This is a great insight into why Google completely failed to compete with established game industry titans. They don’t get the industry, don’t get the customers, don’t get their partners. Doing a rug pull on another company’s monthly active users pretty much guarantees that no game publisher will ever take them seriously ever again. That bridge is torched.
I’m used to Google pulling the rug under their users. They are a B2C company for most of the product they stop. It only somewhat damages their image. Probably not much revenue lost there.
But mismanaging their large business partners seems new. That’s the kind of reputation which can really negatively affect their other B2B products. For it to leak like that in the press, they must really have botched it. Makes you wonder what’s happening at Google.
They’ve rug pulled on users who got wise. Now on B2B.
Sundar is a sus CEO. Ballmer of the decade, knows how “Google works”, but was riding high on money printer going brr. He does not seem to have a clear vision forward with the cheap cash tap turned off.
Reminds me of Intel. Back in the day they had a huge contract with Panasonic to supply flash chips. And then they decided to renege on it. Panasonic put Intel on their banned suppliers list.
For me, Stadia was by far the best gaming experience I've had in recent history. I'm a very casual gamer so I don't really want to invest a lot in hardware or buying games. Stadia made it very cheap for me to easily jump into a game session whenever I wanted with minimal upfront investment. I'm most disappointed to see Ubisoft+ on Stadia gone since several franchises I like were Ubisoft and now I have no easy way to play.
I'll probably check out GeForce NOW at some point, but I currently don't have a way to use my only controller (Stadia) with my TV.
If you don't care about graphic performances or photo-realistic quality then I can't recommend the Switch enough.
Some find find the initial 300-400 EUR investment a bit steep but after you go through that they have sales all the time and you can easily amass a collection of 50+ games for a maximum of 200 EUR. I did that over the course of 2 years -- less than 10 EUR a month. Now I can't decide which game to play because I have so many, lol.
There are several gems - my family easily spent 1000+ hours on Wittcher 3, Zelda, Hades or Animal Crossing - but most of the games are just too bland.
I'm a fan of cloud gaming and have used both Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming. It appeals to me, as I don't have to invest in a gaming rig and can play on almost everything.
> If you don't care about graphic performances or photo-realistic quality then I can't recommend the Switch enough.
Or just performance in general, or a game library not made entirely by Nintendo, or hardware that doesn't have problems after a few months of usage, or, or, or...
The Switch is good for people that specifically want the Nintendo Switch games, for anyone else it's the absolute last choice any day of the week.
I really don't care that much about graphics. Sure, I don't want something that looks awful, but I care more about just taking a break and having a good time. The Switch is definitely something I've considered, but the cost relative to how much I would expect to use it makes it a more difficult choice for me than it was to pick up a Stadia controller.
You don't need amazing internet. I played Stadia (and other game streaming services) in 8+ different places across Europe.
OTOH, what really kills the experience IME is the jitter. Even if you have decent latency with Wifi, a brief spike in latency can ruin the race that you've been competing in for the last 5 minutes, for example. Wired internet obviates this, and powerline adapters are cheap and fix this for good.
2. Live in a major city that has a direct line to their datacenter.
You can literally get 1-2ms latency from your home to AWS/GCP/Azure with such a setup, as it's all fiber from your home->ISP->IX->datacenter and there's no additional inter-city routing. This is compared to DSL/Cable which pretty much has a ~10ms delay to the exchange in perfect conditons, and the even larger delays involved in routing a packet over multiple hops across the country.
Probably depends on where you live as much as how fast your connection is. Hard to get adequate ping. 100ms ping means the equivalent of a 6 frame input delay at 60 fps. That's very noticeable.
I tried Stadia several times, and it just never worked well.
In my case I'm pretty sure it was wireless congestion despite only having a low tier cable service. I live in a town home right beside some condos and the throughput sinks like a stone as soon as I move away from my router. If I stood right beside the router it actually worked fine despite the relatively slow nominal performance of my internet connection.
