That aside, I do not think this is a bad move at all. None of the titles they were working on were that appealing, hopefully it will mean they pivot to integrate more into a shared licensing model. I would pay $5 a month to be able to import my current Steam games and play remotely, but this fractured model is incredibly reminiscent of video streaming.
We had a first mover (Steam/ Netflix) come in and now all the stragglers are saturating the market with similar but slightly differentiated products (Stadia/ Peacock). I am curious what the next evolution of this model will look like.
Don't we have a marketplace already? If we take the game example we have Steam, Origin, Epic, and other stores competing to sell games. There are differences in offerings but they all still do a healthy business.
On the streaming video side it is even harder since we never license or pay for videos, just the ability to watch as long as the service persists.
For context, Amazon is also struggling to make first party games [1]. I think it was hubris that these large companies didn't start with smaller scoped games and instead jumped head first into building their own engines and ips.
Perhaps hubris. But it could also be the same thing that plagues every developer that tries to build games: procrastinating the impossible part (building games, especially games worth a damn) by the doing the easy part (building tools). And the delusion that you're doing anything of value because it feels productive. And the allure of generalization.
What's funny is a friend of mine who is a talented developer and started a game studio surprised me when he started blogging about his experience and he was solely focused on the characters, story development, animation, etc. Instead of technology. Reading about the problems Amazon has been having, this seems like the only way to go.
They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that.
This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great deal on this!"
Unfortunately the engine they got a great deal on was CryEngine, which has made some cool games, but by a lot of accounts is not great to work in. Much like the issues reported at EA's studios (with Frostbite), if you're working on a game in it you want to be working closely with the engine devs. They're the ones who know how to make it work, or can fix it when it doesn't work.
A number of CryEngine developers left to join Cloud Imperium's Frankfurt office working on Star Citizen. That office basically exists to pick up the ex-Crytek people who wanted a job where they'd get paid. I don't know if Amazon snagged any of them, it would've been a harder sell to relocate to the US, but with the amount of money they were pouring into this, not impossible.
> I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine.
For the same synergistic effects as Epic and their game store + their engine. If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. It's basically trying to incentivize selling on their platform and using their platform tools at the same time.
and I'm sure there would be an incentive (financial) to using all amazon services/storefront etc.
The reason they started with lumberyard was because amazon does platform thinking. Unlike open source they can't just take it, so they bought cryengine to start with.
Can you imagine spending tens of millions on a game then getting blocked from AWS on a policy violation and not being able to move it to another provider?
I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
The license (last I checked anyways) also lets you self-host your servers. If you can afford the upfront costs for that, it's probably cheaper in the long run. IIRC, part of the motivation for Roblox's IPO was to raise funds to setup their own hosting infrastructure to lower costs, because AWS was too expensive.
And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files.
So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.
I saw a talk about Lumberyard once. The really special things they wanted to do were integrate it tightly with AWS and Twitch, which enabled some neat features like letting people spectate games and move their own camera around the field to do so.
Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?
No. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.
I know absolutely nothing of game dev, but adding cameras to the scene doesn't sound like it would be the most complex aspect of developping a video game?
Imagine a Twitch livestream with tens of thousands of viewers, and each one is able to independently move a live camera to get the view they want. The complexity comes from scale.
You could very well tie that to a high-tier subscription to any Twitch channel. Depending on the game (e.g. Fortnite) you could easily server a bunch of viewers from the same GPU.
I mean, I could probably figure out how to do that in Unity in about a week.
You would basically just need to stream the cameras output texture to a web app, and then read inputs from from said web app. Regardless there's no reason to try and create a whole new engine for this, CryTek has always been known as one of the worst engines to work in, just because it's not supported very well.
Yes, that would be the low-tech way to achieve this, but if you want to scale that up to Twitch subscriber level of users, you would certainly want engine support for such a feature. That CryEngine was a bad choice is a valid point, though I guess there weren't that many public engines to choose from at the time that were that desperate for money.
Yes and no, if Amazon really wanted to do this they could have bought a source license from Unity and made whatever modifications they needed. It feels like an absurdly niche feature to focus on though.
The way I would personally do it I would maybe create a multiplayer game and for each ten cameras spin up a game client instance.
According to the other comments here it looks like Amazon wanted to create some type of bizarro system where if you use their engine you had to use AWS as your cloud back end. Which does sound pretty horrible, like I can't even do a HTTP request to get weather data unless it goes through AWS ?
I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .
I disagree with this a lot. Building your own engine offers many advantages, especially for a company with ambitions like Amazon. If anyone should build their own engine, it's them.
Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards.
I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet.
Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error)
However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.
> They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that.
If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place.
Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment.
It's probably more that PC gaming is just saturated anyways, and even throwing money at it won't work unless there is a clear and compelling advantage or hook. There are way too many market killers that just suck up time and attention now, with the rise of games as service.
My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL
My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive.
There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!).
Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!
> Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position?
Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
I think a lot about Treasure, a quirky game developer that tended to make a bunch of strange games in the past. I think their studio director and founder, Masato Maegawa, understood the value in being more hands-off in a leadership role. [1] [2] Part of me feels like Amazon and Google thought their super-direct top-down style would be successful in a creative project involving larger team, unaware of the lessons previous game developers had learned.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker, on the other hand had a unqiue idea and was a critical success, and in a retrospective the developers were very explicit not to impose a top-down attitude to development. [3] (disclaimer: I work at Blackbird Interactive, but not on Hardspace: Shipbreaker)
I think this might get the “oh, Google shuts down another area after a few years, color me surprised” crowd going, but for me this is totally the right move.
There are a LOT of videogame developers out there. Many of them are quite good at what they do.
The cloud gaming space, while much better than it used to be, has plenty of room for improvement — it’s not remotely mainstream yet, and there’s still time yet to mint the cloud gaming household name.
I agree that they didn't need this in the first place, but this is the venture they started last March [1]. What changed for them in those 10 months that wasn't an obvious trend before?
I presume that they came out of the gate with the sensible perspective that if you build it, and there aren't any games on it, the players won't come. My guess is what changed is that the infrastructure is now viable as infrastructure, they don't need to prop it up with their own game releases.
Likely it’s the other way around and Stadia isn’t doing well enough to think that first party titles released in a few years time will pay development costs or necessarily have a platform to launch on.
IMO, it would be better to take the Nintendo approach and build out a couple generic games that highlight the best features of the system. Wii tennis and wii bowling ended up being my favorite Wii games.
That... is very interesting. I didn't realize the timeline was that short; I was assuming the game studio had started around the same time Stadia had (multiple years ago).
First thought: it's probably pretty hard to start a new game studio during COVID? That article is dated March 4, oof.
As a gamer, I'll buy a console for the exclusives that I can't experience elsewhere. Having solid AAA content that's exclusive seems to come from having solid first party development studios.
PS Now is great. It has most (all?) Sony exclusives and they run great on your desktop or laptop. The only issue is that I don't think it is available for OSX/iOS.
Game development is terribly fickle, and it's very much a space where Google is better positioned to sell pickaxes to miners than to try and seek the motherlode itself. TBH, I'd forgotten that they'd started up an in-house game dev team in the first place.
I think the reason this is a big deal is that one of the selling points of Stadia was that "cloud gaming" would enable things that consoles and PCs didn't, like huge persistent worlds with a ton a players in a single area. With no first party support, Stadia is just going to be a way to stream ports of games designed for consoles and PCs. Imagine if Valve released the Index, then announced that they aren't making VR games any more. That's basically what Google is doing by saying it isn't worth it to develop games specifically for Stadia.
