Google's Stadia Problem? A Video Game Unit That's Not Googley Enough (bloomberg.com) 70
The tech giant likes to test and tweak. Stadia promised to change the industry and failed to deliver. From a report: Google's streaming video game service Stadia had ambitious plans to disrupt the gaming industry, which is dominated by consoles. The tech giant had planned to pack Stadia with original content, announcing two years ago that it was hiring hundreds of game developers and starting studios in Los Angeles and Montreal. But those teams barely had time to get started before they were dismissed earlier this month as Google shut down in-house game development. From the beginning, Google's approach to video games wasn't very Google-like. The Alphabet company tends to launch bare-bones products and test them as they grow. With Stadia, it came out big. Flashy press conferences and ad campaigns promised high-quality games with innovative features playable on Android smartphones or on the TV through Chromecast. Gamers would have access to a library of exclusive titles and well-known favorites like Assassin's Creed without having to dish out $500 for Sony Corp's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox.
So when Stadia launched in 2019, gamers were expecting the complete package, not the beta model. While the cloud streaming technology was there, playing to Google's strengths, the library of games was underwhelming and many of the promised features nonexistent. Other platforms offer hundreds of games a year, but Stadia offers fewer than 80, according to Mat Piscatella, an analyst at the NPD Group, which tracks video game sales data. Players also didn't like Stadia's business model, which required customers to buy games individually rather than subscribe to an all-you-can-play service a la Netflix or the Xbox's Game Pass. Paying as much as $60 for a single game, for it only to exist on Google's servers rather than on your own PC, seemed a stretch to some. After all the hype, gamers were disappointed. Stadia missed its targets for sales of controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story. "I think it would be fair to say the messaging leading up to and around the launch was inconsistent," with the final product, Piscatella says. Further reading: Stadia Leadership Praised Development Studios For 'Great Progress' Just One Week Before Laying Them All Off.
So when Stadia launched in 2019, gamers were expecting the complete package, not the beta model. While the cloud streaming technology was there, playing to Google's strengths, the library of games was underwhelming and many of the promised features nonexistent. Other platforms offer hundreds of games a year, but Stadia offers fewer than 80, according to Mat Piscatella, an analyst at the NPD Group, which tracks video game sales data. Players also didn't like Stadia's business model, which required customers to buy games individually rather than subscribe to an all-you-can-play service a la Netflix or the Xbox's Game Pass. Paying as much as $60 for a single game, for it only to exist on Google's servers rather than on your own PC, seemed a stretch to some. After all the hype, gamers were disappointed. Stadia missed its targets for sales of controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story. "I think it would be fair to say the messaging leading up to and around the launch was inconsistent," with the final product, Piscatella says. Further reading: Stadia Leadership Praised Development Studios For 'Great Progress' Just One Week Before Laying Them All Off.
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Stadia is too much like the game console in the film eXistenZ, and should be a trigger warning.
lot's of people don't have internet that good for (Score:5, Insightful)
lot's of people don't have internet that good enough for that kind of use or have caps that are way to low for something like this.
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That sounds like a recipe for getting bite marks.
Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:5, Interesting)
While the cloud streaming technology was there, playing to Google's strengths
And to Google's dismay, gaming was there, playing to all the weaknesses of "cloud streaming."
From the moment you select a (non-live) streaming video to play, most every bit from the beginning of the stream to the end is known, or can be (barring the invocation of features like automatic on-the-fly quality/bitrate adjustment). The entire movie/show/vlog can and will play without any further user input.
Games in general are completely interactive on the level of seconds and usually milliseconds: i.e. in an FPS it often isn't known what the screen should look like even a tenth of a second from now, so the dumbest thing you could do is make everything rely on passing (a round trip) through an internet connection.
I see why publishers will always push this customer-rights-raping tech as aggressively as they can, and I see how startups like Onlive might do it to con investors out of a fortune. What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product, except for the most simplistic explanation that no one cares because they have a bottomless pit of money.
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For people in North America, all their games are delivered from Council Bluffs, IA.
