Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today.
The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way to draw a bunch of people to Stadia outside of that... and if Google is unable to make the business justification to develop Stadia exclusives, neither will anyone else.
Have you ever worked for a tech company? They don't just fire PMs/leads because their project failed. We are all human, we all make mistakes, in fact I bet 90% of the projects Google works on fail (public and private). It's the 10% that succeed that the company is going after (but you don't know that until after the fact of course). The PMs that drove this will simply move on to the next project and keep trying until they get a hit.
Sure, we all know 9 out of 10 projects fail. Let's make sure we only ever begin the 1 that doesn't.
“One out of ten research and development projects will succeed. I recommend cancelling the other nine.”
You need some sort of balance between the two.
There might not even need to be any consequences in any given case, but there should be an appropriate and fair approach to rewards and possible consequences.
That's the sort of thing you have engineers for - so you don't sink money in something so idiotic. Not to mention that they picked the worst possible business model: pay price for title and pay a subscription at once.
The one who greenlit it, and proposed it should be under scrutiny.
What boggles the mind is that nobody is able to formulate who is Stadia even meant for. Who are the target customers?
Draw a Venn diagram of people who:
- care about gaming
- are OK paying full price for their games
- are OK paying 10 euros a month subscription
- are OK buying an extra controller
- have top-notch, 100% reliable internet connection
- are willing to accept occasional technical glitches
- are OK with Google's mercurial approach to product lifecycles
- have a computer
- have a console
- have a Steam library
- mod their games
- subscribe to Nvidia's cloud gaming service
Right now they are still giving away the product for free if you just use 1080p, which the vast majority of their target audience will be perfectly happy with, if you care about 4K and 120hz you probably want to have optimal latency as well and just get a local box anyway. So where do they expect the money to make the service profitable will come from?
I've said the same thing so, so many times from even back when there was OnLive. Streaming games to paying customers is an interesting idea and some people will love it, but I just fail to see the business model. If you can pick up a cheap second hand console for less than 1 year of subscription service, who are the people who are going to keep paying for your service because they 'just want to play a game every now and then'? You have to build and maintain servers all around the world to make the service work, and you expect people who are not really into gaming enough to just buy a $400 console once every ~5 years, who just want to play every now and then, to be willing to spend enough on your service to cover the cost?
It boggles the mind how much money has been going into these kinds of services without any one of them ever seeming to have an obvious and solid long-term business plan...
I think it’d make a lot more sense if they didn’t charge full price, allowed rental/trial periods, or cut a deal to recognize your existing Steam/Epic/GOG purchases - making it a good deal for people who are traveling, don’t want to fire up a desktop at the moment, etc. – and worked on some unique features like hitting GCP strong points – AI at a new level or massive scaling for things like Sim-style games, etc. — so the value pitch wasn’t so narrow.
Also, what makes you think that 5/6 of the world has fast internet? I have good internet but if you asked me 3 years ago I would have said no.
Google's fundamental theory seems to be "users will always forgive us" or "there are always new users" and neither is true.
Nvidia's GeForce go is under the same physical constraints and Cyberpunk 2077 is very playable there (so I can play it on my IPad Pro using XBox bluetooth controller...) . There are lot's games where brief latency is not a problem. I agree for some games latency is a dealbreaker but hardly for all.
But at least Nvidia's initial conceit was that it would piggy back on someone else's content ecosystem rather than building their own - building your own gaming content ecosystem is a) incredibly hard b) a fifteen year plus project and c) costs a hundred billion dollars. Google weren't willing to do those but launched a project that needed them.
Like, 600 ms latency is still 100% acceptable and enjoyable.
And not only graphics. Turn-based strategy genre can also benefit from gigantic ram and cpu resources - all to make ai smarter, more enjoyable to beat the ever.
I think stadia and cloud gaming in general is a gold mine. But it is a different platform, games should be optimized for it.
You can apply the same logic to anything new. We had VR headsets before HL:Alyx and anyone could say "VR has no good games, idea is toast".
And there were great VR games before HL:Alyx and Alyx is no killer app.
You can make amazing AI that beats humans 100% of time pretty easily, the hard part is making it challenging enough for people to have chance to beat it... It also just needs game state, without all the cruft of stadia(visual side, sounds, graphics, inputs etc).
Also did google partner with any of developers of such games?
Did they develop their own? or even formed any form of partnership for them?
No. They went for action titles, or titles with great graphics.
It was disaster from business perspective no matter how you look at it. Do not expect game developers to just bend over for google just because they release a new platform(and where are doubts about sustainability and quality of that platform from the beginning).
What kind of games will emerge 3 TB of assets will be totally fine amount? For a mobile turn-based game, no less. Or when 6 2080tis will render graphics for your phone no problem?
Roguelikes like Cataclysm DDA also tend to be extremely heavy on the complexity side despite having "extremely poor" graphics by your standards.
6 2080TIs? How are you going to pay for that waste? Do you know how delusional you sound?
I am talking about future of gaming.
