A good model will be to start working on a new startup with a competing product as soon as google launches something. In couple of years when they shut down, provide migration paths. Swim in $$$.
This is, to some extent, what Feedly did. They started off as a really nice, somewhat niche magazine-style news reader built on Google Reader. When Google Reader shut down, it was in their best interest to implement the API themselves. They had the very clever idea to make that a _public_ API, just like Google Reader, so in the end all kinds of apps and services wanted to use it, and it seems they're doing really well. (I'm still a big fan of their own news reader, and have a Feedly t-shirt somewhere…). I'd be very interested to hear the full story of the Google Reader debacle from their end :)
Feedly was amazingly positioned for that. Their two signature featuers were: 1.) it looked and worked almost exactly like Google Reader, and 2.) it could import your Google Reader feeds with one click.
Within months of Google announcing Reader's closing, Feedly had acquired something like 8 million new users. Amazing stroke of fortune for a well-deserving product. I still happily use the free version.
And 1) I don’t understand. Feedly was one of the first ones I tried, and none of the settings I tried got me close to a headline-only view that I used in GReader. I used Newsblur for a while and am on TT-RSS nowadays. But Feedly always seemed to cater more to those people who enjoy image-heavy subreddits and full-page hero images, or pinterest.
Nothing I tried with Feedly got me a simple, no distraction one-line, click to expand downwards view.
Note that all of this was around when GReader closed, no idea what changed.
Odd, I was able to get a headline only view almost immediately. I believe the display option said something like "most like Google Reader". Titles-only View is what I am using now.
I remember something like this, but everything took up more space.
edit: Just decided to log in and check ;) So what I didn’t like was the way it popped up from the side instead of actually doing what GReader (and TT-RSS and Newsblur) can do: Simply popping down the current article, and not switching the view.
>And 1) I don’t understand. Feedly was one of the first ones I tried, and none of the settings I tried got me close to a headline-only view that I used in GReader.
I am pretty sure that I tried Feedly in the post-"Oh no, Google Reader is going away!" panic everyone else using the service was in at the time, and like you I could not replicate the feel. The Old Reader was the closest alternative I found among the several I tried, but soon afterwards Inoreader appeared with a very, very, very close-to-Google Reader feel, and I've been extremely happy on it ever since. (If only Inoreader would correctly open the comment link and not the original article in the HN RSS feed.)
I am pretty sure that I tried Feedly in the post-"Oh no, Google Reader is going away!" panic everyone else using the service was in at the time, and could not replicate the feel. The Old Reader was the closest alternative I found among the several I tried, but soon afterwards Inoreader appeared, and I've been extremely happy on it ever since. (If only Inoreader would correctly open the comment link and not the original article in the HN RSS feed.)
I also like and use Inoreader. It's better than any other service I tested (especially Feedly), and very lightweight and Google Reader-esque.
To be honest, however, I was disappointed with the recent price increases and other changes. I have a grandfathered Pro account that I'm paying $18/year for until 2021 (with a 40% off coupon). Then my options will be to either pay $50/year for a much more limited service (only 30 rules instead of unlimited, only 30 filtered feeds instead of unlimited), or reject the price increase and go back to a "supporter" account, which doesn't have any perks and costs $20/year, more than I'm paying now for Pro.
For those that remember Google Notebook, this is also what Evernote did 10 years ago. It's why I've been using Evernote for 10 years and why I'll never use Google Keep.
I don't know, Google has failed at all kinds of products that other companies have achieved massive success with. This includes some really ubiquitous tools like a social network (Google+) or messaging apps (too many to list). I think at this point most people assume a failed project from Google has more to do with the company than the concept itself.
A few days ago I was researching a bug I was seeing using with xfce on chrome remote desktop. Apparently this was thoroughly solved in someone's Google+ post that everyone linked to. All I can see now is the Google+ termination notice. Thanks, Google.
Google was one party in that. The other was the person who choose to gave Google the content to post. When we choose to give content and power to a few, large, centralized organizations, that's on us.
What would you have expected them to do? Would you point to the user if Stack Overflow stopped hosting content? Or GitHub? Before places like imgur, I'd see forum postings linking to broken images hosted on personal sites--so self hosting is unfeasible. Geocities data is still around as well as Usenet postings going back to the 80s.
I do think that is worth noting, but it is (mostly) separate from the original point. It doesn't matter if the copyright is open if the content disappears.
At least in the U.S., I don't think it's that relevant to the use-cases I've seen. IANAL, but in the 4-factor fair use test a place like Internet Archive rehosting the content to me easily clears 3 of them if the original host goes away.
But these are all things where Google was late to the game and didn't succeed in taking someone's crown. So it's an interesting question: How does Google failing at some product that isn't already a well established concept impact the consumer's sentiment towards the idea behind it.
Orkut was pretty much killed in the English speaking world by the Brazilian Portuguese speakers which took over any group which was created. They pushed every photography, climbing and Linux group to the point where, as a non-Portuguese speaker, the site became way more noise than signal. You could flash a group as being for a specific language, but it wasn't enforced when someone violated this. Orkut admins ignored complaints and the malfeasanant posters rebutted with something which might translated to "who's going to make me?"
So, it became a useless site because there were no teeth to the rules.
>Orkut was pretty much killed in the English speaking world by the Brazilian Portuguese speakers which took over any group which was created. They pushed every photography, climbing and Linux group to the point where, as a non-Portuguese speaker, the site became way more noise than signal.
Microsoft had MSN Messenger, there was ICQ and many others, and there was "always" IRC etc., and frankly things were great with gAIM, Pidgin and other messenger aggregators until Google Talk switched off access for third-party apps and launched Hangouts...
I remember my whole family was in gtalk and other jabber talkers. The funny thing they were usable on mobile long before android/ios phones. There were JavaME clients that could run on many common phones. I still miss T9.
GTalk was really in a position to be the #1 messenger.
Sad thing was google+ and the control it offered was nice. The tech communities on G+ were wonderful but for the average person they were just too entrenched in facebooks ever growing social iron fist.
I seriously doubt that's everyone's first thought. I know my first thought when Google launches a product is: "this will suck and I'm not even going to bother trying it". Experience as trained me to avoid Google products and look for migrations away from things I'm stuck with that they executed well on in the distant past (email, maps, search, browser).
More importantly, how many start ups are already in the field that go out of business because Google uses their resources to undercut or out-advertise the existing start up, only to abandon it after the competitors have all been killed?
Google "failures" can have millions of happy users... if google ejected 10m users, and you can gain say 1/10th of those, 1m, and even 10% paying $5/month that's $500k/month of gross income. Depending on your needs, a well designed system to support 1m users or so could be done under $50-100k/month, leaving $400k/month for staff and profit.
While it may not make sense at Google Scale, it can absolutely make sense for a small business spinoff.
I (and plenty of other people) love and make use of services up until the second they are killed by Apple/Google/etc. Just because a big tech firm doesn't like the product doesn't mean it isn't viable as a smaller business.
But for stadia, where the game licenses, executables, and probably save games probably can't be exported legally, how does one provide a migration paths once Google inevitably says "servers are shutting down in three months. You will lose access to everything on that date. We will give you a month free or something that in no way makes up for the service shutting down and you losing everything"
Well, what will happen when Google Play Music (or Spotify or Apple Music's subscription store or...) inevitably announces a shutdown in 3 months?
Spotify's been running strong for like 13 years, GPM is about to turn 10, etc. None of those people have been bitten yet, and there's literally hundreds of millions of them.
Google Play Music/Spotify/Apple Music is next to free to run, it's basically just a CDN on their end. There's almost no user data that didn't come from user machines originally.
Stadia has all the user data on the backend, _and_ is expensive to run since all the processing happens on their end too.
Reading spotify's most recent filing, there was an increase in its compute costs of ~25 million dollars in 3Q2019 when compared to 3Q2018, mentioned in a footnote. In other words, a compute cost increase of $100 million a year was a footnote. That was an increase of about 1.5% of their gross operating income. The full hosting costs are not public, but we're easily talking hundreds of millions a quarter. Practically free?
So, an increase of about $1/yr/user? Including I'm sure all of the money they're wasting training half baked ML models? Yeah, that's pretty damn close to free.
Now compare that to stadia which'll probably be dedicating high CPU and GPU to each logged in user, in addition to the low latency video compression hardware they're pretty much guaranteed to have?
With Stadia, this concept probably relates more to game saves more so than games. [0] It's just your data—finding something that can use the data is another story.
That's beside the point, though—my reply, it's parent and it's grandparent were discussing Google products generally, not Stadia specifically.
[0] I realize that Takeout doesn't support Stadia. Though, for two different Stadia titles (Destiny 2's "cross-play" and NBA2K20's "MyPlayer"), I was prompted to log into a publisher account where my data could be linked/stored or something.
That would be true if you're thinking of Stadia as a subscription to get access to an all you can eat buffet of games (ie Netflix for games) but that's not the primary model proposed. The primary Stadia purchase model is that you buy games on Stadia and then get "free" unlimited streaming of them. In that case if they were to shutdown the user has to get something back, preferably the game...
Can you think of any other system like that which allows you to export licenses to games? AFAIK, that's unprecedented in the industry, and explicitly against the contracts I've seen.
Edit: Steam will let you _import_ a CD key, but that's the closest I can think of, and there's no way to export once it's in steam.
When the Ultraviolet movie service shutdown they had some mechanism to prevent users losing their purchased content. I don't know how it worked exactly but ultimately it must have been some kind of license transfer. I don't think it's a huge stretch to imagine something similar being applied to video games.
Ultraviolet wasn't a service really AFAIK, it was a DRM scheme that brokered licenses to other services. those other services could continue running off of the cached licenses, but there's no way to re auth licenses for Ultraviolet works you have but haven't registered yet.
Yeah, I'd be surprised if they'd give anything more than a refund, and probably only a partial one. It isn't really practical to do anything else for a service like this.
Your post reminds me of those occasional posts where an entrepreneur will post something like: I started a company and now Google has built a near exact copy. Something in the past the entrepreneur should have been worried about. Now, I agree with you: Sit back and wait for Google to pull it, and profit.
I understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader.
Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development.
Stadia will require a substantial engineering effort from Google to make this work. The latency and network requirements are a great test to gauge network requirements as we move into 5g, AR, and self driving cars.
Gaming is huge and if Google can be the first to provide (viable) steaming as a service they can really threaten some of the incumbents like Twitch, Sony, Microsoft, etc.
Obviously Google doesn't have the best track record here but I'm excited to see them tackle this challenge.
Glass cost money, more than 10x what this cost, and that was not a signal of their long term ambition.
The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game.
If I, conversely, buy the same $60 game on Steam, I know it'll be there years down the road, that I'll be able to play it on any PC I build, and I don't have to maintain a monthly fee for it.
What Google is trying has been tried many times before, by people who had more permissive game ownership structures.
Do not tell us we shouldn't be worried about using such a product from Google given their track record -- especially when the costs to them are enormous in terms of computing power and the reception has been very tepid (meaning those costs are larger per-user than they likely anticipated).
> "...it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games."
WHAT? I've been under a rock and I assumed that it was a service where you buy a controller, already own a streaming device (or maybe the controller has the device in it), and pay monthly for the whole service. You have to buy the games too?
That is an immediate about-face for me. If they shut down the service then I just stop paying the monthly fee. This is perfectly comfortable for any service. But if I have to buy-in to every game...
The OP is incorrect, but in the opposite direction than you are thinking. The monthly subscription is optional (it gets you 4k streaming, instead of 1080p, and discounts / free games similar to Playstation Plus or similar). You do have to buy the games.
So yeah, if they discontinue Stadia it is an open question what happens to the games you purchased on it. They have avoided questions on it, unsurprisingly.
Yeah, that part is pretty crazy. I wonder if that is just up to the game developers, or if they were given a limited compute budget and the current 1080p / 1440p base resolutions were the best they could get? Maybe Stadia can't deliver the needed latencies at full native 4k?
Unless I am misunderstanding, the 4k up-res is happening on Google's side, so it's not like they are skimping on bandwidth.
I agree, if they had launched a subscription service to a large catalog of games that would have been really something -- like how Netflix created an alternative to the buy/rent single titles model.
I suspect they didn't have enough clout with development studios to create that pricing structure.
As an example, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is $59.99 on Stadia ($39.99 with subscription for 4K). On Steam it's currently $59.99 too, but at 4K without the extra subscription.
Game distribution is a hyper-competitive market right now, with Epic Games in particular giving away high quality games for free every week on their Steam competitor and paying developers up front to get timed exclusives.
I think Google's going to have to re-visit its pricing and customer acquisition model on this one.
Perhaps. But I just decided to look at Google Play Movies for the first time in years, and to watching some Avengers movie on there is 18 SGD (approx. 12 EUR). For one movie.
I'm not saying their Games strategy will mirror the one taken for Movies, but I'd advice waiting to see what will happen.
Microsoft is curenlty alpha testing its xcloud service by the looks of it, which encompasses exactly that. There is also the Nvidia streaming service too.
There is a no monthly fee version that you only have to buy games to use eventually that will be limited to 1080p streams. 4k costs a monthly fee + the cost of games though they are saying there will be some discounts to games if you're paying for the better service.
Oh yeah the whole thing is kind of a shit show right now but that's what they're pitching so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for the moment and treating this like one big early access trial for the minute. From all indications this launch came in incredibly hot with the lineup doubling at the last minute, almost as if they had some last minute major issues with some of their Linux ports.
Don't be all negative. At the very least Google would pay engineers like us a decent salary to enhance the technology to keep CPU away from Keyboard/Mouse/Screen. By the time Google is done with this and decommission their service, we would be walking around with the new "Mac 2025" which is scuba diving water proof with CPU and OS hosted on iCloud available for a $1000/year subscription.
I don’t disagree with your main point about losing games, but the fee is strictly for Stadia Pro, which permits 4K and 5.1 surround sound. Stadia Base is free and will launch in February, but only permits up to 1080p and stereo sound. You still obviously also need to buy the games though (except F2P). They’re using the “Founder’s Edition” almost like Early Access. If you have Stadia Pro and you stop paying, you lose access to the free games that are included with Pro, which right now are Destiny 2 and Samurai Showdown. This is the same as Xbox Live Gold and the Free Games with Gold. You don’t lose access to the games you purchased if you stop paying for Pro.
