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134

Stadia's death spiral, according to the Google employee in charge of mopping up after its murder (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.

"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).

...

"However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia," Zimring says.

According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia's Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google's eyes, this wasn't enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia's GeForce Now.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago (9 children)

The worst thing about Stadia was the squandered opportunities. Had Google actually put some effort into marketing it, it could have really succeeded. The tech behind it worked amazingly well. I played Destiny 2 on it from launch to the service's shutdown, and it was a fantastic experience. The latency was nowhere near as bad as people (who often never even tried the platform) would claim, and it was also the best place to play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, as it was somehow the most stable version of the game. Streaming to YouTube worked very well, and some of the integrated features with YouTube (where viewers could interact with certain games) were also kinda groundbreaking.

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. They refused to inform the public about what the product is or how it worked or what stood it apart from its competition, which led to bad-faith reviews and rumors being spread about the platform, ultimately leading to most people who knew about Stadia being wildly misinformed on it.

It's such a shame. I absolutely loved Stadia. It fit my needs perfectly. None of the other streaming platforms I've tried have even come close, even today.

[–] EnglishMobster 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] droans 9 points 9 months ago (8 children)

It was doomed from the start for that very reason. Why would people spend $60 on games if they didn't think they would be able to play them in a year?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] sznio 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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

Stadia's subscription service wouldn't have cost more than a console for several years. It was only $10/month, and also not required to play the games or use multiplayer.

It would've taken over 4 years for Stadia Pro's subscription costs to reach the price of a PS5, not even including a PS+ subscription. And during that time, you'd have been able to claim ~150 free games. Realistically, Stadia had the potential to be more economic than buying a console.

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[–] Astroturfed 3 points 9 months ago

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....

[–] MooseBoys 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Google couldn't be bothered to advertise the product at all. Except, apparently, to me specifically. I must have seen the same handful of Stadia advertisements literally 100+ times while watching YouTube. I got very sick of it after a certain point.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Because everything ran locally at a datacenter, the real killer app of Stadia would have been a super-massively multiplayer game. There wouldn't be any problems with latency between game states, (any lag would be between the server and the console.) Imagine massive wars or mediaeval battles with thousands of participants. They never developed games that took advantage of what was unique about the platform.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Larger massive multiplayer capability was one of the features Google was touting upon Stadia's launch:

Over time, Buser [Google’s director of games] says we should not only see additional exclusive games on Stadia, but also cross-platform games doing things on Stadia “that would be impossible to do on a console or PC.” Instead of dividing up virtual worlds into tiny "shards" where only 100 or 150 players can occupy the same space at a time because of the limitations of individual servers, he says Google’s internal network can support living, breathing virtual worlds filled with thousands of simultaneous players.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18654632/google-stadia-price-release-date-games-bethesda-ea-doom-ubisoft-e3-2019

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Sure, they claimed that, but it's telling that nobody ever took them up on that.

Google's internal network may be good, but it's not going to be an order of magnitude better than you can get in any other datacenter. If getting thousands of people into the same virtual space were just a matter of networking, an MMO would have already done it.

A shard is going to be storing the position, orientation and velocity of key entities (players, vehicles, etc.) in memory. If accessed frequently enough they'll be in the processor's cache. There's no way the speed of accessing that data can compare with networking speeds.

That doesn't mean there couldn't have been some kinds of innovations. Say a game like Star Citizen where there are space battles. In theory you could store the position and orientation of everything inside a ship in one shard and the position and orientation of ships themselves in a second shard. Since people inside the ship aren't going to be interacting directly with things outside the ship except via the ship, you could maybe afford a bit of latency and inaccuracy there. But, if you're just talking about a thousand-on-thousand melee, I think the latency between shards would be too great.

[–] EnglishMobster 2 points 9 months ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

I will never, ever, understand why Stadia was something thay had to be "ported into" at such high cost. Specially for games that were ALREADY working on Linux. Like, what the fuck was the hold up. I read up stories that it was basically like porting to a fourth console and that just sounded outrageously stupid in my head.

Whatever tech stack they had, they could have made it way more profitable by making it generic windows boxes that partially run your library elsewhere. I dunno if there's some hubris or some licensing bullshit behind it, but fact is, if I want to do this on GeForce Now, I can do it, no questions asked, and as the costumer, that's the beginning and end of my concerns.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).

This is so true. Getting promoted requires showing impact. If you use off-the-shelf tools (that happen to be easily maintainable) that's not an impressive impact. If you invent a new language (and make up a convincing reason it was necessary) and so-on, that's really impressive and you can get promoted. The minefield you leave behind that makes maintaining your solution so difficult is just another opportunity for someone else to get promoted.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

TIL Fuchsia hasn't been killed quite yet.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Kotlin: "are you talking to me?"

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[–] Astroturfed 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Zeth0s 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't think the people downvoting you have ever experienced the pain of dealing with Windows in a cloud environment

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

No, we're downvoting because of conspiracy theories about planned obsolescense.

Yes, it's disappointing how hardware requirements climb for minimal appreciable improvement, but Hanlon's Razor applies.

[–] Zeth0s 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It is not a conspiracy though. Planned obsolescence is a well known real thing. There is a reason unix computers last on average longer than windows computers, and Linux is the stereotypical OS for old pcs.

If people are downvoting for this, they should learn how computers and operating systems work

[–] Zeth0s 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Don't worry, I was expecting the downvotes. This place is full of angry windows fan boys that believe they are tech expert because they watch ltt and can install a skyrim mod. Less than reddit luckily

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (3 children)

One of the main issues with Stadia is that they didn't even do the basics. I saw basically no marketing, and on top of that, I heard all kinds of rumors about the business model that were entirely false. They made no effort to combat the misinformation. It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees, but that was like the number one issue brought up in every discussion.

[–] Molecular0079 11 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

From everything I can see, you did have to buy games on Stadia. They would give you a free game a month, but if that wasn't the game you wanted to play, you had to buy it. The base version of Stadia was free, but the Pro version gave you a discount on games - it did not make them free.

This is the official support forum and there are many Q&A's about purchasing games:

https://community.stadia.com/t5/Payments-Billing/Can-t-buy-games-in-the-Store-OR-HDT-01/m-p/52482

If you have an Android device, you can also try via the Stadia app to purchase games (once purchased, you can play them everywhere, on mobile, TV or PC).

[–] Stamau123 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

So it wasn't bullshit? Well in the end the environment was confusing, as thus it died

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

The "wrong" part was that you could theoretically play games you owned without the subscription active.

But it was downgraded heavily enough that it wasn't really worth doing.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's interesting that this comes out during the FTC vs Microsoft case.

As much as Google shot itself in the foot, as usual, this also shows the anti-competitive landscape in gaming. One of the biggest issues Google had was convincing AAA studios to develop games for their "console". Meanwhile, Microsoft is solving that by buying studios like Zenimax, Mojang, and soon Actiblizz. If you own the studio, they're guaranteed to develop for your console, and they may choose not to develop for any competitor's consoles.

[–] tankplanker 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] GeneralEmergency 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not exactly a unique situation to Stadia. Look at any failed console and lack of games is a prominent reason given why.

Not to mention the issues raised from a cloud service streaming platform that plagued previous attempts. I'm honestly surprised Stadia lasted as long as it did.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

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.

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