Stadia died because no one trusts Google
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that.
Compare that to paying the same price for a regular PC game which you can play via streaming using a streaming service, but also play locally, and know that you can take that game with you through multiple hardware decides and streaming services.
With Stadia, if I move somewhere with bad internet, there is no way to recover the value of my games I purchased. There is no other gaming system like that. All other systems either have an offline possibility or are pure streaming where you aren't making a game purchase investment, like Xbox Gamepass or Luna.
It just doesn't make sense except to a really small niche and is not competitive to the average gamer.
First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.
For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.
Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.
I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.
And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.
And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.
And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.
> manually logging in
You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.
You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).
You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.
> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores
As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.
I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.
Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.
If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.
They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.
Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.
I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.
Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.
It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?
There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up.
They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.
Which happens once and requires no intervention from the user.
The rest of the time it's as simple as take DVD out of box and put in drive.
If you meant "setup" as in literally just playing a game you've already setup, then sure, that can be fairly quick, but still not as quick as Stadia was.
I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.
Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...
But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).
I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another.
I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer.
If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam.
The whole walled garden "app store" system sucks.
And yet those programs do not magically work on Windows or Linux because that's not how computers work. Developers have to specifically target and build their programs for the devices they wish to support.
And many apps (in particular SaaS ones) allow you to buy one license and use their program on whatever device they support. App Store doesn't stop you.
If I can get it to run, licensing shouldn't be another road block
It's never been as reliable as Apple platforms are way more of a moving target, so it's never got as feature complete and dependable as wine
* - I am taking developers at their word on this. I haven't sold anything on the Mac App Store.
My knowledge about this is limited to a couple board game programs I used to use on a Mac and now run on Linux.
It’s not gog type freedom from drm but it seems to be cross platform. Well of course not on iOS….
Never heard of that before. Googled it, and it appears to be an american only thing. Any suggestions for the rest of the world?
I don't really see the value in transferring my Steam games to GOG for example. So I don't really see what the criticism is here.
Game store and some multiplayer integration is not that limiting. It's preferrable to every single game building their own awful mini-stores/platforms (like EAs and Ubisofts. Even Battle.net's can be annoying and naggy).
I was also wondering if the licence could be some form of asymmetric key which could be used to "unlock" the game, but that might be a solution looking for a problem.
I don't think this would ever work in reality, because it limits the ability of the delivery service to double dip.
Except on Steam. Never buy your games on the app store. Get them on Steam and you get all platforms* (at least most of the time).
* PC platforms of course. Hell will freeze over before you also get the console version.
It's a bit weird because other games haven't had those issues. It's common for racing games to get delisted because of expired licenses, but if you purchased it that licensed content is yours to download forever. Every 2 years or so a Forza game has to get pulled and goes on sale for $1 for the final week.
Edit: Doing some further digging it looks like it's because they kept selling Alan Wake after the music rights expired, so they had to push an update or delist the game. That's pretty crappy.
https://www.pcgamer.com/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-steam-u...
Just because it’s on the disc doesn’t mean the binary has to load it.
As for mandatory patches: you would at least have the option to play single-player offline without updating.
Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitable in its own right.
It's not always going to work out, but I do think Google's actions helped stifle competition in that market. Google could have successfully stopped another company from blowing up in that market and becoming a real competitor to worry about in other markets down the line.
It sounds like a financially smart thing to do but it cuts your legs out because nobody is doing research anymore, and you select for people with half a billion potential and an eagerness to lie.
No one devs on a 8 year old budget laptop or a slow internet connection. Some devs forget that those even exist.
Fast internet isn't a given either. It's slow in some areas, and slower in most hotels. I've had sub-10mbps, 1500ms ping internet quite often, especially while travelling.
That's without counting cultural assumptions SV companies make, especially when their staff is lacking in cultural diversity.
1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity
2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out
3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something.
So for example, let’s look at dart.
There was never any way it was going to work, really… but, at the time, maaaaybe, it could have worked. …and google would have owned the web stack entirely.
…but, they’ve put it to work in flutter now and that’s going ok.
The point I’m making is that if you look at this from the perspective of investment in fundamental technology (Ie. Steaming video say) what’s better?
A) develop it with no specific use case
B) work really hard on a very difficult use case that might end up failing
If you can afford it, the latter is maybe not the worst way of doing it.
You end up with battle tested technology and no users to bother you for the made-in-a-rush service you made to go with it.
You could easily argue that more successfully outcomes could come from less risky investments… but do you want 50 kind of bleh services in your portfolio?
I don’t think google does. They want a few unicorns.
You don’t get unicorns by playing it safe.
So… I’m not saying it’s the right strategy, or even a good one, but from that perspective you can see why you’d try.
Bet: we’ll see something fancy using the streaming tech roll out eventually, probably linked to a more successful existing product, it will be unremarkable and well liked by most people.
Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.
I only use the products that are very unlikely to go away quickly. Search, Gmail and Android. I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain. And I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.
I used to think that, but I was actually surprised how easy it was to get off GMail. I gave Fastmail my credit card number, clicked a few buttons in their UI to get my mail transferred over, moved my MX records, and I was done. I ended up migrating contacts, too, but that was just a couple more clicks in Fastmail's UI, as they have an OAuth flow that interacts directly with Google's APIs.
I still haven't migrated my calendar, and a few other email-adjacent things, but it's fine; it can all operate this way until I'm ready.
Edit: right after posting, realized you might be using an @gmail.com address, so yeah, migrating off GMail in that case is much harder than if you have a custom domain.
Beyond that, especially given that I assume (hope?) such sites are rare, a simple workaround would be to have a GMail account just for such signups, and set it up to forward to your main mail account hosted elsewhere. I think that's a pretty small price to pay if you really do want to get off GMail.
In my case, I still have my GSuite (or Google Workspaces or whatever they hell they're calling it now) account (really the only difference is now my MX records point somewhere else), so if I did have any sites left where I hadn't switched from Google auth to email/password auth, it would still work.
they should use TS. or kotlin or Swift ... or just Java.
look at React. the simplest piece of shit and it's eating the world because people got into the cult of React. similarly with Go.
...
streaming tech: they'll just fold it into YouTube somehow.
unicorns: did they ever launch any since Gmail?
Maps
Docs
Go
/shrug
I dunno, I think it’s fair to say they’ve had a few winners.
Got any winners that they started themselves instead of acquiring?
Credit where it's due though: A lot of companies destroy their acquisitions, which hasn't happened in these cases.
Go doesn't make them money directly. Similarly k8s is great, but doesn't make them money. (At best it's the classic commoditize your complement strategy. Though I have no idea where Go comes from. Well, I guess if you hire enough language developers you're bound to eventually get a new language, even if it's a bit meh, so they at least matched React in that.)
It’s a product I’ve shied away from because Google.
Angular (and angularjs before it) are typical Google engineering. (Too much rxjs solutioning in search of a problem to solve. Compare it to svelte using an observable interface to get 80% of the benefit with the rest of the absolute insanity that junior devs bounce off and make angular a dreaded framework compared to react, vue, svelte)
Google is an anti-brand at this point.
r/ps5: 2.6m
r/steamdeck: 230k
r/stadia: 119k
What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.
Stadia relied on casuals who happen to have a stable fiber optic cable internet connection.
Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.
Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.
I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products.
When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success.
Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.
Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."
There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.
Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.
So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.
Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.
As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.
But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).
All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.
On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”
The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated
And that’s because it was a terrible phone.
I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
> The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately
They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car.
You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative.
In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry.
Innovation is not just new products.
And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation.
And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable.
> spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets
What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation.
SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics.
The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back.
Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.
Tesla were early adopters by making use of them, but not innovators.
There are two versions of the Gigapress history going around. In one version the idea came to the Idra CEO in a dream, while in the other version Elon gave multiple die casting manufacturers a call and got a hard no from everyone, expect for Idra who gave him a ‘maybe’.
Whichever it it is not that important in my view. What is undisputed is that Tesla put their money where their mouth is and took a real money bet on this new unproven technology early on. That is as much innovation as actually coming up with the machine and idea yourself.
Edit: to add to my point about innovation, from what I understand, no car company has ever used die casted parts in structural components due to concerns about internal stresses resulting from the die cast process. Normally this requires expensive post treatments but Tesla developed a custom alloy that makes this post treatment unnecessary. I am a bit light on details; someone with a metallurgy or structural engineering background pls chime in.
