
Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support - Impossible
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/357269/Stadia_owners_on_Reddit_are_blasting_Google_over_radio_silence_and_lack_of_support.php
======
tmpz22
1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially
gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real
community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2
week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their
holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse,
especially because other industry competitors are really active during the
Christmas season because thats when so many sales are, but you see other
studios like Dice's Battlefield V go utterly dark during this time.

2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise

3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against
"reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you
will.

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_officially_gone_40_days_without_a_new/)

~~~
SimeVidas
Meanwhile on Switch eShop: 10 to 20 new games released every single week of
the year (many of them mediocre, but still).

When you’re a massive global video game streaming service, you’re supposed to
plan ahead a bit, don’t you think. This is not a mom and pop store.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
It's tough to compare a company's first few steps into gaming to the
established machine that is Nintendo.

~~~
rchaud
I think a company with Google's resources would have hired people with the
necessary experience to run the project.

~~~
72deluxe
They're a "me too!" company that pretends they are the leader in all the
projects that others are doing, and merely offer a service/product to tick a
box next to their competitors.

The only case where this isn't true is Search (but getting worse), AdWords,
and YouTube. But everything else is not uniquely Google (eg. Drive, GMail,
phones, Android, Chromebooks).

Then they may or may not abandon the project based on the uptake, leaving the
adopters high and dry. I personally would not risk buying anything from them
based on their proven approach to product launches.

------
scotth
I've been following this situation somewhat, and although Google's outreach
has been lacking, there are signs that they're working hard behind the scenes.
Apparently they have over 100 games launching this year [1], have been
consistent in releasing new games with the pro subscription [2], and are
delivering a number of talks at the upcoming GDC [3].

I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the community
hasn't been particularly happy with any kind of news. Not to be derisive, but
I don't really understand the tribal fanaticism both for and against the
service.

Yes, the service is missing promised features, but it's actually pretty good.
For someone like me (in my 30s, don't want another box that I have to keep
upgraded), I've been enjoying it for what it is — with a decent internet
connection, you can play a modern looking game with very little effort.

Google did promise more, but I still haven't given up on their ability to
deliver. Seems like a lot of moving parts, and maybe only their community
management is missing.

1\. [https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-
stadia-12...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google-
stadia-120-games-2020-10-exclusives-4k-controller)

2\. [https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-
pro...](https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro-
february-2020-metro-exodus-gylt)

3\. [https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-
it...](https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-its-games-
developer-summit-at-gdc-2020/)

~~~
013a
Hype is truly a double-edged sword, and its surprising to me that companies
are so cavalier about it, especially in the gaming industry where the
consumers are so brutal and unforgiving.

Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into
marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play
games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn't
(yet). It very much smells like a disconnect between their business/marketing
and the product development.

~~~
ethbro
> _They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the
> future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up
> hard._

Stadia development is expected to pick back up as soon as the Google Fiber
rollout is complete...

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kristofferR
In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like
they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for
Google to do so too.

They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying
costumers so badly.

~~~
ehsankia
Except the 2nd most popular post on /r/Games is about how Artifact hasn't had
any updates in over a year now... So 4 weeks in the middle of the holidays
seems a lot more trivial.

~~~
kristofferR
That's a quite different situation, Artifact is a dead product while Stadia is
a recently launched product.

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ErikAugust
From /u/GraceFromGoogle's response:

"While I don't have product updates to share right at this second, I can
promise you that I have been, and will continue taking feedback posted to
r/Stadia and other channels, like the Stadia Community Forum, back to the
Stadia team."

They can't even scrape together an update for a thread of thousands of people
who paid good money and are foaming at the mouth.

Gaming, community, and customer service could not be further from Google's
DNA.

~~~
arkitaip
This was my main concern when Stadia was launched. I knew that Google could
figure out the tech but their product development and customer support would
be their Achilles heel _, especially when it comes to gaming. Gamers go all in
with their passion and if you as a company aren 't _heavily* community
oriented, their passion can quickly turn destructive.

* Their reputation for prematurely closing down products too but that's not something they can directly affect.

------
Jamwinner
Did people not see this project as clearly stillborn? The radio silence (when
it comes to fixes, issues) is not new, nor have I heard a single positive
comment about the service. This feels like investors and users alike got
scammed by a product not ready for prime time. Did they assume they could fix
it after boot? I really, really hate this trend of building the plane in
flight with passengers present (paying customers), and coasting on expectation
of fixes.

~~~
kalado
I had the same impression since the first announcement. Stadia is an
enthusiast product (for now), but enthusiast don't need it.

Stadia might become lucrative in a few years with slow adoption and
improvements but if you get into it right now, you just pay to be a beta
tester.

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smt88
This was predictable both specifically and in general. Google _does not
support their products_ , period. They stop updating them meaningfully --
years before announcing that they're terminated -- and they refuse to have a
human customer service team. G Suite is possibly the only exception.

~~~
ehsankia
I'm sorry, but 4 weeks, 2 of weeks were the holidays, is by NO means "not
supporting their products". What company releases an update faster than every
4 weeks?

~~~
Polylactic_acid
What company leaves their hyped up product mostly useless for 4 weeks after
launch?

