I'm really curious the calculation here. That's a lot of money, and I'm certainly glad they're doing it, but feels both out of character for Google, and I'm surprised they have the budget allocated to just "doing the right thing". What goodwill is this saving that they aren't burning by shutting down Stadia?
I think it saves a ton of goodwill. Yes, you’re taking a platform from people, but it’s much better to not take their money too. Nobody is losing their livelihood, it’s a gaming service that can easily be replaced.
Does it though? It doesn't seem to be in keeping with how the rest of Google functions with their general lack of care, customer service, or recourse on anything. It also don't paper over the fact that they killed a service that, just 3 months ago they said wasn't being shut down.
If there was some new Google paid service that I cared about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in a couple years.
If this is for goodwill, they have to start somewhere.
Google hasn’t remained the same company through its history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a radical departure from their past.
Maybe Google is realizing they can’t keep being this cold company forever.
Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn’t get me to trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse. It would have to be done a few more times.
I don’t disagree with that, but I think it’s somewhat orthogonal. If you pay people back, the general reception is now “eh, assumed this was going to happen. Glad I’m not out hundreds of dollars.” compared to fire and pitchforks if there’s no refunds. Google already has the rep for shutting things down. This doesn’t really move the needle besides showing that they will at least financially compensate your loss.
I'm hesitant to claim exceptionalism, but history supports the claim that gamers are (a) quick to claim umbrage, (b) VERY vocal on social media, (c) have a LOT of free time to shitpost, (d) have long memories, and (e) are a younger demographic (aka future consumers).
Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the cheaper option.
Perhaps, but I wonder if that class of gamers you're talking about is the target/actual audience for Stadia. The folks I knew who had/used Stadia were a lot more casual and non-traditional gamers, since why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
It's not like Google has a good rep in that community already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube, and especially in its gaming community, complains about YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively to move over to YT.
A lot of gamers are the sort of people that flame a developer of a bad game they never even bought/played in the first place. Attacking corporations is itself a sort of game they enjoy, having a personal stake in the fight isn't necessary for them.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that "lot of gamers" in my experience is the type to flame Stadia without playing or buying it anyway. I highly doubt the overlap of the population of /v/ and Stadia owners was that large, but maybe I'm wrong.
>why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
Lots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me were portability (playing my games at max settings while traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops, etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home, but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks like using less battery life / hard drive space / time updating / etc than the native alternative.
In other words, if I have the choice between playing the same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going to pick the latter.
I guess they're keeping the subscription fees for those who subscribed, not sure what percent of their revenue that would have been. All in all the total sales are probably paltry relative to the investment they've made in it (though surely they'll find other uses for the servers and tech), so it's not a big sacrifice to give that back to avoid anger and lawsuits
I dunno, Google has never really seemed to care about consumer anger and lawsuits. Like I said, it's a welcome change, and I'll be happy if they keep up this new pro-consumer attitude, but this feels a lot more like a weird one-off than a new policy or commitment.
But if it wasn't that much money, then it wasn't that many people who would be upset about not getting a refund, which for a company with the cashflow that Google has feels like not worth not pissing off.
2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years" into broad public consciousness
3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try again
4. Maybe it's relatively not that much money. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two people who'd ever even heard of Stadia
It's not out of character. They did exactly the same thing for "Google Offers," the old Groupon competitor from a decade ago. They refunded ALL of the purchased deals, even the ones that had been redeemed.
12 years ago, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion and Groupon declined. Those were the second and first dumbest business decisions I've ever heard of, respectively.
People were extremely cautious about stadia from day 1 because while Google may be the single most capable company of actually making cloud gaming workable, this specific product required a lot of money input that had a fairly good chance of being completely wiped out based on Google's track record.
With this, next time there's a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"
The simple answer is that it's legal hedging. They don't want anything related to this closure of Stadia to lead to a lawsuit that might impact the concept of software licensing, particularly in the EU. This is a move out of pure self-interest (not that I see anything particularly wrong with that).
I’m surprised, but I’m also glad they are doing this. It could be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5 minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished product they shipped thinking they’ll solve it. But the reality is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were barely playable. I’m talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps upload speed.
I'm somewhat surprised the 4 sibling comments as of this writing don't even mention the latency/jitter issue-- to me, that's always been one of the obvious biggest flaws with game streaming. Your average consumer has little to no awareness of it, it's beyond Google's control, and it has a very noticeable impact to anyone experiencing it. Not a good combination.
Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.
Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is also a major problem when it comes to latency & jitter. It doesn't even have to be game streaming, any real-time application such as calls suffer from it as well, despite not actually requiring much bandwidth at all.
Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.
I remember it using a Java applet. I think the reason none of the online test sites support it is because it’s hard to test latency & jitter in the browser as the lower layers try hard to compensate for it.
Speedtest for random server (servers listed on Ookla is quite random) is useful but ping for random server is a bit useless. Just ping for targeted server that runs service you use.
The problem with such statements is that game streaming services are INSANELY dependent on literally a century of cruft and how it was handled on a house to house basis. You can have great performance in your house, but your neighbor across the street could have utterly useless behavior.
Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem your ISP sent you when you first got service.
I'd be shocked if their contracts/EULA wasn't structured to avoid risk of suit around something like this. Shutting down a live service feels pretty defensible as not a crime or tort, and they could almost definitely fight the lawsuit for less than this costs in refunds, which makes it all the weirder.
It's the most likely reason. We've seen plenty of cases were EULAs were declared void and that won't hold in a place like the EU. You can't sign away your rights as consumers here. They might be able to fight individual lawsuits in some places, but it might eventually escalate into an investigation by the EU. There's significant legal risk there that is being avoided by just refunding a few millions. It's the sensible move.
It's also just a good marketing move. "they made people pay full-price for games and deleted them shortly after" is the kind of association that sticks around and even Google has an interest to avoid.
Honest curiosity, has that actually been proven in EU court? The sort of "licensing as a service" that Stadia did doesn't seem that different from the business models of something like Audible, or even iTunes in the DRM era. I totally agree that it's a predatory and anti-consumer model, but I wasn't aware that anywhere in the EU had successfully argued that removing access to something you were essentially "renting" access to was a violation of consumer protection laws.
These sorts of EULA arrangements are essentially the foundation of almost all modern media consumption - if anything Stadia is on better ground than most since it's not just a DRM layer like Steam or iTunes. If Steam disappears, I have a bunch of entirely playable game files on my computer that I can't use. When Stadia shuts down, you have a client for nothing. You're not paying $60 to own a copy of a game, you're paying $60 for an unlimited term license to play the game on Stadia's servers. Legally, it feels odd to claim in court that that should be the same as a purchase of the game in some other method. If Google had turned off Stadia, but transferred everyone's purchases to Steam or EGS, that wouldn't be providing the same service you purchased from Stadia.
Anytime I see an asymmetric upload bandwidth like 600/100, I assume the ISP is just advertising temporary burst speeds and does not actually allocate enough upload bandwidth to the neighborhood for people to sustain usage at 100Mbps.
I assume you mean same argument regarding download. In my experience, the download is always far less over-provisioned than the upload.
For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a neighborhood of 500 houses.
It actually just means they're using DOCSIS to carry the signal, which has asymmetric bandwidth allocations for upstream and downstream. 600/100 is a standardized allocation too.
In practice, it is always a heavily oversubscribed network that never delivers sustained bandwidth for either up or down.
Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency. Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the USA).
Speed alone isn't what matters here - latency and jitter are more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is meaningless.
I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).
This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.
Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.
Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.
Game streaming is great for casual gamers. A lot of games are perfectly playable even with 200ms tacked on, actually.
It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games
Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry making these streaming products are adults with real lives who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore players
200ms?? it's really frustrating in my experience for every game (I had 180ms when Xbox Cloud Gaming connects server over pacific ocean for unknown reason).
Yeah, a lot of people play games with their TV not in game mode, which is a ticket straight to +300ms City
Not only that, but a lot of AAA games nowadays have super long animations, tons of post-processing slapped on the tail end of the rendering engine, etc, so you end up with 300+ ms from "button pressed" to "something happens"
I suspect most of those games played on TVs would be running on consoles which are much more forgiving as their games are optimised for that use-case and there’s built-in assistance for inputs (aiming with controllers is much more difficult without it).
My understanding is that Stadia and most other game streaming providers run PC games which are developed with the assumption of precise mouse/keyboard inputs where there’s no assistance.
I think hardware was a loss-leader anyway. They were generously giving them out for free. Games are probably the biggest loss for them as a majority of that money was handed off to publishers.
Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones, IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don't recall), and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they drastically overestimate how many people would buy their hardware.
Kudos to Google for doing right by their customers without being prompted. They could’ve said “$5 off a Nest Thermostat” or some crap and instead they manned up.
Does anyone have sales numbers on hardware and software?
If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.
Not quite hardware/software sales, but a lot of people pegged Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the beginning of the year. It's also unclear how many of those break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-game-once-and-play-it-now users.
