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Anyone who pays out of their own pocket to launch anything on a newly introduced google product moving forward is an idiot. Google is going to need to dig deep

Anyone who pays out of their own pocket to launch anything on a newly introduced google product moving forward is an idiot. Google is going to need to dig deep into their wallets to build an ecosystem in any new market in the future. Then again, Stadia is too early and costing them too much money. More people need fiber internet before it’s practical. Good thing Google killed their fiber internet rollout years ago…

bobthepanda 4y ago
The business model made no sense. You don't get a big library of games for free to stream, and you don't get to use existing licenses of games you already own, now you have to double dip the full price of a game to play it on Stadia.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Yep. It's like if Netflix made you buy all of their movies and TV shows.
  - ccouzens 4y ago
    Google and iTunes allow you to "buy" films and TV. I don't think they're as successful as Netflix, but they're not unsuccessful.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      A song is $.99 or $1.29, a game is easily $40-60. I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia.
      - ccouzens 4y ago
        I meant movies not songs. Eg https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-martian/id1039586890 https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-martian/id1039586890 Which is the same price as some games Eg https://stadia.google.com/game/human-fall-flat-stadia-edition https://stadia.google.com/game/human-fall-flat-stadia-editio... That's the game I brought when I dipped my toe in to try it out (although I remember it being cheaper than that). > I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia. I have no idea, but it's notable that movies don't need porting to a platform, but each game will need at least a little work.
        bobthepanda 4y ago
        I think I’ve seen a number thrown around where Google doesn’t like businesses making less than a billion in revenue. According to this, 2021 electronic sales of movies totaled $737M. https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1644476313 https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
    - skykooler 4y ago
      Amazon Prime does that as well.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Yes, iTunes introduced buying films and TV in 2003 when the state of the art was an iPod. Very few people still do it and Apple is all in on streaming and has many affordances to seamlessly support first and third party streaming services through various APIs like supporting TV Anywhere globally, supporting third party apps in the Tv app, etc.
    - acdha 4y ago
      The difference is that you aren’t paying a monthly fee, have much greater selection, can download the file to play later (without the Netflix problem of content disappearing due to whatever contract terms are secretly in place), and using Movies Anywhere your purchases are synced to other stores. There’s still a lot of room for improvement there but it seems like you need to pick one model or another, not both. This is not a very good fit for games, however: everyone sells and watches the same movie and almost nobody watches the same ones for anywhere near as long as gamers play them.
- x0x0 4y ago
  It made sense for me -- I own no gaming devices, and my only computers are macbook pros with shoddy graphic cards. There are occasionally games I'd love to play, but I don't want to pay $500+ (ps-latest, xbox X) or $2.5k (computer with $1k graphics card). Unfortunately, this outcome was easily predicable to anyone who follows google.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    Fortunately the companies that understand gaming have similar-but-better solutions that are still perfectly viable. Assassins Creed games on xcloud have been a delight.
krzyk 4y ago
Fiber is not needed. 50mbps is enough for 1080, 60fps. You just need lowish latency, so no radio, no wifi. Worked fine for me on GFN, Paperspace and Shadow.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  No wifi damns the premise completely, wifi is so ubiquitous that it has become synonymous with internet access itself. Cafes and hotels advertise having "wifi", not "internet access". College libraries label ethernet cables as "wifi cables" so that young students understand their purpose. The average laptop on the market doesn't have an ethernet port, nor do any of the low power tablets/phones on which Stadia might otherwise make sense.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I mean, the whole thing clearly didn't work out, but not having a built-in ethernet port is easily solved with a $10 adapter.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Most people would have to buy the cable too, and either run it through their walls, under doors, or restrict their play to whatever room their router is in.
      - pdimitar 4y ago
        Normal users are not that helpless so as to give up when faced with this problem. I maintain contact with several non-tech people. When they realized that e.g. Valorant will work better with a cable they very quickly deciphered the USB-to-Ethernet adapters market and asked a father or a friend to run their cable properly. Took each of them 2-3 days and they're much happier casual gamers now. Where there is a need, a way is found. When the need arises, people learn. Seen it happen several times.
lnanek2 4y ago
I bought the founder's edition Stadia hardware and I'm thrilled with what I got out of it, personally. I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds. Played several AAA games I had no access to otherwise. Still going to have the, now free, Chromecast Ultra 4k with ethernet cable power adapter afterward too. It works fine even if I don't pair Stadia controllers with it. This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.
- wbobeirne 4y ago
