
Google's ambitious push into gaming is floundering - Impossible
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2
======
polytely
It's really interesting if you compare it to Epic's entry into the game
selling business. What they did was:

1\. Appeal to developers by making exclusivity deals with them (e.g: we give
you a bag of money upfront if you only sell your game via our store for a
year) which is really beneficial for developers as the game business is quite
risky. The developer gets guaranteed cash and Epic gets everyone who would buy
that game on their platform (minus the people who are outraged by the
exclusivity deal)

2\. Appeal to the customers by giving away free games every week. Epic pays
developers for you, so you get a free game while the developer also gets paid.
Epic wants you to have a library on their platform so you keep coming back,
and because you need to visit the store to claim the free games they literally
train their customers to use the store, from there it's a small step to
convert them to paying customers with good deals.

It's absolutely baffling to me Google didn't do anything like this, they have
literally more money then they could spend, yet they didn't do anything to get
people to actually use their service. Compare it to the Gmail or Chrome launch
suddenly there was this 'free' product you could jump onto, it was
technologically superior and exciting and it came out of nowhere. Imagine if
they did _that_ with Stadia, just suddenly release it without fanfare, all
your favorite games are on there and you can play X hours a week for free or
something like that.

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
Epic's entry into the game storefront business has been a drama filled shit-
show. It has not been well received by very vocal swaths of the gaming
community. In fact, their strategy of buying out developers for exclusivity
rights is one of the reasons they've drawn so much ire.

See the controversy where Borderlands games were getting review bombed on
Steam, because Epic secured exclusivity rights for Borderlands 3.

[https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-
on-s...](https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-steam-
over-epic-1833818454)

In the gaming world, you're basically damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If Google had aggressively gone for exclusives, they'd be getting the same
backlash that Epic has gotten/is getting. But since they didn't they might be
getting an equal but opposite sort of backlash now.

~~~
prostheticvamp
The epic approach gets a lot of hate from a vocal minority. Everyone else has
had multiple storefronts for a while, and having -one- more is borderline
meaningless. As long as they don’t jack up the price, how many people give a
shit which executable they have to click on to launch a game?

~~~
imtringued
The Epic Store isn't supported on Linux. When they turn existing games on
Steam into Epic store exclusives I can't play the games I have purchased.

~~~
prostheticvamp
> vocal minority

> Linux gamer

I fail to see the contradiction. Per Steam’s October 2019 user survey, all
Linux distros together total 0.43% of their users. I am using the notably pro-
Linux Steam as a benchmark for how many gamers are affected by this.

------
Animats
_" 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."_

That's a terrible reputation for any company to have.

In addition to Stadia, it seems to be killing off Improbable's Spatial OS,
which is a back-end system for very large world MMOs. Originally, that had to
run on Google Cloud. Three of the first games shut down, partly because the
costs for that service are high. Nobody big is using it.

~~~
bartread
When Microsoft launched Xbox they suffered pretty terrible losses for a number
of years but they always knew that was going to happen[1], and they were
willing to accept it because they were playing the long game.

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

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

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

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

~~~
bakuninsbart
I have an incredibly good internet connection since I'm working from home, but
because I only play like 2-4 hours a week I can't really justify investing in
a very expensive gaming computer. I need a laptop for work, and investing in
an extra platform just for those 4 hours? Stadia might be a very good
compromise for me, and I think there are quite a few others like me out there,
especially in the youngest generation who mostly use mobile in the first
place.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
"A very expensive gaming computer"

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

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

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

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

~~~
Shakahs
Where would that GPU go? My laptop doesn’t have a place for it, and doesn’t
have the connections for an eGPU. A $300 delta would only be true if I had a
desktop.

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

~~~
thu2111
Next to the laptop, believe it or not.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208544)

 _eGPUs are supported by any Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac1 running macOS High
Sierra 10.13.4 or later_

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

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

~~~
aagha
God it's so frustrating to see posts like yours.

[https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-
share.asp...](https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx)

~~~
throwaway-9320
Thunderbolt 3 based eGPU-s work very well on Windows-based machines, too.

------
Shank
I have Stadia! Here are a few impressions:

1\. The game catalog is totally the most important thing and they don't have
any really big games. I'm not a Fortnite person, but they don't have that, nor
Apex, nor PUBG. Battle Royale may not be the biggest thing in gaming anymore,
but this is the type of game that at least a lot of people enjoy and they have
none on the platform.

2\. They sold Stadia as being able to achieve higher quality than local
hardware at a fraction of the cost. Yet it's been shown multiple times that
the games running on Stadia are running at less than promised quality, with
techniques like upscaling being used for 4K instead of native 4K:
[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-addresses-
comp...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-addresses-complaints-
of-sub-4k-image-quality-on-stadia/).

3\. As a person who wants to play with a keyboard and a mouse on a computer, I
get really frustrated that the Stadia output resolution is fixed. You can't
output 1440p to a monitor at all, and 4K is only available if you have a
Chromecast. Why?

I've also tried Shadow and GeForce now. Shadow is easily the best in terms of
quality, because you can run at arbitrary resolutions and pump the bandwidth
up to a max of 70Mbps down, which is astoundingly good looking compared to
what Stadia offers. GeForce Now is great too, but point 3 applies to it: you
can't run at non-preset resolutions, which really stinks if you have a bigger
monitor with a higher native resolution. However, both Shadow and GeForce Now
leverage existing game libraries, look better, and are generally more
approachable than Stadia's "rebuy everything, run at lower quality, and lack
significant features" plan.