Structural die-casting has been a trend in the automotive industry, having started before the Gigapress. One article on this, from 2018, is https://www.spotlightmetal.com/opportunities-for-die-casting... and in that you see an analysis of the economic benefits, even though it's an article for public consumption.
The article itself, back in 2018, mentions cars already using structural die-casting and basically forecasts structural die-casting becoming a more typical manufacturing method.
Also its a part of company from China operating in Italy.
These machines are also continuously improved in prosecution at Tesla and that knowlage is flowing back to the company. The machines deployed in Texas are already an improvement over those in California. There is a lot around the core machine that needs to be improved as well.
My understanding is that they saw the usefulness of these machines quite early and were developing them in this direction and that they had already produced 4000 tonne presses of this general type. Now it's at 6000 and 8000 tonnes.
Customers are needed to make use of good ideas-- you can't take them otherwise, but the innovation is the work the Italians did.
Machines that like still wouldn't exist today had Tesla not done the necessary investment.
There is the machine and then the application of the machine to an actual production process.
It's like Germany and its heavy presses, during WWII. Lack of manpower, or in this case, something else that is wrong, leads to an player going for the most complete realization of that is easier and has major advantages.
All other car companies?
> If the other manufacturers have that down, then their need for very large components of this kind is lower.
This is not how this works. Tesla also 'has it down' with the Model 3 manufacturing line.
Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.
This is a large part why even the former CEO of VW said they were behind in some ways.
Yes, but at the time when they went after these presses as the thing for the future, they didn't quite have it down.
>Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.
Now, probably, yes.
That’s Panasonic, not Tesla. You are confused by the Tesla marketing here. Tesla makes plenty of interesting things but that’s not part of it.
Yes, Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic. They are also buying batteries from LQ and CATL. Nobody questions that.
In addition to that Tesla has its totally own production process and chemistries. These are not shared with LG, CATL or Panasonic. Its own fully owned battery factory and research facility in California. They are currently building a battery plan in Austin and in Berlin, these are fully owned and operated Tesla plants.
These plants have their own manufacturing processes developed in-house. They even built the machines them selves. A lot of this is done in Germany in a former well known German supplier that Tesla bought outright like 5 years ago. They also bought a company in Canada that makes the battery filling machines and pumps in Canada.
If you still think we are in 2014 and Tesla is just being supplied by Panasonic, you have not been paying attention.
This may be part of the problem. Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Apple (Tesla/Starlink/etc) was founded upon vision - what could the future look like? How do I make that happen today? - and then, somehow, to pare that back to something that's economically viable in a reasonable time frame.
That said, taking existing problems and trying to better apply algorithms to make a better product is still a thing in AI space though - and even here plenty of start ups are taking the lead.
Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.
On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.
Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.
Not any more. These days their DNA is ads.
Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios.
If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model
It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted.
And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it.
This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story.
You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole!
But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.)
Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.
In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.
The big guys at that time were blinded by their own success, Google wanted users to do their search and leave the site which was completely opposite to what the Yahoo's of that day wanted to do, they wanted users to hang out on their portal.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think what's being proposed is that the more undiscovered markets get discovered, the fewer undiscovered markets are left, and the more difficult they are to discover. Pagerank was a good idea that worked.
And back at the time, before Google Search, many many related markets didn't, couldn't, yet exist. And, back then, I'd think PageRank could count as one of the few and difficult thing to discover.
I think "low hanging fruit" makes it sound too easy :- )
Then you missed the point. It doesn't matter whether PageRank was something trivial any grad student could come up with or if it was on the level of Einstein's General Relativity in difficulty. The point is that it was one basic idea.
Today if you want to dethrone Google you need to overcome the enormous amount of engineering that has gone into Google Search and Maps. You can't do that by just "discovering" something as a grad student. It's going to take thousands (or millions) of engineering hours to achieve.
That is what it means for the low-hanging fruit to be gone. It's like the difference between discovering electricity, as we all know took quite a while but was achieved by a small number of scientists and inventors over a period of a couple centuries, and trying to compete against the modern-day electrical distribution network on your own, which is essentially impossible without some kind of Star Trek alien galactic empire level technology.
This is what everyone thought in 1999. Search engines were a solved problem in a crowded market where there could be little room for new contender And whatever limitations we had in search were just inherent in how it all worked and we just had to deal with it.
We must have lived in different 1999's
I’ve often heard the saying how “everything easy has already been invented” and that it’s so much harder today to invent new things.
I think it’s a fallacy. Things were just as hard in the past.
I owned an ISP in 1998 and there were plenty of search engines at the time. Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.
In 1998 there were plenty of search engines and their use was distributed more evenly. The internet was still fairly new and most people weren't online yet. It certainly wasn't an integral part of most people's life. Google came along and improved on the existing search engines and in doing so wiped out a lot of that competition, becoming what they are today.
A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.
Even only looking at the advantage that Google Maps brings to the table totally blows past any barriers present in 1998. Sure, you could build a much better search engine but who's going to use it when it can't give them directions?
Then consider that if you look like you'll end up making some headway, you're likely to just get bought and killed off/integrated.
Are you a pessimist in life? You’re focusing on only the negative aspects of starting a search engine today.
24 years after Google was formed we have orders of magnitude cheaper processing, orders of magnitude better AI, the ability to start small with cloud computing and work your way up from there. We have 24 years of search engine research to a large extent publicly available.
I really think all this “things would’ve been so much easier back then” are simply excuses as to why someone can’t do something today.
They do exist, have you heard of any of them?
My intention wasn't to dismiss the possibility of popular new search engines. Only to highlight that the environment is substantially more complex/challenging than in 1997.
I actually think that their entrepreneur spirit and business attitude made them successful. Other guys thought of their search engines as of technical experiments and hobbies, they weren't serious about it. In another words Google cared more for innovating their search engine, making money and then reinvesting it back in R&D and staying ahead of everybody. The same story was with Microsoft and Digital Research; Bill Gates simply cared more business wise and was more fanatical in making money than Gary Kildall.
I'm not a programmer but I can write down on a piece of paper an algorithm which is more efficient than Google's in filtering out "spam" websites. I'm from southeast Europe and for my local market there are numerous ecommerce phishing websites that are popping up on a first page of search results. Some even ranked first. I reported them to Google but 6 months after nothing changed.
There were 10 search engines when Google launched, and a megalith called Yahoo dominating the Internet.
Emphasis added. It took putting the right money and the right minds towards doing it well. There aren't a lot of SaaS ideas that scale to close to 100% of world population that don't yet have an incumbent. Tiktok was lucky that Twitter dumped Vine. Zoom was lucky that Skype, Hangouts, Facetime dropped the ball by trying to keep their users in walled gardens, and not really solving the teleconference problem well.
So they are big because they were there early. But being there early didn't guarantee you'd get big.
Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.
Altavista was certainly better than what came before, but you had to get your query just right in order to find what you wanted. And if you couldn't find the right words for the query, you were sunk. With Google, you could get ok-ish results with a sub-standard query, and the ok-ish results would often help you figure out a better query.
Search technology wasn't new or innovative, the innovation was when Google bolted on AdWords.
I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business.
The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)
IMO from the outside the problem with Google seems to be a lack of saying ‘no’ to people - they start so many different offerings without enough/any cohesion, bring stuff to market quite fast, then seemingly strip resources away as soon as they have gone live if the product isn’t instantly an overnight success.
I don't use iCloud with Keynote myself, but those sort of sync issues always happen in multiuser apps that also allow offline editing (e.g. I get the same conflicts in O365 with Powerpoint because they are inevitable if you are allowing offline editing).
This is the issue. If it’s not #1, or maybe #2, in the market then google is certainly going to drop it after a while.
This is accurate. What makes a company good a defending market leadership makes them terrible at innovation - and you see this with both Google and Meta as they churn though building 100 million dollar products only to discontinue them because they aren't worth billions yet.
Google wants googlers and high school students to not use Windows for any reason, and only use chromebooks.
Stadia was a way for people with a chromebook to play Windows games.
However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.
This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.
By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up.
You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers.