Free at time-of-service (and as mentioned, of course you're paying with your privacy anyway) doesn't mean there's not very real costs to the customer if the service goes away though.
Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say, gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around shifting sands like that.
Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.
So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra months of service on a second line) even to migrate off "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a business.
Yeah, if I had known this would be how they would have handled a hypothetical shutdown, I would have very happily used the service. Instead I signed up for GeForce Now since I can buy games through Steam and play them there. The main thing that stopped me from going with Stadia instead was that I was pretty confident that at some point it would shut down and I'd lose access to $xxx worth of games. If they had promised up front to do this in case of failure, maybe it wouldn't have failed.
How is GeForce Now with Steam? I have a Steam link but find it to be a pain in the rear. It's also difficult / clumsy to use for non Steam games. Does GeForce Now solve this or is it just ... different?
GeForce Now gives you a Windows box with Steam on it, and you log into your Steam account on it. They pair it with a super fast cache of the Steam Depot so your first install is speedy. That way, there's no integration necessary, and Nvidia doesn't have to reinvent the achievement/launcher/licensing wheel.
It's probably just different. I don't know what the Steam Link is like. GFN streams the games from a datacenter, so the quality will depend on the quality of your internet connection. Also, GFN can't play all Steam games; publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN, and several major publishers don't agree (eg Bethesda, Rockstar). All that said, I'm happy with it. Usually I can't tell at all that it's being streamed, and it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
> publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN
Hrm. I have an "eclectic" mix of native Steam games, non-Steam games (added to my Steam library) and some emulators. I can't imagine those will be available, thanks for this info.
>it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
I certainly like this.
Do you use it with your TV? Do you need a Shield too for the controller?
If you have an Nvidia graphics card that supports game streaming, install Moonlight on the steam link and look up how to stream the entire desktop using Moonlight.
It works perfectly for non Steam games and usually works better for Steam games as well.
I would recommend a wireless keyboard and mouse to launch the games or if you just want to use a controller to launch your games the Playnight launcher.
This is the exact reason that I don’t mind purchasing Amazon’s experiments. If it doesn’t work out, I get my money back and Amazon has more data for product dev
I'm a Stadia user, and Google's handling of the shutdown of Google Play Music is what gave me confidence to purchase anything on Stadia (~$500 on a quick review). I actually thought we'd be sent personal links of our games, which would live-on in Google's white-list stadia product called Google Stream - they did something similar for GPM which merged into Youtube Music. I'm fine with a refund though.
It's a remarkable decision to refund! I'm assuming all the game developers are keeping their revenue from Stadia gameplay, so it's a meaningful net loss for Google overall. Maybe not that much though; I hope someone publishes an accounting.
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.
Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally" for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).
I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.
Yup, that's exactly what everyone expected since the beginning. And that's why publishers were not very interested, because they always suspected that's what would happen. Why invest when Google will get bored and shut it down in a couple years?
I think there would have been more interest if they didn't launch with folks having to the purchase games instead of it just being a subscription plan like most were expecting. Of course, pure subscriptions came later, but that was an odd way to roll it out.
Agreed. The upfront cost of games and a new Stadia-specific controller was too much. I subscribed to PS Now to play Spider-Man. I still had to buy a PlayStation controller, but it was reusable for other PC games.
Ironically, I am now only subscribed to a visit GeForce Now, which requires game purchases. This is primarily due to Sony’s lack of macOS support for PS Now, and my owning an M1 with no Bootcamp support.
> It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive games.
Stadia was cool and I think there is a future for this sort of gaming in some genres and for some audiences, but I play fighting games and it absolutely did not work "fantastic" for them, even living in Boston and having a sporting symmetric-gigabit connection.
I wonder if Google's tried to study & put some numbers on how much harder it is for new products of theirs to take off, due to their reputation, and decided it's not worth the cost to fix, or if they just don't care to even find out.
I think you're probably spot on about the latter. Besides, attempting to find out if their reputation has been damaged in a measurable way wouldn't get anyone promoted. :)
>It never had any traction at any point in its history.
B/c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and stops carrying afterwards... and b/c it was marred with promises like "negative latency". But mostly it required to purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock in.
Nah. Google execs and others keeping making the mistake that cloud gaming should target the high-end gamers. It should be the middle-ground between mobile gaming and pc/console gaming, IMO. Low barrier to entry with some AAA games.
Stadia users often joked about how it was really 'Dadia', since so much of the player base was younger dads that wanted to game with their friends from time to time but couldn't justify purchasing the required hardware. These are the users Google should have been targeting - along with less tech-inclined crowd.
The entire pandemic I had this vision of a Stadia commercial where a younger family member sends a link on the family group chat or over zoom and then next minute everyone is playing Among Us or some other casual party game together. Even grandparents and click a link to open their chrome browser.
You don't need fiber for casual games like these. You need enough internet to stream netflix - which almost everyone does.
I used it a bit. The performance was exceptional. I enjoyed playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my phone with a Razer Kishi controller. Although I'm not surprised Stadia struggled to find traction, I think this is mostly due to Google's ongoing struggle with entertainment branding, and despite this, I do agree with their sentiment that streaming is the inevitable future of mainstream gaming.
Game streaming struggles because your average American has like four different TERRIBLE networking devices between them and any service. Those devices will not be upgraded just because google wishes the internet was more like home. If you do not have a good streaming experience, there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
I tried a bit. I don't have space in my life for dedicated gaming hardware or a PC, so seemed to be a way I could play a game once in a while without commitment. Was ok. Didn't get hooked.
I use it and it works surprisingly well even on UK DSL (80/20). I found it useful to play games that insist on anti-cheat systems that deeply embed themselves into your machine. Also my PC is a bit ancient, built in 2015 and running a 4690K, DDR3 with a 750Ti so I get access to games that need a bit more poke.
I've been using for about two years I'd guess. I have a pretty fast connection and it worked pretty flawlessly at home. I used it while traveling too, and if the connection was good enough for streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, it was typically totally fine for Stadia. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the highest settings while playing on an iPad was pretty damn cool, and meant I could slim down a ton when traveling.
That said, I haven't played any multiplayer FPS games. The multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though "seems totally fine" is obviously a subjective observation.
The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn't use your Steam library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that they're refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google, I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that'd be it, and I was ok with that.
used it exclusively for gaming the last year and a half. mostly just for Destiny 2, but bought a few other games on the platform as well. worked very well for my purposes. even pre-ourchased the next year's content for destiny as well. I'm very sad.
For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad/phone when you have 30 minutes free and don't want to buy/build/maintain a PC or Console.
That said, I haven't played in around a year. The games catalog was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call of Duty, EA games etc)
I've used it almost exclusively for gaming since it was released. I've occasionally had issues with poor connection over WiFi but most of the time it has worked flawlessly. I know the latency is higher than a locally running game but I'm not doing side by side comparisons so I don't notice it. With this news I guess I'll be switching to GeForce Now which supports higher quality and framerates but a worse UX in my experience. In my opinion the business case for GeForce Now makes less sense than Stadia but I guess the numbers of overs makes more of a difference.
Yes. I only tried Destiny 2 because no other game (that was available without extra purchase) was of interest to me. It worked very well and I _really_ liked the experience. Just open the website in Chrome, click on the game you want to play and it launches in seconds. Certainly faster than launching Destiny 2 on my own PC, which is also a gaming rig.
For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now. Technologically, it’s basically… remote desktop to Steam? From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam. Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.
I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it could be more like Stadia.
I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new platform and getting software on it is very hard.
I like GFN and I agree the experience is not seamless. It still takes a long time to launch the game VM, and you feel it; but a lot of these other issues are much better or nonexistent now. In particular having to re-auth to Steam is much rarer now; launching the VM for a newly-purchased game often used to take a long time, with you waiting for the Steam launcher go through some kind of "Preparing" state for a long time (you don't have to be in-session for this), but this hasn't happened for me in some time. I haven't had a problem with any settings like language, resolution or video, and I think performance, while highly dependent on your own network and ISP, is much improved and hasn't been a problem in a while. So I do think, while the "remote desktop" approach is inevitably going to have some clunkiness, it has improved quite a bit and continues to do so.
I'm a little bit of an enthusiast (tried all of the major platforms). I have shitty rural internet, Stadia is (was) by far the best of the bunch by far, especially with the controller. Near-native for latency and crystal clear image. 40ms ping to Google.
Currently I use xcloud, its "acceptable" with certain games that don't require low latencies but its picture quality in particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.
I use it... and honestly I'm really bummed by this. I've avoided owning a console mostly because I didn't want to drop $500 just to get started. Stadia launched CP2077 with a free Chromecast and controller, so it ended up fitting my use-case rather well.
They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any room in my house and I just needed the controller.
I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from the beginning... I'm just bummed because I quite enjoyed the ride.
Not stadia, but I tried Steam In Home streaming (basically you stream from one PC in your house to another), with ethernet and it was NOTICEABLY laggier (because of input lag). It was probably like 33ms+ of added input lag. From that point I knew cloud streaming (which is basically this plus network latency) wasn't going to be pretty.