I imagine this wouldn't have been an intractable problem. I could have spent the time and money to optimize the networking in my house. But the fact is, everything else I want to do works well enough for my purposes - except Stadia. I can't imagine a non technical user would bother to diagnose this class of issue before just giving up and buying a console.
Eventually my Steam Deck pre-order shipped and I never looked back.
My neighbors constantly complain about the connection quality in our neighborhood. We almost all use the same provider since there aren't many options in our area. During most gaming sessions, I didn't have any real problems. Of course, part of that has to do with the fact that I'm not a very skilled gamer, so I'm not as likely to notice lag.
Good selection supported of games tied to your Steam/Epic/Origin purchases. They suport Ubisoft+ and EA Play (for at least some of the games). Played through a bunch of Ubisoft titles I'd missed this way.
I use a Playstation 4 controller with my Macbook Pro and it all works nicely. Not sure how that would work with TV.
Anyone who pays out of their own pocket to launch anything on a newly introduced google product moving forward is an idiot.
Google is going to need to dig deep into their wallets to build an ecosystem in any new market in the future.
Then again, Stadia is too early and costing them too much money. More people need fiber internet before it’s practical. Good thing Google killed their fiber internet rollout years ago…
I bought the founder's edition Stadia hardware and I'm thrilled with what I got out of it, personally. I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds. Played several AAA games I had no access to otherwise. Still going to have the, now free, Chromecast Ultra 4k with ethernet cable power adapter afterward too. It works fine even if I don't pair Stadia controllers with it.
This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.
Considering more people are reading these headlines than experiencing a round of google freebies for their shutdown, this is only going to work to limit consumer buy-in on whatever google decides it needs to do next.
Google is panically trying to find another unicorn, as it knows its current cash cow, ads, is holding almost all its eggs and could be facing its demise as online regulation only continues to strengthen.
Not to mention google’s perverse promotional incentives that ignore supporting products long term, focusing on launching new things instead.
Google, as it is right now, is a dying company. They need basically a complete overhaul, starting with firing the entire C-level, especially the true CEO, Ruth Porat.
As an aside about GPUs, things have changed a lot over the years. In the early 2000s games were being released that were impossible to run on high settings with current hardware, and your hardware was outdated after 3 months and obsolete after a year.
Today An RX580 (released in 2017) can be had for $100-$200 and is enough to comfortably run any modern game at quite nice settings. It's been a while since I looked as well, it's entirely possible the Ethereum swap is pushing card prices down even lower.
You only need the silly priced cards if you want to do something like play games on maxed out settings in 4k at a locked 120fps.
I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds.
This will be a common attitude in the future as far as Google's consumer products go. People will buy them expecting them to shut down in a few years, but now they'll also expect a refund.
If you're a Googler who dreams of heading up a project to make something consumer-facing it'll be a lot harder to get buy-in from the board now that it'll cost so much more to shut it down (in dollars if a refund is given or in good will if it isn't) anything that's not a massive success.
I'll echo your sentiment. I got to game free for nearly three years and I get to keep any hardware I purchased to do so. I personally grew tired of Stadia due to the lack of public support and negative sentiment any time it was brought up so I'm happy to be getting my money back (especially seeing as some games are providing second licenses on top of refunds) which can go towards a GPU while being given time to finish any games in the coming months.
No wifi damns the premise completely, wifi is so ubiquitous that it has become synonymous with internet access itself. Cafes and hotels advertise having "wifi", not "internet access". College libraries label ethernet cables as "wifi cables" so that young students understand their purpose. The average laptop on the market doesn't have an ethernet port, nor do any of the low power tablets/phones on which Stadia might otherwise make sense.
Wifi is fine too. I played a good bit of Destiny on it, and the latency was barely noticeable most of the time. I'd only notice it for maybe 2-3 seconds out of a 2 hour play session.