Not to mention that 100ms of latency in TVs is constant usually, it isn't the case with network latency.
The problem with stadia for me is that gaming platforms are social networks and Stadia is relatively small. No one else I know has Stadia and for many games you can't even expect to find randos willing to play at all. Embr and GetPacked are basically useless.
The fact that well over 90% of the products Google launches fail for very understandable reasons (I would argue that the last successful product Google launched was Android, and they technically acquired that) is why Google's structure and management need to change.
Most studios have to target a variety of hardware, stadia exclusives could have allowed studios to focus exclusively on top end experiences which really flex the hardware - similarly the potential for multi-TB fast storage and 10 Gb connectivity could have enabled dramatically larger game worlds than we see today.
But it's absolutely a go big or don't bother problem.
What surprises me more is why people trusted Google enough to invest in Stadia in the first place. Had they let you import Steam games (like Nvidia does), fine, you're not risking anything. But actually paying Google for the license to a game that's ONLY available on Stadia? No thanks.
This is exactly what HP looked like a couple of decades ago. Making billions from printers meant everything else suffered.
I haven't seen a good model for incentivizing staying with a product or team in a large company. Most of the time the "ops" work or incremental growth work will never appear as significant as a new launch (particularly if 2 years on the product isn't performing to the launch teams projections)
A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.
If no one downloads VideoLAN for a year they won't burn a bunch of money, but also they had no chance at fundamentally changing the way people watch videos.
They stuck with it for decades and have turned it into a great product.
As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told.
Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but they have a CFO who basically demands any project makes money in two years or gets canned (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not especially criticising this approach but it's clear most Googlers and their culture do not get it), and a generation of project managers who believe you can launch minimum viable products to consumers and fix it later. You can't make all three of those points work at the same time, and that's why literally anything they launch new at the moment is going to fail.
Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.
google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.
Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
- what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...?
- was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak)
- did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc?
- does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t).
Is it being used for education or something?
The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move.
After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.
My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book.
So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.
Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end.
> profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off.
Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way.
> they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks,
Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users as well as at least one advantage towards each other network.
Of course by then they'd made everyone angry and made everyone here shun them
> which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect.
Probably more what I wrote above IMO. Mixing the brilliant Google+ social network with the despised Google+ identity solution wasn't the most brilliant thing they did. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but still.
> they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same.
Yep. And when they finally created the best solution the web have seen so far it was too late.
> they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results.
Can't remember it but wouldn't surprise me at all.
They required real names at first (slavishly copying FB in that regard), and then later as they were obviously failing they tried offering the option to use a pseudonym. I tried it, and they rejected my handle for no reason given. This was the day I started to really have deep-rooted negative feelings for Google, it was just insulting to have my time wasted by an also-ran social network.
That was the last straw for me and I burned my G+ account to the ground.
I think Google suffers from something akin to the oil curse. They're throwing out dilettante efforts to diversify but never accomplishing anything noteworthy outside their core business. In that regard they're making the world worse, because they're soaking up top-tier talent and then producing garbage with it.
How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?
I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
Exactly.
FWIW: That's what I tried to explain above: "like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users"
> I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
On Google+ the social network it became really simple: You logged in using your main account.
Then in the upper right corner of the desktop (and probably in the hamburger menu on mobile) you could choose which connected identity you would like to post as.
Meaning one identity to answer serious questions about programming on the backend and another identity in a support group for front end developers etc ;-)
Google of course knew but back then we trusted Google.
I never used Google+ because it never made sense to me. There were probably a lot of great ideas that were just not obvious.
In hindsight it really looks like Yahoo all over again.
All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.
>Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.
>Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.
It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...
Glass for business is a thing.
Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.
Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature.
A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused.
Otherwise your stock is getting destroyed.
Maybe they just couldn't get licensing deals they wanted and refused to let go of the idea until now? It seems like Stadia needs both heroic technical effort and really clever go to market and they just failed outright on the latter.
I just bought a new PC, and it’s great, but it sits under my TV, unused, for 90-whatever percent of its life. If you can deliver cloud gaming as a complete product that actually offers value, the potential efficiency is staggering.
While playing Destiny 2 and Hitman on a laptop running Ubuntu and over wifi with a controller, it felt ok-ish. Almost on par with playing on a Xbox Series X but not quite there.
However, when I tried the same games on my gaming rig, on a 1 Gbit fiber connection with a mouse and keyboard it was completely unplayable for me. The input lag is just too high for me to enjoy the experience. On top of that the picture quality is pretty bad compared to running the same game on your own machine at 4K.
My conclusion is that Stadia will not replace a high end gaming rig for the type of gamer with higher demands. I even doubt it will replace xbox or playstation for the console players.
That's pretty low bar to clear
I still think it’s a good idea, with a lot of people falling into the “who is this for” camp, and very well could eventually be very successful.
My impression is that it just needs more time to mature. If we were talking about some saas product, those rough edges and missing features wouldn’t be a big deal. Everyone here would be saying “yeah, it’s an MVP that they needed to get into market to test things out. It’s improving incrementally.” But because it’s video game related, people’s expectations are that it finished and perfect the day it launches.
