will solve that. Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)
animitronix 4y ago
Agreed, it was a dumb idea from the get
DannyBee 4y ago
"I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused." They are - Google is still the most trusted brand in any studies you can find (and if you find one where it's not, it's probably #2) It is going down rather than climbing right now, but that's also not that uncommon - Apple/etc is also seeing the same thing. Now, among tech, and maybe even gamers, i would bet this is less true, and that is highly problematic to the degree it needs to sell to tech/people who listen to tech. But the latter also often consistently overestimates how much influence it has (IE tech people often believe that the whisper effect they have makes a difference, and that is only true in certain cases over a long period of time). In most cases, social influencers in completely unrelated fields can generate more tech product sales than happy/angry tech people :) Put another way - the simplistic notion that Stadia, or anything from Google, failed simply due to lack of tech trust is silly. While it's a fun headline that plays to their audience, things are rarely that simple
- Nokinside 4y ago
  You are taking about general trust into brand. That's not what the trust means in this context. We are talking about trust for Google to launch a new product or service. It's not worth to users nor businesses to direct any money or effort into anything new Google makes because it's not for long. Google simply can't be trusted to do that. Partial list of products estalishing this trend: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Google Schemer, Google Spaces, Google Checkout, Google Directory, Google Sync, Google Hangouts, iGoogle, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Moderator, .... Complete list is over 200 items long.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    Exactly this. Would I trust a new google offering by putting a bunch of my money, time, dependences into it? Hell no. The history is too strong that this offering will likely only be around for a short time and then be unceremoniously shut down and leave you hanging. Ironically, the fact they they keep doing this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
josefresco 4y ago
> You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. sigh As a gamer and actual Stadia user this is not a complete or fair depiction. Like almost every other cloud/gaming service including Xbox etc. Stadia had a "Pro" subscription model which have you access to dozens (hundreds?) of games. Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Geforce now allows you to link an Epic account and play all the games you previously purchased.
  - sascha_sl 4y ago
    Definitely not all. GFN is by far the most reliable and "native feeling" of these, but not just giving you a generic Windows install with some persistence is what makes it not worth it for me. I guess it's not trivial to get such "floating" windows licenses and prevent people from mining with a mouse jiggler? Though I did subscribe to the 3080 tier for a month when my gaming machine was out of comission.
- Asooka 4y ago
  > Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service! In theory, yes. In practise, if Steam shuts down tomorrow, I still have all my games on my hard disk and cracking Steam's DRM is pretty easy, and quite possibly completely legal in the circumstance.
throwastream4 4y ago
Streaming works for movies and TV, it will work for games. It was a shitty platform to develop for, end of story. I’m the games industry, there are 100 more failures that look like that. Specifically Vulkan is bad, and Linux is worse. The solution is obvious and done by the extant and thriving streaming services.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Streaming works for movies and TV, it will work for games. Latency isn't an issue for movies or TV. Streaming will never work for games in the same way playing a game locally does.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    Streaming RTS games is virtually indistinguishable from playing locally, except for lack of fan noise and constant need of needing to patch. There are tons of games that stream well, just not twitchy games.
    - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
      Agree completely that streaming single-player games is not an issue. The issue is that many of the most popular games in the world are FPS or real time twitchy games where latency is a huge issue. The #1 and #2 games in the world by peak player times are PubG and Crossfire. League of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, Overwatch, are all hugely popular games with hundreds of millions if not billions of players. There may be a niche for streaming games to those who enjoy single-player games, but that wasn't what Stadia was trying to be. They were trying to become the goto gaming platform for all games. Unless and until they figure out some sort of FTL communication, that is never going to be feasible as a universal platform.
mitchdoogle 4y ago
I think there needs to be a distinction between stadia the monthly service that lets you play new games each month and stadia the platform that allows you to buy and play games from any device. The platform is amazing and I wish Google would find a way to keep it around. The service is a different thing and like you said, doesn't make a lot of sense. Too few games and someone who wants to play games all the time anyway probably has. Setup they like already and lots of games for it to boot. I bought RDR2 for stadia in 2020 and played it everywhere - my phone, laptop, desktop. I played through the whole game and never once had any technical issues. That ability is what gives cloud gaming a real value beyond PC gaming or console gaming. You tell someone without a high spec gaming PC and no PS5 that they can play a new AAA game without buying anything new, then I think lots of people will love that. The article mentions you can't use your own controller, which is flat wrong. I used a Microsoft Xbox controller for both computer and android when I played. For someone who only plays games for 10-20 hours a month or so, it's great to not have to worry about buying new equipment. However, after the introductory free month of the service I gave it up. Only a few games, and the ones I liked were so short and simple that I was done with them after a week or so. GeForce now has the right idea here - the cloud gaming IS the service and it connects to your existing games on steam and origin.

