[Bloomberg] Google’s Stadia Problem? A Video Game Unit That’s Not Googley Enough
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... I'm starting to think Ol' Phil is a sleeper agent. A console captain of chaos. I mean, it keeps things interesting and competitive right? Lol!
Might be confusing it with Japanese sales. In Japan, Wii U sold more launch aligned than PS5. At its current trajectory, PS5 won't pass Wii U in Japan. That trajectory will probably change and PS5 will have a longer life cycle, but still.
I'm just gonna tell you that the more you post here, the weaker your position is becoming.
You'll want some evidence to share if you're going to claim something as crazy as the Wii-U selling more than the PS5. And especially give us something more than speculation about some internet posts to claim that the lack of PS5 is causing people to "run" to Stadia. Or your claim that Stadia is growing more and more. Receipts are demanded but it appears your ignoring every call for it.
Their post to me seemed more like global sales, imo. Regardless, the PS5 is going to soon blast through the Wii U lifetime sales.
The product is good, the platform is terrible.
I would say marketing was a big issue. They just didn't leverage their strengths.
They could have had bi-monthly 'Stadia Directs' where at the end you play a demo for an upcoming release. That's technically feasible within the constraints of the platform.
In its beta form Luna, Amazon's cloud gaming platform, had Twitch integration.
When it came for Stadia (later) it took the form of an opt-in link buried in YouTube description boxes. Maybe they were worried about antitrust consequences - but all the same they didn't leverage their position.
Even with the platform as mediocre as it is I think Stadia could have had moderate success with good marketing.
Edit: Hadn't seen the other similar responses to your post, and your response. Nevermind.
No worries, I appreciate your perspective!
Worldwide it's a done deal, so done it was done even before PS5 launched. But if somebody sees the Japanese sales and doesn't get the context, they might get the wrong impression.
So far I don't think so cause they're roster is more focused on existing stuff that's a bit more niche.
There was never Japanese sales mentioned once in the kurt comments in this thread. Your comment is unnecessary.
One advantage of Luna is that it runs on top of Windows so they don't have to invest much to get games to run on it. Stadia requires Vulkan ports.
I tried Luna and the streaming experience was worse than Stadia, but it could be improved and Amazon has the capacity to do so easily.
GeForce Now is even better since it just runs steam and egs directly. They probably have to do very little, other than get consent from publishers, to get games running on it.
The indie idea is a strange one to me; so Google should have made games that are often designed to run on super low end hardware?
The tech giants think streaming is going to blow up on cell phones, but cell phones can play the games people want to play on cell phones just fine.. same idea. A contradiction.
The tech giants think streaming is going to blow up on cell phones, but cell phones can play the games people want to play on cell phones just fine.. same idea. A contradiction.
There are a lot of problems in their posts but at least that claim has a very specific context in which it is correct. This kind of thing should be pointed out.
That always bugged me. "Let's take things that can run on a potato, but run them remotely on much more powerful hardware, then waste a bunch of everybody's bandwidth and energy sending things back and forth."
Steamworld Dig is 200mb. Streaming video is like 3GB for an hour of streaming video. It's kinda disgusting.
Hah. What a hit.
So porting games to stadia was profitable from day zero lol
He is the poison chalice.
The costs of running Stadia can't be cheap either. Running a server farm, the electricity and cooling, the cost of porting games etc. There is no way in hell there business model will make up for it. Stadia is bleeding money left right and center and I don't see it being profitable for at least 10 years and that assuming it lasts that long.
They were making that Molineux Milo Kinect thing all over again lmao
They only had to compensate for the sales they would lose vs the new players and exposure it'd bring to the game. Rockstar didn't have to port it.
So probably way, way less than Google paid.
Actually, I think it could have been a good thing for them. If they'd gotten to the point where Stadia could just work with smart TVs without all the fuss, I could see people getting interested in a Nintendogs-esque experience that also had access to the internet and potentially the devices in their home.
Maybe not something to push the gaming industry specifically forward, but if I had a virtual assistant that also had Chao Garden elements or whatever, I'd probably give it a whirl.