That’s what people are lamenting, you can’t role out a competitive gaming platform with such a small catalog of titles.
>I bought an Xbox to play Red Dead Redemption 2 . . . lots of people falling into the “who this is for” camp
Those people appear to be “casual/occasional gamers”? I am very doubtful that this group will really turn into a cash cow. $10.00/month is enough that few are going to keep a subscription after they are done playing. If you amortize a console over a lifetime of 4 years it would be considerably cheaper than paying for stadia if you consider the current $75 upfront cost.
So the way I see it, for stadia to be viable there would have to be a steady stream of AAA titles(because otherwise the need for cloud compute is questionable) produced by 3rd party studios...this just doesn’t exist, titles like RDR2 & CP2077 are an exception. We only saw a handful of titles that demanding and hyped come from a non-Microsoft, non-Sony published studio in the last decade. I’m not in the game dev world, but producing these types of titles seems to be exceptionally difficult, and the trend seems to be less and less AAA titles per year as the complexity compounds.
Combined with stadia’s limited selection, Google’s history of product abandonment, and that you often have to purchase stadia specific versions of titles to play them on the platform. It’s a difficult pill to swallow. Nvidia’s product, GeForce Now, where titles are portable seems like a much more viable product to me.
I can go on the store and buy Cyberpunk 2077 and start playing on my phone if I wanted to.
And the 75$ upfront cost does exist, you need a controller. You could get a controller for cheaper, but it wouldn't be as easy to use or be usable with the chromecast ultra, which seems to be where the best experience is. Nonetheless you still need a controller and most people wouldn't settle for something that is terrible to use, so the cost is still a consideration.
Especially in the 'casual/occasional' gamer market, where they don't care enough about the difference between 1080p and 4K. Most are probably just interested in being able to play the latest hot game. That's exactly the same market Microsoft is targeting with the Xbox Series S.
Last time I signed up the Stadia Pro upsell was mandatory (you had to provide a CC). This was annoying because I was interested just in Destiny 2, which is free.
COVID sucks, but at least vadym909's kid has been able to make the most of it by investing in a usable setup and gaining some valuable hands-on experience with computers.
Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.
But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.
Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success):
Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to third-party game developers. Recently released consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered underwhelming sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers.[22] With initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment,[41] as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone, the company secured the launch of influential new games such as Ridge Racer and Mortal Kombat 3.[22][5]
The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.
Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.
In top of that, after seeing Cyberpunk 2077 get the closest thing to an exclusive launch they could possibly hope for, I imagine they looked at the results decided that the problem is not going to be solved by one or two great games that only work on Stadia. They need many games and for that they need third party.
... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.
Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.
Publishers changed their licence agreement to exclude streaming or cloud.
Since you are free to change the licence at anytime you like, they did. My bet is we will see white labelled streaming services from Blizzard and co.
We will have dozens of gaming streaming services, much like film streaming services...
And any way, NVIDIA is in no position to challenge the games industry on such things - they are very much in bed with them and would lose enormously if games suddenly all went for a big 'best on AMD' logo.
I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.
Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.
That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.
But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.
Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.
To me, that put Stadia in an odd place where only the more casual players without a gaming device would sign up, or those with enough money to pay twice because they spend a lot of time away (but with good internet).
... which makes shutting down gaming studio part of it even weirder.
They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.
Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.
Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.
Except they misteriously stop releasing Linux versions of their games.
There are many reasons Android and Switch games don't get ported to Linux; having to rewrite the game from scratch is not one of them.
I'd assume company politics. Steve Jobs described Apple like a "big startup" [1]— it had 0 committees, and instead had one person in charge of each of the things the company needed to do/care about. They all met weekly and talked about everything they were doing, and it yielded great collaboration. That's why everything "makes sense" and grows from the divisions/apps you'd expect.
Google sounds more like Microsoft before it, with different teams doing work that might overlap and compete against one another. On top of that, afaik flashy "new" products play better for promotions than building upon something that exists. Hence Play Music and Youtube Music, Android and Chrome OS, Google Play and Stadia, etc.
Nothing succeeds like failure.. In my experience at multiple companies in tech and elsewhere, it is (sadly) frequently the case that the people responsible for the biggest failures are the ones who have the fastest career progression. It's a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome where they are holding their bosses captive because as they fail the stakes for the management get higher and higher and so they get more and more bought in.
There's one person in particular that I remember from my time at Goldman. Lovely guy but every single thing he was involved in was an unmitigated disaster. Sure enough he failed his way to becoming an MD in record time.
Failures should be celebrated and not shunned. Presuming charitably everyone is doing their best etc.
What happens for companies where no-one dares to start new projects? Yeah.
So what is the correct number of new projects per risk? Everyone would like to choose only those that succeed. But the whole point of new development is that the information and experience to build such a product does not exist and needs to be learned as the project progresses.
Should companies take too many new risky projects or too few? If the reward for successful project is high, then it's obvious a company should take a few too many risky projects, rather than too few (and risk cancelling some hit in it's infancy).