by _zgx0 4y ago

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.
  - nomel 4y ago
    I think you misunderstand Shadow. It’s just a cloud PC. Any games you buy are unrelated to Shadow. You can stop paying whenever you want, and the games are still yours. You just reinstall them when you start up you Shadow subscription again. This is what I do. If you buy a physical gaming PC at any point, you just install your games into it, rather than Shadow. And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time. And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      I know what Shadow PC is. But they now have an 'activation fee' that costs 1 month of use - $30 (currently waived but it will be imposed soon). That means if you just want to use it for 1 month (e.g. during a holiday) you will have to pay for 2 months. It applies every time you reactivate a paused account too! And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > It’s just a cloud PC With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.
  - nomel 4y ago
    The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows, and Steam/whatever popular store games. > manually logging in You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login. You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login. You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with. > there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions. I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.
      - nomel 4y ago
        > you want to play games with. Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.
impalallama 4y ago
A 300-400 dollar console isn’t that much of a barrier compared to a 60 AAA video game. This market of people willing to pay premium prices for enthusiast products but is unwilling to pay for the hardware to run them I don’t think exists.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  When I buy a console I usually wait until it’s had some price drops and then there’s really only a few games I want to play. And because I waited so long these too are at a steep discount. These days, that means there’s so much content with DLCs and the base game that it could take me over a year to finish a AAA title. If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    Now that I think about it, Stadia launched into an extremely favourable market where both GPUs and next-gen consoles were unobtainium and 'price drops' are a thing of legend, but they still couldn't make it work. Any other time without that advantage and they'd have failed even harder.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      They barely tried though. Did they expect to rival Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo in 2 years with their shitty reputation and without a AAA exclusive game? Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?
      - sofixa 4y ago
        > Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all? They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform. Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Do the kinds of people shelling out $60 for a game find the $500 console a big barrier?
- smelendez 4y ago
  I think so: People who played video games as kids, don't really have much time for them now, and don't really want to go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up, but occasionally get curious about a particular game. Maybe they don't even have an obvious place in the house for a console, if they only have wall-mounted smart TVs with nothing hooked up to them, or maybe they don't want to give their own young kids console games yet, which is hard to do with a PlayStation in the living room. It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?
  - threeseed 4y ago
    > go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up. They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      Not only are there only three consoles, I bet I could set up any of the three faster than setting up stadia.
    - delecti 4y ago
      Modern consoles take way longer to setup than they used to. Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches. I think you're giving consoles too much credit for ease of use.
      - threeseed 4y ago
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
This model has been tried many times in gaming, and has never succeeded
jayd16 4y ago
But who has good enough internet for this service and no console?
- brianbreslin 4y ago
  I bought it, heavily discounted, after having sold my ps4 and wanting something to play very infrequently. The service was spotty despite having gigabit fiber and mesh wifi in my house. As an infrequent gamer, I'm likely the worst possible customer archetype for google.
  - mesh 4y ago
    That was my experience. (I tried it for a free trial). Graphics were poor and input lag was abysmal (and made a lot of types of games unplayable).
    - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
      I never had much trouble with input lag or dropouts. Perhaps region-specific? I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't. Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-to-haunt-it-in-class-action-lawsuit/ https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  I have college friends on the east coast who all said it worked great for them. The they all commented that it was better on ethernet. The mesh Wi-Fi kits that everyone loves now add noticeable latency.
jjav 4y ago
> I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console. But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).
alasdair_ 4y ago
But you need a high quality internet connection instead.
mstipetic 4y ago
If I were to rent a game for say 10 dollars play it and be done with it that would make me jump on it. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense

3746648 4y ago

bitexploder 4y ago

Steam games I bought a decade ago are still in my library. Steam is trusty. Google is not.

echelon 4y ago
Nevermind Steam, nevermind Google, nevermind Apple. I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another. I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer. If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam. The whole walled garden "app store" system sucks.
- seabriez 4y ago
  Yeah, thats a HUGE downside to Apple, because they locked you into their AppStore you now suddenly have no rights to use the app on anything outside of an Apple device. That is very anti consumer and detrimental to everyone involved... except Apple.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    There is no requirement to use the App Store on a Mac. And yet those programs do not magically work on Windows or Linux because that's not how computers work. Developers have to specifically target and build their programs for the devices they wish to support. And many apps (in particular SaaS ones) allow you to buy one license and use their program on whatever device they support. App Store doesn't stop you.
    - 8note 4y ago
      If you get some windows app, it's possible that you will be able to run it on Linux. If I can get it to run, licensing shouldn't be another road block
      - 4y ago

_HMCB_ 4y ago

I’d be curious as to the elevator pitch presented to Google execs and why they bought into it. Wasn’t anyone thinking about the issues you brought up? Seems like fundamental issues. To think they spent millions and millions on this service only to close it down in short order. Typical Google but what other company does this repeatedly with 4-year precision.

heavyset_go 4y ago
I think some of Google's strategy is identifying new markets and potential rivals, and then throwing their resources at them until they dominate the market or buy/crush the competition. Building a sustainably profitable product is ancillary to that and not much of a factor initially.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect this was exactly it; Google saw a potential for something like this, wanted in on it, and when the whole market didn't pan out, abandoned it. Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitable in its own right.
  - ahartmetz 4y ago
    In his book "The Road Ahead", which was full of bad predictions by the way, Bill Gates wrote something about the competition between computers and TVs and about set-top boxes. The original Xbox makes sense in that context. It was a bottom-up project initially, but its approval probably had something to do with Bill Gates' set-top box ideas. Microsoft Bob was another related development (cf. the Xbox dashboard, computing appliance).
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Go back to the 90s or maybe early 2000s, and there was definitely this widespread vision of a media hub connected to the TV in the living room as the primary home entertainment device (or even more broadly home control). People weren't necessarily in broad agreement about the nature of such a device but it was certainly a more centralized view of the world than what ultimately has ended up playing out.

ttty 4y ago

Maybe reading real reviews from real users will help too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xsyr8x/i_am_really_sad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xsyr8x/i_am_really_...

lowbloodsugar 4y ago
r/nintendoswitch: 4.2m r/ps5: 2.6m r/steamdeck: 230k r/stadia: 119k What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Chasing casuals isn't a bad idea. Nintendo does it Pokémon and Animal crossing. Stadia relied on casuals who happen to have a stable fiber optic cable internet connection.
  - taeric 4y ago
    Neither Pokemon nor Animal Crossing strike me as casual. I think of Candy Crush and all the games like that. Not games with a story that start off with a tutorial.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      It's a spectrum, not a binary. They're way more casual than, say, Half-Life or GTA.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  I disagree with this use of metric completely. I game a lot, and I own multiple devices on your list above yet subscribe to 0 of the subreddits. People subscribe to the subreddits of _games_. You didn't even count /r/nintendo instead. If anything, I think the fact that these subreddits have so many people is actually a point against what you're arguing about the size of the casual market. I do agree with you on the larger point though, stadia had no product/market fit