  Their efforts should also allow you to transition to GeForce Now or other cloud gaming providers, so it's definitely not worthless.
- BakeInBeens 4y ago
  I'll echo your sentiment. I got to game free for nearly three years and I get to keep any hardware I purchased to do so. I personally grew tired of Stadia due to the lack of public support and negative sentiment any time it was brought up so I'm happy to be getting my money back (especially seeing as some games are providing second licenses on top of refunds) which can go towards a GPU while being given time to finish any games in the coming months.
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  > they are giving everyone refunds Not the developers who poured millions into porting games.
  - danhor 4y ago
    Few developers ported to Stadia out of good will, Google paid very handsomely up front.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      Yeah, this. My previous company got paid a lot of money to bring our titles to Stadia. And it wasn't worth it, as Google kept changing APIs and interfaces. And then nobody played the game. It didn't happen again, and basically everyone in this industry has been using Stadia as a punchline for years.
dmix 4y ago
Stadia is not too early? Cloud gaming is getting mature now. I’ve heard people say there is lag but apparently the platforms have optimized them heavily in recent years and I’ve personally never experienced any problems after hundreds of hours on both Xbox cloud and Paperspace, with maxed out graphics. 100-250mbps connection is probably more than enough. And those connections are becoming the standard in the western world.
- monlockandkey 4y ago
  You only need 25mbps? Why does everyone think you need gigabit. It is not the size of the pipe, rather the latency to the nearest datacenter.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    One of the things hiding behind the gigabit recommendation is that there are lots of terrible ISP decisions that might have been made upstream of you, but that symmetric gigabit providers haven’t made by and large. It’s not actually that you need gigabit, but rather that you need an ISP good enough to offer it. Back in the day, FiOS offering gigabit at your address was a handy shorthand for being on a more modern ONT, not using DSL to deliver it to your apartment over crappy copper, etc.
monlockandkey 4y ago
I played Stadia over 20mbps Wifi. It was flawless. I finished Tomb raider 1&2 and Metro exodus. Completely forgot I was streaming a game to my laptop after the first 5 minutes. Google killed fiber rollout because they were forced out by other ISPs... Issue with Stadia was Linux. Linux choked the entire platform. You had to get developers to port their game. If they used Windows they would have a solid platform with thousands of games. Instead they are at the mercy of "bribing" devs to port their game to Stadia.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  If Linux was the issue, how do you explain the steam deck’s library of games? This is really simple: people no longer trust Google.
  - monlockandkey 4y ago
    Proton is the explanation to the steam deck library. Stadia came out 2019 and probably has been in development for a few years prior. Proton is relatively a recent thing. The issue is in a low latency environment, translating directx to vulkan may have overhead.
    - SXX 4y ago
      Proton is just pre-built Wine with Valve patches. Wine existed for years and DXVK wasn't Valves' own project. They just sponsored some open source project and driver improvements and integrated it into Steam. I seriously doubt that if you count every single developer that Valve hired to work on it as well as sponsored 3rd-party developers there likely gonna be 25-30 people or less. I pretty sure that more people worked on Stadia within Google than all people working in Valve on all of their projects.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Valve put a whole lot of work over several years into making that possible (including the failed Steam Machines).
  - 4y ago
dmitriid 4y ago
It's not too early. They just had exactly zero proposition and understanding of the market. It was early when OnLive started the whole thing. Now? It's already a market. One that Google doesn't understand.
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
I played OnLive like what, 10+ years ago on a trash AT&T DSL connection and it was a great experience. Stadia was not too early. Google is just stupid.
- cafed00d 4y ago
  Yup, I played the entire "Last of Us" campaign on Sony's PS Now service in 2015 on cheap Comcast internet on my 2014 MacBook Pro. Display was great and the streaming quality was great! Don't remember if it was 4k; very very unlikely. Perhaps it was 1080p or 720p. Anyways great experience! Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! It was just too much work to end up paying full price for games I already owned! Such a bad bad product. The most greatest of technology/engineering! And yet, such a waste! Google really has fallen in my eyes. As a software engineer, I would be so scared to go there to work on something new.
  - ansible 4y ago
    > Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! As I understand it, the Stadia controller can be used like a wired USB game controller on a PC.
    - cafed00d 4y ago
      Yup, I did use it like that. You found a flaw: I shouldn’t have said “never”. I actually did try it for maybe like 5mins and got felt meh about it. It’s a nice enough controller tbh. It’s just so inconvenient compared to my wireless dualsense controller. Or any other controller: Xbox, dualshock4, steam, backbone controller connected to an iPhone etc. The stadia controller is really nice in the sense that it has Google assistant built in yadda yadda. Imagine if they made that configurable to control Cortana on windows. Or some form or voice control on windows. It would make using my living room PC that much easier.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bobthepanda 4y ago