You don't get a big library of games for free to stream, and you don't get to use existing licenses of games you already own, now you have to double dip the full price of a game to play it on Stadia.
It made sense for me -- I own no gaming devices, and my only computers are macbook pros with shoddy graphic cards. There are occasionally games I'd love to play, but I don't want to pay $500+ (ps-latest, xbox X) or $2.5k (computer with $1k graphics card).
Unfortunately, this outcome was easily predicable to anyone who follows google.
Stadia is not too early? Cloud gaming is getting mature now.
I’ve heard people say there is lag but apparently the platforms have optimized them heavily in recent years and I’ve personally never experienced any problems after hundreds of hours on both Xbox cloud and Paperspace, with maxed out graphics.
100-250mbps connection is probably more than enough. And those connections are becoming the standard in the western world.
I played OnLive like what, 10+ years ago on a trash AT&T DSL connection and it was a great experience. Stadia was not too early. Google is just stupid.
Yup, I played the entire "Last of Us" campaign on Sony's PS Now service in 2015 on cheap Comcast internet on my 2014 MacBook Pro. Display was great and the streaming quality was great! Don't remember if it was 4k; very very unlikely. Perhaps it was 1080p or 720p. Anyways great experience!
Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! It was just too much work to end up paying full price for games I already owned! Such a bad bad product. The most greatest of technology/engineering! And yet, such a waste!
Google really has fallen in my eyes. As a software engineer, I would be so scared to go there to work on something new.
I played Stadia over 20mbps Wifi. It was flawless. I finished Tomb raider 1&2 and Metro exodus. Completely forgot I was streaming a game to my laptop after the first 5 minutes.
Google killed fiber rollout because they were forced out by other ISPs...
Issue with Stadia was Linux. Linux choked the entire platform. You had to get developers to port their game. If they used Windows they would have a solid platform with thousands of games. Instead they are at the mercy of "bribing" devs to port their game to Stadia.
I believe Google is completely blind that these kinds of moves cause people to not want to invest themselves in their new products. Why would I want to pioneer using new something if there is good likelihood it will get unceremoniously killed with very little reason / advance notice.
I would think gaming would go up during a recession. Gaming can be very cheap entertainment once the hardware is purchased. Like for the price of 4 movies in the theater at $15 a pop that might be 6 or 7 hours long in total, I can play a game for 40x that long over months for the same price and not leave my house.
I am happy that Stadia is gone, maybe now all the stadia exclusives can come to Geforce Now. Presumably not much development work is needed to port your game to GN, it just needs to run on Steam.
Stadia business model was flawed from the start, people want to own the games they buy, they might buy a new expensive computer in the future and don’t want to pay for the game twice. With Geforce Now you play the games that are already in your steam library.
Yes, everything that I don't personally like shouldn't exist because there's no way it could work for someone if it doesn't work for me, right?
I am not a fan of cloud gaming, but Stadia as a service wasn't bad. As for owning games, you don't own your Steam games either, unfortunately.
As glad as I am for Valve supporting Linux, the real practical difference between Steam and Stadia is that Valve has proven it will keep it around. But in terms of ownership there's hardly a difference.
I said it before, A lot of people on here will happily argue that they want to own their games (Which I want too!), while also rejoicing that cloud gaming is increasing narrowing to fewer and fewer companies. Licensing is getting increasingly harder, and I'm worried at some point we'll be left with a monopoly and it'll be too late. There's a lot of money in being the last man standing, and if one company holds all the licensing and economies of scale, then that leaves the consumer experience to the goodwill of whoever dug themselves into the deepest hole.
> the real practical difference between Steam and Stadia is that Valve has proven it will keep it around
How about being able to run the game on hardware that I own? On stadia I have to rent hardware from a single vendor, while on steam I can run it on my own hardware or rent hardware from cloud vendors to run my game.
