by shapefrog on 9/30/22, 12:16 PM
Best thing to ever happen to them.
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?
by haunter on 9/30/22, 1:48 PM
"I'm actually not a big gamer" - Sundar Pichai on the Stadia reveal event
https://youtu.be/nUih5C5rOrA?t=120The 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
by simonebrunozzi on 9/30/22, 12:58 PM
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.
[0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2017-ac...
by asdfasgasdgasdg on 9/30/22, 12:20 PM
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?
by glandium on 9/30/22, 12:24 PM
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")
by AlexandrB on 9/30/22, 12:49 PM
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.
by babuskov on 9/30/22, 1:35 PM
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.
Thanks.
by treis on 9/30/22, 1:27 PM
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.
by scarface74 on 9/30/22, 2:52 PM
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.
by fisherjeff on 9/30/22, 3:00 PM
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.
by bko on 9/30/22, 3:10 PM
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.
by incrudible on 9/30/22, 1:38 PM
by znpy on 9/30/22, 1:36 PM
> Nobody is to blame.
X doubt.
At the very least google is to blame, and the stadia exec that assured stadia wasn’t going to shut down.
by danielvaughn on 9/30/22, 2:00 PM
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?
by klik99 on 9/30/22, 2:15 PM
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…
by Animats on 9/30/22, 5:42 PM
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?
by JohnJamesRambo on 9/30/22, 12:36 PM
Plan on Google to kill a product more than keep a product.
by Phenomenit on 9/30/22, 2:58 PM
At least they can release an update for the controller so you can use it with other platforms. What a waste of earth's resources.
by forgotpwd16 on 9/30/22, 3:28 PM
Since both are Linux/Vulkan environments, how big is the difference between targeting Stadia and Steam runtime?
by Havoc on 10/1/22, 10:01 AM
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.
by eloff on 9/30/22, 7:05 PM
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.
by raverbashing on 9/30/22, 3:09 PM
How do Stadia ports even worked? Do you target a generic Linux platform or it is more specific?
by richliss on 9/30/22, 4:14 PM
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.
by dqpb on 9/30/22, 3:33 PM
> Nobody is to blame.
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.
by hericium on 9/30/22, 12:07 PM
Cost of doing business with Google.
by chem83 on 9/30/22, 2:57 PM
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.
by tebruno99 on 9/30/22, 3:47 PM
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
by shmerl on 9/30/22, 3:43 PM
Well, now release the native Linux version on Steam and GOG. Thanks :)
by RektBoy on 9/30/22, 1:23 PM
Wait, I though shutting down of Stadia was a public knowledge for months now?