Google has become impressively good at killing their own products. It's just unfortunate they can't support things enough to get them off the ground in the first place.
The gamers said no because it was a product where you didn't own the games, didn't own the hardware it ran on, and couldn't play the games without being within a few dozen miles of a Google datacenter (an exaggeration, but I'm certainly not close enough to play anything with a reflex check, and I'm on fiber in the lower 50 states).
I can't blame them; the value proposition for most gamers was approximately zero.
Happy user of Stadia here. Fit the dad gamer in off hours usecase perfectly. Spent enough on it that even the total refund felt like something. And now on top of that I own a controller to use with the GeForce Now embedded in my LG TV. Consumer galore.
If I understand correctly Ubisoft even put the games I got refunded in their portal including progress for me conditional on me making an account. All other progress is lost. The Xbox days of caring about perfectly finishing games are long behind me.
I did think about the money and Google angle up front. I saw no reason Google could get away with no refunds under Dutch law. That might have been optimistic, but in the end might also have driven them to refunds. Same risk is in my eBook or audiobook collection.
IIRC, Google said from the beginning they'd refund purchases if they shut down.
>Question though: Did you get to keep your progress in the games, or did you lose that with the shutdown?
You can get all your game savedata from Google Takeout, but in order to actually use it you'd need to own the game on another platform that lets you import that save data (like PC). The refund for each game is nice for re-buying the games elsewhere, but some consoles aren't that easy to import existing save data into. Some games implemented some cloud saves to help move data around, but there's probably some games where you're SOL getting your progress into your next platform.
I was a happy Stadia user too, I think they should have marketed it more to casual audiences, it's untapped, plenty of people would love to play the odd game but don't as they don't have hardware etc.
Partly as the service had games like Monopoly and Uno on it, lots of casual party games, that is all it needed. Bad marketing from Google here, they should have pivoted to that market once they lost the toxic gaming community.
> and couldn't play the games without being within a few dozen miles of a Google datacenter (an exaggeration, but I'm certainly not close enough to play anything with a reflex check, and I'm on fiber in the lower 50 states).
Counterexample: I was happily playing Destiny (a "twitchy" FPS) on an iPad in AirBnBs by Lake Tahoe or in Washington. I was really impressed.
In contrast, one of my friends who migrated to Geforce Now has been complaining about much worse latency, graphical and audio glitches. I assume Google's excellent ISP peering helped Stadia.
>Counterexample: I was happily playing Destiny (a "twitchy" FPS) on an iPad in AirBnBs by Lake Tahoe or in Washington. I was really impressed.
Another anecdote: I played through the entirety of Celeste (an extremely difficult frame-perfect platformer) on Stadia with almost no issues.
I switched to GeforceNow when Stadia announced they were shutting down. It's comparable in quality most of the time, but has quite a few quirks and the UX leaves a lot to be desired.
Celeste is a very strong data point in favor of the platform. That being said, it is amusing that you are describing a game that could likely run on 10 year old hardware without any issue.
> it is amusing that you are describing a game that could likely run on 10 year old hardware without any issue.
That really has no relation to the inherent problem of cloud gaming: latency. In fact, an Apple II can have better latency than a modern computer! [1]
And as a counterpoint to Celeste, they recently released their toy/testing game "The Worm Game" as a sort of parting gift, and I was shocked at the latency on that, where I had to really anticipate turning the snake. It was a completely different experience, and had I tried that first I never would've believed in the platform.
I consider the best cloud gaming use case for playing games in high fidelity without owning a dedicated gaming computer. My point was strictly that the cloud likely has nothing to offer on this front: any and every computer could likely run it locally.
It's always nice to be able to take your save with you to friends' houses, traveling, or even just to your couch/bed without lugging your computer everywhere (or worrying about copying/syncing saves across devices), or just play your desktop-quality games on a phone/laptop while sitting somewhere comfy.
I have two dedicated gaming computers (one at a desk and one at a TV) and apparently still ended up putting in 828 hours of Stadia because it was just a nicer experience to have a single "gaming PC" with all of my games/saves that I could access from anywhere (even from either of my "real" gaming PCs!).
I disagree with the characterization of Destiny as twitchy. Maybe at higher skill tiers, but it feels Halo-y in that the combat is more methodical against larger targets. It feels controller-first design, which limits how precise and quick players need to be.
It's circular though - I think a lot of gamers said no because they knew that Google could kill the service, and in this case everything they bought would disappear forever. I didn't want to invest in such an ecosystem. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.