That lack of hardware investment speaks more heavily than how they are approaching software partners and licensing.
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I live right next to CB and my games are defaulting to European settings. I have yet to experience input lag. I see video quality drop to potato for a few seconds several times a day, but it's doing better than my rig would running those games locally.
I've been using Stadia to bide time while I ride out this chip shortage. My rig is 4+ years old now but I can't get my hands on a new video card unless I want to pay newest-gen prices for a card that's already last-gen. At this point I'll probably just wait t
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I see how startups like Onlive might do it to con investors out of a fortune. What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product
Someone conned Google out of a fortune.
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Google Stadia was based on new algorithms for predicting the game, finding the forks and rendering and sending both possible outcomes to the clients before either happens.
But no, I agree. I think Stadia is still not suitable for FPS, even with these predictive enhancements,
Competitive FPS gamers do chase those milliseconds. Some gamers still use CRTs to avoid screen lag. Gaming hardware companies compete on reduced latency, claiming that their product will give be just a little faster, providing that edge t
Re: Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:3)
You can make many complaints about Stadia, but the responsiveness for many kinds of games is not one of them. I didn't think it would work either, but the last game I worked on also released on Stadia, and it was really snappy over a 30mbit connection. It was way better to play than when I was doing it natively at my desk before the pandemic. It's a melee combat heavy RPG, so responsiveness matters (though I won't make any claims about FPSes or fighting games; especially fighting games. Those guys still pla
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i.e. in an FPS it often isn't known what the screen should look like even a tenth of a second from now, so the dumbest thing you could do is make everything rely on passing (a round trip) through an internet connection.
You mean like multiplayer WAN gaming in those FPS games have been doing since the 90's? It's not like your computer magically knows what someone else's computer is doing when playing an online multiplayer match.
All Stadia and other streaming services do is offload the frame renders and game engine computations from your CPU / GPU. Which if you don't have a hardware accelerated network card to offload to, and have your OS set to not CPU offload to the network hardware stack, means better performance on the n
Re:Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:4, Interesting)
What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product, except for the most simplistic explanation that no one cares because they have a bottomless pit of money.
Have you not been paying attention to the last 23 years of gaming? They've been winning the war on software ownership and general computing which began with mmo's in the mid to late 1990's (aka rebranded PC rpg's to undermine game ownership). In the mid 90's everyone was gearing up for every game to be like quake 2 (aka you own it, have dedicated servers, no steam, level editing, modding, the works... that all went away because of the success of stole RPG's with a subscription (aka ultima online) everyone was expecting PC RPG's to get the quake 2 treatment but that didn't happen because of the success of Ultima online which changed the direction of the entire industry.
The nerd zeitgeist back then was fear of hardware/software DRM and Palladium (trusted computing) see here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja1... [cam.ac.uk]
Two or more machines connected in a network behave as a single machine, so that means every program from adobe photoshop, to quake to Windows OS can be split into two seperate executable files and split between your machine and a companies. That's why you never want to buy client-server anything, but people did en masse with Ultima online, Everquest, Asherons call, Guild wars 1 and world of warcraft, those games accelerated Microsoft/intel/amd's drm plans by miles. That's how we ended up with Steam, Origin, Uplay, Denuvo, Rockstar social club, Battle.net DRM, Diablo 3's always online drm, etc.
Everyone was expecting Diablo at some point to get level editing and dedicated servers, that didn't happen because of "MMO's" aka the game industries rerbrand of PC RPG's to deceive the public and put an end to game ownership where you are given the complete honestly C++ compiled binaries for your games. Just try running something like Deep rock galactic without steam running to see how far we've fallen, against something like Quake 2/Quake 3 (which you can get on gog.com btw).
Microsoft accelerating developments for "silicon innovation" (aka encrypted computing) windows 10 is the first OS with major drm in it which is what the nerds in the 90's feared. Either way the average member of the gaming public is chimp factor five levels of stupid and Intel, MS and the rest of silicon valley software and game companies have been on a full scale assault against general computing. Any game or app that's client server and demands a login 9/10 equals you getting screwed.
https://blogs.windows.com/wind... [windows.com]
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They've been winning the war on software ownership and general computing which began with mmo's in the mid to late 1990's (aka rebranded PC rpg's to undermine game ownership).
