[HN Gopher] Google is shutting down Stadia
___________________________________________________________________
Google is shutting down Stadia
Author : vyrotek
Score : 1415 points
Date : 2022-09-29 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| lol, props to Google for refunding the costs of the hardware,
| games, and DLC, though.
|
| I might've actually bought one, except that I didn't want to be
| stranded with an outlay of hundreds of dollars for a bricked
| streaming device. If I'd known up front that they'd have refunded
| my costs (or even a percentage of them) if they shut down the
| service in some timeframe, I'd have totally bought one.
| pkulak wrote:
| I actually bought one of their controllers, and it's quite
| nice. I'm pumped it's free now. Works great on Linux.
| josefresco wrote:
| Same. If they told me "we'll refund you 100% if we shut down go
| nuts" I would have gone nuts as the service was solid. The
| funny thing is it would have helped their "uptake" numbers and
| might have stalled or prevented the shutdown!
| dleslie wrote:
| This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and
| Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that
| purchasers would have an opportunity to download their
| purchases.
|
| Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital
| things like trading cards and stickers, and before many games
| were heavily dependent on the continuation of online
| services.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well;
| and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down
| that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their
| purchases.
|
| I didn't realize this. I'm looking to build a pc in the
| coming months, and the fact that valve has a plan in place
| is comforting
| lmkg wrote:
| > Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral
| digital things
|
| But by that point they had established themselves. They
| earned trust before selling things that required that
| trust.
| goingAvalanche wrote:
| The thing is that nothing is bricked \o/
|
| I end up with a Chromecast and a gamepad that are both
| compatible outside of Stadia and played a few games, all of
| that for free.
| scottyah wrote:
| Same here. If they intended to use this buyback as a strategy
| so next round we're more comfortable buying into their project:
| it's working.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Exactly! Google doesn't get this. Google has a commitment image
| problem. As a consumer I've not seen them address this with the
| seriousness it deserves.
|
| Since they won't commit to their products, their customers are
| reluctant to commit as well.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not using any new Google products unless it's for a
| one off use.
|
| And I'm reconsidering the existing services I'm dependent on
| as well.
|
| GMail, for example. While I have no doubt GMail will continue
| to exist as long as email exists, Google's spam blocking (not
| just filtering...blocking, where the email doesn't even make
| it to the inbox), has become far too aggressive. And the
| frequent UI changes are becoming unsustainable.
|
| Also, the nagging suspicion that Google is having silent data
| loss issues across their products is not helping either.
| cheriot wrote:
| Google, where large engineering projects meet with half assed
| businesses.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Well, who won the pool?
| codyogden wrote:
| Great question! Two people actually guessed correctly (not
| posting their names for privacy), but the average date across
| for all users (October 6, 2022) was surprisingly close to the
| date they announced it would be shutting down.
|
| https://whenwillgooglekillstadia.com
| monkeydust wrote:
| Takeaway - next time you decide to buy a google product and have
| choice through their store or 3rd party retailer, best to go
| through their store!
| gw99 wrote:
| I think the best thing is wait 5 years and see if they are
| going to shitcan it or not...
| hotdamnson wrote:
| Google search when?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| If you are looking for an alternative, I'm currently using
| shadow.net for my games, and so far the ping is decent (I do have
| fiber though). Mind you, I'm into single player titles, I
| wouldn't advice trying out overwatch or lol on this.
|
| But for 30 euros a month, I got a machine with a full functional
| windows system and a good GPU from the tip of my laptop.
|
| Not perfect, but it does the job for me.
| julienreszka wrote:
| I think you meant shadow.tech
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Indeed :)
| radar1310 wrote:
| Shocking news, Google shuts down something.
| oumua_don17 wrote:
| Around 6 months back, I withdrew from the offer stage to join a
| Stadia team; dodged a bullet I guess.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| Just when Netflix & Amazon are increasing their focus on gaming
| market, Google is shying away. This is an epic failure on the
| Google management.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I remember in fall of 2018 some co-workers getting hyped about
| Stadia and I told them that given Google's track record, they
| will probably abandon it in 4 years.
|
| At some point, I think Google should stop launching products that
| are going to be dead within 5 years, why should anyone get
| excited about anything they do?
| tonymet wrote:
| this is especially bad news given the growth in games stremaing.
| nVidia, Amazon, sony, microsoft and even Logitech are all growing
| streaming products. It was Google's game to lose.
| drstewart wrote:
| Add it to the pile
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Well, that's kind of sad, if predictable. I worked with the team
| that built the controller firmware. They worked their asses off.
| And I personally worked on and finished up / optimized /
| productionized the the stream receiver component for Stadia that
| lives inside Chromecasts.
|
| Might be the last remaining piece of public facing code I worked
| on @ Google (assuming it wasn't rewritten after I left), and now
| it will be buh-bye.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Ge-Force now customer here, in my opinion, a better business
| model than Stadia.
| pfortuny wrote:
| People: remember IBM. It used to be completely indestructible,
| like a _given_ in any office...
| [deleted]
| sgtnasty wrote:
| I really liked Stadia, it worked well for me and played lots of
| AC and Destiny. Never had much of an issue and things worked
| well. Im bummed, but not surprised. No one seems to mention the
| real potential of cloud gaming: which is massive worlds and
| players on the same "server"; and I mean MASSIVE, the likes home
| PC's would never have enough power/graphics/memory/storage to
| handle.
| julienreszka wrote:
| Have you tried shadow.tech? What did you think about it?
| sgtnasty wrote:
| Never heard of it, I am currently subscribed to Statia Pro,
| GEFORCE Now RTX, and MS Xbox Ultimate. Because I am 100% into
| game streaming. Its the future. But GEFORCE Now is the best.
| I have high hopes for Xbox.
| activitypea wrote:
| How was Destiny PvP on Stadia?
| 0x457 wrote:
| So, Destiny PvP is segregated by input type: controllers
| against controllers and kb/m against kb/m by default.
|
| Destiny has different matchmaking types: Connection-Based
| Match Making and Skill-Based Match Making. Destiny also p2p
| network model.
|
| CBMM was always a breeze to play as long as you can "git
| gud". SBMM was often a nightmare because you get matched with
| players all over the globe.
|
| I played Destiny on nearly every streaming platform except
| for shadow, I can say that Stadia made SBMM more consistent
| because, well, p2p within google DC is much better than all
| around the country or globe. Win some lose some kind of
| situation here.
|
| I mean, yeah, it's nothing like playing on my PC with 144hz
| monitor, but it's very much playable.
| sgtnasty wrote:
| Lets just say I would only play Iron Banner, and do above
| average. Its NOT for competitors looking for 4k @ 144hz .
| tonymet wrote:
| this is especially bad news given the growth in games streaming.
| nVidia, Amazon, sony, microsoft and even Logitech are all growing
| streaming products. It was Google's game to lose.
| nafizh wrote:
| Sundar Pichai is like the anti-Satya_Nadella. Since taking over
| Google, the company has only gone downhill but they haven't
| realized this, heads will only roll once they get hit over their
| search and ad dominance, by that time it will be too late.
| dekhn wrote:
| Think of Sundar as being like a nicer version of Steve Ballmer.
| He only existed to help the company grow as fast as possible in
| terms of revenue and market share. It seems likely Ruth Porat
| will replace him soon and then Google's transition to evil will
| be finally complete.
| Laremere wrote:
| Random assorted thoughts as someone who worked at Google at the
| time of launch (but not on Stadia), and now works in the game
| industry proper: Props to the engineers, the technical base was
| there. It really just worked. You could load a AAA game on a
| Chromecast, and play it. Unfortunately, it didn't work perfectly:
| From some users it didn't work at all (bad when this was someone
| reviewing the platform), and for serious gamers the input lag was
| noticeable on games where it mattered.
|
| Others here are saying Stadia should've been the Netflix of
| gaming. Here's the thing though: Netflix isn't even the Netflix
| of Netflix anymore. The streaming industry is now split between
| the large content producers each having their own platform.
| Netflix survived this only by becoming a content producer
| themselves. Smart people at the major video game publishers have
| seen this trend, and to the extent streaming is going to be a
| thing, want to skip to running the platform themselves.
|
| The launch was a mess. They said it'd be available at a certain
| time, but that's when they started a slow roll out. This didn't
| meet gamer's expectations, where good launches just turn on a
| game. The lesson here is that if an engineering process (eg,
| Google's usual practice of slowly rolling it out to make sure it
| doesn't fall over right away) is going to drive the user
| experience, clearly communicate that.
|
| The suite of launch games appeared to check the boxes of a good
| launch lineup, but didn't actually. They had major AAA games on
| launch.... that were all out elsewhere for awhile. They had big
| games launching on the platform early on....except actually they
| were delayed leaving a drought of content. They had a good number
| of games to carry them through the first year... but no "platform
| sellers" which would on their own get users to try out the
| platform.
|
| The target audience was misdirected. It feels like they tried to
| get the core gamer crowd, which are those who would be the
| harshest critics and have the least benefit (they have their own
| systems already).
|
| Their commercials were a bit much, and failed to explain what the
| platform actually was:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Wy_pWscsk
|
| The landing page, on boarding process, and value proposition
| where an absolute mess. You could outright buy a game and play
| it, but they didn't really tell you that. They had a Netflix like
| subscription where you got games, but it was a weird system where
| games would rotate onto the subscription but you could keep them
| as long as you were subscribed. The on boarding process also
| immediately tried to get you to sign up to the trial for this
| service, which fed the impression that this service was required.
| The subscription also increased the resolution of the games you
| were playing, but only sometimes and there was no way to know
| what resolution games were actually being rendered at.
|
| Phil Harrison has now overseen the launch of the Playstation 3,
| Xbox One, and Stadia. He should be unemployable as an executive,
| and be weary of anyone who does employ him.
|
| Stadia hilariously lacked a search feature for nearly 2 years.
| From Google, you know, the search company.
|
| From my time at Google, I saw many people who understood the
| business of video games. Lots of great insight there. However, I
| only saw one person (there were likely others I didn't interact
| with) who understood video games themselves, as a form of art and
| entertainment. They were on that development team that Google
| canned, as the first sign that Google was giving up on Stadia.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| cool, so I get a free USB controller and a chromecast?
|
| should've ordered a couple more when they were 20 euro or
| whatever in that case...
| vincnetas wrote:
| If they refunding then it does not matter what was original
| price.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| ah yeah I know I'm just being stupid. I wouldn't have
| remotely considered getting them at full price though; I did
| consider getting a second at 20 just to give my mother a
| chromecast and my brother a gamepad at the time though but 20
| somehow still seemed too much.
|
| actually, considering how much I use both I'll just give them
| the ones I have now...
| politician wrote:
| So, having read 100s of comments in this thread and understanding
| the sentiment about Google's track record, I find myself
| wondering whether and why I might hire Google employees for
| software development jobs. It's a strange question, right? It's
| not their fault that these products fail and are shut down, but
| on the other hand, ex-Googlers are more likely than average to be
| from teams that failed and were shut down. I find it a bit of a
| stretch to believe that management is 100% at fault for 100% of
| the products in the Google Graveyard.
| ohashi wrote:
| It seems like a self fulfilling prophecy for Google products.
| They have a reputation for killing them off, so users don't want
| to invest and get committed to them. Then the products don't
| match their expectations and get killed. It just further fuels
| the cycle.
|
| At some point I wish Google would take a stand and believe in
| some products. If they said we have a 10 year commitment to
| making Stadia a success and will not close it before that, no
| matter the cost. I might be willing to consider giving it a try.
| I don't want to buy into something that's going to just get shut
| down, especially when there are high costs involved.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Absolutely devastated about this.
|
| I love Stadia. I bought it for a friend last Christmas and we
| have been using it this year to play games together, she has a
| Macbook which cannot play a lot of PC games and the Stadia model
| works a lot better for us.
|
| Despite the lack of AAA titles, it had everything we wanted to
| play, we just started playing overcooked on it. Now I do not know
| what we will do.
|
| Geforce now will require a subscription + the game and I believe
| this doesn't work anywhere near as well on her connection.
|
| We've also been doing playthroughs of Life is strange together,
| due to the new feature where they let you watch another player
| play.
|
| Stadia was absolutely perfect, Google absolutely messed this up
| and i've got a bunch of games i won't get too lined up.
|
| It was fun while it lasted.
| p1necone wrote:
| Looks like Overcooked 2 (but not the first one) runs on Mac -
| buy it on Steam and then you can use GeForce Now or the Macbook
| depending on what's more convenient.
| dafelst wrote:
| Though it does need a subscription, Xbox Game Pass plus their
| cloud gaming works very well, plus gives you a huge library of
| games to choose from.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Game Pass is horrible. It has to be the worst service I've
| ever used.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| i'm going to look into it, but I'm not sure my friends
| connection holds out very well somtimes, geforce now didn't
| work too well (although this was about 2 years ago), but
| Stadia was perfect.
|
| Plus it's a bit expensive, particularly when you are not an
| xbox user, 2x subscriptions could be pricey when all we want
| to do is play a handful of games. Might even work out cheaper
| to buy a Switch or something in the long term.
| Reason077 wrote:
| This is a bit sad.
|
| Stadia was pretty cool while it lasted. I was a Stadia subscriber
| for a while. Great technology, but (mostly) crappy games. The
| store was also pretty lame with just a huge list of (mainly
| B-list) titles, and no indication of whether something was good
| or not.
|
| With a better game library and a better store, Stadia could be a
| winner. Shame they didn't just partner with Steam!
| spatulon wrote:
| A lot of AAA games presumably got ported to Linux so that they
| would run on Stadia. Were those efforts funded by Google? I
| wonder if we saw more proper Linux game client releases as a
| result, and whether we'll see fewer Linux ports in the future.
| outworlder wrote:
| That was the best thing about Stadia. Cyberpunk ran on Linux on
| day one, probably because of that.
|
| Don't forget Valve though. They don't have as much power as
| Google, but they have done way more. The Steam Deck (as long as
| it lives) will help.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Were those efforts funded by Google?
|
| Yes[1]. One clue (among hundreds of others) that Stadia was
| already dead months ago was when the ports dried up, indicating
| that the project had lost internal funding.
|
| [1] https://gamerant.com/google-spent-millions-stadia-ports/
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Remember like three weeks ago when some news about this came out
| and they were like no we promise we are not shutting it down?
|
| Glad they are doing refunds though.
| jedberg wrote:
| Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is
| finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways.
|
| Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get
| shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.
| coldpie wrote:
| I remember every single article when they first announced
| contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would
| shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was
| doomed from the start.
| serial_dev wrote:
| On the other hand, I also remember all the hype that it
| received (though maybe I live in a tech-obsessed bubble).
| "OMG, it will change everything you know about gaming". All
| my colleagues were so convinced that it was a technical
| breakthrough (maybe it was, I dunno), and that everyone will
| be playing with it because it is simply so amazing and
| revolutionary.
|
| My opinion was "yeah, cool, but I just don't see it". It was
| very annoying when these coworkers judged me, thinking I am
| simply too stupid to realize how amazing this is...
| Animats wrote:
| Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google
| product that isn't ad-supported dies, with very few
| exceptions.
|
| Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. "Google Cloud is
| now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but
| Google's ad business is likely to subsidize it for the
| foreseeable future."[1] AWS makes money in that business, but
| Google does not.
|
| So, don't depend on Google Cloud for anything critical. Only
| a few months ago, Google was saying they were not going to
| shut down Stadia. So, any PR statement about Cloud not
| shutting down can't be believed. Stadia, after all, was a
| cloud service.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I wouldn't touch GCP even with a 3 meter stick. And using
| it in any project is just out of the question. No.
| ignoramous wrote:
| I think folks can finally accurately model what Google is
| going to kill... GCP surely wouldn't be on that list? ;)
|
| > _You can pretty accurately model what they will and won
| 't do with this one unusual insight that they're a
| business... But "It's a Google product" is a weak signal
| about whether it's going to get killed, and there are many
| stronger signals. Let me know when they kill Ads and
| Cloud._
|
| -u/geofft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30353025
| sofixa wrote:
| Of course GCP is losing money, have you seen their rate of
| investment in new datacenters and services? That shit is
| extremely expensive. AWS was losing money for many years
| too, they're at entirely different places.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you
| want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but
| you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all
| that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it
| out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will
| just kill it in years time.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Amazon publicly stated that they ran their _own_ business
| on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might
| have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out.
| The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale
| business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.
|
| Google is starting with a handicap, in that they have a
| very strong reputation for killing products that don't
| meet unknown high standard of performance/revenue. I
| mean, the term "Google Graveyard" is popular, although I
| prefer Killed By Google[0]. To counter that handicap for
| GCP, they need something that stands out as much as
| Amazon's initial claim, and I haven't seen it. It seems
| clear that Google isn't running their own infrastructure
| on GCP. If anything, the hope seems to be that they've
| spent _so much_ money on GCP, _surely_ they wouldn 't
| shut it down after all of that?
|
| But of course, the bright sparks at Google are aware of
| the Sunk Cost Fallacy as well as anyone else, so... yeah.
| I have trouble trusting it.
|
| 0. https://killedbygoogle.com
| jlarocco wrote:
| > Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business
| on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might
| have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out.
| The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale
| business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.
|
| I think even more important than the scalability, it
| implies AWS isn't going away as long as Amazon is in
| business.
| eknkc wrote:
| I deployed stuff on GCP but we moved to AWS after
| stability issues and horrendous support experience on
| GCP.
|
| And that was easy because we did not commit to any GCP
| exclusive services (because they tend to shut down all
| thr time). On AWS we prefer using things like DynamoDB
| and that further locks us into AWS.
|
| GCP is a joke.
| cpsns wrote:
| I mean if I had to bet development time and a
| product/service that has to run for years I wouldn't bet
| it on GCP, precisely because of Google's reputation.
|
| I'm confident AWS will exist in a decade, I'm not
| confident GCP will. I would never recommend a dependency
| on a Google service, especially not one that matters
| where there's potentially millions of dollars on the
| line.
| singron wrote:
| Cloud has had over 135-153% YoY revenue growth every
| quarter since they started reporting Cloud revenue 11
| quarters ago. It's amazingly consistent high growth.
|
| TAC (traffic acquisition costs) have exploded over this
| time frame. If you subtract TAC from Services revenue, the
| growth is merely good. Cloud revenue also seems a lot less
| sensitive to the recent economic downtown so far, but we'll
| really know after Q3.
|
| The operating losses for Cloud are also shrinking quickly.
| Building data centers should be capex, but I'm guessing
| they count R&D as opex, which makes the losses higher now
| even though it will pay off later like an investment. They
| could probably start to have operating income any time in
| the next 3 years.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It was always strange that Google would decide to dabble in
| the brutally expensive and competitive games market, of all
| things.
| apozem wrote:
| "Brutally expensive and competitive" is right. Look at what
| Microsoft had to do after losing the Xbox One / PS4
| generation. They've spent almost a decade building out a
| radically new subscription service. That's before the $100+
| billion they've dropped on studios for content to fill out
| said service.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if
| it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down,
| we'll refund all your purchases"
| pavon wrote:
| Or at least use a business model that didn't require your
| customers to put complete trust in the fact that you wouldn't
| shutdown, when you have a reputation for killing projects.
|
| I'm not a hardcore gamer and have a pretty weak desktop by
| gaming standards. If this was setup like an all-you-can-eat
| subscription, or an al-carte rental, I would have jumped on
| it in a heartbeat, and if it went away, oh well, I got what I
| paid for.
|
| But the fact that that you had to "purchase" individual games
| made it a complete non-starter for me. If I purchase
| something, I want to actually own it, forever, not have
| temporary access to it at the whim of the publisher/service.
| I don't trust any online service to stay active indefinitely,
| and Google doubly so.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| what's also important here is that people are very invested
| in the ownership of their games, probably more so than they
| are of their films/their music. 'your games' are
| intrinsically tied to your saves in those games; your
| characters, your items, all the bullshit grinding you did
| once and _never_ want to have to do ever again. in a very
| real sense, "You" are in your games in a way that isn't
| true of movies or music or the other formats of media that
| have been relinquished to the cloud.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Yeah actually, same here. When Stadia launched I really liked
| it. The subscription was free for like 3 months. I've not
| owned a gaming PC in years, but really enjoyed playing
| Serious Sam and almost completed it. When the free period
| ended I could've purchased few of the games I most liked but
| ultimately decided against it because I knew by that time it
| was inevitably going to be shut down so giving Google any
| money was a fool's errand.
| matrix_overload wrote:
| That could have put them to unlimited risk. Let's assume they
| _currently_ got $1M in revenue and spent $500K on
| maintenance. They can either refund everyone (buying goodwill
| for $500K) or book a $500K profit and piss people off.
| Currently, the estimated value of the goodwill is above
| $500K, so they are proceeding with a refund.
|
| But it could have been different. They could have got $10M in
| revenue, then most users would have moved to competing
| platforms, while still playing previously purchased games on
| Stadia. This could have left them with a choice between
| $1M/year running costs to keep the lights on vs. $10M to
| purchase goodwill that is only worth $1M.
| permo-w wrote:
| can you imagine marketing or finance allowing a statement
| like that through?
| paxys wrote:
| I would 100% have signed up and bought games if I was assured
| that I'd get my money back if the service was shut down in
| under, say, 3 years.
| dmoy wrote:
| That's kinda why I keep buying on steam, because they (at
| least ostensibly) will un-DRM games for download if they
| ever shut down
| mey wrote:
| My steam account is 18 years old. I can still easily
| download Braid, a game released in 2009, and I apparently
| played in 2014, install it on my Steam Deck and be
| playing it again in ten minutes. Considering it has cloud
| save support, there is a not small chance that my saves
| may even be intact.
|
| It's that endurance in the platform that has me coming
| back. I have faith that Valve as a company is in it for
| the long haul to act as a game store platform and honor
| my digital purchases. It's allowed me to put several
| thousand dollars into them.
| dham wrote:
| It's really the endurance of Windows more than anything.
| I can play stuff on Windows 11 mostly the same as I did
| on Windows XP. I can't play any game from Steam on Mac
| more than a few years old.
| imran0 wrote:
| It's fascinating that I can just click and run a game
| compiled in 1996 (WINQUAKE) in Windows 11; but my ubuntu
| installation breaks after not touching it for two months.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Proton offers some of this effect also: Wine/Proton is
| pretty good at playing lots of old Windows stuff, in some
| cases better than actual Windows is.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| You have no idea who Steam's CEO would be in a scenario
| where they were shutting down, so you certainly have no
| idea whether that CEO would un-DRM anything.
| DRW_ wrote:
| They can really only remove the DRM on games that use
| Steam's own DRM, there are plenty of games on Steam that
| use third party DRM that they couldn't really do much
| about.
|
| However, on the flip side, there are also a good amount
| of games on Steam that are totally DRM free and Valve
| wouldn't have to do anything for those games in the event
| they shut down.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I believe they've stated in multiple places that they
| have budgeted for running the auth and entitlement
| systems. They set aside money in escrow to do that. Those
| systems are cheap compared to the CDN (which is also
| getting much cheaper). A small team could have a multi-
| year runway for running auth and entitlement.
| ajnin wrote:
| No-one at Steam ever actually said that, and I highly
| doubt they have the legal and contractual standing to do
| so if they wanted.
| 5d8767c68926 wrote:
| Eh, I'm not sure that has ever been a stated policy other
| than an offhand remark when Steam was _much_ smaller.
| Valve is unlikely to have the legal right to strip away
| DRM from other companies games. Especially now that
| everyone runs their own store front.
|
| Maybe, just maybe they would release DRM-free Valve
| games, but that is as far as I could imagine they would
| go.
| jerlam wrote:
| It will be three years and two months from Stadia launch to
| cancellation. So you'd be ok with getting none of your
| money back in this situation?
| paxys wrote:
| If all the purchases were made on day 1, then sure.
| That's a lot more playing time than I usually get out of
| a game anyways. For games/accessories I bought after that
| - no, I'd expect a refund.
|
| The hardware itself was cheap anyways - like $50 for a
| Chromecast + controller (and even cheaper with deals and
| bundles), and you can still use both after the service
| shuts down. It was the $60-80 per game that was the deal
| breaker.
| anonymousab wrote:
| They straight up incompetently dodged the question whenever
| it came up and tried to turn it into some patronizing and
| belittling "we understand that you're scared of the future"
| statement every single time.
|
| They deserved to fail on that point alone. Either promise
| refunds or promise none; either way you're signaling a form
| of confidence in your product and making the expectations
| clear to your users.
|
| Refusing to answer on that point made it clear where their
| confidence was and how weasely they felt they needed to be to
| sell their product.
| schnevets wrote:
| The question is: Would that be more cost-effective than just
| outright buying Ubisoft or a similar-sized publisher so your
| device has some content?
| nailer wrote:
| BTW when Cyberpunk was released and didn't work, and PS Store
| / Steam / XBox gave refunds, Stadia was the only platform
| that refused refunds.
| zorked wrote:
| It worked well in Stadia.
| josefresco wrote:
| Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might
| kill it. If they promised me a refund I would have probably
| spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a
| pro membership.
| sbarre wrote:
| Just for clarity, they are refunding hardware and software
| purchases but not membership fees.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| How would Stadia shutting down justify you not getting a
| pro membership? It's something you pay monthly anyway, it's
| not like you get less of your money worth if they close the
| service 2 years after your subscription was used, unlike
| hardware and games.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yes it was a decent investment to get started, too much for
| a whim.
|
| I seriously thought about it but ended up scoring an Xbox
| and game pass and my main reason was I have to buy the
| games at full price for Stadia and google will deffo shut
| it down sooner rather than later so too risky.
|
| Game pass is amazing for someone who isn't a hardcore call
| of duty type gamer! I've been away from gaming since
| playing tiger woods on the OG Xbox so being able to play so
| many different types of games is awesome.
|
| I like forza horizons!
| sylens wrote:
| Google's mistake was not choosing to go with a Game Pass
| type model - but then again, they didn't have the content
| as they have had to work to get each of the games offered
| running on Linux. It's why they have had to pay millions
| to developers to make Stadia versions available.
| [deleted]
| appleflaxen wrote:
| That is incredibly funny, and incredibly apt.
| dicomdan wrote:
| They are refunding purchases to users.
|
| But developers aren't getting their time back.
| [deleted]
| aequitas wrote:
| I don't remember exactly, but I believe this was promised in
| some sense when I decided to get on board a year or 2 ago. At
| the time you got a free Chromecast + Controller when buying
| Cyberpunk which was also a pretty good deal to pass by.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Someone asked Stadia devs or reps on Reddit if users would
| have access to purchases games if the service shut down,
| back when Stadia was announced, and the response was not a
| "no" but definitely wasn't a "yes".
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu5
| 6...
|
| (That said, props to them for refunding folks.)
| chihuahua wrote:
| That the Stadia dev's response on Reddit is pure
| nonsense, basically just saying that
|
| 1. we're committed to supporting this for years to come
|
| 2. you can download your game metadata (saved games)
|
| LOL, what are people supposed to do with their game
| metadata now that Stadia is being shut down? Look at it
| in a hex editor?
| Macha wrote:
| "and let you export your saved games"
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not with developers though. Consumers get refunded, game
| developers don't get anything back.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| A lifecycle policy is a truly underrated component of a good
| services and software business, and I wish more people both
| understood that, and more companies had them.
|
| When I buy pretty much any Microsoft product, I can go on
| their lifecycle policy page and see a date, often five to ten
| years out, when they commit to continue supporting/securing
| the product through. If I get more than that, great, but
| there's a commitment Microsoft is held to up front.
|
| Google cannot make that commitment because Google cannot
| commit to anything. But it's a large enough company it could
| afford to do it and eat the cost when it was a bad call. The
| reason they won't is because Google doesn't view customers as
| people or partners they need to value.
| dilap wrote:
| That's a promise you can only keep if almost no one buys
| anything, though. :-)
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| If Stadia had grown to the scale where Google would have
| had a hard time refunding all purchases, odds are they
| wouldn't have felt the need to shut it down.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Problem is though, if they ever decided to shut down
| they'd have to repay the entire amount of revenue they've
| made and more.
| jedberg wrote:
| Presumably it would be something like "we will refund any
| purchase if we shut down before 2024" or something like
| that.
| hvis wrote:
| I would have liked this kind of promise, but for the
| general public this marketing message might have sounded
| differently: "We _might_ shut down before 2024 ".
|
| Even if some people are kind of used to this happening,
| stating it more obviously might have a negative effect
| just as well.
| foepys wrote:
| Nobody would have prevented them from changing the ToS
| after a few years to not refund new purchases after date
| X. It would have been a bad signal but if the platform
| was successful people wouldn't really mind.
| kevincox wrote:
| If you put it in from the start it wouldn't be an issue.
| Or even just guarantee refunds from purchases in the past
| 3 years. So there is a rolling window and you can lessen
| the impact but closing the store and continuing operating
| the platform for 1-2 years.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| "We'll refund the purchases made while the service was in
| public beta"
| bombcar wrote:
| Just have a rolling refund window - "If we shut down the
| service in 3 years, we'll give you a full refund, and if
| between 3-5 years, a half refund".
|
| And then if you need to and don't want to refund, just
| keep the service limping along for 5 more years.
| yencabulator wrote:
| The monthly subscription costs will not be refunded, only
| controllers & games you "bought", instead of played via
| Pro subscription. If Stadia had been a success, there'd
| been plenty of Pro subscriptions.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, you can also keep the promise if there are lots of
| buyers and business goes well.
| anonymousab wrote:
| "we'll make sure you have a way to play your games even if
| stadia shuts down" would have also been acceptable and
| would have guaranteed much more good will.
|
| But they failed to adequately engage devs or their
| customers' desires in the first place, so such an
| arrangement would have been a comparatively impossible
| licensing and product goal for them.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Surely is down to licensing 'only'? Google presumably
| didn't develop those games, the games still needed to
| connect to servers, etc. Arguably, it's a benefit to get a
| new person on your gaming service so Steam, for example,
| should adopt all those users is the licensing that Google
| arranged.
|
| If the terms Google had were "we'll sell licenses for your
| games, but if we shoot down then you have to accept those
| users as native users", then uses would have been insured
| against shut-down. I can't see how those terms are worse
| than if Google were a retailer of those games?
|
| A lot of AAA games are freemium with IAP, surely the
| acquisition is Cannondale enough that game companies would
| go for such a deal?
|
| I suppose there wasn't enough upside for Google as people
| still bought Stadia without any such promise.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Funny story. Two years ago they gave away "Stadia Premiere
| Edition" kits for free, which was a Chromecast Ultra and a
| Stadia controller which I believe retailed for USD 100. I
| wasn't particularly interested, but I figured it would be
| worth a try.
|
| But when I got the hardware I tried signing up and realized
| that apparently I had signed up for the Stadia free trial 6
| months earlier. I vaguely remember trying for literally a few
| minutes on my laptop. This means that the $100 of promotional
| hardware they sent me is completely useless for its intended
| purpose.
|
| It's genuinely sad that some manager or team went to all the
| trouble of getting the budget for this hardware promotion,
| but couldn't or didn't reset the free trial for the Google
| accounts of the recipients. But it might be a clear sign of
| the general level of competence with which the entire Stadia
| project was executed.
|
| On the bright side, the Chromecast is still quite useful,
| although I'm not personally using it and haven't found
| someone to give mine to. Last I checked there wasn't any way
| to use the Stadia controller for anything, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if people could figure out how to "jailbreak" it
| and make it useful.
| icelancer wrote:
| It works over its standard USB-C interface with a computer.
|
| I got the same deal you did and use my Stadia controller
| with ROMs on my laptop when traveling. Works great.
| Excellent controller, too.
|
| The wireless interface is actually WiFi and some form of
| Bluetooth and not easily jailbroken last time I checked.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That's good to know. I think the WiFi and/or Bluetooth
| was what I had looked for and found nothing. I'd want to
| use it for games on my Apple TV or Nintendo Switch.
| hbn wrote:
| Assuming it's possible, they should really patch the
| controllers to be used like a typical bluetooth
| controller.
| inerte wrote:
| I use the Stadia controller which I got for being a
| YouTube Premium subscriber to play Xbox Cloud games.
| Works flawlessly!
| totaldude87 wrote:
| I finally find some use for stadia controller then
| Flameancer wrote:
| Yea they should definitely open source the firmware or at
| least do one last update to make it Bluetooth compatible.
| I as well got the promo deal.
| hbn wrote:
| I got the same bundle and had the same issue (already used
| the trial for like a minute just to see if it worked)
|
| I had a secondary Google account for app publishing, and I
| was able to switch to that and start another trial there.
| Not that this information is really any use to you now!
|
| For what it's worth, my experience was pretty bad. Had tons
| of lag spikes on my 50/5 down/up internet.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| It's been a while, but I seem to remember using my OnLive
| controller for a good while after system shutdown as a
| Bluetooth media controller. I'll bet someone will figure
| something out.
| intrasight wrote:
| "Google Stadia is a cloud gaming service whereby games can be
| purchased and played, but don't have to be downloaded to a
| console or PC."
|
| This was a doomed business model because it blurred
| subscription and purchase. If it was subscription, there
| should have been no purchases (hardware or software)
| necessary. There are millions of people - myself included -
| who would pay for a subscription game service. Stadia was not
| that service.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Stadia had both. Stadia Pro was a subscription that gave
| you access to a few new games every month, and you could
| buy (licenses to play) games.
| intrasight wrote:
| Had both means blurred - therefore doomed
| anonymousab wrote:
| "stadia" in the public's mind, and how it was primarily
| communicated and advertised, was a subscription streaming
| service where you also had to pay full price for games
| that could only be used on their service and would go
| away with it.
|
| That's not the "Netflix for games" that it needed to be
| and stadia pro's limited selection was nowhere near
| adequate either. As a result, they set themselves up with
| the most unappealing business model possible for
| consumers.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'd say the biggest effect was that consumers didn't trust
| Google to actually keep their purchases alive for more than two
| years. Techwise Stadia was actually very good and it could have
| been a good alternative to a full-blown gaming PC for people
| who are not gaming enthusiasts.
| agrippanux wrote:
| People who are not gaming enthusiasts are pretty happy with
| mobile gaming. I honestly don't know what Stadia's target
| market was.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Google should have launched a new PC game store that lets
| you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee, you can
| stream those games from Google's servers instead of needing
| to buy expensive gaming hardware.
|
| This would have given enthusiasts a lot less to hate about
| Stadia. It would have given customers a lot more confidence
| in the long-term viability of their purchases. It would
| have highlighted the flexibility offered by Google's
| streaming platform without making putting up with its
| drawbacks a requirement to enjoy your games. A player could
| start out only streaming their games, then upgrade to a
| real PC down the road to get an even better gameplay
| experience out of their existing library.
|
| For many enthusiasts, the product Google actually launched
| felt like an existential threat to their hobby. They feared
| games could go streaming exclusive. Publishers could use it
| as a form of extra draconian DRM, or start designing their
| games around the limitations of streaming. As a result this
| turned many of the biggest gaming enthusiasts, the people
| casual players will often ask for advice on what to buy,
| into ant-Stadia evangelists.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| "Google should have launched a new PC game store that
| lets you download your games. For a nominal monthly fee,
| you can stream those games from Google's servers instead
| of needing to buy expensive gaming hardware."
|
| Nvidia already has a product like that called Geforce
| Now. Instead of having it's own store it integrates with
| Steam and GOG.
|
| There's still the problem that is a hypothetical customer
| wants to game enough to pay for Stadia but doesn't have
| the funds for a gaming PC... why don't they just buy the
| $300 dollar Xbox Series S?
| babypuncher wrote:
| GeForce Now is a good option, but their implementation is
| clunky precisely because it is a "bring your own games"
| affair.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Well Google sure proved them wrong, they kept those purchases
| alive for nearly three years!
| lrae wrote:
| > Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would
| get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.
|
| One of the reasons why they launched and bought studios for
| exclusive content. Which they then shut down early, only a bit
| over a year after launch of Stadia (?).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is
| safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google,
| Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I am using Flutter and have the same concerns. There are many
| companies that use Flutter, but Google do 99% of the
| development and don't seem to be using it for any of their
| own public apps, which is discouraging.
| tsbertalan wrote:
| Well, they did a Big Damn Rewrite to use it for Wallet/Pay,
| and, in the process, dropped a bunch of features and made
| it infuriatingly tied to a phone number, because the
| rewrite was really for the Indian market.
| collegeburner wrote:
| i can confirm that this kept at least a few teams i've talked
| to or worked with from choosing flutter. facebook and react
| native are viewed as much safer from the "killed by google"
| effect. same thing tossing around the idea of using carbon,
| their new language.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Not to mention that it seems that the relationship between
| Flutter and the Android team is contentious at best
| sirius87 wrote:
| 100% this. I don't know if this is a PR problem, but it very
| much feels like Flutter is a project that will live and die
| by Google's sword. Go doesn't come with this perception.
|
| Projects that make it big from within Google need to find
| shelter from this perception by moving into community driven
| project governance, for better or worse.
| mosburger wrote:
| I feel like it might be a little "safer" if it wasn't tied to
| Dart. :-/
| rjh29 wrote:
| Dart is pretty much 'done' as a language though. They are
| adding code generation and other nice things, but it's
| stable. Flutter on the other hand needs to be kept up to
| date as Android and iOS change, so it's very vulnerable.
| SahAssar wrote:
| What is an example of a mainstream language being "done"
| before?
| detaro wrote:
| Most mainstream languages are "done" in the way that
| matters here. Not "done" in the sense of "not receiving
| new features anymore", but in the sense that you could
| switch their implementations to maintenance mode today
| and they'd remain useful for a long time. Easily visible
| with languages where people do indeed keep using old
| versions for whatever reason.
| tommy92 wrote:
| I started learning dart/flutter a few days ago. Now I'm
| having second thoughts.
| timsneath wrote:
| (Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.)
|
| For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're
| not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as having overtones
| of the Baghdad Bob meme. And indeed, why should you trust my
| word?
|
| The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is
| because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in
| it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already
| written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps
| for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big
| brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as
| a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if
| Flutter didn't continue to flourish.
|
| Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google
| who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety
| of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written
| that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system.
| Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that
| code away and start over.
|
| Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base
| of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell
| us it makes them more productive
| (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-
| prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide
| variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a
| vested interest in continuing that.
|
| Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to
| Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team
| employees. Those contributors include big companies like
| Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual
| developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).
|
| We're working hard on lots of fun new stuff right now,
| including a rewrite of our graphics rendering engine. If you
| haven't seen it, check out https://wonderous.app, which is
| using the new engine on iOS. We think it shows the potential
| of Flutter well!
| root_axis wrote:
| Yes, and even worse, the nature of Flutter means its utility
| is especially vulnerable to abandonment. If Go were abandoned
| you could at least maintain your Go applications
| indefinitely, but since Flutter relies on its own UI engine
| it requires perpetual development to stay in sync with the
| evolving UI design language of iOS and Android.
| megaman821 wrote:
| It's even worse than that. Not only is keeping the UI
| updated a herculean task. It is written in a programming
| language (Dart) that virtually nobody outside of Google
| uses. Other than another giant tech company, no one could
| keep Flutter going if Google ever drops it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick
| up, and there are all sorts of hobbyist languages and
| frameworks that have niche developer interest. It doesn't
| have to replace anything major to survive.
| SahAssar wrote:
| > Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick
| up
|
| Are there any major projects besides flutter built on
| dart? The fear is not that dart is hard to use, it's that
| it would not be maintained if flutter was not a
| mainstream success.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| A quick browse shows a few notable names like Square,
| Tizen, and Toyota. Amazon seems to have also forked
| Flutter themselves to make their own framework so expand
| Flutter to Desktop and Web: https://docs.amplify.aws/
|
| Seems to be enough buzz around it that I wouldn't be
| super worried.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to
| like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the
| one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of
| interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate
| to bet that they'll keep going with it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough
| in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone
| might be interested enough to pick it up.
|
| https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960
| (thread)
|
| Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop
| apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's
| caught on since when it was announced in July 2020.
|
| https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far
| Illniyar wrote:
| Flutter is basically a custom rendering engine with
| massive effort to create pixel perfect compatability with
| native offerings. If google drops the ball on it, I doubt
| there is any company that can take on maintaining
| something like that.
|
| If google drops support for flutter, the next design
| update by ios or android would kill it.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| The wonderful thing about making everything OSS, and also
| why execs hate it, is it gives up a degree of control to
| kill something at a moment's notice. And so Dart/Flutter
| are in a good place!
| busterarm wrote:
| It's an important point to understand that it's not the
| flexibility to kill it but the flexibility to divert its
| resources elsewhere.
|
| You lose that with OSS projects because you eventually
| end up with people screaming down your door and the
| visibility that brings. Also being assigned to work on
| these projects internally is career death. Both of these
| problems happened to Google Cloud's Terraform provider at
| some point and it was a headache for the company and the
| community.
|
| Luckily Terraform adoption is out of Google's hands.
| They're just forced to play ball. OTOH, Google could
| easily kill off Flutter via other means.
| preommr wrote:
| Go projects are also usually biased towards being very simple
| with few dependencies. A lot of projects that are well suited
| for go would be easy to rewrite to another language if Google
| did ever decide to abandon it.
| rinze wrote:
| Honestly, at this point in time if you don't know that
| investing your time in a Google product is probably going to be
| a waste... it's on you.
| eis wrote:
| Yup and at least my friends and family are extra cautious when
| it is a service where you "buy" something which can be taken
| away from you at any moment.
|
| Google is building a too strong reputation of an unreliable
| company. Doesn't help when an AI is in charge of banning people
| from accessing their critical stuff like emails and stored
| files.
| blihp wrote:
| Google's reputation is, and has been for years, so bad on this
| front that most of their initiatives are stillborn for this
| reason pretty much from the day they are announced. Three years
| ago we had this regarding Stadia:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 (even before
| this, I recall lots of skepticism re: Stadia on the day it was
| announced)
| kabdib wrote:
| Years back, I received quite a few contacts from Google
| recruiters about interviewing to work on an unannounced gaming
| product (which was Stadia, of course).
|
| Google's reputation for canceling projects was bad, even back
| then. Never gave it serious thought. You could see the writing
| on the wall, even before they built the thing.
| phao wrote:
| Super sincere question.
|
| > Google's reputation for not supporting things long term
|
| I didn't know Google had such a reputation. I mostly use drive
| and gmail, so it was fine to me.
|
| Does google really have such a reputation? Any place I can read
| more on this?
| [deleted]
| kalmi10 wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| I miss Google Reader and Google Wave the most.
| nitrixion wrote:
| I really miss Google Play Music. For my needs, it was the
| perfect streaming service.
|
| Youtube Music is a huge step back. Spotify is far too
| playlist and recommendation happy, I want to listen to
| albums not curated lists. Tidal is decent, but similar to
| Spotify. Apple Music is the one I haven't tried for more
| than a couple of days and I don't recall what I didn't like
| about it.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| It made a great offline music player, too!
