This worked out not only because Microsoft had the money but, critically, because they had the will to make Xbox a success. They resolved to slog through the years of losses, failures (anyone remember the Japan launch?), and missteps in order to build a successful business.

Whilst Google have the money, more than enough money, to do the same, I don't think they have the will.

From my own perspective, as a gaming enthusiast, Stadia simply isn't solving any problem that I have, and I don't believe it's going to be around long enough that I want to invest in it.

[1] I'm sure they would have preferred if it wasn't.

You already have a laptop/PC. A lot of gaming can be done with iGPUs so the cost for you would be zero.

If you really want to play big titles, then you are looking at a delta of 300$ (the price of a good GPU) for 5 years, which amounts to 5$ a month.

I don’t see why anybody who has already a computer would pay more money to vendor lock-in themselves into an online-only service, one-store-only, no-mods-allowed, Internet-quality-dependent service.

I can see the appeal for people that wasn’t into computers before that, though. But still, if I were in that case, I would choose a non-locked-in platform at all costs.

I use Paperspace + Parsec for a regular Windows cloud desktop so I’m not locked into anything and pay just a few dollars per month for my gaming.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544

eGPUs are supported by any Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac1 running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later

The key is to realise that modern cables coming out of laptops are basically extensions of the PCIe bus. The bandwidth through them is phenomenal. It's entirely feasible to run an external GPU.

However, you don't really need one. I am a casual gamer who uses my laptop (got an Xbox too though), and even with the embedded GPU strategy/city building/etc type games work fine and look great. The Mac isn't a good platform if you're a capital-G "Gamer" but if you just want some entertainment on long flights and the like it works just fine. Go grab Steam and off you go. I don't think I'll be using Stadia any time soon as a consequence.

https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...

I ended up having too many glitches and lost connections and eventually moved to Shadow.tech and been thrilled with their service (though it's more than a few $'s a month).

https://blog.parsecgaming.com/a-seamless-cloud-gaming-experi...

You run a windows vm with a beefy gpu in the cloud, so anything that can run in windows is supported.

I’m definitely rooting for them. I don’t want to introduce a middleman that decides what games can and cannot be distributed.

Also, if parsec or paperspace or microsoft or steam go sideways, it’s easy enough for the industry to bypass them. That won’t be the case if one or two cloud vendors have monopolies over gaming hardware.

Geforce now probably isn't it, but titans are overkill (unless you're also using them for work.)

Either way there are certainly options other than nvidia's most expensive consumer end card.

If they had done some basic market research they could have saved themselves a ton of money.

I have a Ps4 and recently tried out the PS4 now streaming service, and while it was nice to try, I would not subscribe because of one reason: to much lag. And I have a very good internet connection and ethernet connection. I also live in a city where there are datacenters which host service.

Even then the lag was unaccceptable to me and I wouldn't even call myself an avid gamer. I'm just a moderate gamer.

There's only a certain type of game that is feasible over a streaming service and that is slow-paced strategy type games, or adventure games. Anything that requires fast reactions who's work. Kids won't like it. Kids will demand a PS4 or PS5 from their parents.

Putting games like Doom on Stadia is pure idiocy. These are the wrong type of game to put on it.

In any case, it will certainly fail and be shut down pretty soon.

I'm bearish on streaming games as well, but if there's one company that has the potential and know-how to solve the hard problems, it's Google.

I think Stadia has come about 20 years too early. Cloud gaming makes sense, but the infrastructure isn't there yet.

But in 2 years it won’t be just Stadia in the games streaming game.

Their free tier isn't too bad, as of now, too. I see very little sense in buying something on Stadia, when I can buy it on steam and play at my desktop, or stream on my laptop.

I see one specific market it could target: visual heavy "walking" simulators. Contemplative games where you don't care too much about input lag but having a powerful rendering hardware could add to the experience.

Honestly, they nailed the 'hard part' - technically the platform is incredible, I can pick up the controller and be playing almost immediately with short loading times, no updates etc.

And then they screwed up the launch itself, all the marketing and failed to get a decent library of large games.

It might sort itself out though as they are set to launch the free version next month which will add many more players (so multiplayer without crossplay won't be dead) and equally there are some huge games down the line like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldurs Gate 3.

I bought it because before I had a gaming PC but to upgrade it I'd have to replace the motherboard and practically every component - whereas with Stadia I can play on my PC with kb+m or on my TV with controller etc. depending on how I feel and it's easier to get in and play.

