Write a postmortem, publish it to gamedeveloper dot com and capitalize on all the Stadia drama while it's hot to boost sales for your original game release. Make a YouTube video talking about the pain you went through, all the things you learned that you didn't get to give to people, and see what kind of hype you can salvage.
Or just get it on HN and tell people where they can buy your game?
Porting the game in the first place was 5 months of wasted dev time. By the time they had fully committed to the decision to port a game to Google Stadia, they had then taken the time, money, and resources of developers and put it in a burn barrel and set it on fire. It was the "best thing that happened" because it made what would've been a guaranteed worthless waste of time anyway into something that could actually help them.
Surely Google was funding this, right? 5 months ago no body in their right mind would have been investing their own money/resources into porting or building for Stadia, right?
It is entirely possible that my purchase of this game doubled the number of sales the game had experienced - it is also entirely possible that it was the 1 billionth $2 purchase they had.
5 months of dev time was to place the game on another platform and generate revenue, with an expected return of X. If they make more than X (ignoring the knowledge gained along the way) then in every way possible the exposure from this outweighs the 5 months of wasted dev time
My constructive feedback: on Steam, the "Jump Challenge!" trailer [0] (2m51s, way too long, not snappy) sucks and the in-game screenshots 3..12 are way too dark and static-looking. This is the developer's main chance to attract customers - compare to rockstar trailers like "Bubble Bobble" [1] which hook you within 5 seconds. Things that are painfully missing: zoom-to-closeup on the characters e.g, on level completion or when they complete a key move, add big captions, animation, color to the trailer, screen transitions/dissolves/fades (compare to the (static) screenshots for "Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved"[2], they superbly use neon glow/fade to convey tons of fast-and-furious movement). In the trailer, the human voiceover (excessively chatty/jokey) and clipart (plain irrelevant) instead of in-world captions (like "Bubble Bobble") don't work for me, it feels too much like QVC; don't waste our time saying cheesy infomercial-grade stuff like "Now we've got your attention..." or "You will love it". Take a chainsaw to the first 0m35s of trailer (well maybe a 3-second splash screen for your studio's name, like Taito/Bubble Bobble does) and start on an actual game screen, already. RIP Stadia, but get on with a compelling kickass trailer for your Steam store, already - you only have 15 seconds tops to attract and hook the user. It doesn't take 5 months to make a compelling trailer. Based on the current trailer I wouldn't even download this. Fix it, already.
The game is (mis-)tagged "4 Player Local" but also "PvP"; I don't see anything in the trailer showing how multiplayer is supposed to work, either adversarial or cooperative. ("4 Player Local" sounds mistagged; it conjures up memories of "Gauntlet"). The voiceover says there are many ways to play the game; that's too open-ended "Either play solo or challenge up to 3 friends, local or remote", overlaid on an animation showing exactly that, is way clearer. I don't even get the tag "Battle Royale", it seems irrelevant, if it isn't then you need to add to the static screenshots and trailer to show why this is "Battle Royale". Own your listing's tags and delete the misapplied ones.
I find it hard to get useful information from Steampowered. Curiously, "Jump Challenge!" does not appear anywhere in Steampowered's 17 hits for "Jump Challenge!" (?!) [3]. Probably downweighted by sales rank/popularity.
Does Steam provide the developer with analytics on how many users viewed the trailer and bounced? by demographic, by OS, by genre of Steam titles purchased, by referring channel/URL...?
Also, I tried crossbrowsing by the tags used for Source Byte Franchise > "Jump Challenge!"" "Action/Casual/Racing/Battle Royale/Parkour/4 Player Local/Multiplayer/Local Co-Op/Platformer/Arcade/Co-op/PvP/Pixel Graphics/Runner/Exploration/2D Platformer/Puzzle Platformer/Funny/2D/Rhythm"
Actually this is the game industry. Very reasonable indie titles die on Steam with sales in the dozens, all the time. Everything is about marketing and buzz, everything. So yes, I think this absolutely has made the game more successful than it would have been given its very-neear-zero median expectation.