AAA game industry agrees with you, releasing mega titles like Halo w/o a story to finish, just online "service game" that will always be there for you (until they shut the service off).
And in my mind, those are enthusiast games, because only enthusiasts are spending $500 on a graphics card.
If we gave some gamer the funds to run the gaming equivalent of archive.org I might have more trust in the service. Earning money and archiving cultural goods for future generations are not easily compatible goals.
I wrote this on another article comment but I don't think it's just about Google not understanding gamers, but gaming in general.
- People who play games are fickle and distrustful (and rightfully so, cause gaming in general has a sordid history of screwing the player-base repeatedly). Google didn't understand this and seem to have understood it as "built it and they will come", ignoring the handful of failed consoles that claimed to revolutionize gaming
- People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly). Google didn't understand this and thought it would be enough to just put platform out there and everyone would switch over
- Developers understand the resource allocation for making a game pretty well, and they constantly are missing deadlines and/or releasing half-baked games. Google didn't understand this and just released a platform that was costly to port to and might as well have been another console
- The games that were the showcase of Stadia were not games you want to just pick up and play on the go, they're something you sit down and put a few hours into. Google didn't understand this and apparently just thought "well, AAA game X is popular, let's get that on our platform"
- Google already _has_ a platform for gaming called Android, and they didn't seem to understand what makes it work and what doesn't, or how to use that as a base for their idea, and instead tried to make a whole new platform
- Stadia was a new gaming platform no matter how you slice it, but Google seemed to have the idea that Stadia was just something everyone would love and convert to immediately no matter how complex it was to put games on it. Developers even as late as 2022 still had trouble porting games to Stadia and if it's hard to port, naturally they're not going to develop something specifically for it
The list can go on, but really Google just didn't understand what they were trying to do. The tech was pretty neat, but they didn't understand that what they were offering simply wasn't the way people wanted to play games or develop games for.
Combine this with the fact that _everyone_ (devs and players alike) knew that it had a limited window to be successful before Google shut it down due to lack of $$$, and not having a strong showing from day 1 was not even a nail in the coffin, it was shoveling dirt atop the platform the moment it arrived.
Google was never poised to disrupt gaming in my opinion -- what they were poised to do was to provide the datacenter and audience for developers to create their own vision of what Stadia should have been, but Google tried to make a video game platform, and instead made another entry in the "Failed Video Game console/platforms" lists that will be content for Youtube in the future.
Well people who just care which console has MOAR FPS deserve what they get.
But as long as console exclusives still exist, there is an argument for a platform preference.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stad...
That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme.
I agree with the article. Stadia was an interesting offer. The revolving free games coming with the pro subscription was a good deal and the idea of being able to keep playing games at their rendering best without having to fuss and constantly upgrade a PC - by far the worst platform to game for occasional players like me - sounded great.
Stadia issue was for most it wasn’t offering what it claimed to offer. Games didn’t look that good on the free tier for exemple and as pointed no one trusts Google so I didn’t want to invest more than the strict minimum. Apparently I have played Cyberpunk for free so that’s nice.
> That’s where the market is moving towards however.
It's a lot harder to build a walled garden from scratch as a late-comer, and even harder when you're building it in a swamp where people are less confident about moving in.
The idea of Stadia made a lot of sense to me when I first heard of it. I guess the implementation wasn't very good though.
Of course, the average consumer has also never heard of Stadia. I've barely heard of it and I was at the Google Cloud event where they either launched it or gave it a lot of air time.
Like any other console.
Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)
They are - Google is still the most trusted brand in any studies you can find (and if you find one where it's not, it's probably #2)
It is going down rather than climbing right now, but that's also not that uncommon - Apple/etc is also seeing the same thing.
Now, among tech, and maybe even gamers, i would bet this is less true, and that is highly problematic to the degree it needs to sell to tech/people who listen to tech.
But the latter also often consistently overestimates how much influence it has (IE tech people often believe that the whisper effect they have makes a difference, and that is only true in certain cases over a long period of time).
In most cases, social influencers in completely unrelated fields can generate more tech product sales than happy/angry tech people :)
Put another way - the simplistic notion that Stadia, or anything from Google, failed simply due to lack of tech trust is silly. While it's a fun headline that plays to their audience, things are rarely that simple
We are talking about trust for Google to launch a new product or service. It's not worth to users nor businesses to direct any money or effort into anything new Google makes because it's not for long.
Google simply can't be trusted to do that. Partial list of products estalishing this trend: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Google Schemer, Google Spaces, Google Checkout, Google Directory, Google Sync, Google Hangouts, iGoogle, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Moderator, .... Complete list is over 200 items long.
Rather then assert your feelings as truth, please show any meaningful data that says the general public doesn't trust Google to launch products. It should not be hard to find if you're right.
As an aside, I was responsible for Google moderator for the majority of its life. It was never launched except as a "use this if you like it" type thing (we considered it but chose not to make a formal product offering).
The launch blog post (which only appeared on the app engine blog) makes this super clear: "Several of our colleagues and visitors to Google have asked if we could make it available externally for any kind of talk, presentation and/or event. Conveniently, Google App Engine launched in April and made it easy for us to do this! As a result, we're pleased to release this tool, now called Google Moderator, on Google App Engine."
We were asked by some folks to let them use it, and it was easy enough, do we did it. We kept it around for folks for 7 years. Just about everyone using it had moved on.
The turndown notice was a generic one I approved because we got asked to have some random public facing answer in case anyone cared. IE so that Michael Arrington didn't just make stuff up out of thin air to support whatever his narrative of the week was. We were spending our time helping the small number of users, so I didn't care about the accuracy of the notice. It is correct that we didn't productize it due to usage and other reasons. It still remains used internally.
I know that data doesn't fit your narrative either, so I suspect you'll discard it or argue rather than change your view.
This is actually why your view doesn't match the data - you are focused on conforming the data to your view instead of your view to the data. Citing moderator in the same list as actual products shows that.
sigh As a gamer and actual Stadia user this is not a complete or fair depiction. Like almost every other cloud/gaming service including Xbox etc. Stadia had a "Pro" subscription model which have you access to dozens (hundreds?) of games.
Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!
I guess it's not trivial to get such "floating" windows licenses and prevent people from mining with a mouse jiggler?
Though I did subscribe to the 3080 tier for a month when my gaming machine was out of comission.
In theory, yes. In practise, if Steam shuts down tomorrow, I still have all my games on my hard disk and cracking Steam's DRM is pretty easy, and quite possibly completely legal in the circumstance.
It was a shitty platform to develop for, end of story. I’m the games industry, there are 100 more failures that look like that.
Specifically Vulkan is bad, and Linux is worse.
The solution is obvious and done by the extant and thriving streaming services.
Latency isn't an issue for movies or TV. Streaming will never work for games in the same way playing a game locally does.
I bought RDR2 for stadia in 2020 and played it everywhere - my phone, laptop, desktop. I played through the whole game and never once had any technical issues. That ability is what gives cloud gaming a real value beyond PC gaming or console gaming. You tell someone without a high spec gaming PC and no PS5 that they can play a new AAA game without buying anything new, then I think lots of people will love that. The article mentions you can't use your own controller, which is flat wrong. I used a Microsoft Xbox controller for both computer and android when I played. For someone who only plays games for 10-20 hours a month or so, it's great to not have to worry about buying new equipment.
However, after the introductory free month of the service I gave it up. Only a few games, and the ones I liked were so short and simple that I was done with them after a week or so. GeForce now has the right idea here - the cloud gaming IS the service and it connects to your existing games on steam and origin.
GeForce Now allowed me to play the games I already own with a more powerful machine than I could buy myself, for just $10/month. Artifacts were noticeable but not enough for me to care. If I bought my own gaming PC later, I would be able to continue playing the game there. GeForce Now offered "Hey, you're playing Cyberpunk at 720p@25fps? Wanna play at 1080p@60fps for $10? And you can leave any time" And I said heck yes.
Stadia would have denied me the ability to continue playing on my own machine while charging me even more money. There are a bunch of stories of people with saved games trapped in Stadia. Google made no attempt to be better than the competition. It's like they're unaware of anything other than themselves.
Being a purely PC game (slash arcade) platform. As much as Xbox is trying to evolve and games being cross-console/PC is getting far more common the Xbox cloud platform is still largely just an extension of Xbox games.