Well, those comments were responding to a July 2022 article stating: "Google Stadia denies the recent claims online that it would be shutting down its services by the end of the summer, promising more games to come."
So technically, the commenter was right, as Stadia did survive the summer and will be operational for a whole 3+ months!
They sure do try out a lot of stuff. Google really need to do the reverse an create "productsbygoogle.com". Many of the products are pretty unknown, until they get publicity for being killed.
You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that.
I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.
I disagree. The fastest human reaction time is something around 100ms. (https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime). I've just measured, and mine is 230ms. As such 10ms lag wouldn't make any difference. I've used Shadow Tech PC for a while during pandemic. With good upstream and downstream bandwidth it was a fairly decent experience, even for playing something like competitive Overwatch. I noticed the difference with normal gaming PC due to some other factors (quality of sound, etc.). Standard accessories worked seamlessly for USB-over-UDP.
Humans can detect 10ms of latency easily. The problem is more than just reacting slightly later to events, its also how quickly the game/system responds to your inputs because its a round-trip interaction. This ends up usually being where the latency becomes more noticeable to most people. People can generally adjust for consistent latency, but any latency gains are pretty noticeable once you get used to looking for it.
Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a single frame.
Practiced musicians begin to feel discrepancies in time starting at latencies as low as 10ms. I learned this when investigating whether bands could practice live over the internet (spoiler: most of them can't). Turns out that due to limitations of physics, even absolutely optimal connections still have enough lag/jitter to ruin it for professional instrumentalists.
I tried Shadow and, well, you could really tell they host in a budget datacenter with how often there was stutter or missing keyframes (they host with OVH in Europe). I never had such issues with GeForce Now.
Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually tell you what hardware you'll be getting beyond "4c/8t". Mine turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.
You're definitely right for most people, but even 10-20ms is noticeable by experienced players and can be very impactful at pro-level -- e.g. some high-level LoL players feel 35ms ping is unacceptably high for competitive play: https://afkgaming.com/esports/news/ls-talks-about-why-35-pin... (though it probably doesn't matter much for Stadia's use cases)
Doubtful. Pro gamers are known primadonnas. If anyone ever tested them and added synthetic lag with double blind study I suspect they wouldn't identify it more accurately than what a random chance would dictate. Sorry, but pure speed of electrical signals/chemicals traveling in the body puts a constraint on that.
It's not even just "pro gamers", the most popular fighting game in the world (Smash Bros U.) is enjoyed by casual players and pros, and has an entire mechanic based on "two-framing" for edge guarding.
One absolutely does not need to be a pro to pull it off, and the whole interaction window for that mechanic is based around being able to react within ~32ms (1/30th of a second) to edge guard an opponent. It is exponentially harder to pull off in online play.
You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80 (Microsoft Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop things, so it's not like it's just first person shooters that suffer from latency.
You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah.
One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.
Thanks for posting this. This comment section has been particularly frustrating to read, since it's a mirror of what I've seen in the real world. There are teams at big tech companies making TERRIBLE decisions about the future of gaming because they don't actually understand how latency affects games, and they aren't hardcore gamers so they can't feel the effects themselves.
Even the ~50ms total latency you get from locally streaming over a 1ms wired network (from buffering/inappropriate firmware design) ruins whole genres of high level gameplay. You miss tricky shots in FPS games, you can't confirm/link in fighters, etc.
The bigger issue is jitter. People can compensate for consistent delay (e.g. by leading shots in an FPS game). But when the delay is inconsistent and varies quickly, it becomes much more difficult to anticipate movements and execute time-sensitive maneuvers.
This is confused. Reaction time is irrelevant, you can still notice very short delays between two events. The fundamental issue is that when you make an input that corresponds to an action in a game, you expect that to action happen near-immediately, and anything else feels terrible.
Human reaction times have nothing to do with perceived input latency. There is a latency budget that is different for every individual that determines whether or not something will be an acceptable experience. This budget is divided between everything in the signal chain like the input devices, the computer/console, the monitor/tv, and any other processors along the signal path. Streaming games adds additional latency to the signal chain. Generously if your target is 60fps and you have a round trip latency to their server of 8ms, that's a half frame of added latency. On its own it's almost certainly imperceptible to most people, but it's not working in a vacuum and most people don't live right next to the datacenter. It can very easily go over the threshold for what is acceptable to most people.
It matters for MMOs. If there are two pro gamers A and B both with 100ms reaction time, but gamer A has 10ms ping while gamer B has 30ms ping, gamer A has a consistent advantage. This is not strictly a Stadia problem but it may be exacerbated if the display data adds latency on a slower line.
Unless cloud gaming company intend to put servers in every single city across the globe it's not going to work. Even in Boston with good, fiber internet streaming games have too much lag and the compression artifacts are horrible.
When there is fast movement the compression is much more noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing graphical comparisons do it with static images. It's quite common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup.
Also, you are misunderstanding what "reaction time of 100ms" means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length so long as they are bright enough.
What 100ms reaction time means is that you can't react to a given stimulus in less then that. Here's the important distinction, you don't react to lag, you perceive it.
To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms, and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce.
you cannot reduce streaming latency with smaller transistor, nor with more transistor density. or maybe there's a new more law interpretation I'm not aware of that makes speed of light in the connectivity medium faster?
This logic doesn't apply to single player games. I tried playing a racing game on Stadia and it just didn't feel good.
On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for PC. But that game is slow anyway.
Indeed. Count me as one person who was negative on stadia at the start (worked for a company where the CEO wanted to try to copy the idea, I said don't bother)
Jitter is what really kills it. I found out that my ISP (who own switches in the basement) limits bandwidth based on a rolling time window, so whenever someone in the house starts a download they can briefly saturate the entire link. Wish they'd know how to configure QoS on their very expensive network gear.
Yep if people were bothered by 10ms then everybody would be on CRTs. But... nobody is doing this except some extreme speedrunners and fighting game players.
I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.
I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my partner on Stadia, and we’ve never noticed any significant problems - even when using non-stadia controllers.
Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud gaming market, and even the Switch supports “cloud version” games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon’s Luna service continues to grow and improve.
> I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.
Something like Stray that doesn't really require "hundreds of dollars regularly". Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that was definitely < $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then also not on the cloud...
On the other hand, it's highly likely that you won't be able to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as providers will drop it down (or outright close...).
It's still $10-20 forever, monthly(assuming they never increase prices). Versus a few larger sums every few years. If you don't buy the latest and greatest, a $200 yearly budget can definitely keep your hardware up to date. If it's a PC, you can even use it for other purposes.
Let's do a little math. Let's say you want to buy a gaming PC and have a budget of $1000. Let's also assume you play 1 hour of video games a day, 5 days a week. That is 20 hours a month.
At 20 hours a month you would have to play for 50 months (4 years) on your machine before you pay off the machine. Alternatively, you could spend that same money on the streaming service. I think the math doesn't hold up if you are a casual gamer. Building a PC and maintenance just isn't worth it.
That being said, if you play a lot more, maybe even 15-20 hours a week, I think it makes a lot of sense to build your own machine (I have one and it was very worth it when I was a serious LoL player).
Within the context of Stadia here, you could purchase a game at cost and play it forever (or, until the service shut down, heh) without paying any monthly subscription fee, which does change the math somewhat.
> I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.
If you take a look at the 25 games with the most current players[1] I would argue at least 20/25 would either be annoying to play with increased input lag, or outright highly disadvantageous.
All that means is that people who choose games where lag is annoying pick Steam because that's where the lag is lowest. It's not a canonical list of all games.
When Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Switch came out I did alright on Super Mario 64 until I encountered a level that required precisely timed wall jumps in order to advance. I consistently missed my jumps and wondered what was up. I plugged in my controller via USB and was still failing to do the jumps properly. What finally fixed it was putting the input on my TV into "game" mode, which reduced the amount of processing/latency. If local display latency can cause issues with gaming, network latency would be a non-starter in a lot of cases.
Super Mario 3D all star is running emulation on the switch. How much latency is introduced with just that? It was not like the emulation was even top notch either.
It's hard to say. If the emulation to compute a single frame finishes before the frame deadline elapses then the latency caused by emulation is effectively zero.
Nah, it's definitely true.
I have seen plenty of (especially larger-format) TVs where, with "game mode" (or the respective equivalent) disabled, it's unbearable to even do latency-forgiving tasks like office work on them.
It really depends on the TV. And if your gaming console is plugged into a receiver, it could add more.
My previous TV had about 150 ms of video latency. Even if I enabled Game Mode, it was 75 ms, which was still noticeable.
With my current TV, I have no idea what the latency is because I stopped gaming on console and so I'm not playing Rock Band which had a calibration option to compensate for video and audio latency.
I've had a TV that were nearly 200ms, but it was the absolute cheapest panel I could find.
