Even at the time of its death, crossplay, cross save etc. didn't work except for a tiny handful of games. The Stadia Plus Chrome extension made a bunch of improvements on their own. There was never a desktop app. No ultra wide support. No RTX. Never got vsync working right.

In the years it was alive, what did they add? How come GeForce Now saw such activity and Stadia got... nothing? I wouldn't blame the people working on it, but some manager in Google really screwed that up.

It’s very irritating.

Having only OpenGL/D3D was like if the only way you could do network programming was via python. Python is easy enough to use but it’s not well optimized in every use case. Vulkan is like the C of graphics programming. It’s useful when you want to get in there at a lower level, because the higher level abstractions leave too much performance on the table.

OpenGL was a high level interface, so to speak. And due to this, it made some things easier and other things harder. Most notably, you didn't have the low level access some people/projects wished for. Some time ago, there was a push for a more low level interface and Vulkan was supposed to be the platform-independent, open solution. Naturally, when your interface is lower level, you also need to provide more boilerplate. So Vulkan is slower to get up and running but that's not a particular fault of Vulkan I'd say. The story around it is rather interesting. It is based on AMD Mantle which was discontinued on behalf of Vulkan. Unfortunately, not every vendor was pleased with an open interface. Microsoft released DirectX 12 and Apple released Metal as direct competitors with very similar (if not identical) goals, fragmenting the whole landscape in the process.

Today, Vulkan is supported on Linux and Windows. Apple provides GPU drivers for macOS themselves (not the GPU vendor) and never implemented Vulkan support to not cannibalize its own Metal (I suppose). However, there exists MoltenVK, an open project that creates a translation layer from Vulkan to Metal.

And if they did want to stream a game from time to time (for me it was being able to play on a laptop anywhere, not just on my own LAN), Steam games were usually cheaper from sales and resellers, there was actual multiplayer, and the Steam ecosystem has a bunch of other advantages. It was just a better service.

And GeForce Now had better hardware, ray tracing, customizable graphics settings, vsync, etc.

If you don't need to stream a game, well, you don't need any of these services. But if you did, GeForce Now and Steam were just plain better than Stadia.

GFN is good especially if you live in an area serviced by it's RTX 3080 streaming "rigs" which make it reasonably good value for money vs the cost of building an equivalent PC. But it's still the most expensive service on the market PLUS you also have to BYO library which rules out entire groups of potential users - Nvidia knows this as well based on how hard they're pushing the free-to-play titles. On top of that a lot of titles aren't even playable on it; I have a steam library of ~700 titles and apparently only ~140ish of them can be played on GFN.

Personally I like the GFN idea of being able to "rent" hardware and that's a business model other companies have proven works to a certain degree since ~2015 (Shadow.tech being a good example). However I don't think it has the same mass market appeal of the other surviving services which give you the hardware + a huge library of content just like Netflix/Disney+/Stan etc.

Something being tragic doesn't make it not a waste of time. The writing was on the wall since day one. Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down being offered by the most ADHD company in existence. If you chose to spend your time and energy working on that and expected to accomplish anything other than being paid you were a fool.

Eh that's true for Steam, Epic, GoG, et al. If anything, regular people trust Google way more than those other companies since they use the browser/search engine/mail/youtube every single day

I do think it was doomed from the start, but only because the subset of people that have high speed internet, disposable income, like gaming and DON'T already own a PC or console is a very very small market

I think it's appropriate enough to interpret the commenter in jest and see that their point is that google spent 1/nth of the required time/resources necessary for it to succeed.

In that light, it reads to me more like having some understanding for the people working on it that they were set up to fail, and the failure is not a reflection of their effort.

On your first day, you're asked to design a big toothed wheel. You ask your boss, will this be used to mulch babies? No no no, he says. It will be used to chop up entirely unrelated organic material. You spend three years on it, and once finished, it's immediately incorporated into the Baby Mulcher 3000, the next generation baby mulcher, which can puree one hundred toddlers per hour.

Everyone starts yelling at you for building a baby mulcher. But it wasn't your decision! You spent years working on it! This is so unfair!

Unfair, maybe. But was it unpredictable?

Fortunately you are here to be anonymously offended on their behalf.

I didn't work on Stadia, but I did work on Google Fiber for a couple years only to have almost all that work cancelled, and I'm still sad about it many years later. At the time, I really wouldn't have appreciated people on HN rubbing salt in the wound.

In fact I think Google has some of the best engineers in the world. Sadly, they're handled by some of the worst management and leadership in history. Your CEO has no vision or charisma and the whole company is just spinning in place, waiting for something to happen. Your middle management looks like little fiefdoms actively working against each other in some eternal civil strife. Google is its own worst enemy.

From the outside it looks like you guys are a bunch of really smart lab rats stuck in some perverse maze, being forced to run little Hunger Games style competitions to entertain some higher power.

I wouldn't want to work there for a million dollars. It jumped the shark a decade ago.

Fiber was just another tragedy in a long long list, another fight Google picked and then chickened out of. Google hasn't had a major success in recent memory, just a graveyard of half-assed attempts. But that's a bigger cultural problem at your company, not the fault of any engineer or single team. I sincerely feel for you, and I hope you got out and found something more constructive.

Edit: Sorry, not Fi, Fiber.

@GoogleStadia "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions." Jul 29, 2022

2 Months ago