You're not wrong that the game industry has been one of the worst offenders about software ownership, but you're doing MMOs an injustice. The MMO architecture allowed a new kind of game to exist which had never existed before, with features that are impossible without that architecture.
Without the client/server architecture, running a world that can accommodate a massive number of players is beyond the means of any individual gamer. They can't afford the hardware. MMOs allowed previously unimagined level
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By all means, lament the state of software ownership, but MMOs were not the thin edge of the wedge.
They were you idiot, all mmo's are are just rpg's with game code and functionality ripped out and held hostage, MMO's are literally just hardware dongle Role playing games by way of network connection, your network connection to a 2nd computer half a world away keeps the files and code missing from the game you paid for it to continue to function. That's why most games from the 90's to the mid early 2000's are complete local apps where you can host your own multiplayer games with no DRM (corproate news-spe
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You're not wrong that the game industry has been one of the worst offenders about software ownership, but you're doing MMOs an injustice. T
No I'm not dude, game clients of the late 90's and early 2000's could barely handle over a 100 objects on the screen to render at once, when Ultima online was released most people had 28.8K modems, downloading a game state representing all object positions over 28.8K don't give me this crap RPG's with large # of players rebadged with the "MMO" marketing moniker to confuse the lay ppublic are some special category of software. The fact you buy into the mmo mythology of the game needing "special server" prov
Re:Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:4, Informative)
game clients of the late 90's and early 2000's could barely handle over a 100 objects on the screen to render at once, when Ultima online was released most people had 28.8K modems, downloading a game state representing all object positions over 28.8K
So much vitriol, so much incoherent ignorance. MMOs don't have hundreds of objects. They have hundreds of millions of objects. The MMO server keeps track of all of them, without burdening the client with them. Ultima Online had no volume or stack limits, so people grinding their production skills would fill chests in their houses with tens of thousands of shirts, all of which were unique objects in the game database. If you never went into their house, your client never saw all those objects, but their server did. It eventually became such a drag on their systems that something had to be done about it, but that's just an exemplar of the reality that MMOs are always bigger than any client sees. And you obviously haven't the first clue how many orders of magnitude the difference is.
I do, because I was there, and I wrote some of that code. No I'm not John Carmack, but John Carmack never wrote MMO code and I have. Don't quote Carmack at me. Especially don't quote him while continuing to display your wild ignorance. He projected "150" players in Quake, not "unlimited", and the original Quake peer to peer limit was just eight players. Eight. The machine couldn't handle more than that while rendering the game. It wasn't until the Quake dedicated server that the limit was finally increased to 32, where it remained for many years (because Carmack had to move on to the next thing), and it had to exploit plenty of clever hardware tricks to handle even that many. It's no accident that the limit was a power of two.
Where do you think valve got the idea for steam from?
From their need for an autoupdater you absolute gronk. Ultima Online wasn't relevant to Valve's decision to create an online autoupdater for their multiplayer games which required matching versions to play online. That's all Steam was, for the first two years of its existence. An autoupdater with a little bit of cheat prevention in it. If anything, I expect their inspiration was Windows Update, which debuted in Windows 98, less than a year after UO was released.
That's why every game suddenly had "MMO" stuck to the front of it to justify back ending it and preventing piracy...
You are obsessed, and blinded by your obsession, and flat wrong. "Every" game does not have "MMO" stuck on it, and the vast majority of the GOG catalog is available DRM-free. There were over 10,000 PC games released in 2020 (completely ignoring mobile games), and how many of those were MMOs? Lists I see online run to no more than 20 of those, and that's only if you count retreads like WoW Classic and the weird little thing that is Elder Scrolls Online. The VAST majority of new games are not MMOs and do include all of the game logic in their download, with nothing hidden on servers. The SimCity debacle is a rare exception, not the rule. If you hadn't covered your entire face from foaming at the mouth, maybe you could see enough of reality to know this.
