Wow, this is good analysis and very prescient. I don't necessarily condemn this as a strategy, if you can afford it - there's always a chance of an interesting pivot. The problem is when people know your company doesn't commit to products long-term and don't care if people love them (cough Reader cough), it starts to affect their interest in engaging and committing their time.
I disagree. This is terrible analysis: it's wrong about Sun and it's wrong about Stadia.
Sunray failed not because people didn't want utility computing. They clearly do - utility computing kiosks are absolutely everywhere. Sunray failed because the Sunos/solaris userspace wasn't adequate to provide a utility computing experience people wanted. In fact it was total garbage. You can see it there in the screenshots. CDE, a desktop only a mother could love. No applications worth a damn except Lotus. I worked as a contractor at a large bank and when Novell refused to say that Lotus 123 was y2k compliant they ripped out 2 sun workstations from every trader's desktop and replaced them with windows boxes. They literally had a skip/dumpster outside the building where you could go pick up sun hardware they had chucked out. The only good userspace tooling on Solaris around 1998 was for developers and even there the sun workshop debugger was pretty sketchy[1]. I speak as someone who owned a Spark 5 at home and had solaris workstations on my desk at multiple jobs. I really wanted to love Sun and kind of did love Sun hardware, but their userspace was always severely lacking.
Likewise Stadia didn't fail because people don't want cloud gaming. The success of Nvidia GForce Now and Nintendo's new stream-things-to-switch architecture for several new games proves that[2]. Logitech is also about to come out with a cloud-based mobile gaming device (although that may struggle to compete with Steam Deck which is a device you own for about the same price point). Stadia failed because Google completely failed to look at competitive offerings like GamePass and offer something compelling as an alternative. Instead they did a full-price cash grab on the games and just said "trust us" to keep the service running (which everyone knew they would not honour and they did not honour).
[1] This debugger has the unique distinction of being the only debugger to ever core dump on me when I was trying to load the core dump of the program I was trying to debug.
Agree, huge demand for virtual desktops and centralised management overall... just not running Solaris.
Altho hn'ers are not very exposed to it, many large enterprises run with thousands of users on "virtual desktop farms", like, this is huge part of citrix / vmware business model.
You could argue that the SunRay vision is what Eric Schmidt spent the next decade years or so implementing at Google and what Amazon did with AWS, just with browsers replacing SunRay hardware, racks of AMD/Intel boxes replacing the SPARC hardware, and with passwords/phone apps instead of the smartcards. The vision wasn't necessarily all that wrong, just the approach wasn't incremental enough.
Also - it was a very different and opposite approach to what Java was doing at the time. Java didn't have any notion of UI streaming like NeWS. It ran UI locally, always. So it's pretty unclear how much Sun really bought into the SunRay vision. They certainly didn't align everything around it.
A big difference is that XBox developers hardly have to change anything, unless they want to offer a better experience regarding user controls, whereas Stadia required targeting a special Linux distribution, with the typical vi/emacs/gdb development experience, to a community used to Visual Studio.
Even support for engines like Unity came on the second year, as the adoption was still quite lackluster, and even that did not help, one of their talks at GDC this year was how they were rebooting the development stack.
Xbox Game Pass/Cloud Gaming seems reasonably popular on mobile, and it has a nice collection of Xbox games like Halo, Forza and Sea of Thieves. And Minecraft. ;-)
Stadia is weak on platform exclusives, but I wouldn't mind if every PC game announced at E3 (for example) had a demo you could stream via Stadia or some other cloud gaming service.
Edit: I didn't realize Google was shutting down Stadia. Unsurprising but also sad because it was cool and a lot of people put a lot of work into it. It clearly died before finding its feet, although it's not clear that it would.
> They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?".
Precisely - as Steve Jobs observed, sometimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Stadia does seem like a solution in search of a problem. For Microsoft a relevant problem is "How can we enable smartphone (or other non-console, non-PC computing device) gamers to play (and rent/pay for) Xbox games without porting them to/shrinking them onto Android or iOS and without cannibalizing the sales of Xbox consoles or Windows PCs?" But Google doesn't exactly have that problem.