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I don't understand this comment. You can listen to whole
| Albums on Spotify.
| nitrixion wrote:
| Yes, you can. Easily!
|
| The point I was making about Spotify is that even if I
| solely listen to music as full albums, I _only_ get
| recommendations for playlists. I rarely want to listen to
| a playlist. There are a number of other things I don 't
| like about Spotify, but it works well enough.
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| Same here, GPM recommendations were fantastic and the
| interface was very simple and nice to use. When they
| moved the service to YouTube music half my playlists were
| filled with poor quality songs uploaded to YouTube, it's
| a mess.
|
| Spotify is okay and does have some nice features in the
| way that casting works and multiple devices joined to one
| account, but it's certainly not as enjoyable to use.
| gilrain wrote:
| Apple music is my choice, exactly because it is still
| album focused. That said, I'm not surprised you bounced
| off... the UI isn't very good.
| baq wrote:
| Gmail and drive are pretty much the only safe havens. The
| rest... how many its own chat apps will google kill this
| year?
| citizenkeen wrote:
| https://gcemetery.co/
| dougmwne wrote:
| Very sincerely, you must read just about zero tech news.
| Google has been infamous for this ever since they shut down
| Google Reader in 2013. For about the past 10 years they are a
| company adrift that can no longer launch new products without
| getting absolutely ridiculed. Everyday consumers have lost
| their faith in the company because they are so used to
| getting jerked around anything G. People I know wont touch a
| G chat app because they know it wont last 6 months.
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| Yes, they do. I personally would never put a single service
| on GCP just out of principle.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| [deleted]
| misthop wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/ Lists the lifetime and EOL of
| everything Google has killed, along with a short blurb about
| the termination
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Developers didn't onboard because it was Vulkan-only. You can
| release for GOG as an afterthought, but you had to build for
| Stadia as Another Separate Platform, and they somehow managed
| to make their SDK requirements more onerous than Xbox's.
|
| They might still of joined if there were any customers, but
| customers didn't join because of the prospect of needing to buy
| their existing games again, then pay for a subscription service
| to play them, on top of the already-not-so-big group of people
| with great internet but not so great hardware. Though they
| might of still joined if there were any games.
|
| The primary thing Google got wrong was assuming everyone would
| flock to their service in droves for the promise of the other
| side of the service, thus forming it. They didn't anticipate
| that all the roadblocks they installed from the start would
| prevent any kind of flocking.
|
| HN posters will talk about Google's graveyard, but it is not a
| factor for businesses; Google's history of shuttering perfectly
| good services doesn't extend to services you actually fork over
| cash for. And this won't affect that, as it was nowhere near a
| perfectly good service and was doomed before it was released.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, if it was truly a cheap port that was just putting the
| game on another store and plugging in some API calls, devs
| would have flocked to it. But it involved a pretty involved
| linux ports instead. Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 cost
| tens of millions to get working on Stadia.
|
| sucks to hear as someone who wants linux gaming to get more
| prominance, but I guess for now the current direction is to
| WINE it out.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Google's GDC talks regarding Android and Stadia are kind of
| proofs of how they lack any kind of sensibility how to talk
| with game developers.
|
| While Sony, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, NVidia do cool tech
| sessions, Google is all about analytics and Play Store.
|
| Then they expect developers used to devkits and Visual Studio
| plugins, to use classical UNIX like development experience to
| target Stadia, while hoping Stadia will stay around.
| berz01 wrote:
| well said, literally it's getting old. no one trusts
| amazon/google/fb new ventures. atleast fb is going all in on vr
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Facebook is dumping money into VR to try and push their
| boulder of a terrible idea (the "metaverse") up a hill.
| Except the hill is a solid 90 degree angle cliff
|
| Nobody wants to go to Walmart in VR and artificially grocery
| shop. That's a dystopian misery. But Facebook is happy to
| try!
|
| Their counterparts at places like VRchat meanwhile realized
| that just making a sandbox environment for people to do
| whatever they wanted is far more enticing to users. Valve
| meanwhile is happy to chug along and putter out critically
| acclaimed games to go with their own bespoke hardware
| releases
| vhold wrote:
| For those who have not seen the Walmart VR demo, it's
| really something else. Something is going very very wrong
| at Meta if they thought this looked enticing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcaDStxljw
| rjh29 wrote:
| They are losing stupid amounts of money on VR (as part of the
| R&D thing) in the hope that people will use it for work. The
| awesome value of Oculus Quest 2 will probably never be seen
| again.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| They could mitigate this by always releasing the source code
| for shut down projects so that it could be self hosted or third
| parties could continue the work.
| jedberg wrote:
| That wouldn't work because their tooling is so custom you
| could never run it. Also the code is probably in an
| embarrassing state, especially if the product is getting shut
| down.
| scarmig wrote:
| It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down
| products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things?
| Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails,
| the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go
| with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason.
|
| I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than
| an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut those
| products down in such a way that it's generated far more
| backlash and ill will than anyone else.
|
| Just brainstorming, but perhaps a large company, when launching
| a new product, could establish some kind of dedicated trust to
| provide credible assurances that e.g. the product would be
| supported for at least 10 years.
| coldpie wrote:
| Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony have all launched game streaming
| products without this kind of coverage. It's a Google
| problem.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Importantly all of their products are still alive,
| supported, and even if they're doing superbly do not appear
| to be on the verge of shutdown.
|
| There are a few problems to Google's way of doing things,
| having witnessed it from the inside. In no particular
| order:
|
| 1) Google tends to be over-optimistic and under-skeptical
| when it comes to new products. This is largely driven by
| organizational dynamics: Google's corporate structure
| encourages fiefdoms that come up with the Next Big
| Thing(tm) - everyone involved is encouraged to be wildly
| over-optimistic about their products, and there is not a
| countering skepticism from upper management to impose the
| right amount of discipline re: these wild-eyed claims of
| TAM, growth, etc. The net effect is that Google launches
| products that aren't sufficiently baked, with vastly
| overestimated initial growth. This creates disappointment
| as the products bounce off the market and do not get
| anywhere near the (completely fictional) projections.
|
| 2) Google's go-to-market strategy tends to be under-baked
| as well. This is related to point #1 - heavily over-
| optimistic projections causes Google to accept woefully
| substandard GTM plans. Stadia launched with an incredibly
| poor lineup and burned a lot of the initial goodwill and
| press which stalled any kind of momentum they could've
| gotten.
|
| 3) Google organizationally isn't set up to reward
| individuals that turn around troubled products. Promotions
| heavily favor new product, not fixing existing broken
| product, especially once the product has lost executive
| favor. This causes team death spirals - failing products
| experience intense team attrition that further hampers any
| kind of turnaround plan.
|
| 4) Google has comparatively high executive turnover vs.
| similar companies. This results in rapidly shifting high-
| level strategy. Products and projects fall in/out of favor
| so quickly it causes whiplash. Other companies (see:
| Nvidia, Sony, MS, Apple) seem to be able to identify
| product areas of strategic importance to the company,
| executing against it, and having the executive support to
| continue resourcing these projects even if they initially
| fail/disappoint (see: Apple Maps, PSVR). Google
| constitutionally does not have this ability - they _talk_ a
| lot about multi-year investments in strategic areas but in
| reality their commitments are fickle.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Though do any of those do the Stadia model of having you
| "buy" the game specific to them to be able to stream it?
|
| Other systems I'm aware of mostly piggyback on some other
| platform so your "ownership" extends to local usage also
| (like how Nvidia's system works with your Steam library),
| or are just Netflix-esque subscriptions that give you
| access to the available library as long as you're
| subscribed (like PlayStation Now, well, whatever it's now
| called under Plus, and Game Pass streaming).
|
| Neither of those models has the same type of concern over
| losing your purchases. Google's track record is obviously a
| factor too, but the business model is as well.
| csydas wrote:
| > What's the best way to launch new, risky things?
|
| To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in
| the room as directly and clearly as possible.
|
| I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google
| being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third
| parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from
| Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think
| that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature.
|
| With a console, I assume there are some general timelines
| developers get on how long the console is going to be around,
| so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with
| it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N
| years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand
| how many projects you can put onto it before the console
| obsoletes.
|
| With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android
| games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to
| understand it:
|
| - It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and
| OS to keep new fresh games coming in
|
| - It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to
| refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses
|
| My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter
| and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how
| the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a
| quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling
| with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help
| make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years
| into the platform already and they were still teaching
| developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently,
| and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the
| numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp".
|
| So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have
| this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I
| did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested
| in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and
| the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems
| that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for
| an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming
| fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's
| interest.
|
| Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually
| owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess
| it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot
| enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a
| game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed
| due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps,
| but this is again a communication issue for Google)
|
| [0] -
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-
| stad...
| the_snooze wrote:
| >What's the best way to launch new, risky things?
|
| Slow-roll invite-only launch to establish a core user base,
| work out the bugs, show staying power, and build from there.
| Exactly what Google did in 2004 with Gmail.
| pb7 wrote:
| The same strategy that failed with Google+. It's not as
| foolproof as you're making it out to be.
| bink wrote:
| That's not really apples to apples though. Gmail worked
| with external SMTP services to send and receive mail.
| Google+ required that anyone you wanted to connect to
| also have been offered and accepted an invite (or
| received one of your limited invites).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It seems plausible that social networks have more of a
| network effect than things like a game streaming
| platform. Obviously there's still some network effect and
| a certain marketing aspect to it, but I don't think
| they're directly comparable.
| pb7 wrote:
| You have to convince game developers to port their games.
| If the reward is a few thousand users, it's going to be a
| hard sell. Also the R&D and infrastructure required to
| even start up the project is too high. Building a Gmail
| (especially back then) is small potatoes in comparison.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Well for a thing like Stadia it's not doable, you have very
| complex hardware and r&d to do first.
| delecti wrote:
| Conversely, they tried the same approach with Google+ and
| the slow rollout absolutely killed the momentum of a
| desired service.
| theptip wrote:
| That works great for a service where costs scale with users
| so you can run lean in beta.
|
| Unfortunately I don't think Stadia fits that description
| well; you need to build hardware, network PoPs, license
| games, etc.
|
| Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really
| iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only
| launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it's
| hard to make a splash like that.
|
| I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using
| it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not
| have mattered.
|
| It just ended up not being a game-changer economically,
| people still want to buy consoles etc.
|
| The model of thin-client gaming might win long-term but
| it's just not a clear winner yet.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Unfortunately I don't think Stadia fits that
| description well; you need to build hardware, network
| PoPs, license games, etc.
|
| Hardware is literally scaled by customer demand, and was
| one of the reasons gmail went with the invite only
| launch.
|
| Network PoPs are less an issue when you are already
| piggybacking off of Goog / GCP infrastructure, and you
| can mitigate the remaining costs by per country launches.
| And they did exactly that. It's still not supported in
| Hawaii.
| https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852?hl=en
|
| > I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone
| using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might
| not have mattered.
|
| Stadia was too late to market, in a field where content
| is rare enough relative to the number of competitors to
| have bargaining power. And they have no vertical
| integration to lean on. Nvidia has GPUs in house,
| MS/Sony/Nintendo have game devs in house for exclusives.
| Amazon _might_ be able to parley Twitch into a profitable
| Luna, but its a long shot.
| theptip wrote:
| Hardware is well understood to be OpEx intensive, and
| have high up-front costs. Look at the pricing for
| injection mold dies for example. The opposite of a good
| fit for an iterative approach.
| jldugger wrote:
| In my defense I was thinking of the GPUs and servers, not
| the client devices (does stadia have clients?). In that
| scenario, might HW be capex -- a durable good you buy and
| use for many years, and can sell if you no longer require
| it?
| munificent wrote:
| _> Hardware is literally scaled by customer demand_
|
| Hardware manufacturing is, but design is most certainly
| not. It takes as much work to design a controller that
| you build one of as it does a controller you build a
| million of.
| jldugger wrote:
| Okay, fair, design costs have to be amortized across the
| userbase, and probably the correct solution to this is to
| build hardware people want to use with or without Stadia,
| so your design isn't anchored down. I.e. I can (and do)
| pair PS5 and Switch Pro controllers with other OS's.
| Obviously those other platforms don't offer the force
| feedback or HD rumble, but at the very least it's a
| signal to the your designers and the market that you
| expect your designs to be competitive in the open PC
| market.
|
| Obviously less viable for the set-top boxes, but still a
| valid strategy if you can do it.
| TheCondor wrote:
| I never had stadia so I don't know, but was it games
| only? Or was it a YouTube TV box/Android TV and a game
| box? You could build a compelling user base to develop
| the scale and then make it more about the games.
|
| A coworker and I were chatting about it, what happens
| if/when Apple drops and Mx SoC in the AppleTV? There are
| the obvious apps, you create a camera add on and add
| FaceTime to the living room. Things like that but you
| also have a very serious machine that can go head to head
| with PS5 and Xbox, legitimately. I wouldn't be shocked if
| something like that were to happen.
| mook wrote:
| > Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really
| iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only
| launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it's
| hard to make a splash like that.
|
| That's... kind of the problem? They have a reputation for
| abandoning products after making a huge splash. The only
| way around it is to stop looking for big splashes and
| start building products slowly instead. Pixel phones were
| notoriously only available in selected countries. Google
| Fibre is even more limited.
| lewisl9029 wrote:
| It does sound like their distribution power is a double-edged
| sword when it comes to launching new products.
|
| On one hand, the distribution power makes it extremely easy
| for new products to get lots and lots of users really
| quickly. On the other hand, it can give a false sense of
| security when it comes to product-market fit.
|
| The only real solution I can think of is deliberately
| launching new products without the Google branding and
| without relying on the built-in distribution channels,
| working towards product market fit the hard way, and only
| after that should they consider taking advantage of Google's
| distribution power to accelerate growth.
| josephcsible wrote:
| They should have split Stadia into two conceptual halves: one
| with the technology to split the processing from the input
| and output, and one to do the hosting of the processing. Then
| when they decided to kill Stadia, they could have let other
| people run the latter, so that the former would still be
| useful to people who already owned it.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Shutting down most product lines doesn't mean said product is
| rendered unusable.
|
| It does mean any further support is non-existent. With PaaS
| and SaaS, this implicit contract between buyer and seller no
| longer holds.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _every company is going to shut down products_
|
| There's typically a fight, though.
| jedberg wrote:
| > I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products
| than an equivalently sized company.
|
| AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire
| existence (SDB). And only when they had a viable alternative
| (DynamoDB) _and_ helped their biggest users make the move.
|
| I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down
| without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware
| programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And
| they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed
| some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only
| after most of the big ones had been converted.
|
| And Microsoft is the king of long term support. How long did
| they keep supporting DOS in Windows? Or 32 bit programs. Or
| Windows 2000!
| busterarm wrote:
| Steve Jobs's Apple liked to deprecate the whole API
| underpinning their OS from version to version. That and
| "upgrade" products with increasingly inferior versions
| (Final Cut, iTunes, XServe).
|
| And then there's any era of Apple and their habit of
| removing consumer choice and forcing customers more into
| their closed ecosystem.
| acdha wrote:
| > Steve Jobs's Apple liked to deprecate the whole API
| underpinning their OS from version to version.
|
| Can you provide some examples? The years of supports for
| things like Carbon are hard to reconcile with that claim.
| munificent wrote:
| Bias up front: I work at Google but this is just my
| personal opinion.
|
| _> AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its
| entire existence (SDB)._
|
| Sure, but that's comparing a different branch of the
| company. Stadia is a consumer product, not a paid developer
| product. On the consumer side, Amazon has discontinued
| plenty of things (as every large corporation has):
|
| According to this article[1], Amazon has canceled Haven,
| Amazon Spark, Amazon Restaurants, Amazon Storywriter,
| Amazon popup stores, Dash buttons, Amazon Tap, Instant
| Pickup, Amazon Tickets, Whole Foods 365, Amazon Fresh's
| Local Market Seller, Quidsi, Endless.com, MyHabit.com,
| Amazon Webstore, Amazon Destinations, Amazon Local, Amazon
| Wallet, Amazon Local, Fire Phone, Amazon WebPay, Amazon
| Askville, Amazon PayPhrase, and Amazon Auction.
|
| Relevant to this thread, Amazon Games is technically still
| around, but they canceled Nova, Intensity, Breakaway,
| Crucible, and the Lord of the Rings MMO. Many top
| executives have left.
|
| [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-products-
| services-fai...
| mosburger wrote:
| > I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down
| without an alternative.
|
| I can think of an esoteric one that no one misses: Ping
| (their music-based social media network)
| duskwuff wrote:
| There were a decent number of features in Apple's iTools
| / MobileMe package which were discontinued with no
| replacement. One big one that comes to mind was iWeb
| (static web hosting).
| joshstrange wrote:
| Also their "Print a photo book" from Photos (at the time
| it was call iPhoto I think?). You could design a photo
| album and they would send you a really nice bound copy.
| They discontinued it but had 3rd-party plugins that
| filled the gap for a while before even those died (I
| think).
| mikebonnell wrote:
| Ironically enough, Google Photos still has this
| capability.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Amazon shutdown Drive (their dropbox competitor), there are
| plenty of consumer services Amazon has shutdown. Google's
| problem has been their tendency to shutdown perfectly good
| services because they aren't successful as ads. Reader is
| the posterboy for this; a service probably used happily by
| millions (or tens of millions) that had the plug pulled.
|
| The fear with Stadia wasn't that Google may just shut it
| down, it's that it could have been very successful, with
| millions of happy users, and Google _still_ would have shut
| it down. That 's what separates Google from other
| companies.
| throw10920 wrote:
| jedberg said " _AWS_ has shut down I believe only one
| service in its entire existence (SDB) " - emphasis on
| AWS, _not_ Amazon as a whole. Big difference when you 're
| talking about developer services, as opposed to end-user
| services.
|
| Now, it's a perfectly valid point that Stadia is a
| consumer service, like Drive - but in a thread where
| there are discussions about developer services (GCP, for
| instance), making the distinction is important.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _(GCP, for instance), making the distinction is
| important._
|
| The distinction is meaningless in that case because GCP
| hasn't sunset any services either.
| silisili wrote:
| > it could have been very successful, with millions of
| happy users, and Google still would have shut it down
|
| Weeps in Google Play Music and Hangouts.
| kingaillas wrote:
| Microsoft shutdown stores, resulting in loss of purchases
| for customers. I lost a few ebooks when they shut down
| their ebook store, their Zune Marketplace and Play For Sure
| was a confusing fiasco with the final result of authorizing
| purchases for one final resting place before the DRM
| servers were killed.
|
| So they don't exactly have a spotless record.
| Aunche wrote:
| Windows phone was the biggest shutdown of all time. Off the
| top of my head, there's also Edge and Silverlight.
| jedberg wrote:
| Edge and Silverlight both had replacements. Windows phone
| was shut down because almost no one cared.
|
| The difference is Google shuts down services people
| actually like and use simply because they aren't
| profitable _enough_
| pjmlp wrote:
| 10% of Europeans cared, but it wasn't enough.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| And windows phone still got updates for over 2 years even
| after the shutdown, despite the fact it had been semi
| dead for years before then.
| Aunche wrote:
| In terms of market share, Windows phone was a few
| percent, but that's still millions of phones.
|
| Silverlight may have a replacement, but that doesn't help
| the devs who sunk their time developing with it. Same for
| people writing extensions for and debugging compatibility
| with Edge.
| jsnell wrote:
| So is your argument that people liked and cared about
| Stadia? Because right now it feels like a really odd
| double standard. Go read through that canonical "Killed
| by Google" list. How many of those products were more
| popular than Windows phone / had users be more invested
| in it / etc? Be honest, it's a handful. Most of them you
| hadn't even heard of.
|
| It feels like you have a double standard at play here,
| and are giving both Microsoft and Amazon a free pass on
| their abattoirs of dead products by various excuses, and
| totally ignoring that those same excuses would apply to
| Google's.
| faefox wrote:
| Feels like the writing was on the wall almost as soon as they
| launched. It seems telling to me that Stadia couldn't get any
| traction even during one of the most protracted GPU
| shortages/crypto manias in history; connectivity requirements and
| lag issues aside, I think a lot of gamers just aren't interested
| in outsourcing the hardware side of things the way these
| corporations might expect. Building and maintaining your "rig" is
| a big part of the appeal for the PC gaming crowd that renting
| time on an anonymous server in a datacenter somewhere just can't
| match.
| polytely wrote:
| I think they might have made it if they went with a gamepass
| style service, pay a fee per month, get access to the full
| catalogue of games, you could even bundle it with youtube
| premium.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| I will happily pay Nvidia to be able to play my Steam games in
| the cloud when I am out of state with no access to a gaming PC.
| But Google wanted me to buy a separate copy [!] at full market
| price [!!] while also paying them a subscription service [!!!].
| And then there's no games, because they thought they could
| impose a specific graphics API instead of just porting D3D like
| Steam did, and in reality ports take time and nobody wants
| spend just as much money as any other console port takes in
| order to sell to a platform with a fiftieth of the users.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| The subscription is optional. I loved Stadia because I only
| really play one game, Destiny, and I could play it year round
| for just the annual season pass and 0 hardware investment.
| Came to ~$100 a year for all my gaming needs and it was
| perfect.
| drusepth wrote:
| Yeah, I mostly just bought games outright on Stadia rather
| than subscribing for the Netflix-y pool of games everyone
| said they wanted, which worked out really well for me in
| the end: I played for years and hundreds of hours and it
| was basically all for free.
| foepys wrote:
| My personal problem with Stadia was the lock-in. You were
| required to buy a game at full price on Stadia and were only
| allowed to play it on Stadia, a service for which you would've
| eventually had to pay a subscription fee.
|
| One can tell people that a PC is much more expensive upfront
| and that you could play for years on Stadia for the same money
| but the risk of it being shut down and losing access to all the
| full price games just wasn't worth it. Plus real-time
| multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible
| to play competitively, so you needed a PC anyways if you played
| even only one of such games.
| p1necone wrote:
| Yeah, and people will shout about Steam being the same level
| of vendor lockin but they're ignoring the trust factor. Steam
| has been around for decades and rightly or wrongly people
| mostly consider it a given that their Steam games will never
| disappear. Google needed to acknowledge that and actually
| provide an appealing alternative.
|
| Instead they tried to charge full retail price on games from
| a tiny library on a product that nobody believed they weren't
| going to sunset in a couple of years time. I suspect if
| they'd gone with a subscription cost only model they probably
| would have been a lot more successful.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Just look at the popularity of 144-240hz displays and eSports.
| The fact the 5800x3d even exists to eek you out 20 extra fps at
| 1080p to get you from 150 to 175..
|
| Cloud gaming with its latency? Some people not noticing isn't
| going to cut it.
|
| PS5 is hugely popular and perpetually sold old. So the console
| market is not hurting either..
|
| The market has spoken and it's not interested in cloud gaming
| services with its downsides.
| donatj wrote:
| Stadia owner here, the entire concept of a streaming game system
| where you still have to buy the games is just weird. I used it
| for a couple weeks and went back to my Xbox.
|
| To succeed, it really needed to be just a gamepass-esq model.
|
| The thing I found _really_ impressive is that the latency felt
| better over the _actual internet_ than streaming my Xbox from
| another room.
|
| It's also _super impressive_ that the headphone jack in the
| controller 's audio seemed perfectly in sync with the video from
| the Chromecast despite the controller operating over Wifi. The
| video and audio streams are presumably completely separate,
| originating from Google servers.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm honestly astonished at full refunds for everything purchased
| via Google -- not just software but hardware too.
|
| I know most of the comments here are focusing on "Google shuts
| down yet another thing as everybody expected" but this is really
| doing right by consumers.
|
| I think they deserve a lot of credit here. With so many (usually
| valid) warnings about how you don't really own digital content in
| the cloud or hardware you can't root... the fact they're giving
| everyone all their money back even when they're probably not
| contractually obligated to, that's pretty huge.
|
| If Stadia were a startup that ran out of money/funding, that
| would never happen because there wouldn't be any money left in
| the first place. So even if Google cancels a lot of things, this
| is a nice (if occasional) bright spot of news, that Google has
| the ability to do full refunds and actually does it.
|
| It also makes you wonder what future gaming plans they have,
| especially since they're spending the cash to preserve as much
| goodwill here as possible.
| jsploit wrote:
| Two months ago, Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188
| jjulius wrote:
| >Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don't have to
| believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread
| in October.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402
| neogodless wrote:
| Summer ended a week ago! They were right!
| defen wrote:
| It's not October yet though. I look forward to returning to
| that thread in a few days.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Streaming is not sexy for gamedevs. We all know that latency is
| going to suffer.
|
| I don't understand the pain point they are trying to solve for
| end-users.
|
| Gamers are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games.
|
| This is again a case of a solution looking for a problem.
| unsafecast wrote:
| > Gamers are used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games.
|
| I think you meant "Gamers _that have the money to spare_ are
| used to buy shiny new hardware to run their games".
|
| You can get a subscription for $10/mo. That's $120 every year.
| That's a hell of a deal for a casual gamer that doesn't want to
| spend the money on a PC.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| There is also a huge amount of free to play games for this
| audience.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| I just have a mac so don't have the real hardware to run proper
| games. I've used Stadia for the last year+ and here are some
| nice aspects to cloud gaming you may have overlooked.
|
| - No downloads. This means if I wanna play any game in my
| 'library', I just click a button. Not decide if I wanna wait X
| hours to download/install the game or figure out what to delete
| to free up space. This means when new updates come out I just
| get to play them, not time out the download, etc. For cloud-
| only games, this also frees them from having to limit the game
| to to user hard-drive space.
|
| - No cheating. I mean I guess you could rig an AI that watches
| your screen and reacts to it but that's much, much harder than
| current cheats. For a while when cheating was a bit too
| rampant, some destiny users opted to play PvP on Stadia instead
| just for the fair games.
|
| - Convenience. Being able to switch devices/screens mid session
| was quite nice. Same for launching games to do a bit of
| maintenance from my phone (i.e. check daily vendors on my lunch
| break)
| welcome_dragon wrote:
| Have you tried it though? It's so much better than any other
| streaming game service from Xbox or PSN
|
| When cyberpunk came out, it was crashing everywhere except the
| stadia version. I've rarely had performance issues with a
| stadia game, and even playing over 4g is pretty good.
|
| The technology almost works like magic here.
|
| Now if only there had been more games on it and if people
| didn't dismiss it before it even launched it MAY have had a
| shot (and I guess if Google didn't have a knack for killing off
| things).
|
| I am fully convinced that stadia represents a good future for
| gaming, and as hardware costs go up with sinking bandwidth
| costs, I am sure the concept will come about again in a similar
| way.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Oh, this idea has been around basically forever, it will come
| again, I have no doubts about it.
|
| Stadia was not the first attempt; it won't be the last one.
|
| People have been trying to build perpetual motion devices for
| centuries, some still are.
| zepppotemkin wrote:
| Get wrecked Google
| vyrotek wrote:
| Just a couple of months ago.
|
| "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working
| on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro."
|
| https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
| furyofantares wrote:
| What I think happens in situations like these (from experience)
| is that the team is trying as hard as they can to prevent
| shutting down. And they either believe they'll succeed, or
| believe they _can 't_ succeed without boosting the expectation
| that they'll succeed by explicitly claiming they aren't
| shutting down.
|
| If you say, both to the public and to the team, that you might
| shut down but you're not sure yet, that's as good as shutting
| down. And if there are rumors about shutting down, because it's
| close to happening, then you may have to address it. And you
| may believe that the only chance you have of not shutting down
| is to tell everyone that you aren't shutting down.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| I like this statement. It doesn't imply ill-will such as
| intentional lying or selfish intent as most other posts do.
| This statement simply shows that people are trying to make
| their projects succeed in a complicated environment.
|
| From my experiences, most people are doing what they think is
| right. We should take more time understanding why people
| think what they are doing is right, even when we may perceive
| the action as immoral or wrong.
| sva_ wrote:
| > Just a couple of months ago.
|
| This was exactly 2 months ago (July 29th).
| timmg wrote:
| I mean, it was _probably_ a lie. But, also, things may have
| changed. It 's not like Google didn't just go through a big
| hiring freeze and budget process.
| gilrain wrote:
| They really don't deserve the benefit of the doubt when it
| comes to abandoning products.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Everybody here knew it wasn't going to play out that way, so
| surely everybody in Google knew it too. Or should have known.
| Either they were lying, or were effectively brainwashed by
| the corporate environment (a real possibility.)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The company really did go from "hire like mad" to "oh shit
| cut stuff" seemingly overnight. It would not surprise me if
| Stadia was an easy way for some SVP to slash their budget
| to appease Finance.
| z9znz wrote:
| Many companies, especially publicly traded ones, do overt
| knee-jerk reactions when there are big stories of
| economic downturns.
|
| I actually think it's an intentional behavior designed to
| show investors that they are being studious relative to
| economic conditions (aka, covering their asses to avoid
| shareholder suits).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That tweet was from _two months_ ago, long after everyone
| saw the writing on the wall with respect to the economy.
| As another commenter responded, the first tweet in
| response to that was:
|
| > When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months
| could you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the
| controller first? It's a good controller and I'd like to
| be able to use it.
|
| In other words, people didn't believe them from the get
| go. Whether it was an outright lie, or a George
| Constanza-esque "It's not a lie if YOU believe it"
| message, is pretty irrelevant. Everyone knew or should
| have known it was BS.
| lazide wrote:
| Delusional thinking isn't just for random people living
| under a bridge.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Also, orgs have multiple levels and various individuals
| in leadership who have their own plans that never quite
| perfectly align. Miscommunications happen, and
| corporations aren't a single entity.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This just gave me a flashback to everyone working for
| WeWork pre IPO
|
| Nobody I knew there was willing to understand how all of
| Wall Street was making fun of them and the valuation
| attempt.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is a really low-stakes prediction, for us to guess that
| Google is going to cancel a product. Internally I bet they
| had people making good-faith arguments in both directions.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| Not a pay product though. How many pay products have they
| shut-down cold-turkey, with no new service/product to
| migrate to?
| bee_rider wrote:
| My point is less that we are more likely to be correct,
| and more that without seeing the sunk costs first hand it
| is easier to say "lol it is google they will cancel
| things!"
| sbarre wrote:
| It's likely that the person tweeting this believed it,
| because it's what they were told..
|
| I'm going to bet most of the Stadia team found out at the
| same time as, or shortly before, everyone else.
| lrem wrote:
| Most certainly not a lie. The person tweeting that was a
| member of the Stadia team. If they didn't believe Stadia is
| going to be fine, why wouldn't they jump ship earlier?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| In the UK, you know a minister will be sacked soon when the
| Prime Minister publicly announced they "have her full
| confidence"...
| tomschwiha wrote:
| Same for German politicans
| Psychoshy_bc1q wrote:
| wrong. german parasites can literally do what they want.
| they get away with (almost) everything.
| drcongo wrote:
| And football managers.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| archived for posterity:
|
| https://archive.ph/W3F3g
| artursapek wrote:
| It's a Google service, what do you expect
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Some people were mean to me when I said I wasn't going to port
| my game to stadia. I said, "google will probably cancel it
| within the next few years, so I'm not even considering it," and
| they got really offended by my prediction.
|
| Well... it was a little rude to make a prediction like that,
| but it was based on research and past history. It was just way
| too big a risk.
|
| I wonder if it's a bit self fulfilling at this point: timid
| users lead to poor adoption which leads to cancellations which
| leads to timid users?