In aggregate if every new project fails and business is starting to look like Kodak or Xerox then that's bad. Failing one new project is just a large company trying to innovate and cutting it's losses when a project is not a success.
If it's something completely new, then yeah, celebrate failure, because at least you learned something. But game streaming had been tried and failed spectacularly before (remember OnLive?). Stadia didn't add anything new except "this time it's Google, they know their network stuff". Turns out that isn't enough if the business model makes no sense.
You don't celebrate failure and you certainly don't celebrate causing failure by having such a poor strategy that random cartoonists predicted your failure mode on launch day and then riding it into the ground.
And let people install whatever they want on it. There's probably a decent market for people with low/mid range hardware that would like to stream the newest games an ultimate settings. Others who'd just like a portable game library not tied to a specific PC, and a 3rd group that might use it through a chrome cast like a game console.
I'm not sure how large of a market these groups would have been, but certainly much larger than whoever Stadia appeals to.
It's probably more of a semantic difference, but saying "Here's a VM, do what you want with it" is different than saying "Create a game library with us and we'll stream publisher X's games to you. We'll even put them in your GeForce library if you own it somewhere else!"
So publishers got mad and many of the biggest pulled the most popular games. Had GeForce just said "Here's a gaming optimized VM" and let users do whatever they want, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, an very early version of GeForce now did exactly that, complete with a windows desktop.
(I'm ex-GCP)
https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/worldwide-cloud-market-q320
I don't have a PC or a console and I can play Cyberpunk - in fact the Stadia controller+Chromecast came free with it (because of a promotion).
Stadia has huge value to new gamers, but it hasn't done a good job appealing to them.
No. It was an excellent idea, with very bad execution on the supply side.
I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are not. There is no amount of money they could pay Valve to make that partnership happen that would not pay dividends.
Valve/Steam is just "behind" in all of this modern gaming crap, and the fact that they're still the most popular platform (and its not close) speaks volumes about whether the CloudStreamingGamePass-way things are going is actually the right one. Its reasonable to believe that people who identify as "gamers" right now are not interested in that stuff, and the strategy Google/Amazon/etc have of "Netflix for gaming, no console, convert non-gamers to gamers" won't work. Time will tell, but maybe Valve's traditionalism is the right one long-term.
You know where Valve is investing their money? VR and Linux. God damn do I love that company.
Gabe has publicly stated that he does not believe in game streaming services, because he thinks computation is best done at the edge.
The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with it so would one competitive advantage of PC gaming. Might be tautological, but the games that thrive in the cloud are games designed not to need a PC to be played.
And VR is inherently incompatible with the design goals of cloud computing. The slightest of latencies destroy the illusion in VR. Valve is not going to support a world that doesn't encourage people to own the hardware necessary to run VR.
Although doing over-the-internet streaming is definitely a terrible idea because of how many out-of-your-control factors exist.
Maybe, but I tend to think that it wouldn’t diminish, and that this idea that very many will just “get over” latency is something VPs and PMs have convinced themselves of and not something that would bare out in the data.
The first time I gamed on a 120hz display was life changing in a way, I was never totally satisfied playing any sort of competitive multiplayer game at 60hz again, it’s like wearing hazy scratched glasses when the competition doesn’t. And all it took was playing on a friends PC with a 120hz display for half an hour. I think considering how great the push to >120Hz has been in PC gaming, and that High-hertz are now being adopted in smartphones and tablets I’m not alone in this experience.
My point being here that a large part of why people choose to play competitive, reaction driven games, is precisely because they are competitive and especially because they are very fast paced. So fast paced that 8ms of output latency makes a significant difference to a large segment.
Tactical shooters and MOBAs are still immensely popular despite the fact that most consumers likely experience a fairly high level of latency. People play games like Fortnite because they're fun, not because they're so competitive & fast paced that 8ms of latency makes a difference. Even competitive games nowadays try to soften the direct correlation between player skill and wins using matchmaking and RNG mechanics so everyone gets a reasonably consistent rate of winning. Want to play a really competitive and fast paced game where 8ms probably does matter? Play Quake Live against the 100 or so people that still tolerate that level of competition.
If it were really 8ms of added end-to-end latency compared to local, then it would be a complete non-issue – even in the twitchiest fighting games and shooters, unless you’re a literal pro-level player, as you mentioned. Most people would not be able to tell the difference even if they were specifically looking for it. It would even be tolerable for VR.
Unfortunately, the reality is more like 80-120ms, at least in one benchmark:
https://www.pcgamer.com/geforce-now-beats-stadia-in-our-inpu...
And again, that's not to say that they can't notice the difference or something, it's just not the dealbreaker that it seems to be for some vocal people. I can definitely tell the difference but it's not intolerable for me. I'm definitely happy to trade it for better convenience in many cases just like many are evidently happy to trade it for cheaper hardware.
If you design lag-prediction into the game it isn't so bad. People even used enjoy working the "lag shield" (be erratic, change direction frequently).