For ex: with Divinity and Pathfiner: WOTR they all had to release "Enhanced Editions" to support Xbox and it takes many years after the PC release to get a lot of PC games. It's not one-to-one.
That said I see Xbox Cloud completely dominating this space. Their library, pricing, and service quality is A+
Earlier this year Microsoft announced[1] that they are going to be allowing cloud enabled games that you own to be played without them needing to be Gamepass games.
[1] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/06/09/whats-next-for-gaming... (section titled Get More Out of Your Xbox Game Pass Membership, just over halfway down)
This is the curse of Google products. They don't care about what the competion is doing.
Competition is good.
It is said the biggest motivator for people is fear and lock-in results in fear. It's powerful anti-marketing.
Epic in particular basically forced their way in by using Fortnite/Unreal money to fund a combination of price dumping and exclusivity agreements.
The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a gaming console for free. You could buy a PS5 for $500 or you could play on Stadia for $0!" (In practice the free tier of Stadia didn't have the greatest quality but many people didn't even know Stadia had a free tier...)
Game streaming could have opened up new possibilities. Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. "Okay GodGamer420 spamming in chat, if you think this boss is so easy, now you have control. Show us how it's done."
Even the lowest hanging fruit. The biggest advantage of game streaming is that it works on any device but Stadia didn't even work on most Android phones at launch, and for many months after.
This is very true, and it sounds really good on paper, but it seems like anything that attempts to transition content consumers to participants fail.
For example, Mixer had incredible low-latency technology and game integration, yet failed because (at least, I think) a lot of it was banking on that consumers would want to take control.
For me, at least, this would never be the case. If I'm watching my favorite Twitch streamer, I don't really want to play, I want to watch them play and see their reactions. If I wanted to play the game they're playing, I would do so (in fact, I just bought Railbound because I saw the Twitch streamer Atrioc playing it)
I think the line a lot of people have are small tokens of support (bits, donations, subscriptions), because many people don't want to be that involved.
I think the tech that this feature requires would be a huge thing for computing in general. Easy, lightweight state-saves for any program. Quick hibernation for any game. Imagine how much easier the Windows update problem would be if users knew they could open everything as it was before in a few seconds.
It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company with the absurd revenue that Google gets. It feels like a double warning: Google will withdraw suddenly, whenever they like, and they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions.
Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one.
When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome only runs properly from second execution onwards after the underlying operating system has cached most of the stuff Chrome wants in RAM in anticipation of subsequent executions.
I want to say this is optimization for ever more powerful hardware, but I'm inclined to say it's also sheer incompetency that Chrome literally can't fallback gracefully if it doesn't get data as quickly as it wants.
"Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."
EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.
I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?
If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.
You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.
In particular I often fight the slowest machine leaving the office. That should stay for a long time, set aside for testing.
Testing only in a VM on a beefy dev box leads to terribly performing software on customer machines. There's a multitude of performance problems that only come up when a system starts paging to disk, a machine has a HDD, or a CPU gets maxed out. These issues will be completely occulted on a dev machine with tons of RAM, 16 cores, and an NVMe disk.
Far too many developers have the beefy dev box with no requirements to test on more prosaic configurations. Even limiting a VM's CPU and memory isn't a good environment for performance testing because it's still faster than actual low end hardware.
Basically: An end-user has computer with 4GB of DDR3. Devs for <software> wrote for and tested on a machine with 64GB of DDR5. <Software> ends up running like shit on end-user's computer.
It isn't the end-user's problem that the software runs like shit, because the devs programmed to an unrealistic common denominator. The end-user is going to find <software> that doesn't run like shit on his computer, and the devs only have themselves to blame for losing a customer because they were so out of tune with reality.
It may not be their fault but it almost certainly is their problem…
I have to say, I appreciate the insane expertise browser engine developers have in making JS and layouting run fast.
Which, unlike making everyone develop on palm-pilots, is the correct solution to performance problems.
Make sure nothing else is running, start the application, expect failure, start it again, works as expected.
The end result is that anything I type gets jumbled or overwritten multiple times before the page settles down and can actually be used.
Obviously, it can be done right, but it seems that most devs who are so eager to jump on the async bandwagon have no idea that they have to make that effort now.
I was a SRE on Gmail, and I can assure you that the experience for devs was not great intentionally. We had a pool of dedicated machines that ran various versions specifically used for development. I made sure those where always on our worst clusters (slowest CPUs and disks) so the dev experience was always the worst case scenario for performance. :-)
Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.
I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.
I can “launch” (pun intended) AAA title on a cloud VM in the time it takes for steam to download the game.
I haven’t used stadia; honestly curious.
There's stories like this [0] which suggests that the performance for Stadia was different than other platforms you might deploy for. The threading behaviour is a little bit different than just a VM, which is to be expected, but can come out surprising. So there's probably Stadia-specific patching for different games.
[0] "Stadia Adventures in slow server code on Unity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-SpWSEWYbU
Never build a business on a Google project, only ever use Google as a side hustle.
Is there even an RCS client for iOS? There is for signal…
When you're making a decision like this, you have to go full steam ahead until you decide to stop. Because not going full steam ahead compromises you in the event that you choose not to cancel.
It's like a negotiation. If you're thinking of completely folding to your counterparty, the last thing you ever want to do is tell them that they have you on the ropes.
This is fine for some situations, like games, and can even be fun.
It is not ”fun” if you are a paying customer and and X is ”Suddenly kill the service I’m using.”
The only remedy to this is trust. (Which a simple short term zero sum game theoretic analysis does not account for.)
[1] https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACk...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-com...
They don’t have a real vision for the company. All they know how to do is search and ads.
Google's refunding all Stadia game and hardware purchases.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Stadia.
It looks like it applies to basically any online post/comment, regardless of if it's anonymous.
https://nitter.net/OldeSkuul/status/1575863134857793536
https://nitter.net/burgerbecky/status/1575721820904632320
I don't really know if there's a better way to do it. If you're going to shut down and refund everyone's purchases, you need to disable purchases at the exact moment you make the announcement, otherwise people will buy things for semi-free knowing they'll get refunded in the future. If you tell game devs before the general public, it's going to leak out. If it leaks out you either need to lie and say it's not shutting down, or announce that it is shutting down, in which case the game devs didn't really get much advance notice.
I also guess there are legal complications about telling employees early. Google employees are Google investors.
So, I think Stadia died for reasons other than trust of Google.
So lack of trust also prevented Google from getting that huge game library.
As far as I understand it, Amazon Luna’s official controller does the same thing.
I really hope they make a Bluetooth update so it can be used with a PC.
Here - no one wants to work with google on this one. They have to port their games to linux at the least (which is amazing on its right own).
Nobody in the gaming industry trusts anyone.
Customers don't trust developers, see "never pre-order anything."
Developers don't trust publishers, "executive meddling via focus groups."
Publishers don't trust each other. The difference is publishers have lawyers so they write legal contracts to fix that.
Google, Did, Not, Produce, The, Goods.
Full-stop.
Their service was light on content and offered terrible value for money.
A subscription, which allowed you access to the entire library of games in stadia, akin to netflix, is a compelling product.
It would probably be better if I plugged it in more often, but it pisses me off so much I usually stick it back in a box once it accepts my password.
Even Netflix mostly funds their own content. A “Netflix for games” would involve Google funding exclusive games to be made for their platform.
Well, the current situation is that stadia is defunct, because their business model doesn't work!
I'm saying that i reckon an alternative business model such as a subscription service for games would've worked, but require much more up front investments. Epic games have managed to attract a large dev following using incentives like grants (in exchange for exclusivity). Google's pockets is much deeper than Epic; obviously, google isn't really ready to invest in the stadia platform or make it succeed commercially - it's likely no more than a technology demonstration, something that someone at google intended to further their careers (like all things cancelled at google).
The branding of google services is highly tarnished by now. If you are a business, you will not purchase any google services, short of the monopoly on advertising.
Xbox Gamepass or Playstation Plus
Or 3rd party via Amazon Luna
Stadia had their own first party games that they canceled rather early - Feb 2021, year and two/three months after launch. The writing was on the wall. Stadia was a failure through and through, and they knew it.