~~~
SeeDave
>Yet it's been shown multiple times that the games running on Stadia are
running at less than promised quality, with techniques like upscaling being
used for 4K instead of native 4K

I remember having tons of fun playing Portal and Left 4 Dead with buddies in
my dorm room when 720p was pretty high end. Is 4K really that necessary to
have a good time with a video game?

Or perhaps I'm... officially old :(

~~~
Shank
I don't really care for 4K personally. I just want "native" because I can't
stand looking at blurry interfaces. I can definitely tell when I'm running a
1080p game on a 1440p native monitor and everything is being stretched up. I
would take lower settings just to have a clear UI, but I can't do that.

In terms of raw quality with streaming game services, bitrate matters much
more than resolution. 4K mandates higher bitrate to deliver the pixels in a
timely fashion. All of the services have some upper cap on bitrate, and if you
can drive that up (can downstream clients support it?) then you can increase
the streamed game quality to be closer to what's actually being output. This
is most noticeable in areas where it's extremely dark or shadow detail is
important, less so in light settings.

But either way, quality is a combination of the game settings (what is being
output to the card), the output resolution (the scale of things you see), and
the bitrate (what is being sent down for you to actually view). If these three
components are mis-tuned, the quality of the image you're looking at will be
lower due to one of those components.

~~~
daemin
I agree with Linus from LTT where he said it's because the TV and Phone
industry have effectively ignored 1440p as a resolution. Movies are either HD
(1080p) or 4k and so TV and phone panels are made in those resolutions.
Monitors may be 1440p (which I find most useful) but only native PC games
actually output at that resolution.

This really goes to show that Stadia is a video streaming platform (i.e.
something to help compete with Twitch) rather than a game playing platform.

------
axaxs
I'm both bullish and bearish on cloud gaming, if that makes sense. I have
Stadia, and the tech is really nice, but as pointed out, there are no games.
Further, you have to buy/rebuy all your games just for Stadia, which may not
exist soon(ish).

Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech
but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win.
But biggest of all, most of the games are just via Steam. So buy it once, play
on PC or ShieldTV, your choice. This was, as it turns out, too good to be
true. In the last month, at least two huge publishers pulled out, essentially
disabling the ability to play a purchased Steam game via Geforce Now. Now
their fate is looking questionable as well.

One month ago, I would have said Geforce Now is absolutely the way to go.
Today, I'd tell anyone curious just to wait and see what happens this year.

~~~
asdff
Give it 5 years and xbox and playstation will have their equivalent cloud
offerings, but far more refined and with their expansive and ever growing
catalogs. The players in the market now are doomed, but at least it can be
assured the industry giants pick up the pieces from when google inevitably
cancels this project and make a better product like they tend to do.

~~~
Narishma
Playstation already has it and they've been operating it for many years.

~~~
asdff
I'm putting 5 years on when it overtakes buying the console in market share.

~~~
daemin
It will never overtake having a local device which you can play games on, and
people that think so are delusional or are trying to sell you something on
subscription.

There will be people streaming the games they are playing, there will be
people playing streaming games, but it won't ever overtake playing on a local
device. (I include handheld consoles, phones, consoles, PCs in this).

------
remir
Let's say I'm a casual gamers, without a console or a gaming PC and I briefly
heard of Stadia. I imagine this is their target audience.

I went to stadia.google.com and there's no catalog with the available games on
the platform. There's nothing that show me, with trailers, videos, what's on
there and why I should buy this. Remember, I am a casual gamers, so I don't
know much about what is out there in terms of games.

What I see is some images of games that tells me nothing, a link to buy the
service and links to both App stores. That's it.

Basically, this is Google assuming, once again, that because they're Google,
that people would be tripping over themselves to sign up for this. Total lack
of empathy.

I ended up closing the tab.

~~~
100-xyz
I visited the page. Pathetic. I think someone did that page in an hour?

------
ineedasername
Unless it's a game I really, really want to play right NOW, I wishlist it and
wait for deep discounts, then purchase. This leaves me with a large back
catalog of games I haven't played yet, from which I choose when I'm done with
one game and want to choose another.

Given the frequent discount sales model popularized by Steam (and maybe Humble
Bundle was first to that?) I think a lot of avid gamers are in a similar
position.

As a result, game streaming services that doesn't let me bring my own games is
a complete non-starter for me. Especially for a sales model like Stadia where
I really don't own it. GoG is an excellent storefront to safeguard your
library with DRM free games and archiveable installers. Even Steam has made
sounds about finding a way to let you keep your library if they were ever to
go under. But past failures like Onlive have left gamers bereft of purchases.
I think I lost some games when Direct2Drive had some issues or transfer of
ownership years ago.

If Google really wants to make a viable product, they should be looking at
integrating Stadia streaming tech into compute instances that let me install
Steam or any other storefront or stand alone game.

If you're looking for such a service, you could do worse than Shadow or
Paperspace. I demoed GeForce Now and liked it better, but they're also running
into some trouble over not firming up publisher agreements, so I'd wait for
the dust to settle there in the next months.