I hope they sort out the problems as I feel it has a lot of potential.

Think Android NDK, just worse. At least that is what I get from those comments.

It vastly increases the work required by devs for very little incentive.

If they launched and made a go of it? You could make a slow transition. But up front? Insane.

I don’t see how this is possible if they are sending player input to a server somewhere with a 50ms ping. That’s a full twentieth of a second, not counting any lag at all from the server side.

I guess if you play an MMO or something that doesn’t care about lag it wouldn’t matter but I don’t see how you could play even a simple fighting game like Street Fighter 2 with that kind of lag, except at the most basic level.

As for a game like SF, I am not sure. They have MK on Stadia and I hear people enjoy it but I don't know what the latency is like.

This is with wifi hitting a local router, to a separate wifi access point, then wifi to my desktop. None of the network equipment is “gaming grade”.

FWIW: At 60 ms (due to a misconfiguration) super meat boy was unplayable.

The reason some people think that is absolutely insane and ridiculous is simply perception. I switched from 100 Hz CRTs to 120, then 165 Hz LCDs. Console games to me are unplayable already. Obviously, Stadia in it's current form is entire useless to me, no matter what game I'm playing because it just feels bad.

However, people who mostly played 30 FPS console games their entire lives, can usually play on stadia perfectly fine. The input lag isn't that much worse.

If they did that, they could offer cloud gaming as a niche service on that platform, to test the waters, meanwhile they are building up a solid user base.

Instead they decided to go all-in on unproven technology, launched with barely any games available and no clear path forward.

Google wasn't going "all in" on "unproven" technology. They were making a strategic investment in a new market segment using technologies and people that it already was an expert in rather than trying to follow the footsteps of competitors that have several decades lead on them. And they're not betting the bank on stadia. They could turn it off tomorrow and it wouldn't make a blip of difference to the health of the company.

It’s true that at this moment - I don’t even know what, other than the streaming side, Stadia is even based on.

Edit: Apparently it’s Debian and Vulkan? Because that’s what every game developer uses as their tool chain, right? eye roll

Microsoft is really good at supporting products it releases even if they don't take off, at least when it comes to software.

But by the time they finally had a really good OS, developer interest simply wasn't there anymore and a mobile platform lives or dies by it's app store.

Gaming is different because you have the advantage of being able to court and fund exclusive titles eg Halo and Gears of War

The other thing is - they must, must be playing the multi-year long game here. Infrastructure around the world just isn't ready for game streaming.

Having said that, from what I hear GeForce Now is giving people a FAR better experience than Stadia.

Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out? I never got the impression anyone was dying to get their hands on it. They could have given it another year of polish at least and nobody would have complained, surely?

I'd love to hear Google's internal rationale for why they thought this pricing model was a good idea.

Most games on Steam require activation through Steam servers, so unlikely. Also in case Steam went under, there would most likely be legal issues at play, preventing Steam from issuing any sort of no DRM fix.

1. You can't foresee competition, why give up early.

2. It's a big market, worth a shot even if it fails.

3. Someone thought the project would be good for their promotion. This happens more frequently than you might think :)

If you keep on moving fast and breaking things, people who don’t like it when you break their stuff are going to think twice about trusting you.

The reason for that is as you say, they're playing the long game here. They know it won't make money, not today, not next year, not in 3 years. But in 10 years it could make billions. And getting actual user data and feedback early while you're building the architecture is probably worth a lot.

It's also much cheaper in most case. In average I paid less than 5$ per game on Steam (and that include many full price games).

One thing: some pockets of the world do have good enough internet already, and they are only going to multiply.

I've traveled in so many countries, and the ones with the best fiber in the world can't guaranty a stable ping for the entire day.

This is what makes so many online games frustrating. I played MOBAs for a long time, and there is nothing more irritating than losing because you didn't get an information at the right time.

Now a non multiplayer game is not real time, so you can put mitigation measures in place, but it can't fix everything, especially for games where the rhythm is important: plateformers, FPS, racing games, etc.

We put up with it in multi-players game because there is no alternative.

But are you going to tolerate than sometimes, randomly, you are going to die because the network had a spike in ping when playing Mario or Cod when you could play comfortably on your TV locally ?

Remember the joke: videos games don't make kids violent. The lag does.

I wouldn't mind the occasional bad lag nearly as much as in a competitive multiplayer fast-reactions game.

I was thinking of eg XCOM 2.

