They did plan ahead! The plan was to push some newfangled "world changing" product, get a promotion .. and move on in the company.

Yep. When I read somewhere here another article about thebpromotion processes at Google, the early Stadia launch started immediately making so much sense. It was a launch for internal reasons.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21882791

They should stagger the perf cycle on a division/product basis so there isn't an incentive to ship to align with the promo cutoffs.

It's tough to compare a company's first few steps into gaming to the established machine that is Nintendo.

Especially since the Switch eShop was pretty slow at launch. Not to mention a certain other Nintendo product that ends with U.

I think a company with Google's resources would have hired people with the necessary experience to run the project.

They're a "me too!" company that pretends they are the leader in all the projects that others are doing, and merely offer a service/product to tick a box next to their competitors.

The only case where this isn't true is Search (but getting worse), AdWords, and YouTube. But everything else is not uniquely Google (eg. Drive, GMail, phones, Android, Chromebooks).

Then they may or may not abandon the project based on the uptake, leaving the adopters high and dry. I personally would not risk buying anything from them based on their proven approach to product launches.

Not necessarily, because: They can already see what the other major platforms in this space are doing, and learn from it. They are already a large company that has other income with which to support this service through its initial growth. They can hire/poach people from these existing companies to help give them a kick start.

I know just saying it makes it sound easy, but responsible executives and teams should be capable of doing better.

Have they done that during the first 70 days of the Switch release? Sure plan ahead but release are hard and 70 days isn't much.

All the consoles go through the same thing every time there's a new generation. The consoles have never been backwards compatible, each generation invalidates your previous library. And they always begin with tiny libraries.

Here we are in 2020 and only now have Sony and Microsoft begun talking about backwards compatibility in future console generations.

Never is a strong word.

The initial version of the PS2 had dedicated hardware to be fully compatible with PS1 games.

See also

* GameCube to Wii

* Game Boy to Game Boy Color to Game Boy Advance

* Also features a case of backwards compatibility on behalf of games too. A lot of GBC games would run in a Gameboy in black and white

* Nintendo DS to 3DS

* PS2 to launch PS3

* (Announced) Xbox one to Xbox Series X

* Wii to Wii U * Limited original Xbox to Xbox 360 * Less limited Xbox 360 to Xbox one * Early sega consoles

All versions of PS2 have the PS1 hardware since it does I/O on the PS2. You are probably confusing with PS3, which had the PS2 hardware in the first versions specifically for backwards compatibility.

The first PS2 model came out ~20 years ago, and likely offered backwards compatibility only because very few developers then were building games to maximize the capabilities of DVD storage.