If you don't configure your TV correctly sure, you could get massive amounts of lag. Even with an OLED display if you turn on all the post processing you're going to have problems. That's not really a fault of the TV though. I disable almost all post processing on my TVs and get a better picture without the downsides.
With digital receivers adding lag is minimal at best. Especially with newer models that don't draw on top of the source signal.
It is quite accurate, but only for the highly processed cinematic modes. Latency is essentially irrelevant for video content as long as the audio stays in sync. The game mode drops all the processing and is usually pretty low.
For example, my LG OLED tv is regarded as one of the best for gaming. Game mode latency is about 9ms. Cinema mode is about 90ms.
Those "old games" were designed around the technology of the time, which had drastically lower latency than anything today except for high end gaming (and sometimes not even that).
- Controller buttons caused CPU interrupts, so basically 0 latency
- No OS getting in the way
- N64 era would be double buffered and then straight to the CRT
- NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen
- CRTs have virtually no latency, same with the analog signal chain because there is no buffering
So when people try to play them in modern systems, things that were easy back then are quite hard now.
There's a reason anybody speedrunning SM64 will play on a CRT.
In 2015 I found myself a decent deal on my old childhood console, the Super Nintendo which I had sold at a garage sale years ago (and later regretted)
I bought a Japanese copy of Super Mario World on ebay (Japanese copies of games were peanuts at the time, I assume they're more now), and found an old CRT for cheap on a local used site. I continued to play SMW many times over the years on various platforms and emulators, and I'm pretty damn good at the game.
But man, did it blow my mind feeling as little input latency as I did the first time I booted it on a CRT after all those years. It actually took a little bit of time to adapt to. It's like that phenomenon where if a button activates a light with low enough latency, people think the light is predicting when they'll hit the button, i.e. turning on before the button is pressed. People don't realize the latency we started dealing with when everything went from analogue to digital!
Yeah, the latency on a lot of TVs outside of "Game Mode" is really atrocious, commonly in the order of 100 - 200ms, which is way higher than even network latency on game streaming services assuming you're close to the data center.
Worth noting, I'm pretty sure by default when you plug a Switch controller into the dock, it just charges and continues to communicate over Bluetooth. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong
It's absolutely noticeable. The question is whether it's tolerable, and people do seem to tolerate increasing latency both from networks and their TV.
But, personally, I find the experience much less enjoyable as the latency goes up. It's not about being competitive either. (I don't play games online.) It just feels sticky and sluggish and I don't enjoy it. I miss the crisp responsiveness of older consoles. :(
> I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.
I agree with your disagreement here. For me streaming game services don't have a lot of technical hurdles.
> Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.
I disagree here. I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.
The subscription model I think has already proven it self be consumer hostile. I don't want to subscribe to Adobe, I don't want to subscribe to Office, just let me buy the damn thing outright.
> I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.
I totally think this is fair - and I think the market can support both models.
E.g.: I like paying for Netflix / Hulu / [insert video streaming service here], but I wouldn't hate on others who prefer buying the DVD. Same thing for Apple Music vs. people who prefer CDs / records.
Splatoon 3 is already one of the best-selling Switch games ever released - a competitive online shooter on a console most popular with casual gamers. Games like Fortnite and Overwatch are massively popular. 99% is a real over-estimation.
Latency really isn't a problem in many contexts. I've got some prototype streaming solutions running in an azure region near me and I can't perceive any round trip latency compared to localhost.
There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time.
Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.
I’ll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99% (99.9%?) of cases.
Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms.
I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag.
I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games.
But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.
the 10ms or whatever the real amount is, is in addition to tbe monitor lag, etc.
i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.
Local lag was significantly reduced over recent years, low latency modes of TVs/monitors, 60 and more fps even for console games, etc. So the baseline moved. That affects remote gaming also, but in a much smaller proportion. Remote gaming quality is as good as ISP quality, and most of ISPs are sh*.
The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and can easily tell if their game isn’t running with optimal fps. High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you might be right about the general population, but were talking specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more doubtful that it’s just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching yourself can mean death).
Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also cars.
Agree that many casual people don’t care much, but casual people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or wouldn’t be in the know enough to try out a streaming game service that wasn’t advertised much.
10ms is completely fine for any game you can possibly think of. Including competitive FPS e-sports. We are not superhumans and your monitor alone probably adds more lag than that.
What's not acceptable is jitter. If it's a constant 10ms delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.
If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.
I think this is right for games that are ported to streaming from a traditional PC or console release, but presumably if some studio cared, they could design games with streaming in mind. As an extreme example, imagine the original NES Final Fantasy, or the SNES Monopoly on Stadia: with mainly turn-based interaction, they would be basically indistinguishable from playing locally.
That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags, etc... )
I was cloud gaming for 2 years and recently switched to PC. I've been gaming for about 30 years or more. I can confidently say you wont notice anything up to around 60ms latency. I could still twitch aim and play and compete in online shooters no problem.
Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection starts to become unstable, even if it's a fast connection, it becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and I'm out.
So.. what's your point? Are you saying that Google saying they're not shutting down 60 days ago was wrong? Or that the current post is wrong? Or that neither should be trusted? Or..?
I agree, just not sure what your comment meant in regards to that. Ie the decision is made by quarters, yea, what does that have to do with the parent comment?
I'm not arguing that internally, no one at Google knew this 60 days ago. They may have. I'm saying that it makes sense to cast doubt on public relation statements that cast a company in a good light, but it makes much less sense to doubt an announcement that casts them in a bad light. Why would they "lie" about killing a product or service?
>... it makes much less sense to doubt an announcement that casts them in a bad light. Why would they "lie" about killing a product or service?
If you are suggesting that I'm saying that we shouldn't trust Google's announcement that they are shutting down Stadia, then you are misunderstanding my comment.
You replied to a post saying "this is news direct from Google" with the comment
> to highlight that we generally shouldn't put much trust into Google
It seemed like a logical conclusion. Given your argument now, I assume you simply meant "don't trust anything they say" (which would include their announcement today) but it's not exactly the spirit of what you mean. Your initial intent was not clear (in my opinion.)
Just a general, friendly reminder to take whatever comes out of Google's mouth with a gigantic grain of salt, circumstantially. In this circumstance, I would trust that they are shutting it down.
I'm saying that their statement 60 days ago was a lie. A lie that leadership knew was a lie, yet they let the PR statement be generated and broadcasted regardless.
Google will have financially benefited from that positive PR (from interest on invested money, if in absolutely no other way).
Right - if you re-read what I said, it was that you can believe negative PR ("we are shutting it down") while taking any positive PR ("we are totally not shutting it down!") with a grain of salt.
The main thing that initially got me excited with Stadia were the ideas around having much bigger shared gaming worlds enabled by google-scale cloud expertise.
Too bad that all it turned out to result in was video streaming optimisation.
They have by far the most awful customer service of any big tech company. One or two experiences of dealing with issues (in my case Google Fi) turns you into a life long hater.
They turned evil when they started putting ads inline with search results. The main utility of that is to trick unsophisticated or unwary users, so basically they're preying on the elderly (among others), but it made the line go up and to the right, so they don't care.
Plus any company with a core business model of "being a super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal memory" is inherently terrible and shouldn't exist.
I think it stems for their beginning. The Google search page was innovative, in showing that you didn't need to be flashy, just good at what you do. The same for Gmail, which was an awesome product and completely changed how people use email. Even the original Google ads where viewed extremely favorable, as it showed that you could make money on ads, without them being obnoxious.
Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google adopted all the things we had hoped they'd save us from, just so they could make more money.
That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google these days. The only two Google products I use are Google Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.
I remember the first time I saw someone mention Google. It was just so obviously better than what came before. That's rare. Most improvements on technology have to prove themselves over time and slowly build a following. Google was so amazing it grew to IPO through the .com crash and the early 2000s recession. For a time, everything they launched was gold. No one seemed to notice or care that everything was still "beta" years after sweeping each market.
As an ex fanboy (or fanboy lite) who has circled into hater section of recent, I can give you MY reasoning.
For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge company, so only strike 1.
They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.
And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.
Me too. I was all in on Google services, owned a Nexus 4, 5, 6P, Pixel, Pixel 3. Even a couple Nexus 7's, and a Chromebook. I was into rooting and custom ROMs, I got people to use Hangouts, I had a Google Play Music subscription, I backed up all my pictures to Google Photos (still do that one), I was learning Android Development and had an app published, etc.
But after so many years of being jostled around and seeing every product I liked and used destroyed and brought back as something worse, I had to get off the train eventually. Google has no long-term plans. They only know how to ruin things that were once good. Android isn't the fun, open mobile OS it once was. It got more locked down with each update and became a cheap imitation of iOS. So eventually I just bought an iPhone. I went through so many messaging apps and renamings and relaunches of various products and services.
At some point you realize Google has no respect for their customers and no interest in making products that are nice to use. They only want to optimize people's attention so they can turn it into ad revenue. I celebrate their failures now, in hopes it'll one day shake something up enough that they'll have to try giving a shit for once.