I preorder things all the time and have never been disappointed. Granted I specifically avoided some preorders (Cyberpunk comes to mind) because it was obvious it was gonna be a shot show at launch
I wouldn't trust a Google product with the same.
Stadia was a bad product, but a lack of trust (combined with a business model which requires trust) is certainly part of it.
I've been buying games on Steam since 2006. The "never pre-order anything" take is overblown, IMO. Or rather, it is the default when you don't have a specific list of brands you trust to deliver (i.e. it's the attitude that a new gamer should start with) - but such list does accumulate over the years.
So, no. Trust does matter, and Google lacks trust specifically on the matter of not abandoning things.
Who said hardware is the problem? Modern consoles are relatively cheap, especially considering modern $60 price tags on games. So why Stadia tried to solve that?
I'm sure Google has a lot of brilliant engineers who can build a state-of-the-art streaming platform that can leverage existing Google cloud infrastructure. But that's all it is - a brilliant piece of technology nobody really needs. And not that innovative as well - I've met a bunch of game streaming startups back at Jan 2016 CES, something like two years prior the launch of Stadia, so the idea has been around for quite a while.
Hardcore gamers are buying a lot of overpriced gaming gear all the time. I can't see how people spending thousands of $ on tuned hardware suddenly would want to change all that on a faceless streaming platform. Ownership and belonging is a big part of that subculture.
Stadia could make sense for a casual gamer who doesn't want to invest into expensive hardware. But games a casual player plays are not GPU-heavy and work fine on any relatively modern platform.
Too basic for a hardcore gamer, too powerful and demanding for a casual one. The Stadia's fate was sealed.
I rather pay a bit more for games without the burden of having a console, or a gaming pc to be honest.
It solved a problem for me. Until my kids are not old enough to have a PS (whatever the number is in 6 years) I won't have a console able to run top tier games
Do you not have a computer/laptop? That's supposed to also play games. Maybe you chose the wrong computer (apple).
Stadia had none of those properties.
They had already nailed the tech then. Latency was acceptable and so were compression artifacts. But they eventually failed and so did every other subsequent service that tried to do the same thing.
Not only does it solve a problem that barely anyone has, it’s also insanely expensive to run. I don’t think any of these services ever had a clear path to profitability.
Let's assume the usage peaks on Friday eve in LA area. The LA resource pool must have enough capacity for the peak. And on Saturday early morning that usage drops almost to zero. Now we might want to reuse freed resources to serve another currently active user pool, maybe in Tokyo. But we are dealing with highly specialized cloud resources not that easily reusable. You can't use LA servers to serve users in Tokyo - the latency will be too high.
Now we need to deploy our resources near all big urban population centres for all target markets. And these resources would stay mostly unused because of the latency and usage patterns (unless we're going to mine crypto with unused GPUs). And once we move out of densely populated areas, the problem becomes bigger.
So it is really hard to see how that can be economically feasible.
I just clicked your link and it says "you already have the no cost option". So we'll see what happens next month.
I actually closed my account when they first announced the cancellation, which made things more difficult and I had to contact support to get it back (I was successful). But if you haven't done that, I believe all you need to do is press that button.
Fails to exclude results without the text, and ignores known results with it.
I suppose they just expect us to eat the dogfood we are served
The deal for AAA companies was: Port your game for an entirely different OS/API, pay the Google tax and be subject to Google reviews. But you can't treat a game streaming service like a Play Store. AAA game companies have way more power and money than the typical mobile app developer, and will fight you even on mobile where GoogleApple is strong (see Epic). No way they want the Play Store experience when they can avoid it by going to the competition. So Google had to bribe and bribe. Eventually it became depply unprofitable, and Google had to pull the plug.
Was there any way to avoid that?
A) Make the service more accessible to casuals. Like by having a search bar, a subscription model and making some Windows compatibility layer so indies could more easily port. But there's no way Google's ego could accept a service not targeted at AAAAAA.
B) Make 1st party studios and show capabilities only cloud gaming could have. Force AAA companies to your service to compete. This requires investment for a good time with uncertain rewards and possibly no promotion. We're talking about Google here.
C) Pivot to a white-label service and give AAA companies a way better deal. This is what Google is trying to do. Of course, there's no reason to keep Stadia in that case.
They started with 1st party game studios, they shut the bit more than a year after the launch.
I imagine that if you work on such stuff at Google, you probably need the attitude that you're only there to earn money. If you get too involved, it would suck big time if it got thrown out.
So I would think that devs not getting too involved with what they work on, will probably reflect in product quality.
For a non-Google example: Costco and their roasted whole chickens they sell for $5 USD each. There is no fucking way Costco makes a profit, let alone break even, on those, but they do it and run the red ink anyway because the customers that come to buy them will also grab other stuff on the way out, generating black ink to offset and surpass the red ink.
Streaming a game requires an actual real GPU being (I guess) exclusively used by that customer while they're playing. Not feasible to put those in edge locations.
Completely different set of costs.
Google has had a long history of messing up on the content front. They've made a lot of false starts with Youtube to get into paid content and it just never took off. Netflix is raking in billions from paid subscriptions. Not so much with Youtube. Few people pay for the premium content because there hardly is any worth paying for.
Where Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix and others succeeded, Google failed repeatedly to get a compelling offering of content together. It's a blind spot they have; they seem unable to come up with a coherent plan. They can do the tech but not the content. I'm not sure what it is. On paper the tech is a lot harder and they do have deep pockets. But when it comes to content they are a combination of stupid and frugal and somehow refuse to spend money on good content to lure in customers.
With Stadia, they had the right idea and all they would have had to do was two things: fix the bugs and get some amazing games in there. They dropped the ball on both fronts. So, it failed because they never gave it a proper chance to begin with.
Which was ultimately a tech driven chicken and egg problem. I know someone who is the lead for a popular game. They said they'd need to drop DirectX and effectively port the game to Linux to get Stadia working, which wasn't worth it for the user base.
Google came empty handed to what is a very competitive space. It's all about the games. That's not a technical problem but a doomed product strategy. They failed to engage with game developers to develop for their platform.
And of course valve had the same issue and and actually fixed it. Many games run fine on Linux these days with Steam. That could have worked for Google as well.
They have the means to keep the product alive and keep trying until they make it, if they really believe in the vision and if it was part of their long term strategy.
Look at Microsoft, Bing have been struggling for years but they're still sticking with it. They waited until it was clear that it couldn't be salvaged before killing Windows phone. And XBOX also had a tough start, and was bleeding money for years.
Half of the problem is that Google kills product before giving them a chance. The other half is that they launch new product randomly "to see what sticks", instead of focusing on a strategy.
Also a backup/failover plan to migrate to any vendor can also mean you can migrate to save money or outage. Or they ban your account by mistake, which on google seems to happen way to often, if you link it to your developer account, or your personal account.
And if you find something that you’re absolutely dependent on; either try to mitigate that or accept it and be aware.
If you don't think Google would support GCP long term, it wouldn't make sense to put one (and just one?) service on GCP.
They have no hope of meeting the 2023 deadline. They are at 10% market share, growing 1% YoY and half of number 2 (azure).
Doesn’t look good.
[1] https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/2afswwuvis94wy12r320w/..., https://www.ciodive.com/news/aws-microsoft-google-cloud-mark...
"Azure" includes Office 365 so MSFT can pretend Azure is 3x bigger than it is: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techtarget.com/searchcloudc...
At some point it becomes like a “no true Scotsman” argument. They’re all big, and all use their niche to drive spend. IMO HN commentators comparing GCP to Stadia are missing the boat. Likewise, MS will figure out how to monetize the bazillion O365 users with Azure.
I wonder how good of a proxy this is for actual use. I trust Google's numbers (unless Azure users are all using Bing), so I read this was AWS is by far the leader, with GCP possibly being second.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I wonder if anyone other than AWS is making money in this space. It reminds me of the phone space with one or two winners and everyone else bleeding out.
Surprised alibaba isn’t bigger TBH.
This was a couple of years ago, I don't know if they are better at it now. But a quick search shows this looks like it is still a thing.
To clarify the analogy: Nobody trusts Google not to cancel a new thing, so they don't invest any money or effort in the new thing, so it gets cancelled.
Google shouldn't stop cancelling products that fail to get traction, they just need to learn to fail gracefully without leaving customers and developers who've built on top of their platforms in the lurch.