I'm speaking with 15+ years experience in the games industry, often explicitly in marketing.
It's very possible that I'm wrong: obviously we don't have the knowledge of what their expectations from Stadia were, nor is it possible for anyone to now know how successful or not their Stadia launch would've been if Google had decided to keep trying to make Stadia work, nor do we know how many sales the game will get from this exposure.
But I still stand by my view despite agreeing with your first few sentences about the industry generally.
edit: It's mainly coming from gut instinct, so I've tried to think more about why my gut says that. I think the main thing is that the exposure is going to people who are interested in games industry business, or tech industry, or Google specifically. That's what everyone is discussing, not whether or not the game is actually worth playing (and unlike if it was some planned PR, there's not even any subtle suggestion within the story that the game is worth playing - nor to be fair that it's not worth playing).
Sure, a few people might click onto the steam page out of curiosity, or buy the game out of sympathy to the poor people getting screwed by this situation, but it would be surprising (to me at least) if the amount of people converting is more than if they actually just had a marketing person spend a day writing a piece of content for Hacker News / GamesIndustry.biz with the goal of being both interesting tech content and featuring mentions of what makes the game worth playing. And that's just thinking about doing targeted marketing to not-very-good target audiences (for promoting indie games - sure there are some areas where HN traffic is incredible and businesses that would love a front page post, indie games not so much).
SteamDB's data on the game doesn't seem to suggest that I'm wrong here, but maybe with time I'll become wrong. (Side note, while writing this comment I couldn't remember the name of the game we're talking about, so I had to go look it up... because the name of the game wasn't the interesting bit when I read about this earlier!) https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/
I agree with the other reply here. I think you are directly comparing 5+ months with the value of this exposure. In reality you should contrast what they would have got from 5+ months of work and launching onto Stadia. They were already doomed when they put 5+ months into a doomed platform.
All that said, this is probably bigger outreach then they were going to get with a Stadia launch.
Attention in the games industry likely doesn't drive sales for this title, but could lead to contacts and development for future titles, etc. (if the game shows promise)
Some games (very few) have growing sales from word of mouth, this news could get that started. (if the game is good)
I could be wrong, but I don't think cloud-driven graphics processing is dying. The knowledge gained by the dev team making it work will serve them well going forward, in addition to the marketing considerations being discussed.
The is "No way" that a fontpage HN post to a popular reddit post can generate more sales then Stadia. If it was that successful even Google wouldn't be closing it down.
Why even assume the "5 months of work" part is not a lie? Unless you spent the majority of time during these 5 months waiting for feedback from Google, I can hardly believe it. Entire AAA game engines have been ported to different graphics APIs in less time...
My bet is that there was not even an intention to do it, and just made this post for the clickbait. Wouldn't be the first time.
Based on past posts about what happened after getting front-paged on HN, I don't think it's necessarily the case that the surge of interest will pay off 4 months of development work:
Numerous emails from people all around the world. If you sent me an email, thank you! I’ll do my best to get back to everyone but it’s been an overwhelmingly positive response.
But they weren't going to pay off the development work by launching on Stadia either is my contention. Even if it had stayed open. So in the grander scheme of things they are probably better off than if they had launched. So I contend that they will get more sales from this publicity than they would have got on Stadia - even if it had stayed open.
Wow, the short promo video brings back so many memories from Icy Tower (2001). Such a great, simple game by probably the most productive developer in the Allegro scene back then.
Oh yeah. My first instinct on checking their steam page is same. Surprisingly, it doesn't mention icy tower in description. Would have worked to its favour
The whole industry is there and this is how you start a keynote. Not surprised that most people weren't confident about Stadia.
But it's also baffling when there were so many running services and standalone products already. Steam Link, Nvidia Geforce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Playstation Remote Play, Parsec etc. It's not like Google had a brand new open field ahead of them and no idea what to do
IMHO: Google is handling a bunch of things, including Stadia, and including GCP, in a very poor way.
