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Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

There was recently an article about Stadia where a developer from a decent sized studio claimed they were approached by Google for Stadia. What did Google offer for the developer to bring the game to Stadia? Almost nothing. The figure was in the tens of thousands.

For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost. Sometimes millions of dollars. Google is just cheap and won’t invest in their own platform.

Direct quote: "We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it."

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...

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Having been approached by Google for these kinds of projects, I 100% believe this. I was leading a team approached by them to do something similar for Google Glass. There was no real incentive there except the privilege of being an early glass partner. The entire process of working with them was a nightmare and we decided to bow out.

I'm short on any attempt Google makes at being a media company.

Just to add general interest info to this strain of the conversation: I had to work with Apple in ensuring content for the launch of News+ in Canada after they bought out Next Issue/Texture, and they were very involved and the incentives were substantial.

It makes a real-world difference, there's no doubt about it. Hell, this is why governments issue arts funding. The return has virtually limitless potential in more than just the financial aspects. But it does take commitment, perseverance, and often, patience.

> commitment, perseverance, and often, patience

Despite these being crucial attributes to being a good developer, it's shocking how few (people and tech organizations) exhibit them.

Namely, Google.

I'm not sure if I'm surprised or not. On one hand, it kind of fits my mental image of Google perfectly, I don't know why. On the other: doesn't Google have a shitload of money and doesn't Google burn it so often by starting hundreds of projects it just kills after a couple of years of development?

The problem is not that Google couldn't pay them. The problem is that Google is arrogant as hell: Why should we pay you when we give you the privilege to be part of something we, the masters of the universe, introduce?

They fail to understand that from the outside people don't see things Google does as sure bets.

Google glass and game streaming are two very different projects with different motivations/incentives etc for partnering. Game streaming is on the cusp of becoming mainstream. The technology works (playable latency), and the overall product is simpler than competing products (pcs, consoles) for the job we hire gaming hardware for. It is clear the future is in the controllers and displays, not in math boxes. The biggest difference is that gaming is an existing habit gamers have. Google Glass was something completely new and was unclear what we were using it for.

I would also say "media company" is pretty broad. Will Google become a media infrastructure company? yes (they already are). Will they become a media platform? yes, (they already are). Anything more and it's probably spreading investment too thin, but those are substantial components to media.

Game Streaming also needs typical home internet connections to get better before it can really go mainstream.

Not everyone has low latency, high reliability fibre in their home, yet. If you have some crappy DSL or whatever then the experience isn’t great. Likewise if your WiFi signal is anything less than perfect!

And the people who do pay for the best internet connections are often those who don’t need Stadia, because they already have latest-generation consoles and gaming PCs?

That's a great point. I did say the technology is proven but did not specify the market this is ready for. It is sort of like Tesla adoption 10 years ago. It will take time for the investments in technology and infrastructure to cover more of the market. Hopefully Verizon can accelerate their mmWave 5g deploys.

> when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost

We once had a Microsoft rep come visit us to get us to publish our upcoming mobile games for Windows Mobile Tablet notreallysurewhatwasthatanymore. When we asked what kind of support they were ready to provide, they offered to lend us a device for a few weeks.

Of course it's not representative of how things should happen, but for every big partnership or exclusive you read about, there's a dozen dumb wastes of time.

Yeah, not sure where the idea comes from that Microsoft fronts like the entire development cost for ... for what even? As a publisher? Sure, maybe.

For games coming to Game Pass? No.

Same for the EGS, it's not like they front all those games. (Most exclusivity is bought way later in the process.)

But the original comment is pretty much Windows Phone back then. To this day I have no idea why Microsoft was so cheap and didn't even try to get developers on their platform. Rip Lumias, some of you were some great devices.

My point of reference here is from this twitter thread.

https://twitter.com/RaveofRavendale/status/13094734056039096...

"With Nowhere Prophet, it was an interesting case because we were also launching on Xbox Game Pass at the same time, which had essentially already secured financial success for the console versions"

Not exclusive, still got a significant chunk of cash.

Having the money to port a game to console is great, but usually not comparable to fronting the full development of a game.