Too much risk and too little risk are both bad. Take risks, but only risks which you can actually afford.
It's like how both too little and too much dihydrogen monoxide is bad for you.
Companies grow old and fearful. They stop taking risks and treat failure as a "bad" thing to be avoided. In so doing, they become blind to new frontiers.
That, in turn, finally opens the door for a new wave of hungry startups who are willing to take risks and embrace failure. They come in, disrupt the old guard, and spend 10-20 years becoming giant corporations in their own right. In time, the cycle repeats again.
It's been a very long time (20+ years!) that some of these companies have been going. If they're just starting to become fearful and risk-avoidant, then perhaps the next wave of interesting startups is finally < 10 years away.
(For what it's worth, the current bear market also has me thinking it'll be a good time to start a startup in the next 5-10 years. If I were still young and spry, I'd be champing at the bit to save up a few bucks, stockpile some ramen, and go for it.)
However, if you look at their history, they cancel many many products.
Looking at wikipedia, I see 200 discontinued products (or scheduled like stadia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Schedu...
Also, hats off to Google for refunding all hardware(!) and software purchases. I don't remember any parallel to this from a large company.
Essentially, gamers participated in a wonderful large-scale experiment which cost them nothing (except maybe the occasional monthly fee).
I am a happy Stadia user, I am sad to see it sunset.
Contrast this to Amazon for instance, where movies/tv shows you have bought just disappear from your account when Amazon loses the license to serve them.
* Allow me to use any controller the game natively supports on almost any device (phone, tablet, pc, stream box, etc.) and also as many game consoles as possible (probably 0 or 1)
* Give me access to hundreds of games when I subscribe just like Netflix gives me access to hundreds of shows and movies. Don't make me pay for the service and again for games. Gamers just want to pay one monthly fee for unlimited games access. (Probably only Microsoft, Sony, or a partnership between a major game publisher and Amazon or Apple could deliver on this due to consolidating IP portfolios)
* Build data centers close to your customers for low-latency rendering
* Use modern GPU hardware with ray tracing and dlss or the AMD equivalent.
* Work with game publishers to make a killer game so computationally demanding that it won't render with just one or two desktop graphics cards. Show the power of the cloud and market the hell out of it.
DLSS, upscaling - but why? Just so the company can save costs. You should be able to get 60 frames without, and you won't get more than 60fps/4k with any latency. Upscaling will be even worse due to compression artifacts of the streaming. So in short - DLSS is useless. I guess nvidia ad division has a true power.
In the network case (i.e. "streaming"), you are limited by the bandwidth and latency of the network itself. I.e. you will sooner bottleneck by the network than by GPU being unable to render frames faster than that. So upscaling is just pointless for it.
But it's hard to sustain those frame rates at max graphics. Ue5 will raise the ceiling quite a bit too. The gfx cards will continue to be a bottleneck for AAA games.
But low end GPUs use case isn't relevant for streaming since they can have highest end ones. So we are talking about those who want to push those crazy framerates, and I don't think networks allow that even if GPUs can sustain them.
Some middle case can happen I suppose if you get an outlier super demanding game, but I always saw it as questionable to push max settings if you are ready to trade image quality for more framerate with upscaling anyway. I'd rather stick to lower framerate and keep image quality of max settings intact by avoiding upscaling. So I just don't see a value in having it, let alone in dedicated hardware vs something like FSR which can work on regular compute units.
Modern games are built with an understanding of controller and display latency that just didn’t exist in the analog era, and I’m sure most cloud adapted games don’t mind a few dozen milliseconds of round trip latency. It’s remarkable that nearly 30 years later, retro games that could be easily emulated locally in any streaming device give these services a hard time.
That being said Sadias failure was only partially the Google closure effect. It ws a terrible business model. Had they gone down a Gamepass style system it would've likely worked. But making you pay full price for a game with zero actual ownership of it, and being 100% reliant on a strong internet connection was always going to cause this to be a flop.
If it hadn't died now it would've happened eventually. With Gamepass expanding and offering an absolutely massive library of games, combined with Origin it's a far superior service, and easier to accept the price.
Isn't that what they did? You got a handful of games every month when you were on their Pro subscription, and I think you kept them as long as you paid your subscription.
Just they didn't have as good of offerings, cause their library was lacking.
The early announcements hardly explained what it was.
There seemed to be little outreach to gamers.
Gaming press folks described constantly having to fiddle with getting access as they normally would expect / consistently.
I don’t doubt people were trying, but it looked like a half hearted effort from the start as far as google goes.
Google should have provided an option to transfer games from Steam and GOG without buying them again, and run them for example using Wine if there was no native Linux version available. Then their service could have worked out. Their refusal to use Wine and stick to native games only was their major mistake that limited their catalog (in addition to that buying games again issue).
I think Amazon are already working on something like above and they are using Wine. They probably learned from Google's mistakes.
Instead of shutting down, Google should have addressed above issues. But in Google's usual fashion, they'd rather shut things down than fix them.
Stadia was a solution in search of a problem. No one wanted it and it wasn't a good product. It was also a case of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Google did everything in the cloud and already had cloud compute services that were good technically but under utilized because of Google's low-touch business models. Add in the appeal of that sweet, sweet recurring revenue model that drives the MBA types wild and it became very easy rationalize that it was a good idea. They likely never considered if it was going to be appealing to gamers or to developers because they were blinded by their their own desires.
The actual problem for game developers was that the architecture was home-grown (Vulkan-only), with little tooling, annoying licensure requirements, and not enough profit incentive to dedicate the effort. Companies have no (financial) problem releasing for GOG, which has fewer users than Stadia, because you barely have to take any effort to do so, but porting to Stadia took the effort of porting to Xbox. This both counted as a direct incentive not to port to Stadia, as well as the writing on the wall for how well-managed this product would be.
Stadia is essentially trying to replace a gaming PC. To offer this service you will have to charge users enough money to:
1. buy a gaming PC every 3-5 years
2. run it at ~250W for average play time (4-8 hrs a day)
3. pay for all of the bandwidth on your end
And then you can offer the user a worse service than if they had spent that money on a PC themselves.
Where's the value add for the average user here? Does Google get computer hardware that's optimized for games several times cheaper than average users? Is their bandwidth free? Free electricity?
Ultimately Stadia is trying to offer a service that's very similar to what already exists. They have to do something much better to have a chance or they have to have a stable offering that slowly builds up more users.
I enjoy games but if be hard pressed to spend that much time a week.
I think this is the important aspect. If you're only using it for a few hours a day, the hardware can be used for someone else while you're not playing.
So it runs into the same issue as autonomous taxis: the hardware is only useful in a narrow region and most users want to have their go at the same time.
Still grieving for Google Reader.
I haven't checked recently but they usually make the (N-1)th version free.
Thanks for the recommendation to!
I upgrade regularly as this is one of the old fashioned developers who doesn't play subscription games.
Fantastical and 1Password? Looking at you.
If you stand in line to buy a Playstation 5, you're part of an exclusive club of PS5-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform.
If you buy an Xbox you're part of an exclusive club of Xbox-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform.
If you buy a Nintendo Switch, you're part of a (not-so) exclusive club of Switch-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform.
If you buy a gaming PC, you're part of the "PCMR" and you can play exclusive games for that platform (and brag about how much RAM you have or whatever).
If you buy a Stadia, you can play some games that already exist on other platforms.
This whole situation isn't surprising. Big tech has a particular disease where they think that other industries are trivial and they can just muscle their way in with their superior intellect and size. Just look at how every MAANGA company is trying to disrupt healthcare right now, has a self-driving car division, etc. (There's some business antipattern, or psychological effect, but I can't remember the term right now).
This is why YCombinator exists, because startups do a deeper dive into their markets and don't usually fall for ego traps like this.
It would be a win situation for all - Google makes money, Netflix doesn't have to start from scratch for their next strategic move, Stadia gamers are not left stranded.
Same as when Google sold Sketchup.
2012. Google’s sale of 3D modeling software SketchUp, to Trimble, is its first divestment in years, ..the search giant made a profit, as it sold SketchUp for more than it bought it for back in 2006.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/sketchup-google-first-dive...
I don't think Google should become a maintenance company and I understand what the sunk cost fallacy is but I must ask...