GCP: copycat of AWS, but with less high margin, higher level services, so have been losing money since the beginning (ask some of Alphabet's board members, if you can, and watch their eyes rolling). The only thing that could have given them the advantage - not, not Kubernetes, although K was and is a great thing to fund - was a "cloud in a box" product, so companies could install a rack of GCP in their existing Data Centers, and use it. See "The Cloud Wars of 2017", written by me [0] six years ago.
Stadia: you can't build Stadia without getting into account that the market has one big monopoly (Steam), and a few huge other ones (Xbox, Epic, etc). The strategy has simply been to ignore this simple fact. It's like Netflix building a streaming service, without a huge investment into content as well. Doomed to fail from the get go.
Small rant, no horses in this game on my part; just a pity that two huge opportunities were wasted like this.
I've since left, but when I joined Google in 2018 one of the things they talked about excitedly at the orientation was how GCP was poised to be successful with enterprise. I may be misremembering some of the details, but they explained they had just hired a woman from Oracle(?) into a VP role for GCP who explained to them how an enterprise sales funnel worked, so now they were beefing up their sales team and GCP would finally get some real traction in enterprise.
It didn't _seem_ like they were being sarcastic, but they for some reason were claiming that the management team didn't understand how enterprise sales worked after a decade of trying to sell GCP, and were saying that like it was a good thing.
it can be good / a relief to find out you've been doing it wrong the whole time, because it means that now you can do it right and you may yet reach your objective
For example, embedded in the entire concept is the unwavering belief that Googlers has that their stuff is just by definition BETTER. I don't know if this is part of the orientation or the culture, or just the kinds of people that the Google hiring process is optimized for (the absolutely most insufferable software engineers i know wind up at Google), or just a lot of kool-aid drinking from the cloud department, but they clearly believe that the only reason they're not winning is sales. Not that they didn't build as good a product. Not that AWS or Azure just might be better at anything.
In my experience, Google showers companies with incentives and discounts to get them on the platform based on spend commits/forecasts that never materialize
Yes, entering a market with a huge war-chest and dumping an absolute fuckton of free product is one way to attack a monopoly. There's a reason they had to do that to gain any traction.
I've paid for one game on there. It was an exclusive and is the only reason I finally installed the damn thing. I think I'm up to about 150 games on Epic, and I didn't even get in near the beginning and have missed a few since. What they've managed to buy from me, with that, is a +1 in their install-base stat because the free games every couple weeks keep me from uninstalling it, but I still buy everything on GoG or Steam. I don't even care if epic has a lower price, I use one of those.
If Stadia had taken the same approach, the average account would have spent $100 or less but would "have" $3000+ worth of games.
Why do publishers not offer end-users the right to transfer games from one service to another? That would allow new platforms to compete.
I can understand that established services like Steam oppose the transfer of licenses. But why don't the less established services remove the fear of losing access by making the licenses transferable among themselves? This must be prevented by the publishers. What's their benefit?
GoG did something a little like this. You could add copies of some games in Steam to your GoG account, by linking them—not just, like, letting you launch them through the same interface, but you'd "own" a copy on GoG, too.
I don't think it really took off. It was a little clunky and I'm not sure they got enough buy-in from publishers that the catalog available ever expanded much past their initial offering.
More broadly, I'd love to see a strict, legally-mandated separation of media distribution and production. Mostly for the film and TV industry (there's precedent—the US only very recently stopped barring movie studios from owning movie theaters, because it caused serious problems in the past, similar to how vertical integration of studios and streaming platforms is making things worse today) but maybe something similar would help the game market work better for consumers/users, too.
Decoupling the physical media from the license to access that media would be a huge boon for consumers and creators but publishers will need to be forced into it.
The ideal would be an open system where you can buy a license directly from the creator (or from a publisher on the creators behalf) then retrieve that content from any publisher by presenting your proof-of-purchase.
