Google's Cloud Gaming Ambitions Died With Stadia, Exec Says (theverge.com) 45
An anonymous reader shares a report: Two years ago, I wrote a reasonably prescient editorial about how the writing was on the wall for Google's cloud gaming service Stadia -- and how the company was now hoping to sell its white label streaming technology to other companies instead of building out its own Netflix of games. But it seems that, when Google killed off Stadia, it threw away that technology, too. Google executive Jack Buser has now admitted that the company is no longer offering the white label version of Stadia that allowed companies like AT&T and Capcom to let anyone try games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Control, and a demo of Resident Evil Village for free over the internet, not to mention the first game from Peloton.
"We are not offering that streaming option, because it was tied to Stadia itself," he told Axios' Stephen Totilo. "So unfortunately, when we decided to not move forward with Stadia, that sort of offering could no longer be offered as well." Google called the white label version "Immersive Stream for Games" and sometimes "Google Stream" and, to my knowledge, it was only ever used in experiments like the ones I link above. In AT&T's case, they were limited to its own internet subscribers. Maybe they weren't that successful? When we spoke to AT&T about cloud gaming following those experiments, the carrier didn't seem that bullish about serving up more games itself.
"We are not offering that streaming option, because it was tied to Stadia itself," he told Axios' Stephen Totilo. "So unfortunately, when we decided to not move forward with Stadia, that sort of offering could no longer be offered as well." Google called the white label version "Immersive Stream for Games" and sometimes "Google Stream" and, to my knowledge, it was only ever used in experiments like the ones I link above. In AT&T's case, they were limited to its own internet subscribers. Maybe they weren't that successful? When we spoke to AT&T about cloud gaming following those experiments, the carrier didn't seem that bullish about serving up more games itself.
not being able to use your own games from steam / (Score:3)
not being able to use your own games from steam / others really kills the idea.
also no / limited mods.
While running up your cap = better off with an local system.
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It also sounds like Google was in way over their heads on this project
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The latency alone would make it a non-option for me.
Many games do not place any meaningful latency requirements on you.
It also sounds like Google was in way over their heads on this project
No, other companies made it work. There are several cloud gaming services doing just fine, including NVIDIA's and Amazon's. Google's failure was one of policy not of technological or development problems. The service worked. It just was really really poor value.
Re: not being able to use your own games from stea (Score:2)
I had Stadia. The latency was not at all noticeable. I pushed a button, the game fired a bullet.
Round trip ping time is really low, and Google has the processing power for real time rendering and streaming of the video footage
The next Xerox? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bell Labs... Xerox...
Google is reminding me of all these companies that developed tech, decided it wasn't part of their "core business", and then eventually let someone else eat their lunch because they weren't willing to take sustained risks to open up new markets.
At this point, Android is the only thing that Google developed aside from Search that I'd be willing to trust is still going to be around in 5 years... but it might not be owned by Google at that point.
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This paragraph from this article says it all:
"Only Google could fail at creating an online gaming service that can play AAA titles and indie favorites during a global pandemic forcing people to use online forms of entertainment, all while a silicon shortage worsened over years and prevented gamers from building high-end computers."
https://www.xda-developers.com... [xda-developers.com]
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The issue is that short-term, high end build would not be a viable target market for streaming. The trans-coding takes a toll and thus those unable to stand their current rig were unlikely to find higher quality in a hosted client solution.
I'm not so sure that datacenter rendered gaming is really a significant addressable market, even in that context. Geforce Now is about the only option that is not muddled with traditional gameplay financially, and I don't think it turns in crazy lucrative numbers either
Re:The next Xerox? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except they failed at building a STREAMING game service.
And so far, everyone has failed at building a STREAMING game service.
Because physics.
Re:The next Xerox? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real failure was in the business plan. Stadia may actually have succeeded if it the business types recognized it for what it really was: a convenient way to rent games for a low monthly subscription fee. But instead, there was this half-assed notion of "purchasing" games, which are still ultimately rented and streamed to you. There was also dedicated hardware involved, which seems to fly in the face of the advantages of streaming games anyhow, which is that you can play it on the low-cost hardware you already have.