I have no idea what the legal ramifications really are, but I don't think there's anything morally wrong with the service they are providing. If companies really believed in the whole "selling a license" thing more of them would be willing to provide cross-platform copies for free once you own one instead of grabbing another sale.

As a developer, you have an additional burden of testing on and optimizing for Google's hardware, which are apparently different from consumer hardware.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Google which was an industry gold standard for innovation and job satisfaction has become anything but.

What I found most interesting is how Microsoft and Google have seemingly changed roles.

Microsoft was the old boring behemoth while Google was riding the front wave.

I guess complacency really is a silent killer.

I would really love to hear Brin's or Page's thoughts regarding the current Google

It's been worse. Google bought all those robotics companies a few years ago. Some, such as Bot and Dolly, had real customers, and the customers were cut off. All the companies they bought were silenced - no papers, no demos, nothing. People in robotics outside Google land thought Google must be doing something spectacular. No. Just a total botch with no plan. Google ended up dumping all those companies. Some just folded. Google basically trashed the advanced robotics industry.

At least Google isn't buying game companies and trashing them.

Though I think the game industry is kind of used to that by now. Big giants like EA, Activision, Microsoft, etc keep buying smaller studios and shutting them down after a few years and a few projects.

I kind of hope that isn't the case with the studios that Microsoft has purchased recently.

Although one suspects talent will start to flee very shortly.

Part of me wonders if this is due to the fact that google doesn't hire traditional sysadmins.

It might sound weird, because convention has become that you can "dev" your way out of "ops" and that SRE is the new hotness- but consider the fact that (as a gross generalisation) developers don't like maintaining stuff, it's much more beneficial for your own sanity and to present to management: new things! especially shiny things.

Sysadmins however think the opposite; how can we take $legacyThing and make it better, always the eye on maintenance and longevity. SRE's solve for reliability but not maintainability or longevity.

EDIT: guess I hit some peoples nerves, could someone elaborate on why?

Scroll forward a couple of years and you have a reputation for just abandoning existing things rather than improving them, because people individually maximise their own career advancement by migrating off difficult maintenance and improvement projects on to "new hotness" projects only to abandon them again later for an "even newer hotness".

Small organizations have an immune system that rejects bullshit like that but as orgs grow they institutionalize and it becomes harder and harder for them not to succumb.

Most developers make terrible operators. Devops shops also sometimes shift release management and QA tasks onto developers.

Most developers are terrible at those roles too (and most are uninterested in learning them). I’m good (for a developer; mediocre-to-poor vs specialists) at some of the non-developer roles I mentioned, but I hate doing them, and am better at developing software anyway.

Continuous deployment “saves” the system by just throwing something over the wall at customers. This means you always meet the development metrics that get passed up to upper management.

SRE’s optimize for minimizing the number of pages generated by the monitoring system.

All of the positions that acted as customer advocates or considered long term development roadmap (beyond a few sprints) are eliminated in such shops, so even successful products end up being a flash in the pan. At best, they get too popular to shut down, and immediately stagnate.

I’ve seen this play out in multiple organizations from multiple different angles over the years.

https://www.vox.com/2014/10/7/11631634/new-google-head-david...

A month earlier I'd suggested 4-5 years, earily on-mark:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190115022452/https://plus.goog...

(I'd made a few other predictions, but they were roughly in line with that. I insist it was a fluke.)

And it turns out that it was very nearly precisely five years later that the service folded.

This on what had been a "bet-the-company" effort in 2011:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-aims-to-subtract-users-...

It was the only true competitor to FB, it would've needed to steal more features from Facebook but with G+'s touch, but nothing happened for years, they lost the vision to topple FB.

Given the dissembling surrounding G+ from the very beginning, credibility of that rationale is ... low.

For consumers that's fine. They understand the situation and approach Google products with that knowledge. Stadia is a good example.

The people who should be most wary of this policy are Googlers who are looking for a team to join.

So taking that lens it's easy to see why so many new products are launched but then fall away and are killed, because the people involved can get their money and then move on to do other things. Also explains the constant user hostile redesigns of existing products.

To fix the reputation in this regard the internal reward structures would need to be changed so that building new things is the only way to get ahead.

Only building new shiny things from scratch and never having to support them? Doesn't sound like a bad deal.

Most people (certainly everyone I've ever worked with) need to have positive external input and feedback on the work they do to drive them forward, and if you're not getting that and the feedback is repeatedly "Meh, it'll just be killed in a few years" it would eventually start to impact your confidence and ability to do good work.

That's how you end up with x programming languages, y services and 1000 messaging/chat apps.