> If you have Stadia Pro and you stop paying, you lose access to the free games that are included with Pro, which right now are Destiny 2 and Samurai Showdown. This is the same as Xbox Live Gold and the Free Games with Gold.
Games With Gold are actually free. You need the Gold membership to get them, but you can unsubscribe - they're yours.
Edit: You may be thinking of Game Pass, which behaves in the way you describe.
Nope. I’m not mistaken. What you’re talking about only applies to Xbox 360. For Xbox One, you lose access to your claimed Free Games with Gold when your subscription lapses until you resubscribe. The same is true for the free games to PlayStation Plus subscribers.
Yes on the 360 because its Store was never built with Memberships in mind. No on the Xbox One (and PC where applicable) where a lapse in your Gold status will make those games unplayable until you rejoin.
If I could play high-end complex modern AAA games like RDR2 on my iPad Pro while traveling, I think there's a valuable proposition there. But ironically that's exactly the area where Stadia falls flat: internet connections are weak or nonexistent while traveling, and currently it's not even usable from an iPad.
Well I bought stadia. With 3 young kids and a busy job i don't have a lot of time to game so I want something where I can just sit down and game. No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.
A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.
I don't doubt your motivation here and am not going to sit her and debunk your thought process - but I do wonder how many people match your template, which seems to be "people who want to play AAA games but not very much".
I game on PC, my kids use PC and consoles, and I can't say that "downloading/installing games" is a significant time sink - and if your network isn't good, Stadia isn't going to work either.
The other thing that I think will break the Stadia business model is that the free access costs Google money unless it recoups the spending on the games. So while we're hearing about reasonably competitive Day 1 prices for games, will we see the pattern of discounting that all other games go through? Second-hand console games?
It just feels like it's aiming at a niche while building out a huge system that's only going to be viable if it achieves mass adoption.
I think it has it can have its uses, even if it's not great for every single situation.
For example, say you want to play a particular new game but don't have the hardware for it. Stadia could be a good option to quickly get to play without having to buy new hardware.
Say I have a decent PC for most days and small games, but I'd like to try the new Forza Horizon because it looks fun. I could very well get it on Stadia. I'm not worried about losing access in 10 years, it's just to have some fun for a few months.
Actually for games with pretty high requirements such as the future Microsoft Flight Simulator, streaming could be the best option for most people.
> A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.
Unless you have (particularly good) fiber, this probably won't happen. The bandwidth requirements are too high.
> No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.
FWIW, all of the current generation consoles (even the Switch) have a standby mode that will let them patch your games while you're not playing, meaning that in most cases when you go to play, you can immediately play. They'll even download pre-ordered games without your input.
The only time you would need to be concerned about download times is when you're purchasing a new game for the first time. That's typically a one-time event per game.
Microsoft thinks there is an audience here too, given Project xCloud.
Maybe there isn't enough high speed internet deployed in the world, but there certainly are a lot of devices capable of streaming given how many people already have an Android or iOS device on them at all times. Both of which support Bluetooth and most modern game controllers. Some of which have better screens than most people have at home. Some of which have better specs than, as just one interesting example, Nintendo's Switch.
I'm not sure if this is a big enough market, but system exclusive games would be a reasonable cause.
For example, a gamer playing on PC and/or XBox might want to play Horizon Zero Dawn for some time, but not buy a PS4 just for one game. Or some Nintendo exclusive game.
Most people don't have all gaming consoles available, and exclusives are (IMHO sadly) a thing, and this might be a reasonable workaround to provide compatibility.
part of the problem with that market is that there are very few true console exclusives left and that trend seems to only be going one way. sony made sure to have their mark all over death stranding and it's still gonna be on pc in a few months.
It's not entirely about cost. I don't want a gaming console or a gaming PC because they take up space and require maintenance. But I'd still like to play modern AAA games occasionally. If I can do that from my MacBook, I'm interested.
$400 amortized over a lifetime of 5 years (10, at the outside). ~$6 a month. You can also buy a console used for less than half the price at this point in the console lifecycle.
The game purchase story is identical.
The multiplayer subscription is approximately another ~$4 a month, and includes an average of two new, free, games per month. It's also not required outside of multiplayer.
So, the deal is virtually identical to (or better than) Stadia, but with much more stability in poor internet zones, and the chances of Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo turning off their entire ecosystem are much lower than Google's (they have a positive track record spanning decades on this topic).
So cost of ownership over time is similar and competitive for the non-free Stadia. But I'm not sure I really care about that, or that most people think of money that way. Its just easier to part with a few bucks every month for most people, than it is to part with $400 at one time.
You can look at the cost another way: Buying a console is like buying a 5-year pre-paid plan for a subscription service. That puts it in clearer terms, to me.
Anyhow, once Stadia's free version is released, unless its drastically limited in someway, it will be cheaper than everything. Honestly, I don't know why they didn't advertise as a primarily free service. People think of it as a paid service first, that has a crappy free tier, rather than a free service that has a value-add pro tier.
The biggest problem I see with this right now is that Stadia appears to be sub-console quality and really nowhere close to PC gaming. The Pro service that is supposed to be 4K@60 is not at all 4K.
I do agree that if it reaches the point where Stadia allows you to effectively rent a $3k - $4k high end gaming PC for just $10/month, it will become an interesting proposition.
> it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games
While this is true now, you'll later be able to play games by only paying a monthly fee or only buying the game for the normal <=$60 price. The subscription isn't necessary to play games at all.
The problem you have with the service potentially going away also applies to Steam, to a lesser degree. I acknowledge that they have a proven track record now and also require much less to continue serving games though.
If Steam says "We're shutting down" , I would be able to download the games to my computer and manage my own backups.
If Stadia shuts down, the games I've bought will vanish. In that case, I hope Google would make a deal with a company like Steam to transfer already purchased games.
Actually, If I buy a game, I'd like to be able to download it just in case if I wanna play with low settings on my laptop while I'm on holiday with crappy internet connection. PS Now gives you option to download and/or stream PS4 games.
This could be solved in theory by a streaming service that didn't try to lock you in. Alas, almost every streaming service of every kind does want to lock you in, and often the licensing agreements necessary to offer competitive pricing require it.
But having a pricier option where you can save your content offline would be a way to satisfy both audiences.
Although in this case, I personally think a pure subscription model should replace the fee + pay-per-game model as the basic streaming option.
Stadia does not have a monthly required. It has a monthly fee only for the highest quality streaming tier (4k@60). If you stop paying that fee, you will keep games you purchased (with the exception of those given away for free with the subscription).
There is certainly room to be concerned with what happens to purchases if Google eventually pulls the plug on the whole service.
Honestly, glass simply seems too early. We know that Apple is also working on AR glasses, even Intel came out with a AR glasses platform but quickly had to kill it because the market is simply not mature.
I think Google is betting that cloud steaming is now viable and are going to put as much resources as possible to make it work.
I am not doubting that there are issues with the product and concerns about Google, I obviously have reservations but don't believe that it hinders me from being excited about the prospect itself
I feel like "X was too early/ahead of its time" is kind of a red herring.
What it's basically saying is "this failed until it succeeded", because the alternative option, that of being able to accurately predict the exact point the technology is 'good enough', has proven effectively impossible to do (given how so many companies that manage it occasionally also fail at it most of the time; it's a crapshoot).
To that end, given Stadia is here, does anyone think the tech is ready? No. In fact, people seem to think the opposite, that Stadia is Google's attempt to get the tech to a specific point, or to offset the cost of the tech serving another use case.
The only way Stadia has a shot is if Google stays viewing it as a way to profit from having unused GPUs sitting around within its cloud offerings.
It’s not the market that wasn’t mature, it’s the technology/product —- although the latter is what you need to grow a market.
I love new technology and gadgets. I bought an Oculus DK2 and Vive and they were both mind blowing when I first tried them, although I don’t still use them. Trying Google Glass, on the other hand, was beyond underwhelming. Holo Lens and Magic Leap, while slightly better, were also extremely underwhelming. Other than niche industrial applications, these products are far far too early for any consumer product.
Now you can play games at lower quality and higher latency than ever before, and pay Google for the privilege of renting them! Plus, Google can control what games you play! Innovation!
AFAIK, there is a big difference in the backend. Something like the Playstation 'cloud gaming' gave you remote access to a playstation console. Others gave you access to a VM running the game. I think Microsoft was talking about giving you access to your own XBox running at home?
The games were not re-engineered / ported specifically to run 'in the cloud' as Stadia is attempting. There are some interesting things that could allow, if a developer ever decides to utilize it.
My mental model is that Stadia is just like owning a PS/Xbox, but the hardware is in Google's datacentres.
You pay the one-off cost to buy the console, you then maybe pay for the Pro subscription, but you have to buy your games and those games are locked to that platform - just like with PS/Xbox.
All the other stuff about having games that deliver something unseen before because of "the cloud" are mostly promises and theoretical features at this stage, so I wouldn't bank too much on that.
I think I can help answer your question, but just watching the keynote will be best. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM. The tl;dr of the whole keynote is what's different about Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure. Outside of Amazon and Microsoft I don't know of another company that will be able to match the latency and computation requirements to make this all work as marketed. What really stood out to me from their keynote this year was the number of edge nodes that Google has on top of their datacenter infrastructure. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM?t=1360
Okay, but that's hardly what most would consider innovative. Applying their large scale is more of an evolution of or improvement to the established cloud gaming idea.
Google Suggest is low latency, and required a huge effort, driven from the top.
Cloud gaming needs even lower latency. I don't think it's possible, but if google is doing the serious datacenter work, it must be a testbed for something else, because gaming isn't worth it anyway.
> By 2018, the United States video game industry had matched that of the Unites States film industry on basis of revenue, with both industries having made around US$43 billion that year.
Yup. OnLive tried it with similar results. There are many markets where 10ms - 20ms latency doesn't matter that much, but realtime gaming isn't one of them. It's extremely disorienting to play a game with even the slightest framebuffer lag.
After playing it for about 5-8 hours in the last 2 days, I'd say for a casual gamer like me, there is no perceptible latency. Even in an FPS like Destiny. But again, yesterday was the first time I played a AAA game after two years so maybe I'm just a bit rusty.
You don't know what you're missing until you have tried lower latency.
My regular gaming setup is a 144 Hz monitor with a PC. Everytime I try gaming on a console with a 60 Hz TV I feel like I'm completely drunk because of the noticeable input lag. And that's not even cloud gaming. That's just the Console + TV input lag...
I think Stadia could be super cool for simulation games like Cities: Skylines. The lag isn't nearly as much of a problem and the ability to have an extremely powerful computer simulate many more "agents" would be fantastic.
I think the experience will vary quite significantly, the surface is quite large. For Stadia launch, I created a crowdsourcing reports site and am hoping that we can get a better understanding through others' experiences.
And you can add others like Shadow, or you could roll your own using Parsec or Moonlight + a cloud provider like Paperspace or AWS (or even Google cloud).
What is important in case of Shadow, GeForce Now and roll you own, that you buy a PC game that you can access on any PC, not just using a single service (like Stadia, or xCloud).
My concern for Stadia revolves around Microsoft's upcoming offering.
Apparently, Microsoft is simply going to rack-mount XBox hardware and stream it that way, which means the entire XBox library is instantly compatible.
For Stadia, games have to be modified specifically for it and their Linux configuration, which limits what games are announced for the platform, and requires engineering effort.
Netflix has been trying to introduce interactive content to their platform for years. The latest attempt is Minecraft: Story Mode [0]. Netflix's architecture is designed around streaming static video files, on platforms without great latency guarantees. There can be gaps of up to a second when loading the next video file. Interactive UI and choicepoints are quite limited.
Streaming live and streaming offline media require very different infrastructure.
They don't have the game dev experience or the library. Seems obvious. They can stream the games for the same reason Netflix can't buy a single DVD and stream that movie to everyone on the planet.
>Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative.
Google is not the one being innovative here. This has been done before, to no real success. Google was first to the finish line (kinda, seems more like a beta in implementation), but other offerings are coming down the pipe shortly.
I don't see Google winning this one. MS is in a much better position here, and NVidia also has one in the works.
I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money.
I would argue that there are a couple of innovations here that haven't been tried (to my knowledge) by the previous attempts. One is the wifi directly connected controller (so it bypasses the display device for lowering input latency), the other is, supposedly, advance algorithms to estimate inputs to reduce lag. The latter, of course, is something that FPS servers have been doing for a while but I don't believe this has been tried before in terms of cloud game streaming.
Remember, for years, Xbox One has allowed for local streaming from Xbox One consoles to Windows 10 PCs via the Xbox app over LAN, which gives Microsoft's Project xCloud the benefits of:
* significant experience with the fundamental technology,
* no new special hardware required (they can tweak existing Xbox One hardware),
* a much larger library of games currently available for download (for consumers who want to switch to a local console), and
* an existing Netflix-of-games program via Game Pass (for consumers interested in pure subscriptions)
As-is, Google just happens to be first-to-market in the current generation of on-demand game streaming options. But we've seen this technology before, and I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home.
its initial purchase price is only slightly less than a full console, the games cost more, the visual quality is worse, it is way way more subject to packet loss, the input lag is orders of magnitude worse and it (along with my purchases) have a high probability of disappearing in 3 years time
You forgot that stadia also lacks nearly all of the nice-to-gave features already provided on consoles. You don't even get a notification when you unlock a trophy.
It's not just all of the products they've dropped in the past, it's also the cumulative day-to-day experience I've had with them overall. When their stuff works, it's great, but if anything goes wrong, one faces the impervious silent wall of Google's tech support, or rather complete lack thereof. The idea of trusting their compute cloud for a business service that truly has to be reliable seems insane.
They make great free toys that mostly work and make a lot of money doing so. I'm glad to use those toys for free, but I'm under no allusions that what often works will always work. That's not their forte.
Could you explain to me what is innovative about Google offering you fields to enter your social details on your Stadia profile for AIM, MSN, YIM, etc... And could you explain why they won't put fields for Google Talk, Google Wave, Buzz, Huddle, Google+ Messenger, Google Hangouts, Messenger, Google Allo, Google Duo or Google Spaces?
The question is not how innovative or useful Stadia is but how reliable Google is. If all Google produced was boring useless garbage, no one would care that they shut it down.
You do realize that streaming games is an old idea and has been tried many times and Google's competitors do or will have similar services. Google isn't doing anything new here. They don't have any first-move advantage. The only advantage they have is infrastructure and scale. Whether that is enough, we shall see.
I do understand that this is an old idea. My TV actually has a steaming service for games built in but I have never used it because I doubt the performance would be up to standard.