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| This is Google we're talking about. They shut everything down
| eventually.
| Kye wrote:
| Somehow Blogger persists almost 20 years post-acquisition.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I still like Blogger.
| Kye wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how it keeps getting updates while
| other stuff dies. Maybe the people responsible for it are
| on a different career track. I'll probably put my next
| blog on there. 10+ years of "Blogger is doomed!" haven't
| amounted to much as the graveyard fills with newer,
| hotter applications.
| krossitalk wrote:
| Does anyone think we'll ever see the sunsetting of something
| huge like YouTube or GMail?
| transfire wrote:
| Yes.
| 8note wrote:
| Those are part of the core ad business. I could see
| anything that isn't an ad driver being shut down. Eg. GCP
| or Google docs
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Not unless the products start failing or human population
| grows 10x and they don't keep up relative to other Google
| products. Google takes products seriously when they have
| huge user counts and huge user counts relative to their
| competition. Their problem is their inability to seriously
| commit to growing valuable new products to that size.
| wvenable wrote:
| Nope. Huge products will be fine as long as they stay huge.
|
| Google doesn't support new products enough to become huge
| and don't seem to have a cohesive plan to support a range
| of products in the long term.
|
| I'm probably someone who could have benefited from Stadia
| but I feel like they never marketed to me in a way that
| even got me to try it. And the fear that this was just
| another experiment by Google didn't have me seeking it out
| on my own especially for the up front costs.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| If Gmail goes, most people on earth will be locked out of
| their online accounts
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Too big to fail. If Google ever collapses the G in
| 'GMail' will come to mean Government.
| morepork wrote:
| Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1361/
|
| There are 2 classes of product that I don't see them
| shutting down.
|
| 1. Those that make lots of money, e.g. search, youtube,
| maps. Unless that changes of course.
|
| 2. Those that are heavily used internally at Google, e.g.
| gmail, docs, calendar. They are always going to want those
| as internal tools. I guess they could make them internal
| only, but how much more work is it to maintain the public
| version too given it already exists?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| In 1997, I'm not sure anyone could imagine an Internet
| without GeoCities.
| pvarangot wrote:
| For GMail? yes.
|
| For YouTube I think it would be something like it will
| slowly turn into CNGooGSNBC and be heavily editorialized
| where you need to work with an AI assisted nebulous entity
| for weeks before you can upload content.
| 93po wrote:
| I agree with this. At some point YouTube could possibly
| only allow monetizable content, meaning anything that
| veers even slightly out of mainstream, or covers topics
| that advertisers don't want to associate with, will get
| deplatformed.
| sfmike wrote:
| Nope because both are extensions of ads. Both are bought
| and managed within google ads manager. Basically a product
| lasts at google ifnm it can reach ad placement scale. Docs
| is useful for it's data and to help personalization of ads
| so it stays. Most of the tool shutdowns couldn't have ads
| or didn't assist ads effectiveness.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 100%. Not sure which will go first but my guess is youtube
| will fold into another product. Gmail will start breaking
| and be sunsetted. It would not surprise me to see search
| sunsetted.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| The first reply to that tweet:
|
| "When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months could
| you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the controller
| first? It's a good controller and I'd like to be able to use
| it." - https://twitter.com/josh_ross/status/1553465786634604544
| DSingularity wrote:
| Gold
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Lol, I like his other response to someone praising his
| prediction abilities:
|
| > It's not hard to predict the Google future. Yet another
| rebranding of whatever chat product will come soon enough
| also.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I am guessing they didn't release the drivers?
| zerocrates wrote:
| My understanding is that it uses Bluetooth just for
| pairing, so I'd assume that it's not so much an issue of
| "drivers" but more of controller firmware to get it to send
| inputs over Bluetooth at all.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Yes, the way it normally functions is directly connected
| to the Stadia server over wifi. It does show up as a
| controller connected over USB too. But Bluetooth is just
| for setting up the wifi connection.
|
| I don't even want to call it pairing because the way you
| pair the controller to your game session is to enter in a
| 5 button combination that is displayed on your TV.
| willtemperley wrote:
| It works nicely as a controller over USB, I'm using my
| stadia controller with OpenEMU
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks
| the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got
| promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't
| care about whether Stadia was a success long term.
|
| Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is
| literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No
| serious business or developer is going to trust them. If
| governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their
| cash cow, Google is in trouble
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Google needs to restructure their incentives before it
| wrecks the company.
|
| People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this
| is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing
| in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your
| managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital
| expenditure.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You can't blame this on Google's size. Neither Microsoft,
| Facebook, Apple, or Amazon (Disclaimer: I work at AWS) have
| this problem.
|
| Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely
| survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and
| even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after
| Balmer and missing out on mobile.
|
| Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage
| of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in
| the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.
|
| Google's ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program
| mismanagement.
| pb7 wrote:
| Microsoft choked their lead in the console market to Sony
| despite being much larger with bigger pockets.
| PlayStation 4 and now 5 both outsell Xbox 3:1 or so
| despite Xbox 360 having outsold PlayStation 3 and had
| loyal customers. They also choked with Mixer, losing to
| Google (YouTube), Amazon (Twitch), and Facebook (Gaming).
| It is not a "Google problem". Google (and Apple and
| Facebook) hate is just trendy on HN.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than
| selling loss leader hardware. They are all about
| subscriptions and streaming games.
|
| Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other
| companies to see how well they were able to move into new
| markets
|
| - Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers,
| accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have
| been getting rave reviews.
|
| Apple Arcade even isn't in any danger of being cancelled.
|
| - Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong
| second, at least they didn't cancel XBox and I bet their
| streaming game service will be around for awhile.
|
| - Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail,
| AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices
|
| - Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of
| those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has
| Google screwed up completely?
|
| And then you have Google.
|
| - YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a
| profit standpoint
|
| - it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively
| little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the
| numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the
| time of the trial, Android already had the dominant
| market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a
| year to be the default search engine. That has to be more
| than Google is making from Android per year.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google
| -s-...
|
| After all these years, everything that Google has don
| outside of advertising has been a failure as far as
| profitability.
| pb7 wrote:
| >Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than
| selling loss leader hardware.
|
| Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an
| entirely different game than having paid-for-products but
| instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads
| machine.
|
| >But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up
| completely?
|
| I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More
| or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's
| not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example,
| is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned.
|
| I don't think every company needs to have the same _type_
| of business model. Google became popular because it made
| really great products that were all free* which increased
| adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would
| have never gotten popular if they had charged for it
| right away. I 'm not convinced there's a single right
| path.
|
| >it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively
| little Android makes in profit
|
| It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how
| Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways,
| not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for
| making money from the Play Store.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing
| an entirely different game than having paid-for-products
| but instead funneling products into the money-printing
| Ads machine.
|
| Look at the diversity of profitable lines that Amazon,
| Apple and Microsoft have gone into over the last two
| decades and compare to the number of failed attempts that
| Google had at trying to diversify.
|
| I'm sure Oracle was counting Ad revenue coming from
| Android when calculating profits.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| It's less size and more lack of competition. As dominant
| as the companies you listed are, none of them completely
| capture a market to the degree that Google does with
| search and ads.
|
| Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going
| away can definitely be a curse.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Google's "market" isn't search, it's "selling ads" and
| capturing attention (mostly YouTube). Google is under
| assault in ad selling by Facebook who knows more about
| you and Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS) who knows
| your buying habits.
|
| You also can't block Amazon and Facebook ads.
|
| On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming
| more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)
| pb7 wrote:
| You know this is not a good take, right? This is like
| saying Amazon's market isn't e-commerce, it's taking
| payments.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Amazon makes most of its profits from AWS. It's also
| making plenty of money these days from advertising.
|
| Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money
| for?
|
| When I was working for B2B companies, our "customers"
| were the IT department and the companies. Our customers
| weren't the end users. We tried our best to make the
| software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the
| CxOs and made sure they were happy.
|
| In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince
| the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and
| services.
| pb7 wrote:
| >In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince
| the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and
| services.
|
| Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the
| products and continue using them, so that ads can be
| shown, and maybe even _despite_ ads being shown.
|
| I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for
| products even here on HN where the average user probably
| makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads
| than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me
| that ads are actually a pretty good business model
| because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less
| wealthy people definitely won't.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Does anyone love Google search or does it just suck less
| than the alternative?
|
| Search for "bicycles" on Google with Ad blockers turned
| off. How do you like the experience?
| bongoman37 wrote:
| meltyness wrote:
| Once it is realized the ads are mostly harmful this is
| inevitable
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything
| successful beside search.
|
| Google experiments constantly and shuts down bad experiments.
|
| Experiments that probably aren't going anywhere for a long
| time:
|
| 1. Gmail
|
| 2. Maps (acquisition, but did not have a web interface and
| was not remotely popular prior)
|
| 3. Android (literally bought before the first launched
| devices)
|
| 4. Play Store
|
| 5. Cloud
|
| 6. Google Pay / Wallet
|
| Most of these businesses are larger than most public
| companies in the world...
|
| Google will likely continue to experiment. People should
| think of Google's new products as startups - because that's
| exactly how Google thinks of them.
|
| Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake
| when their 1-2 years old.
|
| Google does a very good job of distancing the Google and
| Android brands from things like Stadia.
|
| All of us on here know Google owned Stadia. We're also all
| smart enough to know that we can keep using Gmail & YouTube
| without worrying about Google shutting them down.
| pb7 wrote:
| Google Drive (2012) and Google Photos (2015).
| avrionov wrote:
| Google Chrome the most popular browser in the world. Google
| Workspace (Docs, Sheets) more than 1B users
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done
| anything successful beside search.
|
| That is a total strawman. I think most people know Google
| has done other successful products, especially Gmail and
| Android.
|
| > Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like
| Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.
|
| Actually, I think the opposite may be true. A startup like
| Snowflake has _one_ business, and they are all focused on
| that business. They will go through hell and highwater to
| make that business successful. I think the biggest risk
| with a company like Snowflake is not folks worried that
| they 'll fold, but worried that they'll get acquired and
| their "goodness" sucked out (see Figma).
|
| With Google, though, basically nearly _everything_ besides
| ads is an afterthought. Nobody trusts them anymore to keep
| things around. Which has the ironic effect of making some
| of their "experiments" invalid, because if all potential
| customers _know_ it 's an experiment that may get killed at
| the whim of whomever got promoted, they'll be less likely
| to try it in the first place.
|
| I'm not a Google hater. I'm a big fan of GCP, and also a
| big fan of Firebase. I do get nervous, though, when I see
| some simple, straightforward problems that languish for
| literally years because apparently they're not "sexy"
| enough to fix. Case in point, Firebase Auth (an Auth as a
| Service platform) _still_ only supports SMS as a second
| factor for login, despite the fact that Google itself
| recommends against using SMS as a second factor. People
| have been complaining about this for literally years, yet
| it 's crickets from Google/Firebase teams.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done
| anything successful beside search.
|
| I don't even think that search is very successful. Pagerank
| was successful, and was also pretty quickly made obsolete.
| They still own search because their competitors died as
| they replaced the verb "search" with their brand, and then
| created a browser to funnel people into search. Search is
| only important because of ads. And buying Youtube after
| failing with Google Video, in order to show more ads. So it
| all boils down to buying Doubleclick, building a browser,
| and buying a popular video site for me. Android is
| certainly key in this too, but its key was somewhat in
| funneling people into Google's ads, but mostly preventing
| Apple or some FOSS upstart from getting between users and
| Google's ads.
|
| Google was successful at being a significantly better
| search engine for a very short time. It took the money it
| made and bought the largest ad company. Then it vertically
| integrated the entire industry from OS to final purchase
| (with varying degrees of success) to funnel people into its
| ads.
|
| The only skill that Google has is taking advantage of and
| creating monopoly positions, not technology.
|
| edit: Oddly, I think that their greatest success might have
| been to covertly corrupt Firefox. Without that, Chrome
| might have ended up a largely USA-locked thing like the
| iPhone is. Although releasing a brutally locked down and
| closed mobile OS masquerading as an FOSS upstart is a close
| second.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Weren't Gmail, Maps (Keyhole), Android all acquisitions?
| avrionov wrote:
| GMail was internal project.
| jenny91 wrote:
| Gmail was a 20% project apparently.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| YouTube..
| travismark wrote:
| an acquisition
| pb7 wrote:
| An acquisition in its infancy.
|
| Acquisitions happen all the time and later get turned
| down when they don't flourish. Many stories get posted
| often with negative sentiment right here on HN.
| seizethegdgap wrote:
| | 6. Google Pay / Wallet
|
| Since Google Wallet launched in 2011, they added a physical
| card, replaced that card with Android Pay, dropped NFC and
| limited it to Android Pay, merged Google Wallet and Android
| Pay into Google Pay, launched Tez in India and then
| rebranded that to Google Pay (which was an entirely
| different app than the first Google Pay), then rebranded
| the first Google Pay as Google Wallet, while people in
| India still use their Google Pay app.
|
| I think. I still can't make sense of it.
|
| Imagine being a store/vendor and trying to make sense of
| which app your POS supports while just trying to run your
| business, what an absolute nightmare.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_Send
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wallet
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_(mobile_app)
|
| https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pay-becomes-google-
| wall...
| kibibyte wrote:
| I can provide a little bit of insight into the Google Pay
| shenanigans, though I didn't work there or interact with
| anyone there.
|
| The initial Google Wallet launch irked the card networks
| because they presented their own proxy card rather than a
| card that clearly advertised the card issuer and the
| network. (Oh boy do they care a lot about branding...)
|
| I assume they dropped NFC initially because it was done
| with the first generation tech that was very insecure and
| simply transmitted card numbers in the clear. Today's
| contactless tech is all EMV based, and also needs to
| depend on a Secure Enclave chip to be blessed by PCI;
| that might explain why they cut off support for a number
| of devices. This happened around the time Apple Pay came
| into the scene.
|
| The rebranding and all that though, well, that's Google.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > 1. Gmail
|
| 2004
|
| > 2. Maps
|
| 2005
|
| > 3. Android
|
| 2008
|
| > 4. Play Store
|
| Elementary component of the Android business, but well:
| also 2008
|
| > 5. Cloud
|
| 2008 (also)
|
| > 6. Google Pay / Wallet
|
| A requirement for Play Store, but relaunch as general
| payment solution: 2011
|
| Now the current year is 2022. And yes, they did
| improvements here and there and in cloud launched more
| services, but anything big new, with a chance of survival?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| worse when you realize that Maps and Android were both
| acquisitions, Google hasn't had a genuine home grown win
| in almost 20 years
| pb7 wrote:
| Google Drive (2012) and Google Photos (2015), both with
| >1B users.
| hbrn wrote:
| This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google
| practices because Google can't be wrong.
|
| My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn
| anything, be it product, management or programming. You will
| only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is
| only applicable at Google.
|
| It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there
| probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But few
| will claim that let's say Norway will be better off
| implementing China's political system.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's easy to see from the outside that Google is
| incompetent when it comes to overall product and program
| management.
|
| Since this is a technical audience, I guess I should
| clarify that "program management" doesn't refer to software
| development
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management
| samstave wrote:
| This.
|
| And when you refer to pm-Ing in this way I'm reminded of
| the guy in San Francisco that did all the management for
| a huge eve online guild and he didn't play the game he
| managed all their affects in a spreadsheet and whatever
| they were using to chat.... And he was making a boatload
| of human money a month...
|
| I wonder where he is now...
| moandcompany wrote:
| As a Xoogler, Google is an "engineering-first" company
| and in practice doesn't consider "product/program
| management" to be part of engineering. Ironically, the
| origin of formal methods used in program management come
| from operations research and engineering management --
| they are part of engineering, but not seen that way at
| Google.
|
| Engineering leadership is not judged for their acumen in
| these areas, as they are separate job ladders, and thus
| to no surprise there is little cultivation of this
| knowledge or skill.
| donalhunt wrote:
| Before ~ 2007, Google didn't believe in project managers.
| There were actually no project managers roles (even
| though some people were probably doing considerable
| amounts of project management) and the expectation was
| that engineers would know enough to structure efforts and
| timelines.
|
| That evolved into a situation where program managers
| (mostly - programs have a sense of scale right??) exist
| in most orgs and are critical to keep things aligned.
| There were (are still?) even internal conferences just
| for program managers.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The only BigTech company that I've worked for is Amazon
| and there are plenty of articles about how features and
| products get approved at Amazon.
|
| How does this even happen at any company that isn't a
| conglomerate based on acquisitions?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-
| allo...
| huevosabio wrote:
| It's more like learning to government from Saudi Arabia or
| another gulf country.
|
| The money printing machine obliterates all economic
| feedback loops.
| samstave wrote:
| And the fact that it seems literally nobody at google is
| even looking at said loops.
|
| But you know what is needed : is some whistleblower from
| within google to tell us how the decisions are made for
| shutting down services...
|
| And btw I don't even know what stadia is!
| hbrn wrote:
| Looking at feedback loops means being honest with
| yourself and accepting you don't know everything. And for
| most people that's hard to admit. Surely if you got into
| Google you know almost everything. You just need a little
| bit of money to execute.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It's a good place to learn real engineering. They know how
| to build systems. There are some of the best engineering
| minds on the planet in there.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Only if you very narrowly define real engineering.
|
| Google, collectively, may be among the best (I'm not
| hazarding an opinion) at solving technical problems.
|
| I, however, expect good engineers to help with product
| vision, understanding and addressing customer pain
| points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be
| effective at communication and helping manage upwards to
| achieve those ends. Somewhere, Google engineers are
| dropping the ball there, or are so detached from those
| problems that their abilities in those skills are
| untested.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. I'm just trying to discern between
| building a distributed database system with 5 9's and
| writing a crud app I guess. I agree "real" isn't the
| right term for that difference, I don't know what is.
| hbrn wrote:
| Here's a counterintuitive piece of wisdom: building both
| is equally hard.
|
| Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most
| people are not even capable of doing marathons.
|
| But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than
| winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because
| of harsh competition.
|
| When you're building products, your goal is not _run_.
| Your goal is to _win_.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Nah, it's not. Consultants pump out CRUD apps with 4th
| rate engineers left and right.
|
| About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with
| Spanner.
|
| I'm just talking about engineering. I'm not talking about
| building products which get market acceptance, which is a
| lot more than engineering, and might be your point.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| some of the most valuable companies on earth are "just
| CRUD apps", which was the point of the comment above.
| Knowing what to build is important, which google fails at
| in most cases. Google has incredible engineers working on
| stupid projects
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _I, however, expect good engineers to help with
| product vision, understanding and addressing customer
| pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially,
| be effective at communication and helping manage upwards
| to achieve those ends._ "
|
| Not necessarily. FAANGs have an army of
| product/project/program managers, market researchers, and
| other analysts and experts to handle product vision, etc.
| for the engineering team. That's the big advantage of
| being a megacorporation: they can afford the overhead of
| having their employees be narrowly focused specialists.
|
| (It's also why one sometimes see people who leave FAANGs
| stumble when they join a startup; they're used to having
| all that infrastructure supporting them and have to
| adjust to an environment where it isn't there.)
| hbrn wrote:
| And yet those minds managed to build the most hated
| frontend framework. Not just bad or mediocre. The most
| hated one.
|
| Now, I'm not denying they are super smart. But you need a
| mix of book smart and street smart to be successful.
| Google seems to only focus on books. They are incredible
| at solving problems. But they suck at picking which
| problems to solve.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| A front-end framework isn't exactly the kind of thing the
| engineers I'm talking about work on... there are 10's of
| thousands of engineers at Google. A good number of them
| aren't building systems per se. But if you want to learn
| how to build systems, some folks in there are crazy good.
| hbrn wrote:
| Might be a bit anecdotal, but I actually hired ex-
| Googlers for two different startups in the past. I would
| be hesitant to do it again.
|
| They can indeed be good at building complex systems.
|
| But when we needed simple systems, they would still build
| complex systems.
|
| When we needed to ship product, they would still build
| complex systems.
|
| Twice I had the experience where an ex-Googler would
| promise to rewrite a piece of software from scratch
| because it had a bad architecture, only to quit/get fired
| few months later (obviously the big rewrite was not
| finished by then).
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yup, I believe it.
| pb7 wrote:
| Which framework are you talking about?
| hbrn wrote:
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-
| most-...
| akmarinov wrote:
| Come on, Flutter's not that bad...
| freeopinion wrote:
| It's curious to me that there hasn't been an evolution in re-
| exit strategies. You want to get bought by Google, then sold
| by Google. Why don't we hear about something getting sold off
| by Google instead of just shut down? Is it just a given that
| if Google can't make it work, nobody can?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| There is one case: Google acquired Keyhole (Google Earth),
| John Hanke then built Ingress/Niantic which is a spunoff
| company (where Google afaik still holds some shares) doing
| quite well with PokemonGo it seems (while they had to stop
| their Catan project and killed off their Harry Potter game)
| jsnell wrote:
| A couple of others: Boston Dynamics. Motorola.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Dependencies on google-only stack plus many of the things
| they build aren't actually financially viable.
| layer8 wrote:
| Selling it off incurs the risk of strengthening a potential
| competitor. Also, in many cases at least half of the value
| is in the team of developers, which probably don't want
| leave Google and which conversely Google doesn't want to
| lose.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| It also signals to the would-be customers of their
| _other_ products that the service they want to sign for
| has a chance of surviving. At this stage I wouldn 't
| touch any new Google service.
| murderfs wrote:
| It's practically impossible to spin stuff out of Google
| because of interdependencies with the rest of google3 (the
| monorepo), not to mention assumptions about infrastructure.
| You might as well completely rebuild the entire thing from
| scratch.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Will there ever be a google4?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| No. The google3 path itself is baked into so many things
| that it would be a monumental task to move. There was an
| attempt in maybe 2010 or so but it was quickly abandoned.
| Things are 1000x worse now.
|
| What Google does now is just not rev the version in any
| repo paths. This is true of several projects that
| previously had versions included in the path. Now all
| versioning is handled separately.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| The infrastructure problem is funny because this wouldn't
| be a problem if Google would use GCP by themselves. They
| should also be smart enough to create an export function
| for google3.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| There's a fun problem with this.
|
| No other company in the world has workloads that match
| Google's. So there are two options. You can spend a
| shitload of money making GCP actually work for the
| ridiculous needs of google3 applications and then
| actually get everybody to use GCP rather that using borg
| directly or you can not spend that money building all the
| infrastructure to do things that borg already does and
| has zero external customers.
|
| Turns out the latter is attractive.
| weinzierl wrote:
| In that sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes
| the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total
| failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline
| ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the
| attention span of three year old toddler.
| booi wrote:
| Stadia is 2 years and 10 months old hah
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| And it's that property that means Microsoft always has an
| edge with its b2b customers.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google
| is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products.
|
| The thing with x amount of products failing is true. Doesn't
| matter if you're an indie hacker or Google. It's been shown
| by giant after giant releasing products and them failing.
| Doesn't matter what industry they're in either. That's why so
| many corporations just buy new products lines. They get a
| product that is in demand.
|
| That's why it made sense for Adobe to buy Figma. Building a
| competitor would have been probably rather expensive and
| risky. Where instead they just buy it and have the product
| and the market share.
|
| why Amazon has been buying products like Ring and the robot
| hover. They're in demand and Amazon just needs to put some
| cash behind it and it's going to generate tons more cash.
|
| If you're wanting to build the next big thing, you've got to
| try building lots of things until one catches off.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Meh. There is a reason you don't hear about MS shutting
| down services, or Apple, or Facebook... Failing or not, you
| can still pivot them until they succeed. It is just Google
| that is shutting down everything that doesn't grow huge
| fast.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Facebook hasn't really created any new products have
| they?
|
| MS shut down products all the time.
|
| And Apple? They are very good at hiding their failures.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Yup, he was promoted to VP before moving on to Fitbit.
| timcavel wrote:
| enumjorge wrote:
| The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue
| for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any
| significant moves to improve this.
|
| Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as
| a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be
| solving existing issues related to culture and incentives.
| And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly
| see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago.
| I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in
| though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest
| companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me
| what that is.
| nimbius wrote:
| >Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals
| as a CEO are?
|
| Fighting a growing wave of calls from all political sides
| to regulate Alphabet and Google in the US, and paying an
| endless stack of compliance fines to the EU who already
| regulate Google and Alphabet.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It's not only fighting them, but also forming them: The
| "right" regulation can become an entry barrier for
| competitors.
| antipaul wrote:
| Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for
| companies that are decently strong and have stable growth.
|
| I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up.
|
| In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't
| someone else there who would screw up more.
|
| They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the
| flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The
| explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth
| stable".
|
| There is no requirement about "solving existing issues"
| because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to
| land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough"
| and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose
| everything.
|
| Why this profile for CEOs?
|
| These days, everything is amplified and the smallest
| mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already
| magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start
| to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad
| attention.
|
| If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything
| up".
|
| That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to
| Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1]
|
| The danger could be that the companies may become
| complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that
| is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the
| JD) - and they buy out any competitors that get too
| haughty, as needed.
|
| [1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a
| founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no
| matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ),
| he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's
| there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones,
| such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about
| culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also
| doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which
| seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Nonsense. Apple and Microsoft are both objectively
| thriving under their respective current CEOs, who have
| both made some tough calls and been responsible for
| important new products, and both now have sufficient road
| behind them that we can believe in their ability to call
| shots for the long term to at least some degree. These
| companies are not just treading water.
|
| I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone outside
| Facebook has much respect for Zuck in terms of
| decisionmaking for products or anything else in
| particular. This may look different to a Facebook
| employee, of course.
| lovich wrote:
| Zuck is still there because he didn't give up control.
| These companies weren't wrested from their founders
| grasp, they were sold
| [deleted]
| ginger2016 wrote:
| I don't understand why engineers in this forum argue
| against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for
| workers, you want successful companies like Google and
| Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of
| failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds
| expertise.
|
| Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using
| that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.
| rurp wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy. I think most would prefer a
| third path where Google invests in projects it actually
| believes in and commits to for longer than the lifespan
| of a fruit fly.
|
| Projects contantly being half-assed and rug pulled aren't
| good for users or the developers being bounced around
| between them.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Stadia wasn't something that excites engineers in the
| first place. It only looks genius if you've not had prior
| experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.
| noirbot wrote:
| I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia
| team 2 years before it was announced because working on
| it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be
| "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and
| backing of Google behind it.
| dekhn wrote:
| And I know somebody who had been a 15 year Google
| employee who could choose to work any team decided to
| make it his new priority. This is somebody who could have
| worked on any platforms project they wanted. They left
| Google a couple years after it launched, I imagine
| probably at seeing their hard work go nowhere.
| datavirtue wrote:
| "scale and backing?"
|
| The just ended it because it didn't scale.
| bigiain wrote:
| I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature
| scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they'd
| spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000
| games, before doing the engineering to support a billion
| users, they may have actually needed that scalability
| (and might have become at least a small cash cow
| alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden
| goose)?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was
| genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| On the other hand, Google still just prints money with ads.
| Everything else is just a talent retention program.
|
| 'Success hides all problems', but exactly what _real_
| problems does Google have making money?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The fact that it can't keep doing it forever, and its
| investors expect that if Google is going to keep
| expanding its headcount and keep spending tons of money
| that it will produce results.
|
| Nobody would mind if Google _just_ printed money with
| ads. That is what the trade desk basically does (TTD),
| and it 's a comparatively very small company. Google
| could be the most profitable company per employee in
| history if it wanted to, and it wouldn't lose anything
| from its core money-making functions. Instead, Google
| wanted to build a grand technology empire.
|
| If you're going to act like a rockstar, when the lights
| come on, you better be dancing up on the stage. The
| lights are turning on right now, and I don't think anyone
| sees anyone dancing.
| itstomkent wrote:
| I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic
| lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many
| of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of
| the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs
| want to work on new and exciting shit, so google
| continuously mints projects and kills them off when they
| are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working
| as intended.
| ksec wrote:
| >Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals
| as a CEO are?
|
| The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to
| earn as much money as possible for themselves while they
| are at it.
|
| It is funny I was extremely sceptical but I remember all
| the hype around Sundar Pichai becoming CEO and how it would
| improve Google. Repeating something similar to what Satya
| Nadella did to Microsoft. And it wasn't media / VC or
| submarine PR article hype, it was real hype on HN, by
| Silicon Valley fellows. And Google wasn't considered "evil"
| back then, even though nothing much has changed, only the
| perception of the public.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| > The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO,
| to earn as much money as possible for themselves while
| they are at it.
|
| Sure, but you don't get a company working in concert or
| particularly well if all you have is "go make money"
| chihuahua wrote:
| The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company
| making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is
| earning as much money for himself (into his own bank
| account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if
| the company is working in concert etc. when Google can
| coast on ad revenue for many years.
|
| 1. Get stock grants 2. Sell it as soon as it vests 3.
| Apres moi le deluge.
| lupire wrote:
| Sundar Pichai is like (the Hamilton version of) Aaron
| Burr. He rose to the top by not making noise and survived
| to be last man standing as the most inoffensive
| nonthreatening choice.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > nothing much has changed, only the perception of the
| public.
|
| I would say things have changed: directly in google
| services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube,
| useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they
| forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales
| on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the
| internet for everyone else too.
| tektekX wrote:
| At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten
| significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are
| completely AI-generated text, with my search query just
| rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's
| disappointing.
| FreakLegion wrote:
| You'll find plenty of people who support every side of
| every issue here. You'll also find plenty of people who
| call out the people who support $BAD_SIDE of an issue as
| "classic HN" and "Silicon Valley folly". In this case, as
| in others, it's all in your head.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals
| as a CEO are?
|
| His primary job is to keep the FTC at bay.
| kodah wrote:
| imo, your eye is on the wrong ball. Google died when it's
| founders moved their attention to Alphabet. Google has
| moved from a bespoke kitchen to the catering kitchen that
| keeps the lights on for Alphabet while they build a
| strategy.
| lupire wrote:
| The founders retired in all but name only almost 10 years
| ago.
| usrusr wrote:
| But how much "alphabet" is there still left, other than
| Google and YouTube? In hindsight it almost seems as if
| alphabet was deliberately set up as a pasture for the
| various doomed "moonshots" to die more quietly, with less
| impact on the main brand.
| ghaff wrote:
| What moonshot--at least that is known about--is possibly
| transformative at Alphabet/Google scale? Waymo seems
| increasingly unlikely both in terms of time-scale and
| differentiation in a crowded field. And what else is
| there?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Loon could have made them the ISP for the developing
| world.
| pb7 wrote:
| Waymo is very far ahead of the competition. It may be
| hard to compare given all the fly-by-night competitors
| but it has had many more years in development and the
| result is more dependable.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with
| no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate
| anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of
| Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else.
| Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming
| platform that they stopped making games.
|
| These companies become victims of their own successes and
| eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed
| upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all
| the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid
| early employees who have worked on core services for
| decades.
|
| Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they
| don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time
| for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same
| problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why
| enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud
| services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small
| core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will
| decorate their resumes for their next jobs.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes
| so much money that it kills everything else.
|
| $15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to
| something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google
| spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.
| mrazomor wrote:
| My impression is that Google actively tries to hedge.
| They are aware of the fragility of the ads business.
|
| But it's difficult to set up a business when your
| baseline is "Google Ads".
|
| I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how
| it went wrong.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| People only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by
| Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better
| from the perspectives of API stability, customer support,
| and third party support, aka the primary things cloud
| customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they
| are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is
| nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google
| invented most modern cloud technology.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Azure has been around for > 10 years. If they're planning
| on crushing GCP then they're taking their sweet time
| about it.
| oefnak wrote:
| Their cloud is better, or at least I like their interface
| better, but how do you know they won't just shut it off?
| Azure or Amazon are safer choices.
| [deleted]
| pas wrote:
| they won't, it makes a lot of money, it's b2b, etc.
|
| gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees.
|
| still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a
| dangerous savant at this point.
| antonymy wrote:
| Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious
| competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out
| something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any
| rush since their core business is virtually unassailable
| at this point.
|
| They have less to fear about "professional executives"
| worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly
| traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned.
| It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of
| the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their
| way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the
| company from on high, or oust its historic leadership.
| Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't
| protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of
| competition.
| giobox wrote:
| Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology
| is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some
| point he presumably will want to sell or die.
|
| Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that
| point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the
| biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves
| their products/services today.
|
| I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a
| Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind,
| given their current appetites.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a
| Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind,
| given their current appetites.
|
| This is absolutely what will happen.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| >... World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills
| everything else
|
| This fact reminds me of the resource curse.
| andybak wrote:
| > Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming
| platform that they stopped making games.
|
| The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one
| of the truly great games made for VR (which they
| pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not
| writing off Valve entirely.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| Alyx was the result of an acquisition (campo santo) and
| it killed their work a non-franchise game "Valley of the
| Gods" after "firewatch".
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Citation needed. Wikipedia at least says that they were
| acquired while Alyx was in development and that they just
| joined the overall dev team.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Both are nice, but very niche.
|
| Now if they do Half Life 3 - that'll be a mainstream
| blockbuster, but they won't, as they're not the company
| that can pull that off anymore.
| giobox wrote:
| VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its
| promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be
| being reflected in impressive sales.
|
| I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of
| Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC
| games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the
| implementation such as the store experience is already
| leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on
| the Switch.
|
| When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED
| display and more performance and battery life, its going
| to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to
| failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures
| came Proton which has been directly responsible for the
| Deck concept working so successfully.
| balefrost wrote:
| It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or
| simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their
| investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge
| against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled
| garden, like iOS.
|
| On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are
| unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued.
| Secondhand prices are through the roof.
| EricE wrote:
| >Secondhand prices are through the roof.
|
| Really? I never use mine - guess I'll have to look at
| selling it!
| giobox wrote:
| I'd argue this to be a pretty dated take on Valve's
| strategy, personally. Gabe stated it was a hedge over 10
| years ago, in response to the risk of Windows 8 moving to
| mandatory Microsoft Store:
|
| > https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/26/window
| s-8-i...
|
| Obviously none of that came to pass, we are two more
| Windows releases on and much has changed since. It is
| serendipitous the tech built is so great for delivering a
| portable experience - I think Valve's actions and words
| demonstrate it to be far more committed to the Deck than
| prior efforts, I don't see this as hedging bets. And why
| wouldn't they? At this stage they appear to have a hit
| product on their hands.
|
| In 2022, Microsoft and Valve have strategic partnerships
| too, which certainly wasn't the case in 2012:
|
| > https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645250/microsoft-
| xbox-g...
|
| > https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22952086/valve-
| microsoft-...
|
| > https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/25/22550103/microsoft-
| new-wi...
| goosedragons wrote:
| After having a Steam Deck for a bit I really really hope
| either Valve or some other decent controller company like
| 8bitdo makes a controller with the same style of setup.
| The dual haptic trackpads+paddle buttons combined with
| the customizability is incredible. To me it is easily the
| biggest leap in controller tech since the analog stick
| with the N64.
|
| I've never used the original Steam Controller and I still
| think the dual analog stick setup is better for some
| games but having the trackpads is good for many others.
| zepppotemkin wrote:
| They are still pulling off big projects and pivoting well
| though though steam proton/steamdeck which pivoted from
| the initial failures of the steambox push
|
| they may not really be in the AAA game business as much
| but I'm not sure that's a bad thing
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > as they're not the company that can pull that off
| anymore.
|
| No company could ever pull off Half Life 3. This game is
| hyped to death before it's even announced and everyone
| would come in with sky-high expectations. To make matters
| worse, everyone would expect that game to be something
| different and it would be impossible to make even just
| half of the players happy. There's no point in creating a
| Half Life 3, it's a guaranteed disappointment.
| stickfigure wrote:
| They could just take the old game engine as-is, give it a
| new plot and art, and I would beg them to take my money.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And this is how you end with "Jaws 19: This Time It's
| REALLY REALLY Personal".
| cmsj wrote:
| Always leave the audience wanting more.
| almenon wrote:
| Nitpick: niche, sure, but the deck isn't very niche. The
| mobile gaming market is a established market open to all
| sorts of gamers.
|
| I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.
| hintymad wrote:
| Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill
| your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it
| requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to
| execute such killing successfully.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| His goal is to keep the peace. And he's good at it. It's a
| little bit "game of thrones" in there.
| bigiain wrote:
| You you're saying he's Tyrion Lannister? That sorta
| checks out...
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Lol no no, I think Tyrion drinks a lot more than
| Sundar... and Sundar certainly doesn't seem like the
| womanizing type either. But hey, I didn't know him
| personally so who knows.
| oofbey wrote:
| > Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals
| as a CEO are?
|
| I'd say he's trying not to be remembered as the "Steve
| Ballmer" of Google. You know - that second-run CEO who
| drove the company into the ground while keeping the wall
| street numbers looking good. Cuz that's exactly where he's
| heading right now.
|
| I think he knows he needs to fundamentally change the
| culture of the company. He's been making public statements
| as such. He knows it's a problem that Googlers have been
| treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all
| the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero
| accountability for getting anything done. And despite this
| obvious rot, most of the world (like everybody here who
| dreams of a google job) still reveres Google as an idyllic
| place to work. Which makes it all the harder for the
| company to admit to itself that anything is wrong.
|
| Cultural change is really hard. And it's not at all clear
| that he's got what it takes to do it successfully. Googlers
| are so pampered that any attempt to push them out of their
| comfort zone is going to get serious pushback. I say this
| as a former googler. There was a hilarious post on HN not
| long ago which I can't find where a googler said something
| to the effect of "no way in hell my manager is gonna make
| me work."
|
| The entire company is built around solving HARD problems,
| not USEFUL problems. Obviously they've pulled off a lot of
| truly amazing things, but that difference is pretty
| important when your company's entire revenue stream is
| still coming from key insights made in the late 1990s. To
| me it's clear they need to change their promotion criteria,
| which solidifies this and drives so much of people's energy
| and bad patterns. But the arrogance built into the culture
| of "solving the world's hardest problems" means that any
| changes there are likely to insult the fragile egos of all
| those snowflakes and cause them to go on strike or make the
| good ones just leave.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with
| free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain
| about, with zero accountability for getting anything done
|
| As a user, and customer of some Google services, I don't
| care about that. They should give a pink unicorn to each
| Googler if they want to. These are not relevant to me, as
| the user.
|
| What I care about is the stuff that I am using not
| getting deprecated on my face because some mba thinks
| that it is not making enough gobs of cash and they should
| shut it down and do something else that will make more
| gobs of cash.
|
| Cherishing and building up user trust. That's what is
| missing from Google. And that's not the engineers' fault.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| He structured it as Alphabet. As in 26 different
| companies.
|
| Google can't VC new projects with a 50 billion to play
| with in excess/above line revenue to fund them a year?
|
| How does google not have self driving car revenue? They
| should have highway driving (as in trucks on
| superhighways) solved 10 years ago and been rolling in
| money.
|
| How does google not have a competitive IaaS offering? How
| does google not have THREE competitive IaaS offerings?
| Buy one or two, and have them compete against each other
| internally and externally.
|
| Why doesn't google have a competitive Desktop OS based on
| some combination of Linux / Android / Chrome and Macbook
| pro level hardware?
|
| Their AI products are all dystopian.
|
| ChatsChatsChatsChatsChatsChats.
|
| Why didn't they buy Java/Sun. Stupid. Why don't they buy
| Keybase? Actually don't then the servers will be shut
| down.
|
| Silicon Valley is too woke? Start new branches.
|
| What is the biggest recent success of Google? Chrome. Why
| not repeat that a dozen times over? Take important Open
| Source software, and make it good, and don't make it
| utterly dystopian until 10 years later. Linux Desktop?
| Open Office? WINE? Steam clone on Linux?
|
| You know, why not have a hardware division that can
| deliver? For IoT, Google Glasses, an actual decent phone,
| self driving sensors.
|
| Be good at software. Be good at hardware.
|
| What a clown show.
| ktzar wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. The problem in Google started as
| soon as it went public. Then "Don't be evil" went through
| the window and it's all a short-sighted vision driven by
| making as much money as possible for investors and pay
| dividends.