That Judgment Remaster announcement is starting to make a lot of sense now.
Does it? They paid a lot of money (presumably) to prevent the game from hitting PC. So it's still getting to consoles.
How in the world is Stadia a competitor to PC gaming? Like, who would go "You know, instead of paying 60$ for this game on Steam, let me pay 60$ to stream this game to my Gaming PC. My GPU needs some time off."
And to think that I'm making jokes about Phil Harrison's bad record for a long time ... reality never ceases to amaze me
Oh yeah, for sure. Even if it's a bit of scummy move to your PC audience.
Its so bizarre to me that the stadia team was willing to spend tens of millions of dollars licensing games but didn't want to spend the money getting those games into users hands as irritant free as possible. Why didnt they have a period where you could just play any stadia game for a flat $10/mo fee?
The second you tell someone "you can play these games... but you gotta pay $60 each... " is the second you lose a LOT of interest. Instead tell them "pay $10 now, and for the next 30 days you can play any of these 100 games as much as you want". You WILL get a fuck ton of people who try it out. And some of them will decide to stay.
Its just so bizarre to me they wouldn't spend the extra $10... 20... 50? million it woulda taken to tell all these developers "look, we'll give you $5/mo for each person who plays your game, its just a way to get the stadia user base big".
The second you tell someone "you can play these games... but you gotta pay $60 each... " is the second you lose a LOT of interest. Instead tell them "pay $10 now, and for the next 30 days you can play any of these 100 games as much as you want". You WILL get a fuck ton of people who try it out. And some of them will decide to stay.
Its just so bizarre to me they wouldn't spend the extra $10... 20... 50? million it woulda taken to tell all these developers "look, we'll give you $5/mo for each person who plays your game, its just a way to get the stadia user base big".
The ET, Dreamcast, etc thing was real, it was part of this popup museum they did. While ET, Dreamcast, etc were failures, they are part of gaming history.
Now hold on a second. The picture may be real, but someone just *has* to have snuck in and replaced the Game Boy, Wii, etc. with this stuff. It's just a little *too* on-the-nose. There is no way management signed off on literally putting E.T. on a pedestal, when it's renowned for being one of the all-time biggest industry failures.
I'm surprised Google didn't try to get Call of Duty on the system. Wonder if Activision didn't consider it worth it or maybe their price was too high even for Google
How is steam doing with cloud gaming? I feel like valve can play it right they can do cloud gaming better than google and amazon with their credibility among pc gamers.
I think this is kind of the elephant in the room. Making video games is really really hard, but most of all really complex. I would wager to say with confidence that a single polished AAA game is far more technically-demanding, time-consuming, and collaborative in nature than any product or service Google, Amazon, or Apple have ever created in their entire history. You can't conjure up big time first-party games in a day by throwing money and people at the problem, that's not how this works. They really do not understand what they're getting into.
This is basically like if companies that specialize in making editing/VFX/filming tools for movie development suddenly decided they could expand to making summer blockbusters.
So much money for ports, this reminds me of that crazy guy that convinced people from his church to give 100.000,00 dollars to him and used that to create a port of Doom.
The only reason I can imagine people confabulating about Stadia being still a thing after 2021, is that they invested some money buying a game there and can't accept the fact they will soon be left with nothing. Google closed the studios, indiscretions preparing for the shut down are coming out, and the next step is absolutely obvious to anybody who ever followed a Google initiative. Actually it was even obvious day 0 when their busines plan could be summed up "cool tech ??? profit".
It's also the definitive end of Stadia's horrible business model, which already tanked Onlive, at this point I'm just curious to see what the real gaming streaming services will propose because the future it's clearly Netflix model and the question if how the industry will reach there.
It's also the definitive end of Stadia's horrible business model, which already tanked Onlive, at this point I'm just curious to see what the real gaming streaming services will propose because the future it's clearly Netflix model and the question if how the industry will reach there.