~~~
ehnto
The frequent discount model is popular in most retail now. Many people don't
shop for clothing unless it is on sale because they have been trained that it
will be on sale soon enough.

~~~
ineedasername
Very true. I know I can get work casual clothes from the usual shops if I wait
a few weeks at a 30-40% discount.

------
crazygringo
This article seems misguided.

It's assuming Stadia is "floundering" because it doesn't have a ton of indie
titles, assuming those are "critical" for success.

But are they? The article is clear that Google is working with "EA, Bethesda,
Ubisoft, 2K Games, and Rockstar Games".

Google is obviously consciously choosing a product strategy of starting with
major publishers rather than indie ones.

Now I don't personally know if that's the right strategy. But it's clearly the
strategy Google is pursuing, so they should be judged on whether that's
working.

Judging solely on the presence of indie titles just seems weird.

~~~
iandanforth
I paid for the Founders Edition, eagerly awaited its release, played a couple
games for a few hours and haven't touched it since.

I want to play games like I watch Netflix, free with lots of variety. Indie
game makers would keep me coming back for no other reason than I want to try
new things regularly and I have zero interest in paying $60 for titles I've
already played or had no interest in in the first place.

Dr. Kate Compton articulates what I want well in this twitter thread:

[https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1197227916158996481](https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1197227916158996481)

~~~
setpatchaddress
Twitter won’t load for me right now, but it sounds like you want Apple Arcade.

~~~
SanchoPanda
Twitter will load differently for me depending upon referrer; try reloading by
selecting url and hitting enter to make it a direct thing.

------
dreamcompiler
"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."

There it is, right there. Nobody takes Google seriously on any new initiative
outside their core wheelhouse. We've all been burned too many times.

~~~
ehsankia
I find this point so overplayed lately.

Can someone here name "so many other (paid) services" that Google has killed?
And even for free ones, how many major services can you name of the scale of
Stadia? G+ is really the only one, and maybe Allo. Hangouts is still not
killed though its future is uncertain, GPM is apparently being migrated and
Inbox was mostly a UI over Gmail.

Other than those, almost every other item in those cemetery site is a trivial
side project, not even close to being comparable to Stadia.

~~~
72deluxe
Out of interest, what is the alternative to Hangouts from Google? I have Duo
but I don't want to video call all the time. I would like to IM and send
pictures (without WhatsApp).

Does Google have an alternative or are they just ditching it for no purpose?

~~~
ehsankia
It's still not clear, but I doubt they will fully ditch it. My understanding
is that Hangout Chat is going to replace it, but the current iteration is very
enterprise centric (feels like Slack). The fact that they still haven't killed
Hangout makes me think that they will adapt Chat to be closer to the old
Hangout and swap the two.

------
valas
The article does not support the title. The facts also do not support the
article.

Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last
week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from
SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon
(Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one
claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some
clearly do.

Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click
factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing
page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few
articles to that extent. They know how to run business.

Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is
not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible
that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and
they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are
imaginary?

Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when
someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.

~~~
fiblye
3 indie games is not exactly a lot. 3 indie games is what's launched on Steam
any given 10 minutes. If you mean _huge_ indie games, Steam gets about one or
more of those a day.

And it seems like the Steamworld developer is quite serious about porting
games to Stadia, since 4 games out of the 10 you mentioned are all related to
Steamworld in some way. That doesn't strike me as a healthy indie market if
it's so heavily sustained by one developer.

And announcing 4 more indie titles coming soon doesn't leave me with any
confidence. It's not much.

~~~
valas
I agree that the number of games compared to established platforms is small.

But what can you expect? This is a new entrant, all the new platforms faced
similar issues. Some overcome it, some didn't, we'll see how it goes here. For
what I know, Google already invested a lot and has deep pockets.

~~~
fiblye
The facts seem to indicate that it's floundering if nearly half of its indie
titles are from one minor developer. Indie devs often readily hop on new
platforms (given that development isn't unreasonably difficult) since it's a
wide open market and they have a fresh chance to get in before it's too
crowded.

Nobody is eager to put anything on Stadia. As an indie developer myself,
Stadia would at best be an afterthought long after I've comfortably released
my games elsewhere. It doesn't seem worth the time investment.

------
sdinsn
I just don't see the market for this. Powerful computers are becoming cheaper
and cheaper; the PC game market is continuing to expand.

I don't see the comparison to other cloud media services like Netflix or Hulu-
on Stadia, you have to pay for the service AND the individual items, instead
of just the service. As far as I know, there isn't any other business like
this. I don't think this is appealing to consumers.

~~~
drusepth
Some of the most exciting potentials for cloud streaming for me are some of
the things they've toted as not possible on consumer hardware.

Most of these are just related to scale (like 1,000-person Battle Royales,
500-car races, MMOs that don't have to shard players in the same area into
separate "worlds", etc), but there's other features that'd be exciting to see
when games have effectively unlimited resources (instead of having to worry
about what's available on each consumer's PC); Google's got a lot of resources
in NLP and language recognition/generation they could apply to NPC dialogues,
massive amounts of resources could make enemy/npc AI way more impressive than
what you'd see on local hardware (I'd love to play against DeepMind's Dota 2
bots!), or even something as mundane as Maps-like navigation as a first-party
feature to help you navigate through game worlds.

I'm less excited about some of the streaming-based features they've advertised
(streamers being able to share save-states with viewers that viewers can click
to start playing from, viewers being able to instantly jump in and play live
with streamers, being easier to stream at 4K while also playing in 4K, etc),
but I guess those are probably appealing to some people also.