I had your experience, except when I finally traded in my android for a iPhone I felt like a FOOL. It was so much better on every level. Just fantastic, polished and near perfect in every way. It was light years ahead and I realized that I had Google ecosystem Stockholm syndrome.
It’s not just Google, but the cause for embarrassment at other formerly prestigious places is different and not relevant.
I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.
Because they started out good ("dont be evil" and all), providing an exceptional yet fundamental internet service but somewhere along the way they lost the plot. They now hoard enormous wealth by shoving ads to our faces yet have done nothing with the money. Not to mention their engineering culture goes directly against the spirit of this site (rest'n vest vs startup's hustle culture). They're the hero turned villain all start ups fear they'll become
Mainly because of wasted potential, in my case. They revolutionized the internet (repeatedly) with a great product and found a reasonably unobtrusive method to monetize it, then moved into creating replacements for Microsoft products (browser, calendar, email, documents) and I thought they would then pivot into cloud as a good competitor to AWS, whilst also spending their copious profits on long-term scientific research projects and helping bring ML advances to the larger community.
It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's products worse. What's really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.
They have/had incredible potential. Imagine what a company with Google's resources could do. They have simultaneously the sharpest minds on the planet and a vast treasure chest of unprecedented proportions at their disposal.
What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it functioning.
It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it isn't, but it certainly feels like it.
You're not gonna get me to defend Google at all, but I'm really sick of hearing this parroted over and over because
1. It's not true. Read the [1]code of conduct, it's right there at the bottom: "And remember... don’t be evil"
2. Who cares if they say the words "don't be evil?" The actions are more important than a cute phrase. If they sent Google Ad Bots to every house in America and forced you to sit through 30 second ads every morning or else they shoot you, would you say "well at least the code of conduct says 'don't be evil'!"?
I am not a fanboy, have never been a fanboy and never cared about the "do no evil" marketing motto or any other Google crap. I am bitter against Google because it plainly sucks. Their products suck, they have "soft monopolies" and they have used them to Embrace Extend and Extinguish any alternatives. They are what Microsoft was in the 1990s-2000s. If you are young enough to remember the 90s and 00s Microsoft you will understand.
Note that I not only hate Google, I hate Google, Apple, Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes me an old fart.
It is embarrassing. It's not just embarrassing, it's fucking embarrassing.
Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in this country - poor broadband Internet service.
But... oh God, if only... if only Google had something they could use... something they could do to solve this problem!?
Oh... wait, yeah. They have their own fucking fiber ISP! Google could have ponied up money and started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.
But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you're stupid and/or naïve enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and Verizon and Charter and AT&T are just going to let you waltz in and steal their customers (and yes, these ISPs do think this way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you should never have entered into the ISP business in the first place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.
If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, """""""lobby""""""" all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials - they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP's territories, laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.
But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems: fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success. The road to becoming America's best ISP will be a long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but when you've got literally billions of dollars of cash at your disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors... or you could build something that would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of revenue in a decade or two.
Too bad they're focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors.
If you're a manager, why the hell are you going to risk your career trying to get the last guy's project to work? There are two incentives in corporate America: start a project to get the praise for something new, and kill a project to get the praise for saving money. Is it any wonder projects keep popping in and out of existence?
Because calling people's job choices "embarrassing", no matter how right you may be, isn't a good starting argument against the people in those jobs. Not to mention that it comes off as pretentious.
No, Google upper management is a bunch of incompetent clowns, and they should rightly be called out for it.
Working at Google today, you better be in just for the 200k salary, because your options there are to sell ads or work on a product that's going to be shut down in a week.
Cole, do you know what working at Google is fast becoming like?
It's like going to Harvard.
You don't want to advertise that you went to Harvard. People who attended Harvard not only admit this, they don't even actively proclaim they went to Harvard any longer. Why is that? Because a bunch of really shitty people have sullied the reputation.
It isn't that way with Google for the general public, but the SV folks know that Google of 2022 is nothing like Google of 2012, and certainly nothing like Google of 2002.
My great fear is that it won't be much longer before saying you work at Google in say, 2025-2032 is like saying you work at Hewlett-Packard or IBM in 2022. The prestige is long gone.
I worked with a startup company once that seemed to bias towards stanford / berkeley grads. I was surprised how good some of them were, easily ahead of me with 5 yrs experience from a mediocre Canadian university and work experience in Canada.
I've noticed people adapt to the demands placed on them, so highly encourage people to at least start out in a very demanding environment.
Full disclosure: I work at AT&T but not directly on fiber. My views are my own and do not represent my employers.
Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.
I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t / weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.
Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.
started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.
>If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years
Sad thing is they did not even have to do that. all they had to do was put some lobbying effort in empowering municipalities to do their own broadband and the rest would take care of itself. ISP monopolies have been kneecapping municipal broadband effort right and left and just some push from otherside would have cleared up the way for some competition. But they did not, as you said, its classic short term thinking and 'not my problem' syndrome. What really troubles me is that Google & FB have sucked up almost all of ad market but none of that revenue is trickling back into society except for these 'promotion packet' side hustles.
Well, we're still at the point where, for nearly everyone who worked on Google products between 2008 and now, it was financially lucrative and great for their resumes.
Unsurprising, as I knew it was going to shut down already as I said in 2021: [0]
>> I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard. [0]
This is the second time I have seen them shutdown as I already said this before: [1]
This is a great example of why you can never trust PR statements. They outright lie. We're not working on X. We won't shut down Y. Bald faced lies.
Edit: Missed that they're doing refunds. That part's good.
EDIT2: Why I'm calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on a whim. They're made months if not years in advance. A public company making public statements about how you're not shutting something down while you're internally mapping out the shutdown process... that's a lie.
Or even more likely, management changes their mind.
It is obvious that Google is battening the hatches for a recession. Economic conditions looks worse than just a few months ago. They’ve already reduced their Area 120 investments. This makes sense to cut as well.
That remains a lie by incompetence. Just because Google can't be bothered get their product and PR people on the same page doesn't excuse the entity named Google from making misleading statements.
That's a leadership problem, not a rogue intern problem.
And I'm sure some Google Shareholders will be grumbling about it too, since this represents a non-trivial loss of revenue thanks to the (IMO appropriate) refunds, since it represents a material change in the value of stocks purchased between 60 days ago and today.
That's still a lie from whichever individual or group of individuals you consider to have agency over the matter. Like sure, maybe the individual who physically typed the tweet had little or no agency, but it's still reasonable to call it a lie when the responsible agent was deliberately making a false statement.
Is it even in the realm of possibility that Google, of all companies, has an intern with zero insight into the long term strategy manage the twitter account AND make definitive public statements?
As a rule, with corporations, official denials can be thought of as unofficial confirmations. Occasionally this is not true, but for the most part they wouldn't be responding unless the issue was credible and at least a few parties had strong reason to believe whatever it is they're denying.
I agree, I have the controller and it's pretty decent ergonomics-wise for me. Just hate that I have to use it wired if I want to use it for other PC games.
If I remember correctly, they do have Bluetooth hardware inside them but I think it might only be used for pairing. Not sure if someone could hack it to work via Bluetooth as well.
Of course, USB remains an option.
EDIT: Yup, official Google Store specs list "Bluetooth" and "Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2".
A friend gave me a Amazon Luna controller he didn't want.
I was pleasantly surprised that the controller synced via BT. I was able to play non-Luna FireTV games with no problems.
It even worked without the Luna software installed on my FireTV Stick (I don't recommend you buy a FireTV stick, nor any FireTV product really).
The concept of the Luna software is interesting: Cloud streamed HD gaming on low-end hardware. Game play was really responsive. Very little video artifacts. But like all other FireTV products, the UX was geared towards sales, not user ergonomics.
I plan to uninstall the Luna app and just play the few FireTV games that I have. Sadly Alto's Adventure is too resource intense for my FireTV Stick.
No, that how google was able to achieve better latency and allowed using it on Chromecast devices. The controller has Bluetooth used only for setting it up, from there it's Wi-Fi that used to send input directly to the cloud instead of "BT to showing the stream and then to the cloud".
I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it's an excellent controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via iPad...
You know, this gave me an idea: I'd love to see legislation that states that when a company the size of Google, Microsoft, etc. launches a product like this, then kills it off, that they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it. Not just for hardware like controller firmware etc. but also for software they used to create it. Obviously the games themselves in the case are IP owned by other firms so that would be exempt, but I think this would go a long way to forcing companies to stick it out with supporting products and customers they create over longer periods of time or not launch things flippantly in the first place.
they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it
This would have no impact on anything. If they had to share IP after shutting it down they'd just restructure the business so that Stadia licensed IP from Google Streaming Gaming Technology LLP, and do the all the real work in that absolutely-definitely-a-separate-company-look-the-logo-is-a-different-shape part of Alphabet instead.