It's the dropped packets and consequent stuttering that is really frustrating.
I agree. As a casual gamer, lag/latency has never been a problem on Stadia. Visual glitching and stuttering has. But have you noticed it only happens in certain titles?
Some games seem to suffer from periodic stutters (ahem, PUBG) no matter how good your connection is. While others are always butter smooth and crystal clear. This has lead me to suspect that it’s not entirely a connection issue, but maybe an issue with the ports/hardware at Stadia’s end?
Now, they put you in a weird virtual zone where your library is restricted to only the game you are currently playing. And if that game is not allowed by the publisher, you can't play it. So I can't play Slime Rancher. I can't play Shadows of Mordor. And it seems like over time there is less and less there.
It sucks, because it was basically my dream gaming service. Kind of like Google Play Music was my dream music service. :(
17" Dell with a GeForce mobile whatever-it-comes-with will let you play everything fine for 5ish years if you're into the latest shooters, longer for other genres.
Now compare it to the cost of a streaming box & subscription.
I think for most people the decision on PC vs a particular console is:
* Which types of games tend to be available on that platform.
* Which specific games that they like are available on that platform.
* Inertial / brand loyalty based on what gaming machine they had on the past.
* If they play multiplayer, what their friends have.
* How much they like tinkering with / get frustrated fighting against computers.
If you're willing to build your own and buy second hand components on ebay you can just about put together a PC that is competitive with a modern console, at around the same price. But yea, if you're buying new from reputable dealers it's pretty much impossible.
I don't think you are wrong, just more lenient in your definition of affordable. It is compounded by the supply constraints, and markups over retail we are currently seeing. I can buy a 3090 right now on amazon, but it is $2,450, 5x the console price. Titan was ~2x console price.
(Amusingly I'm running the exact card you mentioned, and I did buy it for about $450 NZD used, although the going rate is more like $350 now on the local used market).
So I agree with your point, but it's not like Valve as a company is totally unaware of the opportunities. They are just... uninterested.
I think Remote Play works brilliantly? I've finished multiple games using it, streaming from the PC at the other side of the house to the TV with SteamLink in the living room, using an Xbox One S controller. I hardly see a difference compared to sitting directly behind the PC (granted, this is limited to 1080p on the SteamLink hardware, but my eyes are old enough to not care about higher resolution anymore).
But I'm also happy they haven't. These cloud streaming ecosystems are the apex of locked down closed systems. Valve is built on a culture of modding, revving games to make new ones, and being fair to users in a way that doesn't compromise being fair to developers. Cloud streaming systems, by and large, are not. They're built by big-tech megacorps that are looking to buy-in then cash-out on an industry they know nothing about (except Nvidia; if there were one cloud streaming service I'd support, its theirs. Nvidia isn't perfect, but its definitely within their wheelhouse, not a cash grab).
Beyond that, you're marginalizing Valve's dominance in the gaming industry. Of the top ten games by players on Steam right now, again, the most popular western gaming platform ever made, three are made by Valve (CS:GO #1, Dota2 #2, TF2 #4, and #3 is Rust, the monthly TwitchFad). Overall, the only non-Steam western PC games which compete with their numbers are Call of Duty, League of Legends, Valorant, Fornite, Minecraft. The one theme with most of these games is that they're pretty old. People love games they know; when the developer sticks around, builds out a fair monetization scheme, and iterates on the gameplay, the games become unbeatable pillars on whatever service they're distributed on (the few that aren't old: Fortnite/Valorant will get there, and CoD has this in a way, but is definitely the most different every year). Valve is a rock-solid game developer; the fact that they don't release new games every year just speaks to their commitment to their existing communities.
And, they also made Half Life Alyx last year. Its legitimately the most groundbreaking game to be released in the past decade, that unfortunately so few people are able to play. You physically cannot play that game and not have a shit-eating grin on your face the whole time. It is the only game I've ever played in VR (on Valve Index) that made me think "if this game were in both non-VR and VR, I would choose to play it in VR".
The first was well received but died off the rest of auto-battlers, the second was terrible but is being reworked, and the third was critically acclaimed and the probably the most important VR game released besides BeatSaber. I know you said not counting VR but I feel like skipping Half-Life:Alyx, a game in a well beloved franchise that was very highly rated, is a little disingenuous
Besides that they've also: Trialed Linux-based Steam Machines Greatly contributed to Linux gaming through Proton Tested out two unique hardware systems (Steam controllers and Steam link)
Outside of them being essentially the biggest and most important game distribution service, as well as helping devs with any distrbution, multiplayer, DLC, etc services that they need.
So I'd say it's a toss-up between whether that would benefit Google or not.
How? Stadia doesn't support VR.
And a massive failure at that.
Valve is not behind in VR
Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.
Something like Stadia requires customers to believe that it won't go away. Google, given their long history of mediocre commitment to projects, already had considerable skepticism for Stadia from Day 1. Shuttering their internal studios is just one more signal to skeptical customers that Google really doesn't know what they are doing and doesn't care.