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| When was there last big win?
| ok_coo wrote:
| Android and Chrome... so it looks like around 2008-2009?
| tmpz22 wrote:
| The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders.
| There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that.
| I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of
| related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will
| continue to drive value to those.
|
| If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the
| incentives were never for you in the first place.
| hintymad wrote:
| I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without
| Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the
| 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1.
| Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to
| ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks
| to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated
| as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw
| people who were not necessarily effective get promoted
| fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying
| the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as
| the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all
| cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in
| Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a
| team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.
| Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and
| impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice
| team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3.
| Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so
| large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and
| complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds
| of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end,
| gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.
|
| In other words, people are culture. When a company grows
| large, the culture regresses to the mean.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he
| is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his
| underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets
| questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful,"
| everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole
| thing blows over. That does not incentivize
| responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar
| tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but
| in doing so, he loses control.
|
| There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the
| man couldn't say either:
|
| * "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the
| buildings" or
|
| * "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in
| through the same lobbies"
|
| He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-
| only door access for a while until it blew over.
|
| This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much
| lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he
| couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to
| provide an opinion about _anything_ to the wider group of
| Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they
| can do stupid shit and work against each other without
| accountability.
| cosmotron wrote:
| Why would VPs be interested in using different building
| entrances?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The lobbies get very crowded around 9 and 5, and so do
| the elevators near them.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Can't have the executives possibly smelling the rabble.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| All executives exit effectively immediately!
| stoltzmann wrote:
| At some offices, the exit only doors are in significantly
| more convenient locations.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I remember when Sundar became CEO the first thing he did
| was hole himself up in 2000 Amphitheatre Pkwy and block
| access to all Google staff not in that building. The next
| thing he did was get bullied by the board and their CFO,
| but I digress.
| ikiris wrote:
| The buildings were designed for much more open access
| prior to security policy changes that made most of the
| useful paths exit only.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that
| he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his
| underlings know it.
|
| What?? Sundar is the CEO. All the buck stops with him.
| Why are you pretending as if he doesn't have agency? The
| problem here is his actions and/or lack thereof, not
| people under him doing stupid things and he's somehow the
| victim. He gets paid the big bucks to lead.
| dlp211 wrote:
| That is what the person is saying. I'm not sure what you
| are questioning here. Sundar has agency and authority and
| he refuses to use it. This enables his underlings to have
| free reign.
| scarface74 wrote:
| No manager who leads in demand software engineers will
| ever be able to change anything unless their reports
| believe in the vision. The minute things don't go their
| way, we can just get another job,
|
| It's really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the
| current success of the company to have any type of
| credibility with employees.
|
| Let's look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.
|
| - Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current
| success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from
| the time it was broke until today.
|
| - Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division
| from its "real" founding until he became CEO.
|
| - Facebook - still founder led
|
| - Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision
| for what the "new MS" should look like - completely
| different than "Windows Everywhere"
| tektekX wrote:
| There's some bizarre PR campaign going on to try and
| brand Sundar as the next Steve Jobs: lots of the photos
| of him looking thoughtful with steepled hands overlaid
| with anodyne quotes about technology or AI. It's unclear
| to me if he's much more than a tech billionaire by luck.
|
| No kind of strategy is ever communicated to employees,
| just defensive + responsive TGIF responses. Truly
| bizarre.
| oogetyboogety wrote:
| That's funny. Yes, for me this bizarre PR campaign shows
| up as promoted content when I scroll through my Google
| news feed.
| vosper wrote:
| > The only metric that most managers in Google seems to
| be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more
| "successful" a manager will likely to be.
|
| I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies.
| And especially managers seeking to make their way up the
| hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their
| teams.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in
| terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was
| still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's
| "corner office". A manager was on track to get their
| Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on
| iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of
| badge readers. This continued for a few years after the
| iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were
| still not fully integrated.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers
| influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost
| never confidential as opposed to other business metrics.
| "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be
| debated about.
| unity1001 wrote:
| It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's
| the problem. Or engineering.
|
| It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the
| problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards
| incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone
| works at Google - like everyone works in a large
| organization with ample funding so that they can take
| time to go through deprecation and backwards-
| incompatibility hooks.
|
| Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So
| when something is deprecated on their face out of the
| blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses,
| their very own personas.
|
| So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on
| Google.
| z9znz wrote:
| > looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the
| problem
|
| I think this has always been the case for Google. It just
| so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do
| happens to align with what's good for users. But when it
| doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't
| appear to be concerned for the impact on users.
|
| Obviously this applies to the whole automated
| moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk
| for years.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > The only metric that matters to most managers in Google
| seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team,
| the more "successful" a manager will likely to be
|
| sounds like... bullshit jobs? [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| zepppotemkin wrote:
| Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash
| these days it's reflected in their hiring where they
| don't even know where they want to place people half the
| time
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third
| place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of
| these have made progress, but not in a way that actually
| makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you,
| there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product
| vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep
| building the handful of actually popular products we've had
| for ages."
|
| It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business
| the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem
| like there's a clear idea here.
| tomp wrote:
| "GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always
| working on bringing more great servers to the platform."
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Unlike Stadia, I do actually think that killing GCP would
| destroy the company. So I don't expect the same end
| outcome.
| dekhn wrote:
| Right, they're trapped in a terrible position where it's
| sucking the company dry of its profits while also being
| necessary to continue or they will lose all credibility
| with enterprise and developers forever. That said, they
| could shut down Verily and save some $1B/year.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The thing that is bizarre to me is that Google has
| _absolute shitloads of money_. 120B+ in the bank.
| Megabillions in profit each quarter. Like, they could
| _buy Nintendo_ for less than half of their cash on hand.
|
| I understand that the market demands infinite growth but
| internally it feels like horseshit to see the ridiculous
| numbers and also get told that basically nothing is high
| priority enough to get funded.
| lmm wrote:
| Nothing is high priority enough to get funded _because_
| they have a firehose of money coming out of ads, compared
| to which nothing looks like a good enough opportunity.
| jsnell wrote:
| Cloud's losses ($1.8B in H1) are about 4% of the
| operating income of the money-making parts ($46B in the
| same timeframe). Sure, a billion here and a billion
| there, pretty soon you're talking real money. But it's
| hardly "sucking the company dry of its profits".
| xerox13ster wrote:
| 291 titles. Not great, not terrible.
| caskstrength wrote:
| Don't forget about shoving Shorts into faces of their
| paying Youtube Premium users without a toggle to
| permanently disable it. That will definitely outcompete
| TikTok any day now!
| post-it wrote:
| If they made it possible to cast Shorts like other
| videos, I might actually use them. I've tapped a Short
| several times because it looked funny, but it wanted to
| start playing on my phone instead of the TV. I watch
| TikTok alone on my phone and YouTube with my wife on my
| TV, so Shorts just doesn't fit into that routine.
|
| It's mindboggling that you can't cast Google Shorts to a
| Google Chromecast. My hypothesis is that because
| Chromecast casting is so buggy and unresponsive (compared
| to Bluetooth), swiping from one Short to another would be
| such a frustrating experience that they dare not enable
| it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| My 2yo smashed my Oh So Smart TV with the remote and I
| got a spare dumb TV and plugged in Chromecast into it
| since everything is streams nowadays.
|
| Dear God how annoying it is to use. Buggy, laggy, drops
| randomly ... still can't play videos from my computer in
| an easy way.
|
| I forgot how bad Chromecast were since I last used it 5
| years ago.
| Tostino wrote:
| When the original came out ir was practically magic to be
| able to have the TV on while hanging out with roommates
| or friends, and all be able to contribute to the
| entertainment for the night right from your phone...then
| it didn't improve in any meaningful way, and regressed in
| others over the following 8+ years.
|
| Really sad with the state of things.
| rightbyte wrote:
| When he broke my TV I was in the store looking for a new
| one. I had one condition -- there had to be a sane way to
| write with the remote. None of the TVs had any sane way
| but used arrows and enter or some cursor marker for the
| on screen keyboard.
|
| Dunno why none used a T9 type of letter entering system.
| All remotes but one had number pads. It is really
| inconvenient to use "Smart" TVs.
|
| So I went with the spare for a while.
| terinjokes wrote:
| It seems like within the last two weeks they changed how
| Shorts and Chromecast works, where I'm at least able to
| cast the video.
| dijit wrote:
| I'm still annoyed at the "hover to play" that I have to
| disable seemingly every few days.
| makestuff wrote:
| Also they are testing 5 preroll ads now. Idk why as a
| premium customer I do not have the option to filter out
| shorts. It is really frustrating. Also I just want
| youtube with no ads I do not care about youtube music
| that is bundled with it.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Azure became interesting when it got better integrated
| into the Windows/AD/Office worlds. You're not having to
| manually integrate so much anymore.
|
| The way for GCP to compete is to give customers
| (presumably high level customers) some real deep
| integration into Search/Gmail/YouTube/Ads/Drive/Maps,
| including data. That would not only be a killer
| differentiating feature, it would signal to everyone that
| Google is serious and won't shut this down on you like
| they did all those other services.
|
| They probably won't do that, but I'm not sure why they
| really want to run GCP if not. If they're not going to
| give customers something only Google can give them, I
| don't see them capturing much more of the market.
| ghaff wrote:
| >something nebulously magic with AI
|
| And even then I wouldn't place a bet on Waymo producing
| anything interesting from a revenue perspective for the
| next couple decades+. And, while I'm sure Google is doing
| other interesting things with AI--especially from an
| internal operations perspective--it's not like Google
| Home is doing anything earthbreaking or that Google
| search etc. is--from a consumer functionality point of
| view--particularly differentiated from other major
| players. And plenty of AI research is happening outside
| of Google.
| snek_case wrote:
| It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going
| up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why
| rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you
| can just keep collecting your bonuses?
| myko wrote:
| "More wood, fewer arrows" has destroyed the longevity of
| Google as a company for anything beyond search/ads
|
| Alphabet seems to have been a mistake, too. Instead of
| shielding their bets they flounder and wither.
|
| Just terrible strategic thinking.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what bets they should have better shielded.
| Probably social generally but that seems so counter their
| DNA.
| [deleted]
| lumost wrote:
| It's really hard to diversify away from a major cash cow
| product. Everyone else's success gets compared to the cash
| machine. Ask for another 30 engineers to work on a product
| with _only_ 100 MM profit, why aren 't you more successful?
|
| People get wise to this dynamic and just start selling
| dreams. Everyone can buy into the dream of the next Billion
| dollar product, it's harder to get buy-in to just grind out
| a _measly_ 50% YoY growth.
| scifibestfi wrote:
| It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell
| in.
|
| (said about twitter, but fits here)
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I know some of the leads. One key guy I know bounced from
| Google completely right after Stadia went live. This is
| classic Google cool tech bad business/product
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey
| didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very
| smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There
| were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive
| structure was completely set up to reward launching products
| and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at
| playing the promo game.
|
| There was _talk_ about the need to "land" rather than just
| launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if
| it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below
| VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Agreed with this take. It's frustrating to see people in
| this thread pinning this on Sundar. I certainly think he
| could've done _better_ as CEO, but the incentive structure
| and culture around products was baked in from Larry &
| Sergey's time.
|
| I was around during the pivot to "landings" - which didn't
| actually make many practical differences. For the most part
| people simply redefined "landing" to "releasing a
| product"... which was also the definition of "launching" :)
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It does seem to be that way from the outside: tons of
| products launched, acquired,and then nothing happens, as
| they either rot or get killed after a few years.
| moandcompany wrote:
| I wrote a description of the actual incentives Googlers see
| here a couple weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704
| lrem wrote:
| What if I told you that perf has been abolished in the
| meantime?
|
| It's even public:
| https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad
| reindeerer wrote:
| Yep but incentives haven't shifted, and the
| organizational inertia to fight in their fiefdoms is
| super strong
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This sounds like a re-brand...
| [deleted]
| lupire wrote:
| 2014 was when they retired.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Nope, wrong.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and
| then bounced to a different product and didn't care about
| whether Stadia was a success long term.
|
| apparently the product manager was Phill Harrison. He's been
| active in games for a few decades, so I'm not sure if this is
| just a pivoting move to focus the product or his exit
| strategy. Time will tell.
| [deleted]
| jesuscript wrote:
| They are silo'd and it appears to be so bad that their
| organizational structure is now appearing in the actual
| products. Amazon and Apple (obviously more so Apple) don't do
| silo'd product releases, they do product releases veiled
| within the shroud of the "ecosystem".
|
| What ecosystem is Stadia in? They couldn't brand it right and
| veil it through YouTube or Google Play? You'd never shut down
| YouTube or Google Play, you'd just let that, you know, that
| "Google Play Live (Stadia)" feature quietly enter maintenance
| mode.
|
| Apple won't shut down Apple News. They'd never announce it.
| It's just some product that's interweaved into iOS. If it
| ain't a hit, it quietly fades.
|
| Google+, weave that shit in with Gchat. But no, no, it's ...
| yeah, it's its own special thing. Special things get their
| own very special shut down.
|
| I'm not wise like that, but if you want to try stuff to see
| what sticks, lay low and quietly try things. That way you can
| quietly cut it short if necessary.
|
| If you enter loud, you exit loud. And if you don't exit loud,
| people remember you left quietly and laugh that you entered
| loud.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| Something I'm still hung up on about the "promotion then
| bounce" strategy is wouldn't having a history of launches
| followed by fizzle-outs actually look bad on your resume?
|
| Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else
| before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first
| transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further
| growth, when people can see that they have been leading
| failed projects?
| appleflaxen wrote:
| Can an argument be made that antitrust action a decade ago
| could have saved them billions on now-shut-down projects? If
| I were an investor I would want brutal focus from the top on
| search search search and _nothing_ that didn 't directly
| create value in _search_.
| jraph wrote:
| > Google needs to restructure their incentives before it
| wrecks the company
|
| No no, please don't restructure, wreck the company, that's
| fine.
|
| Or more realistically, the worst offenders are not going
| anywhere and Google is going to be okay (Search, Maps, Play,
| Ads, Analytics, Fonts, Chrome, YouTube, ReCAPTCHA...).
|
| Stadia, I don't care either way.
| ferminaut wrote:
| Google kind of reminds me of IBM in the early 90s before Lou
| Gerstner. IBM built segments of its business around the fact
| mainframe money would keep pouring in.
| taurath wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly - I'm currently using google fi which
| hasn't had an improvement of any real impact in over 3 years,
| and it still barely works on my iPhone. I suspect it will be
| shutting down soon - which is a shame, it was a fantastic
| idea but they launched and then promptly did nothing but let
| it slowly rot.
| coryrc wrote:
| Don't worry too much, Google Voice had been in that state
| for at least a decade and I'm still using it. (Not official
| statement, just long-time GV user, if your font is large
| enough to read in GV app it's because I complained
| internally and that was the only user-facing thing I ever
| got to improve).
| Applejinx wrote:
| Hope not. I use that to barely have a cellphone service and
| not have to pay much when I don't really use it :)
| picsao wrote:
| partiallypro wrote:
| To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google
| to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to
| me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the
| Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI,
| etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP
| in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is,
| which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for their
| own development. It was dead before it ever launched.
| i_love_cookies wrote:
| It's a shame their platform choices prevented a decent
| stream of content, stadia was easier to use but I subscribe
| GFN due to the content
|
| on the whole I feel like they were to focused on potential
| vs. offering something desirable right away
| Ecstatify wrote:
| The whole point was to diversify their business model. The
| tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play
| Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K.
| Stadia integrated into YouTube could have been a Twitch
| competitor. With Covid it could have been the perfect time
| to really launch the product when no one could buy a
| PS5/XBOX. Google didn't invest in games, closed down their
| own game studio. It's reminiscent of Windows Phone having
| no apps.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play
| Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in
| 4K.
|
| Could they actually do that? Or more importantly, could
| the average user - not someone next door to the
| datacenter - get that kind of performance?
| Ecstatify wrote:
| 35 Mbps or greater for 4K.
|
| Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically
| over the past year and a half. Average fixed line
| download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9
| percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March
| 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It's not just throughput, but also latency. I'm getting
| 20-30 ms ping to google, which is 2 frames latency. For
| something like an RPG, or among us, that's probably fine.
| But for an FPS or a fighting game, that's a huge
| difference. And I live in a city center with good
| internet.
| zepppotemkin wrote:
| Honestly they just didn't have any content due to their
| technology choices, I use GFN all the time because it has
| most of the games I want to play already
|
| they put themselves in a position where they were stuck
| acting like a psudo-console-platform thing needing to get
| developers to support thier platform
| lupire wrote:
| I doubt the Stadia leadership killed their own division. The
| problem was someone higher up.
|
| Harrison is still the lead of Stadia.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I'm not sure how bad this is. I think it's good that they
| like to try new things. They couldn't do that if they
| committed to supporting everything they start indefinitely.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| try new things under a different brand name that doesn't
| taint everything related to Google if you want to
| experiment
|
| Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud
| in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud
| itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that
| people build their businesses on. And customer support is
| equally terrible across the company
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Examples of Google Cloud sunsetting products? As far as I
| know it's very rare that they do that.
|
| Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching
| products that flop in the first place, or their failure
| to make their consumer products appealing over time,
| really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep
| repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its
| Enterprise offerings
|
| Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be
| essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider
| problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel
| in basically only accepting email from one another.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Their IoT platform last month -
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-
| shutter-...
|
| several other examples as well, but the worst thing they
| do is very frequent breaking API changes which force
| companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google
| iroh2727 wrote:
| Well, we also gotta look at Google's outside incentives,
| those of being a monopoly. At the end of the day, it's not
| the most efficient use of resources to innovate internally at
| a monopoly (better uses include M&A, competitor sabotage, and
| sales/marketing, which they've of course also done).
|
| Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a
| semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract
| talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil,
| and to make investors think it is still an "innovation"
| company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and
| bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new
| products.
|
| Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self
| or a company centered on innovation because that's just not
| how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which
| hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-
| competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like
| with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve
| Jobs back.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I wonder if Google even realises, like at Pichai level, how
| much this hurts them. I'm fairly sure it's at least one
| important piece as to why GCP is struggling to gain market
| share. Who in their right mind would depend on a Google
| product for critical business functions at this point.
| endgame wrote:
| https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-
| deprec... makes exactly this argument.
| samstave wrote:
| There is literally only one service I use from google and I'm
| actively sunsetting that use : Gmail.
|
| I never go there for search and I can't think of another tool
| of theirs I use...
| schlauerfox wrote:
| If you go on any website that uses adsense, Google's real
| customers are using their services on you. The rest is just
| to feed the beast. I got suckered, I loved my very early
| invite only Gmail account. Not sure my protonmail isn't
| just more of the same performative 'i'm a techie and using
| the fashionable thing" but can I ever escape that?
| tlogan wrote:
| Google is NOT in trouble. Our perception that Google is not
| an ad company is in trouble.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| > governments get serious about ad regulation
|
| Or companies pull back on Internet advertising.
|
| The unknown unknown is the creation of a new advertising
| method. I doubt that any newspaper in 1990 thought that this
| thing called the Internet was going to all but destroy their
| ad business within twenty years.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Internet advertising isn't going anywhere.
|
| Google's ad product, however, is truly horrendous and
| exists only because it's perceived as "too big to fail".
| htrp wrote:
| working with the core ads platform, feels like one of the
| worst designed systems i have ever seen in my life.
|
| definitely no innovation in that side of the business
| julienfr112 wrote:
| don't fix what ain't broken.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I've given up trusting anything new they make. They've shut
| down otherwise perfectly fine products that they could of
| charged some money for and I would of gladly payed. Google
| Talk was perfect, the UI was stale but I could log on via
| Pidgin. Everything that followed Google Talk was a regression
| is what it felt like.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Take away that search monopoly and you have one one of the
| most dysfunctional and slowest moving companies in tech.
| Which is incredibly surprising as they hire really bright
| people but their leadership and product direction is not good
| at all.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| So that was a lie
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on Stadia.
|
| From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product
| improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing
| of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working
| towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown
| decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.
| ddalex wrote:
| I mean, HN is read more often then memegen/ I guess they
| know now.
| gilrain wrote:
| > When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison
| admitted nothing had and told those on the call, "We knew."
|
| I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company
| which respects you; you're worth it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| TBF, if Mcdonalds paid people 100k at age 23 to flip
| burgers, employees would put up with a lot more BS as
| well. And that salary for a google newgrad is low
| balling.
| hinkley wrote:
| Unfortunately there's a reason teams and people get put on
| "Double Secret Probation". If consumers find out the team
| might get shut down they start relying on them less, at
| which point the probation becomes a self fulfilling
| prophecy.
|
| It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to
| lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have
| plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never
| checked up on them. What actually happened is that the
| construction project got delayed over a year, and the
| restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the
| immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told
| someone it was still open, the response was happy, but
| complete surprise.
|
| They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their
| menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great
| (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential
| location for hours on multiple days to see what foot
| traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street
| from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see
| foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their
| demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food
| wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff
| turnover.
|
| That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the
| company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd
| managed to stay out of the local paper.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| At this point it's standard fair for Google, in my
| opinion, a large reason this ended up being unsuccessful
| was that people were worried it was going to be shutdown.
| hinkley wrote:
| Oh I'm totally on Team Popcorn at this point, I'm more
| talking about "hey kids, copying a Google is not the
| ticket to success".
|
| Being caught saying "don't worry" just damages their
| brand more. What they really need is to declare some
| things as sacred cows. But you can't do that after you've
| already lied using the same phrasing.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I can't believe that I'm defending Google, but this time
| at least they offered credit or refunds for any
| purchases. Google not doing this in the past has made me
| extremely hesitant in paying for new Google devices that
| feel risky. This will alleviate that worry a bit
| hinkley wrote:
| It's a very common problem in software that we target
| 'better' instead of 'good'. Or as we used to call it,
| "sucks less." It doesn't help that we keep trying to
| 'disrupt' domains that had no software or had software
| written by people who know how to write critical systems.
|
| It does sound like they're trying to do better, but it
| was a long time coming and this still isn't good
| behavior.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't see how this is bad in the consumer's perepctive.
| Those that didn't use it lose or gain nothing. Those that
| did use it get their refunds. They don't care about the
| dev side.I don't think it's bad behavior to shut down
| something no one watns.
|
| The exec communication with the devs is unfortunate, but
| a separate matter.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| After negative news, it's pretty safe to assume thr opposite
| when PR / Marketing says something like "we wont be shutting
| down" or when a CEO says "there wont be any layoffs".
|
| If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements
| can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate "time to
| adapt", whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start
| buying IP on a survivable platform.
| wil421 wrote:
| A company I worked for moved from the Suburbs to downtown
| in the city I live in. Local news broke the story right
| when the deal was signed with the building contractor. For
| weeks on end they denied it, until they didn't. Surprise we
| were always lying to you!
| chrsig wrote:
| As a general rule, I tend to invert any sentence any
| manager ever gives me.
| bink wrote:
| They usually couch it in weasel words such as "we have no
| plans to conduct layoffs at this time" rather than an
| outright lie.
| elil17 wrote:
| That is an outright lie if they do have plans for
| layoffs.
| hansvm wrote:
| "at this time" just needs to refer to when the layoffs
| are happening rather than the existence of a plan.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| Oh no, they have a plan to create a plan for layoffs, but
| as of right now there is no plan to layoff employees.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| More realistically, "We don't have a plan for laying off
| employees at this time. Our plan is for laying off
| employees next month."
| jerf wrote:
| Companies, governments, and politicians do not say things
| to inform you about what is happening or what they are
| doing. They say things to produce in the listener the state
| they desire, whatever that may be, and they have few
| limitations as to what they will say to do that. (Not quite
| "zero", but definitely "few".)
|
| The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get
| from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can
| perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more
| information. And the amount of time that "more information"
| outright contradicts the nominal content of the
| statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the
| normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the
| nominal content.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I hope this becomes common knowledge and starts being
| taught in elementary schools.
| jerf wrote:
| I wish. People talk big about "critical thinking" but
| critical thinking curricula still tend to focus on the
| nominal content of claims. Motivation of the speaker and
| their desired goals is not an incidental concern to be
| briefly covered, it's the core of the skillset.
|
| Of course asking people teaching "critical thinking" to
| arm the students with a toolset that can be turned
| against the teachers is a pretty tall ask. I've had
| teachers who could take that level of heat, and props to
| them, but I've certainly had teachers that simply
| couldn't.
| geodel wrote:
| Excellent point!. I agree typical critical thinking
| courses seems to be about logical/mathematical
| consistency. I find a _follow the money_ approach works
| much better in real life situations.
| [deleted]
| throw10920 wrote:
| Unfortunately, many people let their political beliefs
| interfere with their use of this principle; if one
| institution('s representative) lies, then it's just an
| isolated incident or there was a good reason, but if
| another institution does, it's because that institution
| (possibly including all institutions in that class) are
| "evil".
| falcolas wrote:
| This gets confusing when you consider public companies,
| whose shareholders are also the targets of public
| statements (like tweets saying "no we won't shut X
| down"), and there _are_ (well, supposedly) legal limits
| on misleading public statements by public companies.
| coldpie wrote:
| Yes. Stadia execs lied to their own employees. It's a pattern
| for the company.
|
| _This call was followed by a contentious Q &A where the
| Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week
| before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of
| the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the
| misleading statements made in his previous email, according
| to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what
| changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had
| and told those on the call, "We knew."_
|
| https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-
| stu...
| dekhn wrote:
| My very first TGIF after my noogler one, I sat behind some
| disgruntled employee who kept yelling at the stage about
| how the execs were lying to us.
|
| I thought it was fairly rude and also I thought the execs
| were simply using careful language. After attending a bunch
| more TGIFs, I finally realized that nearly every exec had a
| very specific way of presenting things that sort of made
| their work sound perfect, even if it was shit. You can see
| an example in "An Update On Google Reader" or "Advancing
| our Amazing Bet on Google Fiber", or even this one.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in
| some heads where you tell the patient everything is going
| to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't
| freaked out before the anesthesia hits.
|
| But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that
| narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to
| nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I
| can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need
| people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the
| Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them
| bullshit).
| humanistbot wrote:
| > I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going
| on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is
| going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they
| aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits.
|
| That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it
| might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-
| term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with
| this case. It gives all of us (internal employees,
| outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to
| never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of
| an Alphabet executive.
| hinkley wrote:
| I am at the moment trying to get an appointment with a
| doctor to tell him the same thing to his face.
|
| What you shouldn't do is enumerate all of the potential
| side effects in vivid detail. That's the WebMD curse. But
| if someone wants you to look at your work you should look
| at your work, not blow them off on the phone. That's just
| more arrogant asshole behavior, which contributes to
| White Coat Syndrome.
|
| What are we going to call WCS for mega corps with short
| attention spans? Because I think we need one.
| Melatonic wrote:
| At least with the mushroom treatment though you end up
| with some very tasty and healthy products!
| hinkley wrote:
| I am not a product.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Surely these executives will be severely reprimanded for
| their lack of integrity, lest employees throughout the
| company begin to assume that such behavior is the standard.
| thombat wrote:
| Actually, the Stadia management were _this_ close to
| being shitcanned for failing to live up to Google ideals.
| The only thing that saved them was when they announced
| that their group had already pivoted to a promising new
| product idea featuring a built-in messaging client.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Upvoted because I had to think twice if this was sarcasm.
| switch007 wrote:
| I found much more peace as an employee by accepting that
| all executives lie to some degree
|
| In their circles it's called "controlling the message",
| "not causing panic", "simplifying" etc. They often simply
| do not believe it's lying
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| I try to work for companies that aren't openly evil.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| you best bet of doing that is spinning off your own
| company. I unfortunately cannot afford to do that.
| findingaway wrote:
| The greatest idea since sliced bread... too bad that
| leaves a vanishingly small pool of potential work.
|
| "Working as Intended"
| JTbane wrote:
| Pull Request: Remove "Don't be evil" from the Code of
| Conduct.
| ceph_ wrote:
| I think it's realistic to assume that this happens but it
| doesn't mean it should be accepted. How can you trust in
| the leadership of someone you know will lie whenever they
| think it will get them a slightly better outcome? Execs
| like that are not leaders and they should not be in those
| positions.
| vkou wrote:
| > How can you trust in the leadership
|
| You shouldn't. At best, they are fellow travelers. At
| worst, they aren't accountable to you, and their
| incentive structure usually does not drive them to behave
| ethically towards you.
|
| Execs aren't paid to lead, they are paid to deliver
| business value. Ethical leadership is often incidental or
| counterproductive to it.
|
| In this case, the execs were paid to do everything
| possible to promote and grow the product. And that's what
| they did.
| hbrn wrote:
| They should probably try implementing OKRs at Google. I
| heard it helps with transparency.
| rany_ wrote:
| I doubt the social media guy even knew. They were posting
| promotional tweets just 2 days ago.
|
| Source:
| https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566
| __david__ wrote:
| It depends on when they made the decision. Changing your mind
| doesn't mean you previously lied, it just means you were
| wrong. Lying needs intent.
| wpietri wrote:
| I doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it
| believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under
| Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to
| persuade without regard for truth.
|
| But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying
| might have believed it to be true, because some executive
| also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google
| as a whole, it was always uncertain.
|
| So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google
| as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR
| mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.
| tgv wrote:
| Publicly, knowingly uttering bullshit of which you know
| it's false, or has a high probability of being false, is
| simply called lying.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree, but don't see the relation. Who specifically do
| you believe publicly said something knowing it was false?
| canadianwriter wrote:
| Like... maybe? Why does it have to be a lie instead of
| incompetence? They may have totally thought that back then,
| then changed their mind?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's Google. Everyone knew the second Stadia was announced
| that it would die. It wasn't even a particularly good
| example of a game streaming service. If you work for Google
| and were convinced that Stadia was secure for the future,
| you should reconsider the reality you live in.
| myko wrote:
| I've used GeForce Now and Stadia was a lot better than it
| on my iPad/WiFi
|
| What service is better than Stadia at actually running
| games in the cloud?
| DashAnimal wrote:
| So... Just to get this correct, the social media person
| who probably isn't privvy to plans affecting their job in
| two months should have written something along the lines
| of "were told it's going to be ok, but who even knows
| with Google"?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| That would actually have been hilarious.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Maybe PR teams shouldn't get a free pass to say whatever
| they want. If your PR team can just lie to the public due
| to "ignorance" it becomes very very profitable to lie to
| your own PR team.
| awill wrote:
| Probably the reason they had to give refunds, or they'd get
| sued, and this would be evidence #1 against Google
| taytus wrote:
| It's really a lie if everyone knows it is a lie thou?
| xxs wrote:
| Of course it is, and it's just a blatant one at that.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Yes it is.
| taytus wrote:
| It was a joke
| jamiek88 wrote:
| In the current zeitgeist it was a poor one.
|
| Blatant lies are destroying nations.
| judge2020 wrote:
| What is the social media person supposed to say in this case?
| "we're working on a blog post about Stadia shutting down
| that'll be released in 2 months"? Even if Phil Harrison
| himself were the one running that Twitter account, he
| probably knew it was destined to shut down but didn't have
| anything official on when or the details of the shutdown.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| "We're proud of our Stadia experience and we are working
| hard on projects for it." That would not be as misleading
| as we are not going anywhere.
|
| Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at
| least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being
| paid not to realize the obvious.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| There are also those who knew it was at risk and in
| danger but thought that it could be saved with hard work
| and a little luck and were working toward that end.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _What is the social media person supposed to say in this
| case?_
|
| If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a
| professional liar, they should quit their job and find an
| honest line of work.
| bccdee wrote:
| Something evasive in the vein of "Stadia represents a
| significant investment and Google has not announced any
| plans to scale back Stadia. We can't comment on rumours and
| speculation."
| bombcar wrote:
| "Good night, Stadia. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most
| likely kill you in the morning."
| messe wrote:
| Fittingly, piracy would've served consumers better than
| Stadia did.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| How about nothing?
| laserlight wrote:
| If we collectively stopped believing non-binding statements
| with no skin in the game, these bullshitters would stop
| bullshitting.
| unicornmama wrote:
| From a cynical ex-Google employee, this would have translated
| to "Stadia still has more promotions to squeeze out". Today's
| message signals that it's done its squeezing, permanently.
| [deleted]
| Forge36 wrote:
| https://twitter.com/BlueFireDemon44/status/15530629798847488...
|
| >I mean we could wait till September 24 too
|
| Not bad missed the estimate by 5 days.
| Yhippa wrote:
| I should have known when they cancelled the Pixelbook that this
| was next.
| goldenManatee wrote:
| This is what drives my hesitancy toward subscribing any Google
| paid product. The company is very short-term focused and fickle
| on measuring the success of a product. They have the cash to
| throw at new problems, but they lack the stamina for any of
| their products to weather-out a storm. Google itself has the
| reputational problem of being weak on product longterm visions;
| that makes it a non-starter for buying into their mercurial
| fantasies.
| sjs382 wrote:
| I used Stadia super casually, despite buying the Founder's
| Edition as soon as it was available. I bought maybe 5 games
| at very steep discounts and maybe played them for 1-4 hours
| each.
|
| With that said, the way they're handling this shutdown gives
| me LESS hesitancy re: consumer entertainment purchases.
| Granting full, automatic refunds is the vest way this can be
| handled, period.
|
| Now, developer services are another story... Winding down a
| service that I rely on (rather than just being entertained
| by) would cause me more work, on their schedule.
|
| But still, I have _slightly_ more trust that they 'll handle
| similar things well in the future.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That tweet was surely from the Stadia team, and teams generally
| do not plan on shutting down. I think we can assume that was
| 100% honest at the time, and the team was doing everything it
| could to keep going.
|
| And that upper management (VP/director/etc.) probably finally
| made the decision to shut it down just a couple of weeks ago or
| even less.
|
| So while ironic... it's highly unlikely Google was lying, as
| multiple people here are suggesting. Nobody knows for sure that
| a product/team will be shut down until it actually is. Not even
| upper management knows until they see the newest numbers.
|
| Having had some experience at large companies, many teams'
| whole existence is on the line every ~3 months as the product
| manager presents updates to the VP and associates, and then
| waits a week to find out later if the team a) gets new
| employees / higher budget, b) gets no new employees and no
| increased budget, or c) gets cancelled so start looking for an
| internal transfer.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I don't think folks really care much if it was an outright
| lie, or if it was a George Costanza "It's not a lie if YOU
| believe it" lie.
|
| Just another data point on why people rightfully think PR
| posts like this are BS.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Typical Guurgle move. Self fulfilling prophecy and all that
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| That's why you should always take corporate promises with a
| tablespoon of salt.
|
| After seeing so many big companies promise things and only
| screw those over along the course of last couple of decades,
| this is of no surprise to me
| ravenstine wrote:
| Though I'm not suggesting lying/malice on The Google's part
| here, it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of
| corporate PR. Whenever a company insists it's not going to do
| something, I assume they're doing damage control and that the
| opposite is more likely to be true (much like Bettridge's Law).
| If a company makes a positive statement in PR, I assume their
| statements won't live up to their promise or, even worse, come
| with a deal breaking caveat.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > it's incredible that anyone still believes a word of
| corporate PR.
|
| If you look at the discussions about the shutdown rumor,
| hardly believed PR. I was on the defensive side and my
| argument was that spreading this rumor was basically a free
| point.
| rvz wrote:
| Yep, damage control that is: _" It's okay if your head's in the
| clouds. There are video games here."_ We all saw though that,
| and we knew it was a sinking ship.
|
| But this wasn't really a surprise since this information was
| given to me from the future [0] and I said exactly was was
| going to happen and predicted it a year before [1].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm Jack's complete lack of surprise.
|
| Also, there's this tidbit:
|
| > Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia's
| technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play,
| and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to "make it
| available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we
| see the future of gaming headed," he wrote.
|
| I assumed they'd do a pivot towards offering it as a service
| for game publishers to build on, something like GCS just for
| game streaming. I wonder when we'll see an announcement for
| that.
| rajnathani wrote:
| The top 4th and 7th comment on the Stadia launch post on HN sort
| of predicted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432957
|
| During those times I thought HN was being overly pessimistic as
| usual about a product being killed by Google, but now it is
| pretty understandable, especially as despite Google's headstart
| that they were overtaken by Nvidia, Microsoft, and others in this
| space.
| alsodumb wrote:
| A reply to the 7th comment says "I'd say one promotion cycle
| for the top executives on the product, 2-3 more for the next
| tier of engineers/product folks to ship some cool stuff, then a
| year or two for the product to coast before no one wants to
| take on the technical debt. So I'll predict its shutdown will
| be announced by July 2022."
|
| That prediction was so damn close.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It's funny, when Google lied and said they were always going to
| be working on Stadia, were in it for the long-haul, etc - they
| lied because they knew they needed people to believe in the
| service to use it. Of course, people knew they were lying and
| didn't believe in the service and didn't use it. If Google had
| told the truth - "We're trying Stadia, it might shut down, and if
| it does complete refunds on everything" - people would've
| believed Google and would've tried out the service and they
| wouldn't need to shut down.
| solaarphunk wrote:
| It turns out that if you run an ads monopoly and cloud oligopoly,
| very few other businesses you try building will turn out to be
| worthwhile maintaining. I wonder if Google cut 75% of its
| workforce and their long tail of products, if their stock price
| would go to the moon because they would be ultra-profitable.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Someone at Logitech is having a miserable day.
| mooman219 wrote:
| There's a lot of animosity on this thread, but I think Stadia
| shutting down is distressing and we should talk about that.
|
| The concept of a 3rd party game streaming platform is another
| foot into the grave with Stadia shutting down, and that should be
| cause for alarm. I think most people in this thread can agree
| that the licensing model for Stadia was less than stellar, but it
| feels like getting favorable licensing requires being an existing
| behemoth (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Sony PlayStation Now, Nvidia
| GeForce Now) to have any chance of a AAA title being on your
| streaming platform. Blade filed for insolvency just last year,
| and has since been remarketed as Shadow.tech which functionally
| is just expensive Windows VMs.
|
| A lot of people on here will happily argue that they want to own
| their games (Which I want too!), while also rejoicing that cloud
| gaming is increasing narrowing to fewer and fewer companies.
| Licensing is getting increasingly harder, and I'm worried at some
| point we'll be left with a monopoly and it'll be too late.
|
| This is hacker news, what's the answer here for startups going
| forward? Is becoming a 1st party powerhouse (Like Netflix) while
| getting licensing agreements with as many indie games as you can
| (Like Epic Games?) the only option? How do you make this model
| succeed when you have no negotiating power? If Sony is suing
| Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on their platform, what chance
| does a startup have?
| wbear wrote:
| I do not want cloud gaming startups to succeed. I feel like I
| would own my games even less than I do now, and due to the laws
| of physics, games would be less responsive than playing
| locally. I am glad that Stadia has failed.
| mooman219 wrote:
| I believe the issue is cloud gaming is succeeding for a
| triopoly of companies, and only them. You can not want them
| to succeed, but that's further entrenching their dominance.
| If you're fine with narrowing who can license games to just a
| couple of companies, then I'm afraid that's there's a very
| real risk of no longer owning your games at all. This is a
| bit of a slippery slope, but that's just my concern.
| majormajor wrote:
| I knew someone who worked on Stadia a few years ago. They left
| Google shortly after. I don't know how universal it is, but in
| that case working on non-core-ads-business stuff there sounded
| like a bit of a mess (unless it was just Stadia).
| spir wrote:
| I was a happy Stadia customer for a while. And then an unhappy
| customer. And now I own relics of history (Stadia
| controller+purchased games).
|
| In my view, the root problem here may be that Google is too
| accustomed to having a monopoly position in the market and not
| actually treating customers that well, whereas gaming is
| hypercompetitive and Google doesn't have the customer centricity
| in their DNA to compete successfully.
| christmm wrote:
| p1necone wrote:
| Kinda surprised about the full refunds on seemingly _everything_.
| That has to be a pretty huge loss doesn 't it?
|
| Did they have to do full refunds legally, or are they just
| choosing to?
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| A few years ago I did some back of the envelope calculations that
| suggested to me that the input and display latency were
| unacceptable. Were they never worried about this?