The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has reached a point of viability and it's very exciting to see them tackle the challenge.
Obviously there are concerns with the products. Specifically paying for games, the games itself, etc. But generally I'm excited for this effort.
There is ZERO innovation here. This is simply google trying to lock more people in to a service they will later try to pivot, which will then be canceled. I'm glad you are excited for this, and I hope to be proven wrong, but like all others I see a google service and wonder how long until EOL
Nice Freudian slip there. We have a "smart" TV here that's never been connected to the Internet. They seem to just universally suck.
For extra credit, our TV is a Roku TV, and from the CEOs comments, I doubt I'll ever connect it to the Internet. At least until they start coming with 4G connectivity built-in...(!)
On the original rumors about Stadia I did think Google was going to revolutionize the industry, particularly in social/massively-multiple games. Starting with the development stack that would leverage a coherent, synchronized world that is massively malleable -- huge banks of systems connected in the microsecond latency range with virtually unlimited throughput, massive neural engines, etc. Destructables, enormous player counts, a completely dynamic environment, virtually eliminating cheating, etc -- it would change everything.
But then they come out with some hosted older games. Eh. Maybe the big reveal will come out eventually, but this far it's pretty disappointing.
So what? Products improve. This one will too. Imagine seeing an ad on Youtube and immediately being able to play the game on your chromebook. I don't know that's what is going to happen and it can't work today, but maybe in a few years.
Latency is pretty bad (GFN by comparison works fine for me). Samurai Shodown, a brawler game, is mostly unplayable.
The overall quality is very beta (black screen in Stadia unless you disable hardware acceleration, which I have to do every time, Stadia can't easily handle multiple Google accounts, I have to change accounts every single time).
Probably worst thing is very Google-like support. Super long queues for "Customer Care", phonelines are closed at 10:30 AM because they're "Out of hours".
Google’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or deprecating APIs and products like this on a whim.
They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.
From what I hear, this is due to the promo driven culture at Google. You can good reviews/promos based on new products that get pushed to market, nobody cares about maintenance at Google.
One of the most senior engineers here (someone with his name on many research and whitepapers from his tenures at Amazon, Microsoft et al), left Google for precisely this reason. He was bored of working on stuff that would never reach the light of day. It happened multiple times to him in his time there.
When people say this, what exactly does this mean? If you break Google up into Gmail, Search, Calendar, etc... what stops those from within, who have intimate knowledge of the innerworkings and HR related matters within Alphabet as a whole, from simply secretly colluding and sharing resources off the books?
I’ve asked this question an bunch of times and never got a serious reply. There’s no strong anti-trust angle or end game to these things, it’s purely vindictive because it’s trendy to hate on SV.
Sometimes companies are shitty but it doesn’t justify such a strong hammer. If anything their search products or mobile products would themselves need to be broken up, (or FBs network and Instagram) not the whole company... but even then it’s not like they will go away.
So I don't necessarily support it, and I agree a lot of technical people just hate SV and have no idea what it'd mean, but as a developer I can see some benefits.
Here's an example from Apple:
Only Apple Maps can show you maps on a locked screen.
Until iOS 13 Siri tightly integrated with Apple Music ways no other app could.
Apple Pay is the only payment method that can work with a locked phone.
Only Apple's app store can install apps.
Only Apple's messaging apps can create new contacts.
All built-in apps only call other Apple apps for supporting functionality, for example Reminders will only open Apple Maps, Siri smart suggestions for ETA only work with Apple Maps as well.
All Apple apps get an immense head start of integrating with new APIs and OS features.
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So if you create a competitor to one of those Apple apps, from day 1 you're at a disadvantage.
If they were broken up, all competitors would be on a much more even playing field with Apple's apps.
And Apple is just an easy example, Android is much more open than iOS, but Google Play Services is still a guillotine over anyone who dares to go against Google's wishes.
Imagine if Google services were separate companies so a claimed misdeed on one couldn't end what is the core of billions of people's online existence...
Perhaps, but the vast majority of the hate lands on those companies that are actively screwing over their users, so... I'm happy with vindictive against a billion dollar monolith that I have no hope of ever controlling.
The idea is that breaking up a company will reduce both their resources available to behave badly (cash, infrastructure, people etc.) as well as getting the people in the newly independent organizations to start thinking competitively with each other as well as other companies in the market. If done right, the newly formed entities wouldn't be viewed as the 'same old people under a new name' but rather an entity no longer working toward the same goals if not an outright competitor. (that's in a perfect world... it rarely is perfect) What would keep them from colluding would typically be government/regulatory oversight for some period of time after the breakup with civil and/or criminal penalties being the stick for doing what you describe.
Simply, that's an extremely difficult criminal enterprise to pull of especially on an ongoing basis and for what gains? I would only see to do so for spite and active defiance of the law. Is that worth hefty fines, investigations, possible charges and jail time?
A break up usually means many of these people are laid off or move on. Every separate company would have its own books that would either need to be public if they remain public entities or have audited financials that match expenses to revenue and investments. Not an easy thing to hide QTR over QTR. Furthermore, depending on how the companies are broken up, they will be acquired by other companies or PE rather than be stand-alone enterprises. Lastly, whistleblowers.
TL;DR
It's not worth it for spite and any significant gains or advantages that are imagined, are probably significant enough to be noticed by the government or some enterprising analyst.
Doesn't seem like they do "whatever", but rather "whatever they're told" - otherwise they'd be free to maintain passion projects (like our beloved Reader.)
It's bad that there are half forgotten systems but almost every sizable business that has been around for many years will have this. On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years.
It's good to see that maintenance is rewarded at Google at least occasionally. I only ever hear that it is only new products that are rewarded. And I notice new people piling on to issues in their product trackers that I've been following for years.
But consider incentives. If nobody gets promoted for doing it, nobody does it. Promotion for maintenance isn't a bad sign if your corporate culture is "hire the smartest people in the room and let them build great products;" you're going to have to incentivize maintenance somehow, and "maintain it or you're fired" is counter to your cultural goals.
It’s not at all a bad sign. Any large and complex system will have parts rot from lack of maintenance, and giving awards to people who identify and correct this ahead of disasters is a good thing.
So... people shouldn't be promoted for keeping existing services running, but they should keep those services running as SOP? Sounds like a recipe for misaligned incentives to me.
Sadly from a UX point of view I can't disagree. Google inbox (and other products) showed how the UX for mail clients can be tremendously improved. But they shut it down and only migrated some of the more irrelevant features. IMHO the UX of gmail is so bad that I wonder if they want to phase out email altogether.
This doesn't even include some of the thing inbox (and maybe gmail, idk) supported wrt. metadata and live updates and now is discontinued "because it's no longer needed with dynamic amp pages". Just that amp kinda misses the whole point of email :( .
I really want to write my own client. But I know it's way to much work to get to the point where it's nice _and_ that is pointless if the people sending mails will stop including thinks like json-ld sections in mail. Really sad, as that had a lot more potential then the amp * they want to ship now.
They've replaced the hamburger menu in the upper left with a "back arrow", which does the same thing as the hamburger menu did, while making even less sense.
And that's before you open up the compose field. To this day I click the wrong button every time when I want to forward an email. Every time. Despite knowing I do it every time, I still click the wrong one.
Eh, I agree with him. I've been with gmail since middle school (going on... a LOT of years now, back when it was invite only).
Somewhere in the last 10 years or so it feels like the gmail team switched from "Make a good email client" to "Shove all the enterprisey things into gmail!".
It's gotten SO slow to load and is incredibly bloated.
I was a happy inbox user until... drumroll... they shut that down too.
I still use Gmail because old habits die hard, but I won't ever suggest a google tool at work. Fool me once, shame on you...
Actually for work Gmail has gotten (and is getting) better. My workplace switched from Outlook to Gmail recently and I felt like it was a net improvement.
Google has a vested interest in reading your email. Google lets users think that setting up a mail server is difficult, that email is a dead end communication medium compared to walled gardens, and that phishing is difficult to combat effectively.
FWIW though, setting up a mail server is difficult. Setting up a mail client with reasonable spam filtering to make email usable is also difficult. Compare the list of steps on either of those tasks to the list for getting email via Gmail: "1) Sign up to a Google account, 2) visit gmail.com"; it's obvious almost all users are going to do the latter (or its equivalent at a Google competitor).
Setting up a mail server isn't difficult. It's about as easy as installing and configuring a web server, and just about as technical.
Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult. Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.
Unless email servers have gotten a lot more turnkey in the last few years, I'm gonna disagree with this, sorry. :) I can get nginx running on most systems with literally a couple commands ("package-manager-thing install nginx" and "service-manager-thing start nginx"). Getting a mail server running -- at least in any form that qualifies as "Gmail replacement" -- seems to involve "install postfix, immediately edit the configuration because it has no out-of-the-box defaults, create multiple configuration files beyond that because that's how postfix rolls, install dovecot, immediately edit its configuration because it has no out-of-the-box defaults either, create some directories and user accounts and more configuration files because that's how dovecot rolls, then test that everything's working." And I'm leaving out the "install MySQL" part that many guides you'll find online will also have you do. Also, I haven't talked about running a spam filter and YOUR HARD DRIVE IS ALREADY FULL OF NIGERIAN PRINCES TRYING TO SELL YOU PENIS-ENLARGING BITCOIN I'M SO SORRY.
I would love it if "package-manager-thing install mail-server-thing" and "service-manager-thing start mail-server-thing" could get things going with sensible defaults like they do with nginx, even if you'd probably need to tweak things after they were going just like you're almost certainly going to do with a web server. But AFAIK, that just ain't the case.
I've run a mail server, and still help out with one, and getting consistent deliverability is hard. We've wanted to move to another hosting service for years, but the only reason we're doing ok right now is that our dedicated IP has a solid history and we just can't give that up in a migration.
The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. That it's easy and cheap on a marginal basis for them to add one more inbox to their millions doesn't mean the overall infrastructure is easy to keep running.
> The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc.
Can you provide specific numbers to the count of people devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc? I suspect the number's a lot smaller than you think. I also suspect the peoples' duties are less devoted than you think.
If Google, for example, truly worked to tackle spam then it wouldn't have a spam problem today. If Yahoo truly worked to tackle reputation, people wouldn't have trouble sending email using an email client instead of a browser.
I'll grant you that uptime does have dedicated people. But it's not to tackle spam or reputation. It's because offline services don't make a profit.
There are teams that actively (and solely) work on spam and abuse detection. They're larger than you seem to believe, though I won't give exact numbers. There's also obviously sre teams that maintain uptime. (Note I said teams, and there's a public approximate minimum size for an are team at Google of 8-12 people)
The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to use awa or gcp to send email, or even send spam from Gmail, prevent trickier things. So you're left to defend from a spam campaign from Yahoo while also trying to not block everyone at Yahoo, and detect the spammers who are using Gmail to spam Yahoo too.
And the spammers are always innovating, so you have to as well.
My personal belief is that Google likely considers spam detection to be an area of competitive advantage so investments are warranted.
> The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to use awa or gcp to send email, or even send spam from Gmail, prevent trickier things. So you're left to defend from a spam campaign from Yahoo while also trying to not block everyone at Yahoo, and detect the spammers who are using Gmail to spam Yahoo too.
Spam absolutely can be solved.
1) enforce identity. If the sender isn't authentic, then the sender is spam.
2) enforce reportability. If the user reports the sender as spam, then don't permit the sender to send more messages to the person who complained. if a lot of people report the problem, then block the sender.
3) enforce liability. if an ISP hosts spammers, then block the ISP.
If someone complains then walk them through the process. Just like people shouldn't drive vehicles without understanding that vehicles are dangerous, the same should be done with computers.
What is identity? A name? An SSN? How do you verify that for people in all the countries of the world?
How do you do that at scale? With hundreds of millions of users, you can't exactly call them up.
How many users are you going to have after you start adding measures to verify their identities at signup? How will the board of directors feel about that? And feel free to run your own company into the ground doing the right thing, but there are other email providers in the world who will happily accept the users you drive away.
What happens when people have their accounts taken over and start spamming? Were the accounts ever "real"? How can you even know?
What happens when the reports themselves are spam? Spammers will report other spammers to remove the competition. Or they'll just overwhelm it with useless fake reports to DOS your human reviewers.
You have to realize that every input to your system is a potential avenue for abuse. There are people sitting there all day thinking about how to prevent you from achieving your goals. Humanity went to the moon, we're problem solvers. If there's a way to manipulate and undermine your spam defenses it will be found.
> If the sender isn't authentic, then the sender is spam.
What's your definition of authentic? Is a self-hosted email server authentic? How do you decide?
> If the user reports the sender as spam, then don't permit the sender to send more messages to the person who complained.
If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails to other websites, what do you do? Block all yahoo senders? Try to block the yahoo accounts as they appear?
> 3) enforce liability. if an ISP hosts spammers, then block the ISP.
All major ISPs host spammers. Often they don't know that they do. Is it worth cutting off all comcast users nationwide from being able to use email? If anything, this would further centralize on one or two trustworthy email hosts, because those providers are essentially their own ISPs.
> What's your definition of authentic? Is a self-hosted email server authentic? How do you decide?
Authentic in terms of DNS. That means using and enforcing DKIM at the minimum.
Also in terms of from: and reply-to: addresses matching each other.
> If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails to other websites, what do you do? Block all yahoo senders? Try to block the yahoo accounts as they appear?
If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails, then that's a Yahoo problem. Yes, I would refuse to accept incoming mail from @yahoo.com until they've fixed their complicity.
> All major ISPs host spammers. Often they don't know that they do.
I disagree about not knowing that they do. ISPs must respond to fraud and abuse reports or they would lose the ability to do business. ISPs not responding to spam reports are offloading the cost of policing their users onto you.
> Authentic in terms of DNS. That means using and enforcing DKIM at the minimum.
Sure, these are basic things that are generally used as strong signals, but all this does is filter out the incompetent spammers. If you're sending from yahoo or from gmail, you've already solved the reputation problem. And there are other ways of doing the same.
> If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails, then that's a Yahoo problem. Yes, I would refuse to accept incoming mail from @yahoo.com until they've fixed their complicity.
I'd expect that this is approximately the baseline number of yahoo accounts sending spam when they aren't being actively targeted. Its less than 1% of 1% of the active monthly accounts on yahoo. So you'd like to just block yahoo constantly?
> I disagree about not knowing that they do.