The fact you bought into the mythology is why we lost dedicated servers and level editors to begin with and why Modern quake champions has no modding, maps, skins or open file access...
You act like that was even remotely normal. It was not. Doom didn't come with modding or mapmaking tools. I know, because I knew the guy personally who created them, by reverse engineering the format. We went to the same university. I saw him working on his Doom map editor in the labs on more than one evening. Level editors and dedicated servers have been extremely rare for the entirety of the existence of PC gaming. Lode Runner came with a level editor, and I whiled away many an hour on my 286 in it. It was the ON
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So much vitriol, so much incoherent ignorance. Especially don't quote him while continuing to display your wild ignorance. He projected "150" players in Quake, not "unlimited"
Dude watch the video again, he said NO LIMIT to the # of players, the 150 player remark was he expected to see 150 player quake 2 game at quake con.
From their need for an autoupdater you absolute gronk. Ultima Online wasn't relevant to Valve's decision to create an online autoupdater for their multiplayer games which required matching versions to play online.
No dumbass this is your delusionsal world idiot, EVERY ROLE PLAYING GAME IN DEVELOPMENT was rebranded mmo after the succes of ultima online idiot, Ash
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EA literally cancelled ultima 9, the game were expecting to get level editors and dedicated servers and modding.. So no, you are still an idiot:
See the postmortem of UO by the original devs:
https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t... [youtu.be]
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Every" game does not have "MMO" stuck on it, and the vast majority of the GOG catalog is available DRM-free
All the big AAA games have been back ended idiot, it doesn't matter whether it has an mmo tag or not, EVERY FUCKING GAME now has a login screen and has been reprogrammed client server.
Mech warrior "online" client server
Tribes Ascend - client server
They used you as a useful idiot to steal PC games and undermine game ownership, the fact you cant' see mean's your a moron, we specifically lost dedicated servers in quake and level editing BECAUSE Ultima online, everquest made it permissible to steal games by bac
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Latency in Stadia, and Nvidia's streaming game service for that matter, is fine.
Modern games are designed with a fair amount of latency in mind. Time between pressing a mouse button and the character on screen reacting is rarely much less than 40ms, and some games add even more to make online play work better. For example Street Fighter V has 112ms latency from button press to action, which allows it to hide most internet latency in online play.
Stadia's problem is that it's a shitty deal.
history repeating (Score:2)
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Come on, game streaming has never been tried!
Every should oppose Stadia because (Score:1)
Re:Every should oppose Stadia because (Score:4, Funny)
There are already some people on twitter complaining because female soldiers can be attacked inside the games! Recently the news had an article that GTA could be the cause for carjackings! Please leave games alone,they are not real! But I have all my favorite old games saved permanently on my hardisk like Roadrash,NFS Most Wanted,Max Payne
I'd never considered that the Assassin's Creed games might be the cause of 18th century piracy.
For the sake of our ancestors, this crap needs to be banned.
How not to use disruptive technology (Score:3)
The first gaming platform that realises this potential is going to have so many new customers it'll have to beat them off with a shitty stick (or put them into a queue :).
Google just crapped out a janky streaming service connected to a midrange PC. Even just doing that might have been okay if there was sufficient content to play or if the payment model was reasonable value but it isn't. Where is the subscription that lets me play a ton of games on a subscription like XBox Gamepass or PS Now? Where is the 24 hour rental model? Why does Epic give away better games for nothing than Stadia does on a subscription? Why can't I play games I bought on Epic / Steam on Stadia the same way I can with Geforce Now? Why aren't all the free to play games that exist out there in the wild hosted on Stadia - Fortnite, Rocket League, Apex Legends, World of Tanks etc?
So if Stadia gets shitcanned or relaunched then I will not be surprised. I've never seen a service so badly launched before. Google of all people should have gotten what it should have been from day 1.