Damn. Google spent millions PER port. Then asked buyers to shell out full price (to try and recoup) for a streaming only version of a game. No wonder they've dropping out. Google was losing money hand over fist on Stadia. Then they saw MS flexing with Bethesda and they finally said "Fuck it this ain't for us".
Another ridiculous mistake (because Google hates MS so much) was forcing developers into using only Linux (not windows) for their games. They probably thought they were fucking MS somehow with that move. Smh
These guys don't know anything about this business. Nice try though.
Another ridiculous mistake (because Google hates MS so much) was forcing developers into using only Linux (not windows) for their games. They probably thought they were fucking MS somehow with that move. Smh
These guys don't know anything about this business. Nice try though.
Google literally thought that they could just throw money and things would happen
I think the tech behind Stadia is awesome. I hope the team running the show over there at Google can right the ship and keep the service around for a while longer. I would love to see what it could turn into. It seems to not be a very popular service around here but it's working fine as another avenue for me to play games, so that's okay in my book.
The tweets explaining it have already been posted in the thread, but that's literally exactly how Google chose to present it.
No mischief, no photoshoppery, just a company that had no idea what it was getting into.
Stock shortages are temporary.
Stadia will be dead in the ground long before this console generation is over.
I'll take the option that allows me to keep my games.
Man, I kinda feel bad for all the publishers that didn't jump on the deal!
It cost them nothing, Google do all the work, sure the royalties they get from sales is laughable but the upfront cash you get is really nice.
And you get to brag on press releases some more about how much work you're doing making your games available everywhere.
Google probably funded RE Village and Monster Hunter Rise!
It cost them nothing, Google do all the work, sure the royalties they get from sales is laughable but the upfront cash you get is really nice.
And you get to brag on press releases some more about how much work you're doing making your games available everywhere.
Google probably funded RE Village and Monster Hunter Rise!
This is pretty much a question I have had too. Black Ops 3 marketing (and thus timed DLC exclusivity) switching from Xbox to PS4 was one of several things that lead to the PS4 reigning supreme the entire generation and the Xbox One not doing so hot.
And the fact that Google didn't do everything in their power to try to get Cold War on Stadia is just truly baffling to me honestly, and to me just hammers home the point that Stadia is failing because there are simply almost no big casual games available on the platform.
I mean, I'm pretty sure when MS entered the console space 20 years ago they also started paying for ports of several third party games just so that they could develop a brand presence, and even as recently as with the Yakuza games, MS paid for (and even helped develop according to the credits) the ports of the Yakuza games. And while the porting likely didn't cost as much, games were also much cheaper to make back then, and Xbox is also a much more popular platform in today's world (plus whatever MS paid to get the games on Gamepass as well muddies the waters).
Another thing of note is that I remember reading some time last year that Google wasn't paying enough for several publishers to port their games over to Stadia, though I also don't remember the specifics on that either.
The worst thing is that Google didn't get enough publishers on board (pretty much only Ubisoft, which did them well for 2020, but won't always) and Stadia hasn't become a successful enough platform on it's own for publishers or devs to port games over without being paid, so it's just literally not sustainable for Google unfortunately.
Stadia basically is just a PC in the cloud, but only in the same way that the PS4/5 is basically just a PC. It's still a fixed hardware set running on it's own special drivers (Stadia backend tech is Linux based) and will thus have it's own development environment. If it had a Windows backend, it would be much easier as the devs could pretty easily retool the PC ports of the games over with the same toolset and everything else, but since it's off Linux and using custom stuff, it is much more like a console than anything else.
That's part of what made the Xbox so successful back in the day, because it was pretty much a mid to high tier PC in a console form factor, it used all the same tools and had hardware similar to a Windows PC. Even the 360, which had much different hardware to PCs, had easy development because the toolset and graphics APIs was just DirectX as it would be on PC.
Even Amazon Luna is Windows based, because it basically means devs don't have to really "port" to Amazon Luna for the most part.
Also I know I'm explaining this poorly and I am sorry, hopefully someone more technically inclined can explain it better
I always read you get ahead in Google by launching a product, not maintaining or making it successful
This is amazing, why am i just learning this
This is amazing, why am i just learning this