Additionally, there are competitors (Microsoft's xCloud, NVidia's GeForce NOW) that side-step the problem of Stadia's ecosystem. xCloud is only available with Microsoft's all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style game subscription service (and generally only plays games available on that service), while GFN works with a user's existing digital library. Stadia seemingly offered the worst of all options: games had to be purchased at full price through Google's storefront, could not be played locally, and required Google's streaming back-end to be available.
GFN works by linking your accounts on existing storefronts (Steam, Epic, GOG). Not all games from those libraries are supported (publishers have to opt in, not out), but if you own a supported game already, you can stream it on GFN for free, or subscribe to a paid GFN tier for a better experience.
Anecdotal numbers: I have a Steam library of 197 games and 44 of them are available on GFN.
Target market = people who: (I) like to play computer games (II) haven’t already invested in hardware and a library (II) aren’t sensitive to latency. Not exactly surprising that it didn’t take off.
Weirdly enough, a lot of the latency doesn't seem to be all network related, but rather encoder/decoder and pacing related. I can't play games on the same LAN over Moonlight/Parsec without noticing the severe drop in responsiveness, but I can barely notice when using GeForce Now. Shadow and Xbox Cloud Streaming are basically unplayable again though.
This product specifically is DOA. Its userbase is too niche. Gamers are not found of latency and this product is very much latency. I used something like stadia called OnLive in 2012 and while very neat, I preferred gaming on my system or PC.
I'm sorry, but did you actually use Stadia? For many, including myself, latency was minimal and not a problem at all for the tons of story based games (Red Dead Redemption 2, Hitman, various Assassin's Creeds).
It wasn't DOA, it was killed by Google's poor marketing, strategy and reputation (which could have been compensated if they had done the first two right).
It's certainly an uphill battle to convince players.
I blame their feeble marketing. For example I remain flabbergasted that the landing page for Stadia always redirected to a "Need Chrome" page if you weren't already on it, with zero enticement for why you should.
It is all on Google as the lack of a market fit is absurdly obvious.
In theory, cloud-only gaming would make it possible for low budget gamers to experience high budget gaming. To play games they normally can't run because they can't afford the hardware. That should be the entire point of moving heavy compute to the cloud.
That theory doesn't work out because the network requirements to make this playable correlate with people that are NOT on a budget. Plus, you still have to pay full price for individual games, so in any case it's not low budget gaming.
Which brings into view the more likely target audience: the convenience gamer or "dad gamer". Gamers constrained by time but not money.
When you game infrequently yet consistently, a console is still the superior deal. They are heavily subsidized hardware, don't have the network overhead for rendering, a very long lifecycle (7 years), a huge selection of games, additional functionality (a media center for your TV), supports fully offline games, and are backed by actual gaming companies rather than the erratic toddler named Google.
Why would you possibly go for Stadia? To experiment? To not want to commit to owning a console? Fine, all valid. But you can't seriously think that's a sizable market. Simple market research or basic common sense should have revealed this prior to this disaster.
I'm especially calling it a disaster because during launch, Google got roasted with questions about the platform being future-proof, given their questionable reputation. They promised to commit this time, for real. Just 14 months later their internal game studio got shutdown, and things started rolling from there.
Zero market research and just throwing things at the wall, business as usual. Any other company being this unreliable would have been out of business long ago, but Google's arrogance knows no bounds as it prints money with ads.
They should not be celebrated for a graceful shutdown. They should be thought of as an unserious business to avoid. Don't ever put anything of value (time, money, energy, emotion) into a Google product.
> Don't ever put anything of value (time, money, energy, emotion) into a Google product.
To be fair, any product that allows them to capture data about your habits and improve their ability to push Ads at you is generally good (e.g., Google Account, Gmail, Android).
But I completely agree with you. They used OR instead of AND in their market research.
Meaning that controllers that have the old firmware will be unable to switch after that date? This seems like a weird restriction to have if this is a firmware update?
I mean, that's absolutely true for Android hardware. If MediaTek or Qualcomm or any other supplier for the various parts open sourced their drivers we would be able to port any new version of AOSP to basically everything that has enough juice to run it and then some.
Unfortunately these companies control the drivers and have the strictest licenses imaginable, so even companies like Samsung or Google can only offer updates as long as their suppliers allow them, after that it's just waiting for the ABI to break and the old drivers to stop working
I am beyond grateful for Bluetooth functionality on a free controller, but the greedy part of me was half-hoping Google would unlock the device and open source the gamepad-over-ip code. My wish is selfish: I wasn't play Steam games that are on a gaming PC in a different room to my TV, the PC is well outside of bluetooth range, but both areas have WiFi coverage. I acknowledge that this is a first-world problem, but regardless, I hope someone will be able to reverse-engineer the firmware and come up with an open-version.
