I saw far more people saying 'I don't think stadia will be around in 5 years' than I saw people buying into it. I don't think people are very suprised by this, google has basically destroyed people's faith in the staying power of their products outside of a small core.

Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.

It’s the first step to cancelling it in an year or so.

Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?

Running a cloud infrastructure is something Google is good at. Making AAA games is not. It is entirely consistent with a deep belief in the product for them to reallocate resources toward partnerships rather than trying to spin up a AAA game studio internally.

That's not wrong but I think they've put themselves in a tricky position here: this requires companies to make a non-trivial commitment to their platform. There haven't been any new deals or increased partnerships announced to make this look less like they're just giving up on the idea, and anyone thinking about partnering with them has to be wondering about the odds of getting much return on their investment relative to the risk of Google changing direction again.

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.

This understates the impact of the move. Everyone already was aware that Google was better at running cloud infrastructure than at making AAA games when they started their internal studios. This looks considerably worse than having never tried to make games in internal studios.

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.

Totally agree this is what is happening and Google may be dense enough to believe this is a winning strategy (or a way to salvage their investment). But this is not how you create a competing gaming console, or gaming platform, or whatever Stadia is. Worse, this is a pivot, which also signals Google is ready write-off the entire exercise. That doesn't give consumer and publishers a lot confidence in viability of Stadia.

So as a third-party developer, apart from getting big subsidies, why should I publish on Stadia? Especially after Google has signaled they have no faith in their platform.

Same as for any other platform: because it's one place more you can sell your games.

But that's not what happens. That's why publishers are not porting games to Linux. That's why many console games aren't released on PC. That's why most publishers didn't bother with Stadia to begin with.

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.

But in the context of this discussion, I'm fairly sure "Google has a game studio and is making games for Stadia" was never an important part in the decision of game makers to port to Stadia or not, because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future. (Certainly wasn't for any of the Stadia users I know)

>I'm fairly sure "Google has a game studio and is making games for Stadia" was never an important part in the decision of game makers to port to Stadia or not

... 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.

> The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming.

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)

Let's take a step back. Stadia, as a product and service, has been out for over a year. It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing and now we have an announcement that Google isn't going to bother releasing games for the platform (even though they went to the effort of buying and setting up full fledged gaming studios to do just that - which isn't cheap).

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.

> It has tepid publisher support, and tepid consumer support, without any inkling that it's growing

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.

I guess I was wrong. Stadia is clearly a success.

How did they signal they have no faith in the platform? This move was to consolidate to just focusing on developing the platform.

So they are going to compete with Valve?

Good luck with that.

I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.

I thought the same about reader.

I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.

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...

> I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there.

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.

What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any.

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.

Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates.

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.

Thank you for the links. I have not read these before and there are some very interesting snippets of information I was unaware of.

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.

Feedburner similarly seems like something they could have monetized but nobody felt pressure to try very hard when the company was making so much money. It probably would have been a rounding error in their existing revenue stream but new markets don’t happen by accident.

> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.

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.

Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities.

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.

True, letting you access posts from before you subscribed (if that's what you mean) was unique (as far I know) to Reader.

>Why are people still so surprised

Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.