Games

I would have tried it if I could trust Google to maintain a commitment to something for longer than a couple years (at best).

I was intrigued but I didn't want to invest in it because of Google's history of killing great products.

They have some great tools for their cloud platform but at this point, I wouldn't go all in on any new product of theirs.

I always loved the "hardware running 24/7" e-waste part of it

I owned a ps4 that I must have played 60 hours on for spiderman and horizon and now it's never going to be used anymore

Would've loved a streaming platform that doesn't cost a whole console in a year in subscription fees + makes you pay for the games

But somehow, Google couldn't be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn't make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that.

Google is really bad at marketing despite being an advertising company. Most of the products they've launched then shut down I just never heard of, despite finding the ideas behind them really enticing after the fact.

The tech behind it worked amazingly well.

In my experience it was pretty shit. While visiting family in Minnesota, I got a better experience using Steam remote play to my desktop in Seattle than I did using Stadia, both in terms of latency and visual quality. I’m sure it would have been better living in California or New York, where you’re closer to a datacenter. But Doom Eternal was just unplayable for me.

I got one, was super disappointed with the functionality and didn't like it at all. Returned it in less than a week. I got it after it'd already been steeply discounted and was so glad I hated it and got a refund when they killed it....

Despite Google being heavily invested in the advertising space, they have always been terrible at advertising their own products. It almost seems like the top brass don't actually care about their non-search products at all.

AFAIK, MMOs keep all the game state on the servers already. The difference is that what they send to the client is key deltas to the game state, which the client then renders. Stadia type services instead render that on the datacenter side and send the client images.

With their expertise at networking and so-on, Google might have been able to get a slight advantage in server-to-server communication, but it wouldn't have enabled anything on a whole different scale, AFAIK.

IMO, their real advantage was that they could have dealt with platform switching in a seamless way. So, take an addictive turn-by-turn game like Civilization. Right now someone might play 20 turns before work, then commute in, think about it all day, then jump back in when they get home. With Stadia, they could have let you keep playing on your cell phone as you take the train into work. Play a few turns on a smoke break. Maybe play on a web browser on your work computer if it's a slow day. Then play again on your commute home, then play on the TV at home, but if someone wanted to watch a show, you could either go up and play on a PC, or pull out your phone, or play on a laptop...

You'd only be able to play with people local to you, in the same Stadia datacenter. If Stadia wanted to minimize latency, they would increase the number of datacenters (thus making fewer people per instance).

Google engineers always choose the hardest route to solve problems. Why wouldn't they? If your products are going to be shutdown in a few years anyway, might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).

Think about it, every time Google made a product with sensible tech stacks, those products were actually started outside Google and later bought by Google (Android, YouTube, etc). If Google made Android from scratch, there is no way they'll use java and Linux, they'll invent a new language and made their own kernel instead (just like fuchsia os which might be canned soon).

The thing was clearly designed to force you into paying a subscription fee. You can't let people have something they could possibly easily use and play games that aren't on your subscription if your entire purpose is to milk a monthly subscription from the users. Google, fuck you capitalism woohoo.

Only Microsoft can run decently windows in a decently big data centers. Because they can tweak it, as they do for Xbox os as well. For everyone else scaling windows server VMs or containers is a pain, because windows is a bad, poorly optimized, resources-hungry OS developed with main goal to make hardware obsolete every 3-5 years.

I don't know what nvidia is doing, but when I use it at my friends' places, lags are painful.

Linux was the right call in theory, in practice gaming industry is pretty broken on the PC side with its lock on windows, as we see on every new AAA port... Let's hope valve can save it, but I doubt.

It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees

It depends on the game. There were a bunch of games under "Stadia Play" that came along with the subscription, GamePass style. And then there were games you had to outright purchase.

It's been how long now? TIL that was false. 🤷

The main problem with stadia was Google. I knew it was doomed from the start and that's why I never bothered with it. I actually know a lot of people that didn't bother with it because it was from Google. It's basically a self fulfilling prophecy at this point that most of their shit ends up on the Google graveyard.

A lot of people actually don't trust Google anymore since they've already been screwed over many times by them.

Big air quotes on "choose."

But it has always been that way, with first party titles and exclusives , even purchasing studios like Rare or Psygnosis, its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia.

If Google had done even any research, I would have started by looking at the PS1 launch and how Sony broke into a market then dominated by Nintendo and Sega with their exclusives, they would have secured a multi year pipeline of AAA titles before launch.

This is a mess Google could have completely avoided with some basic research and discussion with the remaining independent studios. Instead they launched and assumed that they could fix this shit later, rather than making an informed decision on if they actually had a real chance.

Which is why steam went whole hog into proton development for the steam deck. It's brilliant strategy. Suddenly their game catalog is immediately available on the device. So users can play games they already own and will have access to hundreds of others day one.