Did no one at Google find the grit to ask for more money and try new things? They understand that we have stopped believing in their new products because they display no belief in those themselves, right?
Stadia died due to:
- business model
- cloud only
- conjuncture and anti-competitive nature of their competitors
cloud gaming is 20years too early anyways, i'm not saying it's pointless, i am saying it shouldn't be your sole offering
they own android and they didn't capitalize on it, instead they went rogue with web only
a dedicated handheld gaming console with cloud capabilities would have been 1000x better and smarter strategy to penetrate the premium gaming market
These are core services. Google is trusted for their core services. Everything else faces an uphill battle for coming from Google.
To add: Trust (lack of it) played a big role also, in the sense that to capitalize with Stadia, one needed to produce a quite different port of their game. I can imagine that making the decision to invest your developers' time on a new port and that being a product that its known track record is "https://killedbygoogle.com/."
But also google, as other sibling comments have pointed out also, did not integrate at all with their other products, did not offer more than some free games, had no offline offering -- I would pay 110% the price for physical + online access to the game for life.
They could have actually been a serious Steam competitor, they have the money to do so. Instead of supporting linux gaming, they went with their own approach. They did not offer a console, or hardware, besides the initial giveaway. Minute point, but doesn't help, when competition in the space gives weekly games, deep discounts and has a great API and track record.
Everyone knew they would fail, and they did, despite their resources, which tells us a lot. I think it is high time and paramount to retrospect and learn.
Their missteps are so public and feel so egregious, and that's what this article is underscoring. Great and fun things that clearly they are not able to monetize, no matter how much they throw into it. Yet the things that they go all in on are usually things no one actually needs or wants, such as Google Plus and Stadia. Instead, as again pointed out by the article, Google puts out great experiments that people love, and the management and marketing at Google simply are never able to get their shit together to monetize those things in ways to make the products profitable enough to keep around, such as the article-mentioned Reader (which I am also still bitter about), and just destroying other great tools like Picasa to hoist less useful web-based generic experiences upon the user base they build up.
Google is really, truly, at this point so many years into their existence, an afterthought for most end users. When non-tech people say Google they mean Chrome almost 100% of the time. They mean a web browser. People still have and use yahoo.com and aol.com emails more than anyone thinks, and gmail might be Google's second most successful product after Chrome, but for a grand majority, Google = Chrome.
The Google Graveyard site exists for a reason. https://killedbygoogle.com/
I'd say that when people say Google they mean
search, youtube, android/gmail, maps
YouTube, Android: Fair point, though android is shrinking in developed markets.
Gmail and maps are commodities with minimal network effects and differentiation.
When I first decided to try it last year, I couldn't even sign in and access game pages without it making me sign up to a pro trial, I had too find a free to play game and go to that page and then go to other games from there. It was crazy. Completely unclear what the service was and how it worked for most people until recently. Even now with all the media coverage, i've seen large publications miswrite how the service worked and that you needed a pro subscription and to buy the games.
If they weren't going to put in the resources to get the triple titles, then they should have marketed it as a more casual gaming service. Used youtube to market it, have a bunch of party games on the subscription service and then it would have gotten more traction. They should of marketed it in the play store and to android users more. It could have worked, but they did nothing.
Casual players don't have a problem trusting Google, as they are not aware they shouldn't trust Google. Only tech people and people in the know, know that and this was Stadias real problem.
Tech people knew that Stadia existed, those people into games already had big gaming PC's and thought Stadia was a joke since it didn't have big triple A titles and they already had the hardware needed, the people that could have benefited the most for the service, didn't know it existed and if they did due to Stadias poor UX had no idea how it worked / that it could be useful for them.
The fact that Google's management could not see this, when it is so clear is silly, all they needed to do is pivot and relaunch the service and fix a few issues, they did all the hard work and then just gave up, it's insane.
I could imagine it's better for business because you can gate-keep access to your game and nobody can copy it.
It's easier and faster to develop because you just have to optimize it for a few datacenters with a limited scope of hardware. (But is hardware support even a big problem today?)
For the user they don't have to care for anything. Just click "START" in the browser and you're good to go. Optionally transfer some money for a day pass for premium games. (But is it that easy?)
So I think it's supposed to make sense from a business and UX perspective but technically it still falls short. Whoever has enough internet also has enough hardware. Both get cheaper. Whoever develops a game with a big budget could also develop a custom streaming solution.
A lot of folks point out that Stadia doesn't make sense because you'd be tied to locations with stable Internet. That wasn't suppose to be a problem anymore. Google misjudged the telcos who had promised 5G and delivered the weak, low coverage form we have today.
Had the gamble paid off, it would've been strategically perfect. Cloud-based intensive computing, which is exactly Google's forté, would've taken off and Stadia's infrastructure could've been extended beyond gaming. And the pitch would've been easy: don't buy $500 impossible-to-find consoles and $2k graphics cards. You'd also be able to play your games anywhere. Traveling for work? Log in and play on your crappy work laptop or Chromebook.
- Trust from consumers - Trust (and buy-in) from game developers/publishers
Getting that trust is a long and often winding path, just look at Microsoft's track record with the Xbox. There were moments along the way where it could have all fallen apart, but at least they seem to genuinely believe in the product/platform.
I never really got that impression from Stadia, I tend to follow a lot of games media and Stadia never really got that much of a mention. That might be a fault of the outlets I follow, but you'd think Stadia PR team would be the ones out there working the circuit to drum up positive coverage.
Stadia hired Phil Harrison as the leader, he's had a long history of working in the industry, but tbh I don't think google put the resources behind him.
Stadia was so far ahead technically. They just needed to invest 15 years and 100 billion in studios and a sub model. Gaming and cloud will be the future. And now they lost one them. I get that it’s really difficult to justify loss leaders for that long but you kind a have to in this case.
It’s funny that Google became so risk averse over the years while MS is just taking massive gambles and spending like they don’t have a care in the world. And MS seems to be doing the right things for them somehow.
1. Google is not a reliable vendor. Anything they launch is highly likely to be cancelled and you are left holding the bag.
2. Game streaming is fundamentally inferior to local play, and the structure of the Stadia market didn’t account for this.
3. XBox Game Pass exists, which is superior to Stadia in every way, and comes from a reliable vendor.
I’m more surprised that anyone bought Stadia than I am that it got canceled.
Even the gaming press was pretty harsh on this in general.
Stadia was dead on arrival for me. I live in a 3rd world country so they didn't ever bothered trying to sell the hardware over here. The internet also probably wouldn't be able to handle the needed downstream of a high quality gameplay footage, and even if it could it would have a ridiculous lag without servers in the region. Even if they managed to solve all of those problems, they were literally asking me to buy games that not only I wouldn't own but couldn't install or mod in my own way and trust that enough people would do the same so they wouldn't cancel the entire thing and run with the money? It's too much to ask.
Heck, is the promised refund actual money back into the bank account or "gift cards" to spend on Google services? Wouldn't surprise me if it's the latter.
I don't think Google was ever all that much successfull with products that only attend certain small regions. For Stadia to have a better chance, it would need at least be coupled with a service similar to Steam or Epic Games, where bought games are ran on client machines and that could be operated worldwide. A simple game store would make the service much more reliable.
I think the biggest problem of Google now is how much they try to *control* their users. Google+ was really annoying to use because they kept making demands like real name and surname, not giving proper API so people could automatize posts with little effort, etc. They literally killed Google Reader just so people would stop using feeds and use their proprietary stuff instead. Stadia demanded the user not just to relinquish the ownership of the game but also the machine where it ran and how it was installed, so you couldn't modify games or manipulate saves. They also demanded people to use Chrome even though they could make it run on any web browser. It's all about control, control, control.
I'm at a point where I don't even use Google Chrome. I know they will fuck it up somehow by being too "controlley". Oh wait, they're already trying to get rid of Ad Blockers, aren't they? That will surely work and in no way make people just use other browsers like Firefox, I'm sure... /s
From TFA:
> the turning point was the assassination of Google Reader — for which I will never forgive them, and try to regularly exert a small vengeance by mentioning it
They are kind of like that psychotic cat owner that refuses to get their cats fixed. They just keep having kittens and drowning them in the lake or letting them run wild because they don't want to take care of them.
Dart only reason to stay around is to write Flutter apps.
