Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate.

The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.

Google basically sounds like a large scale startup incubator where every successful project is doomed to fail.

There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.

Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

The second one should read “or it becomes a large scale ad data gathering opportunity”. That’s the value of Maps and Gmail IMO.

You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.

Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?

I'm sure Alphabet was really a restructuring to optimise tax returns

> Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

They do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.

They do sometimes do that, Loon 'graduated' to become its own company that issued its own shares and has since died.

Waymo is another spin off company.

The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.

My guess would be that disentangling a project from all proprietary dependencies is very expensive.

It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.

Couldn't the spun out company just license the centralized compute infrastructure and subsequently migrate as needed?

Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here

> Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

They would only do that if the spinoff made them a noticeable amount of money. I suspect that is rarely the case.

Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.

the latest chromecast is the "Chromecast with Google TV", also called the 3rd-gen chromecast. The Chromecast ultra is the previous generation.

https://store.google.com/ca/product/chromecast_google_tv

That is one of the most obnoxious sales pages I have seen in a while. WTF is up with the scrolling?

Meh, another HN complainer going on about<click>...OMG, what the hell is up with that web page?! That some truly nausea-inducing scroll behavior. Is there a RNG behind it somewhere?

I'm talking about the "Chromecast With Google TV", which is the official replacement for the Chromecast Ultra.

Google is like a rich guy who switches hobbies.

He may have real musical talent, but he'll never put in the blood, sweat & tears for the band to make it big.

Google has ADHD.

Have they tried Ritalin? I hear it helps quite a bit.

I think they know that it’s a sub standard product that is “good enough” for today but it will never be good enough for a use case like VR. I think the future of gaming is in ultra low latency, high resolution experiences and people will look at Stadia like a silent film from the 1920s.

Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.

Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.

I think you are right that Google isn’t taking it seriously, but one of the futures of gaming is subscription streaming, for basically the same reasons as video. Streaming can dramatically improve user experience by making it trival to acquire or switch between games, and subscription revenue allows providers to sponsor the creation of content that doesn't make financial sense in a individual purchase model- think games that strongly appeal to a single demo or amazing, but short, experiences.

Stadia already has very low latency. Maybe not enough for VR, but it's still an impressive achievement.

Then why do it at all? What would possibly justify such a large investment of capital if Google didn't believe it to be a potentially nontrivial contributor of future revenue?

Cynical answer: Because at big tech companies culture leads them to believe they have to have a competing product in every new market rather than letting their "competitors" go unopposed. Occasionally it works out, but often you just get a ton of also-rans. The companies are so big a profitable that even complete failure barely moves the stock price.

Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.

How do you increase revenue/stock price in meaningful way without expanding into other markets?

Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.

You can do a few things well, or many things poorly. Google used to be the former but they've shifted towards the latter over time.

Because of how Google's internal performance evaluation works.

You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.

When you have Google's resources and talent, you probably need a reason not to do these kinds of things. If a product has a decent chance of generating revenue or building out consumer profiles or reaching a new demographic and doesn't undermine the ads business, it has a shot of being pursued.

For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.

The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.

Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.

People need promotions I guess.

Think of it like there’s generally two ways to innovate.

1) Old-school Waterfall: evaluate, commit, and then build (Tesla, Apple, 2000s MSFT are examples)

2) Spray and Pray: build, evaluate, and then commit (Facebook, Amazon are examples)

Google is 2

Senior engineer retention program?

So another company can't.

There are like 700 full time engineers working on it. That's not a side project.

I expect this is true. Perhaps Jade Raymond will start a service like Stadia and do this. It would be an excellent move on her part.

but up until now they did apparently have funding to be running an internal studio? seems like those funds could have been better spent bribing tv companies like the parent is suggesting.

Google is a company of engineers. Engineers solve problems by building stuff, not by bribing companies. I think the main exception is Android and Ads, which also happens to be the main parts of Google I disagree with...

Building successful platforms isn't about engineering - many well-engineered platforms were market failures.

You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.

If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.

"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]

The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.

"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]

[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

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

I know, it was kind of a jab at engineers since I listed two of Googles most successful parts as their most business driven parts.