~~~
fooey
Things that aren't possible on consumer hardware are implausible to be
financially viable as an on demand service.

Even for Google, it will never affordable to spin up giant clusters of servers
for one person playing a video game.

The basic premise of Stadia being able to match and surpass a high end desktop
gaming machine makes no sense. The cloud isn't magic, and it takes people
thinking it is magic to buy the pitch. Stadia reminds me of SimCity 2013
promising it had to be online based because of all the magic cloud power they
needed to make it work, which was almost immediately proven to be utter
bullshit.

There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU,
and their promise of 4k at 60 FPS takes a very serious amount of specialized
gaming hardware.

~~~
drusepth
>There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU

I think the whole idea of economics at scale (and much of cloud computing) is
predicated on the idea that users want to use that $1,000 GPU without having
to pay $1,000 to own it, and that companies can sell access to many users per
$1,000 GPU to recoup the costs of that GPU, both over time (as the initial
cost gets amortized over recurring subscription/usage revenues) and
horizontally (selling access to many users who timeshare that GPU, maximizing
its use compared to owning one you'd only use N hours per day).

Scale that up to thousands of GPUs making a profit from hundreds of thousands
of users each accessing those resources at a cost cheaper than what it'd take
for them to purchase those resources for themselves and you've got the magic
of the "cloud".

tl;dr Users can pay <$1,000 for access to a $1,000 GPU and companies can
afford to do so because the number of users multiplied by what they're paying
exceeds the cost and upkeep of that GPU. Everyone* wins.

------
flipgimble
Google is now starting to feel the economic impact of being a known "mercurial
company" that cannot be trusted with any long term strategic partnerships. see
[https://gcemetery.co](https://gcemetery.co)

As a customer, why would I "buy" a game that I will never own, on a service
that is likely to close on a whim. As a game developer why would I invest time
and effort supporting a new platform from a company without a proven track
record in the game industry.

This will severely limit their impact on the industry, and the executives have
nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of trust.

------
remote_phone
I’m glad to see that Google is finally paying for their actions by having
market forces reject them for retreating so quickly. Anything they try can’t
be just a toe-dip now. They need to actually invest heavily otherwise no one
will trust them. Good. They have fucked over way too many developers by
dangling a promise and then cutting support quickly.

------
pfdietz
Shouldn't a potential user of this service just expect it to be
unceremoniously discontinued, like so many other Google products?

~~~
asdff
Yep, but then you can switch to xbox cloud in a couple years and it will
probably be excellent with a huge catalog of current and legacy titles and
supported until the end of time, or whenever you can no longer afford $10 a
month.

------
_bxg1
Google is an engineer-driven company. They're great at building solutions, but
terrible at packaging them up as products. Making them desirable, and easy to
understand, and just having any kind of unifying vision at all. Nobody who
understands this fact is the least bit shocked about how Stadia is turning
out.

~~~
martin-adams
I agree with this, but only for their consumer products. I gave up on the
Google Home and went back to Alexa. It was like they just don’t try to use
their own products themselves, and once they tick the box of releasing,
improvements seem to be nonexistent.

Admittedly, most of my issues were because I have a GSuite account, but when
it can’t read my own calendar or set a reminder, you realise they just don’t
care. Alexa can read my GSuite calendar just fine.

I always approach Google products with caution.

~~~
D2187645
Could it be possible that employees designing the google home ecosystem can't
actually afford homes in the bay area? If everyone is renting, then they
likely have to make do, and just imagine what owning a home might be like.

~~~
wutbrodo
What does owning a home have to do with the comment above? Calendar
integration has nothing to do with whether you pay a mortgage or rent.

------
Waterluvian
It's interesting to me how a company like Google can still do things so half-
assedly. You'd kind of expect with their resources, they'd to flirt with an
idea, then if they commit, to do it fully. Like, wildly cheap, subsidized
gaming solution until they own the market and then turn up the price.

The only answer I can come up with is, "this _is_ their version of flirting
with an idea." In which case I think the problem is nobody else realises that
given the scale and price tag.

~~~
abvdasker
Maybe this is silly given Google's vast resources, but I do worry about the
future of a company that seems to consistently fall short when it comes to
marketing and product management.

Google probably still has a lot of the best engineering talent in the world,
but without coherent product strategy and marketing what good does it do? When
was the last time Google made a big bet that achieved the same level of
success as their earlier products? Does Google's inability to diversify its
revenue stream make it more vulnerable to disruption than say, Amazon, in the
long run?

~~~
lmm
> Does Google's inability to diversify its revenue stream make it more
> vulnerable to disruption than say, Amazon, in the long run?

Yes. If ads went away, Google would collapse. Google's core search experience
is not _that_ good any more, though it's still the best in town; you have to
wonder what would happen if Amazon or Facebook decided to actually go after
search in a serious way.