Sure they know, in the sense that I also know that there are always people spamming from every major ISP. That doesn't mean that they can immediately address things. And while you're busy blocking all comcast users from sending your users email, your users are busy moving to a different email provider that identifies individual spam senders so that they can still receive legitimate email.
In closing, a simple question: if solving spam is this straightforward, why hasn't an upstart competitor (yahoo, protonmail, etc.) taken advantage of this strategy to fix the spam problem? It appears you're presuming a centralized system, which defeats the point of email and significantly simplifies the problem.
Internet systems are one part technology and one part social.
If my mail server is banning mail from Yahoo, I can't communicate with my grandparents and I stop using that mail server. Enough people do that and the mail server has no users.
inetknght, I get the sense that you run a mail server of your own. Have you taken your own advice here and blocked @yahoo.com incoming? Is it inconvenient? Is it more inconvenient than the two-step process of setting up a Gmail account?
> If my mail server is banning mail from Yahoo, I can't communicate with my grandparents and I stop using that mail server. Enough people do that and the mail server has no users.
Why are your grandparents using Yahoo instead of your mail server?
> Have you taken your own advice here and blocked @yahoo.com incoming? Is it inconvenient? Is it more inconvenient than the two-step process of setting up a Gmail account?
I haven't had any correspondence from anyone who uses @yahoo.com. Or, if I have, they haven't complained about me not receiving their email. Or, if they have, their complaint was also not received in which case it doesn't exactly matter. If it did matter then I would address it then. And, importantly, it also means there's another (less noisy) communication medium available already.
> Why are your grandparents using Yahoo instead of your mail server?
Because internet systems are one part technology and one part social. My grandparents already have Yahoo accounts and are unwilling to change that.
And if your solution to interoperating with Yahoo servers is "I don't have anyone to talk to using Yahoo servers," then I'm afraid it sounds like you're trying to solve a problem other than the one email is designed to solve.
The simplest web server I'm aware of is `python http.server 8080`
... and even for that, I had to disable / re-enable the firewall and fish around in the docs just last night to get the dang thing to accept connections from a source other than localhost (PROTIP: when running on a pretty-out-of-the-box Windows 10 config, the default options bind listeners to IPv6, not IPv4). And I definitely wouldn't recommend that configuration for production; you'll open yourself up to a universe of pain.
But as an analogy for setting up an email server vs. just subscribing to Google or whoever, I accept it. ;)
Phishing is difficult to combat effectively. Part of the problem is technological in that we never adopted a way of verifying senders are who they claim to be, but a large part of it is that humans are really good at fooling other humans, at least enough of the time to cause trouble.
Ironically, it is the technical problem of verification that makes it difficult to run (not setup) a mailserver: no one wants to trust it.
I don't think verification of sender is the problem (see PGP), it's that email was built such that anyone can contact anyone without setup ahead of time. I can give my address to some guy I meet at a conference and he can email me later with no issues, we don't need to agree ahead of time that we know who each other are. If he uses PGP, I need to accept the first communication is him, which means anyone can send me anything claiming to be anyone. Unfortunately, as soon as you solve this part of the issue with technology, I think you've just reinvented social media.
I wasn't trying to discuss whether or not PGP is a good or widely used technology. My point was that even if something like it were widely adopted and made seamless, it would not be able to solve the problem of bootstrapping the verification connections without eventually become social media itself.
> Part of the problem is technological in that we never adopted a way of verifying senders are who they claim to be, but a large part of it is that humans are really good at fooling other humans, at least enough of the time to cause trouble.
Tell me more about how DKIM and SPF and TLS with client certificates don't verify senders.
I didn't say they didn't, I said we haven't adopted a way of verifying senders. If DKIM, SPF, and TLS were universal, it would be a solved issue, but they aren't for a whole lot of reasons.
P.S.: However, come to think of it, they don't. You can receive a perfectly legit and verified email from scammer@consrus.ru with the name displayed as "Mr. Your CEO".
Honestly, as soon as Google announces a new product, my first thought is to wonder how long until it is shut down. Google has completely lost my trust in relying on any of their products. Even when they come out and claim that this product will not be cancelled, for reals this time, pinky promise, etc. I simply can't believe them.
If they don't use it to collect personal info (for advertisement purpose) or display ads they're going to close it, as simple as that. All their battle tested products are doing that, it's almost as if their features were side effects.
Aside: Costumers, er prospects rather, love my products until the end when they ask, "so... how many people work there?"
As though that would indicate how likely it is that the product will have a long life. They are telling me with that question they want my software for a long time. But when they hear the answer they bail.
You'll have to find some early adopters who are willing to take a risk in order to solve a critical business problem. Once you have those few reference customers, additional sales become much easier and you can afford to hire more employees.
In the short term try offering to put the source code in escrow so that if your company fails the customers can take over the product themselves. This reduces their risk a little, at least for large enterprises with competent IT departments.
My company payed once for an outlook plugin written by, near as we can figure, a single guy and has been using it for over a decade and it continues to get updates for free.
The hump you have to get over, I think, is the one where your product doesn't explode the second you disappear. That's tough with web stuff, but easy for native.
"Most companies are bloated and would require a huge staff of N to maintain this product, but I'm able to do it with N/10 because we've invested heavily in the very best intelligent automation. I've staked my entire life on this project so I cannot afford to let it fail."
They shut down Google+ and that was the "new core of the company" or something like that. So I have no problem imaging a stadia shutdown after a year or so.
I think that it's just your (our) bubble's way of seeing Google, most people don't even know what Google Reader was, or Google+. Google doesn't care if a couple of nerds on a forum whine about their killed products. But hey, we can whine if we want to, right?
Trying to do that myself. I'm mostly detached these days but there's a few things that do hang around (Google Calendar in particular - haven't found a good enough substitute for it) and we're a little Google heavy at work, so I'm stuck with it there at least.
I suppose buying a $130 box that no longer works AT ALL because the cloud backing it and providing all of the functionality is gone isn't a reason to want longevity? It would be like buying a mobile phone locked to one network that fails. If Google were giving this away for free and charging monthly I'd agree. Welp service down, no more $10 a month from me, moving along.
The $130 box gives you a controller and a Chromecast Ultra. You can use both of the outside of Stadia.
They are also optional: you'll be able to play on Stadia without the controller and without the Chromecast (e.g. on a computer with mouse and keyboard).
I don't have prior experience with controllers, and I don't know what is standard. But I can play my steam games with the Stadia controller and use it with https://html5gamepad.com/ (on Windows).
I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management is/was.
Now I have no clue what they are thinking with their product launches as of late. All of their products (and marketing) invoke this conservative, risk-adverse blandness that tries to appeal to everyone and in turn appeals to no one.
Maybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products?
Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which then results in shutting things down.
Google has a few products which were stellar and singularly awesome at the time of launch: Search, Maps, and Gmail. In the years since I'm not even sure I love those products anymore. Search has nearly become pay-to-play, a model which the original search killed. Maps is not nearly as stand-out as it used to be (mostly because products like Apple Maps have improved massively over the years). And Gmail is a bit of a mess and it's gotten pretty damned creepy having Google shuffling through mail.
They've also acquired Google Docs, YouTube, and Android which are arguably their most appealing current offerings. But those products are themselves giant question marks. YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws.
Probably the most compelling product to come out of Google in a long time is the Chromebook. Given their history, a lot of people are rightfully suspicious of Google's intentions with the Chromebook and privacy aspects around it.
I tend to eye Google's offerings the same way I looked at MSFTs 15-20 years ago.
> For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier.
While I generally agree that Maps is a great and amazing product, I really feel that it is now suffering "peak product" syndrome like MS Word circa late 90s/early 00s. That is, I think Maps was probably "optimal" about 2 or 3 years ago, but since then there has been so much organizational pressure to do something new and add features than each successive version gets worse overall with feature bloat. Yes, some of those new features are useful, but overall I have less and less screen real estate taken up by the actual map and more and more taken up by shit I usually don't care about.
Some of the Google Cloud Products are quite good in my opinion. Spanner, BigQuery, GKE. They have pretty high price points, but that's what you get to have with a good product. With GCP Google gets to show off what it is actually top of the world at, with these one-off consumer products Google Employees are just being naive to what their strengths really are.
A "product" is something people pay for. Nobody pays directly for Gmail or Youtube, or most of Google's well known "products".
That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers.
Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting.
They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.
Google Apps for Business will stick around, I have little doubt about that. Not because it's a paid product line, but because the underlying free product is used by hundreds of millions of people for mission-critical tasks (email, schoolwork, office work etc).
Same goes for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which offers an incredible set of features for free, even though their is a paid Analytics 360 tier.
How many users would it take for Stadia to achieve that kind of critical mass? Gaming is not as sticky as email or collaborative document editing. So if the critical mass is not reached, I'd expect them to discontinue it.
Google started to make sense to me when I started to understand their business model- Own every 'entry point' to engagement with a business, and then force that business to compete for users by purchasing Google's advertisements.
Gaming is big business, Google wants to own the consumer relationship so it can force publishers to advertise/sell through them.
I've never seen a consistent product vision from Google. What I see is a company that lets engineers spend a lot of time pursuing their interests, subsidized by the company's ad revenue.
Sometimes that results in products, but sometimes it results in multiple teams working on chat apps that never see the light of day, or Android being shipped with multiple SMS messaging applications at the same time, or that weird split between Gmail and Inbox. The money wasted must be tremendous.
My first thought is their obsession with their own culture as opposed productivity. Seems like something that could merge well with the Peter principle and put incompetents in important positions.
The view of Google within tech (oh, but the interviews are so hard...everyone who works there is a genius) is quite opposed to the view of Google without.
They are quite poorly run. You have this huge monopoly product that is locked up super-voting shares. The people in possession of those shares appear to have no management ability or even interest (or just ability in the case of Larry Page). There is no oversight.
So it shouldn't be too surprising that the products they develop have no value...that isn't really what Google do. They make products for staff to manage, not for consumers to use. Maintaining products isn't fun for managers: they need to build empires, acquire staff, and grow budgets. Google is a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly (btw, this is totally unique...I am not aware of another company that has ever been like this outside of tech/the present...the East India Company maybe?).
Er no. Big banks, and indeed all large business, have features of bureaucracies but most banks are basically the Lord of Files in the corporate form. The point isn't that they are bureaucracy but that bureaucracy is actual goal, and it is run that way for employees.
Not only Google, I can't remember any recent internet/web/mobile/computing consumer product I was excited about. Everything is either "meh, seen that already many times" or "nasty thing that's going to exploit users".
It's probably the HN filter bubble, but I feel similarly. I am excited about the return of 'dead' formats like landscape slider Android phones (Fxtec Pro1) or 'open source' hardware (PineBook/Phone/Time), but for most of the big companies out there, not much is new under the sun.
I could be wrong, but this reminds me a lot of 2006 or so when smartphones existed but were mostly Blackberry / Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PCs. We were ripe for a technology revolution but didn't know it at the time.
Either that or we are progressively turning into grumpy old people who don't like new technology?
There is no such team as a "product team." There are programmer teams, sysadmin teams, business admin staff teams, adhoc project teams, and taskforces.
The moment the product ships, all go minding their own business till the next big assignment. This is an inescapable problem in big companies.
The criticism of Google Stadia and the defense of its concept in this thread are correct.
There is a successful future in cloud gaming and nobody denies that. However, it's extremely likely to be delivered by a company with both the technical chops and industry chops, including a deep existing library. Google only has one of those, and they didn't even nail the technical side convincingly.
Look toward Microsoft or Sony instead; all the pieces are there for them to waltz in and drink Stadia's milkshake. And we know they're working on it. It's Disney+ all over again.
"Playstation Now" came out years ago. You can stream games, or you can cache the executable locally if you have a dodgy connection or want to go offline. And if I'm reading this correctly, you don't need to pay for the individual games, either - just the service.
"Playstation now" was just a rebranded acquisition and is not fully released to be played on phones/ipads etc in all areas. Nor did it had half the markting of Stadia.
It's seemed more of a test bed, for something they plan to do together with the PS5
>June 30-Sony Computer Entertainment has agreed and signed an agreement to acquire Gaikai for about $ 380 million [12].
that statement is in the playstation now jp wikipedia page.
also there
>In addition to PlayStation 4 (PS4), it is a cloud-type game service provided to various terminals, and was officially announced under the name “PlayStation Now”. PlayStation 3 (PS3) games will be provided using the technology of SCE subsidiary Gaikai
Just transalate the playstation now japanese wikipedia page for more info.
I agree. If Google was really serious about Stadia, they should have invested in first-party and second-party dev studios to show off the platform (instead of relying on disinterest third parties to port their old games). They should also subsidize the service (and the games) and lose money on it while they educate the public on the benefits of cloud gaming. And yes, they should also forge deeper relationships with third-party developers and sign license deals to maybe turn this into an Xbox-GamePass-Type service (i.e. Netflix for games), or just experiment with other types of business models (maybe something like Audible, where subscription gets you one free game a month).
But they did none of it. The focused on the technology with no thought on the value prop and the business and consequently decided on the easisest and worst model where the customer pays full price for old games. Typical Google.
I’m not a huge fan of it either and I agree with some of your points, but:
1. They are investing in first-party studios, but I’m not sure about second-party
2. Most of the launch games available to Founders are up to 50% off and included 2 free games (although that’s just like Free Games with Gold so I wouldn’t necessarily say it sets them apart)
3. They’ve worked with other studios getting their games on Stadia. For example, they sent engineers to Bungie for 6 months to help port Destiny 2.
4. It took MSFT years to develop Game Pass and the relationships with the developers to do so
5. Not many, if any, AAA companies are going to agree to put their new game on a subscription service, which is why Game Pass only has old games and Microsoft’s first-party games (although there might be a couple of exceptions)
6. It’s the developers that are choosing to sell the games for full price. Google definitely could eat some of the cost though
Good arguments. We'll have to see how serious they are about Stadia. I don't have a lot of faith in them. But I hope to be proven wrong.
The launch was a disaster in that there is no excitement about the platform. I like their statements on first-party development, but quality first-party games should have been at launch and ideally platform sellers.
Though I referenced Microsoft, Microsoft isn't doing a great job either. They have bungled the XboxOne launch and somehow ended up with almost no first-party games. They have certainly regressed since the Xbox360.
>For example, they sent engineers to Bungie for 6 months to help port Destiny 2.