Except it was terrible. Not only was it by a company whose profit center is pure evil, but if it would of taken off it wasn't inconceivable games could of been developed exclusively for the tech. It would make DRM, anti-cheat and a whole host of other things a lot easier.
There are many of us who do not want to see that future ever, where the only way to play game is to stream it.
Writing good titles is pretty difficult. There's lots of SEO advice on title crafting, but not a lot of advice on writing titles with standalone narrative value, since that doesn't generate ad revenue.
It was a very good way to prove everyone right in not trusting any kind of Google's products.
Even Android, only succeeded because OEMs also like free beer instead of paying licenses and the day Android stops being, they can anyway carry on with the last AOSP code drop.
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I’m used to Google pulling the rug under their users. They are a B2C company for most of the product they stop. It only somewhat damages their image. Probably not much revenue lost there.
But mismanaging their large business partners seems new. That’s the kind of reputation which can really negatively affect their other B2B products. For it to leak like that in the press, they must really have botched it. Makes you wonder what’s happening at Google.
Sundar is a sus CEO. Ballmer of the decade, knows how “Google works”, but was riding high on money printer going brr. He does not seem to have a clear vision forward with the cheap cash tap turned off.
[1] https://business.panasonic.nl/mobile-solutions/rugged-laptop...
I'll probably check out GeForce NOW at some point, but I currently don't have a way to use my only controller (Stadia) with my TV.
Some find find the initial 300-400 EUR investment a bit steep but after you go through that they have sales all the time and you can easily amass a collection of 50+ games for a maximum of 200 EUR. I did that over the course of 2 years -- less than 10 EUR a month. Now I can't decide which game to play because I have so many, lol.
I'm a fan of cloud gaming and have used both Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming. It appeals to me, as I don't have to invest in a gaming rig and can play on almost everything.
Or just performance in general, or a game library not made entirely by Nintendo, or hardware that doesn't have problems after a few months of usage, or, or, or...
The Switch is good for people that specifically want the Nintendo Switch games, for anyone else it's the absolute last choice any day of the week.
Just buy an Xbox controller. I bought mine almost 10 years ago and still use it regularly when playing on a computer.
I’ve never bought an Xbox but having an Xbox controller around is really convenient.
These services are basically unusable to everyone I know, and we have pretty decent connections. The input lag is just horrific.
OTOH, what really kills the experience IME is the jitter. Even if you have decent latency with Wifi, a brief spike in latency can ruin the race that you've been competing in for the last 5 minutes, for example. Wired internet obviates this, and powerline adapters are cheap and fix this for good.
1. Have fiber.
2. Live in a major city that has a direct line to their datacenter.
You can literally get 1-2ms latency from your home to AWS/GCP/Azure with such a setup, as it's all fiber from your home->ISP->IX->datacenter and there's no additional inter-city routing. This is compared to DSL/Cable which pretty much has a ~10ms delay to the exchange in perfect conditons, and the even larger delays involved in routing a packet over multiple hops across the country.
In my case I'm pretty sure it was wireless congestion despite only having a low tier cable service. I live in a town home right beside some condos and the throughput sinks like a stone as soon as I move away from my router. If I stood right beside the router it actually worked fine despite the relatively slow nominal performance of my internet connection.
I imagine this wouldn't have been an intractable problem. I could have spent the time and money to optimize the networking in my house. But the fact is, everything else I want to do works well enough for my purposes - except Stadia. I can't imagine a non technical user would bother to diagnose this class of issue before just giving up and buying a console.
Eventually my Steam Deck pre-order shipped and I never looked back.
Good selection supported of games tied to your Steam/Epic/Origin purchases. They suport Ubisoft+ and EA Play (for at least some of the games). Played through a bunch of Ubisoft titles I'd missed this way.
I use a Playstation 4 controller with my Macbook Pro and it all works nicely. Not sure how that would work with TV.
Also some GOG purchases (like Witcher 3 or CP2077).