~~~
dodobirdlord
They do. It is deeply irritating to Amazon that people mostly search Amazon's
product catalogue via Google, and only actually navigate to an Amazon
controlled page when they go specifically to the product page. Amazon has
thrown tremendous resources into building a search experience over _their own
databases_ and it still sucks compared to the one Google produced by scraping
their website.

~~~
lmm
I'm sure some part of Amazon must be deeply irritated, just as some part of
Google must be deeply irritated that so many people buying products after
searching on Google go to Amazon rather than through Google Shopping. But both
Amazon Search and Google Shopping suck badly enough that I struggle to believe
they are high priorities for their respective companies, whether that's based
on an objective view of their own business or because (tacitly or explicitly)
they've decided to avoid fighting each other directly.

------
WoahNoun
Google has consistently been terrible at large corporate deal making. It's the
same reason I have no faith in Google Cloud as a future product. Their tech
may be interesting, but they can't court and maintain strong relationships
with other large corporations. And Stadia's success will ultimately come down
to their ability to make deals with the largest publishers.

------
torgian
I think the other problem with Stadia, and why both consumers and developers
are wary of it, is simply due to its streaming idea.

Even within major cities, internet connectivity can suck a lot. Couple that
with data caps, and streaming games becomes a chore to play. Nobody wants to
play a game that “buffers”( we already have to deal with loading screens! )

I don’t think this is feasible in the States, and even other western
countries.

The exception would be Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, where there are
no data caps and internet is much faster and cheaper. The market is different,
however, so I don’t think there would be much success.

And then there’s the ownership argument.

------
reilly3000
Despite its failings, Stadia has few complaints about its killer feature:
streaming at decently high FPS. Whether Google pulls it off or not ultimately
isn't the question- the question is whether game streaming over the web will
be the norm in 10 years, and I think that Stadia's initial rollout has proven
the tech out.

I'm rather fond of physical game media. I like the way it looks on a shelf,
and how I can always trade it at a local store for something else. I like that
I can demo titles via Redbox. I like that I own my hardware and can get some
value out of it if I sell it. Downloadable games don't have those qualities,
but at least they can (generally) be played offline and still allow for
permanent ownership. That said, all of those qualities have essentially
vanished with music and video streaming and gaming isn't fundamentally
different than those mediums. Look at home stereo systems over the past 50
years, where audiophile quality has given way to convenient delivery almost
universally.

Any player in the game streaming business needs to have big metal, fat pipes,
and money to burn on acquisition, so it does seem like a somewhat of a natural
monopoly.

~~~
sixothree
My experience with the technology supporting YouTube TV being so lackluster, I
am reluctant to ever consider Stadia. By lackluster I mean buffering on
episode load, waiting for the rewind feature to start working.

------
m0zg
I bet at least one googler's ambitious push into becoming a director or a VP
is succeeding though.

------
rodgerd
The article throws up two problems: the obvious one is that no-one trusts
Google not to lose interest in a year or two and flush everything into the
Google Sewer that all sorts of other killer products have been dumped into.

The other, though, is even harder for Google to solve: it's their culture of
contempt for creators. Google's most successful products are all founded on
the idea that content is worthless, and that whatever Google brings to the
party is so valuable that paying in exposure, or the opportunity to
participate in surveillance capitalism via advertising, ought to be enough to
make you happy.

Search increasingly repackages other people's work, and Google are happy to
leverage their monopoly to delist you if you don't like it; AMP ditto. News is
wholesale the same story. YouTube spent years turning a blind eye to rampant
copyright violation (particularly for music videos) to build itself into a
monopoly. Google Scholar, Google Books - almost every Google success story is
based on the same formula: take other people's work, repackage it, tell them
you'll see them in court if they don't like it, and drop you from search
(hell, at one point, Google banned a news outlet for a story about concerns
with Google Maps' privacy aspects, if you want to understand how freely
they'll use their monopoly).

Here, though, the creators have many outlets competing for their output, and
an audience who are well-engaged with Steam, the Windows Store/Xbox,
PlayStation Store, and so on. But Google's culture appears to be too arrogant
to actually recognise the value of creators.

~~~
perl4ever
"tell them you'll see them in court if they don't like it, and drop you from
search"

You tack on "drop you from search" as if it were an afterthought. But the
"copyright violation" or "taking other peoples' work" _is_ the process of
making it searchable. What logical possibility is there other than doing it or
not doing it?

------
mmsmatt
I rent a Shadow instance for $35 a month, and play my entire Steam library on
a MacBook Air. New games, old games, whatever. It just works, given good
broadband and an Ethernet cable.

I think the future of "cloud gaming" looks a lot more like Shadow than Stadia.

~~~
p1necone
Don't underestimate the importance of marketing. History is full of very
successful products that are dogshit compared to competitors but have flashy
marketing and celebrity endorsements.

------
smt88
Still an accurate headline if you replace "gaming" with...

\- music streaming

\- chat

\- phone hardware

\- ISP

\- health

As far as I know, they have two profitable products: ads and G Suite.

~~~
scarface74
And according to many reports, they are losing market share with GSuite...

[http://www.cloudcomputing-
news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3...](http://www.cloudcomputing-
news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-365-usage-goes-and-leaving-g-suite-behind-
says-research/)

------
FillardMillmore
> But where are the dozens of indie hits that helped bolster the libraries of
> Sony's PlayStation 4, Microsoft's Xbox One, and Nintendo's Switch? Where are
> the games like "Bloodstained," "Shovel Knight," "Dead Cells," and "Untitled
> Goose Game" — the blockbuster indie games that sell millions of copies and
> inspire sequels?

I think this points to a somewhat more important problem for Google. As the
article points out, to incentivize developers and their studios to do the work
to move their games to the Stadia platform, Google would need to offer to them
the benefit of a base of dedicated users. If we consider that many prospective
users may already be using Steam or home gaming consoles, the question
becomes: how does Google attract these users to their platform? In my opinion,
as someone who has played games from an early age, the best way to do that
would be to either develop a game for the platform themselves (however
feasible that may be) or hire a studio to produce a game for the platform with
at least a temporary exclusivity deal. I've known many young kids throughout
my childhood who were inspired to go out and get a game system simply because
there's that one game that can't be played anywhere else. Whether it's Mario
on Nintendo, Halo on Microsoft, or Uncharted on Sony, every gaming platform
has historically had exclusive games that can't be played anywhere else.
Imagine if Google Stadia had secured Fortnite as an exclusive game - Fortnite
would probably have not been as successful as it is now, but Stadia may likely
have received a serious boost in consumer attention, all things staying the
same.