Developer relations is something that Google is actually pretty good at. They make their engineering resources available to their partners (even outside of Stadia). I worked with them when we moved to GCP. That's not the issue. Their technology isn't the issue. Their engineering talent and technology is top-notch.
The issue is the commercial, marketing and business side. They also have a big problem with dealing with customers directly. Their natural inclination is to be a platform. That's great for search, cloud, YouTube (though they should be creating a catalogue of high-quality content), but not great for things like phones, and in this case, Stadia.
>Not many, if any, AAA companies are going to agree to put their new game on a subscription service
Agreed. Exclusivity is very expensive. You won't get RDR2 or MK11 at launch in your subscription service. Even having AAA publishers supporting a marginal platform at all will be a challenge (if they can't move units on your platform, why bother supporting it?). That's why you can't rely on those publishers. They need to be building their own library of first and second party games.
> They have bungled the XboxOne launch and somehow ended up with almost no first-party games.
Two very different issues, and both of which are arguably "solved" at this point.
1. Long tail sales is on par for Xbox One with where they should be at, at this point in the generation.
2. Microsoft divested several studios prior to the Xbox One. Such as the aforementioned Bungie which was a first party developer for the Xbox 360, and Epic which was a strong "second party" developer. It's taken them a bit for the spin-ups of their replacements to match their former brethren's output levels (343 and The Coalition, respectively), and Microsoft has also invested heavily into acquisitions in recent years, adding a bunch of interesting heavy hitters (such as Obsidian, inXile), and some interesting oddballs (such as Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Compulsion). It will take a short while for those new first parties' power to be felt in the Xbox space, but no other console manufacturer has invested as much in the first and second party development as Microsoft has recently. The only thing watering that down is that Microsoft (for very good reason) still believes the PC to be their first and oldest console, and "first party exclusives" are getting released to Windows 10 and now (again) Steam simultaneously with Xbox releases.
(I think it says a lot that Microsoft let Bungie go. They didn't try to kill the golden goose. It's made the Xbox One a bit slower to catch up to some of the highs that the 360 saw with Halo 1 and Halo 2, but maybe it's so much the better for the industry as a whole that Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 haven't been Xbox Exclusives.)
Google is going to face the classic conundrum that anybody who's ever tried to enter the gaming industry has had to face, it doesn't matter how complex the technology is, every generation of gaming has some degree of complexity. Google will need a killer exclusive franchise.
When Microsoft entered the market with the original Xbox, it took Halo to make them competitive. When Nintendo did it in the 80's, it was Super Mario Bros. Sega did it with Sonic. Google needs a flagship IP or they'll fail.
I think Valve has the option to play king-maker here. They seem to have everything but the inclination to dominate the game streaming market. I don't blame them for not wanting to get into it as running giant hardware farms is way outside their forte. But imagine a streaming service coming out that was tied to your steam account, letting you run all those games but keeping the ability to download them and run them on your PC.
I don't really see Sony doing that... I could see MS doing it though as it plays into their cloud ambitions and they seem more open to alliances than the other big cloud players.
Take MSFT game pass and back it on cloud servers. Almost all the games run on Windows, their own OS, and can be optimized for whatever datacenters are on the way out from enterprise apps but with some GPUs tossed in.
I'm over simplifying but I'm sure MSFT has a plan out there if they wanted to move forward after seeing how Stadia works out.
Both platforms are at similar levels of maturity, actually, with similarly limited support for platforms, controllers, and games. Microsoft just hasn't had the audacity to charge for their beta test.
MSFT are working on xCloud, which uses actual Xbox hardware in the data centers, so you have access to your entire digital Xbox library, including Game Pass. I’m sure they’re going to replace whatever the current hardware they’re testing it with to the Xbox Scarlet hardware when it releases, which should put it on par (or better) than Stadia.
One thing which Google does have is servers everywhere in the world: pretty much everybody is at a low-latency distance from Google. Considering one of Stadia's main risks is latency, they do have something going on for them that other companies don't. Stadia will still probably fail, but if latency is an issue even for Google, it's hard to believe it won't be for Sony.
Microsoft is the real competition, here. Look into xCloud. They have the network, the technology, and a deep first-party library alongside third-party relationships.
FPS games have had this for a looong time. In Quake 3 it's called timenudge and you can have it set to a negative value which means that the client will predict the opponents movement before receiving the next packet from the server.
The CPMA mod then came up with even better adaptive prediction in their netcode.
Without some prediction opponent movement would be jerky depending on the other players ping. The downside is that sometimes shots don't register which are a clear hit on your screen and sometimes weird flick shots hit which are far off the target.
Very surprised of general negative sentiment towards Stadia. Why is it like this? Because it's Google, the evil company?
Seriously, if any startup launched it in its current state, people would be cheering and blaming it on a new tech/new challenges. But cause it's a very big corporation with top talent it means that they have to release top quality product every time? What the hell...
I'm very excited about the project, although not really interested in it at the moment. I don't think its target audience is hardcore gamers, so why all of you are so over dramatic? Possibly, feeling happy that "real" gaming isn't going anywhere anytime soon?
Obviously, there are problems and challenges, but I'm pretty sure that sooner or later it will get better. That's what the MVP is for, isn't it?
>if any startup launched it in its current state, people would be cheering and blaming it on a new tech/new challenges
I'd direct you to a review of Onlive, a previous startup doing exactly what you say[1]. The take away is exactly what I've heard about Stadia:
"OnLive's streaming game system is a really cool concept, and the ability to access a library of games with no downloads, discs or storage worries is definitely cause for excitement. Some gamers will be put off by the occasional lag, though, and the list of currently available games isn't hugely tempting.
Still, OnLive is an exciting proposition, and it costs nothing to try it out. It probably won't suit you if you're pernickety about lag and image quality, but we'd recommend checking it out nevertheless."
I personally think that, after seven years, Google seems to be in the same place as a much smaller company, speaks to why it feels disappointing to me.
I hadn't heard of OnLive until there were comparisons to Stadia. On the other hand, Google is able to do some great first party advertising on YouTube.
OnLive was kind of a big deal when it was announced. A lot of poeple used it and tried it. They "gave" some games for you to play for free and test it out. Also, Sony did a few things similar on Playstation but was never a huge success because of the technical implications.
I remember playing an OnLive demo of a (then recent) Mass Effect title. I was picky about both image quality and lag, and I was not in a top-tier city. I was very impressed! Unfortunately, the problems with the business model remained.
This is honestly out right depressing to think there are people who extract joy out of these kinds of messages. I know this whole thing is meant to be a joke, but come on, people need to get over themselves.
You can live life, have good moments, enjoy and have a good laugh about things without it coming at someone else's expense.
People have spent a good portion of their working life to put this product out there. It has flaws and it's not perfect on day one, sure. It might even get cancelled a year from now. None of that matters nor does it mean we need to make a mockery of their work. So much negativity around us these days. It doesn't have to be this way.
> It might even get cancelled a year from now. None of that matters
To the customers who spent money on Stadia and games on Stadia only to have it shut down and leave their games inaccessible it matters. If this were a free service there wouldn't be so much negative chatter about it. This is mostly people warning others to consider purchasing Stadia may be equivalent to a high-priced one year subscription.
I think people are critical of google in general, not that that is a bad thing. Although for Stadia's case, I think Gamers Nexus shows why people are negative towards it off the bat:
When Stadia announced I think the general consensus was cautiously optimistic. They promised a lot, 4k game streaming on any device - seemingly anywhere in the world. A lot of people familiar with the challenges were especially skeptical. But the marketing kept going with its promises. Now it comes out and many of these fears are validated - it only really works in tightly controlled situations with very specific types of games. The sticker price and ridiculous marketing remains.
The current negative sentiment as seen on HN is about Google dropping products. But I think the negative sentiment outside of our bubble is due to Google blundering into this with dishonest marketing. Google tried to force this into a viral success on day 1 and that's not going to happen. This strategy also eroded trust that it will be fixed to the point it was originally promised either.
Finally, it didn't help that they didn't vertically integrate the games themselves and are charging full price for the game on top of the service. Microsoft is a good example of how it may have been done, by investing heavily in studios and exclusives to get the people going. To be fair though, Microsoft has decades of experience with this with xbox alone.
EDIT:
Because of a sibling comment I just want to mention how I think this may end. I think Google is now between a rock and a hard place, they either dump immense resources to get it right, or they dump the product and face even worse consumer reputation decline (this time in an entirely new market segment!). I suppose there may be a third alternative of putting it on life support. Either way there is no clear win here, I do empathize with the team which probably has a lot of passionate members who just want to do a good job. It'll be a good PM lesson to watch how it shakes out.
Except you have to pay for the games too, not just the subscription. Probably when they shut it down you got your money back, maybe not. Time will tell.
Google Reader's shutdown was a true act of vandalism. Sure there are a handful alternatives, but Reader despite its somewhat basic UI worked really well. And despite Google's attempts to kill RSS, it hasn't gone away.
I am pretty sure that I tried Feedly in the post-"Oh no, Google Reader is going away!" panic everyone else using the service was in at the time, and like you I could not replicate the feel. The Old Reader was the closest alternative I found among the several I tried, but soon afterwards Inoreader appeared with a very, very, very close-to-Google Reader feel, and I've been extremely happy on it ever since. (If only Inoreader would correctly open the comment link and not the original article in the HN RSS feed.)
I set up my whole company's communication on Google Wave. RIP
Slack, FWIW, is actually quite a bit like Wave was. I feel like if Google didn't screw the launch up so badly, and iterated on the product, they could have had Slack about 5 years before it actually existed.
Oh lord. I knew Google Wave was going to be a disaster from the get go. It was a secret project inside of Google that was not required to follow any of the normal google product design. This meant that it could use whatever database technology it wanted. This lead to some really terrible design decisions that would make sense at a very small startup but not for a large multi-million user product.
At the time I was working on the mail delivery infrastructure and they basically reached out to us at the last minute asking about email functionality. That was horrible because its not easily to wedge into a product after the design phase.
It annoys me so much because it was such a cool idea but the tech stack was badly implemented from the start. =/
I was in high school when Google Wave came out so I had no one to really talk to on it or real reason to use it, but I do remember it seeming pretty cool at the time. Looking back it was ahead of it's time.
These are the two I miss the most as well. Inbox was such as breath of fresh air compared to the Gmail app when it was first launched. And Reader really for me is the best way to follow news/topics/people I care about without too much noise and distractions. Still use RSS readers to consume a lot of my content even to this day.
Yay, FastMail! I've been using them for going on three years with no end in sight. Gmail adds all the "cool" features but us old men appreciate not being told how to reply ...
>And another solitary tear from the other eye for Google Inbox :,(
To be fair, Gmail has been my primary email since early 2009 and I'd never even heard of Inbox until people on Leo Laporte's podcast started whining it was going away.
I am surprised to hear this because I OTOH thought Google's attempts to corral people into Inbox when it came out were obnoxious. The app notifications, the Play Store nudges, etc. I tried it since I got the impression from the nudges that maybe Gmail was going to get knifed; I hated it and went back to Gmail.
Yeah, that's how I found out about Inbox, and switched to it away from Gmail on my phone. Then they killed it and I'm back to Gmail. I learned my lesson and ignored the notifications begging me to try Duo instead of Hangouts. Now Duo is dead (hooray, I dodged a bullet) and I guess they're killing Hangouts for no reason.
How is that being fair? Does you not having heard about it define what is a great product, and what is not?
Google Inbox was great. Intuitive, modern, snappy, a testbed for new features, and on the surface it seemed less monetized and ad-ridden than gmail.
I switched away from Google's email-clients as soon as Inbox died, also having used Gmail since as soon as I got an invite when it was more closed than today.
>How is that being fair? Does you not having heard about it define what is a great product, and what is not?
It's fair because MANY people had never heard of it. I even heard on those same Leo Laporte podcasts people going "what's inbox", people who report on tech for a living. I imagine, compared to people just using the gmail app or the web interface, it had terrible adoption rates which made it not worth supporting. From all I could gather is it was almost exclusively used by those in tech and then only by a small subset.
I imagine reader had a small user base. RSS feeds are a pretty obscure thing and always were.
The only hangouts messages I've ever received have been group spam and likely has a relatively small user base.
Google Circles was largely spam and garbage content created for SEO in my experience and probably had a very small real user base.
Etc etc. If you your user base is a small percentage, or a fraction of your percentage, of your overall user base it's perfectly fair to go "well, let's shelf that".
When Inbox first came out I did not like it at all, but once I got used to it I enjoyed it much more than stock Gmail. It was great mixing in reminders and snoozing emails. Gmail has kind of incorporated some of those features, but not as well.
I don't understand the internet's new obsession with descriptivism. Yes, it's English, in a circular-argument kind of way, but that doesn't make it good style.
The whole takeaway from it seems to be that self-described descriptivists intentionally use non-standard definitions of words then blame the other party for misunderstanding, making the writer fail at the primary goal of communication. And that is literally ridiculous.
I really don’t get the hate... I’m reading that in general UX is pretty good. I only have a Switch so haven’t been able to play RDR2 or AC Odissey... The solution seems perfect for me given the price point and I’m seriously considering picking it up.
When I worked for Nintendo we broadly called the segment I’m in “lapsed gamer” and it’s actually a pretty big niche...
What I read between the lines is that people are pissed that Stadia doesn’t address the “core gamer” demographic well (this kind of reaction is recurrent - see the Wii!), but might this not be a great go-to-market strategy?
Not really hate but more people are so dazed by google's "product" zigzagging that it's hard to take it seriously anymore. Google managed to induce massive amounts of cynicism in their users.
e.g. Remember Google+? The thing that got shut down? Couple weeks ago I get a corporate email saying please update your profile pic on google+.
1. I thought it's dead.
2. What profile? Did you guys create a profile for me on a dead product?
3. Or did they keep the corporate version alive?
4. What about google currents? Google+ pages? Different things? Same thing but renamed?
I don't bloody know. And no I'm not updating my profile pic dear HR. Google will kill it in 3 months time and/or launch 2 clones or relaunch it with a lick of paint anyway.
It's the same with all their other stuff too. Their chat thing I use every day? It's got 3 different interfaces with different functionality and I don't even know what it's currently called. Hangouts? Meet? Google Chat?
>When I worked for Nintendo we broadly called the segment I’m in “lapsed gamer” and it’s actually a pretty big niche...
