Google Stadia's Salvaged Future as a Back-end Cloud Service is Here (arstechnica.com) 11
Quick Google Stadia recap: Things have not been great. From a report: Google's AAA cloud gaming service launched in 2019 to middling reviews and since then has severely undershot Google's sales and usage estimates by hundreds of thousands of users. The company shut down its first-party studio, "Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E)," before it could ever develop a game, and it did so one week after lead executive Phil Harrison gave the division a positive progress report. Several key executives have left the struggling division, like Assassin's Creed co-creator and SG&E leader Jade Raymond, Stadia's VP and head of product, John Justice, and Engineering Lead Justin Uberti.
When Google killed the game division at the beginning of the year, an accompanying blog post hinted that big changes were coming to Google's strategy: "In 2021, we're expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players." Rather than continuing to push Stadia as a consumer-facing, branded service, Google seems to want to pivot the service to what would essentially be "Google Cloud Gaming Platform." This would be a back-end, white-label service that could power other companies' products, just like a million other Google Cloud products, like database hosting and push messaging. Google said it believes a back-end service "is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business." This all brings us to this Batman game presented by AT&T Wireless.
When Google killed the game division at the beginning of the year, an accompanying blog post hinted that big changes were coming to Google's strategy: "In 2021, we're expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players." Rather than continuing to push Stadia as a consumer-facing, branded service, Google seems to want to pivot the service to what would essentially be "Google Cloud Gaming Platform." This would be a back-end, white-label service that could power other companies' products, just like a million other Google Cloud products, like database hosting and push messaging. Google said it believes a back-end service "is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business." This all brings us to this Batman game presented by AT&T Wireless.
Following typical Google product roadmap... (Score:2)
So they have a huge expenditure that they will try to milk best they can by trying to expand their reach through companies like AT&T who get to have a cheap, though likely temporary streaming offering riding on the back of Google's sunk cost. In a few years time, they will shut it all down rather than invest money to refresh the platform to continue viability.
very handy for development (Score:5, Insightful)
Stadia was actually a live saver for the industry during work from home for game studios because we could publish dev builds on their service and people could work on and iterate at home without needing to download or build local builds on their home workstations (or play over corporate VPN remote desktop type clients which were not nearly as elegant/responsive as Stadia) .. so while it's failed very publicly by most important metrics, it actually has become a quite integral backend/platform of choice to a number of studios' workflows. (The other interesting aspect of this is that it probably caused more than a few studios to port their engines/games to linux to ship to Stadia, there's your red meat, slashdot)
In that respect, it makes sense that they're very much setup to package this as a whitelabel service offering.
The question ... do gamers want this service? (Score:2)
So, we have Saas, isn't this just Gaas? (Gaming as a service)
We've reached the point, for PC gaming, that unless you are connected to the internet, many modern games simply won't start. ... except LAN gaming, which is probably dead now anyway.
For multiplayer games, that would be obvious
PC gamers accepted Steam - it took a while, I recall when it was launched, the many problems and the furious kickbacks.
"I've just spent $50 on Half-Life 2 and I can't play it until I can connect to steam!"
Oh, how I remember t
Re: The question ... do gamers want this service? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We are racing toward a world of "dumb terminals" - almost a complete 360 back to the old days of the mainframe and terminal - where the end user has absolutely zero control of their purchase - and worse still, is shelling out monthly payments.
Probably you meant 180 degrees.
Seems reasonable to me. (Score:3)
Why all the hate for what's clearly a "fail quickly" model of experimentation? In other endeavours people laud it as a positive way to be innovators.
No matter where the friction came from, something internal to Google wasn't going to advance (and might actually inhibit) the success of these areas. The question is whether or not to fix the blockers, or shift gears. Is there sufficient money involved - "Google money" - to justify the pains?
Apparently not. So they're falling back to what they know they can do better.
Re: (Score:2)
Is there sufficient money involved - "Google money" - to justify the pains?
Apparently not.
How would they know? Google cancels everything before it can gain enough traction to generate Google money. They're living in a fantasy world where everything they build is the bestest mousetrap the world has ever seen, so everybody better beat a path to their fucking door right now. When that doesn't happen, they can't understand why (because the enormous Google collective ego obscures everything), decide that whatever it was is useless, and shut it down.
Google got to where they are today with zero mark
Re: (Score:2)
It fails to be popular or, alternatively, fails to deliver a path to profitability.
A lot of their shut down projects were not particularly failures, but also done without much of a business plan. For example google reader was generally well regarded, but useless. Google Talk rapidly replaced AOL Instant Messenger as the client of choice, and they kept fiddling and rebadging to try to confer some success of chat to some sort of other thing that would actually be a revenue source of some sort, mainly aliena
Re: (Score:1)
If you "fail internally", you only screw yourself, your team, or your company.
When you fail externally, you screw others that bought your vision not because you're an innovator, but because they wanted to count on your service to work and keep working.
Google Graveyard in 3...2...1... (Score:2)
https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
Surely someone out there can offer this as a service that won't be killed off in 6 months AND offer actual customer support? Google is notorious for not only killing products off but also having some of the worst pay-for customer service in the industry. Also, if there are any bugs or limitations in the product today, those bugs and limitations will never get fixed. Google simply doesn't care about making quality products with quality customer service.