To me this pivot makes a lot more sense. They’re sticking to their core competency. Gaming as a service, without a dedicated device or powerful machine, already has big appeal. If they nail that, they can always try some first party offerings to push the boundaries.
I don't know about that. Google has even less skin in the game now, with a game studio you could be convinced they were in it for the long haul, but now they can pull the plug almost effortlessly.
IMO the single business decision that doomed it from the start was the fact that you had to buy Stadia game to play on Stadia. Nothing from Steam/Epic/Ubisoft, and no cross-play.
I would not at all be surprised to hear within a year that they stop taking new subscribers, with a sunset a year after that.
That's a pretty interesting thought, I hadn't at all considered the "cloud native game" angle.
Based purely on my own experience with games, I tend to think that for the best results, you'd need a really good game studio to learn how to make a cloud game; I'm not sure you want a really good cloud company to learn how to make a game.
But it's still a really good point. Was the Stadia studio explicitly for these kind of cloud-gaming-enabled games?
I dunno. Cloud gaming (theoretically) means that anyone could play from anywhere at any time. Surely such a powerful idea enables some cool new experiences out there in the infinite realm of human creativity?
Cloud native (and streaming) offers a couple of advantages over installed games. Cheating becomes much harder, although not impossible. And people can launch the game easily without an install.
It has some real trade offs as well. Increasing felt latency is the one people love to talk about. But a huge increase in compute and bandwidth cost for the game operator is the other. Both in terms of the wiz bang features people imagine which are also possible with an installed game. And because for each player at peak CCU you have to run the game for them, encode video and transmit that to them. That’s quite the ops cost increase over a traditional game.
The bandwidth consumption and compute cost hurt the play anywhere at anytime idea. Firstly because places where bandwidth and latency are acceptable for play are not ubiquitous and there is no clear roadmap for that to happen. Secondly because the hike in compute cost per user free accounts are considerably more expensive to allow. Adding subscriptions removes ubiquitousness, allowing free players will bring dark patterns to convert that would make Zynga blush. Platform subscriptions will result in a chase for ‘engagement’ and more of the latter. All without anyone able to offer more than vague affirmations that there is anything creatively interesting.
Cloud native is really good for one thing though. Getting investor money.
I agree, but I do think they've been doing a good job lately getting partners to dip their feet in the "cloud-only" functionality Stadia enables. For example:
- GRID added a 40-car race mode that's "just not possible on consoles". (Unfortunately there were rarely enough Stadia players playing GRID for matchmaking 40-car races to work well!)
- Orcs Must Die 3 added Stadia's "Stream Connect" feature, which is basically like screensharing with people in your party. They also apparently increased horde sizes on Stadia compared to other platforms.
- The Hitman series added Stadia's "State Share" feature, which lets players set up scenarios and create customized game states that they can share with others to play.
- Dead by Daylight and Baldur's Gate 3 added "Crowd Choice", which lets streamers create polls for in-game choices that automatically selects an outcome based on viewer votes (e.g. choosing whether the streamer is a killer or survivor in DbD)
- Outcasters uses Crowd Play which lets stream viewers instantly jump into games with the streamer they're watching
- etc
There's a lot of cool stuff that can be enabled when the hardware runs on beefy cloud servers. Although it would be cool to see what novel functionality Google's internal studio would have showcased, I also think it's pretty important to focus on getting "real" games and encouraging devs to take advantage of cloud-specific functionality.
There's probably something to be said for the Ubisoft+ model (basically a separate, smaller streaming service on top of Stadia/Luna/etc), but I don't think cable-like "channels" bundles are the way to go for streaming of any kind.
When google tries to make a product that is new and could go either way, i forgive them for dropping it. You have to make mistakes and some products just don't work. But stadia is different. You could see it was never going to work, the infrastructure is just too wonky. I don't respect them for taking on a project they knew they couldn't do, or for deluding themselves into thinking they could.
What are your thoughts on market fit for Stadia? It seems like Nintendo made something that people really want with the Switch [1]. Do you know if Stadia is being used much?
So they are cancelling the part that actually costs money and creates draw to the platform?
Sounds like tey are putting service on life support with no plans of expansion
Yeah, I think it is a bit tricky to draw the line. Consider brick and motor pharmacy stores putting generic brand white-labeled items next to name brand items. This has helped the consumer (IMO). But, at the same time I can see how it can be abused. The tricky part is coming up with a way to get best of both worlds. Unfortunately, I have personally seen the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other (based on rushed outrage driven legislation) too many times.
The EU? That tax machine... its a wonder these companies still sell there at all. Seems like they should double down on Asian markets instead of bothering.
> Said one source familiar with Stadia’s first-party operations, citing another tech giant’s widely publicized failure to create video games: “Google was a terrible place to make games. Imagine Amazon, but under-resourced.”
"Google" and "under-resourced" in the same blurb is very funny.
> With the increased focus on using our technology platform for industry partners, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Google to pursue other opportunities.
I know Google/Stadia recently partnered with LG to bundle the Stadia app with LG TVs, but I wonder why Google doesn't do this with every TV manufacturers (save Sony.)
If I were Stadia's marketing chief, I'd
1. Bribe the TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app
2. Advertise that the TV includes _a game console_ during TV commercials.
3. Allow the TV users to pay a bit extra ($20?) to buy a basic game controller.
4. Have all the store demo units to auto stream Stadia playing video games and explicitly explain you don't need a xbox/playstation to play these games.
5. Buy out Witcher 3/Call of Duty 4/Project Cars 2/other older games and make them free for TVs with Stadia bundles.
Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.
Fiddling with my phone to play Stadia on my TV is pretty crumple some. It's just too much work for normal folks. People just want to turn on the TV and start playing.
Edit: I guess monopolistic abuse is a concern. However Sony and MS have their own streaming services. Google can just advertise 'play games with Stadia and Playstation Now and Xbox Cloud on your TV!' I am 100% if players switch to playing games on TV without game consoles, it hurts MS/Sony a lot more than to Google.
The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.
Then why do it at all? What would possibly justify such a large investment of capital if Google didn't believe it to be a potentially nontrivial contributor of future revenue?
Because of how Google's internal performance evaluation works.
You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.
Cynical answer: Because at big tech companies culture leads them to believe they have to have a competing product in every new market rather than letting their "competitors" go unopposed. Occasionally it works out, but often you just get a ton of also-rans. The companies are so big a profitable that even complete failure barely moves the stock price.
Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.
How do you increase revenue/stock price in meaningful way without expanding into other markets?
Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.
When you have Google's resources and talent, you probably need a reason not to do these kinds of things. If a product has a decent chance of generating revenue or building out consumer profiles or reaching a new demographic and doesn't undermine the ads business, it has a shot of being pursued.
For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.
The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.
Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.
I think they know that it’s a sub standard product that is “good enough” for today but it will never be good enough for a use case like VR. I think the future of gaming is in ultra low latency, high resolution experiences and people will look at Stadia like a silent film from the 1920s.
Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.
Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.
I think you are right that Google isn’t taking it seriously, but one of the futures of gaming is subscription streaming, for basically the same reasons as video. Streaming can dramatically improve user experience by making it trival to acquire or switch between games, and subscription revenue allows providers to sponsor the creation of content that doesn't make financial sense in a individual purchase model- think games that strongly appeal to a single demo or amazing, but short, experiences.
Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate.
The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.
Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.