> The only thing that could have given them the advantage - not, not Kubernetes, although K was and is a great thing to fund - was a "cloud in a box" product, so companies could install a rack of GCP in their existing Data Centers, and use it.
That hit the Google “no accountability” tarpit: Anthos looked cool, nobody cared to show up to sell it. Amazon shows up.
My account team tried to sell anthos, but they knew nothing beyond “it’s for the dc”. They had no idea what it actually was, or what problems it would solve. They’d get us on the phone with engineers who would just ask if we use VMware and when we said no, it’s like… oh well doesn’t work for you. They failed to educate internally or have any cohesive plans for it. They couldn’t even define what it was
I don't think it's fair. Compute and networking are still ahead of AWS, although the gap is narrowing. GKE was great from the get go, but today it's not much of a differentiator.
I really can't stand how Google has handled the whole stadia thing. Just want to get that that of the way. I don't want to excuse google here.
But I do question the wisdom of porting this game to Stadia. It has only a single user review on Steam after having been out on that platform for four months. Even if only one in a thousand people leave reviews, that suggests a revenue of only $2500 or so, or more like $1750 after steam takes their cut. How can it possibly make financial sense to spend nearly half a year porting this game to an even smaller platform?
Since there were much fewer games on Stadia, your game had a much bigger chance of getting discovered. And if they got their game into Stadia Pro (subscription) they would benefit from its generous revenue share. Hundred Days - Winemaking Simulator made 25% of their revenue from Stadia.
I was one of the people who regularly used Stadia and was part of the Stadia Reddit and discord.
It makes a lot of sense. Stadia has a very small game pool - VERY small, think a new console a few months after launch. It's the best time to launch a game that can get discovered and get a fan base. It's like that side scroller game that was free on PS+ the month PS4 launched - it got incredibly popular even though it normally wouldn't hold a candle to AAA games (Resogun)
Heck, look at Crayta on Stadia - it's a pretty average game, but was extremely popular on Stadia because it was a launch game and the only sandbox game available.
> After watching ReviewTechUSAs video on it, another Developer working on a Stadia port explained that apparently Google Stadia was paying the Developers for the amount of Gameplay Stadia users played their game. So it was enough for them to decide it was worth the investment to focus on porting their game as they would be making a bare minimum.
I think it's the best way to handle shutting it down but I'm talking about the entire product lifecycle: the technical choices made during development, the decision to launch, the business relationship handling, and post launch execution, marketing and comms. I am not claiming that every aspect of stadia has been a failure, and the full refunds for everyone (except developers lol) is one of the few things that is going well.
Ironically, I think that if they’d made that a policy at the beginning the service would have had a much better chance of succeeding. So much of the initial coverage was dominated by people balking at paying full price for games they couldn’t use when Google killed it - saying that they’d give you Steam/Epic/GOG codes or something would have been a good way to completely avoid that and start rebuilding their corporate reputation.
Yup, I never touched Stadia for this exact reason. I'd have been curious otherwise especially since I travelled quite a bit for work before covid (so no access to my gaming pc) but assuming I'd lose any money spent when Google inevitably cancels the service prevented me from even trying it.
It’s wild thinking how they missed the boat during a time when billions of people were looking for online entertainment and GPUs were hard to get. They could have done some kind of pandemic promo if they didn’t want to commit to friendlier terms forever.
Waiting for stories like "I was at company A, we relied on Google product X, and they pulled the plug and we went under. Then I moved to company B, which relied on Google product Y, and they pulled the plug. Then I moved to company C, which relies on Google product Z, and they're pulling the plug." (aka "serially killed by Google")
Nearly completed a project that was using Google's Conversational Actions when Google announced that they'll retire them in 12 months and support only App Actions for its Assistant. The customer froze that half of the project immediately: there will be only the software that interfaces Alexa.
If Google tries to enter the gaming market again any time soon, they're going to have a bad time. What developer is going to trust them to stick around?
It's also interesting to contrast Stadia to the original Xbox and how Microsoft stuck to it while losing money for years.