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>The cloud represents limitless gaming potential
This meaningless buzz phrase keeps getting thrown around, in spite of its utter disconnect from reality. Cloud represents far more limited gaming potential than local. Speed of light alone puts a clear limitation on cloud gaming. Only utterly anti-scientific nutjob would claim that speed of light does not severely constrain any "interactive cloud" application to a far greater degree than a local platform.
Then there's the pretentious nonsense about "we have
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The obvious point is that games are not constrained by what a console or PC can do, or the speed they can talk with each other.
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>The cloud means literally anything a company is prepared to spend money on putting place can be put in place. A single game instance could run in a data center.
Can you imagine this three decade old technology being considered novel? MMOs had this for at least three decades at this point.
This is what I mean by meaningless buzz. It only appeals to people who exist in total ignorance of meaningful aspects of reality. Everyone else understands that this is meaningless buzz, and every time this meaningless b
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The obvious point is that games are not constrained by what a console or PC can do, or the speed they can talk with each other.
Cloud servers are not something magical, they don't have access to equipment that the mere mortals cannot possibly get. To the extent you might have share of an expensive GPU that you might not buy to own, it's defeated by the encode to streaming losing the quality bringing it back down to a console or mid-range pc quality.
Of course it's constrained by the speed they can talk with each other. It's even more pronounced streaming the entire video output and controller input than just sending coordinating info
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Only utterly anti-scientific nutjob would claim that speed of light does not severely constrain any "interactive cloud" application to a far greater degree than a local platform.
The speed of light isn't the issue. Light is plenty fast, even in fiber. If you had a fiber connecting you to the nearest Google datacenter in a great circle arc, it would behave like a LAN, no problem.
But of course the Internet is not made of great circle arcs of fiber. It's made of the most unholy mess of organically grown networking equipment you can conceive of, but it's worse, and it's packet-switched. That's what takes all of the time. The speed of light is nothing compared to endlessly convertin
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Speed of light remains the highest limitation. For all the "hundreds of nanoseconds" that you take to do packet switching and computing needed to figure out what packets go where, it's below error margin for time needed to traverse the distance light has to travel back and forth.
Which is why latency over internet is commonly measured in tens to hundreds of milliseconds rather than nanoseconds. Different order of magnitude. It's why flash traders invest ridiculous sums into things like hollow core fibre and
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Cloud gaming is disruptive. The cloud represents limitless gaming potential - massive online battles, destructible physics, being able to drop in and resume gameplay within seconds of clicking etc. The sky is the limit to what it can do because it is not network or IO constrained in the same way that PCs and consoles are. Games could run on servers in racks with the streaming clients being stripped down graphical frontends.
Yes, that would be lovely. An entire server rack dedicated to you personally. That'd be wonderful. Only the software doesn't exist, and now it definitely won't exist because Google fired everybody who might have written such software. None of their "partners" will ever implement any such thing, because unlike you, they can do arithmetic.
No one is going to implement a game that dedicates an entire rack of servers to you because you can't afford it. No, your personal data isn't nearly valuable enough to
Two words: (Score:2)
Iinput delay.
Gamers expected finished product not beta? (Score:2)
BWAHAHAHA!
That's ALL that Google does. The "Eternal Beta" cycle.
And the "Ooh! This could be interesting!" method of development and feature creep control (essentially NONE).
Yes. Game streaming promises to be a disruptive technology...ONE DAY.
But right now, it's naught but snake oil. Lots of promises, and zero delivery.
Kinda like an AMD paper launch...
Who is surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Google's approach to video games wasn't very Google-like."
Oh bullshit, it was the most Google thing ever.
This was a product that needed focused, sustained investment and Google bailed out before they even got started.
Wait, I thought they cancelled it (Score:3)
That's Googley AF
Stadia's problem was that it was a stupid idea.
Having to buy a game just for a service that was guaranteed to go tits-up was only reasonable for wealthy people... for whom a gaming rig's cost is not worth mentioning. When you add that to the generally poor internet access situations in the US it was guaranteed to fail here.
Maybe they should have tried it in Japan only at first.