I'm interested in what you've said here. Not only does it describe me but, if Nintendo are tracking it, it explains why they're one of the few companies I would trust to continue making the kind of solid, single player experiences that I enjoyed when I wasn't 'lapsed'.
I have no interest in 'e-sports'ey online multiplayer because I don't want to invest time to be good enough to enjoy it. I don't want to invest in a game-as-a-service because I don't want to feel trapped in it.
If you are looking for specific games and already have a Switch for portable gaming, I would suggest that you buy an Xbox One S All-Digital Edition during the Black Friday sale, which I've seen announced for $150 [1]. That's on par with Stadia's hardware costs, doesn't need a subscription for single player games, and has a much larger library of games.
That describes me as well, as a kid and a teenager I was mad into gaming, lost interest as I entered my 20's, now in my 30s and want to get back into it.
There's an easy product fix for this. Offer every game purchase with the option for a one-time key conversion, ideally managed through the game publisher. In the event of a Stadia shutdown you could easily port your purchase over to another single platform of your choice. This stragegy de-risks the platform and would go a long way toward alleviating consumer fears.
We saw similar strategies around the launch of Steam. Sure you're just buying a download code, but if you send us $5 for postage we'll mail you a physical disc to go with it. Same concept.
This. I would buy games on it in a heartbeat if they did this.
The problem is that, to move them to a new platform, for example Steam, they need to pay the platform's cut of the sale price. To give users the option to do this in future, they would need to keep all of the revenue they get from selling games in reserve to possibly do this in future. They would have to do this by charging users what it cost. I think it'd still be attractive though.
I feel that we are a little bit too hard on the big G on this one. They simply have their own inner startups, which they kill if product gains no traction.
We should look at how many startups from YC die within 4 years and make the comparison. I might be wrong, but the ratio could be very similar.
"No traction" for a Google product just means it's not the next Search or Gmail.
It doesn't mean that zero people use it. Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes.
If big YC companies all got shut down if they failed to turn into another letter in the FAANG acronym, maybe people would become reluctant to use services from YC companies.
I still use some Google services, but I check out my data on a regular basis, I'm not buying a Fitbit, and I'm not subscribing to Stadia because I want those things to last longer than I think Google will keep them around.
Picasa: Smug Mug/Flickr is rather highly valuated again today, now that they are free of the curse of Yahoo! Instagram and Snapchat are a part of this game now too.
Google Code: GitHub sold to Microsoft for a good chunk of change. GitLab, Bitbucket, Source Hut, all seem to be doing fine.
Hangouts: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Portal, Matrix/Riot.im, iMessage, Skype is maybe back from the dead depending on who you ask (certainly not kids, though). It's almost easier to ask who isn't in the Messenger game right now. The fact that Google managed to fumble two huge market share leads between Google Talk and Hangouts is maybe only equaled by Microsoft's multiple, complicated fumbles of MSN Messenger and Skype.
I'm not denying that the market exists. I'm denying that the product google launched in these cases was comparable to the competition. Google code, for instance, was SO inferior to github that comparing the two is actually kind of funny.
There were people that felt Google Code to be quite advanced for its time, with comparisons at the time more to SourceForge, Savannah, Trac, and some others that have past into the mists of time. It didn't keep up or maintain any of that "lead", but that just circles back around to the common aphorisms that Google loved big splashy launches and failed to incentivize steady maintenance or competition after a "product" launched.
They wouldn't have true but that isn't the point. The point here is that Google is willing to kill products that are successful by all other metrics and burn the users because it just isn't enough for them. They are acting like a startup but not putting in the dedication or caring enough about more modest gains that a start-up would do.
So if Google is going to launch something under the Google brand they either have to be happier with things that aren't making 10s of billions, or not make so many efforts and burning their users/customers/devs at every step. Why as someone downstream do I want to dedicate my time and money to their product when they've shown that unless it becomes a massive success it will be folded?
I, for one, loved Google Wave. It was much better suited to write specs with my team, nested collapsing branches are way more comfortable to use than google docs comments.
But the team needs to be disciplined not to get wave overblown, that's true.
Yes that is the problem. The inner startups. Some startup from YC fails, oh well they disappeared. But Google isn't willing to put the time and effort to get something to stick as much as it would be for a company that it was their sole effort. For them it is not much of a loss, they just spent some money and moved on. But they also spent their customers' money who purchased some cloud item that is now a brick, they spent developers' time (money) who committed to that platform and now have a 30 day sunset.
When you are a company that is as large as Google with a brand like Google, you don't want to be known to be making half baked marketing efforts, getting people on board and failing. Customers and developers then remember that and rightfully associate Google as a company that will gladly abandon you and cost you your money if it does not become big enough for Google to care (multi-billion). So Google cannot operate like a startup if they want to keep their reputation. A start-up would be very happy to have a low millions revenue but for Google that would be a rounding error and killed. So they need to make less bets, and put much more effort into getting their bets to the level that they can make acceptable money for Google while being mindful that killing a product does a lot more than lose Google the money invested.
> Don't mistake the fact that you don't want cloud gaming for nobody wanting cloud gaming
Also don't mistake half a dozen people on a tech forum as being indicative of a mass audience that's commercially sustainable for something.
Especially given HN is rather prone to imagine a product as turning out in a utopian perfect way rather than the more realistic "compromised by the requirement to be economically plausible" one.
Not only that, but the pre-orders for Stadia were so intense that they couldn't hit day 1 deliveries with orders that were placed within hours of going on sale.
So clearly there are plenty of people who want this and are even willing to risk it being total crap at $130 each.
Were there lots of pre-ordered, or are they just launching slowly? The fact that pre-order customers can not invite friends immediately, who do not need hardware, suggests it is about limiting users to avoid overloading servers/support/ops.
I don't play video games that often. Usually, when I play a newer game, it's because I happen to have new hardware that's capable of playing the game. Otherwise, I just sit on the sidelines when there's new games that come out because I don't want to shell out $BIG_BUCKS for some shiny new console or new PC that I'll only use for 20-40 hours total.
But, assuming I could stream a game with hardware I already have, or very inexpensive hardware, I'd probably play more games. Not nearly as much as active gamers willing to play $BIG_BUCKS for a shiny new console, but probably 1-4 hours a month.
And, yes, I understand that the speed of light introduces fundamental latency problems with streaming. It means that these systems only really work well in dense population centers. It's not like I live out in the boonies where this won't work for me.
I think the point of game streaming is to remove the high cost of entry of a console or PC. At some point, these services can be integrated into smart TVs, and all you need to play a game is a generic USB or bluetooth controller. Everyone wins, especially in a market where consoles were historically sold at a loss.
I want it, but I want the Netflix model. What I don't want is to buy games fullprice on their platform. Let me pay 10 bucks a month for a rich gaming catalog that I can play on anything from Mac, to phone to tablet and I'm going to use it.
I think it will take some time for an effective business model to evolve that works for games. Games don't exactly follow the lump-sum, zero maintenance model of movies, but they also don't work well with the SaaS treadmill either.
Some games lock players in and absorb their time continuously (e.g. Overwatch, PUBG, WoW, etc), while others package a digestible block of content that can be consumed in 10, 20, 50 hours, and then it's done. Subscription payouts based on proportional screen time would drastically favor the former over the latter, while lump-sum compensation flips the tables since it doesn't consider ongoing server and infrastructure costs needed to make multiplayer work.
I think this "Buy your games, and subscribe to them too" model that Stadia is using is how they're trying to split that baby, but given that nearly every other service is either subscription or one-time purchase, I have a hard time seeing it stick around long-term. Then again, some console systems also function that way, so I might be wrong.
So Apple Arcade, then? It's only $5.00/mo, but seems to meet the criteria you've set.
For me, I prefer something like Apple Arcade because it downloads the game to my system. I'm not sending commands over a network connection that might flake out at a critical moment. I also don't care about playing with others, usually, though.
Apple Arcade is great, it cuts through the skinner box horrors that the mobile gaming market has devolved into. However, nothing that runs on my phone will come close to the graphical fidelity and depth that a full blown AAA console/PC title can reach.
> They haven't shown anything compelling why this would be a game changer for end users.
I don't get this view. They really did show compelling, game-changing features for the end-user, if you watched their talks and demos. They showed lots of potentially game-changing features for developers too, which impact the products, which impact the users.
Most of it is vaporware at this point though, and what we have in Stadia today is basically an early MVP.
I disagree. There's a lot of shilling in the games industry and if you pull back even the first layer you'll see a lot of discrepancies crop up. The tear down of the controller, the fact that they didn't allow internet speed tests during live demos, and a lot of videos on youtube showing game-breaking latencies. I think it's still new and you may be proven right, that these are early quirks that are fixable. But I don't think they will be outside of ideal internet connections and very specific games.
IMO it will be the only thing people use one day. I‘m thinking ready player one.
For now. I think it‘s a good solution for certain people. I have gigabit fiber, but no interest to buy a gaming pc atm. So what if I quickly want to look into a game without spending thousands? Could be an OK solution.
Brutal, but fair given the track record of so much out of Mountain View. I’ve always detected a certain sense of tragicomedy about Google; their money-printing ad machine is something they’ve always seemed to feel deep shame about, which drives (and also pays for) all these other things that they give up on when they realise they’ll never come close to that kind of commercial success again.
Something similar is true about Microsoft in that it's had a few core products that have been big hits (Windows, Office, ...) and then to satisfy investor's growth expectations they plow the profits into other lines of business which often fail (Windows Phone, Hololens, Microsoft Band, ...) or stagger on marginally (XBox).
Azure is the latest big hit.
Somehow Microsoft has adapted to this reality with some grace, they even balance it with the "Who moved my cheese?" attitude of its customers.
"Google kills all their products" is a bit of an overused meme trotted out at any launch... But for Stadia it's a pretty legitimate concern, I'd say.
The model where you're still "buying" the games ties you to the ongoing operation of the service much more strongly than in many of their services where an eventual migration might be a little painful, but it's still possible.
The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record.
> The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record.
Exactly, in fact, Stadia is really just a way for Google to subsidize their cloud GPU buildout. Do you think those expensive GPUs are sitting idle in the meantime? No way! They're crunching numbers or spot instances for AI/ML workloads.
That's...probably not true at this moment. They're using AMD GPUs, which generally support the sorts of workloads folks need, and AFAIK they haven't opened up support for AMD GPU spot instances to users.
The OpenCL ML ecosystem is really lacking at the moment.
(Disclaimer -- I'm one of the devs. Even though we were bought by Intel a year or so ago, we've been pretty good about keeping the AMD / OpenCL support intact.)
if you think about it, it isn't that much different from steam, there's an offline mode there and gabe promised a way out if they ever go out of business, but the concern isn't completely remediated by either. the only sure way to have your games working in the future is - unsurprisingly and unfortunately - to crack your copies.
Yes, I was going to mention Steam, but decided not to. Frankly I don't put a whole lot of stock in the assurances of an "escape hatch," I'm not really sure that such a thing is possible to reliably promise.
The better "guarantee" on that end is the knowledge that Steam makes Valve lots and lots of money so they'll probably want to keep it running. The fact that you do have some sort of local copy and cracking would be an option if it came to it is some comfort also, though that's not really a solution that scales to the size of peoples' massive Steam libraries. There's also of course DRM-free stores like GOG as an alternative.
For better and worse Valve is essentially the Steam company now, and they know that's where their bread is buttered. Google isn't going to become "the Stadia company", in the current revenue model they are never going to see a point where they make more revenue from Stadia than any other service they offer.
There are fundamental differences between Stadia and Steam:
1. If Steam shuts down, Valve shuts down. If Stadia shuts down... Google is doing just fine.
2. What Stadia is attempting to do is much more technically challenging, and I've yet to see a strong reason people would want it. Steam fills a clear and unambiguous need, and does not depend on near-magic technology to work.
3. Steam works, right now, and is reliable. Stadia? It's unlikely to ever be reliable for many users. Maybe it will be, but that remains to be seen.
Google doesn't kill all their products, but Google killing a.lot of their products is. There's a website dedicated aptly named GCemetary to track them.
Although Stadia might fail, I see cloud gaming (i.e. streaming A/V) as a revolution for multiplayer games. We can now have all kinds of complicated physics and particle engines, since all players are known to experience the exact same “world model”. It might help a lot with anti-cheat technology as well. It’s pretty exciting!
Yep, definitely not new tech. (You probably know this next bit, but just for anyone scrolling by).
Having your server verify every action is the only way to prevent hackers from simply sending a packet that says "I got a headshot on that guy". Instead the server replays through all their actions. You never say you got a headshot, you just say when you clicked and the server figures out if you hit.
And because like you mention, clients only receive gameplay data and not the fully rendered screen, this allows clients to do things like interpolate the (delayed) server data with their own realtime input elements. Otherwise every single action you take would be delayed by whatever your latency is, and every other player's actions would be delayed by a similar amount. Instead, it appears seamless until your latency gets so bad that you just begin teleporting between positions because the server can't track you well enough (often called multiplayer rubber-banding).
Instead (well designed) game servers run their own authoritative version of the game world and track each player's latency, and use that to replay the previous few ticks of the game when an input comes in from any player. So if you have a 100ms ping, and press "W" to walk forward, when the server receives your forward input it treats it as if you have been moving for 100ms already.
Basically, saying every player shares the world model is incorrect unless you can set them all to the same latency.
This isn't entirely true for most games, clients run world simulation for prediction and sometimes can make authoritative changes. Almost no multiplayer games are complete dumb terminals ,you'd end up with the same latency issues that Stadia has.
Complex physics with high object counts can be difficult because synchronizing a lot of state is bandwidth intensive. Most games with lots of moving objects (RTS for example) use deterministic lockstep so only inputs need to be transferred, even if there is an authoritative server.
That only partly helps with cheating. Client side cheat software still has access to the internal game state and can modify rendering (so you see in the dark for example) or input (point the gun at any visible opponent). If you only remotely control a video stream, that's harder. I guess the next step would then be computer vision on the video stream.
>That only partly helps with cheating. Client side cheat software still has access to the internal game state and can modify rendering (so you see in the dark for example
Exactly, companies like "Artificial Software" (artificialaiming.net) have been selling aimbots for FPS for a decade or longer. I was curious back in 2009 and purchased access for a game in the Battlefield franchise.
It allowed me to have colored rectangles around all other players, my own team being green and the opposing team being red. You could see this rectangle through walls which would let you rack up kills and avoid getting ambushed. You could also auto-aim and tell it if you wanted the head or the torso, you could headshot people that were so far away you could not see a single pixel of their body. It also allowed you to start using your knife rapidly if an enemy got within a certain proximity of you.