There are real costs to supporting yet another platform and if you don't believe the platform will generate sales for you, you're not going to expand the effort.
... and most publishers didn't even bother with Stadia, so what does that tell you about how publishers view Stadia?
>because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future.
And how many customers does Stadia actually have? It seems like Stadia was ignored by customers as well.
Third-party publishers don't care about sales of First-party games. They care about sales of their titles. This means they care about the viability of the platform. So First-party games are ultimately there to drive platform adoption. They do so, by 1) demonstrating the strengths of the platform to consumers and publishers (think WiiSport showing off how Wii controllers can be used), and 2) Providing a reason for consumers to actually adopt the platform. The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming. If you're only offering a (tiny) library of games that are already out on other platforms, there isn't really an incentive to get Stadia and play the games you already own or can get ... but this time from the cloud! On the other hand, if I like Mario or Zelda, I have to get the Switch.
And by the way, for all the talk about all those partnerships Stadia will form - how is it that Microsoft was able to secure rights to hundreds of titles for their subscription-based Netflix-type gaming service (GamePass), and Stadia couldn't even muster more than a handful of games you have to buy individually? And speaking of Netflix, it's not surprise they have pivoted to creating original content to supplement their licensed library - care to guess why?
Stadia is a full fail.
FWIW, most people I know using Stadia are not the core gamers, but people who do not want to invest in a gaming PC or console (or worse, a gaming PC/console for each of the kids!). And they seem really happy with it, specifically because its a streaming thing, so I'm not as negative about it. (For myself, yeah, Gamepass would win if I'd get any of these things)
So I'm not sure what we're arguing about here. That publishers are clueless and don't realize that Stadia is a goldmine waiting to be tapped? That consumer don't know what they are missing by not buying into the platform? The platform is clearly failing.
Recently Ubisoft came on board and all of their recent titles are available on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly great to play on Stadia, and i've read about a lot of people that got Stadia for it ( there was a promo, pre-order Cyberpunk and get a free Stadia controller and Chromecast Ultra). Those are not pretty significant growth points.
Good luck with that.
Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that.
Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market.
Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.
The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.
On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but:
https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/
“ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”
“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.
It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.
What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.
Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.
Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.
The benefit of Stadia is actually it's simplicity. It's about bringing in new gamers who may have come from console world, but don't have the Steam libraries, etc.
I wrote this in another post, but I think Stadia right now is for the game console user who only play 1 or 2 games. This makes for a lot of extra hardware and subscriptions just to play a game you like. Why not just rent the game as a service for as long as you want to play it? When hockey season starts every year I buy the new NHL for $60. Thats $5/mo. Why should i also buy PLaystation plus, and a hardware console just to play the game? it takes 10 minutes from turining on the tv, navigating the menus, getting into the game, finding someone to play online, etc. Chatting with people is really bad UX. Google can make all of this slicker. But the value prop needs to focus on the job at hand: playing a _specific_ game which happens to be your favorite game you play mostly. Thinking of it as some kind of a gaming platform is not the way.
With Stadia, you press one button and you're in the game 5s later. It also has deep integration, allowing friends list, voice chat, game invites, achievements, etc. Nvidia relies on Steam for those (Epic doesn't have most of it). That's just the surface level integration too. By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.
If you've used both, it's night and day experience. Again obviously for you and me, we're used to PC gaming, but for average people wanting to play some AAA game, GFN is a complete no-go.
If I recall correctly, you have to do this once, and it can save your log-in details for next time.
> You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit.
Gamers are their target audience.
> By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares to Nvidia where you have to mess around with the settings like on PC.
That's true. I've found it's sometimes necessary to change the settings, as the default graphical settings are far below what the hardware is capable of handling.
I'm sure nVidia could do something about that if they had the will to.
I don't quite agree on that one. If you already have a 2000$ gaming PC with a huge Steam catalog, Stadia is most definitely not targeting you. Nvidia is.
Stadia is targeting people who want to play the latest AAA game or EA sports game, without having to invest in a $500 console or $1000 PC. You just play $60 and you're good to go on your laptop you use for Facebook, or spend $100 to play on your TV. They're trying to expand the gaming pie, trying to get all those people who will play games on their phones because it's easy and low friction, but won't invest in high friction setups like a gaming PC.
At least that's my take on it.
I don't think so. If you have the hardware, there's little reason not to run it locally. They're both going after the same market, but with different sales models.
There's probably never going to be a subscription that gives you access to all the latest titles.
By considering Steam and Epic, you are already looking at this from the perspective of a platform. I am simply saying Stadia is better if the game you love is already there. NFL Madden is the latest Stadia promo right now. If most of your gaming time is consumed playing Madden, Stadia is probably the way to pay for it.
Because Stadia offers an inferior experience to local rendering. In particular, the way the video compression crushes all dark colors into a single shade of black. Plus, when Google kills Stadia in a year, you'll have lost the games you purchased and paid a subscription fee for.