Flutter, well, it has enough competition with frameworks based on programming languages that aren't tied to a single purpose.
It’s not enough to launch a product, you need conviction, and skin in the game, that the product is a good idea. And when your bets don’t pay off, you need to pivot like your life depends on it.
Google could never succeed with stadia (or other big bets) if there’s little downside risk for those involved to its failure. Instead of digging deep and getting creative with the model, they can shrug and give up.
You can’t give people amazing comfort and stability then expect them to take outsized risks.
This statement doesn't make any sense to me. Who's going to try crazy new maneuvers on the trapeze, the person with the safety net or the one without?
Perhaps you meant to say that you can't expect people to iterate on their business model like their life depends on it...well, I'm sorry to inform you but that rarely happens even in the startup world. People routinely shrug and give up, some return money to investors, and everyone moves on.
I didn't stop using Stadia because I didn't trust Google, I stopped using Stadia because the experience sucked every time I tried it.
google has zero relationships
Similarly, the XBOX was kind-of revolutionary. If anything, it was ahead of its time. It had a built-in HDD, its controllers were logically USB even if they had a proprietary form-factor, and it had built-in networking, and it didn't use any fancy nonstandard architecture. These are all features that would eventually become standard, so MS definitely had good ideas, and by doing them first they were well-positioned to do them right again. If MS had brought literal nothing to the table, I doubt the 360 would have been able to capitalise on the PS3's various shortcomings.
EDIT: "Doing something nintendon't" might be more literal than I thought. If the real market for Stadia is casuals, then what does the Stadia do that the Switch doesn't? I guess from reading the Reddit thread linked elsewhere, that the main market was ex-PC-gaming dads whose wives wouldn't let them get a new gaming PC. Which makes sense, as those people aren't interested in playing Mario or Zelda. But that's not a big niche to be targeting.
A subtle but important distinction. Google had a chance to commit to this and really hold the line until wider adoption.
NO! They only care about themselves and the bottom line. Gimme the game as fast as possible with as low of a cost possible and goodbye.
Sometimes that’s the case, sometimes it isn’t.
So clearly average gamers know enough about companies to factor in reputation into the mix. Otherwise those $50 emulators would outsell everything else on the planet.
Nothing else matters IMO.
It was good tech, bad badly integrated into the ecosystem.
I happily pay for geforce now which can access those things (in an albeit limited way - I think technically it can play anything but there are legal tings that prevent a lot of games from being playable which sucks for the user)
I do agree however that Stadia sucked as a product. Nobody was going to buy into their ecosystem if they can't opt to download the games onto their own PCs like Steam. Too much lock-in without that aspect, and without any guarantees that they were going to refund customers if Stadia ever sunk it just made it DOA
Games are already fiddly when it comes to latency. Adding another fiddling layer inbetween just sounds more painful.
Moved to a different city, and latency wasn't near as good because of ISP routing, mainly. Still playable, but definite pretiming everything. I think latency there was 50ish ms.
Now, different people have different preferences and I imagine if I were a pro online multiplayer guy with 240hz monitor and 10 million dpi mouse twitch shooting against pros, it would not serve as well. But I've played fps games like cyberpunk happily as a single player. They basically have my money guaranteed for foreseeable future.
Stadia wasn't laggy or artifacty at all. That is just because you either haven't used the service or you have poor internet.
I played many games on Stadia for a year with zero issues. I perferred over playing the games on my PC as it was just a lot easier / faster, to open chrome and be straight into the game.
That's the nice way of putting it, but yeah, cancelling things people like and/or not providing enough value (if your internet is fast enough) is going to hold a service back too.
The Google support site says:
> We will be leaving the Stadia platform and game servers online until January 18, 2023, so you can continue to play games in your library.
How is this acceptable? If I purchased Stadia games for $40-$60, I would be furious.
It made sense because the games were bought through Steam and GoG and I paid just for the streaming service. Now I don't have to re-buy the games and even kept saves.
Google just wanted to half ass their entry into the games industry. It's a warning to Amazon and Apple.
I was an early adopter of Stadia. I swapped to GeForce Now because it supported higher resolutions, had better refresh rates, and had lower latency.
The author tried to push the narrative that technically Google did well but it was other factors causing this failure. No, technically they didn’t do well either.
story old as Google especially when it comes to messaging apps, never use messaging app from Google
Plus, much of the existing game streaming services works on Chromebooks. Either through a web interface or through an Android app. And there's a ton of games and emulators available via Android.
I think that gives enough gaming options for Chromebooks that Stadia tech won't continue in Chrome OS. I could be wrong though. Would be amusing if it was integrated somehow.
For the user side, you need decent internet connections and to pay $40~$60 per title. The value proposition is that you can play on a powerful machine in the cloud without paying significant upfront costs, but its inventory is extremely limited and at the moment Google decided to take an intentionally ambiguous position on its commitment, so there was a risk that you're going to lose your ownership on those games. And you also cannot sell your titles on used markets. The pay-per-title model only works if this grants you full control of the title. I think only subscription models like game pass make sense for this kind of streaming service, but Phil looked afraid of bringing too much disruptions to traditional game publishers' business model so made lots of compromises here. This is definitely the first reason of Stadia's failure.
And for developers, they made a significant mistake; instead of making it a plausible platform for everyone, they simply put tons of cash to a handful of AAA developers. This didn't work of course because they're going to release their games on other consoles and Google doesn't have enough negotiation power to have them exclusive on Stadia. The result is a simple failure; overall inventory became much smaller than it could be while it failed to deliver any significant exclusive titles.
Compared to this, Nintendo did it very well on making Switch a developer platform. It's not fully open but still it's considerably more open than what they did in previous consoles. And this gives Switch a very unique value proposition of being the only handheld gaming console (at least before Steam deck) which can play a significant fraction of indie/small developer's games.
There are lots of example cases where an interesting indie game gets skyrocketed by midnight thanks to some big name streamers who decided to play it. What if Stadia was able to have one of them (limited time) exclusive to their platform. Google owns YT so it is in a much better position of negotiating with those creators. And they could integrate ads and payment systems so gaming could be just one click away and developers can get a very precise performance of their ads and attribution from creators.
I still also don't understand why they didn't really plan to integrate the Play store and Android ecosystem. There are significant demands of playing mobile games with a keyboard, a mouse or a controller and on a big screen. The mobile gaming market is dominant not because it's convenient to play but because the mobile market is big. AAA title developers still don't consider it an option because of its form factor and limited controls (and some minor technical issues but not really a fundamental blocker), but Stadia could solve that problem and deliver the Play store to every possible form factors. But they didn't do that. I heard that Google will keep streaming infrastructure and its team that runs Stadia, so there might be some hope that this idea could be realized in the Play store though.
Can't believe it made to hn top.
"Monopoly? Us? Look how many times we've failed. Any dominant marketshare we have could easily disappear. Look how many times we've failed..."
Put another way, certainly Google is aware of the perception impact of these shutdowns. And yet, like clockwork, they persist. It's either intentional, or they're devoid of data about perceptions of the brand. It can't be the latter, can it?
Really???
As for the hypothetical court case. Again, there's history for that as well.
What's your explanation then? The mighty Google with some of the best and brightest minds in the world...is consistently incompetent? That it goes into markets outside its core competence, dumps a ton of resources, and then again and again surrenders prematurely?
Really?
Seems that your theory sounds more ridiculous than mine (which btw is inpired by Thiel and Zero to One).
Again, see Thiel for more details.
People liked Stadia and that is why this is hard on some people but the are not going to jump on the Google hate train over every dramatic event that is often just hyperbole. They'll remember Google for creating something awesome and ahead of it's time, and Google may actually revamp that to scale to personal gaming that runs on local hardware instead.
I believe a lot of game services streaming services just aren't that profitable. The hardware required to stream games to consumers in HD or 4k is expensive. Heck, just a few months ago I was looking at graphics cards and the lower end were still priced around $600 for a modern consumer graphics card. Then having a bunch of servers and ways to dedicate those to users using some form of graphics sharing and doing to with very little latency cost a fortune and probably didn't produce the revenue because of that.
I'd people are leaving Google or this then they can certainly try make an appealing argument about how Stadia damaged them but that Netflix, Hulu, etc don't ever pivot their plans and pricings