It would even allow you to spawn in on enemy team memebers instead of your own team on maps that allowed you to spawn on team members AND it would change your name on non-hardcore servers to appear to appear as an ally to the enemy so you could spawn on one and casually follow them around, them thinking you were on their team, and just knife or headshot them when you wanted or follow them to a group of them and det pack/grenade/spray and pray and kill a bunch of them.
A quick look at their site and they still have many bots that still allow many of these features (and others like radar hacks, no recoil, no bullet spread etc) for various titles because all of this is still on the client side.
> I guess the next step would then be computer vision on the video stream.
Matching output seen on the screen has existed for decades under the umbrella of macros. I remember writing my own for an MMO around 2005 using AutoIt; it was significantly easier than any client modification.
I would hazard to guess that latency would be a killer for that. It's painful enough if you have 100ms ping on tactical FPS games like CS:GO for instance, but if the delay in a player's position updating caused a completely different physics cascade to happen (running into a wall rather than a stack of cardboard boxes for instance), that could get pretty jarring to see either the correction occurring constantly or the physics delayed after someone's actions.
Of course I'm just theorising - it could be an idea that no-one's implemented yet.
A lack of gameplay from the resulting physics to justify the server costs? Game devs don't simulate worlds for the fun of it. They have a purpose behind things. There's a cost/benefit involved.
Hmm, I'm wondering if rendering on the server would make things a bit harder for bots? It seems hard to figure out exactly what to send without at least doing visibility calculations and clipping?
I have heard that the latest Counter Strike servers do player occlusion calculations on the server so that cheaters can't see through walls. If you can't see an enemy, than the server won't even send your client their position.
This is simply an incorrect statement. Even with a dedicated server, most games simply replay game logic with deterministic lock-step simulation based on ordered user input events. There's some exceptions, but (partial) state synchronization is tricky especially with complex physical interaction and complicates/limits game design with a huge amount of edge cases so it's not a wise choice unless you absolutely need to do this, like open-world or MMO games.
What games are you talking about? For example, Natural Selection 2, Counter Strike GO, and Overwatch all do a full simulation of the world on the server, and the server is 100% authoritative. Clients are often running the same simulation locally to predict state despite network latency. Players also can experience packet loss or reconnect at any point and still have full state synchronization.
This is the problem with modern gaming. Everyone wants to fix all the problems that aren't the core problem we have with gaming: microtransactions. No one cares about how nice your game looks or how low-latency your game is if you designed it around microtransactions with pay-to-win gameplay and a laughably greedy content update schedule.
Microtransactions are a pet peeve of the hardcore crowd, but ask any average gamer and it probably doesn't rate in the top 10 disagreements with modern gaming. It's an artifact of the hardcore gamer filter bubble online, not a widespread grievance.
The problems Stadia addresses - eliminating 100GB downloads and constant 10-20GB patch downloads that might take hours to pull down, removing the cost of entry in the form of a console, being able to play AAA games on your phone - these are things the average non-hardcore gamer cares about.
It allows instant-play on 10mbit connections, where you would need to wait 10-20hrs otherwise to play. Even on gigabit connections, you're going to wait ~1hr to play AAA games as opposed to starting immediately. Instant gratification is powerful.
Sure but I’m highlighting the cost of that cause it’s not free. If you’re playing at 4K (which you couldn’t on 10mbit) you’ll be downloading 15Gb of data per hour. I also predict this is going to go up rather than down as we see more data packed in to help reduce felt latency.
Not until the world's internet gets a heck of a lot better.
There's no beating the laws of physics here. RTT in normal installed titles with modest system requirements is already an issue for gamers, let alone the latency this requires. Maybe in a few years when something like Starlink is in wide use, this can be revisited.
I really don't get who Google's target market is for this. A flat monthly fee I can see, that's what Playstation Now and, I think, XCloud is doing, but requiring full price purchases on this platform is lunacy.
Starlink also has to contend with the laws of physics (in particular, the maximum density of ground stations is quite low). It's a service for rural customers and a select few urban/suburban customers at best. It's not a mass-market technology that's going to put cable/fiber ISPs out of business.
When playing Quake over the net, the connection only has to synchronize the players positions etc. And Quake was pretty clever extrapolating the players motions, so even when packets were slow, they seemed to behave naturally. This frequently caused them to jump, when the positions were updated by real data.
With Stadia, the whole gaming graphics are streamed to your local client, so when the network is slow, the graphics will lag. And of course, it takes magnitudes more of data to transmit.
You already do, just with different consequences. Our brains are very good at mitigating input latency since it deals with it all the time, so we adapt quickly to 80ms. Compare that to the current system where what you see on screen is not what actually happens in the game. You get used to it, but every game solves it differently and it always feels bad. So I think that a lot of players would actually prefer this kind of latency over the kind they are used to now.
Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it, so playing with 80ms input lag would be fine for 99% of players.
> Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it
This is just straight up not true in the slightest. There's a reason HDMI ALLM exists, and it's not because "nobody notices hundreds of ms."
80ms is very noticeable, it's like moving around in sludge. hundreds of ms is straight up unplayable. This is no where close to what consoles & TVs are currently doing, which is closer to 50ms.
I didn't say that specific people didn't notice it, just that a most people are surprised if you tell them that they have hundreds of ms latency when they play on their console because they thought it was practically instant because their brains tricked them.
The fact that console gaming is so popular despite it having such horrendous latency is proof that latency is not an issue for streaming services to go mainstream. I'd look more at unreliable latency and data caps, people definitely notice 100ms latency spikes.
> just that a most people are surprised if you tell them that they have hundreds of ms latency when they play on their console
They're surprised because that's absolutely not even remotely close to true. Consoles & TVs do not have hundreds of ms of latency. This horrendous latency does not exist. That's why it's not an issue.
The smallest hundreds is 200ms. 100ms is half that.
And I do notice 100ms which is why I mostly play on PC with sub-50ms end to end latency. But this is besides the point.
> add another 50 - 100ms for a typical plasma tv
The typical TV has never been plasma? LCD TVs have had game modes for a decade and those are 10-20ms latency. Consoles automatically switch into game mode, too, and have for a long time.
This is incorrect. Furthermore, just about every consumer TV has a “Game Mode” setting to further minimize latency by turning off post processing — a feature that wouldn’t exist if people didn’t care about latency.
I had an intuition that quantum entanglement might be used some day to give us worldwide 0 latency communication, until I understood that this would break the universe’s causality :)
These 80ms were just fine because game engines already employ a lot of nifty tricks to minimize the negative impact of latency. Tricks which mostly only work as well as they do because the engine has an inside view on the gamestate. 80ms of video lag are far worse for the gaming experience than 80ms of "conventional" client-server lag.
Try to track a moving target when your screen updates almost 0.1 seconds after you adjust your joystick.
I expect Stadia input latency to be much greater than that, though, because most display hardware adds at least 30ms on top of whatever latency Stadia introduces.
Microsoft is working with Sony and Nintendo on this in some form or the other. Cloud gaming has a future, but it's not going to be Stadia by the looks of it.
the thing with multiplayer games is that they are often latency dependant like first person shooters or fighting games, or mobas.
Portable and cheaper single player games may be a better application in practice, because you're more rarely fighting over advantage over fractions of seconds with other agents, and NPC behavior is likely easier to predict for the machine learning next frame prediction stuff I imagine they are using
Hardcore gamers may not like it, but it's hard to argue against the observation that the overall trend everywhere is towards hosted services. Yes, there are some limitations imposed by physics but applications requiring specific high-performance local [client] hardware are going to be increasingly niche. (As, arguably, a lot of the most hardware-intensive gaming already is in the scheme of the population as a whole.)
I'm not a hardcore gamer -- I think hardcore gamers would call me a "casual gamer". But Stadia is not interesting to me at all. It offers tons of important limitations, and brings no actual benefit that I can see.
You can't see any benefit to never having to download a game before playing it or running 4K games without needing the latest gaming hardware? Given the obvious theoretical benefits regardless of how Google actually delivers on them, it's hard not to take your claim of "no actual benefit" as disingenuous.
I'm a very casual gamer and have no particular opinion about Stadia in its current form. And am perfectly willing to believe that it's pre-1.0 in its current form. But it's the direction things are headed.
Plus gaming has a very sharp peak utilization at a certain time of day and then much lower. When not being used for gaming they can use the GPUs for training, so the marginal cost of providing the gaming stuff could be very low compared to if they had to idle all that hardware most of the day.
I agree, but I think Microsoft would end up leading the way. They have all their Azure data-centers already, and I believe they're working on Xbox/Cloud streaming. Looking forward to what game developers can do with powerful dedicated servers.
The anti-cheat potential would actually be a killer feature for me. Unfortunately the games which would benefit the most from it also tend to be latency-sensitive.
My theory is this was a ploy to make use of idle cloud resources Google invested in for GCP. If that is the case I have much less fear of it just being shut down since its just gravy on top.
I think the core insight here is right, that as far as they were concerned it seemed silly to miss out on a chance to sell their "google-scale" experience and know-how in many cloud/distributed contexts.
But similair things were true for lots of dead products, and google's willingness to launch a large number of products and only keep the ones that gain massive market traction shows just as much paranoia about ending up with a stable full of lqggards and weak brands.
If user growth flattens out after two years, be nervous.
Google Stadia games needs to be customized for Stadia. For how long will developers continue to make Stadia versions of their games?
What will happen to the service when the people first involved have moved on and they have trouble finding engineers wanting to work on something that's not brand new? Wasn't that why they cancelled Reader?
I feel like this product is just a trojan horse for Google to gather and sell customer data in some form. I'm just not convinced that Google has any real interest in the video game industry itself at least not in the same way as a Sony, MS or Nintendo. Further to that, this offering just feels so half hearted that it almost certainly will go the same way as most Google "experiments" - I would avoid putting any money into their budding gaming ecosystem as a consumer.
Stadia will stay. Google needs this to happen since they need one more revenue stream. There is no way it gets shut down. All of the other products that Google was quick to cancel didn’t represent long term key businesses for Google. To shut down Stadia would be akin to shut down their self driving division. Microsoft lost billions with the Xbox before it was profitable and the brand stablished itself in the market. Google recognizes it will be that kind of marathon with Stadia.
Google+ didn't represent a long term key business for Google? From what I've heard the general attitude at Google for a while was that Google+ was the future of the company.
That's why they integrated it into everything that they could (YouTube, Drive, GMail) and shut down any service that might remotely compete with it (Reader, Wave).
If Google could kill Google+ then they can kill this.
Google+ was active for at least 8 years until it eventually folded. Stadia's biggest issues, network latency and lack of exclusive content, are problems that will disappear over time. If Google was able to support a social network with no reason to exist for 8 years, they can support a gaming service until it succeeds.
This should say more about treating software as a service than Google itself. Many companies have created then cancelled products, been bought out then had their products cancelled, or simply went out of business. We simply don't talk about it as much with other companies since they are either smaller or, in the case of larger companies, they were slower in transitioning to online services so products simply lost support rather than no longer being available.
The timer is based on historical averages of Google products. Seems like a decent heuristic, except niche products like Youtube app for the Nintendo 3DS is included
After all the bad PR I decided to sit down, put aside emotions, and honestly evaluate with myself how I felt about Stadia as a video gamer.
I realized that I actually would really like video game streaming. It would be really neat to pop open whatever game I'm playing on a tv in another room, or on a chromebook or some other non-gaming device.
The problem is Stadia also wants to control the game library and the hardware. I'm not okay with either of those. Really, I just want to stream from the ps4 in one room to the TV in the other room. And, I bet there's a way to do that already (going to look more into it later). Either way, it's not a multibillion dollar venture, so I think that's why google wants to be streaming, renting a computer, and owning your game library, all in one. I don't care about the other two services. I have hardware and I have game libraries.
I don't see what you've said as a criticism of Stadia. Stadia was never meant to do what you want and never claimed to either. I personally would rather Google managed my game library because I can't be bothered to download a 10gb game only to play it for 10mins before deleting it. If Google can let me jump in and out easily then it will make discovery much easier for me.
It wasn't intended to be a criticism, more of just an evaluation of why I'm personally not interested in it. I like the concept of streaming, just not the bundled steam and the bundled cloud compute.
If I could run Stadia with a game installed locally on my LAN in addition to content from the internet (like how chromecast works) I would give it a try, maybe buy a TV for my bedroom which is currently devoid of technology save an iPad.
Game streaming requires tens of gigabytes worth of data downloaded every hour, resulting in choppy gameplay because of the latency. Their production product seems more like a beta release. They may be too early to market and could see them shutting it down relatively soon.
I fear that Stadia could bring change to gaming as publishers might decide that streaming is the way to go against piracy, technical difficulties of users and distribution costs. Maybe it would allow them to externalize support to Google even. Another step to take software away from the user.
It would restrict things like modding and user modifications of games, which I value rather highly. The fear that I suddenly loose access to software is also present since I certainly am one of these backwards hoarders. I saw people loosing some of their digital media when GFWL shut down.
Still, in context of this page I believe that there is life in the old dog yet, even if the dog isn't old at all.
In general, Google runs its operation like a family of startups still (even given their new departmentalized org chart), and for any new Google product, I consider the operational expected life to be the operational expected life of a startup company announcement.
Google doesn't have a process internally (AFAIK) equivalent to series funding, but the processes they do have are functionally equivalent; if management decides a project isn't worth investing in, teams get re-assigned and that's it.
And companies that can offer a 10+-year support cycle on their products announce fewer new initiatives a year.
It blows my mind that anyone would support something like this. You're spending full price on a _streamed game_ that will be instantly remove when a) Google deems the service not profitable and closes the doors, rendering your money wasted, b) rights expire for certain games, c) some PR nightmare occurs from a CEO of a game company or something and they respond by removing affiliations.
Digital games are bad enough in that they can be pulled out out of the respective stores whenever, but when you can't even have it downloaded to your own console? Get out of here. What utter nonsense.
I kinda want this to turn into a game. Maybe by being able to buy a ticket and bet that it is X days before/after the D-day. Whoever is closest at the time of the actual shutdown will win the whole prize pool.
Perhaps they will switch to an LTS model for some services, committing to at least 5 years of support.
For comparison in the game industry, Sony has publicly committed to 10 years of support for each numbered PlayStation console generation, and that seems to have worked out pretty well, with generations spaced about 7 years apart.