Meh, another HN complainer going on about<click>...OMG, what the hell is up with that web page?! That some truly nausea-inducing scroll behavior. Is there a RNG behind it somewhere?
There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.
Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.
You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.
It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.
Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?
but up until now they did apparently have funding to be running an internal studio? seems like those funds could have been better spent bribing tv companies like the parent is suggesting.
Google is a company of engineers. Engineers solve problems by building stuff, not by bribing companies. I think the main exception is Android and Ads, which also happens to be the main parts of Google I disagree with...
Building successful platforms isn't about engineering - many well-engineered platforms were market failures.
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
There was recently an article about Stadia where a developer from a decent sized studio claimed they were approached by Google for Stadia. What did Google offer for the developer to bring the game to Stadia? Almost nothing. The figure was in the tens of thousands.
For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost. Sometimes millions of dollars. Google is just cheap and won’t invest in their own platform.
Direct quote:
"We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it."
> when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost
We once had a Microsoft rep come visit us to get us to publish our upcoming mobile games for Windows Mobile Tablet notreallysurewhatwasthatanymore. When we asked what kind of support they were ready to provide, they offered to lend us a device for a few weeks.
Of course it's not representative of how things should happen, but for every big partnership or exclusive you read about, there's a dozen dumb wastes of time.
Yeah, not sure where the idea comes from that Microsoft fronts like the entire development cost for ... for what even? As a publisher? Sure, maybe.
For games coming to Game Pass? No.
Same for the EGS, it's not like they front all those games. (Most exclusivity is bought way later in the process.)
But the original comment is pretty much Windows Phone back then. To this day I have no idea why Microsoft was so cheap and didn't even try to get developers on their platform. Rip Lumias, some of you were some great devices.
"With Nowhere Prophet, it was an interesting case because we were also launching on Xbox Game Pass at the same time, which had essentially already secured financial success for the console versions"
Not exclusive, still got a significant chunk of cash.
Having the money to port a game to console is great, but usually not comparable to fronting the full development of a game.
There might be a couple where Epic might have done that (kind of, I know they saved some games), but I don't think Microsoft funded any development for a gamepass game so far. (From a third party, not published by Microsoft.)
Epic exclusives have generally been provided in the form of a revenue guarantee on projected sales, I believe. Essentially, they're not paying much of anything if the game is successful and profitable on it's own, but if it tanks, the developers still get paid as if it did not.
For an indie developer, this basically means worrying about whether the game will succeed a non-issue prior to launch.
> How do you pay out developers? I’m a developer, I make a game, I say I’m going to put it in Game Pass, a customer pays [you] $14.99 a month. How do you decide how much to pay me, the developer?
> [Phil Spencer, head of Xbox:] [In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk.
GamePass deals are fixed price, the "full production cost" is not an exact truth. For most indies the deal price represents an over shoot over costs, or just a large percent of cost. This is logical: no one ever shares their internal production costs. Like any business you treat business partners at arm's length.
Source: gamedev who has heard from serveral devs who got offers.
was that the end of the discussion? Was there, you know, pushback like "we want 10 devices each of the two most popular sizes, and exclusivity for xxx months, and, and..."
Or did everything just fizzle out after "well, we'll lend you the unit I have in the back of my car?"
As an independent person without a company, Microsoft gave me a free Windows Phone just for expressing interest in developing an app for it. These sorts of developer incentives kinda come and go, depending on the platform and how much they're investing in it.
When I was in college, you could show up to their 'Make an app day' and as long you successfully uploaded your own version of their slot machine app you'd be entered into a drawing for a bunch of really nice hardware. Microsoft was terrible at promoting these events, so everytime I went there where more prizes than people.
Its remarkable to contrast with, say, GamePass; while there's not a lot of disclosure around what that entails precisely, a few small developers have suggested it pretty much floats their studio financially (and doesn't require a re-write, as Stadia does).
From a customer perspective, it gets the game on streaming, Xbox, and Windows PC.
Having been approached by Google for these kinds of projects, I 100% believe this. I was leading a team approached by them to do something similar for Google Glass. There was no real incentive there except the privilege of being an early glass partner. The entire process of working with them was a nightmare and we decided to bow out.
I'm short on any attempt Google makes at being a media company.
Just to add general interest info to this strain of the conversation: I had to work with Apple in ensuring content for the launch of News+ in Canada after they bought out Next Issue/Texture, and they were very involved and the incentives were substantial.
It makes a real-world difference, there's no doubt about it. Hell, this is why governments issue arts funding. The return has virtually limitless potential in more than just the financial aspects. But it does take commitment, perseverance, and often, patience.
I'm not sure if I'm surprised or not. On one hand, it kind of fits my mental image of Google perfectly, I don't know why. On the other: doesn't Google have a shitload of money and doesn't Google burn it so often by starting hundreds of projects it just kills after a couple of years of development?
The problem is not that Google couldn't pay them. The problem is that Google is arrogant as hell: Why should we pay you when we give you the privilege to be part of something we, the masters of the universe, introduce?
They fail to understand that from the outside people don't see things Google does as sure bets.
Google glass and game streaming are two very different projects with different motivations/incentives etc for partnering. Game streaming is on the cusp of becoming mainstream. The technology works (playable latency), and the overall product is simpler than competing products (pcs, consoles) for the job we hire gaming hardware for. It is clear the future is in the controllers and displays, not in math boxes. The biggest difference is that gaming is an existing habit gamers have. Google Glass was something completely new and was unclear what we were using it for.
I would also say "media company" is pretty broad. Will Google become a media infrastructure company? yes (they already are). Will they become a media platform? yes, (they already are). Anything more and it's probably spreading investment too thin, but those are substantial components to media.
Game Streaming also needs typical home internet connections to get better before it can really go mainstream.
Not everyone has low latency, high reliability fibre in their home, yet. If you have some crappy DSL or whatever then the experience isn’t great. Likewise if your WiFi signal is anything less than perfect!
And the people who do pay for the best internet connections are often those who don’t need Stadia, because they already have latest-generation consoles and gaming PCs?
That's a great point. I did say the technology is proven but did not specify the market this is ready for. It is sort of like Tesla adoption 10 years ago. It will take time for the investments in technology and infrastructure to cover more of the market. Hopefully Verizon can accelerate their mmWave 5g deploys.
Given Goog's history on this, I read this announcement as them soft-killing Stadia. They aren't going to admit defeat, but unless they put real resources behind paying people to use it, they aren't going to see any use of it as an API and are effectively mothballing it.
I hope not. The Stadia platform is fantastic: the best streaming user experience out there. It’s just that much of the Stadia Pro content is mediocre, and the paid titles tend to be expensive. (Compare to GeForce Now with it’s awkward, clunky UX but near-unlimited library of content via Steam)
Yah...I just don't see that developers have much incentive to use Stadia? Like, you can't rely on an established 'Stadia playerbase' right now, so there's no natural incentive for studios to integrate with it. Other platform owners solve this by paying for exclusivity or something, but as mentioned above, reports say that Google wants to pay insultingly small sums of money for that work. Unless that changes...no one is gonna use it.
The article says that they’re reassigning 150 people who worked on internal games. If they were betting the future of the platform on the number and quality of games that can be turned out by 150 people, then this never made any sense. Major game studios are hundreds or thousands of people, so this is just Google admitting that nobody in-house can come up with any good games. I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.
I'm not sure that I would invest significant cash to buy games for a platform, which may be killed on a whim. That's apart from all its other disadvantages, namely a lack of choice.
> I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.