Stadia does solve the problem of "how can I play (some) PC games on my phone/smart TV/PC without a great graphics card." So it does provide some clear user benefit, but it doesn't have compelling advantages over other cloud gaming services, and it doesn't seem to align directly with Google's business interests.
It could in theory have solved the Xbox problem of: every time I want to play a game the console insists on downloading 20GB of updates from Xbox Live, which appears to be capped at 50MBit/sec on a good day, thus wasting all the time I had available for actually playing something.
Technologically, the model of subsidizing consoles to put great hardware in your living room for not much money is a good one. You get ultra-low latency, games can work offline if need be, the experience is predictable and robust once installed and you can actually own the games. In practice it requires a willingness to commit to big expensive CDNs, download optimization, and smooth updates that Microsoft just don't seem willing to make. Streaming would appear to fix that regardless of other merits.
That said, I never looked at Stadia. We (me+fiancé) just don't play enough games to warrant changing anything right now, and we tend to pick the platform based on the game not the other way around.
This is partially solved on PS5 by background updates that can happen while the console is in rest mode. For most updates, they'll just happen while you sleep, eat, work, etc. There are times when the console loses power or if you shut it down rather than use rest mode where you'll have long updates after powering it on.
You can also purchase games on your phone and send a request to your console to download and install it so that it's ready when you want to play.
The baffling thing about Stadia is that the business model never made sense for the product and that was apparent the minute they announced it. Why would anyone buy a game for a specific cloud service? Why wouldn’t you do what Microsoft had already telegraphed they were doing with GamePass?
If Google had spent one more year thinking through how the business was going to work they may have had something, but instead they made some tech no one asked for but worked well and and just shipped it.
Not really, you're buying access to a game which you can download an unlimited amount of times and play on your own hardware, often even offline. They're not entirely dissimilar, but they're definitely different models.
Also steam is absolutely central to revenue at Valve whereas there was no world in which Stadia revenue would ever be any more than a rounding error at Google. In the bacon and eggs analogy, google is the chicken here and Valve is the pig. Fully committed.
Steam feels more permanent since the client and game downloads would be preserved, and any phoning home modded or simulated in the event Valve shut it down.
Theoretically, the Stadia system and the game content could be open sourced, but that isn’t something Google is likely to do, and since the games are entirely streamed, there aren’t any local copies floating around.
It would be great if Stadia developers got together and made a new self-hostable streaming application that could play their ports, or at least used the ports to help the community figure out a server that streamed the games close to spec.
I think that is very wrong. People very much wants to run better games on cheaper hardware.
People didn’t trust stadia to deliver and to not stop delivering. And I believe their pricing model played to their weakness and against their strength.
But of course I want to play cyber punk on max res on my Nintendo switch. What a silly thing to say consumers don’t want that.
In the gaming world (at least the parts I touch) there was a widespread belief that Stadia would be shut down by Google and therefore it was foolish to buy games on the platform. See the running joke on SkillUp's youtube channel[1] for example. Part of that was driven by the business model whereby you pay full price for games but if the service goes away you have nothing. This was trying somehow to compete with subscription models from Sony and Microsoft where you pay for the hardware + a monthly subscription but that gives you games which you then own and can play on a continuous basis because you also own the hardware.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 58.0 ms ] thread/xoogler
Sunray failed not because people didn't want utility computing. They clearly do - utility computing kiosks are absolutely everywhere. Sunray failed because the Sunos/solaris userspace wasn't adequate to provide a utility computing experience people wanted. In fact it was total garbage. You can see it there in the screenshots. CDE, a desktop only a mother could love. No applications worth a damn except Lotus. I worked as a contractor at a large bank and when Novell refused to say that Lotus 123 was y2k compliant they ripped out 2 sun workstations from every trader's desktop and replaced them with windows boxes. They literally had a skip/dumpster outside the building where you could go pick up sun hardware they had chucked out. The only good userspace tooling on Solaris around 1998 was for developers and even there the sun workshop debugger was pretty sketchy[1]. I speak as someone who owned a Spark 5 at home and had solaris workstations on my desk at multiple jobs. I really wanted to love Sun and kind of did love Sun hardware, but their userspace was always severely lacking.