~~~
parineum
And that's exactly how steam was introduced, via half life 2

------
pjmlp
No surprise here, even their Android game related tooling is a joke compared
with what Apple offers on iOS SDK.

SpriteKite, SceneKit and MetalKit aren't without their share of bugs, however
on Android's side they are just inexistent.

At any GDC, or IO, the only thing Google seems to be able to talk about is
PlayServices, even the Vulkan support on Android is a joke, asking developers
to clone github repositories and compile shaderc from scratch.

They just don't know how to talk to game developers.

------
p1necone
I don't know about anyone else, but if any of these cloud gaming services want
me as a customer they need to give me access to my existing
Steam/GOG/Epic/Whatever library on their cloud system.

I'd also _much_ rather build my own system though, unless they put a
datacenter in my suburb I don't see this ever being a better experience than
my own machine.

------
lostgame
I don’t get the concept of buying a console or using a service that streams
the games, meaning I cannot play them offline (I play games mostly in Transit,
buses, subways, etc that don’t have wifi) - and meaning I ultimately don’t own
the games I buy, and when Google predictably shuts this service down as it is
notorious for doing, I don’t have anything to show for my investment?

I would never buy a serious console game on anything but hard media.

In a couple years, all the money people spent on games for Stadia will
literally have been completely wasted - and my Sega Genesis I got when I was
six, and the games I paid for 20 years ago will probably still work (I’ll
admit bitrot is a concern, but that’s a hugely different issue), along with my
PS5 or whatever I’m using at that point.

This is a zero-value, long-term net-loss concept for me. It boggles the mind.

------
LatteLazy
I feel a bit like the world needed this in the 90s. I remember when you needed
to constantly upgrade kit to play the latest games. Processors, RAM and the
GPU all had a lifespan of about 2 years before they were obsolete. That was
part of what pushed consoles: you knew you'd get 5 plus years of Sony PS?
games even if they looked a bit blocky by year 4.

But hardware has out run gaming needs now. My 6 year old PC plays the latest
games and streams 1080p at the same time without issue. I could probably mine
some crypto in the background.

If I was constantly upgrading, a "rental" service like this would make sense.
But I'm not. I'm struggling to justify any changes to my setup. So why would I
pay to rent someone else's?

And thats without the fact that Steam already offers games virtually on demand
or that consoles have a big chunk of the market sewn up...

------
iamthepieman
I think I'm one of the target markets for stadia. A big time gamer in my
teenss and college/early post college days before career and family made me
feel out more casual games. I only play a few AAA title to completion in a
year now but have a large library of games on Steam, Epic and GoG that I never
had the time or interest to finish.

I was excited about Stadia when I first heard of it but needing to buy
hardware for a service that will likely be languishing in a year and sunsetted
in two just didn't interest me. I'm more likely to spend money on a 8 times
more expensive VR set than a cheap piece of hardware that will be collecting
dust in a drawer soon.

Google's reputation for discontinuing projects already influences me. Is this
something that people outside the HN bubble think about?

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
You don't need to buy hardware for Stadia (sort of). At the moment, I do think
you need to be invited by an existing member, to get an activation code ,
without buying the "founder's edition" \- which is a controller and a
chromecast ultra.

But in general, you don't need either of those things to play games on stadia.
You can use any controller (or kb/m, and any device that runs chrome, AFAIK).

~~~
georgemcbay
I don't think this is a good defense of the service, in fact quite the
opposite. The fact that you can't just buy access to it without buying the
chromecast ultra hardware bundle just shows how half-baked the whole thing is.

Especially since the chromecast ultra doesn't support non-Stadia controllers,
so if you do want to play with say an Xbox controller google is bundlefucking
you with hardware you will never use, which certainly doesn't make the service
look any more attractive to people who might otherwise be interested.

------
me551ah
IMO the biggest mistake they made was going with Linux instead of Windows.
They were aiming to be Netflix for gaming but while Netflix could add any
title to it's service as soon as they got the rights for it, developers need
to port their games to Linux(& Vulkan) to run on Stadia. This is not an easy
feat. For Destiny 2 Google had to depute a couple of its developers to work
out of Bungie's office for over 6 months.

[https://ajit.dhiwal.com/2020/01/google-stadia-shouldve-
used-...](https://ajit.dhiwal.com/2020/01/google-stadia-shouldve-used-
windows.html)

~~~
ThrowawayR2
1) Microsoft has no incentive to cut a deal with or assist Google since they
have their own online gaming service.

2) Google would be highly unenthusiastic about using Windows both culturally
and because of the need to hire large numbers of engineers with deep Windows
expertise.