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| warinukraine wrote:
| > And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers
| was built on a strong technology foundation
|
| This line is so telling of Google's culture...
|
| No one cares if your product has a "strong technology
| foundation". Users only care that they get something out of the
| product. Google doesn't get this. They think as long as the tech
| is strong, that's all you need for a successful product.
| greatgib wrote:
| The title in itself is interesting as an exemple of the modern
| corpo-speak bullshit as we can see everywhere now:
| <<A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy>>
|
| In the content they tell that they are shutting down, so giving
| up on the project, but the title tries to pretend that they
| "pivot" and so that it is something that is beneficial for them
| in the long term to be invested in "streaming" technologies.
| vardump wrote:
| Never used in the first place, only because I had almost no trust
| in Google not shutting down any new services.
|
| Not surprised. Google really needs to stop doing this.
| adrr wrote:
| Google doing what google does. Release an MVP , dump marketing
| dollars to gain customers, kill the product when adoption rates
| don't meet expectations. With no real exclusive games, Stadia was
| destined to fail.
| esskay wrote:
| It was only a matter of time. It is a Google product after all.
| It's basically their thing at this point. "Hey look at this
| fantastic new service from Google" should be met with "No thanks,
| they'll close it and I'll lose everything".
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| Google is search, ads, and G Suite. Everything else is
| recruitment window dressing.
| pearjuice wrote:
| "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working
| on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let
| us know if you have other questions."
|
| - Jul 29, 2022
|
| https://twitter.com/googlestadia/status/1552989433590214656
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Likely written by a support rep who definitely wasn't in on
| todays announcement.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| I'm still convinced industry applications that have to run on
| powerful hardware (such as 3dsmax or AutoCAD) would have been a
| better target than games, especially when products like GamePass
| exist.
| partdavid wrote:
| It's a really interesting idea and also a way for those
| publishers to help move to subscriptions, which they all do.
|
| I have GFN and I love it, but I will say that input
| methods/devices is a real weak point. Right now there's still
| no credible story for racing wheels, for example. I'm not sure
| about flight simulator rigs, either (I think no). I wonder if
| you'd have to do a bunch of R&D to make all kinds of tablets
| and digitizers and other specialized input devices available;
| or if the workstation costs for consumers of those applications
| are already dominated by license fees and expensive input
| hardware? Making it less attractive?
| _appub wrote:
| https://www.businessinsider.in/advertising/google-made-a-sec...
|
| In 2015 google acquired agawi - any game anywhere instantly
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Stadia always would fail. Most sane people knew this. Same as
| with Google+. But sometimes companies need to be bold for the
| sake of it.
|
| The most worrying trend with Google is the search engine. The
| quality of the search results has declined over the years but it
| seems it has become multiple times worse over the last couple of
| months. Many top results for simple queries result in pages that
| directly send one into a redirect loop that ends on porn or
| casino sites.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| Imagine how depressing it must be working at Google on new
| projects, never sure whether they might just get cancelled months
| down the road. And then how depressing it must be after they do
| get cancelled, and your work just goes directly down the drain.
| Speaking from experience, there is nothing quite as demoralising
| in our trade as this. At least the money's good there, I guess.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Time to update http://isstadiadeadyet.com
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Can anyone find the old tweet by Stadia support, or some
| executive, saying Stadia will not be shut down? It was only a few
| months ago.
| helloworld97 wrote:
| leokennis wrote:
| Maybe their track record in B2B is better, but as a CTO or
| something I'd think very long and hard before I would make my
| business depend on GCP (as opposed to AWS or Azure)...before you
| know it Google pulls the rug out underneath your feet.
| bogwog wrote:
| Sorry for the stupid internet drama/shenanigans, but I couldn't
| resist.
|
| > Anonymous sources providing nothing but a statement are
| baseless.
|
| > Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don't have to
| believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in
| October.
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402
|
| It ain't even October yet.
| the_duke wrote:
| Well, autumn started on the 23rd.
|
| So it technically did exist by the end of summer.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| As someone in the tech area and likes PC gaming, I know nothing
| about Stadia or GeForce Now, despite having a 3070 and a Shield.
|
| Was stadia its own platform and hardware? I thought it was a way
| to say, play steam games over the net on an x11 session or
| something.
|
| I'm not being silly, I really had no idea how the thing worked.
| 2wrist wrote:
| You could see it coming but it is a shame it ended up the way it
| did.
|
| The hardware though, the platform.. it was an interesting linux
| machine which could have been a cracking base going forward. The
| whole thing had so much promise, it is such a shame they half
| arsed the game licensing/ownership side of things.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I was thinking how far back this whole "launch and cancel" cycle
| started and I think I'd have to say the Nexus Q was the first
| one. Launched, received poorly, recalled for further work to be
| done on it and just sort of died an ignominious death.
| tnsengimana wrote:
| Someone has already mentioned this deep in one thread, but I am
| genuinely worried about the fate of Flutter given Google's
| reputation.
| moogly wrote:
| [Surprised Pikachu] Is GCP next?
| hypeatei wrote:
| Probably not GCP as a whole but services within it.
|
| As seen from the recent IoT Core retirement notice.
| legohead wrote:
| I used Shadow [1] for a couple years. They basically give you a
| windows VM and you install whatever you want. All the other big
| players limited the games you could install, which was a deal
| breaker for me. I think there's 1 or 2 others that have a similar
| model to Shadow, but they are pay by the hour.
|
| Shadow was great, when they had a California datacenter (~20ms
| latency). I noticed zero lag most of the time. Once they closed
| that and I was forced to go to TX (~60ms latency), it started to
| become an issue for me. There were other issues too, like some
| games don't let you install on a VM (very rare), and I kept
| running out of space.
|
| I finally upgraded to a PC this year (~$1400 w/GeForce 3070 &
| i5), and it is a much better experience. I was so used to the
| latency, I kept failing mini-games with timed key presses. Now I
| have all the hard drive space I need, and the graphics look and
| feel much smoother (I assume something to do with the
| compression). While the cloud GPUs were performing well, I don't
| think the CPUs were up to par.
|
| I still think cloud gaming is great, and wish Shadow well. But if
| your cloud gaming service is going to limit the games people can
| play, get your tombstone ready.
|
| [1] shadow.tech
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Latency is the aspect of cloud gaming I'll never understand.
| There are literal physics based limits on how fast you can
| transmit a signal (and a lot more practical ones on top of
| those). I keep thinking that someone must have some secret
| sauce they've come up with, but unless Google or someone can
| invent faster light, I'm not sure what that would be. Obviously
| the closer you can get the compute to the screen, the better,
| but 20ms still sounds perceptible to me.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Are they refunding the original price of the games bought?
|
| In that case, it doesn't seem like a bad news at all for Stadia
| users. They will have play through multiple pretty recent and
| expensive games for free during years.
| fakeslimshady5 wrote:
| wilt wrote:
| Hopefully this puts consumers off cloud gaming.
| de6u99er wrote:
| Quantum computing division will soon follow!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I actually got Cyberpunk 2077 specifically on Stadia so I could
| play the meta-game of "Can I win Cyberpunk before the
| unaccountable mega-corpo revokes my access to Cyberpunk?"
|
| I will be losing that game.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Now _that_ is an immersive gaming experience!
| colinmhayes wrote:
| you still got a few months
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I considered that, but then I remembered finishing the game
| would, unfortunately, require me to play more Cyberpunk 2077.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| (I just realized this could be a meta-joke on the plot of the
| game and, if so, I salute you good commenter. ;) )
| MrWiffles wrote:
| But can s/he get ALL the endings in time? I dunno... ;-)
| xxs wrote:
| Likely... there is only one ending that cannot easily be
| achieved. The rest are trivial and require very little
| prep.
| 0x457 wrote:
| The hidden ending that actually leads to the same ending,
| just via a different path?
| xxs wrote:
| the hidden is called 'the star'. No spoilers, etc.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| True; I was forgetting that you can save before
| triggering the endings. You don't have to replay from
| square one all the way through. Still, the harder ending
| (I think they called it the "fear the reaper" one?) was
| the best I think. The saddest is the one on the space
| station, that one was oh my god, gut-wrenching! But I
| also liked the one with the Nomads :)
| xxs wrote:
| >"fear the reaper" was the best I think.
|
| indeed, also the hardest by far - all enemies are max
| level.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| One of those rare instances where I think NFTs and having
| digital copies available for all to download might make
| infinitely more sense than buying into centralized gaming
| platforms with their own licenses.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Nah, NFTs don't quite fit the bill. They can act as receipts
| but they're not good for hosting the product.
|
| I think the spirit of your desire is valid though. What I
| want to see is the invention of some kind of digital legal-
| trust structure.
|
| In theory, SAAS providers could produce some kind of
| "serverless" way to run their SAAS. Trusted cloud providers
| could host the SAAS past the lifetime of the original
| company. Users would need to pay for the hosting but the
| service can live longer than the company given there was a
| desire.
|
| Legally things could be structured such that this works for
| closed source SAAS such that it remains closed source. It
| hits the niche for when just open sourcing the product on the
| way out isn't feasible.
| yreg wrote:
| If the receipt part is solved then torrent is enough for
| hosting installation files, no?
| jayd16 wrote:
| If you can torrent, then why bother with the receipt?
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| Because developers will want to make the game content
| only accessible to buyers who have the receipt
| jayd16 wrote:
| If the devs have servers to validate authorization
| anyway, then NFTs are unnecessary. Were also discussing
| the case where the devs go under and no longer provide
| such a service.
|
| Asking clients to check their own NFTs is very weak DRM.
|
| So what is the actual proposed flow?
| yreg wrote:
| IntelMiner wrote:
| How would NFT's help?
|
| If the company refuses to refund you, your digital "receipt"
| is worthless
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| If the game is able to connect to your wallet and confirm
| internally that you own the game's token, it could unlock
| the game without having to rely on a server.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Then can you just duplicate the wallet and you've
| "pirated" the game
|
| Ah but we'll put it on the blockchain!
|
| ...Which is quite literally re-inventing a worse version
| of systems like Steam
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| Sure I guess, if you want to share private keys with
| friends.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Why not just make a separate wallet per-game? You've then
| effectively duplicated serial keys :)
| yreg wrote:
| Sounds interesting, but isn't there an issue that 10
| friends could hold a key to the same wallet and all play
| all the same games, even simultaneously while purchasing
| just one copy?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'm guessing implementing this would require some sort of
| known-file-type attestation distributed app.
|
| I.e. I prove I have a token + link that token to a hash
| of my current system(s)
|
| It's actually one of the better uses for blockchain I've
| heard so far, given the data sizes are minimal...
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Who's running the server that actually runs the game?
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| The idea would work for single player games, where all
| the content is in the executable, but yeah, multiplayer
| is another story.
| ranger207 wrote:
| To get the inevitable question out of the way immediately:
| how do NFTs help? They're just receipts of purchase, not the
| purchase itself. If you're saying that someone else would
| honor the receipt of a different store... why?
| literalAardvark wrote:
| I guess in the same way you can currently link Steam to
| GeForce Now and be allowed to play your game.
|
| But steezier!
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| Oh you sweet, summer child. That is not how gaming NFTs are
| going to work. They are not going to be consumer-friendly
| transferable assets.
|
| They are going to be vendor-locked, and they will only get
| invested in if they increase the bottom line of the walled
| garden that produces them.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| This is correct. Reason: it's already technically possible
| to transfer games between platforms, the reason it's not
| done is financial, legal and political.
|
| NFTs create a new method for the technical axis but do
| nothing to change the others.
| miniBill wrote:
| NFTs would not help. Like. At all. Otoh digital copies for
| download would
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| NFTs would replace DRM, so it would, in order to actually
| play the game.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| How does one replace DRM with NFTs if the game is locally
| loaded?
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| Have an interface that interacts with MetaMask or
| WalletConnect within the game.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What I mean is: the point of DRM is to regulate play of
| the game whether a person has rights to run the software
| to play it.
|
| How do NFTs help if I have the binaries on my machine and
| can just patch the check for NFTs to always return "Yes
| this user is authorized?"
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| You can patch the check with binaries? Wouldn't you need
| to modify the source and build?
|
| I'm not familiar enough with tampering, cracking software
| like that so I can't really say.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| No problem. So in general: yes, it's not always trivial
| to crack a locally-hosted binary but it's generally
| possible. It can often be done by actually modifying the
| binary itself (it's just machine code; if, for example,
| the entire check is evaluated by one "Call out to the
| server to find out if we're authorized" function that
| returns a boolean, you can just replace the first few
| bytes in its machine code with "LDA $FF # true ; RETURN"
| and the function will think you're always registered. If
| it's more complicated, you could maybe run a proxy server
| locally that pretends to be the check server and always
| returns "authorized" for the query.
|
| Assuming everyone's playing by the rules, I can see how
| an NFT could be used to indicate when someone has an
| ownership license to play a game (but not the mechanics
| of how that right would be enforced were someone to patch
| their local copy to just ignore the rights check). If the
| game is cloud-hosted, this is easier to enforce.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| Ooh very interesting, thanks for explaining!
|
| From reading others replies too, it does looks like
| client-only mechanism on its own is weak compared to
| having checks on both the client and server..
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Patching out these checks has existed for literally
| _decades_.
|
| Even in the 90's (And possibly 80's and before), this was
| common. Games distributed on floppies would have a check
| that involved asking you what the 13th word of page 4 of
| the manual was, or would have some sort of decoder wheel.
| And it wasn't hard to find cracked versions that had
| those checks patched out.
|
| When games started coming on CDs, there were copy
| protection tricks that could detect if the game was
| running from an ISO image (via Daemon Tools or something)
| or even a copied disc, and those were all patched out.
|
| GameCopyWorld was a very popular website in the early
| '00s. It served up these cracked versions of games. How
| it still exists is beyond me, tbh.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| It couldn't replace the DRM, just the license check. Some
| DRM spyware from the publisher will still have to check
| if you can prove ownership via the blockchain instead of
| checking a CD key against the publisher's license server.
| If you can't, it will refuse to launch the game. Someone
| will crack the game and provide a DRM-free experience
| that is better.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I struggle to see how the NFT provides any value in this
| setup.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Alright so the stadia games are computed in a remote
| datacenter, right?
|
| Let's assume that what you proposed is good and useful
| and I have an NFT in my wallet that entitles me access to
| a game in stadia's platform
|
| How does the NFT help me now that the compute resource
| has been unplugged? I have the entitlement but not the
| delivery.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| It wouldn't work for a native streaming service like
| Stadia, but I could definitely see it working for Single
| Player games where all the content is stored in the
| executable, where there isn't reliance on centralized
| servers for content. Maybe download the game from IPFS or
| Arweave, or as another have said, developers making it
| available on torrents
|
| For multiplayer games, you'd need servers for match
| making and such, so it's probably not possible right now.
| billllll wrote:
| Unless you're putting the entire executable on the
| Blockchain (gigs and gigs of data), then you still need
| servers to host the game. I don't see how hosting the
| entire game is feasible, since games can be hundreds of
| gigs. Day one patches would also be infeasible if you
| store the whole game on the Blockchain.
|
| Note that most NFTs are links to a central server hosted
| on a Blockchain, not the actual image itself.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| Developers can still make the executables available on
| other centralized servers, decentralized solutions like
| BitTorrent, etc.
|
| The NFT wallet check could happen internally within the
| game, perhaps some kind of WebView allowing access to
| browser wallet extensions.
| benlivengood wrote:
| The easy solution is Good Old Games. Download the installers
| and archive them wherever you want. NFTs are a red herring
| for this use case.
| zepppotemkin wrote:
| Or just offer steam keys
| meroes wrote:
| Even Steam revokes paid for content, which I think is the
| issue being discussed.
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11
| 481...
| vultour wrote:
| Not sure how this link proves the point you're trying to
| make. I can in fact still download all the games that no
| longer have a page on the Steam store.
| [deleted]
| IntelMiner wrote:
| I'm still amazed that I not only _completed_ Cyberpunk but was
| able to do so quickly enough that I was able to get a refund
| from Steam support! Initially they denied it, but after showing
| the tweet from CDPR saying refunds were allowed they were happy
| to refund me
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| You beat Cyberpunk in 2 hours?!
| IntelMiner wrote:
| 37.5 hours according to my Steam review https://steamcommun
| ity.com/profiles/76561197998185123/recomm...
|
| I can't link to it since it's an internal page. But I have
| a record of my purchase _and_ refund from Steam support
| here, too https://i.imgur.com/TvIuFEi.png
| __david__ wrote:
| Sounds like you just mainlined it? I just finished up the
| last Gig (minor sidequest) and I have 110 hours in it...
| ok_dad wrote:
| They offered refunds for it well after two hours because it
| was a disaster
| bitL wrote:
| Cyberpunk was pretty rad, but after trying all endings I
| learned about the secret one for which I didn't qualify
| due to different choices in some early dialogue with
| Johnny far before ending, which soured the overall
| experience for me...
| Matthias247 wrote:
| This seems common to a lot of games, and aims for
| increasing the replay value. I personally also don't like
| it, because I am absolutely not motivated to play through
| tens to hundreds of hours again and also don't have time
| for it. But it's still ok for me - I'll just watch
| whatever 30 minutes of end scene I missed on youtube if
| I'm interested in that.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| I actually really dislike this sentiment. Gamers being
| upset they can't access secret content on a first, blind
| playthrough means that developers are incentivised not to
| include secret content.
|
| It seems inconsistent to complain about needing outside
| knowledge to find something when the only reason you know
| about it is from outside knowledge. There can be joy in
| going in fully-blind and there can be joy in following a
| guide like a list of chores but the no-man's land in-
| between leads only to disappointment and spoilers.
|
| (this is also why I don't watch movie trailers or read
| book blurbs)
| mattnewton wrote:
| To be fair, the way the secret content is "discoverable"
| involves a very specific sequence of choices in a single
| conversation that you cannot go back and re-make without
| undoing a lot of game progression. Old games didn't have
| the same kind of progression, and new games are generally
| more forgiving about post-game exploration of all the
| content in the game. The game also has misleading
| affordances that give the impression that your
| relationship with this character is built up over several
| conversations, when actually only this one specific
| sequence in one conversation is known to work.
|
| So, I don't think it's bad because the content is hard to
| discover without outside knowledge, it's bad because it's
| both hard to discover and impossible to fix once you have
| progressed past that point. It's not like being able to
| just rewatch part of a film or re read a book chapter to
| get a reference. You basically have to reload an old
| save, go through a decision sequence, and then replay the
| entire last third of the game until you have access to a
| final playable level, and the way it's implemented feels
| like it was very much slapped in to take the place of a
| johnny-friendship-meter mechanic that appears mostly
| broken outside that one conversation.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The King's Quest design aesthetic.
|
| it sucked then, too.
| bitL wrote:
| I finished all main/side missions and gigs, let Johnny
| take over whenever he wanted and then went through all
| reachable ending combinations (8 different endings, even
| if slightly) and then I learned there is a secret ending
| considered the best of them all which was denied to me
| due to some obscure choice early. So no wonder it left a
| sour taste.
| yreg wrote:
| I guess they refer to CDPR comitting to refunding everyone
| who's not happy with the game.[1]
|
| Interesting that Steam had no issue fulfilling that promise
| since they loose out on it as well. Also sounds like a bit
| shit thing to do after completing the entire game.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/13400135166281
| 03170
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Yeah I got the "bad" ending for not spending enough time
| with Keanu Reeves
|
| The game was so unbelievably broken I just wanted to see
| out the end and be done with it
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Steam had no issue fulfilling that promise since they
| loose out on it as well
|
| That would undermine them as a platform and that would
| make them loose more than a revenue from one title.
| yreg wrote:
| App Store doesn't let developers refund their customers
| and it does just fine.
|
| Granted, they are the de-facto monopoly, but this
| specific policy is seldom criticised.
| masklinn wrote:
| It's also a very different populations with different
| expectations.
| p_j_w wrote:
| You're getting a refund, at least?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I am impressed by the depth of your gaming!
| unity1001 wrote:
| He makes up his own achievements. Tough, real-world
| achievements...
| antisthenes wrote:
| Seems like you ended up playing a more realistic version of
| Cyberpunk 2022 instead.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| After the Bio-Crash of 2020 me and my chooms had to make our
| own fun.
| croes wrote:
| Long term and strategy doesn't match with Google
| xiwenc wrote:
| For those wondering what the return process is, keep an eye on
| https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/12790109?hl=en
|
| I purchased cyberpunk combo pack few years ago. I wonder if the
| controller can be used on pc/osx for other games.
|
| Anyone?
| Karunamon wrote:
| I thought for sure they would've kept this going a lot longer,
| and I'm a bit shocked that they're doing full refunds. Very
| unexpected and very not like Google.
|
| That's item number one marked off on my list of 2020s
| predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943323
| sidcool wrote:
| I was blown away by the claims Google made while unveiling
| Stadia. I saw it as a true cloud promise fulfilled. I even
| blogged about it. The tech is still cool. Sad to see Stadia go.
| johnnypangs wrote:
| Imagine selling so badly that you're able to refund everybody.
| RIP! It wasn't a bad service, just badly marketed and they didn't
| invest in games.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Is there a list of all the products Google has shut down this
| way?
| [deleted]
| dustedcodes wrote:
| I can think Stadia was part of my Google One subscription. Do I
| get a discount now that one of the promised services gets
| removed?
| steve_john wrote:
| its cloud streaming service for video games, in light of low
| adoption rates among users, the company announced Thursday on its
| news portal, The Keyword. Players will be able to access their
| Stadia game libraries until Jan. 18, 2023.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| LOL, we knew it was coming. Like all of their other technology,
| everything they produce is living on borrowed time.
| branon wrote:
| Refunds are nice and all, but gaming is a time investment too.
| Wonder if they will allow exporting savegames, or will people's
| progress be black-holed?
| sockmeistr wrote:
| You can export your savegame via google takeout, but often
| these savegames will only work on the stadia builds of games,
| and aren't able to be loaded into stadia. (Source:
| https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/cyberpunk/stadia/sp-
| tech...)
| faller_slive wrote:
| Yes, you can download them through Google Takeout.
|
| https://9to5google.com/2021/02/02/how-to-export-download-gam...
| zinclozenge wrote:
| That's honestly too bad. I used it to log into Destiny 2 to buy
| items that were on rotation when I wasn't able to be at my desk
| to do so, like traveling or already in bed and too lazy to go
| downstairs.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| well you can still use parsec
|
| https://parsec.app/
| closetnerd wrote:
| I've long thought big companies and individuals have WAY more
| money than they know how to effectively use.
|
| This is really hurting American innovation edge. If we could
| figure out a more effective way to get that money towards
| entrepreneurs / start ups - we'd be way better off.
| mattwest wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-a...
| IceWreck wrote:
| People predicted this was gonna happen the minute the first
| Stadia announcement was made.
| autoexec wrote:
| Everybody is talking about how terrible Google and their culture
| is, so I'll just put it out there that this is great news for
| gamers. Cloud-based gaming services are a terrible deal for
| gamers.
|
| Gamers shouldn't cede so much control to some 3rd party who will
| be watching over their shoulder and collecting every scrap of
| data on them and their friends while they play. We don't need our
| performance in games being used to determine our physical and
| mental capabilities, our online chats being mined, or our social
| networks being graphed. When I fire up a single player PC game
| nobody is logging the days I play, or how many hours that I play
| to draw inferences about my life and responsibilities.
|
| With very few exceptions, the games I play on my computer can't
| be remotely censored or modified against my will. Neither can the
| games on my shelf, and I can resell those too. Instead I retain
| the ability to mod games and alter their settings to my liking
| without anybody's approval even when the creators or publishers
| would disapprove.
|
| All the benefits of Games-as-a-Service came with massive trade
| offs and provide far more benefit for the 3rd parties who would
| insert themselves between gamers and the games they want to play
| than they provide for gamers themselves.
| 9dev wrote:
| Well, you conveniently ignore the reality of lots of people who
| cannot afford or just don't want to buy a gaming computer or
| console there. Streaming services are an actual, viable option
| for them. Even though Google has done its best to show why it
| might not be just so viable after all...
| autoexec wrote:
| Not having to keep up with hardware is pretty much the main
| selling point of games as a service and it's still not worth
| the tradeoffs.
|
| I'm what they call a patient gamer anyway. I'm often 10 or 15
| years behind, but I've never once run out of games to play
| and the savings are substantial.
|
| Consoles (which have many of the same problems Stadia did)
| aren't usually terribly expensive if you're willing to be a
| generation behind and used console games are insanely cheap
| with the exception of certain franchises (Nintendo titles and
| JRPGs are notorious for staying expensive. Castlevania
| Symphony of the Night came out in 1997 and can still go for
| well over $100 for a copy!) but thankfully emulation covers a
| lot of that. By the time I picked up a PS3 I was picking up
| 10-15 games for the same cost as just one game at release.
|
| As a bonus, waiting a few years to play the latest title
| means that everyone else has finished beta testing it for you
| and the entire experience is much improved. You can also
| usually get all (or most) the DLC included with the already
| low price of the game.
|
| Point being, you don't have to spend a fortune or have a
| blazing fast video card to have a nearly endless selection of
| exceptional games.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| You raise great points, but often a big motivator to play a
| specific game is the social aspect - playing with friends.
| Stadia gave me access to that when I wouldn't have
| otherwise. I have some really nice memories thanks to it.
|
| Not to say I can't convince friends to replay older games -
| it's just a bit tougher.
| dijit wrote:
| I think you miss a really important use-case for stadia and
| cloud based gaming: infrequent players.
|
| Such players usually use consoles, which are no better than
| cloud based gaming for forcing updates to content.
|
| I jump into a match of apex legends every 3-4 weeks, maybe I
| get an afternoon to play because my partner has decided to go
| out with her friends.
|
| What usually happens is that I launch my PlayStation and _it_
| spends the whole evening applying updates.
|
| It's asinine, maddeningly frustrating.
|
| if I could pick up a controller and play: I'd be much happier.
|
| FD: I worked on a game that came to stadia and knew about it
| before it's public launch.
| hbn wrote:
| People who play 1 match of 1 game 1 time per month seems like
| bad demographic to target for a gaming service.
| dijit wrote:
| Well; One afternoon of gaming every month and a match here
| and there.
|
| Why do you feel that this is a bad demographic?
|
| It's basically perfect because people like me can't
| _really_ justify a console let alone a full fledged PC
| gaming setup and all the work that would entail.
|
| Streaming services lose money the more they are used, the
| worst customer is the one who plays a lot and the best one
| is the one who doesn't play at all.
|
| Infrequent use is really ideal, and it would have suited me
| better than the alternatives too.
| CPLNTN wrote:
| How is a terrible deal? I would literally need to spend at
| least a 1000 dollars for a gaming pc, and that is 4 years of
| GeForce now, without considering maintenance, the space, etc.
|
| I'm playing cyberpunk 2077 max settings on a 2cm thick MacBook
| Pro, I don't have a bulky pc to move every time I move, and
| most importantly, if I ever get bored I'll simply stop paying
| instead of having a pc collecting dust
| [deleted]
| itake wrote:
| The problem is that you have minimal control of your game. If
| Google bans your YouTube account b/c your video of you
| walking your dog recorded a restaurant playing a copyrighted
| song, then you could also lose your entire collection of
| games.
| symlinkk wrote:
| How is that any different than Steam? You're arguing
| against DRM, not against cloud gaming
| autoexec wrote:
| cloud gaming is just another form of DRM. Bad for all the
| same reasons plus some.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| GeForce Now lets you use your existing games, there is no
| way for them to make you lose your games.
|
| By comparison, the Stadia model was broken from the start.
| autoexec wrote:
| Looks like multiple games/developers have already been
| pulled off of the service and there's no shortage of
| people posting about being banned or locked out of their
| accounts. I'm sure the convenience is nice when it all
| works, but you have to give up a whole lot for that.
| easton wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't just leave the play game page up and
| leave an engineer or two somewhere to make sure it still works.
| They could just start you a VM when you click play and kill it
| when you leave. Then they wouldn't have to give out any refunds.
| Thaxll wrote:
| A bit sad, they had the best tech by far.
| smm11 wrote:
| Google is that crazy girlfriend that all your friends warn you
| about, but she's really a good person and is going to change.
| drusepth wrote:
| This is mostly unfortunate just because of how far ahead Stadia's
| tech is in front of its competitors. I hope Luna, GFN, and/or
| xCloud improve a bit more by the time January rolls around, but
| also hope maybe an exodus of users from Stadia might provide more
| incentive to do so.
|
| The full game+hardware refunds are nice. Expected, but I would
| have also been unsurprised to end up disappointed with no refunds
| at all.
|
| I still think cloud gaming will be a huge part of the future of
| gaming.
| nottorp wrote:
| I'm one of the people who posted "and when will they cancel it?"
| when the product was launched.
|
| Even got downmodded, I think.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Why was the link moved away from the official announcement and
| onto the verge reporting on it?
| literallyWTF wrote:
| dekhn wrote:
| When I rejoined Google (working in the hardware division), my
| managers tried to get me to work on stadia and I refused (this
| was shortly before it launched). I looked at it, said "this won't
| be successful, and google will eventually get rid of it". My
| managers simply couldn't understand that. They said "the
| leadership thinks this will be successful and we should build it"
| and then I realized they were sheeple.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Or maybe your managers understood, but were tasked with finding
| workers for the project and were hoping you were sheeple?
| solaarphunk wrote:
| Google is sheeple all the way down
| lmkg wrote:
| That's even worse because it's malicious, wolves in sheeple
| clothing.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| That is like 99% of all tech companies. They want drones
| not people with original ideas.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| When you looked at it, what was it that tipped you off to its
| eventual failure? Was it a flaw in the technical design or
| something? How did you know it would eventually fail? (Looking
| to learn how to spot things like that, here!)
| dekhn wrote:
| My google failure sensors were honed on reader and google
| plus. In fact I just rejoined a company I worked at before
| Google and they had adopted Currents- Google's workspace
| version of Google Plus. Folks tried to get me to use it and
| all I could say was: I will never use Google Plus again. We
| are shutting down our Currents because... nobody ever uses
| it.
|
| There's several factors at play. First, Google simply does
| not have any ability to compete in the consumer gaming space
| because they don't understand it. Second, to make the project
| work required an enormous expenditure across hardware,
| software, deployment, and game studios. If the product wasn't
| absurdly successful, it would be a failure simply because its
| profit margins would be low. Third, there's no real way to
| make money doing machine learning on gamer behavior (the way
| this works in mobile, where many games including ads) so the
| profit margin would be low. Fourth, I saw a number of
| preeminent engineers who worked on the project leave shortly
| after it was launched, or some time later (when it first
| started becoming obvious the project wasn't a hit). Fifth,
| leadership pitched this as something that only Google could
| do, that Google's unique hardware and physical presence in
| POPs meant they would have significant advantages was
| obviously wrong (multiple companies always had the technical
| acumen and production infrastructure to make this happen).
|
| What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is
| becoming to something that Google would have to cancel
| because they can't get the profit margins to compare to ads.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| > What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is
| becoming to something that Google would have to cancel
| because they can't get the profit margins to compare to
| ads.
|
| I imagine GC is one of the big three cloud platforms (with
| AWS, Azure) so I am absolutely intrigued by your
| suggestion. How bad is it going, really? They've made a lot
| of investment in Firebase also. I could probably see them
| shake things up drastically, but shutting down sounds like
| suicide.
| vdfs wrote:
| Everything can be shutdown except Youtube, Search and
| 8.8.8.8
| hackernudes wrote:
| Gmail?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Welcome to every big company ever
| Kiro wrote:
| How could you know? It only became apparent it would fail after
| it launched. The technology is great and not the reason it was
| doomed.
| bogwog wrote:
| > It only became apparent it would fail after it launched.
| The technology is great and not the reason it was doomed so
| you didn't call anything.
|
| The technology isn't why it failed, Google is. Google was
| Google before it launched, and after it launched. So anyone
| familiar with Google could have predicted this failure before
| the actual launch.
| thelopa wrote:
| Or he didn't believe in it either and was just trying to do his
| job: to get engineers working on it.
| matt123456789 wrote:
| Highly paid sheeple whose paycheck and continued employment is
| probably correlated with their ability to oversee a technically
| successful execution of the designs of higher-ups. That sounds
| like the line that I would use if I had to build something so
| that I could get paid, even though I might agree with you
| personally.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Good, Google can't and shouldn't own everything. They have too
| much leverage owning everyone's phones, browsers, etc.
|
| I know 10 or so other companies that shouldn't own the game
| streaming market either, but being dedicated game distributors
| themselves, collectively they're far more deserving than some
| ambiguous tech conglomerate.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It was a mistake to get involved with game streaming to begin
| with.
|
| It was never about the players, it was "everybody else is
| developing a game streaming platform so we should too".
|
| In the last weeks there have been multiple streaming handhelds
| announce which leaves me wondering... "are there product managers
| who believe everything they see on TV?"
|
| Most of the fun of a portable game console is using it on the
| bus, as a passenger in a car, or outside the range of reliable
| WiFi. If you believed everything you see on TV you might think
| "5G" is a solution but I have to break it to you that there are
| postage stamp sized plots in Washington, DC, New York, NY, and
| Los Angeles, CA that have 5G coverage.
|
| Given that these e-waste devices are up against real portable
| game consoles like the Switch and the Steam Deck I can only hope
| the people who make the decisions to go ahead with marketing
| e-Waste products face some personal consequences for their
| actions, at the very least they won't be allowed to introduce
| more e-Waste products that hurt investors, gamers, game producers
| and everyone else.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I actually am bought into game streaming. I subscribe to both
| MS and Nvidia. I travel a lot and not needing a console or
| gaming laptop rocks. Most of my gaming is from the hotel or
| Airbnb, so the connection is not a problem.
|
| Even then Stadia was dead on arrival for me with a completely
| unattractive consumer proposition of having to subscribe but
| get no games (aside from some trash freebies) and having to
| rebuy games at MSRP that I already owned on storefronts that
| were still going to be around when the leaves fell off the
| trees.
| partdavid wrote:
| I also made the switch to streaming (GFN) and like playing
| all my same games from different "terminals" a lot. AirBNB
| and my house obviously work great. I've found hotel wifi to
| range from "barely works" to "does not work", lots of
| crappiness. I'm still looking for a good solution to this.
| Maybe you stay in better hotels! :)
|
| That said, I'm getting a Steam deck soon so I hope that fixes
| the story for "mobile" gaming or gaming without the network
| that GP pointed out. The convincing thing for me on GFN was
| that you're buying your games in a standard game store so if
| GFN becomes a non-option at some point I'll still have my
| games.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I was thinking of a steam deck for the same reason. Decent
| 720p gaming on the go and 4k gaming at home on the same
| device with the same games sounds awesome. Cloud saves make
| it all seamless.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| Stadia Pro subscription was optional, unless you consider 4k
| necessary. once you bought a game you could play it for free
| indefinitely at 1080p
| foobiekr wrote:
| Stadia was quite clearly part of the commoditize-the-
| competition strategy, probably mostly aimed at Sony and
| Microsoft.
| iroh2727 wrote:
| I've realized only recently a way to interpret what's going on at
| Google economically-speaking: as companies grow and as economies
| grow as well (e.g. to be more automated and industrialized), this
| always results in greater bureaucracy [1]. However, Google while
| it did add more bureaucracy, tried to instead turn these new
| less-purposeful jobs and bloat into widescale attempts at
| "innovation".
|
| Partly legitimate, but partly to maintain culture and a semblance
| of being an innovative company, in spite of the fact that they
| are a monopoly that, at the end of the day, is not really
| incentivized to innovate (e.g. M&A is much more practical for
| monopolies, as is competitor sabotage, sales and marketing, which
| of course they've also done).
|
| I guess Peter Thiel for example said this long ago (in a convo
| with Eric Schmidt iirc): that Google is actively anti-
| competitive. And this is always, always the case for monopolies.
| They've just done such a good job of marketing and creating
| sideshows to make it appear otherwise. Not to say that they
| haven't made some legitimate tech breakthroughs since being a
| monopoly, but also that tech is solely to serve their ads
| monopoly, rather than to serve the general public (e.g. what do
| you think their ML investments are for? It's not to create
| C-3PO...)
|
| [1] see e.g. Max Weber for how industrialization leads to
| bureaucracy, or more recently, David Graeber's bullshit jobs talk
| or book for a more fun, anecdotal take.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Entirely not unexpected. Google kills an other product.
| Thankfully it seems they are doing right by their customers with
| refunds on pretty much everything.
| [deleted]
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I should've taken the bet, I'd be $200 richer today. Stadia fan
| tears will fuel me for the next few months.
| palashkulsh wrote:
| Staying clear of sunk cost fallacy too seriously to their own
| detriment?
|
| Sign of rapid experimentation in a big company?
| piotr_slava wrote:
| this deficit of ideas and execution happens when hiring process
| is designed for those who study for six months like an exam.
| wnevets wrote:
| The reality is streaming is the future of gaming for a huge
| number of gamers. Stadia's business model would have never worked
| out but the tech does works. Stadia was always going to run into
| the problem Netflix is going through now, the big IP holders will
| create their own streaming platforms rather then sharing the
| revenue with a third party.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| "A huge number," maybe, in the sense that the majority of the
| world's gamers today only play games on their phone, but not
| the ones spending the most money. People who will pay extra for
| 144hz 4K monitors or multi-rollover keyboards with obnoxious
| lighting aren't going to throw the benefit of those things away
| for a platform that introduces 100-200ms of lag in the game and
| creates fuzzier graphics than the graphics card they already
| own is capable of.
|
| The market for this tech is very downmarket. If you try to sell
| it to the hardcore gamer audience, as Google tried to do,
| they're going to see right through this.
| wnevets wrote:
| > People who will pay extra for 144hz 4K monitors or multi-
| rollover keyboards with obnoxious lighting aren't going to
| throw the benefit of those things away for a platform that
| introduces 100-200ms of lag in the game and creates fuzzier
| graphics than the graphics card they already own is capable
| of.
|
| Console gaming have been introducing 100-200ms of lag [1] and
| fuzzier graphics for almost two decades.
|
| Streaming is a huge win for the big publishers, they hate the
| lost of control and maintenance pc gaming requires. At some
| point one of them will launch their latest must play title as
| streaming only and the gamers who want to play it won't have
| a choice.
|
| [1] https://displaylag.com/console-latency-exploring-video-
| game-...
| outworlder wrote:
| > People who will pay extra for 144hz 4K monitors
|
| They are pretty cheap nowadays, though. That's no longer a
| 'gaming' setup. Even cheaper if you make it (144hz NOR 4k)
| instead.
| classified wrote:
| So they pulled a Google on Stadia. Here we go again...