Eh, there's probably ways to mitigate that from a legislative point of view. The point of this was to make the act of shutting products down all willy-nilly like this less attractive, and if they keep doing it at least the world at large gets a little something out of it. But you're not wrong in pointing out they'll do everything they can to sidestep accountability and screw the little guy, either. I'm just hoping there's some way we can make that more trouble than it's worth.
Maybe it would work if it was based on the production volume and product category, not the size of the company. Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason than software locks is a good idea.
But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual property just because they're successful seems counter-intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists) in a reasonable way for no additional cost.
Yeah I should have thought that through a bit more before posting it.
> Maybe it would work if it was based on the production volume and product category, not the size of the company. Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason than software locks is a good idea.
THIS!
> But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual property just because they're successful seems counter-intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists) in a reasonable way for no additional cost.
Well, this too, with a twist...
I'm not saying they have to relinquish their IP. There's a difference between open sourcing something and relinquishing intellectual property. One says "the world can USE this" and the other says "the world can use this and somebody can PROFIT FROM IT." I'm saying exclusively the former. I'm not OK with them being forced to allow somebody else to pick up their work and make money on it without them getting a cut purely because the government forced that function, that's not ok. So maybe if there's going to be a forcing function here there needs to be some kind of licensing that allows their IP to be used purely in non-profit contexts.
...but then again, coming back to my whole "should have thought it through before posting" notion, no profit might mean no maintaining body. So...I dunno.
It just rubs me the wrong way that Google launches new products and kills just as many every single year, and loads of people worldwide get screwed in the process while they get away with it every single time. If they're going to keep doing this, and let's face it, they are, the world at large oughtta get a little something out of it. Seems like having them open source the thing they're clearly not going to make any money on anyway is the right thing to do here.
I got one of the free promotional Controller + Chrome Cast Ultra "Premier Edition" bundles they were seeding to YouTube Premium customers out of sheer curiosity. I tried it for the free month, and hadn't taken the controller out of its box since (I do get a fair amount of use out of the Chromecast).
The whole system is a _staggering_ technological achievement of (unnecessary) complexity getting a pile of devices closely synchronized over the network with ... absolutely no realistic use case.
I just dug the controller out, it does work wired as a USB-C HID1.1 Gamepad device (18D1:9400). 2 analog sticks, 2 analog triggers, 15 buttons (including pressed/not pressed for the analog triggers), and an analog alias for the D-Pad (just returns min/max when pressed). Doesn't look like the 3.5mm headphone jack does anything when connected via USB, I'm not seeing a bonus audio device or anything.
It doesn't look like it presents as a normal Bluetooth controller (by testing or by the docs https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338851?hl=en ), I think the weird hybrid WiFi for comms/Bluetooth for pairing thing they did would require some hacking and/or published specs to use it wirelessly with anything other than a Stadia setup - or for Google to politely release a firmware update to enable normal BT controller behavior since they imply it's possible. They are apparently pretty nasty to get apart ( https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Google_Stadia_Controller ) for physical tampering, though there is a fairly substantial computer system in it http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Google_Stadia_(H2... .
It's actually a pretty comfortable controller, but it just became an amusing collectors item so I think mine will continue to sit in its box.
It's a great controller, you're right! Very comfortable and my goto on emulators.
I also looked into the weird WiFi/Bluetooth hybrid protocol stack. It's really impressive, and as far as I know, not jailbroken. Also massively overengineered.
They tried really hard with Stadia, at least at the hardware and streaming level. It's just that no one wanted it. They are before their time; PS Plus and GeForce Go are seeing adoption for streaming games. I bet it'll be popular in 3-5 years, maybe sooner. It's just that Google isn't a reliable carrier for this service, and they don't have enough patience.
lol, props to Google for refunding the costs of the hardware, games, and DLC, though.
I might've actually bought one, except that I didn't want to be stranded with an outlay of hundreds of dollars for a bricked streaming device. If I'd known up front that they'd have refunded my costs (or even a percentage of them) if they shut down the service in some timeframe, I'd have totally bought one.
Same. If they told me "we'll refund you 100% if we shut down go nuts" I would have gone nuts as the service was solid. The funny thing is it would have helped their "uptake" numbers and might have stalled or prevented the shutdown!
This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their purchases.
Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital things like trading cards and stickers, and before many games were heavily dependent on the continuation of online services.
>This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their purchases.
I didn't realize this. I'm looking to build a pc in the coming months, and the fact that valve has a plan in place is comforting
Exactly! Google doesn't get this. Google has a commitment image problem. As a consumer I've not seen them address this with the seriousness it deserves.
Since they won't commit to their products, their customers are reluctant to commit as well.
Yeah, I'm not using any new Google products unless it's for a one off use.
And I'm reconsidering the existing services I'm dependent on as well.
GMail, for example. While I have no doubt GMail will continue to exist as long as email exists, Google's spam blocking (not just filtering...blocking, where the email doesn't even make it to the inbox), has become far too aggressive. And the frequent UI changes are becoming unsustainable.
Also, the nagging suspicion that Google is having silent data loss issues across their products is not helping either.
Great question! Two people actually guessed correctly (not posting their names for privacy), but the average date across for all users (October 6, 2022) was surprisingly close to the date they announced it would be shutting down.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 422 ms ] threadIf there was some new Google paid service that I cared about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in a couple years.
Google hasn’t remained the same company through its history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a radical departure from their past.
Maybe Google is realizing they can’t keep being this cold company forever.
Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn’t get me to trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse. It would have to be done a few more times.
Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the cheaper option.
It's not like Google has a good rep in that community already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube, and especially in its gaming community, complains about YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively to move over to YT.
On that note, some commentary from /v/:
Lots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me were portability (playing my games at max settings while traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops, etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home, but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks like using less battery life / hard drive space / time updating / etc than the native alternative.
In other words, if I have the choice between playing the same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going to pick the latter.
2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years" into broad public consciousness
3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try again
4. Maybe it's relatively not that much money. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two people who'd ever even heard of Stadia
IPOed at $522.20, now down to $8.76. Took $1.4b in investment, now worth $265m.
With this, next time there's a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"
Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.
Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.
Sometimes I forget that was ever a thing!
Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem your ISP sent you when you first got service.
These sorts of EULA arrangements are essentially the foundation of almost all modern media consumption - if anything Stadia is on better ground than most since it's not just a DRM layer like Steam or iTunes. If Steam disappears, I have a bunch of entirely playable game files on my computer that I can't use. When Stadia shuts down, you have a client for nothing. You're not paying $60 to own a copy of a game, you're paying $60 for an unlimited term license to play the game on Stadia's servers. Legally, it feels odd to claim in court that that should be the same as a purchase of the game in some other method. If Google had turned off Stadia, but transferred everyone's purchases to Steam or EGS, that wouldn't be providing the same service you purchased from Stadia.
For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a neighborhood of 500 houses.
Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency. Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the USA).
I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).
This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.
Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.
Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.
It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games
Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry making these streaming products are adults with real lives who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore players
Not only that, but a lot of AAA games nowadays have super long animations, tons of post-processing slapped on the tail end of the rendering engine, etc, so you end up with 300+ ms from "button pressed" to "something happens"
My understanding is that Stadia and most other game streaming providers run PC games which are developed with the assumption of precise mouse/keyboard inputs where there’s no assistance.
If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.
Here's one that showed their work: https://allstadia.com/how-many-users-does-google-stadia-have
If they consistently take this approach for other cancellations, it could change the the common view from:
"why use this? They're just going to shut it down in a few years anyway"
to:
"oh neat, Google's experimenting with something new. Let me try it out. If it doesn't work out, they'll take care of me."
Can we get those back, Google? Not just our data, but the profits and improvements you made from it?
"Free" in the age of adtech comes at a high price. The sad part is most people don't care they're getting the short end of the stick.
Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say, gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around shifting sands like that.
Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.
So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra months of service on a second line) even to migrate off "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a business.
Hrm. I have an "eclectic" mix of native Steam games, non-Steam games (added to my Steam library) and some emulators. I can't imagine those will be available, thanks for this info.
>it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
I certainly like this.
Do you use it with your TV? Do you need a Shield too for the controller?
It works perfectly for non Steam games and usually works better for Steam games as well.
I would recommend a wireless keyboard and mouse to launch the games or if you just want to use a controller to launch your games the Playnight launcher.
Yeah, seriously.
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.
Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally" for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).
I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.
And now I'm getting a 50€ refund?
Ironically I will probably use my refund to buy a steam deck.
XCloud and GeForce Now are the two that come to mind. There are others.
- They are not refunding the 'pro' subscription charges
- They are not refunding hardware purchases made from 3rd parties
The first is a bit sus, the second does make sense unfortunately.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-offici...
Ironically, I am now only subscribed to a visit GeForce Now, which requires game purchases. This is primarily due to Sony’s lack of macOS support for PS Now, and my owning an M1 with no Bootcamp support.
Stadia was cool and I think there is a future for this sort of gaming in some genres and for some audiences, but I play fighting games and it absolutely did not work "fantastic" for them, even living in Boston and having a sporting symmetric-gigabit connection.