(Sadly the PSVita/PSTV didn't get that support, nor did some services like PlayStation Vue, PlayStation Home, or Qore; also many multiplayer game servers have shut down after a couple of years, rendering the games unplayable online.)
I appreciate the sentiment here, but this feels incredibly reactive and preliminary.
Stadia should have more clearly set launch expectations: there are only a few games worth playing for, most of the cool cloud features aren't there, etc, etc
But that doesn't mean all of those things aren't coming? For all intents and purposes, this was a soft launch. Sure Google is going to burn a ton of consumers by launching before the true value-adds are there, but it doesn't mean that one-day Stadia won't be worth buying.
That isn't the issue -- it isn't a comment about the quality of Stadia today or even what is possible. It's a comment about Google's propensity to lose interest in products and services and shut them down.
I think the two are inherently connected, no? By assuming Stadia is a failed product out of the box, we just label it as another Google product that is waiting to be shut down.
Google is on the hook for a bunch of titles and features they haven't delivered yet, if they were to "lose interest" in the next six months to a year I'd be pretty suprised
I honestly wonder what it will take at this point to change Google's culture of how they launch products.
They haven't had a success in a while, bluntly. Perhaps the "Google way" of launching a half finished product over vague windows and iterating after that doesn't actually work? Or if it ever worked, doesn't work now when Google isn't a plucky underdog and the products aren't competing with other unfinished platforms but often mature, feature complete alternatives?
Honestly, i cant even name one google hardware product that had a typical industry longevity..
Smart watches were here and there long before Apple jumped in and made it main stream, and just like iPhone they made an industry out of it.
Google should stick with what it does best, like Android model (even wear OS model). Let the market for a new product starts maturing, then use the its software&services to beat the crap out of others.
In the source they cite (https://gcemetery.co/), do they consider only products that have died? Or do they track all products that have started? (hopefully they have right censoring, otherwise it seems they're underestimating the average lifespan).
I'm having a hard time finding the data in tabular format.
I think that this project has the economics to work, so, even if Google abandons it, somebody should eventually build it. Why I think streaming games is a powerful thing: Piracy. It will be more difficult to get a ilegal copy of a game that was never released to the public, only run on servers. But yes, kind of sucks to who wants to test games or live in third world countries.
The idea of game streaming seems sound... at least for certain genres. But having to buy games exclusive to that device is ridiculous, especially when considering Google's graveyard. There is just a whole lot of doubt shadowing it. If anyone can do game streaming correctly, it will end being Steam or something, a platform where most gamers already have games purchased.
Most of those products killed without any transition path are actually consumer products without revenue. So my rule of thumb: if Stadia manages a chunk of other Google business to depend on itself (which makes it much harder to be deprecated), then probably it's okay to use it. Integration into Youtube or Ads would be a good sign of their commitment.
Also worth checking out: the "near death" page on the Google cemetery website: https://gcemetery.co/tag/near-death/. Lots of obscure products you probably haven't even heard of.
I have zero interest in Stadia personally and I would consider myself a gamer. I just feel like I want less latency and video over internet doesn't seem like it's going to catch up with a 4-6ft video cable direct to my monitor / TV.
If Stadia is successful I can see it being a way to pay for new data centers for Google's cloud infrastructure.
If you consider that most consoles last a 4-5 years, they cost ~$299-500 over that period, that's ~$39-$125 per year for the generation. Instead of the users owning the machine locally, Google installs a consoles worth of power in a data center. Once the generation is over, the data center is still there and Google has put all that money into a semi-new server datacenter infrastructure that can be rolled into Google's Cloud service offerings. "Kids" / Gaming money then pays for "Adults" / Cloud Server infrastructure. The idea sounds great as long as there are enough gamers who don't mind the latency.
I am unfamiliar with the lifespan of a Google data center but I imagine it's around 5+ years.
> I just feel like I want less latency and video over internet doesn't seem like it's going to catch up with a 4-6ft video cable direct to my monitor / TV.
It's already close, I've gotten stable <20 ms over 100 m distance with Steam Link in standard 1 gigabit ethernet LAN without any tweaks (QoS etc). This is enough to play slower performance-heavy games like citybuilders without noticing any difference compared to playing on a local computer.
Dunno, I also game in 144hz+ so I'm definitely not their target audience and I'll never sign up likely. Not only that but my next monitor will be HDR color and at least 144-240hz which will just not be possible via the web for a long time to come.
> If you consider that most consoles last a 4-5 years
That was the case decades ago when technology was advancing fast. The last couple of generations are more like 7 years and future generations will probably last even longer.
It sure sucks to invest in a product and then see it shut down. However, I like the idea of a company that constantly tries new things, iterates and is not afraid to pull the plug if it doesn't work rather then have hundreds of zombie products that suck the profits.
> With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business.
I do wonder if this would be profitable though. Is Google operating at a profit even with the current model?
NOTE: I got way into writing this comment. I have things to do, but I thought I'd do some napkin math instead haha. I'm probably way off, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
My guess is it isn't. I'd be surprised if Google is selling the hardware at a profit right now, simply because the volume is not too high and they definitely want to reduce the barrier of entry.
On the software side, game companies probably don't want to lose margins and it sounds like right now they have leverage since this is a nascent platform. My guess is they're taking around 70% of the game sale (wild guess from the "digital sales" info in these Ubisoft slides [1]).
Let's ignore Stadia Pro for now and just assume the $10 a month go towards the the free games, or the extra compute for the 4k games / surround sound, or the discounts. If we go with $60 as the average price of a game, this napkin math tells us Google is making like $18 per game and that this their main source of revenue.
How long is a game? It varies widely, depending on the game (and the player) [4]. Let's say people spend an average of 20 hours on a game though. An hour and a half a day for two weeks.
Can Google stream games, HD at 60fps, for less than 90¢ an hour? Of course, this is Google so they're just employing their existing developers infrastructure, etc. The scale probably means they can probably get RTX 2080s in bulk at a discount. It's perfectly plausible they can. Im again, also certainly way off in my numbers. But it is a huge investment— the promise is it could open the doors of an industry for Google, but if it doesn't, is it worth it?
To be clear, I'm not calling doom on Stadia just yet— YouTube operated [2] (operates?) without profit and there's still old services that have stuck around. Google Voice still exists in spite of many calling its doom years ago [3]. Just wrote this for the analysis, not really to make a point one way or another.
To be frank, I don't want and don't think Google Stadia will go down.
I don't want it to go down because, I'm sure Google will lobby with ISPs to improve their latency and ISPs in many countries have long hidden their pathetic latency behind bandwidth/data numbers.
I don't think it will go down, because once latency issue is fixed there's no debilitating issue with stadia and western reviewers who are bearish about Stadia are forgetting how big mobile gaming is in Asia. Many of those mobile gamers haven't owned a console let alone a computer and Stadia in their cheap android mobile would be first console quality game they experience.
Google understands that the Xbox is what keeps Windows alive, and making $$$ for MS.
They want to get into the gaming industry, but take a gordian knot solution. They don't want to compete against consoles. They want to be a console for computers, regardless of OS.
Do they kill things? Yes. But, if those things are making billions.
Wow, it's really amazing me how much people hate Stadia. It's a perfect storm of Google + subscription gaming, so I guess it's not surprising, but I do wonder if there's a whole bunch of people behind the ones with the pitch forks who like the idea, even a bit.
There are a lot of people that want Google to fail, and will try to manipulate public opinion without any substance to their complaints against Google. You'll see this with Chrome/Chromium as well.
Hah, excellent joke/insight! If this goes viral it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy - people realizing Google likes to kill their services will say "Stay away from Stadia, it'll hurt if you get into it and they kill it".
Joking aside, this self-fulfilling prophecy issue is turning into a serious problem for Google that needs attention from the C-suite. Killing a product is no longer isolated to that product alone but is reflecting badly on the entire company and kneecapping completely unrelated teams. It's especially bad in the cloud: there are tons of enterprises that won't even look at GCP because of Google's flighty reputation.
The constant cancelling of products combined with the risk of having my Google account banned in one service and then locking me out from all others are the main reasons I don't even try out new Google services. The data collection would be one other reason, but they already know everything about me.
The question I assme they ask themselves is "If we no longer let small teams build and release interesting products, what do we miss out on?" The answer probably has a lot to do with employee motivation and retention as well.
This won't be shutdown and I'm betting on it now. If it ends up doing badly, they will pivot chrome into another gaming platform similar to steam and the browser will become a Swiss army knife app where you do almost everything.
Nice joke and nice irony. I actually think that Stadia will be very successful in the long run, and I think Google will never shut it down. Same for GCP.
(Just IMHO, and not much to substantiate my prediction.)
> I actually think that Stadia will be very successful in the long run
So far nobody has come up with a viable revenue model for cloud gaming that people are willing to pay for. People are already complaining about Stadia's $10/mo just to then pay full price for old games. And there's no way even that is covering Google's costs to run the service.
The biggest hurdle is not Google gets bored and canning it. It's at what point does Google decide Stadia needs to at least be revenue neutral and prices double if not quadruple, with the free tier eliminated entirely. Is the service still viable at that point? Will anyone stick with it?
Stadia is a throwaway project, far smaller than e.g. Google+ and in a risk-averse market of gamers who don't want to buy bricks and game studios who don't want to invest in a dead Platform (except as a token of friendliness, or maybe of protection racket, to Google).
Consider Stadia for what it is: it's someone gaming the system (if you pardon the pun) to become a VP. Once that position is secure, and once all the rest of top brass on the project is promoted, it will begin its inexorable march towards shutdown. So I give it a couple of years. The only way of avoiding this fate is if it gets viral and Google starts making at least a billion a year on it (their official threshold for caring about a business), chances of which seem infinitesimally slim.
It's the daily hate on google thread. It doesn't really matter what specifically google is or isn't doing you'll see the same litany of complaints repeated over and over. HN has become painful in that regard.
It's a very different thing from raincoat vs. rain coat. Those sort of combinations happen all the time, and either can be considered correct.
This is a whole class of words that are always two words when used as a verb, and one word when used as a noun. Setup/set up, login/log in, lookup/look up, checkout/check out, etc.
I guess you can claim it is petty, but to me it is like using the wrong "there". Especially bad in a title.
Language is defined by how people actually use it. If people are generally using and understanding "shutdown" as a verb (which has been true in the computer industry for at least 30 years), then it's a verb regardless of what language prescriptionists say.
In the present participle, it's "shutting down", not "shutdowning". Or, "she shuts down the computer", not "she shutdowns the computer". "shutdown" is a verb as much as "alot" is a word. It's just a common typo.
I'm generally a descriptivist vs. a precriptionist, but this is a different thing. Is there anyone arguing that, just because many people write "there" when they mean "their", that we should consider it correct? To me this is the same.
Can you show me anywhere "shutdown" is used as a verb (in the computer industry or otherwise) where it appears as a choice rather than a simple error? Like in the title of a well circulated article, or otherwise in something that has been subject to professional editing?
> Is there anyone arguing that, just because many people write "there" when they mean "their", that we should consider it correct?
Not yet. But if that becomes common enough, then that just becomes how the language is, like it or not. I personally would hate it and would be that annoying pedant who always calls it out, but if people mostly accept it, then I wouldn't really be in the right. When usage is in transition like that, it's these sorts of debates that determine what the end result will be.
My current pet peeve is the use of "literally" for emphasis rather than actually meaning literally. Although I will always object, this usage has become very accepted by people (below a certain age), and so I can't really say they're wrong in some sort of objective sense. But I'll complain anyway.
Yeah, if it becomes common enough, I suppose you are right. But since this is a whole class of "phrasal verbs" that all have the same rules, it seems less likely that that is going to happen any time soon, as opposed to something like "all right" changing to "alright" which is more of a discrete case.
There is also the issue that phrasal verbs are often split up or rearranged ("when will they shut it down?" "it is shutting down", etc), which isn't all that compatible with merging into one word.
Anyway I'm glad to see they changed the title on HN, even if I got downvoted for my complaint. :) I appreciate your pointing out the value of this discussion, though! ("it's these sorts of debates that determine what the end result will be.")
I'm personally ok with the non-literal use of the word "literal," but that's a different tangent...
I'm unsure what you mean - they said that there should be a space there and Merriam-Webster seems to support that. They put "shut down" and "shutdown" in the same page, and state that the verb version is "shut down". In the "First Known Use" section, it looks like it's just going with what the name of the whole page is.
They added the parenthetical "it should be 'shut down'" in an edit.
Originally it was just "Sorry, but pet peeve. Shutdown is not a verb." and I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they weren't just quibbling over a space.
True I edited, but the link to "not a verb" is pretty obvious what they are talking about. Nobody is going to make a site to claim that you can't say "shut down" as a verb phrase, that makes no sense.
It's a bit ironic that a page devoted to correcting a common orthographic error features a typo of its own: search for "Conjgate". (I would report it to the author, but don't see any contact information.)
I would consider this different than a typo. It is a common misuse, where to some eyes it appears correct, while to others' (including mine) it jumps out as blatantly incorrect, like saying "there" when you mean "their", or "it's" when you mean "its".
And it isn't just a case of typical compounding, words/phrases of that general form are never compounded in verb form.
This does not cause ambiguity to anyone. Its a distinction in search of a non-existent problem. The dictionary will change to follow our usage on this one, and we will lose nothing. Compound words become closed all the time.
i mean, why downvote the GP? there is a good discussion to have here. and i am in fact learning new things. i am all for using one word (less typing) but i am not sure i am ready to see shutdowning...
I'd hope that, when making a title (not just texting a friend), more than whether it causes ambiguity counts. Would you be equally ok with it if they said "there" when the correct word was "their"?
This sort of word does not become compounded in the way "rain coat" can become "raincoat".
There isn't a single example where the verb form of any of these, as a single word, is considered correct:
This title is such click bait lol. Granted this service was a terrible idea in the first place, and WILL be shutdown, but this is a hypothesis, extrapolated over hundreds of companies that have nothing to do with each other.
The end goal for google with this tech isn't stadia, it's something completely new. It's loading and playing a game as easily as you load and watch a youtube video right now.
Stadia's just the beta test to get the hardware running, tested and get developers familiar with the backend platform they need to develop for/port too.
Video games are one of the few really massive and lucrative markets which Google can move into and make a dent on their balance sheets.
So yeah Stadia will probably get canned at some point, but the technology will probably go onto bigger and better things.