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Considering that consoles like Xbox Series S, Nintendo Switch are
| available for less than $300 and provide a much better gaming
| experience, it was quite inevitable.
|
| This does even more damage to the Google's reputation. I would
| never recommend or use GCP for example, now.
|
| Lastly google already has a gaming platform i.e. Android, and I
| would have loved to see some more innovation in that space
| instead.
| proboy wrote:
| dqpb wrote:
| Google is like an abusive partner. You keep hoping this time will
| be different, they'll try harder, they'll really commit to
| something good, they won't lie to your face, etc.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| Google lacks of focus. They should take a close look at what
| company they want to be in the next decade and more.
|
| And yes, they should radically restructure their system of
| incentives. Clearly the one they have in place does not work.
|
| They have been all over the places, from cloud, finance, gaming,
| mobile, os, social, you name it. And most of their revenue still
| come from ads.
|
| Steve Jobs:
|
| "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to
| focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no
| to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick
| carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as
| the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >They have been all over the places, from cloud, finance,
| gaming, mobile, os, social, you name it. And most of their
| revenue still come from ads.
|
| Telco, political machine, automotive, surveillance, more
| surveillance... and they made Flutter.
| loudmax wrote:
| This is entirely a failure of management rather than engineering.
|
| The kind of single player AAA titles they were promoting are
| always going to look better and be more responsive on local
| hardware. They should have leaned into Stadia as a backend for
| massively multiplayer online games, where they would have the
| advantage of cheat protection and a subscription revenue model.
| Instead they pushed for a purchase model that exacerbated all of
| online gaming's shortcomings while minimizing the advantages.
|
| The Stadia infrastructure may yet succeed, but never under Phil
| Harrison. He should have been sacked years ago.
| lostgame wrote:
| Funny fact: one of the only times online I actually caught a
| company shill acting as a regular person posting - essentially,
| ads; and whose extensive comment history only included positive
| remarks about a product - was a Stadia shill/plant I found on
| Reddit about a month ago.
|
| Their entire history comprised of posts and comments praising
| Stadia, but clearly typed by a real person; with like these weird
| intentional grammar and spelling mistakes to make the account
| _look_ like it was a real person. Either that or the Google
| employee behind the account needed to go back to Grade 5 or 6.
|
| Ironically - they'd posted the article one or two months ago
| where Google promised continued Stadia support, and I found it on
| the front page of Reddit News.
|
| I didn't think twice about the poster of the article; until
| enough people started joking that - yeah - give it a month or two
| and Google will close it down, kinda thing...
|
| The OP got _so_ defensive in a very strange way to the point
| where their comments started to be more than questionably 'real'.
|
| So, I did a quick background check on the account - only to find
| - holy shit; it's true, this person is literally paid by Google
| to post only positive things about Stadia online. Had to be -
| just from looking at it - but most telling, and the dead giveaway
| was that once myself and several other Redditors pointed out that
| the account was obviously just a paid shill from Google, the
| entire account mysteriously disappeared about an hour later. :P
|
| Companies: if you know your product has problems and/or is shit -
| here's a thought - instead of paying people to shill mostly false
| positive information on social media - how about you invest in
| actually improving your product; or marketing it in legitimate
| ways that don't make you look like a total scumbag. Just my
| advice.
| paulpan wrote:
| Another Google example of great potential sunken by bad/terrible
| execution.
|
| Why didn't it launch as a true "Netflix for Games" solution?
| Similar to what Microsoft is doing now with its Gamepass. Sure
| the gaming partnerships needed to be built but could've easily
| leveraged huge library of Android games.
|
| Ultimately will be curious to see how many heads will roll for
| this. It must've been a huge investment for both hardware (AMD
| Vega GPUs, controllers), marketing, etc.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Ultimately will be curious to see how many heads will roll
| for this.
|
| If other HN commenters with (allegedly) insight into Google's
| politics are to be believed, none.
| james33 wrote:
| Not surprised, but still rather frustrated. We literally just
| signed a deal to bring Arctic Awakening to Stadia in the last few
| weeks, and I know a number of other devs had done the same. They
| never even gave it a chance. What did they expect, to take over
| the gaming market in a few short years with hardly any content?
| pmarreck wrote:
| Oh look, another Google failure, sigh
| vhab wrote:
| Unfortunately this doesn't surprise me.
|
| We worked on a Stadia title before launch. We were constantly
| reminded by Google how big the YouTube integration would be,
| which unique killer features we absolutely had to integrate with,
| and more.
|
| And non of that ever materialized after launch. If Google can't
| even convince their own internal teams to cooperate, how do they
| expect studios and consumers to care the slightest for their
| product.
|
| It also didn't help that supporting Stadia was equivalent to
| supporting an entirely different new console in scope, except
| less battle tested and much more buggy. Meanwhile all their
| competitors allow existing console or Windows builds to be
| shipped to their platforms.
|
| And while we're sharing anecdotes, this was a fun one. For the
| longest time devkits were limited to 1080p, but at least the
| output was streamed from rack mounted servers that supported a
| couple of concurrent sessions. A few months before launch, they
| finally made 4k devkits available, except they supported only a
| single session, couldn't stream, and instead had to sit at a
| developer's desk with a monitor hooked up...
|
| Let that sink in, a streaming service's devkits couldn't stream
| :)
| dougmwne wrote:
| From the consumer perspective, this reminds me of the new
| chromecast that was released without Stadia support, even
| though the previous chromecast supported it. Get that! A
| streaming stick that couldn't stream the company's own paid
| service. Preposterous!
| postalrat wrote:
| IMO streaming games still has a lot of potential. Too bad
| Google couldn't pull it off.
|
| The Youtube stuff is only the surface of what would be
| possible.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > IMO streaming games still has a lot of potential.
|
| Not with the current internet speed.
|
| The vast majority of people is below anything that would play
| "okay", and almost everyone is below a speed that would play
| well (1 GBPS).
|
| Until 1 GBPS is the default EVERYWHERE, streaming games has 0
| potential.
| p1necone wrote:
| You can get high quality streaming video with _much_ less
| than 1GBPS, low latency and _consistent_ speed + latency
| are the important parts.
|
| (Needed bandwidth will still be higher than regular video
| streaming though, as you have to compress in real time)
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| Nah, if you can stream Netflix in 1080p or better and have
| low latency then game streaming works fine. I know people
| who do it off LTE without issue even for non competitive
| games.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I encourage you to watch a Netflix movie and a live video
| game side by side and you will see how nonsensical the
| comparison is.
| drusepth wrote:
| Doing this now... what are you expecting to be obvious
| from this experiment? Obviously the video game has some
| upstream requirements (just user input), but neither are
| stuttering or having any issues.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The quality is simply incomparable. A 4K movie streamed
| wouldn't even compared to a 1080p game being ran.
|
| You're putting side by side compressed and raw visuals,
| it just doesn't compare at all.
| SXX wrote:
| Streaming problem is not about bandwidth, but about
| latency. With current technology and physics there nothing
| you can do about latency.
| drusepth wrote:
| Stadia ran (runs) well at 50mbps, and their competitors
| don't require much more (~100mbps for comparable results
| afaict), and 2x that minimum often results in a flawless
| experience if you have the bandwidth/latency to back it up
| (e.g. if you're on a home/work connection, rather than a
| busy coffee shop).
|
| I put almost 1,000 hours into Stadia across all my games
| travelling across ~20 states and 3 countries the past ~3
| years. It's very rare to find places where it isn't "okay"
| to play (with some notable exceptions near launch where
| you'd regularly get ~1 second input delay at times or
| frozen, pixellated graphics), and in many places now it
| feels indistinguisable from native/local games.
|
| I don't know which platform I'll move to from Stadia, but
| it will definitely be a cloud one.
| danso wrote:
| How much of Stadia tech/innovations will we see in ongoing/future
| Google products? There was a lot of hype about how Stadia's
| (potential) input-lag-reduction tech, but how successful did that
| end up being?
| cletus wrote:
| Story time. I left Google in 2017 after Fiber (which I worked on)
| was unceremoniously mothballed. I mean it still exists bu tall
| expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode.
|
| Before leaving one of the teams some of us considered joining was
| the then unlaunched Stadia team. This was an effort out of Cloud
| I guess to create value added GCP services. Ultimately it never
| went anywhere because the team didn't want a presence in NYC.
|
| Anyway, as soon as I heard about the project I said there's only
| two words you need to kill this project.
|
| "Input lag"
|
| The conversation should've ended there as the games where this
| isn't a factor are so niche it doesn't justify an entire product
| and engineering team.
|
| I really don't understand how projects like this get signed off.
| Well, I do actually. It's a pet project for someone who doesn't
| really understand the domain they're operating in (ie games).
|
| This should've never been greenlit.
| suresk wrote:
| > I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it
| went into maintenance mode.
|
| Google Fiber is currently microtrenching in front of my house,
| and continues to move into more cities here. Did they restart,
| or did their mothballing just mean that they aren't entering
| new geographic regions?
|
| TBH, I'm super excited about it because the only other high-
| speed option we have is Comcast and it is super unreliable and
| the data cap sucks, but I'm also mentally preparing for the day
| they get bored of it and shut the whole thing down.
| chrisdfrey wrote:
| I played God of War (2018), the Last of Us games, and some
| other stuff on PS Now (Sony's cloud gaming platform). There
| were some issues but overall it worked pretty well. There are
| some games where cloud gaming can't give you low enough input
| latency, but I disagree that it is as many games as you think.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| Destiny 2 is free on Stadia. you can launch it right now after
| the intro hop into a PvP match to try yourself.
|
| Input lag was never a noticeable issue for the non-PCMasterRace
| population, which is the majority of gamers.
| cainxinth wrote:
| They knew game streaming wasn't ready for prime time. The
| strategy, I imagine, was to get in early and suffer some
| growing pains to cement a toehold that positions Google as a
| major player if/when game streaming goes mass market. I guess
| the bean counters at Alphabet decided the juice is no longer
| worth the squeeze.
| jsight wrote:
| Don't they have competitors that are doing better than Stadia?
| Eg, geforce now?
|
| TBH, I played quite a bit of Madden on Stadia and input lag
| wasn't really an issue. I think there are a lot of games that
| actually worked really well there.
| partdavid wrote:
| I was really skeptical that this could work before trying it
| myself on GFN. There _are_ network problems, and it can be a
| pain when it happens, but this is standard connectivity stuff
| (my ISP connection fails or I have a problem with my wi-fi)
| and the input lag just isn 't perceptible to me. I was really
| surprised and impressed at how well it works. At that point I
| was sold.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| It's quite the precedent they are setting by issuing refunds on
| the hardware. Presumably dodging a class action, but interesting
| nonetheless
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Happy Stadia user here. Can't say I didn't see it coming.
|
| I'm just frustrated at how bad Google is at marketing a good
| product. For example, the Stadia front page didn't show anything
| enticing if you weren't using Chrome!
| kikki wrote:
| While inevitable, I am impressed they are refunding all
| purchases, including hardware. That can't be cheap.
| dvzk wrote:
| I deleted my Stadia account a few months ago, and it had $400
| in purchases. I assume that I won't be getting the refund. Oh
| well, RIP.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I'm surprised, but I'm also glad they are doing this. It could
| be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5
| minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished
| product they shipped thinking they'll solve it. But the reality
| is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were
| barely playable. I'm talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps
| upload speed.
| lokar wrote:
| It would be great if they could somehow open up the API of
| the controllers, they are nice.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Bandwidth isn't that important with game streaming after
| ~40-70 Mbps, latency and jitter (essentially latency
| consistency) is.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised the 4 sibling comments as of this
| writing don't even mention the latency/jitter issue-- to
| me, that's always been one of the obvious biggest flaws
| with game streaming. Your average consumer has little to no
| awareness of it, it's beyond Google's control, and it has a
| very noticeable impact to anyone experiencing it. Not a
| good combination.
|
| Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the
| record straight. My faith in HN is restored.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is also a major problem when it comes
| to latency & jitter. It doesn't even have to be _game_
| streaming, any real-time application such as calls suffer
| from it as well, despite not actually requiring much
| _bandwidth_ at all.
|
| Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for
| this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be
| tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so
| you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the
| connection cutting completely for a second.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| speedtest.net used to have a sibling "pingtest" site that
| measured your jitter. I'm not sure why they don't exist
| anymore.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I remember it using a Java applet. I think the reason
| none of the online test sites support it is because it's
| hard to test latency & jitter in the browser as the lower
| layers try hard to compensate for it.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Oh. It was Flash.
|
| Sometimes I forget that was ever a thing!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Speed alone isn't what matters here - latency and jitter are
| more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is
| meaningless.
|
| I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with
| an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make
| both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming
| would work).
|
| This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-
| grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS
| datacenter, and all wired ( _good_ wireless gear might 've
| worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-
| grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
|
| Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well _under
| optimal conditions_.
|
| Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good
| equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe
| for disaster. Those who _do_ have the budget are better
| served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games
| locally.
|
| Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as
| Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't
| expect it to work on the majority of residential connections.
| The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's
| network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't
| know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so
| they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it
| inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
|
| Until _good_ networking setups become commonplace, game
| streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have
| serious networking setups but for some reason don't have a
| local gaming machine.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Game streaming is great for casual gamers. A lot of games
| are perfectly playable even with 200ms tacked on, actually.
|
| It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the
| extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for
| hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the
| difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS
| games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games
|
| Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry
| making these streaming products are adults with real lives
| who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore
| players
| camel_Snake wrote:
| I've used Stadia for the past year exclusively and it's been
| fine 99% of the time. I guess I'm relieved from defending
| Stadia duty now though, _sigh_
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The problem with such statements is that game streaming
| services are INSANELY dependent on literally a century of
| cruft and how it was handled on a house to house basis. You
| can have great performance in your house, but your neighbor
| across the street could have utterly useless behavior.
|
| Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem
| your ISP sent you when you first got service.
| noirbot wrote:
| I'd be shocked if their contracts/EULA wasn't structured to
| avoid risk of suit around something like this. Shutting down
| a live service feels pretty defensible as not a crime or
| tort, and they could almost definitely fight the lawsuit for
| less than this costs in refunds, which makes it all the
| weirder.
| Sakos wrote:
| It's the most likely reason. We've seen plenty of cases
| were EULAs were declared void and that won't hold in a
| place like the EU. You can't sign away your rights as
| consumers here. They might be able to fight individual
| lawsuits in some places, but it might eventually escalate
| into an investigation by the EU. There's significant legal
| risk there that is being avoided by just refunding a few
| millions. It's the sensible move.
| detaro wrote:
| It's also just a good marketing move. "they made people
| pay full-price for games and deleted them shortly after"
| is the kind of association that sticks around and even
| Google has an interest to avoid.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Anytime I see an asymmetric upload bandwidth like 600/100, I
| assume the ISP is just advertising temporary burst speeds and
| does not actually allocate enough upload bandwidth to the
| neighborhood for people to sustain usage at 100Mbps.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It actually just means they're using DOCSIS to carry the
| signal, which has asymmetric bandwidth allocations for
| upstream and downstream. 600/100 is a standardized
| allocation too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In practice, it is always a heavily oversubscribed
| network that never delivers sustained bandwidth for
| either up or down.
|
| Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber
| connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually
| sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency.
| Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber
| non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the
| USA).
| cromka wrote:
| You could make the same argument regarding upload speeds.
| They simply have asymmetrical link, and overprovision on
| both download and upload.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume you mean same argument regarding download. In my
| experience, the download is always far less over-
| provisioned than the upload.
|
| For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much
| they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you
| 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I
| assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a
| neighborhood of 500 houses.
| treis wrote:
| Upload bandwidth for something like Stadia is tiny. Only
| thing you need to send are user inputs
| Nextgrid wrote:
| However, you need _consistent_ latency, which isn 't
| guaranteed in a highly-oversubscribed network.
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe it is cheap. Any idea how many units they sold?
| devrand wrote:
| I think hardware was a loss-leader anyway. They were
| generously giving them out for free. Games are probably the
| biggest loss for them as a majority of that money was handed
| off to publishers.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Probably the cost is small compared to their development
| budget.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Exactly. That one guy must be thrilled.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Yes, i am :)
| sofixa wrote:
| Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a
| controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones,
| IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don't recall),
| and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they
| drastically overestimate how many people would buy their
| hardware.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Their 7 customers will be relieved.
| flatiron wrote:
| My main computer is a MacBook 2103 running Linux. Stadia was
| my only way to play games. I'm kinda mad I'm losing my save
| progress on some games.
|
| Ironically I will probably use my refund to buy a steam deck.
| highwaylights wrote:
| There's still a bunch of alternatives.
|
| XCloud and GeForce Now are the two that come to mind. There
| are others.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Kudos to Google for doing right by their customers without
| being prompted. They could've said "$5 off a Nest Thermostat"
| or some crap and instead they manned up.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _That can 't be cheap._
|
| Yeah, seriously.
|
| I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was
| 60EUR new, but there was a 10EUR discount available at the
| time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on
| Stadia before. So, only 50EUR for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.
|
| Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also
| get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally"
| for 99EUR), which includes the Stadia Controller and a
| Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50EUR).
|
| I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40EUR shortly
| after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my
| purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10EUR with a free USB
| controller on the side.
|
| And now I'm getting a 50EUR refund?
| neogodless wrote:
| Does anyone have sales numbers on hardware and software?
|
| If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut
| down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps
| buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next
| time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails,
| they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.
| drusepth wrote:
| Not quite hardware/software sales, but a lot of people pegged
| Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the
| beginning of the year. It's also unclear how many of those
| break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-
| game-once-and-play-it-now users.
|
| Here's one that showed their work: https://allstadia.com/how-
| many-users-does-google-stadia-have
| bogwog wrote:
| It's probably cheaper than the lawsuits.
| nevir wrote:
| I think it _begins_ to address mistrust of new Google products.
| Which is worth a lot to Google.
|
| If they consistently take this approach for other
| cancellations, it could change the the common view from:
|
| "why use this? They're just going to shut it down in a few
| years anyway"
|
| to:
|
| "oh neat, Google's experimenting with something new. Let me try
| it out. If it doesn't work out, they'll take care of me."
| twicetwice wrote:
| Yeah, if I had known this would be how they would have
| handled a hypothetical shutdown, I would have very happily
| used the service. Instead I signed up for GeForce Now since I
| can buy games through Steam and play them there. The main
| thing that stopped me from going with Stadia instead was that
| I was pretty confident that at some point it would shut down
| and I'd lose access to $xxx worth of games. If they had
| promised up front to do this in case of failure, maybe it
| wouldn't have failed.
| josefresco wrote:
| How is GeForce Now with Steam? I have a Steam link but find
| it to be a pain in the rear. It's also difficult / clumsy
| to use for non Steam games. Does GeForce Now solve this or
| is it just ... different?
| belthesar wrote:
| GeForce Now gives you a Windows box with Steam on it, and
| you log into your Steam account on it. They pair it with
| a super fast cache of the Steam Depot so your first
| install is speedy. That way, there's no integration
| necessary, and Nvidia doesn't have to reinvent the
| achievement/launcher/licensing wheel.
| twicetwice wrote:
| It's probably just different. I don't know what the Steam
| Link is like. GFN streams the games from a datacenter, so
| the quality will depend on the quality of your internet
| connection. Also, GFN can't play all Steam games;
| publishers have to agree to allow their games to be
| played on GFN, and several major publishers don't agree
| (eg Bethesda, Rockstar). All that said, I'm happy with
| it. Usually I can't tell at all that it's being streamed,
| and it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics
| setting without thinking about it.
| awill wrote:
| Most Google products are free. That's the difference.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| They are not free. You are paying with your privacy.
| vntok wrote:
| No, they really are free.
| [deleted]
| paulmd wrote:
| Free at time-of-service (and as mentioned, of course you're
| paying with your privacy anyway) doesn't mean there's not
| very real costs to the customer if the service goes away
| though.
|
| Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say,
| gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to
| migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even
| though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around
| shifting sands like that.
|
| Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never
| be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having
| my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem
| nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major
| undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on
| doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone
| on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice
| number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that
| wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the
| underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with
| AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough
| without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm
| not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to
| be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.
|
| So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my
| privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around
| migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in
| the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra
| months of service on a second line) even to migrate off
| "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said
| "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or
| upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The
| obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google
| services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a
| business.
| krmboya wrote:
| Not free at all. You invest your personal capital (trust)
| into their products. Then it'll be degraded and shut down
| just like that.
| imiric wrote:
| You invest with your personal data they sell to data
| brokers, and use to improve their ML models.
|
| Can we get those back, Google? Not just our data, but the
| profits and improvements you made from it?
|
| "Free" in the age of adtech comes at a high price. The
| sad part is most people don't care they're getting the
| short end of the stick.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| I'm a Stadia user, and Google's handling of the shutdown of
| Google Play Music is what gave me confidence to purchase
| anything on Stadia (~$500 on a quick review). I actually
| thought we'd be sent personal links of our games, which would
| live-on in Google's white-list stadia product called Google
| Stream - they did something similar for GPM which merged into
| Youtube Music. I'm fine with a refund though.
| chaostheory wrote:
| This is the exact reason that I don't mind purchasing
| Amazon's experiments. If it doesn't work out, I get my money
| back and Amazon has more data for product dev
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It's a remarkable decision to refund! I'm assuming all the game
| developers are keeping their revenue from Stadia gameplay, so
| it's a meaningful net loss for Google overall. Maybe not that
| much though; I hope someone publishes an accounting.
| noirbot wrote:
| I'm really curious the calculation here. That's a lot of money,
| and I'm certainly glad they're doing it, but feels both out of
| character for Google, and I'm surprised they have the budget
| allocated to just "doing the right thing". What goodwill is
| this saving that they aren't burning by shutting down Stadia?
| kimbernator wrote:
| People were extremely cautious about stadia from day 1
| because while Google may be the single most capable company
| of actually making cloud gaming workable, this specific
| product required a lot of money input that had a fairly good
| chance of being completely wiped out based on Google's track
| record.
|
| With this, next time there's a product that has a similar
| risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might
| get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"
| sidibe wrote:
| I guess they're keeping the subscription fees for those who
| subscribed, not sure what percent of their revenue that would
| have been. All in all the total sales are probably paltry
| relative to the investment they've made in it (though surely
| they'll find other uses for the servers and tech), so it's
| not a big sacrifice to give that back to avoid anger and
| lawsuits
| noirbot wrote:
| I dunno, Google has never really seemed to care about
| consumer anger and lawsuits. Like I said, it's a welcome
| change, and I'll be happy if they keep up this new pro-
| consumer attitude, but this feels a lot more like a weird
| one-off than a new policy or commitment.
| Sakos wrote:
| The simple answer is that it's legal hedging. They _don 't_
| want anything related to this closure of Stadia to lead to a
| lawsuit that might impact the concept of software licensing,
| particularly in the EU. This is a move out of pure self-
| interest (not that I see anything particularly wrong with
| that).
| [deleted]
| tpmx wrote:
| Perhaps it isn't that much money...
| noirbot wrote:
| But if it wasn't that much money, then it wasn't that many
| people who would be upset about not getting a refund, which
| for a company with the cashflow that Google has feels like
| not worth not pissing off.
| vntok wrote:
| Those "not that many people" would have been very angry
| and very vocal though.
| tpmx wrote:
| Ok.
| comeonbro wrote:
| 1. Gamers are particularly vindictive
|
| 2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this
| exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down
| in a few years" into broad public consciousness
|
| 3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try
| again
|
| 4. Maybe it's relatively not that much money. I would be
| surprised if I knew more than one or two people who'd ever
| even heard of Stadia
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's not out of character. They did exactly the same thing
| for "Google Offers," the old Groupon competitor from a decade
| ago. They refunded ALL of the purchased deals, even the ones
| that had been redeemed.
| wpietri wrote:
| Dang, Groupon is a name I haven't heard in a while. I just
| looked and they're still going somehow?
|
| IPOed at $522.20, now down to $8.76. Took $1.4b in
| investment, now worth $265m.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 12 years ago, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6
| billion and Groupon declined. Those were the second and
| first dumbest business decisions I've ever heard of,
| respectively.
| beoberha wrote:
| I think it saves a ton of goodwill. Yes, you're taking a
| platform from people, but it's much better to not take their
| money too. Nobody is losing their livelihood, it's a gaming
| service that can easily be replaced.
| noirbot wrote:
| Does it though? It doesn't seem to be in keeping with how
| the rest of Google functions with their general lack of
| care, customer service, or recourse on anything. It also
| don't paper over the fact that they killed a service that,
| just 3 months ago they said wasn't being shut down.
|
| If there was some new Google paid service that I cared
| about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is
| some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid
| giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in
| a couple years.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| If this is for goodwill, they have to start somewhere.
|
| Google hasn't remained the same company through its
| history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot
| projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a
| radical departure from their past.
|
| Maybe Google is realizing they can't keep being this cold
| company forever.
|
| Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn't get me to
| trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse.
| It would have to be done a few more times.
| beoberha wrote:
| I don't disagree with that, but I think it's somewhat
| orthogonal. If you pay people back, the general reception
| is now "eh, assumed this was going to happen. Glad I'm
| not out hundreds of dollars." compared to fire and
| pitchforks if there's no refunds. Google already has the
| rep for shutting things down. This doesn't really move
| the needle besides showing that they will at least
| financially compensate your loss.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'm hesitant to claim exceptionalism, but history
| supports the claim that gamers are (a) quick to claim
| umbrage, (b) VERY vocal on social media, (c) have a LOT
| of free time to shitpost, (d) have long memories, and (e)
| are a younger demographic (aka future consumers).
|
| Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and
| "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the
| cheaper option.
| noirbot wrote:
| Perhaps, but I wonder if _that_ class of gamers you 're
| talking about is the target/actual audience for Stadia.
| The folks I knew who had/used Stadia were a lot more
| casual and non-traditional gamers, since why would you
| pay for an online streaming game service when you already
| own consoles or a robust PC?
|
| It's not like Google has a good rep in that community
| already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube,
| and especially in its gaming community, complains about
| YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on
| Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively
| to move over to YT.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| A lot of gamers are the sort of people that flame a
| developer of a bad game they never even bought/played in
| the first place. Attacking corporations is itself a sort
| of game they enjoy, having a personal stake in the fight
| isn't necessary for them.
|
| On that note, some commentary from /v/:
| >even the shut down lagged by months
| drusepth wrote:
| >why would you pay for an online streaming game service
| when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
|
| Lots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me
| were portability (playing my games at max settings while
| traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops,
| etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted
| (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home,
| but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while
| travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks
| like using less battery life / hard drive space / time
| updating / etc than the native alternative.
|
| In other words, if I have the choice between playing the
| same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the
| couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going
| to pick the latter.
| falcolas wrote:
| The Ars Technica article about this notes a few caveats:
|
| - They are not refunding the 'pro' subscription charges
|
| - They are not refunding hardware purchases made from 3rd
| parties
|
| The first is a bit sus, the second does make sense
| unfortunately.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-offici...
| zerocrates wrote:
| If you actually get access for the term of the subscription
| you paid for, I don't see an issue with not refunding
| subscription fees.
| causi wrote:
| _We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through
| the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made
| through the Stadia store._
|
| What are the odds of this being another lie?
| swampthinker wrote:
| To the surprise of absolutely no one.
| glanzwulf wrote:
| To the absdolute shock of... nobody.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's always harmful to your reputation to shut down a service,
| but it is especially harmful when it is an ecosystem or platform
| play where you are burning the good will of third parties who co-
| invest to create the platform. Clearly stadia is in that second
| category. While Google can refund consumers for their purchases
| they can never make up for the opportunity cost those parties
| suffered.
|
| At this point, I can't see how Google can ever launch another
| platform or ecosystem except on a 100% transactional basis.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I am more entertained by this than I should be. Back when Stadia
| launched I was in a Reddit thread saying that the blatant double-
| dip business model of subscriptions + purchase stunk and that I
| had no faith in Google to not shut this storefront down shortly.
| I was immediately roasted by a flock of obvious astroturfers
| telling me that this was an absolutely serious move by Google to
| dominate the console games market and that the executive in
| charge was a big shot games industry person who was going to made
| this an unstoppable product. The paid astroturfing felt very
| weird coming from Google.
|
| Then they started locking up game publishers into exclusive deals
| and getting games removed from other streaming services, a
| definite dick move. It was obvious that this special executive in
| charge was pretty consumer unfriendly.
|
| Now this service is being shut down with little notice and while
| it's great that they are refunding the purchases, there's also
| the matter of the Stadia Pro claimed games that were part of the
| subscription benefits but will be lost. Along with no clear plan
| for taking out save data, this is a real FU to anyone who
| believed those astroturfers and went all in on the stadia
| console.
|
| The icing on the cake is this statement that it didn't "gain the
| traction with users that we expected." Ha! This business model
| was dead on arrival. The competition was innovating while Stadia
| stood still. And instead of giving an inch off the starting line,
| they took their toys and went home. This is one of the most
| petulantly childish things I have ever seen from them.
|
| This company is a bloated rotting carcass. The regulators should
| chop it up and feed it to the seagulls.
| [deleted]
| gbasp wrote:
| > I was immediately roasted by a flock of obvious astroturfers
|
| I was a true believer in Stadia for years and still am when it
| comes to cloud gaming. I was never paid a cent by Google to my
| knowledge (although they are refunding my purchases so I
| appreciate that).
|
| That said, unfortunately you are correct that Google is a
| bloated rotting mess. The worst part is that Stadia was a legit
| good product.
| xtracto wrote:
| This [1] guy got it right to the year (3 years ago when Stadia
| started):
|
| >It also doesn't help that it's from Google. They've lost a lot
| of good will in the last couple of years and honestly most
| people expect Stadia to be EOL'd in 24-36 months once Google
| gets bored with it.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e1l9j4/comment/f8ru...
| hbn wrote:
| It was many more people than that one guy. Myself and others
| were calling a shut down in 2-3 years literally the day
| Stadia was announced.
|
| Those of us who were bucked off at the Google rodeo enough
| times eventually learned our lesson and realized it's never
| gonna change.
| wpietri wrote:
| > The paid astroturfing felt very weird coming from Google.
|
| I don't doubt you at all, but how does one tell paid
| astroturfing from rabid fanboys?
| dougmwne wrote:
| It was a few years ago, but I remember it was distinctly
| obvious. Stadia was new. No one really knew much about it and
| it was not launched yet. Several users with same-ish
| usernames all starting giving long well written replies that
| kept repeating specific talking points that were not really
| part of the articles or marketing, things about the product
| strategy that sounded very much like a social media marketing
| brief. And they had a lot of very nice things to say about
| the boss. I used to work adjacent to social media marketing
| and it had the fingerprint. They were either several Stadia
| marketing employees on a coffee break or being specifically
| paid for the campaign.
| sjs382 wrote:
| > blatant double-dip business model of subscriptions + purchase
| stunk
|
| FWIW, the subscription wasn't required. It just got you
| discounts on games, access to a rotating collection of "free"
| games, and 4k streaming (rather than 1080p you get without a
| subscription).
|
| Their communication about all of this _really_ sucked though,
| because most critics who didn 't try Stadia (and even some who
| did) thought the subscription was required to use it at all.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I believe it was required for early adopters. Then they let
| you claim free games while a subscriber, but you lost access
| if you stopped. If you weren't subscribing you could miss
| free claims. It was all very manipulative and low value.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| > This company is a bloated rotting carcass. The regulators
| should chop it up and feed it to the seagulls.
|
| Hey man, there's no need to be cruel toward animals here! ;-)
| totsuzen wrote:
| * didn't "gain the traction with users that we expected." *
| >> GCP : I'm scared out of my mind
| yalogin wrote:
| This is baffling. Stadia was launched with a lot of fanfare and
| it got a lot of attention too. This feels like Google giving up
| on something that everyone wants to succeed. In other words it
| would have been a great success if it's with anyone but google.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Oh man were is that guy from the leak who kept insisting that
| they would never do this, their paud products were perfect and
| lasted forever.
|
| Paging @sofixa [1], [2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32485397
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492932
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Its almost humorous at this point how many services they shut
| down. Starting to get worried about my google domains.
| ezekg wrote:
| Wow, this is so unexpected!
| sva_ wrote:
| Somebody should start a betting site on what Google will shutdown
| next. I think it might be Youtube Shorts.
| jpeter wrote:
| I don't think it will be youtube shorts. I bet it gets a lot of
| views from people using it on the toilett
| franczesko wrote:
| Truly wasted potential. As I wrote a while ago:
|
| "One of the biggest problems Google has is that they excel at
| engineering, but they lack proper marketing or business talent.
| Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract
| players and grow the platform. I'm wondering how many of their
| products were killed just because of the fact, that there was no
| plan beyond letting it out in the market"
| homarp wrote:
| https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1575544578912178176
|
| My best Stadia story was us trying to work out why a developer's
| machine kept getting flagged for malware. Turns out they were
| porting something to Stadia and the DRM didn't work under Linux.
| The publisher refused to give them a DRM-free copy and told them
| to warez one instead.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| My favorite Stadia story is how when Outriders launched, Stadia
| was on entirely different code branch and release from the
| other platforms. Weapon/armor scaling and skill effects were
| different - leading to an entirely sub-meta for the Stadia
| platform. Cross-play (eventually) worked and other people were
| entirely confused why our wacky builds were so effective.
|
| Eventually things were patched to parity but our old armor
| values didn't get re-aligned so were entirely too high (by a
| factor of 2-3x) compared to the other platforms.
| dqpb wrote:
| Google: "Would you like to waste the best years of your life?"
|
| Engineer: "No..."
|
| Google: "What if I pay you slightly above average and give you
| free food?"
|
| Engineer: "Deal!"
| symlinkk wrote:
| Slightly above average?
| llamamare wrote:
| Bring back Chromecast Audio and I forgive you!
| kossTKR wrote:
| This isn't just incompetence, it's a PR smokescreen that
| fulfilled its purpose, to smokescreen the ad and surveillance
| machine that has been Google Corp right from the beginning.
|
| ShadowPC has already proved that gaming over fiber+wifi is very
| viable but it was never googles project - the project was yet
| another toy-thing that people will think google is "doing", when
| they are actually an ad and surveillance company.
| seydor wrote:
| I think i am shocked
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| Yup, that's exactly what everyone expected since the beginning.
| And that's why publishers were not very interested, because they
| always suspected that's what would happen. Why invest when Google
| will get bored and shut it down in a couple years?
| deelowe wrote:
| I think there would have been more interest if they didn't
| launch with folks having to the purchase games instead of it
| just being a subscription plan like most were expecting. Of
| course, pure subscriptions came later, but that was an odd way
| to roll it out.
| clintonb wrote:
| Agreed. The upfront cost of games and a new Stadia-specific
| controller was too much. I subscribed to PS Now to play
| Spider-Man. I still had to buy a PlayStation controller, but
| it was reusable for other PC games.
|
| Ironically, I am now only subscribed to a visit GeForce Now,
| which requires game purchases. This is primarily due to
| Sony's lack of macOS support for PS Now, and my owning an M1
| with no Bootcamp support.
| Kiro wrote:
| Everyone based it on inaccurate predictions though, namely that
| it wouldn't work. It worked fantastic even for the most latency
| sensitive games.
| eropple wrote:
| _> It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive
| games._
|
| Stadia was _cool_ and I think there is a future for this sort
| of gaming in some genres and for some audiences, but I play
| fighting games and it absolutely did not work "fantastic"
| for them, even living in Boston and having a sporting
| symmetric-gigabit connection.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| laughing-tom-cruise.jpg
|
| We all saw this coming years ago when it was first announced.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I wonder if Google's tried to study & put some numbers on how
| much harder it is for new products of theirs to take off, due
| to their reputation, and decided it's not worth the cost to
| fix, or if they just don't care to even find out.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I think you're probably spot on about the latter. Besides,
| attempting to find out if their reputation has been damaged
| in a measurable way wouldn't get anyone promoted. :)
| josefresco wrote:
| Funny I _just_ plugged in my Stadia controller and played around
| to see if the service was still active. It 's sad, I really liked
| the service for a few reasons:
|
| 1. I don't have a gaming console, and this allowed me to easily
| (with the help of my Chromecast) add gaming to my living room.
|
| 2. It's way easier than Steam Link/Controllers which always
| require an element of "massage" to get and keep working.
|
| Downsides:
|
| My library of games on Steam, Epic, EA are obviously not
| accessible with Stadia, and I wasn't about to re-purchase or
| purchase exclusively any game content from a service that was
| doomed.
|
| I've also played with Xbox Cloud Gaming and while decent I found
| it unusable on mobile.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| If you can find your game on GeForce Now you should give a try,
| works really great on PC or Android TV.
| pkulak wrote:
| The other big plus for me was that the backend was Linux. If it
| really took off, it would have been huge for Linux gaming.
| Sadly, it looks like the survivors are all Windows based. It's
| all on Steam now.
| partdavid wrote:
| > My library of games on Steam, Epic, EA are obviously not
| accessible with Stadia
|
| This is what convinced me to jump into streaming gaming with an
| NVidia Shield and GeForce Now.
|
| You buy the games on standard game store platforms: Steam, Epic
| and Ubisoft. So I knew when I was buying the games that if GFN
| folded or I didn't like it anymore I could still play my entire
| library on a PC.
|
| Not every game available on Steam is available to play through
| GFN. For example, you can't play GTAV. But you can play
| Destiny, Cyberpunk, Saint's Row, Assassin's Creed, etc. It's a
| credible if not complete selection.
|
| The service was cheap (very cheap when I signed up with the
| Founder's lifetime rate at < $5/mo.) and I needed a new
| streaming device for my TV anyway (the Shield is a perfectly
| capable Android TV based streaming device), so I could dip my
| toe in it easily and see how it worked (basically the cost of
| the controller, which aren't very expensive). I've liked it so
| much I left console gaming behind and got two more Shields for
| two other TVs. It's very nice to be able to play the same game
| from different terminals, including my phone if need be
| (phone's not great for Cyberpunk 2077 but it does Powerwash
| Simulator just fine).
| julienreszka wrote:
| You can probably use shadow.tech as an alternative
| welcome_dragon wrote:
| For those of you who haven't tried it, it is the real deal. I've
| tried Xbox live, playstation streaming, etc. and Stadia's
| performance blows every single one out of the water. Even on 4g,
| performance is unbelievable.
|
| You don't even need hardware or any account. You can play destiny
| for free.
|
| It saddens me that this is going away but like most people, I'm
| not surprised.
|
| I just hope that the technology doesn't go to waste.
| BudaDude wrote:
| Hopefully Valve,Sony, or Microsoft acquires the tech.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| it's gonna be spun off into Google Stream the white label
| service. you can find the Resident Evil demo online for free
| that uses this, I think it's still live.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Nvidia's streaming is very technically competitive with Stadia.
| Most of the time it worked better. Business model rocks too,
| you own the game through your normal Steam or whatever account
| and rent the GPU time.
|
| I have also used MS cloud gaming a bunch and it stinks in
| comparison.
| vlark wrote:
| Because of course they did.
| ddalex wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/ does not confirm it.
|
| EDIT: it appeared now. This is confirmed.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Was only announced today.
| codyogden wrote:
| Takes a couple minutes for the PR to merge. :D
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > https://killedbygoogle.com/ does not confirm it.
|
| So what? Are you in doubt of the veracity of the post? Look at
| the URL.
| shultays wrote:
| A domain ends in google? sounds fishy
| yellowapple wrote:
| Yes it does; it's listed below Currents.
| [deleted]
| bargle0 wrote:
| Can you get your game saves out of stadia and in to a portable
| format? I have to imagine this is going to wreck a lot of people
| who like to play games with persistent state over the long term.
| haunter wrote:
| Yes Google Takeout actually downloads every data including your
| save files
| minimaxir wrote:
| The real question here is why it took _so long_ to shut down
| Stadia, especially from Google. It never had any traction at any
| point in its history.
| draw_down wrote:
| datalopers wrote:
| Nobody at Google ever thought to put together the venn diagram
| of:
|
| * People interested in playing high end games
|
| * People who don't own modern consoles or gaming PCs
|
| * People with access to fiber
| camel_Snake wrote:
| Nah. Google execs and others keeping making the mistake that
| cloud gaming should target the high-end gamers. It should be
| the middle-ground between mobile gaming and pc/console
| gaming, IMO. Low barrier to entry with some AAA games.
|
| Stadia users often joked about how it was really 'Dadia',
| since so much of the player base was younger dads that wanted
| to game with their friends from time to time but couldn't
| justify purchasing the required hardware. These are the users
| Google should have been targeting - along with less tech-
| inclined crowd.
|
| The entire pandemic I had this vision of a Stadia commercial
| where a younger family member sends a link on the family
| group chat or over zoom and then next minute everyone is
| playing Among Us or some other casual party game together.
| Even grandparents and click a link to open their chrome
| browser.
|
| You don't need fiber for casual games like these. You need
| enough internet to stream netflix - which almost everyone
| does.
|
| Stadia leadership just didn't have vision.
| xxs wrote:
| >It never had any traction at any point in its history.
|
| B/c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and
| stops carrying afterwards... and b/c it was marred with
| promises like "negative latency". But mostly it required to
| purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock
| in.
| awill wrote:
| They should have promised these refunds at launch: "We're
| launching Stadia. if it were to shut down in less than X years,
| you will get a refund"
|
| Ironically, had they done this, they would have seen more
| adoption from the skeptics, and maybe not even had to shut down.
| Typical Google, completely ignoring all the totally rational
| fears people had about their shutdown.
|
| In pretty much all Stadia HN threads, the top question is always
| "But Google might shut this down", and it was really comical to
| see Google employees reply to that with 100% positivity, as
| though people's fears were irrational.
| nkrisc wrote:
| That'd be great for people willing to dive in, but to me it
| just says that they don't expect it to be around for long. You
| might say it shows they're confident enough it _will_ be around
| to offer refunds if it's not around long, but nobody else
| launches a product and talks about it going away so that would
| make me think they they secretly don't believe in it.
| wjnc wrote:
| I'll chime in with a somewhat positive and opposite note. I
| bought 77 + Stadia + Chromecast under the legal impression that
| under EU-law I would always get a refund. They give refunds and
| I've played on a pretty well working platform. This went pretty
| well considering Google being Google. (Note: have not heard
| anything from Google directly yet.)
| malfist wrote:
| But would they get developer adoption? You might refund
| customers, but devs are stuck with an effort they can no longer
| sell, which they may not have recouped the losses taken to get
| it on the platform.
| nathias wrote:
| I am shocked, who could have seen this coming?
| EricE wrote:
| Google killing something unrelated to search or advertising? Say
| it isn't so!
| karmasimida wrote:
| This is laughable.
|
| Hahahahahahah
|
| Google has degraded so badly in those years, its consumer product
| is officially a joke.
|
| When is Pixel going to die, emm?