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Agreed. Feeling of not owning games, being locked into a service, and dependent forever on connectivity, seemed a very bad idea and a bad deal. Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.

h0l0cube 4y ago

> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.

stingraycharles 4y ago
At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success. Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.
- x0x0 4y ago
  I think the point is that Google nailed search so well -- and the $ chased eyes -- that they never really had to learn to build products that aren't constructed in the face of early, overwhelming demand. All the hard work of listening to customers, listening to prospects, teaching them that they should want the thing you built or are going to build, accepting feedback, etc.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  > When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.

midislack 4y ago

Of course, there's also the inherent added lag.

haxorito 4y ago

100% agree with your opinion, the business model didn’t make any sense. Also as platform it wasn’t that grate either: lags, graphics quality and many more issues (not it’s not my internet). I’m glad they tried but suits failed the project.

mrich 4y ago

Shorel 4y ago

It makes sense for their intended use: Google wants googlers and high school students to not use Windows for any reason, and only use chromebooks. Stadia was a way for people with a chromebook to play Windows games.

yyyk 4y ago
That would make sense if Stadia was targeted at casuals (high school students probably can't afford AAA). However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.
- cma 4y ago
  Highschool students are a primary demographic for AAA.
- vermilingua 4y ago
  AAA games are targeted at casuals.
  - fellellor 4y ago
    Exactly but the barrier to entry is price. Most indie games targeted at non casual gamers will run on potato PCs.
  - discardable_dan 4y ago
    No, phone games are targeted at casuals. AAA games are targeted at people who have some 40-60 hours of spare time over the next three weeks to spend on video games. This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.
    - insightcheck 4y ago
      Casual is a nebulous term, but perhaps "widely accessible" is easier to evaluate. We can measure accessibility by games sold. By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2. So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up. You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers. [1] https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/ https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/

atoav 4y ago

I mean you are right, but on top of that I would not have trusted google to keep that service going. Generally I guess it is very unwise to trust any streaming service to keep going indefinitely, because there will always come a point where some old game is more work to support than it is worth. If we gave some gamer the funds to run the gaming equivalent of archive.org I might have more trust in the service. Earning money and archiving cultural goods for future generations are not easily compatible goals.

csydas 4y ago

I get what you're saying but I don't think it's about gamer focus so much as just gaming in general. I wrote this on another article comment but I don't think it's just about Google not understanding gamers, but gaming in general. - People who play games are fickle and distrustful (and rightfully so, cause gaming in general has a sordid history of screwing the player-base repeatedly). Google didn't understand this and seem to have understood it as "built it and they will come", ignoring the handful of failed consoles that claimed to revolutionize gaming - People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly). Google didn't understand this and thought it would be enough to just put platform out there and everyone would switch over - Developers understand the resource allocation for making a game pretty well, and they constantly are missing deadlines and/or releasing half-baked games. Google didn't understand this and just released a platform that was costly to port to and might as well have been another console - The games that were the showcase of Stadia were not games you want to just pick up and play on the go, they're something you sit down and put a few hours into. Google didn't understand this and apparently just thought "well, AAA game X is popular, let's get that on our platform" - Google already _has_ a platform for gaming called Android, and they didn't seem to understand what makes it work and what doesn't, or how to use that as a base for their idea, and instead tried to make a whole new platform - Stadia was a new gaming platform no matter how you slice it, but Google seemed to have the idea that Stadia was just something everyone would love and convert to immediately no matter how complex it was to put games on it. Developers even as late as 2022 still had trouble porting games to Stadia and if it's hard to port, naturally they're not going to develop something specifically for it The list can go on, but really Google just didn't understand what they were trying to do. The tech was pretty neat, but they didn't understand that what they were offering simply wasn't the way people wanted to play games or develop games for. Combine this with the fact that _everyone_ (devs and players alike) knew that it had a limited window to be successful before Google shut it down due to lack of $$$, and not having a strong showing from day 1 was not even a nail in the coffin, it was shoveling dirt atop the platform the moment it arrived. Google was never poised to disrupt gaming in my opinion -- what they were poised to do was to provide the datacenter and audience for developers to create their own vision of what Stadia should have been, but Google tried to make a video game platform, and instead made another entry in the "Failed Video Game console/platforms" lists that will be content for Youtube in the future.