The business model made no sense. You don't get a big library of games for free to stream, and you don't get to use existing licenses of games you already own, now you have to double dip the full price of a game to play it on Stadia.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Yep. It's like if Netflix made you buy all of their movies and TV shows.
- ccouzens 4y ago
  Google and iTunes allow you to "buy" films and TV. I don't think they're as successful as Netflix, but they're not unsuccessful.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    A song is $.99 or $1.29, a game is easily $40-60. I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia.
    - ccouzens 4y ago
      I meant movies not songs. Eg https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-martian/id1039586890 https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-martian/id1039586890 Which is the same price as some games Eg https://stadia.google.com/game/human-fall-flat-stadia-edition https://stadia.google.com/game/human-fall-flat-stadia-editio... That's the game I brought when I dipped my toe in to try it out (although I remember it being cheaper than that). > I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia. I have no idea, but it's notable that movies don't need porting to a platform, but each game will need at least a little work.
      - bobthepanda 4y ago
        I think I’ve seen a number thrown around where Google doesn’t like businesses making less than a billion in revenue. According to this, 2021 electronic sales of movies totaled $737M. https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1644476313 https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
  - skykooler 4y ago
    Amazon Prime does that as well.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Yes, iTunes introduced buying films and TV in 2003 when the state of the art was an iPod. Very few people still do it and Apple is all in on streaming and has many affordances to seamlessly support first and third party streaming services through various APIs like supporting TV Anywhere globally, supporting third party apps in the Tv app, etc.
  - acdha 4y ago
    The difference is that you aren’t paying a monthly fee, have much greater selection, can download the file to play later (without the Netflix problem of content disappearing due to whatever contract terms are secretly in place), and using Movies Anywhere your purchases are synced to other stores. There’s still a lot of room for improvement there but it seems like you need to pick one model or another, not both. This is not a very good fit for games, however: everyone sells and watches the same movie and almost nobody watches the same ones for anywhere near as long as gamers play them.
x0x0 4y ago
It made sense for me -- I own no gaming devices, and my only computers are macbook pros with shoddy graphic cards. There are occasionally games I'd love to play, but I don't want to pay $500+ (ps-latest, xbox X) or $2.5k (computer with $1k graphics card). Unfortunately, this outcome was easily predicable to anyone who follows google.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Fortunately the companies that understand gaming have similar-but-better solutions that are still perfectly viable. Assassins Creed games on xcloud have been a delight.

krzyk 4y ago

Fiber is not needed. 50mbps is enough for 1080, 60fps. You just need lowish latency, so no radio, no wifi. Worked fine for me on GFN, Paperspace and Shadow.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MichaelCollins 4y ago
No wifi damns the premise completely, wifi is so ubiquitous that it has become synonymous with internet access itself. Cafes and hotels advertise having "wifi", not "internet access". College libraries label ethernet cables as "wifi cables" so that young students understand their purpose. The average laptop on the market doesn't have an ethernet port, nor do any of the low power tablets/phones on which Stadia might otherwise make sense.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I mean, the whole thing clearly didn't work out, but not having a built-in ethernet port is easily solved with a $10 adapter.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Most people would have to buy the cable too, and either run it through their walls, under doors, or restrict their play to whatever room their router is in.
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      Normal users are not that helpless so as to give up when faced with this problem. I maintain contact with several non-tech people. When they realized that e.g. Valorant will work better with a cable they very quickly deciphered the USB-to-Ethernet adapters market and asked a father or a friend to run their cable properly. Took each of them 2-3 days and they're much happier casual gamers now. Where there is a need, a way is found. When the need arises, people learn. Seen it happen several times.

lnanek2 4y ago

I bought the founder's edition Stadia hardware and I'm thrilled with what I got out of it, personally. I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds. Played several AAA games I had no access to otherwise. Still going to have the, now free, Chromecast Ultra 4k with ethernet cable power adapter afterward too. It works fine even if I don't pair Stadia controllers with it. This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.