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Not surprised at all.
|
| The refunds are a very nice, unexpected touch.
| lucantini wrote:
| The lack of interest in Google projects because they "might" die
| is a self fulfilling propechy.
| paxys wrote:
| I'm glad that they are refunding customers, but it must suck for
| all the game studios that spent a lot of development hours (which
| could have gone towards other improvements) to add Stadia support
| for their games.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| This is absolutely insane. Everyone who has been paying for pro
| and buying games will now be out $$$ while losing all of their
| games. Google should provide steam codes or full refunds for
| digital purchases. Google has messed around with other services,
| but this is substantial amounts of money they've stolen from
| customers this time. Unbelievable, and I can't understand how
| anyone could trust them with their credit card at this point.
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| I'm surprised. It seemed like a solid platform. Why can't Google
| build a business that just works and grows organically without
| having to completely dominate a field?
| dweekly wrote:
| You know, the day Stadia launched, someone very cynically set up
| http://stadiacountdown.com/ and it won't end up very far off from
| the truth. _sigh_
|
| Honestly, I'm glad Google was willing to take a bet this big -
| they had a lot of serious infrastructure innovations to make this
| work that may end up paying off in other ways, and a company
| that's not willing to make big bets has a 0% chance of having a
| new bet land...
| falcor84 wrote:
| Funny, the stadiacountdown.com counter had actually been over-
| optimistic, by almost a full year, saying there are 414 days
| left (extrapolated based on [0]), but with the new announcement
| of a shutdown date of January 18, 2023, there are only 111 days
| to go. May it rest in peace.
|
| As for whether Google should be taking bets that they might not
| be able to support, I'm actually very much against this. I
| would suggest that they pour their money into supporting
| independent start-ups, e.g. via GV[1], and then possibly
| acquiring them if things go well, rather than further
| tarnishing the Google brand.
|
| [0] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/ [1]
| https://www.gv.com/ (formerly Google Ventures)
| codyogden wrote:
| We actually got the announcement nearly timed by averaging
| user predictions:
|
| https://whenwillgooglekillstadia.com
| dweekly wrote:
| I'm somewhere between impressed and (as a Xoogler)
| depressed.
| gilrain wrote:
| Google making big bets: I'm all in! Actually, no, I fold.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Good. Also good on them for refunding people's money.
| [deleted]
| beoberha wrote:
| Anyone here use Stadia? Not much of a gamer but very interested
| in the tech of cloud gaming.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Yes. I only tried Destiny 2 because no other game (that was
| available without extra purchase) was of interest to me. It
| worked very well and I _really_ liked the experience. Just open
| the website in Chrome, click on the game you want to play and
| it launches in seconds. Certainly faster than launching Destiny
| 2 on my own PC, which is also a gaming rig.
|
| For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now.
| Technologically, it's basically... remote desktop to Steam?
| From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-
| together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the
| resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam.
| Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video
| encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.
|
| I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it
| could be more like Stadia.
|
| I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions
| for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom
| hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game
| versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new
| platform and getting software on it is very hard.
|
| Stadio was awesome. It also never had a chance.
| partdavid wrote:
| I like GFN and I agree the experience is not seamless. It
| still takes a long time to launch the game VM, and you feel
| it; but a lot of these other issues are much better or
| nonexistent now. In particular having to re-auth to Steam is
| much rarer now; launching the VM for a newly-purchased game
| often used to take a long time, with you waiting for the
| Steam launcher go through some kind of "Preparing" state for
| a long time (you don't have to be in-session for this), but
| this hasn't happened for me in some time. I haven't had a
| problem with any settings like language, resolution or video,
| and I think performance, while highly dependent on your own
| network and ISP, is much improved and hasn't been a problem
| in a while. So I do think, while the "remote desktop"
| approach is inevitably going to have some clunkiness, it has
| improved quite a bit and continues to do so.
| gbasp wrote:
| I'm a little bit of an enthusiast (tried all of the major
| platforms). I have shitty rural internet, Stadia is (was) by
| far the best of the bunch by far, especially with the
| controller. Near-native for latency and crystal clear image.
| 40ms ping to Google.
|
| Currently I use xcloud, its "acceptable" with certain games
| that don't require low latencies but its picture quality in
| particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.
| redox99 wrote:
| Not stadia, but I tried Steam In Home streaming (basically you
| stream from one PC in your house to another), with ethernet and
| it was NOTICEABLY laggier (because of input lag). It was
| probably like 33ms+ of added input lag. From that point I knew
| cloud streaming (which is basically this plus network latency)
| wasn't going to be pretty.
| teh_klev wrote:
| I use it and it works surprisingly well even on UK DSL (80/20).
| I found it useful to play games that insist on anti-cheat
| systems that deeply embed themselves into your machine. Also my
| PC is a bit ancient, built in 2015 and running a 4690K, DDR3
| with a 750Ti so I get access to games that need a bit more
| poke.
| umeshunni wrote:
| I was a user from the beginning.
|
| For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large
| downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad/phone when
| you have 30 minutes free and don't want to buy/build/maintain a
| PC or Console.
|
| That said, I haven't played in around a year. The games catalog
| was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call
| of Duty, EA games etc)
| beckler wrote:
| I use it... and honestly I'm really bummed by this. I've
| avoided owning a console mostly because I didn't want to drop
| $500 just to get started. Stadia launched CP2077 with a free
| Chromecast and controller, so it ended up fitting my use-case
| rather well.
|
| They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and
| so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-
| send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living
| room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the
| Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any
| room in my house and I just needed the controller.
|
| I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from
| the beginning... I'm just bummed because I quite enjoyed the
| ride.
| buffington wrote:
| I've been using for about two years I'd guess. I have a pretty
| fast connection and it worked pretty flawlessly at home. I used
| it while traveling too, and if the connection was good enough
| for streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, it was typically
| totally fine for Stadia. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the highest
| settings while playing on an iPad was pretty damn cool, and
| meant I could slim down a ton when traveling.
|
| That said, I haven't played any multiplayer FPS games. The
| multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though "seems
| totally fine" is obviously a subjective observation.
|
| The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn't use your Steam
| library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that
| they're refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google,
| I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that'd be it, and I was
| ok with that.
| vaer-k wrote:
| I used it a bit. The performance was exceptional. I enjoyed
| playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my phone with a Razer Kishi
| controller. Although I'm not surprised Stadia struggled to find
| traction, I think this is mostly due to Google's ongoing
| struggle with entertainment branding, and despite this, I do
| agree with their sentiment that streaming is the inevitable
| future of mainstream gaming.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Game streaming struggles because your average American has
| like four different TERRIBLE networking devices between them
| and any service. Those devices will not be upgraded just
| because google wishes the internet was more like home. If you
| do not have a good streaming experience, there is not a damn
| thing you can do about it.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| used it exclusively for gaming the last year and a half. mostly
| just for Destiny 2, but bought a few other games on the
| platform as well. worked very well for my purposes. even pre-
| ourchased the next year's content for destiny as well. I'm very
| sad.
| faller_slive wrote:
| I've used it almost exclusively for gaming since it was
| released. I've occasionally had issues with poor connection
| over WiFi but most of the time it has worked flawlessly. I know
| the latency is higher than a locally running game but I'm not
| doing side by side comparisons so I don't notice it. With this
| news I guess I'll be switching to GeForce Now which supports
| higher quality and framerates but a worse UX in my experience.
| In my opinion the business case for GeForce Now makes less
| sense than Stadia but I guess the numbers of overs makes more
| of a difference.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I tried a bit. I don't have space in my life for dedicated
| gaming hardware or a PC, so seemed to be a way I could play a
| game once in a while without commitment. Was ok. Didn't get
| hooked.
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| What a shame. The technology was fantastic. Good news about all
| the refunds but still sad.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| We all saw it coming, it was only a matter of time. Shame,
| because the business model was the real problem here.. the
| streaming tech was and still is very viable.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This is the least surprising event since the last thing I wasn't
| surprised about.
| jjulius wrote:
| Heh, the comments in this thread[1] are hilarious in hindsight.
|
| >Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don't have to
| believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in
| October.[2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402
| danso wrote:
| Well, those comments were responding to a July 2022 article
| stating: "Google Stadia denies the recent claims online that it
| would be shutting down its services by the end of the summer,
| promising more games to come."
|
| So technically, the commenter was right, as Stadia did survive
| the summer and will be operational for a whole 3+ months!
| calyth2018 wrote:
| Aged like milk indeed.
|
| Writing was on that wall a long long time ago.
|
| Thanks for pointing it out so that I could have a good laugh :D
| mindcrime wrote:
| " _Yah, hear me now and believe me later._ "
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Seems the Stadia engineers were only told this morning by Google.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/comment/iqe3...
| bspammer wrote:
| I suppose this was the only way to avoid a leak, but I do
| wonder how far in advance Phil knew this was going to happen.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| mrweasel wrote:
| They sure do try out a lot of stuff. Google really need to do
| the reverse an create "productsbygoogle.com". Many of the
| products are pretty unknown, until they get publicity for being
| killed.
| codyogden wrote:
| https://about.google/products/
| tristor wrote:
| And this behavior is exactly why I didn't buy Stadia in the first
| place. One more entry in the Google graveyard.
| TillE wrote:
| You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that.
|
| I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not
| practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input
| lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and
| unacceptable for many games.
| anthonybsd wrote:
| I disagree. The fastest human reaction time is something around
| 100ms. (https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime). I've
| just measured, and mine is 230ms. As such 10ms lag wouldn't
| make any difference. I've used Shadow Tech PC for a while
| during pandemic. With good upstream and downstream bandwidth it
| was a fairly decent experience, even for playing something like
| competitive Overwatch. I noticed the difference with normal
| gaming PC due to some other factors (quality of sound, etc.).
| Standard accessories worked seamlessly for USB-over-UDP.
| least wrote:
| Human reaction times have nothing to do with perceived input
| latency. There is a latency budget that is different for
| every individual that determines whether or not something
| will be an acceptable experience. This budget is divided
| between everything in the signal chain like the input
| devices, the computer/console, the monitor/tv, and any other
| processors along the signal path. Streaming games adds
| additional latency to the signal chain. Generously if your
| target is 60fps and you have a round trip latency to their
| server of 8ms, that's a half frame of added latency. On its
| own it's almost certainly imperceptible to most people, but
| it's not working in a vacuum and most people don't live right
| next to the datacenter. It can very easily go over the
| threshold for what is acceptable to most people.
| streamingbro wrote:
| You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos
| like this: https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80 (Microsoft
| Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch
| interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop
| things, so it's not like it's just first person shooters that
| suffer from latency.
|
| You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're
| using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like
| latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times,
| which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of
| reasoned about from a first principle in a very
| Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That
| happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a
| comment section full of people who play games and parrot
| stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp
| of what it is they're even talking about, so it's
| understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that
| it's just a bunch of blah.
|
| One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays
| is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's
| law than actual journalism.
| anthonybsd wrote:
| Wow. Condescending much?
| redox99 wrote:
| A bit condescending yes but he showed a really good
| example of how input lag is noticeable.
| gilrain wrote:
| Appropriate in response to the breathtaking arrogance-in-
| ignorance of what it was responding to.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. This comment section has been
| particularly frustrating to read, since it's a mirror of
| what I've seen in the real world. There are teams at big
| tech companies making TERRIBLE decisions about the future
| of gaming because they don't actually understand how
| latency affects games, and they aren't hardcore gamers so
| they can't feel the effects themselves.
|
| Even the ~50ms total latency you get from locally streaming
| over a 1ms wired network (from buffering/inappropriate
| firmware design) ruins whole genres of high level gameplay.
| You miss tricky shots in FPS games, you can't confirm/link
| in fighters, etc.
| kbelder wrote:
| This is the most factually true comment that I've ever
| downvoted.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| That comment should be sent out as a blanket text message
| to everyone who commented on this post about latency IMO
|
| The word needs to get out
| 10000truths wrote:
| The bigger issue is jitter. People can compensate for
| consistent delay (e.g. by leading shots in an FPS game). But
| when the delay is inconsistent and varies quickly, it becomes
| much more difficult to anticipate movements and execute time-
| sensitive maneuvers.
| KevinGlass wrote:
| Unless cloud gaming company intend to put servers in every
| single city across the globe it's not going to work. Even in
| Boston with good, fiber internet streaming games have too
| much lag and the compression artifacts are horrible.
|
| When there is fast movement the compression is much more
| noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing
| graphical comparisons do it with static images. It's quite
| common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed
| and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup.
|
| Also, you are misunderstanding what "reaction time of 100ms"
| means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time
| then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound
| of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter
| sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length
| so long as they are bright enough.
|
| What 100ms reaction time means is that you can't react to a
| given stimulus in less then that. Here's the important
| distinction, you don't _react_ to lag, you perceive it.
|
| To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator
| webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will
| quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms,
| and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of
| whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce.
|
| 1. https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html
| mrkramer wrote:
| Moore's law is our friend and in the future seamless cloud
| gaming will be possible.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| This is confused. Reaction time is irrelevant, you can still
| notice very short delays between two events. The fundamental
| issue is that when you make an input that corresponds to an
| action in a game, you expect that to action happen near-
| immediately, and anything else feels terrible.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| 100ms times are cheaters; 200ms is probably closer to the
| absolute lower bound of human reaction time.
| dsissitka wrote:
| I don't know about that. I'm off form and this was my third
| try after going wired.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/8inHYSf
| infecto wrote:
| Agree. I used Shadow for a bit something like 2 years ago and
| it was pretty seamless. Sure, not as good as having a PC but
| it was pretty darn close.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Pro gamers can definitely feel +/- 10ms of lag. It makes a
| difference at that level.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Maybe not 10ms but anything above 50ms is known and proven to
| degrade pro players' performance in competitive FPS games
| natdempk wrote:
| Humans can detect 10ms of latency easily. The problem is more
| than just reacting slightly later to events, its also how
| quickly the game/system responds to your inputs because its a
| round-trip interaction. This ends up usually being where the
| latency becomes more noticeable to most people. People can
| generally adjust for consistent latency, but any latency
| gains are pretty noticeable once you get used to looking for
| it.
|
| Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of
| a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look
| to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee
| (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a
| single frame.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Practiced musicians begin to feel discrepancies in time
| starting at latencies as low as 10ms. I learned this when
| investigating whether bands could practice live over the
| internet (spoiler: most of them can't). Turns out that due
| to limitations of physics, even absolutely optimal
| connections still have enough lag/jitter to ruin it for
| professional instrumentalists.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| I tried Shadow and, well, you could really tell they host in
| a budget datacenter with how often there was stutter or
| missing keyframes (they host with OVH in Europe). I never had
| such issues with GeForce Now.
|
| Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually
| tell you what hardware you'll be getting beyond "4c/8t". Mine
| turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated
| that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about
| an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.
| npinsker wrote:
| You're definitely right for most people, but even 10-20ms is
| noticeable by experienced players and can be very impactful
| at pro-level -- e.g. some high-level LoL players feel 35ms
| ping is unacceptably high for competitive play:
| https://afkgaming.com/esports/news/ls-talks-about-
| why-35-pin... (though it probably doesn't matter much for
| Stadia's use cases)
| anthonybsd wrote:
| Doubtful. Pro gamers are known primadonnas. If anyone ever
| tested them and added synthetic lag with double blind study
| I suspect they wouldn't identify it more accurately than
| what a random chance would dictate. Sorry, but pure speed
| of electrical signals/chemicals traveling in the body puts
| a constraint on that.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| It's not even just "pro gamers", _the most popular
| fighting game in the world_ (Smash Bros U.) is enjoyed by
| casual players and pros, and has an entire mechanic based
| on "two-framing" for edge guarding.
|
| One absolutely does _not_ need to be a pro to pull it
| off, and the whole interaction window for that mechanic
| is based around being able to react within ~32ms (1 /30th
| of a second) to edge guard an opponent. It is
| exponentially harder to pull off in online play.
| foobarian wrote:
| It matters for MMOs. If there are two pro gamers A and B both
| with 100ms reaction time, but gamer A has 10ms ping while
| gamer B has 30ms ping, gamer A has a consistent advantage.
| This is not strictly a Stadia problem but it may be
| exacerbated if the display data adds latency on a slower
| line.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Wow, this site is cool. I consistently get ~188, best was
| 176ms. I wonder what some of the esport gamers get!
|
| After doing it several times it let me save the score.
|
| Reaction Time 181ms
|
| 74.46% percentile
| arc-in-space wrote:
| Top level players don't tend to do better on these than
| slightly above average, because reaction time is something
| you train for a specific task.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I think there is an argument that you can level the playing
| field by making everyone's lag suck equally. I don't know if
| stadia did that though
| imbusy111 wrote:
| This logic doesn't apply to single player games. I tried
| playing a racing game on Stadia and it just didn't feel good.
|
| On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo
| first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for
| PC. But that game is slow anyway.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| 10ms isn't even one frame at 60 FPS. Modern consoles have more
| "native" input lag than that.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yep if people were bothered by 10ms then everybody would be
| on CRTs. But... nobody is doing this except some extreme
| speedrunners and fighting game players.
| blibble wrote:
| your typical high end gaming monitor is now 360hz
|
| CRTs were nowhere near that
| emasirik wrote:
| Typically, not even fighting game players. The last
| holdouts are retro enthusiasts and Smash Bros. Melee
| players.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| 10ms is an extremely generous estimation of the amount of lag
| you'd get playing with a device like Stadia at any rate.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Jitter is what really kills it. I found out that my ISP
| (who own switches in the basement) limits bandwidth based
| on a rolling time window, so whenever someone in the house
| starts a download they can briefly saturate the entire
| link. Wish they'd know how to configure QoS on their very
| expensive network gear.
| twicetwice wrote:
| I use GeForce now for singleplayer games and I'm super happy
| with it as long as I'm on an ethernet connection.
| gberger wrote:
| (For context, this thread originally linked to
| https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-stream...
| "A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy")
| bob1029 wrote:
| Latency really isn't a problem in many contexts. I've got some
| prototype streaming solutions running in an azure region near
| me and I can't perceive any round trip latency compared to
| localhost.
|
| There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when
| streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only
| getting better over time.
|
| Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of
| cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for
| any competitive game today.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I'll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99%
| (99.9%?) of cases.
|
| Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV
| in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the
| input lag is >100ms.
|
| I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting
| for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the
| population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms
| lag.
|
| I've used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with
| 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even
| first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that
| gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced
| racing games.
|
| But let's face it: there are _many_ people who are happy to
| stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn't
| as much of an issue.
| LegitShady wrote:
| the 10ms or whatever the real amount is, is in addition to
| tbe monitor lag, etc.
|
| i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture.
| maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the
| control response times, but not if youd played it running
| locally.
| kmac_ wrote:
| Local lag was significantly reduced over recent years, low
| latency modes of TVs/monitors, 60 and more fps even for
| console games, etc. So the baseline moved. That affects
| remote gaming also, but in a much smaller proportion.
| Remote gaming quality is as good as ISP quality, and most
| of ISPs are sh*.
| riversflow wrote:
| > 10ms is not perceptible . . . less than 1%
|
| The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone
| I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and
| can easily tell if their game isn't running with optimal fps.
| High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you
| might be right about the general population, but were talking
| specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high
| refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more
| doubtful that it's just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on
| reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching
| yourself can mean death).
|
| Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also
| cars.
|
| Agree that many casual people don't care much, but casual
| people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or
| wouldn't be in the know enough to try out a streaming game
| service that wasn't advertised much.
| outworlder wrote:
| 10ms is completely fine for any game you can possibly think of.
| Including competitive FPS e-sports. We are not superhumans and
| your monitor alone probably adds more lag than that.
|
| What's not acceptable is _jitter_. If it 's a constant 10ms
| delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines.
| That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.
|
| If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become
| unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If
| it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Highly disagree. Seems you have not tested current game
| streaming as Gamepass or GeForce Now.
| legohead wrote:
| I was cloud gaming for 2 years and recently switched to PC.
| I've been gaming for about 30 years or more. I can confidently
| say you wont notice anything up to around 60ms latency. I could
| still twitch aim and play and compete in online shooters no
| problem.
|
| Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection
| starts to become unstable, even if it's a fast connection, it
| becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to
| 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and
| I'm out.
| sgtnasty wrote:
| I tend to only play "non-competetive" solo games, so I dont
| care much about input lag. Wasnt a problem for me in Destiny,
| Assasins Creed or Cyberpunk.
| Kiro wrote:
| That's completely false. Streaming works great even for latency
| sensitive games.
| SideQuark wrote:
| >extra 10ms
|
| That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of
| light, so real lag will be much, much higher.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play
| competitive games, it's virtually unnoticeable.
|
| I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my
| partner on Stadia, and we've never noticed any significant
| problems - even when using non-stadia controllers.
|
| Overall I'm bullish on cloud gaming, because I don't want to
| invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console
| hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.
| There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud
| gaming market, and even the Switch supports "cloud version"
| games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon's Luna service
| continues to grow and improve.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > I don't want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to
| update my PC or console hardware just to play games like
| Stray or something like that.
|
| Something like Stray that doesn't really require "hundreds of
| dollars regularly". Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that
| was definitely < $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then
| also not on the cloud...
|
| On the other hand, it's highly likely that you won't be able
| to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as
| providers will drop it down (or outright close...).
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Maybe? But I'm also ok investing the $10-20 per month in a
| service that can guarantee 4k @ 60fps on any hardware I'm
| using.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| in what way is a subscription an investment
| outworlder wrote:
| It's still $10-20 forever, monthly(assuming they never
| increase prices). Versus a few larger sums every few
| years. If you don't buy the latest and greatest, a $200
| yearly budget can definitely keep your hardware up to
| date. If it's a PC, you can even use it for other
| purposes.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Let's do a little math. Let's say you want to buy a
| gaming PC and have a budget of $1000. Let's also assume
| you play 1 hour of video games a day, 5 days a week. That
| is 20 hours a month.
|
| At 20 hours a month you would have to play for 50 months
| (4 years) on your machine before you pay off the machine.
| Alternatively, you could spend that same money on the
| streaming service. I think the math doesn't hold up if
| you are a casual gamer. Building a PC and maintenance
| just isn't worth it.
|
| That being said, if you play a lot more, maybe even 15-20
| hours a week, I think it makes a lot of sense to build
| your own machine (I have one and it was very worth it
| when I was a serious LoL player).
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| why would playtime affect duration of payments
| drusepth wrote:
| Within the context of Stadia here, you could purchase a
| game at cost and play it forever (or, until the service
| shut down, heh) without paying any monthly subscription
| fee, which does change the math somewhat.
| trap_goes_hot wrote:
| If there is demand, and the tech is fine, then why is Google
| shutting down Stadia?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Splatoon 3 is already one of the best-selling Switch games
| ever released - a competitive online shooter on a console
| most popular with casual gamers. Games like Fortnite and
| Overwatch are massively popular. 99% is a real over-
| estimation.
| [deleted]
| redox99 wrote:
| > I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play
| competitive games, it's virtually unnoticeable.
|
| If you take a look at the 25 games with the most current
| players[1] I would argue at least 20/25 would either be
| annoying to play with increased input lag, or outright highly
| disadvantageous.
|
| [1] https://steamcharts.com/top
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| This ignores consoles
| onion2k wrote:
| All that means is that people who choose games where lag is
| annoying pick Steam because that's where the lag is lowest.
| It's not a canonical list of all games.
| throitallaway wrote:
| When Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Switch came out I did
| alright on Super Mario 64 until I encountered a level that
| required precisely timed wall jumps in order to advance. I
| consistently missed my jumps and wondered what was up. I
| plugged in my controller via USB and was still failing to do
| the jumps properly. What finally fixed it was putting the
| input on my TV into "game" mode, which reduced the amount of
| processing/latency. If local display latency can cause issues
| with gaming, network latency would be a non-starter in a lot
| of cases.
| Grazester wrote:
| Super Mario 3D all star is running emulation on the switch.
| How much latency is introduced with just that? It was not
| like the emulation was even top notch either.
| fluoridation wrote:
| It's hard to say. If the emulation to compute a single
| frame finishes before the frame deadline elapses then the
| latency caused by emulation is effectively zero.
| redox99 wrote:
| Those "old games" were designed around the technology of
| the time, which had drastically lower latency than anything
| today except for high end gaming (and sometimes not even
| that).
|
| - Controller buttons caused CPU interrupts, so basically 0
| latency
|
| - No OS getting in the way
|
| - N64 era would be double buffered and then straight to the
| CRT
|
| - NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time
| as the CRT beam moved across the screen
|
| - CRTs have virtually no latency, same with the analog
| signal chain because there is no buffering
|
| So when people try to play them in modern systems, things
| that were easy back then are quite hard now.
|
| There's a reason anybody speedrunning SM64 will play on a
| CRT.
| hbn wrote:
| In 2015 I found myself a decent deal on my old childhood
| console, the Super Nintendo which I had sold at a garage
| sale years ago (and later regretted)
|
| I bought a Japanese copy of Super Mario World on ebay
| (Japanese copies of games were peanuts at the time, I
| assume they're more now), and found an old CRT for cheap
| on a local used site. I continued to play SMW many times
| over the years on various platforms and emulators, and
| I'm pretty damn good at the game.
|
| But man, did it blow my mind feeling as little input
| latency as I did the first time I booted it on a CRT
| after all those years. It actually took a little bit of
| time to adapt to. It's like that phenomenon where if a
| button activates a light with low enough latency, people
| think the light is predicting when they'll hit the
| button, i.e. turning on before the button is pressed.
| People don't realize the latency we started dealing with
| when everything went from analogue to digital!
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" NES era would literally calculate the pixels in
| real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen"_
|
| Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt#
| Nintendo_Ente...
| hedgehog wrote:
| Surprisingly the display latency on TVs is regularly over
| 100ms, way more than latency at most homes these days
| (about 10ms for Comcast here).
| pathartl wrote:
| That is amazingly inaccurate. If you count the entire
| chain from input to processing to display you'll be under
| 40-50ms.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It really depends on the TV. And if your gaming console
| is plugged into a receiver, it could add more.
|
| My previous TV had about 150 ms of video latency. Even if
| I enabled Game Mode, it was 75 ms, which was still
| noticeable.
|
| With my current TV, I have no idea what the latency is
| because I stopped gaming on console and so I'm not
| playing Rock Band which had a calibration option to
| compensate for video and audio latency.
| pathartl wrote:
| I've had a TV that were nearly 200ms, but it was the
| absolute cheapest panel I could find.
|
| If you don't configure your TV correctly sure, you could
| get massive amounts of lag. Even with an OLED display if
| you turn on all the post processing you're going to have
| problems. That's not really a fault of the TV though. I
| disable almost all post processing on my TVs and get a
| better picture without the downsides.
|
| With digital receivers adding lag is minimal at best.
| Especially with newer models that don't draw on top of
| the source signal.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I only know for sure from the few displays I've looked at
| myself but this table from a quick Google search is
| consistent:
|
| https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag
| pathartl wrote:
| Yeah, I mean if you enable post processing (which is most
| likely garbage) you're going to get bad input lag.
| carpenecopinum wrote:
| Nah, it's definitely true. I have seen plenty of
| (especially larger-format) TVs where, with "game mode"
| (or the respective equivalent) disabled, it's unbearable
| to even do latency-forgiving tasks like office work on
| them.
| p1necone wrote:
| Yeah, the latency on a lot of TVs outside of "Game Mode" is
| _really_ atrocious, commonly in the order of 100 - 200ms,
| which is way higher than even network latency on game
| streaming services assuming you 're close to the data
| center.
| hbn wrote:
| Worth noting, I'm pretty sure by default when you plug a
| Switch controller into the dock, it just charges and
| continues to communicate over Bluetooth. Someone can
| correct me if I'm wrong
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play
| competitive games, it's virtually unnoticeable.
|
| I agree with your disagreement here. For me streaming game
| services don't have a lot of technical hurdles.
|
| > Overall I'm bullish on cloud gaming, because I don't want
| to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or
| console hardware just to play games like Stray or something
| like that.
|
| I disagree here. I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I
| will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly
| bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content
| on my local machine thank you very much.
|
| The subscription model I think has already proven it self be
| consumer hostile. I don't want to subscribe to Adobe, I don't
| want to subscribe to Office, just let me buy the damn thing
| outright.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| > I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never
| sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I
| enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my
| local machine thank you very much.
|
| I totally think this is fair - and I think the market can
| support both models.
|
| E.g.: I like paying for Netflix / Hulu / [insert video
| streaming service here], but I wouldn't hate on others who
| prefer buying the DVD. Same thing for Apple Music vs.
| people who prefer CDs / records.
| munificent wrote:
| It's absolutely noticeable. The question is whether it's
| tolerable, and people do seem to tolerate increasing latency
| both from networks and their TV.
|
| But, personally, I find the experience much less _enjoyable_
| as the latency goes up. It 's not about being competitive
| either. (I don't play games online.) It just feels sticky and
| sluggish and I don't enjoy it. I miss the crisp
| responsiveness of older consoles. :(
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I think this is right for games that are ported to streaming
| from a traditional PC or console release, but presumably if
| some studio cared, they could design games with streaming in
| mind. As an extreme example, imagine the original NES Final
| Fantasy, or the SNES Monopoly on Stadia: with mainly turn-based
| interaction, they would be basically indistinguishable from
| playing locally.
| SideQuark wrote:
| >extra 10ms
|
| That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of
| light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers
| scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags,
| etc... )
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| It's quite a feat this was even possible. You have to own a lot
| of the Internet pipes to make a service like this playable to the
| masses.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Maybe the refunds are a hint on just how few devices they sold
| ...
| rockostrich wrote:
| The controller is pretty nice. I wish it worked wirelessly
| outside of Stadia, but it's plug and play with usb-c so still
| pretty great.
| Kukumber wrote:
| Another proof that gamers do not want cloud gaming
| dont__panic wrote:
| Direct from the horse's mouth:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022775
| jjulius wrote:
| Also from the horse's mouth:
| https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
|
| Not saying it to argue with your point, just to highlight that
| we generally shouldn't put much trust into Google.
| neogodless wrote:
| But this is from 60 days ago, and Google has now announced
| they _are_ shutting Stadia down.
|
| While "cover your ass" posts may need a grain of salt,
| there's no logic in "we're killing a product/service" being
| lip service.
| falcolas wrote:
| These decisions are not made over the course of days or a
| couple of months. They're made quarters or years in
| advance.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| So.. what's your point? Are you saying that Google saying
| they're not shutting down 60 days ago was wrong? Or that
| the current post is wrong? Or that neither should be
| trusted? Or..?
| falcolas wrote:
| That PR statements are lies and not to be trusted. Trust
| what they do, not what they say they're going to do.
|
| And not just Google, but every company.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| I agree, just not sure what your comment meant in regards
| to that. Ie the decision is made by quarters, yea, what
| does that have to do with the parent comment?
| neogodless wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is.
|
| I'm not arguing that internally, no one at Google knew
| this 60 days ago. They may have. I'm saying that it makes
| sense to cast doubt on public relation statements that
| cast a company in a good light, but it makes much less
| sense to doubt an announcement that casts them in a bad
| light. Why would they "lie" about killing a product or
| service?
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm saying that their statement 60 days ago was a lie. A
| lie that leadership knew was a lie, yet they let the PR
| statement be generated and broadcasted regardless.
|
| Google will have financially benefited from that positive
| PR (from interest on invested money, if in absolutely no
| other way).
| neogodless wrote:
| Right - if you re-read what I said, it was that you can
| believe negative PR ("we are shutting it down") while
| taking any positive PR ("we are totally not shutting it
| down!") with a grain of salt.
| jjulius wrote:
| >... it makes much less sense to doubt an announcement
| that casts them in a bad light. Why would they "lie"
| about killing a product or service?
|
| If you are suggesting that I'm saying that we shouldn't
| trust Google's announcement that they are shutting down
| Stadia, then you are misunderstanding my comment.
| neogodless wrote:
| You replied to a post saying "this is news direct from
| Google" with the comment
|
| > to highlight that we generally shouldn't put much trust
| into Google
|
| It seemed like a logical conclusion. Given your argument
| now, I assume you simply meant "don't trust anything they
| say" (which would include their announcement today) but
| it's not exactly the spirit of what you mean. Your
| initial intent was not clear (in my opinion.)
| jjulius wrote:
| Just a general, friendly reminder to take whatever comes
| out of Google's mouth with a gigantic grain of salt,
| circumstantially. In this circumstance, I would trust
| that they are shutting it down.
| refracture wrote:
| Fans of this service just seemed convince Google was in it for
| the long haul.. I hated being the cynic that would reference the
| Google Graveyard... wishing I'd be wrong but here we are again.
| MrPatan wrote:
| Didn't they already? It's hard to keep track
| drusepth wrote:
| There's been a "Google will shut down Stadia soon" news story
| almost every single month for the last 3 years.
|
| This time, it's actually sourced from Google though.
| codemac wrote:
| Really unfortunate, and I think Google is making a long term
| mistake here. Stadia worked extremely well for me and some
| friends who all basically didn't want to invest in a gaming
| tower.
|
| I had a theory though, that if you were a serious gamer, you
| probably stream or do a bunch of other things on your computer.
| As the serious gamer would need a reasonable GPU either way to
| accomplish this, the benefits of Stadia didn't make sense for
| them. Google should have implemented the missing pieces as part
| of the stadia experience, thus only requiring a laptop to be a
| mildly successful streamer.
|
| In my head they should have worked on something that could stream
| directly to youtube gaming, and they should have paid $$$$ to get
| some streamers to use Stadia exclusively for their streams.
| totaldude87 wrote:
| I wonder what will happen to semi essential services like
|
| 1) Google fi 2) google nest lineup
|
| And things like Google tv ..
| moomin wrote:
| The only part of this that most people didn't foresee _when
| Stadia was originally announced_ is the refund policy.
| Farbklex wrote:
| I hope there will be one last update for the Stadia controllers.
| They are pretty good but they don't work as normal bluetooth
| controllers right now. You can use them via USB C though.
| ploppyploppy wrote:
| Yet another reason not to buy into Google. Reader was the last
| straw
| ZiiS wrote:
| They must be aware Stadia was always just a "sudden but
| inevitable betrayal" meme.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| That was quick.
| moandcompany wrote:
| F
| jrpt wrote:
| Even if it wasn't massively popular as a gaming platform, I
| thought it could be pretty profitable as marketing for games,
| where you can actually demo the game from a web browser and try
| it before buying it. This could be either directly on e-commerce
| sites or ads on Google.com. I'm surprised that they didn't do
| more with that before killing it. If you could show having a
| Stadia demo increases conversion rates and sales, it would be
| really useful even if gamers don't acquire Stadia gaming
| libraries.
|
| I wonder if they could've sold it off to Netflix or something
| instead of killing it.
|
| I have a Stadia and actually liked it even though I thought the
| go to market execution was bad. Also the latency made it
| problematic for multiplayer games, so I just played single player
| content.
| msoad wrote:
| I genuinely think Apple's Arcade strategy will prevail in the
| long run. Apple doesn't necessarily need AAA games to eat a big
| chunk of this market. A lot of very popular games like Roblox,
| Minecraft and FIFA are not even AAA quality.
|
| Being able to run a game on both your phone and your console
| (Apple TV in this case) is a huge advantage.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think google cloud is a lot cooler than AWS but no way am I
| using it with news like this coming out every few months.
| bilekas wrote:
| It was always a strange sell, especially since you had more
| accommodating options like nVidias GeForce Now.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Translation, for those unfamiliar with internal Google politics:
|
| _We have already promoted and transferred all the product
| managers and senior developers who created Stadia. None of them
| will suffer any ill effects from this disastrous waste of
| Alphabet resources.
|
| All our other struggling products, though: we're still fully
| committed to those. Really. You can believe us this time._
| foobiekr wrote:
| I would love to know how many promos and packages Stadia
| generated. Was it at last efficient by this measure?
|
| So many google projects seem to be quite inefficient in this
| regard - a handful of people get a promo and abandon the
| project, millions spent.
| bogwog wrote:
| Maybe (probably not) this high profile disaster will finally
| make the leadership at Alphabet realize how ridiculously
| dysfunctional the organization is, and things will finally
| start to change. (doubt it)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I also doubt it.
|
| The standard playbook for an ambitious PM or L7 SWE is:
|
| 1) sell product internally 2) launch 3) get credit for
| "impact" and get promoted thereby 4) transfer within
| Alphabet, or quit 5) rinse and repeat
| babypuncher wrote:
| It was clear to me that Google was completely unprepared to enter
| this market when their little display outside the big reveal was
| a Sega Dreamcast, NES Power Glove, and a copy of E.T. for Atari
| 2600. It was practically foreshadowing.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if that display was pitched as a joke,
| and some executive approved it knowing nothing about these
| products. They just saw "Sega", "Nintendo", and "Atari" logos,
| and loved their product launch being compared to these instantly
| recognizable titans of the video game industry.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| Can we stop posting links from The Verge until they revert their
| redesign?
| drumhead wrote:
| What a surprise!