I was excited to see Google make a game that would only be possible on Stadia, be it an MMO, races with hundreds of cars, or something more creative their designers could imagine. With their internal developers shut down, all that's left is more expensive, inferior quality versions of games I could play elsewhere.
Honestly, I'm sick of the limitations of traditional gaming. If that means some compression quality loss and being somewhat inferior to local rendering, then that's the price I'm willing to pay. Playing games is not one of the most important parts of my life, but with the amount of crap I've put up with dealing with flexibility and compatibility issues of a superior local rendering setup for modern games, you might think it was.
Why? Probably less latency/better quality with a PC.
Obviously it depends on how well your local hardware compares to Stadias server farm too.
The PC and Stadia versions are much better than the PS4 and Xbox One versions though - those do not run well at all.
I suspect the actual PS5 and Xbox Series X versions will be relatively similar to the PC/Stadia version, but they haven't been released yet - you can only play the last gen console versions via backwards compatibility.
edit: in what way does Steam or Epic expect you to understand how to use a “gaming PC”?
And as the other commenter points out, playing steam games via geforce now doesn't even require installing the steam app anyway, it's just an account link.
If you're just buying a single game, Stadia comes out ahead on price when you're only paying $60 for the game rather than Geforce Now where you pay $60 for the game and then a monthly fee for every month you're playing.
You seem to be using "non-gamer" as a synonym for "too inexperienced to use basic modern technology", which I don't think is a widespread problem outside of age ranges that didn't grow up with the internet. A much bigger group is surely just people that aren't that interested in video games. (Unless you think Stadia is actually going after the geriatric market, which seems short sighted.)
Too inexperienced to use technology is a strawman, the real comparison is do they prefer the benefit of the better UX more than they fear the amorphous dangers of lock-in. The answer is easily yes.
The problem isn’t just lock in. There are also less games on Stadia. The lack of available games is directly due to Google’s strategy of recreating yet another App Store.
Steam is free by the way, since I guess I didn’t point that out in my last post. You just have to buy the games, same as Stadia.
FWIW, the subscription is optional (with these perks [1]). You can also just buy the game you want to play and play it, no subscription needed.
Also, yes if you already have a huge Steam collection, the thought of buying games on a different store is not great, but I don't think Stadia is aimed at people with a PC gaming rig and 1000 steam games, it's aimed at people who don't have a gaming PC or console, and want to play the latest EA Sports or AAA game. Having to just pay 60$ is far better than paying 60$ + 500$ fo a console + waiting for shipping and installation.
The customer value add of anything on top of that is proving to be extremely thin. I used Now extensively in 2017, Luna extensively this year and Stadia briefly for Destiny 2 - Luna's experience isn't worse enough to provide any benefit to the Stadia lock-in model.
Stadia PM's should really consider focusing more on "Customer Obsession".
Local co-op is a thing in Luna, but I'm not sure about online multiplayer. But in GeForce Now I just used Steam and it worked flawlessly.
At least with xcloud & stadia's approach there's both subscription fees (passive income if people don't play), as well as the 30% store cut to offset some of the cost.
Although none of these are remotely close to being priced at break-even prices, so this is also likely going to end up with even more IAP-based games on these platforms if this ever "takes off" at all. Which, yuck. This is obviously a bait & switch strategy for everyone involved. Just dressed up as "subsidized during user acquisition" instead so they can feel less evil about it.
They did neither and it's utterly boggling. They were clearly aware of their shortcomings when they dodged the more direct questions in early interviews. I don't know if it was just hubris, or an unwillingness at the top to understand. Or maybe the project started out too big to steer well and they just accepted it because, hey, high level paycheck.
There are probably a lot of now ex-googlers with a ton of I-told-them-so stories.
The easiest users to steal from the console market are the ones that buy only 1 or 2 console games which are traditionally reserved for those consoles (NFL Madden is the latest promotion and a good example). For these users, there is massive experience shift going from buying a ps4, ps online, just to play the same game all the time. I am one of these users. If they can find these 1 or 2 games that activate each segment of users, they will take cohorts from the console market. This won't get the entire console gamer market, but it's a great place to start.
Then instead of $10/m, you have a console for 10 years ($120*10 = $1200).
Even cheaper if you go for the PS4.
Has Stadia improved since launch? The PS5 and Xbox Series X are both more powerful than Stadia instances, not to mention modern PCs. Has Google announced any timeframe for powering up their instances to match? Will I have to pay more to access instances with the power of next-generation consoles? Will those be available for all the games I purchased, or on a title-by-title basis?
That's the scary thing for some people. The 'continuous improvement' may just as well be taking away stuff you 'own' or spying on you.
Also, money you paid to stadia are just as "frozen" (spent? frozen money implies they can be thawn) as money for online service.
While you can carry chromecast ultra with you it's PITA to setup - you have to configure the network on it and a controller. Without wired connection it's not a good experience. Meanwhile, ps5 you just plug in a play for the most part.
Why would Valve partner with anyone? They don’t even need to make games anymore. They could fire the majority of their company and run on a skeleton crew and still be making a fortune years later.