We probably disagree here, but to me that's an ear piercing yell about the confidence Google puts into Stadia and its future.
Thanks, from that same article proof that the Google Graveyard is hurting Google...
>This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.
> For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost.
This is so painfully misleading.
You're either describing situations where Microsoft or Epic have become the publisher for the game, or you're describing situations where extremely large titles are paid to exclusively release on a platform where they will then recoup costs from as the sales have to go through their platform.
1. What's the effort required for the port? If a game already has Linux support, it basically is compatible with Stadia, whereas if you have to port it to Xbox, that requires a lot more time and resources.
2. Was the offer to be a timed exclusive like with Epic, or just to add integration for Stadia? I would assume the offers money to be very different depending on that.
3. Are we comparing similarly sized games? "one prominent indie developer" is kinda vague. Again not sure how comparable it is with Epic/Microsoft deals.
Not enough people have consistently fast internet without data caps for this to work. Can you imagine the backlash when everyones tv with "included game console" turns out to be a stuttery laggy mess?
I don't know if this is a consideration, but the reason Sony's PlayStation 3 included "OtherOS" feature was so that it would be classified as a computer instead of a gaming console to avoid a stiff import tax.
I wonder if there's a difference between making Stadia available via an app store and having it pre-installed or advertised as a core function of the device?
Sounds like the right approach, and it seems Google is slowly moving in that direction...starting with this decision.
As others have commented, it was pure hubris for Google (and Rick Osterloh) to believe they could just start a new game studio and use it to fuel growth of the Stadia streaming platform. Xbox surely would've died without Halo!
This "do it all myself" approach needs to start with building a massive user base upon which to lure other game developers and TV manufacturers - not the other way around. A telling sign is that the newest Google TV dongle doesn't yet support Stadia...
From a hardware technical standpoint, I think most TV manufacturers don't include a powerful enough SOC from which to run a Stadia app (e.g. a built-in Chromecast != Chromecast dongle). There's also some server-side compatibility issues that we're not aware of.
Google generally doesn't do BD that well. I think it's something to do with their start as a consumer-facing company. They prefer making a thing and then marketing it rather than using partnerships to get in.
The Android stuff seemed to suffer quite a bit from this early on, though they seem to have a handle on it now.
> Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.
A lot of them have pretty bad game mode latency, though, which isn't a problem with home consoles but start to become a problem once you add streaming latency. Then some of them have >10ms decode latency, and all of it starts to ramp up the delay.
Seriously though, I think Microsoft and Sony would scream the house down if Google made movements like this. They may not be monopoly holders in console gaming, but you think that would stop a suit like that being heard?
I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.
Hopefully the games that SG&E do finish showcase what's possible when a developer targets Stadia's strengths.
Why is that sort of game only possible with cloud rendering vs some dedicated server architecture?
I think you'd need to go much higher in terms of how many unpredictable, latency dependent objects are needed on screen before you'd start hitting issues with client side rendering.
Synchronising the game state in games now is exceptionally hard even with 64 players for any sort of latency dependent game. It's a constant grievance in most gaming communities today. If you just have to point a gpu view into the world, then it just depends on how many gpu's you can attach to the server.
>I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system.
>I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system. Never be able to sell it somewhere else.
I feel bad for Phil Harrison. He worked v hard at Sony PlayStation to get a Facebook style platform off the ground way before FB ever existed, got shafted in the 1st party game dev worldwide studios politics wars, joined MSFT to try and resurrect Xbox and is now presumably not doing well with Stadia at Google which has broken a lot of very hard ground to enable cloud gaming. The games always come before the platform (People bought Sonic The Hedgehog, not the enabling Sega hardware). Assuming Stadia doesn't disappear someone else will probably profit from all this.
Some of the industry's largest players have been in the game development space for 30+ years and even then are only marginally successful. Xbox itself was on the brink of being shut down/sold off a few years ago. What exactly did Google (and Amazon/Apple/Facebook) expect would happen?
Focusing on Stadia's strength as a platform seems to be a good move forward. It is a technically sound service. I'm sure the massive bump it got from Cyberpunk showed execs that a partnership-only gaming model could be successful. They do need to expand licensing, improve their subscription catalog and get more indie studios involved. Relying on users to consistently pay $60+ for games on top of the monthly fees is a losing business model.
Yeah I agree this is the right move. They should use the YouTube model of just providing the best service for everyone else to provide their content on. Google has never been any good at creating original content.
They also desperately need to improve things like the store, which has no wish lists, no way to see all of the titles in specific categories, etc, at least on mobile.
This is a fantastic move by Google. The war for gaming as a service will be on the platform level and something that Google is well positioned to win in. Not saying that Steam, Nintendo, Nvidia won't be some serious contenders as well but the outlook for gamers is quite positive.
I expect to see what the web went through in the early 90s as far as turmoil goes. Lots of platforms with all their quirks and developers getting behind various ones. Eventually (hopefully?) some standards enabling cross platform development of stream gaming. Bandwidth/latency still needs to play catch up but 5G is getting there. Cellular connections are getting more and more stable while landline methods are lagging.
I expect to see each platform playing to their strengths with Google pushing their expertise in infrastructure and Nvidia with their hardware. Also expect to see the space get even more crowded as traditional players join the market.
Considering how poorly Google's external developer support has historically been, I think it's safe to say that without Google dog-fooding Stadia it's going to sputter and die.
Cross platform is old school. You can send email between providers, call people on different phones, and access websites without knowing what kind of server they're on, but can you place a video call from Skype to Google Duo? Send messages from Slack to Discord? Tweet something using your Microsoft account? The open web is dead, it's all big companies' silos now.
Until you can play your Steam game library (and perhaps Epic and Unisoft and GOG) on Stadia, I think they'll struggle.
I have paid for Geforce Now which does let you play Steam et al games (although not everything is available which is annoying) - it is about £4 a month currently (or free if you can spend time waiting to play) and the experience feels largely the same to Stadia to me in terms of latency and quality. Many happy hours playing high-end PC games on a super cheap and lightweight Chromebook that starts up instantly and runs silently compared to my weighty, expensive, and noisy gaming laptop that needs to boot into windows (although that only takes 5-10s these days to be fair)
Feels like nVidia (...and Xbox? Not tried that) have eaten Google's own lunch in the stream-to-chromebook context.
I get the point you're trying to make, but actually your example is one where I wouldn't mind. I'd rather my bad health not be the central profit driver for someone...
I understand it as - premiums are limited by law as a multiple of payouts. The more they pay out, the higher premiums they can charge. So, peversly, the more they pay out, the more they can make.
Yeah, Google doesn't offer enough of an edge that would justify ignoring Steam.
Similar to your experience with Geforce Now, I had a great experience with shadow.tech, where you can bring your Steam library, and I'm sure there are many more competitors.
Computing devices with dedicated graphical processors
Survey says... nobody wants what you're selling Google, and nobody with half a brain trusts you to maintain services long term anyways. Stadia is doomed and riddance.
"Stadia Games & Entertainment." It's Google's in-house content dev studio. Shutting it down means Stadia will need external support to work. If it's gets that then it'll be great. If it doesn't then it'll get killed off.
I've seen this comment a few times now across HN and article comments. Can you say more about why you hold this opinion?
It seems clear to me that Google deciding not to focus on game development is showing a level of awareness we should want to see. In fact, by redirecting those resources they are directly investing in the platform instead of content for it that, let's be honest, probably would have flopped.
I've been a happy Stadia Pro subscriber for about six months and in that time all I've heard from the community is "we want AAA, we want game x, y, and z" and with Google's decision, they're likely freeing resources to do just that.