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Google shuts down service. Film at 11.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I wonder if, in future months/years, we'll still see comments
| complaining that Google's reputation for killing products is
| unfair and exaggerated by a loud minority who are bitter about
| Google Reader. I recall a few comments making this argument in
| defense of Stadia's long-term viability.
| solardev wrote:
| Google's product strategy..
|
| Google: We're going to launch a fancy new product in an already-
| crowded field, not market it at all, and everyone will jump on
| board and love it!
|
| Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing
| Google, they're going to sunset it soon.
|
| Google: No we won't, we're fully dedicated to this thing
|
| Everyone else: No way, they haven't added meaningful features in
| years and they're going to sunset it soon.
|
| Google: We're shifting our focus but we're still fully committed
| to this thing.
|
| Everyone else: No way, they never cared about the home gaming
| segment and they're going to sunset it soon.
|
| Google: We promise, we're in it for the long haul.
|
| Everyone: No way, they're going to sunset it soon.
|
| Google: Sorry, there's no way we could've seen this coming. We
| devoted an entire month of resources to this project and thought
| that was enough! Sadly it hasn't met our expectations. We're not
| sure why more publishers and players didn't get involved, but
| we're going to have it to shut it down.
|
| Everyone: No shit, lol.
|
| At least they're giving refunds.
| Nokinside wrote:
| Partial list of products where this applies: Meebo, Buzz,
| Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Schemer, Spaces, Checkout,
| Directory, Sync, Hangouts, iGoogle, Knol, Lively, Moderator,
| ....
| keewee7 wrote:
| >not market it at all
|
| I noticed that too. Google never adversises its producta.
| Google is almost like the startup founder who thinks their side
| project is so good it doesn't need marketing or sales.
| _visgean wrote:
| I remember a talk given by chief of czech google at our
| highschool, she told us that we are one of the few countries
| where they had to use marketing to compete with for search
| market (I remember seeing ads for Google chrome in metro when
| it was new. ).. I think as a monopoly they just usually dont
| feel the need for marketing when there is no else running
| ads...
| IntelMiner wrote:
| I've been seeing ads for Chrome around northern Seattle
| (Shoreline) area
|
| At first I was baffled why they would possibly need to
| advertise Chrome in the US. But in retrospect it might just
| be feather ruffling in Edge (Microsofts) backyard?
| tmathmeyer wrote:
| There's also the big one right here: https://www.google.c
| om/maps/place/47%C2%B036'07.6%22N+122%C2... when you get
| to downtown from the ID (where the 3d view shows a
| verizon ad, it's now a "no place like chrome" ad.
| stoplying1 wrote:
| Are these new? Reddit had a particularly Firefox-meme
| laden week last week after all of the MV3 chrome
| discussions.
| mrisoli wrote:
| Chrome is core to Google's business so it's worth it
| advertising, they also advertise the Pixel phone a lot in
| high-end places in global cities because they need to
| gain market share for mobile browsing and phones against
| Apple.
|
| Anything else, not that important, even GCP which is
| their major bet doesn't really get any ads because it's a
| business product so not much sense in doing so.
|
| They seem to believe word of mouth/viral marketing works
| because it worked for gmail and chrome, so they didn't
| double down on Stadia before product market fit, and that
| caused Stadia to fail(along with Google's short attention
| span reputation).
| ghaff wrote:
| >Google never adversises its producta.
|
| Not really true (e.g. Chrome) but it's probably true they
| advertise relatively little given their size.
| yetanother4968 wrote:
| They absolutely inundated YouTube with ads for Stadia for a
| couple of months, to the point that it felt like half the ads
| I saw were Stadia ads. So that's something, at least?
| peeters wrote:
| I wonder what the overlap is between Stadia's target market
| and people who watch YouTube without blocking ads.
|
| It's not zero, because Chromecast doesn't block ads and
| that's the natural fit for Stadia. But it's definitely not
| 100% either.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't see ads at all, period. I either Ublock origin or
| pay for a subscription. I pay for youtube premium.
|
| How would an ad reach me? Youtubers? Can Google use its
| "contractors" to promote its own product? That just feels
| weird.
| permo-w wrote:
| I have seen plenty of (annoying) stadia adverts
| xendo wrote:
| They just know first hand that online advertising is not
| worth the money!
| endtime wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but I downvoted your comment because
|
| > We devoted an entire month of resources to this project and
| thought that was enough!
|
| ...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to the
| people who spent years working on it.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| yifanl wrote:
| What relationship does this anecdote have to this scenario
| exactly, other than tenuously drawing a connection between
| Google and baby grinding?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I think what they're trying to say is that the stadia
| engineers should have seen the writing on the wall,
| coupled with the questionable history/actions of their
| employer when it comes to products regardless of their
| own good faith efforts as an employee.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| As a third party with no skin in the game: no idea but it
| was hilarious.
| doliveira wrote:
| Dude, they're making half a million dollars a year, they're
| gonna be fine
| solardev wrote:
| Sorry, but as a player, I honestly can't tell where that
| effort went... feels like they abandoned it as soon as it
| launched.
|
| Even at the time of its death, crossplay, cross save etc.
| didn't work except for a tiny handful of games. The Stadia
| Plus Chrome extension made a bunch of improvements on their
| own. There was never a desktop app. No ultra wide support. No
| RTX. Never got vsync working right.
|
| In the years it was alive, what did they add? How come
| GeForce Now saw such activity and Stadia got... nothing? I
| wouldn't blame the people working on it, but some manager in
| Google really screwed that up.
| robotnikman wrote:
| GeForce now also had the major advantage of being able to
| play games your already bought on Steam
| solardev wrote:
| Yeah, and it was a single switch that publishers could
| check on/off, instead of having to port their entire game
| to Linux and Vulkan (what a sibling post said)
| chrsig wrote:
| I can see where you're coming from.
|
| I think it's appropriate enough to interpret the commenter in
| jest and see that their point is that google spent 1/nth of
| the required time/resources necessary for it to succeed.
|
| In that light, it reads to me more like having some
| understanding for the people working on it that they were set
| up to fail, and the failure is not a reflection of their
| effort.
| parkingrift wrote:
| >...is not just wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful to
| the people who spent years working on it.
|
| Fortunately you are here to be anonymously offended on their
| behalf.
| endtime wrote:
| I'm not anonymous; it's easy to figure out my identify from
| my HN profile.
|
| I didn't work on Stadia, but I did work on Google Fiber for
| a couple years only to have almost all that work cancelled,
| and I'm still sad about it many years later. At the time, I
| really wouldn't have appreciated people on HN rubbing salt
| in the wound.
| causi wrote:
| _but also disrespectful to the people who spent years working
| on it._
|
| Something being tragic doesn't make it not a waste of time.
| The writing was on the wall since _day one_. Nobody was going
| to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the
| servers shut down being offered by the most ADHD company in
| existence. If you chose to spend your time and energy working
| on that and expected to accomplish anything other than being
| paid you were a fool.
| endtime wrote:
| The excerpt I quoted isn't about whether it was a waste of
| time or a savvy career move, just about the total amount of
| work that went into it.
| lgats wrote:
| https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
|
| @GoogleStadia "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured
| we're always working on bringing more great games to the
| platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other
| questions." Jul 29, 2022
|
| 2 Months ago
| permo-w wrote:
| how is this relevant to what they said?
| tofuahdude wrote:
| When the people who make the product literally publicly
| lie (while being paid extremely well), comments like the
| OP's (that are obviously tongue in cheek) are certainly
| not "wildly inaccurate, but also disrespectful".
| endtime wrote:
| Why would you conflate some VP with the PMs and SWEs who
| built the thing?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's not a lie if they believed it. And I don't see how
| this justifies calling the developers lazy.
| dshpala wrote:
| Disrespectful is interpreting words in bad faith. Obviously
| OP didn't literally mean 1 month.
| exolymph wrote:
| It's exaggeration for rhetorical effect, an extremely common
| stylistic device.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| when everyone is "exaggerating" about how Google shuts
| every single thing under the sun down, it ceases to seem
| like a joke.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| > Everyone else: No way, it's a PITA to port to, and knowing
| Google, they're going to sunset it soon.
|
| I've seen a few developers (Ryan Gordon, IIRC?) saying that the
| Stadia SDK was actually great. It was basically just a bog
| standard Vulkan/Linux environment with much fewer unpleasant
| surprises than consoles.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The whole stack was great. Google engineers worked their
| asses off on it. Very smart people throughout. The management
| was _awful_ though.
|
| In the 10 years I was at Google I never really had to face a
| "crunch" situation but there I was right before Christmas
| working til midnight on the very tiny bit of Stadia I had
| somehow been dragged into despite telling my manager I didn't
| want to be anywhere near it because it was _radioactive_ (My
| rule learned the hard way was always stay away from the
| "hot" project at a company like Google. It just becomes a
| feeding frenzy of empire building and egos, and steady
| incremental contribution will get you nowhere.)
|
| I had it much better than most though. If I recall: The
| original app setup (integrated into the existing Home app)
| was tossed at the last minute. The entire out of box process
| for the controller redone in the process. In literally the
| last few weeks before ship date.
|
| The controller folks I knew were heroes. It's sad to see
| their hard work thrown away.
|
| There's no way Stadia in its entire existence made enough
| revenue to cover the sheer number of SWE-hours put into it,
| especially the spent SWE-hours caused by last minute product
| changes; which nobody further up ever had to pay a
| consequence for.
| solardev wrote:
| VS GeForce Now, where you check a box saying "I want my game
| to be streamable" and then... you're done.
|
| https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yup... until one day the game is taken off the story and
| that checkbox removed. Big business is rough.
| solardev wrote:
| Then you lost the 15 minutes you took filling out that
| form? And your players can still stream it elsewhere,
| like Shadow or Luna? Doesn't seem terrible.
|
| VS the days/weeks/months it took you to port to Stadia,
| only to have the entire service shut down.
|
| The point is that there are many PC streaming services
| that are basically "no porting required", whereas Stadia
| opted for a strange sort-of-console, sort-of-not model
| (despite PSNow and XCloud already being able to stream
| actual console games already) that required you to spend
| dev hours porting your game.
|
| It backfired because most devs didn't want to (or
| couldn't afford to) port their x86 game targeting Windows
| to some tiny proprietary platform, ESPECIALLY when it's
| Google hosting it. Of the few that did (Orcs Must Die),
| Google arranged some exclusivity deal with them, lying
| that Stadia could do things no gaming PC or cloud
| streaming service could do due to Stadia's special scale
| or something. It was a lie. When the exclusivity expired,
| it showed up on Steam and GeForce Now and ran perfectly
| fine, and got a lot more players to boot.
|
| Stadia had some really awesome tech -- namely the UX of
| being able to boot straight into a game without waiting
| for Steam Big Picture -- and some nifty (but relatively
| useless) side features like being able to capture a
| memory snapshot and resume that later, emulator-style.
| But I don't think their management really understood the
| PC gaming culture and what was truly important to its
| user base, and failed to take years of pleading and
| feedback into consideration. They just arrogantly did...
| something else (or nothing much? I can't really tell)...
| with Stadia and drove it into the ground. So sorry for
| all the engineers who worked on it and had to see it
| nosedive like that due to managerial incompetence.
|
| None of this was a surprise to any gamer actually
| watching this space. Stadia came late, delivered less,
| and exited early. Google's product culture doomed it from
| the get-go.
| gilrain wrote:
| Aside from the unpleasant surprise of there not being an
| audience.
| dougmwne wrote:
| There must have been hardly anyone stupid enough to buy many
| games. It's probably not even much money to refund.
| solardev wrote:
| Not many games, but they didn't often have sales (so many
| were stuck at MSRP for years), and they also had some
| hardware sales (controllers, etc.)
|
| For Google it's chump change, I'm sure, but I still
| appreciate it. I bought like two titles on there before
| realizing it was a doomed effort... meanwhile GeForce Now
| sees _very_ active improvements and a much bigger library.
| jpeter wrote:
| Would be cool if I could use stadia hardware for GeForce
| now
| solardev wrote:
| Yeah, too bad those controllers don't work as generic
| Bluetooth ones :(
|
| (if you didn't know, though, xbox controllers do work
| great with geforce now)
| dougmwne wrote:
| GeForce now is great and if I ever get a new gaming PC, I
| can play every last game on my own GPU. The tech works
| perfectly, the free tier is generous and the subscription
| is a value. Stadia was behind the moment they launched and
| flat out refused to give an inch to improve the product.
|
| This is a company so obviously in love with its incredible
| success from ages gone by that it thinks we still owe it
| our brand loyalty. We do not.
| oofbey wrote:
| Beautiful observation on Ars Technica[1]: "Google's damaged
| reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy.
| No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be
| shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys
| games from it."
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-
| offici...
| avereveard wrote:
| Surprising no one,
| type0 wrote:
| _As expected(tm)_ for a Google project
| tpmx wrote:
| So since Google is refunding the likely relatively small number
| of hardware purchases, the losers here are:
|
| - Game developers who spent time/focus/money on porting their
| game(s) to Stadia.
|
| - Google.
| pauby wrote:
| [deleted]
| xkbarkar wrote:
| I use gmail, photos and youtube, thats it. Pretty much anything
| from google that I have used in the past has shut down in a few
| years.
|
| So I dont touch anything new from them at all. Pointless.
|
| Good job google.
| Yhippa wrote:
| I wish they'd refund my Stadia Pro monthly subscription fees.
| erwinh wrote:
| The main thing that initially got me excited with Stadia were the
| ideas around having much bigger shared gaming worlds enabled by
| google-scale cloud expertise.
|
| Too bad that all it turned out to result in was video streaming
| optimisation.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| At what point does working for Google (on anything released after
| 2008) go from being prestigious to embarrassing?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Well, we're still at the point where, for nearly everyone who
| worked on Google products between 2008 and now, it was
| financially lucrative and great for their resumes.
| scottyah wrote:
| Why are so many of you here so bitter against this company?
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| They have/had incredible potential. Imagine what a company
| with Google's resources _could_ do. They have simultaneously
| the sharpest minds on the planet and a vast treasure chest of
| unprecedented proportions at their disposal.
|
| What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of
| extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of
| side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned
| out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and
| a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it
| functioning.
|
| It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it
| isn't, but it certainly feels like it.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Because in the 2000, many of use got fooled believing "do no
| evil" and their hacker heart, only to see unfold the next 2
| decades with sadness.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| They turned evil when they started putting ads inline with
| search results. The main utility of that is to trick
| unsophisticated or unwary users, so basically they're preying
| on the elderly (among others), but it made the line go up and
| to the right, so they don't care.
|
| Plus any company with a core business model of "being a
| super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal
| memory" is inherently terrible and shouldn't exist.
| [deleted]
| mrweasel wrote:
| I think it stems for their beginning. The Google search page
| was innovative, in showing that you didn't need to be flashy,
| just good at what you do. The same for Gmail, which was an
| awesome product and completely changed how people use email.
| Even the original Google ads where viewed extremely
| favorable, as it showed that you could make money on ads,
| without them being obnoxious.
|
| Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to
| everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office
| work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google
| adopted all the things we had hoped they'd save us from, just
| so they could make more money.
|
| That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google
| these days. The only two Google products I use are Google
| Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.
| Kye wrote:
| I remember the first time I saw someone mention Google. It
| was just so obviously better than what came before. That's
| rare. Most improvements on technology have to prove
| themselves over time and slowly build a following. Google
| was so amazing it grew to IPO through the .com crash and
| the early 2000s recession. For a time, everything they
| launched was gold. No one seemed to notice or care that
| everything was still "beta" years after sweeping each
| market.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| It's not just Google, but the cause for embarrassment at
| other formerly prestigious places is different and not
| relevant.
|
| I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I
| can't imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to
| tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI
| cluster**. I think I'd rather say I work at Oracle.
| dekhn wrote:
| Mainly because of wasted potential, in my case. They
| revolutionized the internet (repeatedly) with a great product
| and found a reasonably unobtrusive method to monetize it,
| then moved into creating replacements for Microsoft products
| (browser, calendar, email, documents) and I thought they
| would then pivot into cloud as a good competitor to AWS,
| whilst also spending their copious profits on long-term
| scientific research projects and helping bring ML advances to
| the larger community.
|
| It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a
| decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped
| leadership build and launch products, produced papers and
| intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally,
| couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it
| made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and
| repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they
| were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's
| products worse. What's really sad is that there is a
| technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with
| and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they
| know would help google, and instead spend most of their time
| fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.
| my_usernam3 wrote:
| As an ex fanboy (or fanboy lite) who has circled into hater
| section of recent, I can give you MY reasoning.
|
| For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly
| becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge
| company, so only strike 1.
|
| They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes,
| despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.
|
| And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in
| product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps
| has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what
| happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends
| and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe
| a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively
| marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a
| platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.
|
| Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.
| questime wrote:
| They have by far the most awful customer service of any big
| tech company. One or two experiences of dealing with issues
| (in my case Google Fi) turns you into a life long hater.
| rizzaxc wrote:
| Because they started out good ("dont be evil" and all),
| providing an exceptional yet fundamental internet service but
| somewhere along the way they lost the plot. They now hoard
| enormous wealth by shoving ads to our faces yet have done
| nothing with the money. Not to mention their engineering
| culture goes directly against the spirit of this site (rest'n
| vest vs startup's hustle culture). They're the hero turned
| villain all start ups fear they'll become
| [deleted]
| keepquestioning wrote:
| emptyfile wrote:
| When they literally had to remove "don't be evil" as their
| company slogan, on account of how evil they are, that did it
| for me.
| xtracto wrote:
| I am not a fanboy, have never been a fanboy and never cared
| about the "do no evil" marketing motto or any other Google
| crap. I am bitter against Google because it plainly sucks.
| Their products suck, they have "soft monopolies" and they
| have used them to Embrace Extend and Extinguish any
| alternatives. They are what Microsoft was in the 1990s-2000s.
| If you are young enough to remember the 90s and 00s Microsoft
| you will understand.
|
| Note that I not _only_ hate Google, I hate Google, Apple,
| Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes
| me an old fart.
| cbozeman wrote:
| You're being downvoted, and I have _no idea_ why.
|
| It _is_ embarrassing. It 's not just embarrassing, it's
| _fucking_ embarrassing.
|
| Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What
| killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in
| this country - poor broadband Internet service.
|
| But... oh God, if only... if only Google had _something_ they
| could use... something they could _do_ to solve this problem!?
|
| Oh... wait, yeah. They _have their own fucking fiber ISP_!
| Google _could have_ ponied up money and started building out
| their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of
| cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge
| chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be
| one of the leading ISPs in the nation.
|
| But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of
| Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you're
| stupid and/or naive enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and
| Verizon and Charter and AT&T are just going to let you waltz in
| and _steal their customers_ (and yes, these ISPs do think this
| way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you
| should never have entered into the ISP business in the first
| place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out
| eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.
|
| If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits
| for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, """""""lobby"""""""
| all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials -
| they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP's territories,
| laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority
| control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.
|
| But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems:
| fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant
| success. The road to becoming America's best ISP will be a
| long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but
| when you've got literally billions of dollars of cash at your
| disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit
| Wall Street investors... _or_ you could build something that
| would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of
| revenue in a decade or two.
|
| Too bad they're focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street
| investors.
| throwaway991122 wrote:
| Full disclosure: I work at AT&T but not directly on fiber. My
| views are my own and do not represent my employers.
|
| Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It's a labor intensive
| process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig
| trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you
| have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the
| hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated
| areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and
| homes. It's a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.
|
| I'm not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$.
| They could lobby effectively if they were interested.
| Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use.
| Google would use it against competitors if they were able to.
| so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They
| could have started something like Starlink instead they play
| around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that.
| So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren't / weren't
| interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber
| misadventure was just that - something they thought they
| could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood
| the reality on the ground.
|
| Also- I don't think working for Google is embarrassing. They
| deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and
| chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as
| prestigious as ever.
| pkulak wrote:
| If you're a manager, why the hell are you going to risk your
| career trying to get the last guy's project to work? There
| are two incentives in corporate America: start a project to
| get the praise for something new, and kill a project to get
| the praise for saving money. Is it any wonder projects keep
| popping in and out of existence?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > You're being downvoted, and I have _no idea_ why.
|
| Because calling people's job choices "embarrassing", no
| matter how right you may be, isn't a good starting argument
| against the people in those jobs. Not to mention that it
| comes off as pretentious.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Cole, do you know what working at Google is fast becoming
| like?
|
| It's like going to Harvard.
|
| You don't want to advertise that you went to Harvard.
| People who attended Harvard not only admit this, they don't
| even actively proclaim they went to Harvard any longer. Why
| is that? Because a bunch of really shitty people have
| sullied the reputation.
|
| It isn't that way with Google _for the general public_ ,
| but the SV folks know that Google of 2022 is nothing like
| Google of 2012, and _certainly_ nothing like Google of
| 2002.
|
| My great fear is that it won't be much longer before saying
| you work at Google in say, 2025-2032 is like saying you
| work at Hewlett-Packard or IBM in 2022. The prestige is
| long gone.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| No, Google upper management is a bunch of incompetent
| clowns, and they should rightly be called out for it.
|
| Working at Google today, you better be in just for the 200k
| salary, because your options there are to sell ads or work
| on a product that's going to be shut down in a week.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| What major projects get shut down in the same week and
| what ads do you think they are selling?
| zeruch wrote:
| "fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than
| instant success...focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street
| investors"
|
| A nice distillation of most of SV these days.
| wcfields wrote:
| Love the foreshadowing of it being a total flop from the launch
| exhibition:
| https://twitter.com/AllGamesDelta_/status/119683308108220416...
|
| "Remember when Google compared Stadia with the Powerglove, Atari
| ET and the Dreamcast?"
| bogwog wrote:
| The thing I remembered most from that launch was when Sundar
| Pichai walked on stage of this massive product launch, in front
| of the entire gaming industry filled with skeptics, and the
| first words out of his mouth were "I'll admit, I'm not much of
| a gamer".
| nemanja wrote:
| Really grateful for the major contribution Google made to the
| WebRTC over the years, driven by the Stadia effort. They
| relatively quickly turned it into a viable, production worthy,
| real-time protocol. Brought up the state of the art in browser-
| based streaming and reduced complexity in a big way. There were
| things you simply couldn't do in the browser before WebRTC (e.g.
| UDP streaming) and many other things were significantly more
| complex and browser-specific (e.g. tapping into hardware
| decoders). They were also very receptive to external
| contributions, which is really nice to see in a major corporate-
| driven open source project.
| saurik wrote:
| While Stadia did cause them to do more work on WebRTC (AFAIK
| mostly with latency), their WebRTC efforts--and you are
| referencing high-level stuff, not low-level Stadia-specific
| details--was mostly driven by Google Hangouts, not Stadia.
| oramit wrote:
| I was expecting there to be some satisfaction at this news as I
| (and many others clearly from the comments) predicted this would
| happen. But honestly it just feels kind of sad at this point.
| Google used to be, at least from an outside perspective, one of
| the most innovative and forward thinking companies, constantly
| releasing new and interesting products. Not everything was good,
| of course, but I was always eager to give things a try.
|
| Now Google is a paint-by-ads corporate behemoth. I've been burnt
| so many times that I'm now skeptical of every new thing they
| release instead of excited. I hate feeling that way, especially
| because Stadia itself is so technically impressive, but how else
| can I feel?
| dougmwne wrote:
| I was done feeling sad many years ago. It has been absolutely
| ages since there was anything interesting from them. I can't
| even recall the last product that seemed like a real
| innovation. Possibly the first chromecast in 2013? That's 10
| years without a hit. At this point they are covered in cobwebs.
| acheron wrote:
| AppleTV had already existed for years by then, including with
| Airplay.
|
| I would say 2005 with Google Maps.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Alright, I admit it was not incredibly ground breaking.
| Reason it impressed was that it was a very small, cheap and
| simple UI device that showed how to execute an IOT device
| well. It went on to be very popular and it was obvious from
| the start that it would be successful. And as far as I
| understand it was developed internally, not acquired like
| basically every other google product from the past 20
| years.
|
| Google maps was quite impressive, but it was also cobbled
| together from several acquisitions. In fact, Google Earth
| Desktop is still basically the same software they bought
| from Keyhole in 2004.
| timmg wrote:
| > Google used to be, at least from an outside perspective, one
| of the most innovative and forward thinking companies,
| constantly releasing new and interesting products.
|
| Honestly, I think the change from a SWE CEO (Schmidt -- and
| less so Larry) to a PM CEO, Sundar, is probably the main
| reason.
|
| I get why, though. At the time of Sundar's rise, it was clear
| that Apple was _way_ better at making "products". (Now they're
| just a _lot_ better :)
| rvz wrote:
| Unsurprising, as I knew it was going to shut down already as I
| said in 2021: [0]
|
| >> I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to
| change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the
| cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said
| no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the
| Google graveyard. [0]
|
| This is the second time I have seen them shutdown as I already
| said this before: [1]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| The most inevitable gaming news in the history of ever.
| nope96 wrote:
| well, I have this shrink wrapped Stadia box I got from the
| Cyberpunk deal I procrastinated on, and never opened. Is it
| worthless or does the controller work on other platforms? I think
| it also came with a gen 2 Chromecast, but I think that's pretty
| obsolete now too?
| falcolas wrote:
| This is a great example of why you can _never_ trust PR
| statements. They outright lie. We 're not working on X. We won't
| shut down Y. Bald faced lies.
|
| Edit: Missed that they're doing refunds. That part's good.
|
| EDIT2: Why I'm calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on
| a whim. They're made months if not years in advance. A public
| company making public statements about how you're not shutting
| something down while you're internally mapping out the shutdown
| process... that's a lie.
| kshacker wrote:
| Wonder if the CEOs can be made to sign (and stand behind) such
| statements, like CEOs/CFOs were made to stand behind financial
| statements.
|
| Although I guess financial statements are quarterly, PR
| statements are dime a dozen.
| xd1936 wrote:
| July 29:
|
| https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
| drcongo wrote:
| This is also a great example of why you can never trust Google.
| ugjka wrote:
| They shut down everything that does not "print" money for
| them. I guess they were expecting to beat Steam and that
| didn't happen so... bye bye
| scottyah wrote:
| Or the PR teams are just misinformed?
|
| Some intern doing customer support on twitter isn't going to be
| invited to long term strategy/budget meetings
| [deleted]
| tshaddox wrote:
| That's still a lie from whichever individual or group of
| individuals you consider to have agency over the matter. Like
| sure, maybe the individual who physically typed the tweet had
| little or no agency, but it's still reasonable to call it a
| lie when the responsible agent was deliberately making a
| false statement.
| mr-yamasi wrote:
| Is it even in the realm of possibility that Google, of all
| companies, has an intern with zero insight into the long term
| strategy manage the twitter account AND make definitive
| public statements?
| jnwatson wrote:
| Or even more likely, management changes their mind.
|
| It is obvious that Google is battening the hatches for a
| recession. Economic conditions looks worse than just a few
| months ago. They've already reduced their Area 120
| investments. This makes sense to cut as well.
|
| Disclosure: Googler but have no inside info.
| Karunamon wrote:
| That remains a lie by incompetence. Just because Google can't
| be bothered get their product and PR people on the same page
| doesn't excuse the entity named Google from making misleading
| statements.
| falcolas wrote:
| That's a leadership problem, not a rogue intern problem.
|
| And I'm sure some Google Shareholders will be grumbling about
| it too, since this represents a non-trivial loss of revenue
| thanks to the (IMO appropriate) refunds, since it represents
| a material change in the value of stocks purchased between 60
| days ago and today.
| foobiekr wrote:
| As a rule, with corporations, official denials can be thought
| of as unofficial confirmations. Occasionally this is not true,
| but for the most part they wouldn't be responding unless the
| issue was credible and at least a few parties had strong reason
| to believe whatever it is they're denying.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I was hoping they would open source the technology for this.
| Also, instead of flat out killing it having an option of running
| it yourself on your own hardware would have been pretty
| phenomenal.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Hopefully this means they will release the streaming rights for
| PUBG, so it can finally come back to GeForce NOW?
|
| Ever since they banned keyboard & mouse PUBG play (forcing you to
| use the game controller) I pretty much gave up on Stadia.
| skerit wrote:
| Are they even capable of launching any new products? Nobody
| trusts Google to keep anything.
| snthd wrote:
| Google need to open source and unlock the controllers - otherwise
| they just created a mountain of e-waste.
| sphars wrote:
| I agree, I have the controller and it's pretty decent
| ergonomics-wise for me. Just hate that I have to use it wired
| if I want to use it for other PC games.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| You know, this gave me an idea: I'd love to see legislation
| that states that when a company the size of Google, Microsoft,
| etc. launches a product like this, then kills it off, that they
| MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it. Not just
| for hardware like controller firmware etc. but also for
| software they used to create it. Obviously the games themselves
| in the case are IP owned by other firms so that would be
| exempt, but I think this would go a long way to forcing
| companies to stick it out with supporting products and
| customers they create over longer periods of time or not launch
| things flippantly in the first place.
| onion2k wrote:
| _they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it_
|
| This would have no impact on anything. If they had to share
| IP after shutting it down they'd just restructure the
| business so that Stadia licensed IP from Google Streaming
| Gaming Technology LLP, and do the all the real work in that
| absolutely-definitely-a-separate-company-look-the-logo-is-a-
| different-shape part of Alphabet instead.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| Eh, there's probably ways to mitigate that from a
| legislative point of view. The point of this was to make
| the act of shutting products down all willy-nilly like this
| less attractive, and if they keep doing it at least the
| world at large gets a little something out of it. But
| you're not wrong in pointing out they'll do everything they
| can to sidestep accountability and screw the little guy,
| either. I'm just hoping there's some way we can make that
| more trouble than it's worth.
| bogwog wrote:
| Maybe it would work if it was based on the production
| volume and product category, not the size of the company.
| Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it
| possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would
| otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason
| than software locks is a good idea.
|
| But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual
| property just because they're successful seems counter-
| intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to
| install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists)
| in a reasonable way for no additional cost.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| Yeah I should have thought that through a bit more before
| posting it.
|
| > Maybe it would work if it was based on the production
| volume and product category, not the size of the company.
| Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it
| possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would
| otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason
| than software locks is a good idea.
|
| THIS!
|
| > But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual
| property just because they're successful seems counter-
| intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to
| install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists)
| in a reasonable way for no additional cost.
|
| Well, this too, with a twist...
|
| I'm not saying they have to relinquish their IP. There's
| a difference between open sourcing something and
| relinquishing intellectual property. One says "the world
| can USE this" and the other says "the world can use this
| and somebody can PROFIT FROM IT." I'm saying exclusively
| the former. I'm not OK with them being forced to allow
| somebody else to pick up their work and make money on it
| without them getting a cut purely because the government
| forced that function, that's not ok. So maybe if there's
| going to be a forcing function here there needs to be
| some kind of licensing that allows their IP to be used
| purely in non-profit contexts.
|
| ...but then again, coming back to my whole "should have
| thought it through before posting" notion, no profit
| might mean no maintaining body. So...I dunno.
|
| It just rubs me the wrong way that Google launches new
| products and kills just as many every single year, and
| loads of people worldwide get screwed in the process
| while they get away with it every single time. If they're
| going to keep doing this, and let's face it, they are,
| the world at large oughtta get a little something out of
| it. Seems like having them open source the thing they're
| clearly not going to make any money on anyway is the
| right thing to do here.
| Grazester wrote:
| This! I would love this!
| rocky1138 wrote:
| They aren't just regular old Bluetooth?
| 0x457 wrote:
| No, that how google was able to achieve better latency and
| allowed using it on Chromecast devices. The controller has
| Bluetooth used only for setting it up, from there it's Wi-Fi
| that used to send input directly to the cloud instead of "BT
| to showing the stream and then to the cloud".
|
| I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it's an excellent
| controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via iPad...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it's an
| excellent controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via
| iPad...
|
| He's too dangerous to allow to live.
| 0x457 wrote:
| haha, I know it's very cursed setup.
| lokar wrote:
| Wifi
| waltbosz wrote:
| A friend gave me a Amazon Luna controller he didn't want.
|
| I was pleasantly surprised that the controller synced via BT.
| I was able to play non-Luna FireTV games with no problems.
|
| It even worked without the Luna software installed on my
| FireTV Stick (I don't recommend you buy a FireTV stick, nor
| any FireTV product really).
|
| The concept of the Luna software is interesting: Cloud
| streamed HD gaming on low-end hardware. Game play was really
| responsive. Very little video artifacts. But like all other
| FireTV products, the UX was geared towards sales, not user
| ergonomics.
|
| I plan to uninstall the Luna app and just play the few FireTV
| games that I have. Sadly Alto's Adventure is too resource
| intense for my FireTV Stick.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| They're WiFi, I believe.
| Hamuko wrote:
| If I remember correctly, they do have Bluetooth hardware
| inside them but I think it might only be used for pairing.
| Not sure if someone could hack it to work via Bluetooth as
| well.
|
| Of course, USB remains an option.
|
| EDIT: Yup, official Google Store specs list "Bluetooth" and
| "Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2".
| sphars wrote:
| They have bluetooth and wi-fi hardware but currently locked
| and can't be used outside of Stadia. Wired USB works as a
| normal controller though.
| gpt5 wrote:
| They can be used over USB
| tpmx wrote:
| There must be several thousands of them!
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| I got one of the free promotional Controller + Chrome Cast
| Ultra "Premier Edition" bundles they were seeding to YouTube
| Premium customers out of sheer curiosity. I tried it for the
| free month, and hadn't taken the controller out of its box
| since (I do get a fair amount of use out of the Chromecast).
|
| The whole system is a _staggering_ technological achievement of
| (unnecessary) complexity getting a pile of devices closely
| synchronized over the network with ... absolutely no realistic
| use case.
|
| I just dug the controller out, it does work wired as a USB-C
| HID1.1 Gamepad device (18D1:9400). 2 analog sticks, 2 analog
| triggers, 15 buttons (including pressed/not pressed for the
| analog triggers), and an analog alias for the D-Pad (just
| returns min/max when pressed). Doesn't look like the 3.5mm
| headphone jack does anything when connected via USB, I'm not
| seeing a bonus audio device or anything.
|
| It doesn't look like it presents as a normal Bluetooth
| controller (by testing or by the docs
| https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338851?hl=en ), I
| think the weird hybrid WiFi for comms/Bluetooth for pairing
| thing they did would require some hacking and/or published
| specs to use it wirelessly with anything other than a Stadia
| setup - or for Google to politely release a firmware update to
| enable normal BT controller behavior since they imply it's
| possible. They are apparently pretty nasty to get apart (
| https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Google_Stadia_Controller ) for
| physical tampering, though there is a fairly substantial
| computer system in it
| http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Google_Stadia_(H2...
| .
|
| It's actually a pretty comfortable controller, but it just
| became an amusing collectors item so I think mine will continue
| to sit in its box.
| icelancer wrote:
| It's a great controller, you're right! Very comfortable and
| my goto on emulators.
|
| I also looked into the weird WiFi/Bluetooth hybrid protocol
| stack. It's really impressive, and as far as I know, not
| jailbroken. Also massively overengineered.
|
| They tried really hard with Stadia, at least at the hardware
| and streaming level. It's just that no one wanted it. They
| are before their time; PS Plus and GeForce Go are seeing
| adoption for streaming games. I bet it'll be popular in 3-5
| years, maybe sooner. It's just that Google isn't a reliable
| carrier for this service, and they don't have enough
| patience.
| jpace121 wrote:
| Lol. At this point Google needs to be very careful about the
| reputation they have about support for anything outside their
| core.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Really?!? What a surprise! /s
|
| They wanted game devs, with a strong Windows development culture,
| to port their games into a Linux distribution, using bare bones
| tooling vs Windows/Console devkits, a huge investment into a
| company that is known for quickly dropping products when not
| profitable enough.
|
| Naturally most didn't even bothered.
| balozi wrote:
| I expect a half-hearted rebranding effort followed by another
| ill-fated relaunch in the near future. Because Google is Google.
| groestl wrote:
| "make it available to our industry partners" Read: the military,
| right?
| pootpucker wrote:
| dqpb wrote:
| Google has built an incredible self-fulfilling prophecy.
| lakomen wrote:
| I'll just say this... If you can't pirate on it, it won't
| succeed.
| mrkramer wrote:
| This is Google's modus operandi; if they can't dominate the
| particular market and gain monopol, they will simply shut it
| down. Why bother losing money or breaking even when you can go to
| some other niche and try to dominate it and monopolize the
| market.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| I still have fond memories of users here telling me that I
| shouldn't shit on Stadia, that it was the future of gaming and
| that Phil Harrison is a fucking hack that keeps failing upwards
| despite fucking up every single product he has been on.
|
| Thanks Phil for proving you truly are a bottomless pit in which
| companies can throw money in to make it disappear.
| pqwEfkvjs wrote:
| IMO Stadia was born dead because of the lag built into its
| design. Most googlers I talked to when it was announced did not
| think about it at all, it was all about how cool the stack behind
| it was, but from a gamer's perspective I was just terrified about
| the idea.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-29 23:00 UTC)