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just superficially (Score:3)
competitive PvP games mandate very good ping (20ms, 50ms in the very worst case), and that wasn't their promise anyways; their promise (implied to some degree) was that you get OK-ish PvP but awesome PvE on hardware that would otherwise call for a "next frame please" button. which is fair enough; you CAN achieve that with Stadia.
this really becomes problematic when you look at the business side of the story. PvE games are content-based, so they are expensive to make and have to sell a lot of copies during their early hype. they will later sell DLCs and seasons and collector's editions and what have you but you gotta strike while the iron is hot. they are also sold at price points that reflect the PC / console triple-A gamer crowds, with their "I'm paying you a premium so I expect a premium product in return" level of expectations. so if you can't afford decent hardware, you probably don't have budget for AAA games either - so why would Stadia be attractive to publishers with regards to new titles?
so the alternative pricing scheme is a subscription, but since as publisher you want to sell the copies at a premium price, it doesn't make any business sense to offer this game in a package, especially where package price is already going to be discounted for bulk. instead you will be committing your old games and flops to the bundles, and get a cut for time played. this works for publishers, but then think of Stadia's promise: so they are offering some revolutionary technology, and their "killer app" is... a sub for a bundle of games that not many people want to buy? does that sound like a billion dollar business model to anyone?
or maybe I am missing something here?
Stadia works fine (Score:3)
I have a game PC and hardly touch it as Stadia is more convenient. You just click a game and it starts instantly, on any device. Playing AAA games on a tablet is great. Haven't noticed input lag. I guess if you have a shit internet connection then streaming games isn't for you.
The news is about the game studio closing down seems pretty much irrelevant. Who cares about some some games that weren't even announced yet that would have been launched in a couple of years?
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I'm guessing that you are trying to falsely make a point by putting the two questions you object to up front and then listing the rest of the reasonable questions. The majority of the questions focus on:
General Business Questions that are common for any contractor relationship, because they may want to sign a contract with you:
Business/Marketing Questions about specifically games
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Re: The point flew over your head. (Score:2)
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The list of questions you provided and the lists their competitors supplied.
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Or, you don't know how many questions their competitors ask.
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You entered into a publisher relationship with multiple console companies before posting your comment? How much did you get?
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What, if any, initiatives do you have in place that focus on increasing DEI in your game’s content?
What audiences are you interested in attracting with your current and future games? Why?
How does accessibility influence the way you create games?
Seriously? Even games won't escape this totalitarian crap.
the value proposition is just not there (Score:3)
Stadia will fail because the value proposition is just not there. Why would I pay full price to "rent" a game that is only available to me until Google inevitably kills the service? And pay a monthly subscription fee on top of that price? And the only way games play well is if I already have really fast Internet? The people who already have really fast Internet can easily buy a console that can play these exact same games forever.
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> Why would I pay full price to "rent" a game that is only available to me until Google inevitably kills the service? And pay a monthly subscription fee on top of that price? And the only way games play well is if I already have really fast Internet?
Sadly, aside from "until Google kills the service", I think you just described most MMO games...
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If it were more googley... (Score:4, Interesting)
Then two weeks after launching Stadia, they'd announce Google Gaming, same service but you can't play multiplayer with Stadia users, only Google gaming, and vice-versa. Further, there's slightly different selection of games available.
A few months later, they'd announce Youtube Game...
But no, Stadia's problem isn't that it wasn't "googley" enough. It's that it just is so many bad ideas wrapped into one.
First, streaming video gaming is fundamentally constrained. My ISP (a popular one in a large city), it takes about 30ms on average for it to return a humble few dozen bytes from their gateway, before Google could even in theory start optimizing. They have to encode the video output, which adds further latency. This is for 'good' internet.
For another, their business approach is just weird. You have to buy the games (for the same rough price you'd have to buy on Steam or Microsoft or Sony stores) and then on top of that, you have to pay to rent access on a monthly basis for the games you 'bought'. It's more expensive and higher risk of getting shut down.
Also, who wants to pay to grow their library knowing that google has a habit of dropping products? Google may be ok as a free or utterly transactional provider of things, but I'm not going to buy into anything that suggests a long term expectation from the company that cancels things left and right.