Literally don’t think Google can afford them. The offer would be “hey wanna go from doing almost zero work and making a fortune to making a little more and having to work a lot harder and give up autonomy“
This effectively kills Stadia as a service. If they were only willing to try for a couple of years... let's just say people were right to doubt that Google can be counted on for a service.
Stadia's voice party system works well, and while I've been playing on a TV (Chromecast Ultra & Stadia controller), I've run raids with folks playing on their phones, iPads, & Chromebooks.
Maybe because it's still a small and new community, but I've found it generally friendly and good quality.
Yes, but apply this to 90% of their new products. Google's planning in the current age is about as bad as Microsoft's in the 2004-2012 era.
You're really selling me on using Microsoft over Google here: If I'm using a product/service, I'd prefer that it stay around as long as possible even if the company decides that it's a failure. Bonus points for being a "cloud" company so that users are totally screwed the moment the company pulls support.
Yes, actually that's about what I expect. Not literally in a day, but fully do expect that in another year or two Google will announce that Stadia is going away and that in a few months it'll be gone. Games were rentals, not leased/sold, so they'll stop charging but you'll hardly be able to take your games with you. Saves might be Takout-able, so if you go re-buy the games you can keep playing... probably... if you even have hardware to game on...
In contrast, I've known people who ran MS software locally for months-to-years after it was obsolete/discontinued, and non-Microsoft software even longer (cue the classical story of the business that held on to their DOS software until Windows XP finally made it too painful to use).
Seriously, When did Google ever planned anything?
It is only in recent years, they fall out of the Media's flavour did people start to look at them rationally.
If you look at any of Google's project besides their core data-farming business, it's their usual mode of action : half-ass something cool and drop it.
I'm guessing that if you look at an existing title along the lines of any of the ones you mentioned, the team has to balance between ongoing development of the game and porting it to Stadia, and they may just not have the resources or inclination to do the porting even when huge cheques are involved.
I don't see much for them to gain and plenty to lose if they let google build a big customer base.
I'm surprised Nvidia didn't attempt to partner with them rather than developing GeForce Now as a separate product, they could have taken advantage of Valve's developer relationship/client/store front and handled the actual running of the hardware, which Valve seems much less interested in.
Stadia on the other hand is just a demonstration of the level of hubris Google is capable of engaging in. They thought they could launch a brand new store with the twist that people would need to pay a subscription to continue playing the games they had bought and without the option of using your own hardware should you end up purchasing a capable machine.
VIVE is by HTC supporting SteamVR, but Valve has their own first-pary VR headset + controllers with the Index.
Steamlink has hardware is dead because it was bad. Steam controller is dead as well.
Steamlink now is an android app that might work and might not work on your device.
Partnering with Google on stadia would generate a sizeable backlash.
Or can't, these days, considering how strangled the GPU market is.
I think Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will dominate cloud gaming eventually.
So far, I can confirm for a fact it works on HTC Vive, Valve Index, Oculus Rift S, and Oculus Quest 1/2 (in wired mode connected to PC, just like the other headsets, or using VR Desktop for wireless; I tried both and stuck to playing it with wireless).
It's almost as if Google product development stops a v0.8. Maybe time to have the company run by engineers instead of PhD's.
It is actually pretty fascinating, short of cloud computing, and Gsuite, Google doesn't appear to be able to produce products that people will actually pay for. It's not that Google doesn't have success stories, they do, Android for instance. They just don't seem to be able to sell anything.
I think Stadia had hoped that it could become big enough quickly, with the backing of Google's name and capital, that it could negotiate some good deals and build a big library quickly, to the point that there's so many gamers on Stadia that you can't not publish there anymore without losing a lot. Netflix and Spotify did it, too.
I don't know if the quality of their hires has been dropping, but it feels like they just can't execute new ideas. They throw money at problems, and mostly they are really all over the place.
Usually ads can be equally or more expensive than development and production.
It is no longer the year 2000
I bought a PS5 last year and have not bought a PS5 game. Mostly played PS4 games and some of what came in PSPlus.
Stadia still is missing basic features like pagination or searching, but the EXPERIENCE is great. I don't know why you are having issues, but Hitman 2+3 work amazing for me with the stadia controller. 60fps, 4k, etc.
They also have Ubisoft+ integration and with this news they seem to be pushing for more integrations like that which will make the platform even better.
Twitch will never be on Stadia as they compete with Youtube Gaming, which has direct integration with Stadia.
It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that feel half-baked (Hitman crashes on first boot and complains about a lack of a controller) and a bunch of indie games that feel like a sad attempt to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a middling title (the Hello Neighbor hide and seek game) and titles released half a decade ago (superhot).
Minecraft is on every console imaginable—except Stadia. What about Roblox? Fortnite? Factorio? Among Us? Any Sid Meier's game? Any Paradox game? Every genre of game that I actually put time into is completely absent on their platform. Every game from the top 10 (perhaps 20 or more?) on Twitch right now is absent on Stadia. I don't know what they're doing, but whatever it is, it's wrong.