Likewise Stadia didn't fail because people don't want cloud gaming. The success of Nvidia GForce Now and Nintendo's new stream-things-to-switch architecture for several new games proves that[2]. Logitech is also about to come out with a cloud-based mobile gaming device (although that may struggle to compete with Steam Deck which is a device you own for about the same price point). Stadia failed because Google completely failed to look at competitive offerings like GamePass and offer something compelling as an alternative. Instead they did a full-price cash grab on the games and just said "trust us" to keep the service running (which everyone knew they would not honour and they did not honour).
[1] This debugger has the unique distinction of being the only debugger to ever core dump on me when I was trying to load the core dump of the program I was trying to debug.
[2] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/
Altho hn'ers are not very exposed to it, many large enterprises run with thousands of users on "virtual desktop farms", like, this is huge part of citrix / vmware business model.
Also - it was a very different and opposite approach to what Java was doing at the time. Java didn't have any notion of UI streaming like NeWS. It ran UI locally, always. So it's pretty unclear how much Sun really bought into the SunRay vision. They certainly didn't align everything around it.
Even support for engines like Unity came on the second year, as the adoption was still quite lackluster, and even that did not help, one of their talks at GDC this year was how they were rebooting the development stack.
https://stadia.dev/blog/join-stadia-at-the-google-for-games-...
Apply named "How to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch".
Stadia is weak on platform exclusives, but I wouldn't mind if every PC game announced at E3 (for example) had a demo you could stream via Stadia or some other cloud gaming service.
Edit: I didn't realize Google was shutting down Stadia. Unsurprising but also sad because it was cool and a lot of people put a lot of work into it. It clearly died before finding its feet, although it's not clear that it would.
Precisely - as Steve Jobs observed, sometimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Stadia does seem like a solution in search of a problem. For Microsoft a relevant problem is "How can we enable smartphone (or other non-console, non-PC computing device) gamers to play (and rent/pay for) Xbox games without porting them to/shrinking them onto Android or iOS and without cannibalizing the sales of Xbox consoles or Windows PCs?" But Google doesn't exactly have that problem.
Stadia does solve the problem of "how can I play (some) PC games on my phone/smart TV/PC without a great graphics card." So it does provide some clear user benefit, but it doesn't have compelling advantages over other cloud gaming services, and it doesn't seem to align directly with Google's business interests.
You can buy a pretty great console for $500, and it'll last 5+ years. Well under $10/month, even if you buy a little late in the cycle.
I just don't see where any cloud gaming service has room to compete with that and actually turn a profit.
Technologically, the model of subsidizing consoles to put great hardware in your living room for not much money is a good one. You get ultra-low latency, games can work offline if need be, the experience is predictable and robust once installed and you can actually own the games. In practice it requires a willingness to commit to big expensive CDNs, download optimization, and smooth updates that Microsoft just don't seem willing to make. Streaming would appear to fix that regardless of other merits.
That said, I never looked at Stadia. We (me+fiancé) just don't play enough games to warrant changing anything right now, and we tend to pick the platform based on the game not the other way around.
You can also purchase games on your phone and send a request to your console to download and install it so that it's ready when you want to play.
If Google had spent one more year thinking through how the business was going to work they may have had something, but instead they made some tech no one asked for but worked well and and just shipped it.
Isn't that what people do when they buy games on Steam?
Theoretically, the Stadia system and the game content could be open sourced, but that isn’t something Google is likely to do, and since the games are entirely streamed, there aren’t any local copies floating around.
It would be great if Stadia developers got together and made a new self-hostable streaming application that could play their ports, or at least used the ports to help the community figure out a server that streamed the games close to spec.
People didn’t trust stadia to deliver and to not stop delivering. And I believe their pricing model played to their weakness and against their strength.
But of course I want to play cyber punk on max res on my Nintendo switch. What a silly thing to say consumers don’t want that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/SkillUp
It lacked the titles, game play wasn't smooth, and just wasn't what people wanted.
So I would say that it failed to meet market demands, and failed to deliver on what it said it would.