------
akhilcacharya
I do genuinely wonder what the appeal was to build an entirely new and
slightly different hardware platform (using AMD hardware, like PS4/Xbox) when
they could have easily licensed Gamestream like what Shadowplay did? Was
NVIDIA not willing? Google probably already has massive data centers full of
Nvidia GPUs.

Stadia is DOA, because of its absurd pricing and rollout, really strange
design decisions (usb controller for select phones, but wireless for
Chromecast?)

~~~
agildehaus
I already own a Chromecast Ultra. Why would I want to pay for another one? I
have no idea why I can't buy a controller by itself for $69.

It will be interesting to see how they treat paying customers when they
inevitably shut this thing down.

------
m3kw9
Looks like they underestimates the power exclusive AAA titles to bring people
in their platforms. Platforms like Steam and Epic without exclusive games is
like buying bananas from the super market, I get them which ever is
convenient. Having exclusives is like traveling, it brings people to you
because certain things only that locale has and you must be there

------
fourmyle
The main issue is streaming services have too much latency to attract core
gamers. I barely find Steam Link playable on my home network. Nothing breaks
immersion more than lag. It’s like page load times. The occasional jitter
matters. The lag spikes and compression artifacts are killers not the average
latency.

------
johnwheeler
At the end of the day, I think it boils down to simple arrogance and
entitlement.

When you’re the owner of a successful indie game company and you’ve got some
partnerships exec treating you like “big me little you” because I work at
Google and you’re an indie who needs me and will work for free, it’s a real
turn off.

------
techntoke
I think Stadia would make a good platform for virtual desktops running a fun
blown Linux OS with Android App support. Almost every app you'd need for
Windows has an Android app that is comparable. Maybe they could even support
Windows too as a paid add-on.

------
shmerl
I'm surprised Google still didn't use something like Wine (+dxvk) to bring
more games to Stadia sooner, while the library of native Linux/Vulkan games is
gradually growing (which isn't going to be super fast process). Is there a
reason for that?

~~~
ehsankia
You can't just "bring games to Stadia". First off you need the approval from
the devs. We've seen Blizzard and Bethesda pulling out their games from
GeForce Now. Next, the way Stadia is designed, it requires actual porting to
use its APIs, which is a non-trivial amount of work required from the devs.

You can argue if it's the right design or not, but as it is, it takes time and
effort to move games to Stadia, so it's not as trivial as just running them on
Wine.

~~~
shmerl
Adding support for Stadia SDK (for remote input and video streaming and such)
is not as difficult, as writing a Vulkan renderer in the first place, for a
game that doesn't have it. Incentives are measured against the difficulty of
the whole work.

I'm sure, using Wine+dxvk as a first step for existing games is a lot easier
than writing native Vulkan renderer. In this sense, Google can actually
provide one level of incentives for native games (higher one), and another for
Wine use case.

I.e. developers can first release it in Wine (phase 1), and then make a native
version for example (phase 2) to improve performance.

What Google could do, is to provide integration of their SDK with Wine for
phase 1 above.

------
anonytrary
Well, username checks out, since many people considered Stadia to be a
physically _impossible_ endeavor. The napkin math/physics behind Stadia barely
checks out, but I still think it's worth continuing development on it.

------
agoodthrowaway
Gaming is hard. It’s hard to disrupt when we have PlayStation, XBox, and
Nintendo. Xbox was able to break in because they had Halo. Nintendo has tons
of games people love.

PlayStation has a great ecosystem. You need more than just a Google name to
break in.

~~~
rodgerd
Xbox also had Live, an easier dev story, and a willingness to persist - it's
been around since 2001. And it took a long time losing money!

~~~
Macha
And Microsoft were already in the gaming space, both as a publisher and via PC
technologies like DirectX.

~~~
rodgerd
Yes, and I imagine they learned from their involvement with the Dreamcast, as
well.

~~~
ThrowawayB7
That's a persistent myth; the team that launched the Xbox was an entirely
different set of people in a different division from the team that worked on
the Dreamcast collaboration with Sega.

------
seemslegit
As with every area where google didn't have a dominant offering in place
before strong competitors existed. Android being a possible exception because
device vendors rallied around it so as not to be extinguished by apple.

------
Razengan
Can’t someone go take a look at the Commodore 64/Amiga and Sinclair ZX
Spectrum, and make a new _programmable games console_ for the modern age?

Even something like a Raspberry Pi inside a keyboard enclosure would be good.

------
bingobob
Google used to use the term beta a lot in there past. I don't understand why
Stadia wasn't tag with the beta or early access this would of put the problems
and the media more at ease until the product was stable

~~~
lonelappde
The MBA took over and is afraid to show weakness with labels like "Beta".

------
2wrist
Shame, they have such an opportunity on so many fronts.

I am actually very intrigued by the hardware, a powerful linux box which may
make a cracking console in it's own right. Wouldn't mind one of those at home.

------
buttersbrian
Google doesn't really kill pay services. So while projects and random free
services are killed all the time (too often probably), it's kinda unfair to
apply that reputation to Stadia.

------
mensetmanusman
Starlink implementation (best case scenarios) will be the only thing that
saves Stadia’s latency issue. Maybe Google knows something...

------
numlock86
Early adopter of Stadia here. Even I am surprised they haven't shut down the
service yet. I wonder when they'll pull the plug.

------
Rainymood
Google Stadia reminds me of the old adage: "Good business can save bad tech,
but good tech can not save bad business."