Google is going to need to dig deep into their wallets to build an ecosystem in any new market in the future.
Then again, Stadia is too early and costing them too much money. More people need fiber internet before it’s practical. Good thing Google killed their fiber internet rollout years ago…
This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.
Google is panically trying to find another unicorn, as it knows its current cash cow, ads, is holding almost all its eggs and could be facing its demise as online regulation only continues to strengthen.
Not to mention google’s perverse promotional incentives that ignore supporting products long term, focusing on launching new things instead.
Google, as it is right now, is a dying company. They need basically a complete overhaul, starting with firing the entire C-level, especially the true CEO, Ruth Porat.
Today An RX580 (released in 2017) can be had for $100-$200 and is enough to comfortably run any modern game at quite nice settings. It's been a while since I looked as well, it's entirely possible the Ethereum swap is pushing card prices down even lower.
You only need the silly priced cards if you want to do something like play games on maxed out settings in 4k at a locked 120fps.
This will be a common attitude in the future as far as Google's consumer products go. People will buy them expecting them to shut down in a few years, but now they'll also expect a refund.
If you're a Googler who dreams of heading up a project to make something consumer-facing it'll be a lot harder to get buy-in from the board now that it'll cost so much more to shut it down (in dollars if a refund is given or in good will if it isn't) anything that's not a massive success.
Not the developers who poured millions into porting games.
Worked fine for me on GFN, Paperspace and Shadow.
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You don't get a big library of games for free to stream, and you don't get to use existing licenses of games you already own, now you have to double dip the full price of a game to play it on Stadia.
Unfortunately, this outcome was easily predicable to anyone who follows google.
I’ve heard people say there is lag but apparently the platforms have optimized them heavily in recent years and I’ve personally never experienced any problems after hundreds of hours on both Xbox cloud and Paperspace, with maxed out graphics.
100-250mbps connection is probably more than enough. And those connections are becoming the standard in the western world.
Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! It was just too much work to end up paying full price for games I already owned! Such a bad bad product. The most greatest of technology/engineering! And yet, such a waste!
Google really has fallen in my eyes. As a software engineer, I would be so scared to go there to work on something new.
It was early when OnLive started the whole thing. Now? It's already a market. One that Google doesn't understand.
Google killed fiber rollout because they were forced out by other ISPs...
Issue with Stadia was Linux. Linux choked the entire platform. You had to get developers to port their game. If they used Windows they would have a solid platform with thousands of games. Instead they are at the mercy of "bribing" devs to port their game to Stadia.
This is really simple: people no longer trust Google.
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So this has already happened, and will only get worse for Google - unless they start putting some soul into these projects
I wonder if the sudden cut is part of Google preparing for a recession.
A recession is what we say in 2008.
Stadia business model was flawed from the start, people want to own the games they buy, they might buy a new expensive computer in the future and don’t want to pay for the game twice. With Geforce Now you play the games that are already in your steam library.
Yes, everything that I don't personally like shouldn't exist because there's no way it could work for someone if it doesn't work for me, right?
I am not a fan of cloud gaming, but Stadia as a service wasn't bad. As for owning games, you don't own your Steam games either, unfortunately.
As glad as I am for Valve supporting Linux, the real practical difference between Steam and Stadia is that Valve has proven it will keep it around. But in terms of ownership there's hardly a difference.
But I can keep my Steam games’ executables and run them without Steam, either as-is (many games are DRM-free) or with a fake Steam API DLL.
Come this January, all Stadia games will be lost.
How about being able to run the game on hardware that I own? On stadia I have to rent hardware from a single vendor, while on steam I can run it on my own hardware or rent hardware from cloud vendors to run my game.
There are many of us who do not want to see that future ever, where the only way to play game is to stream it.
Even Android, only succeeded because OEMs also like free beer instead of paying licenses and the day Android stops being, they can anyway carry on with the last AOSP code drop.