You need to put yourself in the shoes of the game developer, not the shoes of the consumer. As a game developer, you have a range of platforms you could potentially target, and because you run a business your decision of what platform(s) to target is a purely financial calculus. Each platform you target involves significant costs (including not just engineering but marketing, support, QA, etc.). As you make decisions about which platforms to target you are thinking both about how many copies can I sell per year at what price and what is the risk that platform ceases to exist before I recoup my porting costs. With new platforms, the later risk is statistically very high (not just re:Google) so you look closely for any signals you can find before going that route. A heavy investment in first party titles by the platform owner is traditionally one of the strongest signals of commitment to a platform. Without seeing that commitment, most professional game developers will conclude the risk of platform shutdown is too high to justify the costs. Unity3d is arguably the counter example, but at this point their market presence is strong enough to provide other signals to potential developers. Absent that strong first party commitment, most game developers will only port to a platform if they are paid to do so, and while Google almost certainly did that in the beginning the signals that they are continuing to do so are weak, again suggesting little reason to belief game sales will remain strong on the platform and little reason to believe the platform itself will remain alive.
Initially I thought some straightforward fun first party games would be great. Make them cheap / free with platform, do some of the standards (a runner, a platformer, etc etc). Keep them pretty simple. That would have been nice - show off a bit what the platform can do, but be a fast follower for some popular genres.
What engine was SGE using? When I heard AWS wasn't just going to do something like license Epic I thought - uh oh... here we go!
> "The service’s best moments may have been when its third-party ports showed off the strength of the cloud gaming model, in which a game can run well on just about any device with a screen and a strong internet connection. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ran well on Stadia. Destiny 2’s Stadia support let players of that game drop in for an extra match or quest from their phone or laptop when they were far from their regular gaming gear. When Cyberpunk 2077 was faltering on everything else in December, it was running quite well on Stadia.
They’re not wrong. If Phil *Harrison is trying to turn Stadia into, say, the "Unreal Engine of cloud gaming” (scare quotes added by me), he’ll likely be much more successful at doing that than trying to make "a traditional console like PS5, but, like, in the cloud."
This shatters my confidence in Stadia as an ongoing consumer platform, though (especially that Stadio Pro sub, and possibly even the hardware/controllers too.)
It's worth pointing out that there are/were game breaking bugs, ui bugs, AI bugs, lack of features, strange stuff that plagued all versions of the game.
It was quite well known that Cyberpunk 2077 was running smoother on PCs and trash on consoles. I was surprised too, but lots of reviews came out that Stadia was the best performing out of the "console" varieties.
> This shatters my confidence in Stadia as an ongoing consumer platform,
Being affiliated with Google is why I never bothered with Stadia. Google can't stick with platforms long enough to make investing in them worthwhile. I knew Stadia would under-perform whatever obscenely high standards Google set for the product and would roll it into YouTube Gaming or something before silently killing it off.
As a game developer, Stadia does not in any way excite me because of my prior experiences with the Android App Store.
That is to say, if somehow Stadia is successful then I expect a long term outcome where games are nearly all freemium adware or grind-to-win, with a few poorly-performing notable exceptions; mashing out the same three or four proven-successful concepts with new skins ad nauseum. The margins will be so razor-thin that there won't be any room to risk on innovation.
This is because they don't care to improve discovery on their store front. It's always been awful, it will continue to be awful. There will be virtually no quality control to speak of, with sudden and opaque decisions to remove products, and so on...
Recall that in the very early days of the Android app store it was flush with $20 games, and effectively absent of stolen content, adware and spyware. Look at it now.
The two major improvements that it might have over the App Store experience would be an absence of asset-ripped "clones" (read: your APK is ripped, minorly re-branded, and re-uploaded with a similar name), and perhaps far less malicious software, because access to the local device will be limited.
Google will continue to operate the Stadia gaming service and its $10 monthly Stadia Pro service. It’s unclear how many, if any, exclusive games will still come to the service, though the company has indicated that it can still sign new games and will bring more third-party releases to the platform. It nevertheless will look to many like a draw down of the plan to have Stadia run as a bona fide competitor to console platforms.
I would agree if their service was a way you could play games you own on google's computers, but stadia is more of an another player in console wars, with its upsides and downsides.
And we know that consoles without exclusives lose, I bet product managers at google know that too.
You don't have to buy any hardware to start using stadia from your browser. If you want to play on your TV the hardware is a lot cheaper than a PS5 or Xbox.
Its also nice to not have a large box hooked up to your TV.
it's way more portable so that's a major value proposition in my book. I would never use it for multi-player games, but for single player it's probably okay if you're an average gamer.
I personally wouldn't use it because I'm anal about refresh rates/max settings/latency/etc but for other people (especially younger gamers with less disposable income) I think it's pretty compelling.
For one, it's been very difficult to buy a PS5/Xbox/high end PC for quite a while now. Stadia and other similar services are one of the few platforms that can run the newest AAA titles well and does so without physical supply problems.
It's a lot cheaper. You can imagine the cost getting down to basically the cost of the controller if users already have a streaming device (eg Chromecast) capable of running the streaming client.
You're still paying for the hardware somehow, even if it's not in your home.
Theoretically nobody's going to play 24/7 so you could share the hardware between multiple customers, but in practice latency means that your DCs need to be close to them anyway.
The only way Stadia (or some other bullshit like it) could possibly be cheaper would be:
1. Price dumping
2. Preferential game pricing from publishers (to instead hide the hardware costs there)
3. Gym model (tricking casual users into signing long and expensive contracts)
PC Games with the power of an always-upgraded PC. Maybe not 100% top of the line, but above average, always, with no upgrade cost.
Plus you can play on your TV, mobile device, computer, etc, with the same game saves seamlessly moving between all of them.
No initial $400+ cost.
It offers a lot of the same benefits as consoles, including a monthly subscription that provides good, free games.
The downsides are latency and having to have an internet connection, and the latency is actually pretty decent. Oh, and having to buy the games from Stadia, even if you already own it on Steam, but that's no different than other "consoles".
It's a very compelling platform that they've completely failed to market correctly. With them giving up on first-party games, it seems pretty inevitable that they'll give up on the whole thing now, too. A lot of people never thought it'd last in the first place, and that's partly from their history and partly because Google didn't show enough commitment to it. Those studios that they just shut down were the best proof of their commitment.
> partly because Google didn't show enough commitment to it. Those studios that they just shut down were the best proof of their commitment.
I dunno about that. Counter example: YouTube got huge before Google made original content for it. So, I don't buy the whole "not serious cuz they don't have first party content" argument.
In general, you pay for games on Stadia, just like any console. They're only available digitally, of course.
They also offer a paid subscription (like XBL and PS Plus) that offers certain benefits (higher resolution, etc) as well as free games each month.
If you cancel your subscription, you can no longer play the games you got for free, and you can only play your paid-for games up to (IIRC) 1080p.
It's a great concept that a lot of people don't really see the point of, since they've already invested in PCs and/or consoles, and they don't really want to game remotely at all.
There's also very, very few exclusive games, and they're all pretty weak.
The system as a whole looks good until it's compared to other systems, and then the problems start to show up.
This was all made worse by them requiring that you buy $100+ of hardware to get started at launch, when one of the best use cases for it is people who can't afford to put much money up-front for a console. You can now play it for free, but that wasn't the case at launch when the hype as at its peak. They ruined their best marketing window, and they didn't trumpet the change loud enough when they finally made everything available to anyone.