We all saw this coming years ago when it was first announced.
EDIT: it appeared now. This is confirmed.
So what? Are you in doubt of the veracity of the post? Look at the URL.
Anyone with 100K USD can apply for their own gTLD.
B/c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and stops carrying afterwards... and b/c it was marred with promises like "negative latency". But mostly it required to purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock in.
* People interested in playing high end games
* People who don’t own modern consoles or gaming PCs
* People with access to fiber
Stadia users often joked about how it was really 'Dadia', since so much of the player base was younger dads that wanted to game with their friends from time to time but couldn't justify purchasing the required hardware. These are the users Google should have been targeting - along with less tech-inclined crowd.
The entire pandemic I had this vision of a Stadia commercial where a younger family member sends a link on the family group chat or over zoom and then next minute everyone is playing Among Us or some other casual party game together. Even grandparents and click a link to open their chrome browser.
You don't need fiber for casual games like these. You need enough internet to stream netflix - which almost everyone does.
Stadia leadership just didn't have vision.
The refunds are a very nice, unexpected touch.
That said, I haven't played any multiplayer FPS games. The multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though "seems totally fine" is obviously a subjective observation.
The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn't use your Steam library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that they're refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google, I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that'd be it, and I was ok with that.
For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad/phone when you have 30 minutes free and don't want to buy/build/maintain a PC or Console.
That said, I haven't played in around a year. The games catalog was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call of Duty, EA games etc)
For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now. Technologically, it’s basically… remote desktop to Steam? From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam. Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.
I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it could be more like Stadia.
I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new platform and getting software on it is very hard.
Stadio was awesome. It also never had a chance.
Currently I use xcloud, its "acceptable" with certain games that don't require low latencies but its picture quality in particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.
They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any room in my house and I just needed the controller.
I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from the beginning... I'm just bummed because I quite enjoyed the ride.
>Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don’t have to believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in October.[2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402
So technically, the commenter was right, as Stadia did survive the summer and will be operational for a whole 3+ months!
Writing was on that wall a long long time ago.
Thanks for pointing it out so that I could have a good laugh :D
I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.
https://imgur.com/a/8inHYSf
Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a single frame.
Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually tell you what hardware you'll be getting beyond "4c/8t". Mine turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.
One absolutely does not need to be a pro to pull it off, and the whole interaction window for that mechanic is based around being able to react within ~32ms (1/30th of a second) to edge guard an opponent. It is exponentially harder to pull off in online play.
After doing it several times it let me save the score.
Reaction Time 181ms
74.46% percentile
You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah.
One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.
The word needs to get out
Even the ~50ms total latency you get from locally streaming over a 1ms wired network (from buffering/inappropriate firmware design) ruins whole genres of high level gameplay. You miss tricky shots in FPS games, you can't confirm/link in fighters, etc.
When there is fast movement the compression is much more noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing graphical comparisons do it with static images. It's quite common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup.
Also, you are misunderstanding what "reaction time of 100ms" means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length so long as they are bright enough.
What 100ms reaction time means is that you can't react to a given stimulus in less then that. Here's the important distinction, you don't react to lag, you perceive it.
To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms, and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce.
1. https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html
On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for PC. But that game is slow anyway.
CRTs were nowhere near that
I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my partner on Stadia, and we’ve never noticed any significant problems - even when using non-stadia controllers.
Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud gaming market, and even the Switch supports “cloud version” games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon’s Luna service continues to grow and improve.
Something like Stray that doesn't really require "hundreds of dollars regularly". Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that was definitely < $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then also not on the cloud...
On the other hand, it's highly likely that you won't be able to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as providers will drop it down (or outright close...).
At 20 hours a month you would have to play for 50 months (4 years) on your machine before you pay off the machine. Alternatively, you could spend that same money on the streaming service. I think the math doesn't hold up if you are a casual gamer. Building a PC and maintenance just isn't worth it.
That being said, if you play a lot more, maybe even 15-20 hours a week, I think it makes a lot of sense to build your own machine (I have one and it was very worth it when I was a serious LoL player).
If you take a look at the 25 games with the most current players[1] I would argue at least 20/25 would either be annoying to play with increased input lag, or outright highly disadvantageous.
[1] https://steamcharts.com/top
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag
My previous TV had about 150 ms of video latency. Even if I enabled Game Mode, it was 75 ms, which was still noticeable.
With my current TV, I have no idea what the latency is because I stopped gaming on console and so I'm not playing Rock Band which had a calibration option to compensate for video and audio latency.
If you don't configure your TV correctly sure, you could get massive amounts of lag. Even with an OLED display if you turn on all the post processing you're going to have problems. That's not really a fault of the TV though. I disable almost all post processing on my TVs and get a better picture without the downsides.
With digital receivers adding lag is minimal at best. Especially with newer models that don't draw on top of the source signal.
For example, my LG OLED tv is regarded as one of the best for gaming. Game mode latency is about 9ms. Cinema mode is about 90ms.
- Controller buttons caused CPU interrupts, so basically 0 latency
- No OS getting in the way
- N64 era would be double buffered and then straight to the CRT
- NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen
- CRTs have virtually no latency, same with the analog signal chain because there is no buffering
So when people try to play them in modern systems, things that were easy back then are quite hard now.
There's a reason anybody speedrunning SM64 will play on a CRT.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt#Nintendo_Ente...
I bought a Japanese copy of Super Mario World on ebay (Japanese copies of games were peanuts at the time, I assume they're more now), and found an old CRT for cheap on a local used site. I continued to play SMW many times over the years on various platforms and emulators, and I'm pretty damn good at the game.
But man, did it blow my mind feeling as little input latency as I did the first time I booted it on a CRT after all those years. It actually took a little bit of time to adapt to. It's like that phenomenon where if a button activates a light with low enough latency, people think the light is predicting when they'll hit the button, i.e. turning on before the button is pressed. People don't realize the latency we started dealing with when everything went from analogue to digital!
But, personally, I find the experience much less enjoyable as the latency goes up. It's not about being competitive either. (I don't play games online.) It just feels sticky and sluggish and I don't enjoy it. I miss the crisp responsiveness of older consoles. :(
I agree with your disagreement here. For me streaming game services don't have a lot of technical hurdles.
> Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.
I disagree here. I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.
The subscription model I think has already proven it self be consumer hostile. I don't want to subscribe to Adobe, I don't want to subscribe to Office, just let me buy the damn thing outright.
I totally think this is fair - and I think the market can support both models.
E.g.: I like paying for Netflix / Hulu / [insert video streaming service here], but I wouldn't hate on others who prefer buying the DVD. Same thing for Apple Music vs. people who prefer CDs / records.
There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time.
Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.
Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms.
I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag.
I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games.
But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.
i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.
The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and can easily tell if their game isn’t running with optimal fps. High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you might be right about the general population, but were talking specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more doubtful that it’s just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching yourself can mean death).
Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also cars.
Agree that many casual people don’t care much, but casual people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or wouldn’t be in the know enough to try out a streaming game service that wasn’t advertised much.
What's not acceptable is jitter. If it's a constant 10ms delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.
If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.
That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher.
That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags, etc... )
Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection starts to become unstable, even if it's a fast connection, it becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and I'm out.
Not saying it to argue with your point, just to highlight that we generally shouldn't put much trust into Google.
While "cover your ass" posts may need a grain of salt, there's no logic in "we're killing a product/service" being lip service.
And not just Google, but every company.
I'm not arguing that internally, no one at Google knew this 60 days ago. They may have. I'm saying that it makes sense to cast doubt on public relation statements that cast a company in a good light, but it makes much less sense to doubt an announcement that casts them in a bad light. Why would they "lie" about killing a product or service?
If you are suggesting that I'm saying that we shouldn't trust Google's announcement that they are shutting down Stadia, then you are misunderstanding my comment.
> to highlight that we generally shouldn't put much trust into Google
It seemed like a logical conclusion. Given your argument now, I assume you simply meant "don't trust anything they say" (which would include their announcement today) but it's not exactly the spirit of what you mean. Your initial intent was not clear (in my opinion.)
Google will have financially benefited from that positive PR (from interest on invested money, if in absolutely no other way).
Too bad that all it turned out to result in was video streaming optimisation.
Plus any company with a core business model of "being a super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal memory" is inherently terrible and shouldn't exist.
Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google adopted all the things we had hoped they'd save us from, just so they could make more money.
That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google these days. The only two Google products I use are Google Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.
For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge company, so only strike 1.
They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.
And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.
Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.
But after so many years of being jostled around and seeing every product I liked and used destroyed and brought back as something worse, I had to get off the train eventually. Google has no long-term plans. They only know how to ruin things that were once good. Android isn't the fun, open mobile OS it once was. It got more locked down with each update and became a cheap imitation of iOS. So eventually I just bought an iPhone. I went through so many messaging apps and renamings and relaunches of various products and services.