password54321 4y ago

It’s not just the default prices but the sales which are quite competitive on both steam and the ps store.

mmcnl 4y ago

I think the reason is even simpler: lack of games and exclusives.

muststopmyths 4y ago

Gamasutra/gdmag has an article from the industry perspective. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stadia-was-not-inevitable https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stad...

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> 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. That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme. I agree with the article. Stadia was an interesting offer. The revolving free games coming with the pro subscription was a good deal and the idea of being able to keep playing games at their rendering best without having to fuss and constantly upgrade a PC - by far the worst platform to game for occasional players like me - sounded great. Stadia issue was for most it wasn’t offering what it claimed to offer. Games didn’t look that good on the free tier for exemple and as pointed no one trusts Google so I didn’t want to invest more than the strict minimum. Apparently I have played Cyberpunk for free so that’s nice.

HelloNurse 4y ago
> That’s where the market is moving towards however. That's where certain rent-seeking companies would like the market to move towards. But the market always has two sides.
noirbot 4y ago
I'm not sure that's exactly the right read in a way that is important here. Sure, if you buy a game on Steam or EGS, you're still kinda just "renting" it since if they go away, you can't play the game because of DRM. That said, I have a lot more faith that Valve will be able to keep offering Steam, since it's so lightweight, relative to the clear amount of cost inherent in running Stadia. It's a lot harder to build a walled garden from scratch as a late-comer, and even harder when you're building it in a swamp where people are less confident about moving in.

ghaff 4y ago

The "average" gamer/consumer doesn't want to fuss with any special gamer hardware or upgrading PCs. They may not even know what a GPU is. And they probably accept that there are lots of things that they can't do with bad internet most of which they care about a lot more than games. The idea of Stadia made a lot of sense to me when I first heard of it. I guess the implementation wasn't very good though.

Waterluvian 4y ago
In fact, that’s such the case that the average gamer just uses a tablet or phone.
- ghaff 4y ago
  They tend to be playable offline, but yes. The average player has zero interest in having a gaming PC. Of course, the average consumer has also never heard of Stadia. I've barely heard of it and I was at the Google Cloud event where they either launched it or gave it a lot of air time.

wafriedemann 4y ago

>You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. Like any other console.

taauji 4y ago

how stadia stood our for me was that i did not have to pay a subscription to play my game anywhere. once i bought the game i could take it anywhere and play it for free. with nvidia it was ~10$/month after purchasing the game

moomin 4y ago

Honestly you’re right there’s gaming specific reasons for the failure, but that itself is symptomatic of Google’s entry and exit of many markets: never really bothering to figure out what the market actually wanted and just hoping that high quality engineering will solve that. Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)

animitronix 4y ago

Agreed, it was a dumb idea from the get

DannyBee 4y ago

"I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused." They are - Google is still the most trusted brand in any studies you can find (and if you find one where it's not, it's probably #2) It is going down rather than climbing right now, but that's also not that uncommon - Apple/etc is also seeing the same thing. Now, among tech, and maybe even gamers, i would bet this is less true, and that is highly problematic to the degree it needs to sell to tech/people who listen to tech. But the latter also often consistently overestimates how much influence it has (IE tech people often believe that the whisper effect they have makes a difference, and that is only true in certain cases over a long period of time). In most cases, social influencers in completely unrelated fields can generate more tech product sales than happy/angry tech people :) Put another way - the simplistic notion that Stadia, or anything from Google, failed simply due to lack of tech trust is silly. While it's a fun headline that plays to their audience, things are rarely that simple