Just to be clear to some commenters: This isn't my game and I never developed anything for Stadia. I only develop for Steam and Nintendo Switch and you can find my games in my HN profile.
I just found an interesting thread on game development Reddit today and wanted to share. I don't have anything to gain or lose here.
I agree that it's debatable whether that game really required 4 months of work to port. It does look simple. So, maybe the developer isn't that competent. Or maybe the whole integration process takes a lot of effort? Idk.
Maybe it took not 4 months of work, but 4 months of back and forth with Google? Like the devs sent a build, Google takes 2 or more weeks to make a list of issues, send those, the devs take 2 weeks to fix them, rinse and repeat until four months are gone and Stadia is dead.
They've probably got a case based on promissory estoppel. Roughly Google made promises that Stadia wouldn't shut down. The devs work on a port based on that promise. Thus Google is liable for their effort.
But then again probably there's some sort of "eat shit and die" clause in the agreement developers have with Google.
Pragmatically, my mental model of the legal system is "he who has the most lawyers wins" combined with even the definition of "win" is kind of fuzzy given how many years the appeal process can drag on
I wish I could take credit for this observation. But Ben Thompson summed it up best in the Dithering podcast this morning. An ad company is incapable of selling things to consumers. The entire organization is built around giving things to people for free and selling ads. Everything else that Google has done has been a failure.
Microsoft and Apple have decades of experience with selling stuff to people.
That’s about the number of phones Apple sells in a couple of days in a down quarter.
Also Google isn’t “selling” Android. It’s giving the operating system away to support advertising. Microsoft sold billions of dollars worth of Windows and DOS licenses over the years. It never had to give them away to get uptake.
Eh, they acquired it when it was going to be an OS for digital cameras, and had no uptake. The point doesn't really stand here.
The better point in favor of the "Google can't sell anything" argument is that they don't really sell Android to end users. The OEMs do all the selling, and they just get taken along for the ride while they offer a platform where they also sell ads and gather user data to target ads better.
The devices they actually sell (Nexus, Pixel) have never really had that much success outside of enthusiast communities.
I don’t understand why Google doesn’t ever try to sell these aborted projects off rather than just killing them. Stadia is (was) a means to make recurring revenue off other people’s games! I’m sure margins are thin but I also don’t doubt that there are some scrappier businesses out there would love to take a crack at it.
Google projects are built on Google's proprietary tech stack. Which itself has at least two of everything. So not only is it hard to separate a software project from Google, but it's also hard even to separate a project from the specific team that built it.
Sure, I get that - it’s not zero cost to spin them out. But neither is issuing a bunch of refunds, for example. And at this point, they must know that memory holing projects is costing them a ton of credibility when it comes to launching new products.
Maybe a stupid question, but why doesn't Google just sell the services they no longer want to support? Spin it off. It's gotta be worth something and they likely have an enviable amount of users just from the name.
Google probably no longer wants to support it because it's losing money and they see no feasible plan that will make it profitable.
You can still sell companies like that, if they have valuable assets. But the buyer would still shut down the service and make money off the valuable assets (typical by selling them to someone who can use them).
In this case, I think there are valuable assets -- some of the tech, and the people -- but Google has a use for these themselves, so no need to get a buyer involved. That is, they are doing directly what a buyer would do anyway: shut down the money-losing service and making use of the remaining valuable assets.
Google has to realize that the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" method isn't going to end well for them. They need vested users to make their products successful, and now it's almost a foregone conclusion that anything new coming out of Google these days will get the axe eventually, so why bother?
I truly hate this way of sunsetting projects, esp platforms that others materially depend on. Even if you don’t want to say you’re cancelling it, an attitude of reduced pressure so they’re not crunching to finish the port. A friend was about to close on a house a couple weeks before layoffs happened, and an in the know manager just said “hey you may want to hold off on that for a few weeks.” Of course google can’t sunset projects over time because advancement is so competitive and based on novelty that if anyone knew they were working on a dead end project they’d be gone immediately. If only advancement was based on stewardship and responsible work and not just leading new projects…
What would it take to develop a library to emulate Stadia on Nvidia GeForce Go?