wbobeirne 4y ago
Their efforts should also allow you to transition to GeForce Now or other cloud gaming providers, so it's definitely not worthless.
BakeInBeens 4y ago
I'll echo your sentiment. I got to game free for nearly three years and I get to keep any hardware I purchased to do so. I personally grew tired of Stadia due to the lack of public support and negative sentiment any time it was brought up so I'm happy to be getting my money back (especially seeing as some games are providing second licenses on top of refunds) which can go towards a GPU while being given time to finish any games in the coming months.
puffoflogic 4y ago
> they are giving everyone refunds Not the developers who poured millions into porting games.
- danhor 4y ago
  Few developers ported to Stadia out of good will, Google paid very handsomely up front.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Yeah, this. My previous company got paid a lot of money to bring our titles to Stadia. And it wasn't worth it, as Google kept changing APIs and interfaces. And then nobody played the game. It didn't happen again, and basically everyone in this industry has been using Stadia as a punchline for years.

dmix 4y ago

Stadia is not too early? Cloud gaming is getting mature now. I’ve heard people say there is lag but apparently the platforms have optimized them heavily in recent years and I’ve personally never experienced any problems after hundreds of hours on both Xbox cloud and Paperspace, with maxed out graphics. 100-250mbps connection is probably more than enough. And those connections are becoming the standard in the western world.

monlockandkey 4y ago
You only need 25mbps? Why does everyone think you need gigabit. It is not the size of the pipe, rather the latency to the nearest datacenter.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  One of the things hiding behind the gigabit recommendation is that there are lots of terrible ISP decisions that might have been made upstream of you, but that symmetric gigabit providers haven’t made by and large. It’s not actually that you need gigabit, but rather that you need an ISP good enough to offer it. Back in the day, FiOS offering gigabit at your address was a handy shorthand for being on a more modern ONT, not using DSL to deliver it to your apartment over crappy copper, etc.

monlockandkey 4y ago

I played Stadia over 20mbps Wifi. It was flawless. I finished Tomb raider 1&2 and Metro exodus. Completely forgot I was streaming a game to my laptop after the first 5 minutes. Google killed fiber rollout because they were forced out by other ISPs... Issue with Stadia was Linux. Linux choked the entire platform. You had to get developers to port their game. If they used Windows they would have a solid platform with thousands of games. Instead they are at the mercy of "bribing" devs to port their game to Stadia.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
If Linux was the issue, how do you explain the steam deck’s library of games? This is really simple: people no longer trust Google.
- monlockandkey 4y ago
  Proton is the explanation to the steam deck library. Stadia came out 2019 and probably has been in development for a few years prior. Proton is relatively a recent thing. The issue is in a low latency environment, translating directx to vulkan may have overhead.
  - SXX 4y ago
    Proton is just pre-built Wine with Valve patches. Wine existed for years and DXVK wasn't Valves' own project. They just sponsored some open source project and driver improvements and integrated it into Steam. I seriously doubt that if you count every single developer that Valve hired to work on it as well as sponsored 3rd-party developers there likely gonna be 25-30 people or less. I pretty sure that more people worked on Stadia within Google than all people working in Valve on all of their projects.
- lmm 4y ago
  Valve put a whole lot of work over several years into making that possible (including the failed Steam Machines).
- 4y ago

dmitriid 4y ago

It's not too early. They just had exactly zero proposition and understanding of the market. It was early when OnLive started the whole thing. Now? It's already a market. One that Google doesn't understand.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago

I played OnLive like what, 10+ years ago on a trash AT&T DSL connection and it was a great experience. Stadia was not too early. Google is just stupid.

cafed00d 4y ago
Yup, I played the entire "Last of Us" campaign on Sony's PS Now service in 2015 on cheap Comcast internet on my 2014 MacBook Pro. Display was great and the streaming quality was great! Don't remember if it was 4k; very very unlikely. Perhaps it was 1080p or 720p. Anyways great experience! Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! It was just too much work to end up paying full price for games I already owned! Such a bad bad product. The most greatest of technology/engineering! And yet, such a waste! Google really has fallen in my eyes. As a software engineer, I would be so scared to go there to work on something new.
- ansible 4y ago
  > Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! As I understand it, the Stadia controller can be used like a wired USB game controller on a PC.
  - cafed00d 4y ago
    Yup, I did use it like that. You found a flaw: I shouldn’t have said “never”. I actually did try it for maybe like 5mins and got felt meh about it. It’s a nice enough controller tbh. It’s just so inconvenient compared to my wireless dualsense controller. Or any other controller: Xbox, dualshock4, steam, backbone controller connected to an iPhone etc. The stadia controller is really nice in the sense that it has Google assistant built in yadda yadda. Imagine if they made that configurable to control Cortana on windows. Or some form or voice control on windows. It would make using my living room PC that much easier.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]