What they really needed to focus on was a way for people to dip their toe into the service absolutely risk-free. There should have been no hardware (allow third-parties to do this), no purchases, nothing but a very low monthly fee (maybe with week-long trial periods) with people able to try out a smorgasbord of games, easy-peasy. There would have been absolutely no risk, because if a subscription service goes away, you really lose nothing at all, and thus, the perception of Google as someone you can't count on for the long term wouldn't have been such a problem as it obviously was
Instead, everyone was asking "how does this even make sense?" or "who is this supposed to appeal to?" right from the beginning. That's not a recipe for success.
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That quote is pretty funny / insightful.
TBH it's kind of a mystery to me why they just abandoned this whole thing. From the outside it seemed like the tech was working reasonably well. And on the back end they still have their whole cloud infrastructure that they leveraged for this.
At least when it comes to tech resources (servers, networking, engineers) it doesn't seem that continuing and iterating on what they had would be too expensive.
Maybe they were really underpricing the service compared to their h
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To be fair in the case of Stadia, they pushed pretty hard and for a reasonably long time. They never managed to get revenue flowing and there wasn't really sign that they had any ideas to go further nor that the market would just magically expand out of the blue.
Meanwhile Stadia is a very capital/expense heavy initiative.
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Meanwhile Stadia is a very capital/expense heavy initiative.
Supposedly Google didn't realize this when they started it. I'm not going to go hunting for the article, but there are claims that Google initially thought that they'd be able to take their existing Google Cloud servers and just use them to run Stadia games.
It was only later that they realized this wasn't really feasible, since Google Cloud servers are optimized to be - well, cloud servers, and didn't have GPUs.
This meant that Stadia was only available in regions that were close to Google data centers that
Re:The next Xerox? (Score:4, Informative)
They did buy it fairly early on and I don't think there was any shipping product when they acquired the company. Android succeeded in a large let because a lot of the companies trying to develop their own smart phone OS either had a dog shit product that no one would want to license or only wanted to sell it on their own hardware. Google lucked into having something that no other company really had at a time when a lot of manufacturers were desperate for something.
Few companies are good at doing things outside of their core competencies. Frankly they don't need to be and most investors don't want a company that's plowing all of the dividends into chasing whatever wild geese the can be scared up.
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They're not the next Xerox for this reason. In fact, pulling the plug was the only smart move they made in this whole debacle. A good gaming rig that a subscriber would be happy playing on costs about $2,500. This gaming rig will support only one player playing one game at a time, so a player will have exclusive use of the rig for the duration of the gaming session.
Let's say that a single gamer plays for about 4 hours a day on average. That allows up to 6 customers to use the rig that day (we can assume the
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So Stadia was then a Google x2 then? (Score:2)
I mean a Google product means it got killed as happens to such, but this product then got killed twice in a way.. being the most Google product ever.
Or has Google killed some other products multiple times?
Announced with a bang, died with a whimper... (Score:1)
When in actual reality it was pretty clear this would essentially be a non-starter. Too many things wrong with it. I guess Google execs think they do not need an outside opinion...
That said, this could eventually work. Conditions are lots and lots of people with fast Internet (the US is at best 2nd world in that regard), assured long-term availability or a credible exit-strategy that does not screw over the customer, integration of the major platforms like Steam, high reliability, acceptable cost, and, in p
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The biggest problem is being expected to buy your games all over again. Paying for the service is one thing, buying a Stadia version of a game you may already own is bananas. While the people who have a fast enough connection to use a service like that can afford it, most of them still won't want to pay.
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Indeed. That one is a real killer. If this thing is supposed to replace your local gaming-PC then it must basically run almost all the stuff you already own and it must never ask you to buy something you already own again. Mocking the customer in that way is a sure way to failure.
Re:Announced with a bang, died with a whimper... (Score:4, Insightful)
When in actual reality it was pretty clear this would essentially be a non-starter. Too many things wrong with it.
I thought so, but Amazon and Microsoft are trying cloud gaming now. I guess we'll see in the near future whether it was the idea, or just Google's incompetence.
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When in actual reality it was pretty clear this would essentially be a non-starter. Too many things wrong with it.
I thought so, but Amazon and Microsoft are trying cloud gaming now. I guess we'll see in the near future whether it was the idea, or just Google's incompetence.
Yes, will be interesting to see. My take is it is too early because of the network situation, but I may well be wrong on that.