~~~
ehsankia
> mostly useless

What? The product works just fine, people use it and can play games. How is it
useless? Just because brand new flashy features weren't released doesn't make
it "useless".

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Crash0v3rid3
They made a post on /r/stadia a few hours ago announcing some free games for
the month which has been well received.

I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new
pasttime here.

Does anyone else feel like we're just becoming a predictable echo chamber?

~~~
ehsankia
Yep, Google has over delivered by giving two free games per months instead of
the promised one. Yes, since they are more of a tech company and don't do
crunches, updates can be a bit slower, but 4 weeks is nowhere close to
"abandoning a product"...

~~~
craftinator
* Ad company _

------
api
Good. I really hope Stadia fails. Gaming is one of the major drivers of
continued demand for "real computers" at the edge. Take that away and we'll
lose even more momentum there.

~~~
ac29
On the other hand, its an inefficient allocation of resources for infrequent
gamers (who might play games 100 hours a year or less) to need to own
expensive consoles or PCs to play games.

I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.

~~~
yread
You can just sign up for Geforce NOW beta, it's free for now, you
automatically get all the games you have on Steam, it works and it probably
won't go away anytime soon.

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lspears
I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero
lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit
has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they
supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.

~~~
tmpz22
My problem is that I don’t know who to trust.

Clearly I can’t trust Googles marketing or Sales copy after how it handled
this initial launch.

There are a lot of videos and reviews that mark it as a poor product I.e. it’s
launch title Destiny having an impossibly small player population for
multiplayer activities.

And then there are people who give it shining reviews such as yourself who
seems like a reasonable human but is still only one data point.

So I’ll wait and remember this consumer experience for every google product
that gets pitched to me.

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yingw787
On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable
PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time:
[https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png](https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png)

I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators)
at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.

~~~
DharmaPolice
Related - I think instead of Stadia being pitched as a competitor to cutting
edge gaming platforms it would have been interesting if they had started out
with offering "classic" gaming content. A cloud service which offered me the
ability to switch between (for example) Atari 2600, SNES, NeoGeo, Dreamcast
and old school PC games is something I might consider depending on the price
model. Yes, emulators exist but they can be fiddly to setup depending on the
platform and not everyone is comfortable with downloading ROMs of questionable
legality. Presumably, Google engineers could get older games running pitch-
perfect on their server hardware and we could stream the results.

Once people were comfortable with "game streaming" they could move forward
with new/exclusive content. Which is basically what Netflix has been doing. I
appreciate licensing old games is probably a nightmare, but a service offering
opportunities to play old classics would have got a lot more goodwill than
this mess.

~~~
technofiend
There's nothing stopping someone from adapting an emulator to Stadia's
rendering framework, although I'm not sure Google would approve the result. I
agree with you that Google acquihiring (for example) Good Old Games might have
been cool, but IMHO Google is pitching the other end of the performance
spectrum: play AAA games on a Chromebook.

If they had done both then they could have released GOG titles as filler
between AAA releases and that would have been something.

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thrownaway954
can't say we didn't see this coming. unfortunately this a pattern that google
has exhibited again and again with consumer based products. you think that
people would have learned after the google glass fiasco, but i guess not.

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andrewstuart
I'm sort of surprised anyone bought Stadia. What problem does it really solve?

~~~
risho
There are a number of things it offers. Being able to play high end triple A
games on a chromebook or a cheap computer would be a huge boon. Not everyone
wants to(or has the means to) spend 1300+ dollars on a gaming computer. Also
there is also the casual market. Even the people who do want to play games and
have the money, it's hard to justify the cost if you just play like 1 or 2
games per year. Another huge boon is the ability to switch between devices and
places. Going from your television to your office to your laptop, or from your
house to a hotel, to a friends house, or whatever has huge amounts of utility.

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wmeredith
Google and silence+lack of support go together like peanut butter and jelly

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newnewpdro
It would be more newsworthy if Google _weren 't_ behaving this way.

~~~
Animats
Right. The same thing happened with Spatial OS from Improbable, a back-end
system for big-world MMOs. They announced a deal with Google where you have to
host on Google's servers. Expensively. The AAA title people then totally lost
interest, and two of the major indy games shut down. The Worlds Adrift people
wrote: "The network of Worlds Adrift is built on top of SpatialOS, a
proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside
of SpatialOS’s infrastructure. This requirement prevents us from making it P2P
or allowing players to host their own servers."

In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from
NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you
can now go with the other evil empire.

(There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on
cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really.
That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out.
Land and in-world items are really expensive.)

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ageofwant
Google, a company that sells adds for a living, has absolutely no marketing
skills whatsoever. Anyone that uses any of Google's products, you are living
on borrowed time. This has been illustrated over and over and over. Its not
even a meme anymore.

I wanted to say that I fear for the "do no evil" Google, but that company has
long since disappeard.

------
dragonsh
When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other
innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through
interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide
a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan
Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the
computing power and software infrastructure for large scale simulation, which
at present is limited to some big university, corporations and large
government organization.

But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which
are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if
it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as
it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of
users.

Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts
guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other
products.

This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group
and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with
search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root
Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an
organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this
is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that
the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable.

I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer
to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

~~~
dragonsh
Another example of how google index it’s criticism and use it’s PR mechanical
turks or staff to downvote critical comments.