They've basically screwed up marketing on this in every way possible, and now they aren't even committed to making first-party games, unlike every other console.
At the moment when PC GPU prices are going through the roof into insanity territory, Stadia and its hardware requirements seems like a great idea in comparison to paying $2k for a GPU to play almost any title fairly smoothly at 4k on a shiny TV. This calculus isn't what was predicted for the value statement to consumers though
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 367 ms ] thread[1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/19/18272965/google-stadia-stu...
*through acquisition
That aside, I do not think this is a bad move at all. None of the titles they were working on were that appealing, hopefully it will mean they pivot to integrate more into a shared licensing model. I would pay $5 a month to be able to import my current Steam games and play remotely, but this fractured model is incredibly reminiscent of video streaming.
We had a first mover (Steam/ Netflix) come in and now all the stragglers are saturating the market with similar but slightly differentiated products (Stadia/ Peacock). I am curious what the next evolution of this model will look like.
Marketplace.
On the streaming video side it is even harder since we never license or pay for videos, just the ability to watch as long as the service persists.
Big name directors like Villeneuve and Nolan are already yelling at the studios, but the days of their massive tent poles are over.
I think we'll probably wind up subscribing to our favorite creators directly.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Ama...
This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great deal on this!"
http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-i...
Unfortunately the engine they got a great deal on was CryEngine, which has made some cool games, but by a lot of accounts is not great to work in. Much like the issues reported at EA's studios (with Frostbite), if you're working on a game in it you want to be working closely with the engine devs. They're the ones who know how to make it work, or can fix it when it doesn't work.
A number of CryEngine developers left to join Cloud Imperium's Frankfurt office working on Star Citizen. That office basically exists to pick up the ex-Crytek people who wanted a job where they'd get paid. I don't know if Amazon snagged any of them, it would've been a harder sell to relocate to the US, but with the amount of money they were pouring into this, not impossible.
Unreal and Unity are both fantastic. Let your dev teams pick from one of those two and be done with it.
Unless your doing something really special theirs no reason to build an engine( if your goal is shipping games )
For the same synergistic effects as Epic and their game store + their engine. If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. It's basically trying to incentivize selling on their platform and using their platform tools at the same time.
The reason they started with lumberyard was because amazon does platform thinking. Unlike open source they can't just take it, so they bought cryengine to start with.
I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files.
So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.
Unless you have a contract dispute with them, in which case they bankrupt you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_disput...
I don't think contract dispute is the right word. The developer sued epic for things it knew about in advance. Epic countersued and won.
https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq
Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?
No. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.
Seems like you’d need an instance of the game with its own GPU for every viewer.
Twitch plays Pokemon worked fine .
You would basically just need to stream the cameras output texture to a web app, and then read inputs from from said web app. Regardless there's no reason to try and create a whole new engine for this, CryTek has always been known as one of the worst engines to work in, just because it's not supported very well.
The way I would personally do it I would maybe create a multiplayer game and for each ten cameras spin up a game client instance.
According to the other comments here it looks like Amazon wanted to create some type of bizarro system where if you use their engine you had to use AWS as your cloud back end. Which does sound pretty horrible, like I can't even do a HTTP request to get weather data unless it goes through AWS ?
Unity is pretty much none existent in AAA, it's mostly a mobile engine.
https://youtu.be/cQvW0SdprQE
I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .
HDRP is still new, give it a few years.
Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards.
I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet.
Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error)
However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.
If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place.
Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment.
edit:
To add links to the code:
ly framework, clearly core engine systems unrelated to cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
Gems, the non crytek plugin system: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
A big dump of cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
Which we can see has been dramatically shrunken in the time since the initial commit: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEn...
My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL
My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive.
There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!).
Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!
Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
...wait a minute
Hardspace: Shipbreaker, on the other hand had a unqiue idea and was a critical success, and in a retrospective the developers were very explicit not to impose a top-down attitude to development. [3] (disclaimer: I work at Blackbird Interactive, but not on Hardspace: Shipbreaker)
[1] http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/sinandpunishm...
[2] http://shmuplations.com/aliensoldier/
[3] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026825/Forging-Hardspace-Ship...
There are a LOT of videogame developers out there. Many of them are quite good at what they do.
The cloud gaming space, while much better than it used to be, has plenty of room for improvement — it’s not remotely mainstream yet, and there’s still time yet to mint the cloud gaming household name.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164801/google-stadia-sha...
First thought: it's probably pretty hard to start a new game studio during COVID? That article is dated March 4, oof.
But yeah, that's weird.
There is a widespread and well founded suspicion that Google will just get bored and shut it down one day. This exacerbates that fear.
IMO the single business decision that doomed it from the start was the fact that you had to buy Stadia game to play on Stadia. Nothing from Steam/Epic/Ubisoft, and no cross-play.
I would not at all be surprised to hear within a year that they stop taking new subscribers, with a sunset a year after that.
Based purely on my own experience with games, I tend to think that for the best results, you'd need a really good game studio to learn how to make a cloud game; I'm not sure you want a really good cloud company to learn how to make a game.
But it's still a really good point. Was the Stadia studio explicitly for these kind of cloud-gaming-enabled games?
Cloud native (and streaming) offers a couple of advantages over installed games. Cheating becomes much harder, although not impossible. And people can launch the game easily without an install.
It has some real trade offs as well. Increasing felt latency is the one people love to talk about. But a huge increase in compute and bandwidth cost for the game operator is the other. Both in terms of the wiz bang features people imagine which are also possible with an installed game. And because for each player at peak CCU you have to run the game for them, encode video and transmit that to them. That’s quite the ops cost increase over a traditional game.
The bandwidth consumption and compute cost hurt the play anywhere at anytime idea. Firstly because places where bandwidth and latency are acceptable for play are not ubiquitous and there is no clear roadmap for that to happen. Secondly because the hike in compute cost per user free accounts are considerably more expensive to allow. Adding subscriptions removes ubiquitousness, allowing free players will bring dark patterns to convert that would make Zynga blush. Platform subscriptions will result in a chase for ‘engagement’ and more of the latter. All without anyone able to offer more than vague affirmations that there is anything creatively interesting.
Cloud native is really good for one thing though. Getting investor money.
- GRID added a 40-car race mode that's "just not possible on consoles". (Unfortunately there were rarely enough Stadia players playing GRID for matchmaking 40-car races to work well!)
- Orcs Must Die 3 added Stadia's "Stream Connect" feature, which is basically like screensharing with people in your party. They also apparently increased horde sizes on Stadia compared to other platforms.
- The Hitman series added Stadia's "State Share" feature, which lets players set up scenarios and create customized game states that they can share with others to play.
- Dead by Daylight and Baldur's Gate 3 added "Crowd Choice", which lets streamers create polls for in-game choices that automatically selects an outcome based on viewer votes (e.g. choosing whether the streamer is a killer or survivor in DbD)
- Outcasters uses Crowd Play which lets stream viewers instantly jump into games with the streamer they're watching
- etc
There's a lot of cool stuff that can be enabled when the hardware runs on beefy cloud servers. Although it would be cool to see what novel functionality Google's internal studio would have showcased, I also think it's pretty important to focus on getting "real" games and encouraging devs to take advantage of cloud-specific functionality.
There's probably something to be said for the Ubisoft+ model (basically a separate, smaller streaming service on top of Stadia/Luna/etc), but I don't think cable-like "channels" bundles are the way to go for streaming of any kind.