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A major thing to take into account is that many in the gaming community like owning their games (or at least a license to play them). Unlike television or movies, most of us grew up buying and owning individual games since well, gaming was a thing. Especially on PC, where you have strong modding communities and an aversion to DRM.
Until you overcome that hurdle, this will never really take off beyond a gimmick.
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Indeed. At least it requires some real from of ownership. But that can be done, you could just get a licence key that works online and offline and a download option. The short-sigthed current models will definitely not cut it.
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Indeed. At least it requires some real from of ownership. But that can be done, you could just get a licence key that works online and offline and a download option. The short-sigthed current models will definitely not cut it.
That’s more or less how Steam does it actually. As stated in their user agreement, you’re not actually buying the game per say, but a license to play (and mod within reason). You can still store saves on either their cloud storage or on your pc, and even if you’re disconnected from Steam’s servers you can still play the game.
And of course, you have other sites like Good Old Games which sell DRM-free games.
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Now that it's been out, my opinion has changed. Netflix is something you do because you are bored, games are something that you play because you want to. Applying the Netflix model to games doesn't work, because it makes the games seem boring. Maybe someone can find a way to change that.
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Hmm. Interesting point.
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This is only tangentially related to what you're talking about but after decades of gaming at different levels of intensity (and some game industry experience a while back) ... i'm kind of afraid of games and stopped playing several years ago.
There're just too many of them and they're too good at being engrossing, at least for me. And the "good" games take a certain minimum initial and ongoing time / energy investment to actually play competently ... and that amount is not small.
I couldn't play like 1 or h
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I thought so, but Amazon and Microsoft are trying cloud gaming now. I guess we'll see in the near future whether it was the idea, or just Google's incompetence.
Sony and Nvidia also have cloud gaming platforms.
It was Google's incompetence. I'm not going to go hunting for the article, but somewhere, there was a great article that listed all the ways Google's Stadia implementation was worse than its competitors. The main thing was that Nvidia's solution works with your existing Steam library, while Microsoft and Sony provide a "subscription" service that provides you with a library of streamed games. I'm not sure what Amazon is doing. Stadia, on the other hand, wante
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letting you play games that you own is needed not (Score:2)
letting you play games that you own is needed not buy again and not buy ones that are locked to cloud only.
Need steam + workshop to make an good run at it.
A trend (Score:2)
And this is why some people are reluctant to buy-in to new Google products or stand by products that they purchase. Those products sometimes just go "poof"...seemingly on a whim.
We need to deliver the scooter first to our client (Score:1)
Basically... (Score:2)
...unless the product is going to:
1. Harvest heaving, titanic gobs of customer data.
2. Collect astronomical amounts of corporate data.
3. Provide a direct arterial shunt for advertising directly into the public's everyday internet experience...
Then anything developed by Google/Alphabet is going to be dead inside of three years. Google has precisely one function: consume all data to facilitate the generation of profit.
That's it.
And if something they produce does not do that, then think of it like a lizar [youtube.com]
Patents (Score:2)
Great, you're ending cloud gaming ambitions.
Now would be a great time to cancel all patents related to Stadia, and make the technology available to everybody.
google needed something like shadow gaming pc (Score:2)
I don't think that GCP has any thing like
$44.98 / month no commitment for
4 cores with 8 threads
NVIDIA® RTX
16GB ram
256 GB Storage SSD with $2.99 per mo for each added 256 GB block up to 5TB
Can a company be diagnosed with ADHD? (Score:2)
Does this put anyone off using google services (Score:2)
Apart from Google docs stuff, actions like these have me really avoiding an Google related server tech.
Like Firebase, or any Google hosted containers, or heck even Go, I am really unsure about getting into any of it because I feel like Google could just drop it any time.
Anyone else avoiding using Google tech because of their fickleness in supporting various technologies they develop and promote for a time?
Stadia... answer looking for a oroblem (Score:2)
1: had no exsisting game library
2: if you
a) lived quite close ( in a network sence ) to a dc where Google but their stadia servers
b) had a decent internet connection
3: disappointing game avalibiliry at launch
For me 1and 3 whwew the feal killers, but maybe I was not in the target demographic. I suspect 2 was a rather major showstopper for a lot of people.