GeForce Go is a cloud gaming system that offers roughly what Stadia did, but with a different API. (Cloud gaming, in this context, means the game is running on a remote server and sending just video to the client. So the client only needs to have enough power to run a video player. This approach supports phones, Chromebooks, and "smart" TVs as well as desktops, and simplifies onboarding. But you're renting an entire computer with GPU in a data center for each logged in user.)
NVidia makes and sells GPUs, so renting them is in line with their primary business. Although with Stadia gone, NVidia might raise the price on GeForce Go. Originally both Stadia and GeForce GO were $5/month, and everybody was losing money. Then they both went to $10/month. NVidia also has a premium version with a better GPU at $10/month.
There is some question as to whether anybody can make money in cloud gaming. The cloud gaming services that are independent companies, such as Shadow, charge about $30/month. They're basically reselling AWS. Several of those have gone bust. Anyone looked at the economics?
The nex t Google product/feature launch press release should be rewritten from e.g. "Google introduces Badonkadonk Land Cruiser" to "Google might shutdown Badonkadonk Land Cruiser within 2 years", and the contents also adjusted to say "Since Google has a poor track record with keeping services running, users are understandbly wary about using this new Land Cruiser, meaning it is already on life support and might be cancelled in about 2 years."
This is why I consider ability to lift & shift when building anything on google. They're just not trustworthy as a foundation so being able to take your toys elsewhere becomes a primary consideration.
See also them pulling the rug out from people that built on IoT core about a month ago.
An I wrong to think they could theoretically sue Google for knowingly publishing false information about how likely they are to cancel Stadia? Stadia execs said a few months ago that they will not cancel Stadia, but I'm sure the internal conversations and meetings were very different. Like get your numbers up by next quarter or it's over. These conversations would be found in discovery probably. It seems that lie caused many people to invest in Stadia when they otherwise wouldn't have.
However, I say theoretically, because you'd need an insane amount of money and five to ten year timeframe to get anywhere with it. That's no small risk if you lose, and there's always the chance you do. A class action lawsuit on the other hand might be worthwhile.
While the details are confidential here's what can be considered public knowledge: Stadia instances run some Linux distribution and use Vulkan as graphics API. You are given a proprietary library (SDK) from which you get inputs (mouse/keyboard and controller) among a few other things. Executables are created using a clang-based cross-compilation toolchain.
There is no way I'd ever build anything that relies on anything by Google no matter how good it is - everything they build is marked for cancellation.
Flutter looks good! Would I use it - no chance there's alternatives that will be probably survive.
What is mad is that most people don't realise that Google's search engine doesn't go past about 25 pages of results anymore - it says "millions of search results" but you can't access them so it's actually a search engine now that's probably less useful than Lycos or Excite were.
There's a video online about Google deleting the internet - watch it and repeat the experiment yourself. It's crazy.
This isn't the result of some freak natural event. Literally every action taken was the direct result of a decision made by a person. A lot of people are to blame.
Not saying that this is anyone's fault, but it does sound awful that people have to pull in all-nighters like that to be successful in the indie game (or any game) scene. I imagine that news a small company like theirs can't control, like a major platform is shutting down, or a target market is now under international embargo would not feel like such blow had they managed and been allowed to execute at a calm, healthy and sane pace.
I thought google announced a long time ago that Stadia was a failure and they were taking it enterprise only or something. This post doesn’t make a lot of sense to Me, I’ve not talked to anyone who thought Stadia was still an active consumer product
"Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions."
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/
Write a postmortem, publish it to gamedeveloper dot com and capitalize on all the Stadia drama while it's hot to boost sales for your original game release. Make a YouTube video talking about the pain you went through, all the things you learned that you didn't get to give to people, and see what kind of hype you can salvage.
Or just get it on HN and tell people where they can buy your game?