Nokinside 4y ago
You are taking about general trust into brand. That's not what the trust means in this context. We are talking about trust for Google to launch a new product or service. It's not worth to users nor businesses to direct any money or effort into anything new Google makes because it's not for long. Google simply can't be trusted to do that. Partial list of products estalishing this trend: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Google Schemer, Google Spaces, Google Checkout, Google Directory, Google Sync, Google Hangouts, iGoogle, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Moderator, .... Complete list is over 200 items long.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  Exactly this. Would I trust a new google offering by putting a bunch of my money, time, dependences into it? Hell no. The history is too strong that this offering will likely only be around for a short time and then be unceremoniously shut down and leave you hanging. Ironically, the fact they they keep doing this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
- DannyBee 4y ago

josefresco 4y ago

> You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. sigh As a gamer and actual Stadia user this is not a complete or fair depiction. Like almost every other cloud/gaming service including Xbox etc. Stadia had a "Pro" subscription model which have you access to dozens (hundreds?) of games. Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!

fxtentacle 4y ago
Geforce now allows you to link an Epic account and play all the games you previously purchased.
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  Definitely not all. GFN is by far the most reliable and "native feeling" of these, but not just giving you a generic Windows install with some persistence is what makes it not worth it for me. I guess it's not trivial to get such "floating" windows licenses and prevent people from mining with a mouse jiggler? Though I did subscribe to the 3080 tier for a month when my gaming machine was out of comission.
Asooka 4y ago
> Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service! In theory, yes. In practise, if Steam shuts down tomorrow, I still have all my games on my hard disk and cracking Steam's DRM is pretty easy, and quite possibly completely legal in the circumstance.

throwastream4 4y ago

Streaming works for movies and TV, it will work for games. It was a shitty platform to develop for, end of story. I’m the games industry, there are 100 more failures that look like that. Specifically Vulkan is bad, and Linux is worse. The solution is obvious and done by the extant and thriving streaming services.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>Streaming works for movies and TV, it will work for games. Latency isn't an issue for movies or TV. Streaming will never work for games in the same way playing a game locally does.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Streaming RTS games is virtually indistinguishable from playing locally, except for lack of fan noise and constant need of needing to patch. There are tons of games that stream well, just not twitchy games.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    Agree completely that streaming single-player games is not an issue. The issue is that many of the most popular games in the world are FPS or real time twitchy games where latency is a huge issue. The #1 and #2 games in the world by peak player times are PubG and Crossfire. League of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, Overwatch, are all hugely popular games with hundreds of millions if not billions of players. There may be a niche for streaming games to those who enjoy single-player games, but that wasn't what Stadia was trying to be. They were trying to become the goto gaming platform for all games. Unless and until they figure out some sort of FTL communication, that is never going to be feasible as a universal platform.

mitchdoogle 4y ago

I think there needs to be a distinction between stadia the monthly service that lets you play new games each month and stadia the platform that allows you to buy and play games from any device. The platform is amazing and I wish Google would find a way to keep it around. The service is a different thing and like you said, doesn't make a lot of sense. Too few games and someone who wants to play games all the time anyway probably has. Setup they like already and lots of games for it to boot. I bought RDR2 for stadia in 2020 and played it everywhere - my phone, laptop, desktop. I played through the whole game and never once had any technical issues. That ability is what gives cloud gaming a real value beyond PC gaming or console gaming. You tell someone without a high spec gaming PC and no PS5 that they can play a new AAA game without buying anything new, then I think lots of people will love that. The article mentions you can't use your own controller, which is flat wrong. I used a Microsoft Xbox controller for both computer and android when I played. For someone who only plays games for 10-20 hours a month or so, it's great to not have to worry about buying new equipment. However, after the introductory free month of the service I gave it up. Only a few games, and the ones I liked were so short and simple that I was done with them after a week or so. GeForce now has the right idea here - the cloud gaming IS the service and it connects to your existing games on steam and origin.