At some point you realize Google has no respect for their customers and no interest in making products that are nice to use. They only want to optimize people's attention so they can turn it into ad revenue. I celebrate their failures now, in hopes it'll one day shake something up enough that they'll have to try giving a shit for once.
I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.
It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's products worse. What's really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.
What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it functioning.
It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it isn't, but it certainly feels like it.
1. It's not true. Read the [1]code of conduct, it's right there at the bottom: "And remember... don’t be evil"
2. Who cares if they say the words "don't be evil?" The actions are more important than a cute phrase. If they sent Google Ad Bots to every house in America and forced you to sit through 30 second ads every morning or else they shoot you, would you say "well at least the code of conduct says 'don't be evil'!"?
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
Note that I not only hate Google, I hate Google, Apple, Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes me an old fart.
It is embarrassing. It's not just embarrassing, it's fucking embarrassing.
Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in this country - poor broadband Internet service.
But... oh God, if only... if only Google had something they could use... something they could do to solve this problem!?
Oh... wait, yeah. They have their own fucking fiber ISP! Google could have ponied up money and started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.
But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you're stupid and/or naïve enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and Verizon and Charter and AT&T are just going to let you waltz in and steal their customers (and yes, these ISPs do think this way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you should never have entered into the ISP business in the first place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.
If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, """""""lobby""""""" all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials - they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP's territories, laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.
But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems: fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success. The road to becoming America's best ISP will be a long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but when you've got literally billions of dollars of cash at your disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors... or you could build something that would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of revenue in a decade or two.
Too bad they're focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors.
Because calling people's job choices "embarrassing", no matter how right you may be, isn't a good starting argument against the people in those jobs. Not to mention that it comes off as pretentious.
Working at Google today, you better be in just for the 200k salary, because your options there are to sell ads or work on a product that's going to be shut down in a week.
It's like going to Harvard.
You don't want to advertise that you went to Harvard. People who attended Harvard not only admit this, they don't even actively proclaim they went to Harvard any longer. Why is that? Because a bunch of really shitty people have sullied the reputation.
It isn't that way with Google for the general public, but the SV folks know that Google of 2022 is nothing like Google of 2012, and certainly nothing like Google of 2002.
My great fear is that it won't be much longer before saying you work at Google in say, 2025-2032 is like saying you work at Hewlett-Packard or IBM in 2022. The prestige is long gone.
I've noticed people adapt to the demands placed on them, so highly encourage people to at least start out in a very demanding environment.
A nice distillation of most of SV these days.
Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.
I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t / weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.
Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.
Haha, imagine them shutting it down eventually.
Sad thing is they did not even have to do that. all they had to do was put some lobbying effort in empowering municipalities to do their own broadband and the rest would take care of itself. ISP monopolies have been kneecapping municipal broadband effort right and left and just some push from otherside would have cleared up the way for some competition. But they did not, as you said, its classic short term thinking and 'not my problem' syndrome. What really troubles me is that Google & FB have sucked up almost all of ad market but none of that revenue is trickling back into society except for these 'promotion packet' side hustles.
>> I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard. [0]
This is the second time I have seen them shutdown as I already said this before: [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255
Edit: Missed that they're doing refunds. That part's good.
EDIT2: Why I'm calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on a whim. They're made months if not years in advance. A public company making public statements about how you're not shutting something down while you're internally mapping out the shutdown process... that's a lie.
Some intern doing customer support on twitter isn’t going to be invited to long term strategy/budget meetings
It is obvious that Google is battening the hatches for a recession. Economic conditions looks worse than just a few months ago. They’ve already reduced their Area 120 investments. This makes sense to cut as well.
Disclosure: Googler but have no inside info.
And I'm sure some Google Shareholders will be grumbling about it too, since this represents a non-trivial loss of revenue thanks to the (IMO appropriate) refunds, since it represents a material change in the value of stocks purchased between 60 days ago and today.
https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
Although I guess financial statements are quarterly, PR statements are dime a dozen.
Of course, USB remains an option.
EDIT: Yup, official Google Store specs list "Bluetooth" and "Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2".
I was pleasantly surprised that the controller synced via BT. I was able to play non-Luna FireTV games with no problems.
It even worked without the Luna software installed on my FireTV Stick (I don't recommend you buy a FireTV stick, nor any FireTV product really).
The concept of the Luna software is interesting: Cloud streamed HD gaming on low-end hardware. Game play was really responsive. Very little video artifacts. But like all other FireTV products, the UX was geared towards sales, not user ergonomics.
I plan to uninstall the Luna app and just play the few FireTV games that I have. Sadly Alto's Adventure is too resource intense for my FireTV Stick.
I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it's an excellent controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via iPad...
He's too dangerous to allow to live.
This would have no impact on anything. If they had to share IP after shutting it down they'd just restructure the business so that Stadia licensed IP from Google Streaming Gaming Technology LLP, and do the all the real work in that absolutely-definitely-a-separate-company-look-the-logo-is-a-different-shape part of Alphabet instead.
But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual property just because they're successful seems counter-intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists) in a reasonable way for no additional cost.
> Maybe it would work if it was based on the production volume and product category, not the size of the company. Not sure how the IP thing would work, but making it possible to reuse/recycle electronics that would otherwise end up in a landfill due to no other reason than software locks is a good idea.
THIS!
> But forcing a company to relinquish its intellectual property just because they're successful seems counter-intuitive. Maybe they just need to make it possible to install alternative firmware (whether or not it exists) in a reasonable way for no additional cost.
Well, this too, with a twist...
I'm not saying they have to relinquish their IP. There's a difference between open sourcing something and relinquishing intellectual property. One says "the world can USE this" and the other says "the world can use this and somebody can PROFIT FROM IT." I'm saying exclusively the former. I'm not OK with them being forced to allow somebody else to pick up their work and make money on it without them getting a cut purely because the government forced that function, that's not ok. So maybe if there's going to be a forcing function here there needs to be some kind of licensing that allows their IP to be used purely in non-profit contexts.
...but then again, coming back to my whole "should have thought it through before posting" notion, no profit might mean no maintaining body. So...I dunno.
It just rubs me the wrong way that Google launches new products and kills just as many every single year, and loads of people worldwide get screwed in the process while they get away with it every single time. If they're going to keep doing this, and let's face it, they are, the world at large oughtta get a little something out of it. Seems like having them open source the thing they're clearly not going to make any money on anyway is the right thing to do here.
The whole system is a _staggering_ technological achievement of (unnecessary) complexity getting a pile of devices closely synchronized over the network with ... absolutely no realistic use case.
I just dug the controller out, it does work wired as a USB-C HID1.1 Gamepad device (18D1:9400). 2 analog sticks, 2 analog triggers, 15 buttons (including pressed/not pressed for the analog triggers), and an analog alias for the D-Pad (just returns min/max when pressed). Doesn't look like the 3.5mm headphone jack does anything when connected via USB, I'm not seeing a bonus audio device or anything.
It doesn't look like it presents as a normal Bluetooth controller (by testing or by the docs https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338851?hl=en ), I think the weird hybrid WiFi for comms/Bluetooth for pairing thing they did would require some hacking and/or published specs to use it wirelessly with anything other than a Stadia setup - or for Google to politely release a firmware update to enable normal BT controller behavior since they imply it's possible. They are apparently pretty nasty to get apart ( https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Google_Stadia_Controller ) for physical tampering, though there is a fairly substantial computer system in it http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Google_Stadia_(H2... .
It's actually a pretty comfortable controller, but it just became an amusing collectors item so I think mine will continue to sit in its box.
I also looked into the weird WiFi/Bluetooth hybrid protocol stack. It's really impressive, and as far as I know, not jailbroken. Also massively overengineered.
They tried really hard with Stadia, at least at the hardware and streaming level. It's just that no one wanted it. They are before their time; PS Plus and GeForce Go are seeing adoption for streaming games. I bet it'll be popular in 3-5 years, maybe sooner. It's just that Google isn't a reliable carrier for this service, and they don't have enough patience.
I might've actually bought one, except that I didn't want to be stranded with an outlay of hundreds of dollars for a bricked streaming device. If I'd known up front that they'd have refunded my costs (or even a percentage of them) if they shut down the service in some timeframe, I'd have totally bought one.
Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital things like trading cards and stickers, and before many games were heavily dependent on the continuation of online services.
I didn't realize this. I'm looking to build a pc in the coming months, and the fact that valve has a plan in place is comforting
But by that point they had established themselves. They earned trust before selling things that required that trust.
Since they won't commit to their products, their customers are reluctant to commit as well.
And I'm reconsidering the existing services I'm dependent on as well.
GMail, for example. While I have no doubt GMail will continue to exist as long as email exists, Google's spam blocking (not just filtering...blocking, where the email doesn't even make it to the inbox), has become far too aggressive. And the frequent UI changes are becoming unsustainable.
Also, the nagging suspicion that Google is having silent data loss issues across their products is not helping either.
I end up with a Chromecast and a gamepad that are both compatible outside of Stadia and played a few games, all of that for free.
https://whenwillgooglekillstadia.com