You might get a kick out of https://killedbygoogle.com/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/1/22259836/nintendo-3q-2020-...
[0] https://longbets.org/
The EU seems to be tired of tech companies owning both: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/platform-busin...
1. Microsoft: https://kotaku.com/microsoft-now-has-23-first-party-studios-...
2. Nintendo owns many successful games on their platforms: Zelda, Mario based titles, etc.
3. Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Interactive_Enter...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468760/apple--steals-...
"Google" and "under-resourced" in the same blurb is very funny.
I'm glad she got out.
If I were Stadia's marketing chief, I'd
1. Bribe the TV manufacturers to include the Stadia app
2. Advertise that the TV includes _a game console_ during TV commercials.
3. Allow the TV users to pay a bit extra ($20?) to buy a basic game controller.
4. Have all the store demo units to auto stream Stadia playing video games and explicitly explain you don't need a xbox/playstation to play these games.
5. Buy out Witcher 3/Call of Duty 4/Project Cars 2/other older games and make them free for TVs with Stadia bundles.
Most smart TVs these days are more than fast enough to stream HD broadcast. I don't understand why Google doesn't push this.
Fiddling with my phone to play Stadia on my TV is pretty crumple some. It's just too much work for normal folks. People just want to turn on the TV and start playing.
Edit: I guess monopolistic abuse is a concern. However Sony and MS have their own streaming services. Google can just advertise 'play games with Stadia and Playstation Now and Xbox Cloud on your TV!' I am 100% if players switch to playing games on TV without game consoles, it hurts MS/Sony a lot more than to Google.
You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.
Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.
Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.
For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.
The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.
Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.
1) Old-school Waterfall: evaluate, commit, and then build (Tesla, Apple, 2000s MSFT are examples)
2) Spray and Pray: build, evaluate, and then commit (Facebook, Amazon are examples)
Google is 2
Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.
Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.
The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.
https://store.google.com/ca/product/chromecast_google_tv
Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.
They would only do that if the spinoff made them a noticeable amount of money. I suspect that is rarely the case.
Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here
Waymo is another spin off company.
The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.
They do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
He may have real musical talent, but he'll never put in the blood, sweat & tears for the band to make it big.
For reference when Microsoft/Epic approaches the studios for games on their platforms they front the entire development cost. Sometimes millions of dollars. Google is just cheap and won’t invest in their own platform.
Direct quote: "We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it."
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...
We once had a Microsoft rep come visit us to get us to publish our upcoming mobile games for Windows Mobile Tablet notreallysurewhatwasthatanymore. When we asked what kind of support they were ready to provide, they offered to lend us a device for a few weeks.
Of course it's not representative of how things should happen, but for every big partnership or exclusive you read about, there's a dozen dumb wastes of time.
For games coming to Game Pass? No.
Same for the EGS, it's not like they front all those games. (Most exclusivity is bought way later in the process.)
But the original comment is pretty much Windows Phone back then. To this day I have no idea why Microsoft was so cheap and didn't even try to get developers on their platform. Rip Lumias, some of you were some great devices.
https://twitter.com/RaveofRavendale/status/13094734056039096...
"With Nowhere Prophet, it was an interesting case because we were also launching on Xbox Game Pass at the same time, which had essentially already secured financial success for the console versions"
Not exclusive, still got a significant chunk of cash.
There might be a couple where Epic might have done that (kind of, I know they saved some games), but I don't think Microsoft funded any development for a gamepass game so far. (From a third party, not published by Microsoft.)
For an indie developer, this basically means worrying about whether the game will succeed a non-issue prior to launch.
> [Phil Spencer, head of Xbox:] [In] certain cases, we’ll pay for the full production cost of the game. Then they get all the retail opportunity on top of Game Pass. They can go sell it on PlayStation, on Steam, and on Xbox, and on Switch. For them, they’ve protected themselves from any downside risk.
https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-int...
Source: gamedev who has heard from serveral devs who got offers.
was that the end of the discussion? Was there, you know, pushback like "we want 10 devices each of the two most popular sizes, and exclusivity for xxx months, and, and..."
Or did everything just fizzle out after "well, we'll lend you the unit I have in the back of my car?"
From a customer perspective, it gets the game on streaming, Xbox, and Windows PC.
I'm short on any attempt Google makes at being a media company.
It makes a real-world difference, there's no doubt about it. Hell, this is why governments issue arts funding. The return has virtually limitless potential in more than just the financial aspects. But it does take commitment, perseverance, and often, patience.
Despite these being crucial attributes to being a good developer, it's shocking how few (people and tech organizations) exhibit them.
They fail to understand that from the outside people don't see things Google does as sure bets.
I would also say "media company" is pretty broad. Will Google become a media infrastructure company? yes (they already are). Will they become a media platform? yes, (they already are). Anything more and it's probably spreading investment too thin, but those are substantial components to media.
Not everyone has low latency, high reliability fibre in their home, yet. If you have some crappy DSL or whatever then the experience isn’t great. Likewise if your WiFi signal is anything less than perfect!
And the people who do pay for the best internet connections are often those who don’t need Stadia, because they already have latest-generation consoles and gaming PCs?
> I don’t think it says much about the future of the platform one way or another.
We probably disagree here, but to me that's an ear piercing yell about the confidence Google puts into Stadia and its future.
>This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.
This is so painfully misleading.
You're either describing situations where Microsoft or Epic have become the publisher for the game, or you're describing situations where extremely large titles are paid to exclusively release on a platform where they will then recoup costs from as the sales have to go through their platform.
2. Was the offer to be a timed exclusive like with Epic, or just to add integration for Stadia? I would assume the offers money to be very different depending on that.
3. Are we comparing similarly sized games? "one prominent indie developer" is kinda vague. Again not sure how comparable it is with Epic/Microsoft deals.
https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new....
I think its probably some technical issue or they don't want to risk getting a bad reputation by supporting a wide list of semi-compatible devices.
I wonder if there's a difference between making Stadia available via an app store and having it pre-installed or advertised as a core function of the device?
As others have commented, it was pure hubris for Google (and Rick Osterloh) to believe they could just start a new game studio and use it to fuel growth of the Stadia streaming platform. Xbox surely would've died without Halo!
This "do it all myself" approach needs to start with building a massive user base upon which to lure other game developers and TV manufacturers - not the other way around. A telling sign is that the newest Google TV dongle doesn't yet support Stadia...
From a hardware technical standpoint, I think most TV manufacturers don't include a powerful enough SOC from which to run a Stadia app (e.g. a built-in Chromecast != Chromecast dongle). There's also some server-side compatibility issues that we're not aware of.
The Android stuff seemed to suffer quite a bit from this early on, though they seem to have a handle on it now.
A lot of them have pretty bad game mode latency, though, which isn't a problem with home consoles but start to become a problem once you add streaming latency. Then some of them have >10ms decode latency, and all of it starts to ramp up the delay.
Seriously though, I think Microsoft and Sony would scream the house down if Google made movements like this. They may not be monopoly holders in console gaming, but you think that would stop a suit like that being heard?
Hopefully the games that SG&E do finish showcase what's possible when a developer targets Stadia's strengths.
I think you'd need to go much higher in terms of how many unpredictable, latency dependent objects are needed on screen before you'd start hitting issues with client side rendering.
Very active subscriber base and developer even in 2021.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system.
Never. As a game developer you don't want to be tied to a specific system. Never be able to sell it somewhere else.