There might be a couple where Epic might have done that (kind of, I know they saved some games), but I don't think Microsoft funded any development for a gamepass game so far. (From a third party, not published by Microsoft.)

Epic exclusives have generally been provided in the form of a revenue guarantee on projected sales, I believe. Essentially, they're not paying much of anything if the game is successful and profitable on it's own, but if it tanks, the developers still get paid as if it did not.

For an indie developer, this basically means worrying about whether the game will succeed a non-issue prior to launch.

> How do you pay out developers? I’m a developer, I make a game, I say I’m going to put it in Game Pass, a customer pays [you] $14.99 a month. How do you decide how much to pay me, the developer?

> [Phil Spencer, head of Xbox:] [In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk.

https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-int...

GamePass deals are fixed price, the "full production cost" is not an exact truth. For most indies the deal price represents an over shoot over costs, or just a large percent of cost. This is logical: no one ever shares their internal production costs. Like any business you treat business partners at arm's length.

Source: gamedev who has heard from serveral devs who got offers.

OK, but...

was that the end of the discussion? Was there, you know, pushback like "we want 10 devices each of the two most popular sizes, and exclusivity for xxx months, and, and..."

Or did everything just fizzle out after "well, we'll lend you the unit I have in the back of my car?"

As an independent person without a company, Microsoft gave me a free Windows Phone just for expressing interest in developing an app for it. These sorts of developer incentives kinda come and go, depending on the platform and how much they're investing in it.

When I was in college, you could show up to their 'Make an app day' and as long you successfully uploaded your own version of their slot machine app you'd be entered into a drawing for a bunch of really nice hardware. Microsoft was terrible at promoting these events, so everytime I went there where more prizes than people.

Thanks, from that same article proof that the Google Graveyard is hurting Google...

>This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.

Given Goog's history on this, I read this announcement as them soft-killing Stadia. They aren't going to admit defeat, but unless they put real resources behind paying people to use it, they aren't going to see any use of it as an API and are effectively mothballing it.

I hope not. The Stadia platform is fantastic: the best streaming user experience out there. It’s just that much of the Stadia Pro content is mediocre, and the paid titles tend to be expensive. (Compare to GeForce Now with it’s awkward, clunky UX but near-unlimited library of content via Steam)

Yah...I just don't see that developers have much incentive to use Stadia? Like, you can't rely on an established 'Stadia playerbase' right now, so there's no natural incentive for studios to integrate with it. Other platform owners solve this by paying for exclusivity or something, but as mentioned above, reports say that Google wants to pay insultingly small sums of money for that work. Unless that changes...no one is gonna use it.

The article says that they’re reassigning 150 people who worked on internal games. If they were betting the future of the platform on the number and quality of games that can be turned out by 150 people, then this never made any sense. Major game studios are hundreds or thousands of people, so this is just Google admitting that nobody in-house can come up with any good games. I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.

I'm not sure that I would invest significant cash to buy games for a platform, which may be killed on a whim. That's apart from all its other disadvantages, namely a lack of choice.

> I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.

We probably disagree here, but to me that's an ear piercing yell about the confidence Google puts into Stadia and its future.

> For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost.

This is so painfully misleading.

You're either describing situations where Microsoft or Epic have become the publisher for the game, or you're describing situations where extremely large titles are paid to exclusively release on a platform where they will then recoup costs from as the sales have to go through their platform.

1. What's the effort required for the port? If a game already has Linux support, it basically is compatible with Stadia, whereas if you have to port it to Xbox, that requires a lot more time and resources.

2. Was the offer to be a timed exclusive like with Epic, or just to add integration for Stadia? I would assume the offers money to be very different depending on that.

3. Are we comparing similarly sized games? "one prominent indie developer" is kinda vague. Again not sure how comparable it is with Epic/Microsoft deals.

Its remarkable to contrast with, say, GamePass; while there's not a lot of disclosure around what that entails precisely, a few small developers have suggested it pretty much floats their studio financially (and doesn't require a re-write, as Stadia does).

From a customer perspective, it gets the game on streaming, Xbox, and Windows PC.

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