------
Kiro
Stadia works surprisingly well but has literally 0 games I'm interested in.
Considering cancelling my Pro subscription soon.

------
tcd
It's hilarious. Many people commented on how long it would take before it
ended up in killedbygoogle.com.

I don't trust a single product they launch these days. Usually it's best to
wait 5 years and get a sense for its longevity.

What products do Google make that last longer these days? I feel the majority
of new stuff ends up canned because it just doesn't hold up to the tech debt
and costs for running the service at such huge scale.

~~~
moneromoney
Stadia is already dead. I don't know anyone in Europe who is using it.

------
freeflight
This whole sector is currently just super weird.

GeForce NOW has been somewhat successful but has had support from both
Bethesda and Activision recently pulled.

Meanwhile, Google is just kinda half-arsing it around, even tho they would
easily have the money and infrastructure to create something like a "killer-
app" for the scalability of gaming in the cloud.

But apparently there isn't any attempt at something like that, so what's even
the point?

------
willis936
Google has a growing track record of ambitious half-measure projects.

Game streaming is very appealing to me on paper for competitive games.
Compared to the traditional dedicated server scenario, cloud multiplayer
gaming could nearly halve the player to player latency.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wait, how is adding _more_ servers into the mix going to _reduce_ latency?

~~~
willis936
I shoot. It takes 15 ms to show up on my screen. My shot then takes 50 ms to
make it to a server, which then takes another 50 ms to be sent to an opponent.
What the opponent sees and what I see are off by 100 ms. If all inputs were
handled by the server then everyone would agree on what they see, but delayed
by their latency to the server. Interpolation is exactly that. It has
significant error and is a serious threat to low time-to-kill competitive
games.

~~~
clarry
> If all inputs were handled by the server then everyone would agree on what
> they see

You can already have that; no need for streaming. For example, original Quake
handles all input on the server and movement feels kinda like skating on ice
with the latency. You can feel the latency when you shoot; your gun doesn't
actually fire until the server acknowledges it. _I 've played Quake online
somewhat recently, and I absolutely hate how it feels._ I can't imagine anyone
wanting to play like that. There's a damn good reason why newer engines added
client side prediction, even if it makes different players' view of the game
inconsistent.

Unreal Tournament, up to UT2004, (maybe later -- I'm not familiar enough with
newer ones) are similar. I think they added prediction for player's movement
at some point, and that alone makes it feel much better, but jump pads (and
such) are still unpredicted, shooting still has latency (I can't recall the
details; it's possible that your firing animation/sound is instant but actual
projectile only appears on your screen once the server acknowledges it).

It's great when you're playing with <20ms ping but it absolutely sucks to have
little to no prediction with higher ping. I much prefer unlagged Quake 3
engine games, where hitscan weapons hit what you see on your screen (they're
latency compensated on the server). Otoh some people argue for Unreal because
everything's synchronized and you don't see the ugly side effects of
prediction, like getting shot right after you leap into safety behind a
corner.

Notice that interpolation and prediction are two different things!
Interpolation actually _increases_ latency; I turn it low or off in Quake 3.
The result is that everyone's movement is jerky (they update when the server
sends an update; higher packet rate is better). If you enable interpolation,
then their location is going to be interpolated between two most recent
updates.

~~~
lonelappde
When you say "interpolation" do you mean "smoothing"? Interpolatiin is filing
in missing data. Smoothing is adding error to eliminate discontinuity.

~~~
clarry
Why not both? The data you receive from a server is discontinuous. You
interpolate (and potentially extrapolate) to fill in missing data to eliminate
discontinuity.

------
golf3
The correct word is foundering.

------
anonymouswacker
Google needs to just give up and realize they're an ad and marketing company,
and continue to be very, very good at it.

~~~
fenwick67
Honestly their work on fringe projects like this seem more like PR than
anything. It makes them look like an innovative company with consumer-facing
products, rather than an ad company.

~~~
anonymouswacker
Interesting idea. It would be sad to be an engineering team working on these
poorly managed products, then.

~~~
lmm
Having worked in a company that was more of a PR exercise than something
intended to actually generate revenue, it's an interesting mix. You get the
time to engineer everything really well, you're encouraged to use the latest
technology, go to conferences, and improve your own skills. At its best, it's
the same kind of "blue-sky engineering" that you hear about people having done
at Xerox Parc or Bell Labs. But without that bit of pressure to actually
deliver something, it's very easy to get lost in overengineered architecture,
and if someone high up makes a bad design decision it's very hard for the
consequences to be brought to bear in a way that matters.

------
otabdeveloper4
Wow, what a surprise.

/s

------
stopads
Ambitious or half-assed? You'd have to know literally nothing about gaming to
call Stadia ambitious.

------
carapace
No visible content with JS disabled. Bleah.

------
eximius
If they really want to reach gamers, they should buy Discord and integrate it
into their platform.

And then we can make fun of them for having yet another chat app. It's a win-
win.

------
Karishma1234fff
As a gamer I have bigger issues with Google. I would rather prefer Japanese or
Chinese companies to be better custodians of gaming industry than Google.
Microsoft too in my opinion has done a better job.

It is only matter of time before some google snowflake would call a game
transphobic or "too violent" etc. and write lengthy posts that the game be
pushed off Stadia. Right now this is not a problem but if google becomes 1st
or 2nd largest player this would be increasingly a problem.

I am a big lover of violent video games and Google is not good for such games
IMO.