Focusing on Stadia's strength as a platform seems to be a good move forward. It is a technically sound service. I'm sure the massive bump it got from Cyberpunk showed execs that a partnership-only gaming model could be successful. They do need to expand licensing, improve their subscription catalog and get more indie studios involved. Relying on users to consistently pay $60+ for games on top of the monthly fees is a losing business model.
I expect to see what the web went through in the early 90s as far as turmoil goes. Lots of platforms with all their quirks and developers getting behind various ones. Eventually (hopefully?) some standards enabling cross platform development of stream gaming. Bandwidth/latency still needs to play catch up but 5G is getting there. Cellular connections are getting more and more stable while landline methods are lagging.
I expect to see each platform playing to their strengths with Google pushing their expertise in infrastructure and Nvidia with their hardware. Also expect to see the space get even more crowded as traditional players join the market.
I have paid for Geforce Now which does let you play Steam et al games (although not everything is available which is annoying) - it is about £4 a month currently (or free if you can spend time waiting to play) and the experience feels largely the same to Stadia to me in terms of latency and quality. Many happy hours playing high-end PC games on a super cheap and lightweight Chromebook that starts up instantly and runs silently compared to my weighty, expensive, and noisy gaming laptop that needs to boot into windows (although that only takes 5-10s these days to be fair)
Feels like nVidia (...and Xbox? Not tried that) have eaten Google's own lunch in the stream-to-chromebook context.
Similar to your experience with Geforce Now, I had a great experience with shadow.tech, where you can bring your Steam library, and I'm sure there are many more competitors.
They should lean into that kind of thing.
But having your entire Steam library is very cool
Next day: Publishers start crying and all change their TOS to exclude cloud gaming like they did for GFN.
Look what happened to Netflix. Publishers and rights-owners love to collect exorbitant royalties (and not pass them on to devs/creators).
In the end, if you‘re consumer-facing, you have to create your own content. Or be extremely entrenched.
Were there any games currently in the works in these studios?
reliable high speed connections
or
Computing devices with dedicated graphical processors
Survey says... nobody wants what you're selling Google, and nobody with half a brain trusts you to maintain services long term anyways. Stadia is doomed and riddance.
With SG&E shutting down Stadia is dead whether they admit it or not.
It seems clear to me that Google deciding not to focus on game development is showing a level of awareness we should want to see. In fact, by redirecting those resources they are directly investing in the platform instead of content for it that, let's be honest, probably would have flopped.
I've been a happy Stadia Pro subscriber for about six months and in that time all I've heard from the community is "we want AAA, we want game x, y, and z" and with Google's decision, they're likely freeing resources to do just that.
What engine was SGE using? When I heard AWS wasn't just going to do something like license Epic I thought - uh oh... here we go!
> "The service’s best moments may have been when its third-party ports showed off the strength of the cloud gaming model, in which a game can run well on just about any device with a screen and a strong internet connection. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ran well on Stadia. Destiny 2’s Stadia support let players of that game drop in for an extra match or quest from their phone or laptop when they were far from their regular gaming gear. When Cyberpunk 2077 was faltering on everything else in December, it was running quite well on Stadia.
They’re not wrong. If Phil *Harrison is trying to turn Stadia into, say, the "Unreal Engine of cloud gaming” (scare quotes added by me), he’ll likely be much more successful at doing that than trying to make "a traditional console like PS5, but, like, in the cloud."
This shatters my confidence in Stadia as an ongoing consumer platform, though (especially that Stadio Pro sub, and possibly even the hardware/controllers too.)
0. https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
This is the first time I have heard that, it seems like something that Stadia's marketing team would want to tell people.
- https://www.androidcentral.com/cyberpunk-2077-stadia-review
- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-cyber...
Being affiliated with Google is why I never bothered with Stadia. Google can't stick with platforms long enough to make investing in them worthwhile. I knew Stadia would under-perform whatever obscenely high standards Google set for the product and would roll it into YouTube Gaming or something before silently killing it off.
That is to say, if somehow Stadia is successful then I expect a long term outcome where games are nearly all freemium adware or grind-to-win, with a few poorly-performing notable exceptions; mashing out the same three or four proven-successful concepts with new skins ad nauseum. The margins will be so razor-thin that there won't be any room to risk on innovation.
This is because they don't care to improve discovery on their store front. It's always been awful, it will continue to be awful. There will be virtually no quality control to speak of, with sudden and opaque decisions to remove products, and so on...
Recall that in the very early days of the Android app store it was flush with $20 games, and effectively absent of stolen content, adware and spyware. Look at it now.
The two major improvements that it might have over the App Store experience would be an absence of asset-ripped "clones" (read: your APK is ripped, minorly re-branded, and re-uploaded with a similar name), and perhaps far less malicious software, because access to the local device will be limited.
Its also nice to not have a large box hooked up to your TV.
I personally wouldn't use it because I'm anal about refresh rates/max settings/latency/etc but for other people (especially younger gamers with less disposable income) I think it's pretty compelling.
Putting aside Cyberpunk's overall problems, it performed a lot better on Stadia than last gen hardware https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22167303/cyberpunk-2077-...
Theoretically nobody's going to play 24/7 so you could share the hardware between multiple customers, but in practice latency means that your DCs need to be close to them anyway.
The only way Stadia (or some other bullshit like it) could possibly be cheaper would be:
1. Price dumping
2. Preferential game pricing from publishers (to instead hide the hardware costs there)
3. Gym model (tricking casual users into signing long and expensive contracts)
From my perspective, I probably average 8 hours of gaming a month, so there is plenty of opportunity to pack my usage onto some shared hardware.
Plus you can play on your TV, mobile device, computer, etc, with the same game saves seamlessly moving between all of them.
No initial $400+ cost.
It offers a lot of the same benefits as consoles, including a monthly subscription that provides good, free games.
The downsides are latency and having to have an internet connection, and the latency is actually pretty decent. Oh, and having to buy the games from Stadia, even if you already own it on Steam, but that's no different than other "consoles".
It's a very compelling platform that they've completely failed to market correctly. With them giving up on first-party games, it seems pretty inevitable that they'll give up on the whole thing now, too. A lot of people never thought it'd last in the first place, and that's partly from their history and partly because Google didn't show enough commitment to it. Those studios that they just shut down were the best proof of their commitment.
Worth pointing out that Microsoft has opened up their platforms so you can buy a single copy of a game and play on any supported Xbox or Windows PC: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/xbox-play-anywhere
I dunno about that. Counter example: YouTube got huge before Google made original content for it. So, I don't buy the whole "not serious cuz they don't have first party content" argument.
Can you only play select games in the subscription? Do they ever get removed?
I'm just trying to see why it is struggling. It seems like a great concept
They also offer a paid subscription (like XBL and PS Plus) that offers certain benefits (higher resolution, etc) as well as free games each month.
If you cancel your subscription, you can no longer play the games you got for free, and you can only play your paid-for games up to (IIRC) 1080p.
It's a great concept that a lot of people don't really see the point of, since they've already invested in PCs and/or consoles, and they don't really want to game remotely at all.
There's also very, very few exclusive games, and they're all pretty weak.
The system as a whole looks good until it's compared to other systems, and then the problems start to show up.
This was all made worse by them requiring that you buy $100+ of hardware to get started at launch, when one of the best use cases for it is people who can't afford to put much money up-front for a console. You can now play it for free, but that wasn't the case at launch when the hype as at its peak. They ruined their best marketing window, and they didn't trumpet the change loud enough when they finally made everything available to anyone.
They've basically screwed up marketing on this in every way possible, and now they aren't even committed to making first-party games, unlike every other console.