Depending on how far away the display might be, a USB cable can be extremely inconvenient. Does the USB spec allow for 13" (4m) cables for playin on a TV?
Fwiw, the controller already worked like a controller if you hooked it up through a USB cable.
The Bluetooth functionality is nice, though. I've gone through the process and for what it was (putting a controller into flash mode, then flashing a new bootloader(?), then flashing Bluetooth firmware) it was a very smooth process.
Especially for a browser-based process. I may not like the direction WebUSB is taking browsers, but the process was quite smooth and will work on pretty much any device with a USB port (except for platforms like iOS that limit browser availability).
It could also be a way of covering their asses. Big tech ends up in courts all the time these days, I wouldn't be surprised if creating a bunch of e-waste out of 1 to 3-year-old controllers would be brought up at some point
On the other hand, they made it a WebUSB process instead of a standalone firmware, so when they take this update server down, any further controllers found at a garage-sale or whatever can't be updated.
A cookie for whoever's the first to snarf the firmware in-flight and whip up a standalone updater.
This is the most graceful shutdown of a Google product that I've seen in quite a while. Full, automatic refunds for game and hardware purchases, downloads for savegames, and software updates to remove hardware dependence on external servers before they shutdown.
I can't think of much else they could have done to make things smoother for customers, short of not shutting it down at all of course. (And undoubtedly, the fact that they are killing yet another product is inescapable, and doesn't help their reputation for doing that.)
They did, they always said that they would refund the games if the service shut down, but i guess they didn't make it clear enough, marketing was horrible and onboarding / interface was awful. It's crazy how amazing the service was, but how terrible they handled everything else.
They were asked repeatedly, in several interviews starting from the day they announced it, and they always sidestepped the question entirely. At some points they even framed it as the customer or interviewer being afraid/not ready for the future and other patronising ways of saying "clearly we simply won't ever shut down" instead of answering the question.
It wasn't amazing though. GeForce NOW is so much better, at least for me. Higher resolution, more responsive, better selection of titles.
I'm an early adopter of cloud based GPUs. I've tried them all. Inn the last ~6 months GeForce NOW has finally made it so I can play AAA titles seamlessly. I can't tell the difference between local vs. cloud. Your experience may differ if you play competitive online games, but for single player games -- it's replaced any desire I have for a gaming PC.
GFN has the better quality nowadays, but back when they both launched it was pretty similar. However GFN 's UX has always been subpar because their abstraction layer over Windows regularly leaks - I've had Windows crashes which resulted in lost game progress, I've had to reauth, including random password and MFA to game launchers, shortcuts doing the wrong thing on the wrong layer.
No it's not, Geforce now is rubbish and more expensive.
I tried it yesterday and it crashed within 30 seconds after multiple issues and the image quality is far worse than Stadia, it also doesn't have all the nice features Stadia has.
I was using Geforce now when it was beta, but you can tell it's just streaming a PC, where as with Stadia everything was purpose built and worked great from Chrome.
I actually have two of those and like them a lot, but figured Stadia controllers might cost next to nothing if anyone still has them, as opposed to 50 bucks for the 8bitdo.
I'm sorry to see the service go. It carried my through the pandemic. I do have to say I'm impressed, as this is a very user-centric move from Google. Big kudos for that.
This is great news. I have two controllers (and many hours of fun on Stadia). It really was a great service for me... sat in the Scottish Highlands with a Starlink 'net connection I had the best of both worlds... rural living and a fast enough connection to not worry about latency.
My platform of choice is now a Steam Deck so my first test will be there, hoping it'll work.
I haven't, but I suspect it would work well on a Switch hacked up with homebrew firmware and would not work on a vanilla Switch. The Switch is not very accepting of controllers other than the ones designed specifically for the Switch, but the homebrew crowd has done a very good job of fixing that.
Can confirm. Just tried with my newly-Bluetooth'd Stadia controller, will pair with an on-hand Android device and Linux box, doesn't show up on the find controllers screen of an (un-hacked) Switch, as expected.
Just did this update on my controller. Pretty cool process, it recognized the controller didnt have enough battery to continue and denied the update. After it charged for a bit, it was all pretty straight forward. Now to find the other controllers I got around the house and get them done.
Any browser supporting WebUSB should work. Chromium works, Brave works too I believe.
Firefox and Safari don't support WebUSB because they don't use a Blink-based engine. iOS browsers also won't work because they're Safari under the hood (as all browsers must be under current iOS rules, though that may change soon).
I find it weird that I had to use Chrome to update the firmware of my device. And it was even weirder that the process went through smoothly.
Maybe this is better than downloading a one-off utility from a manufacturer's slow FTP and selecting a firmware file in its file picker and hoping that the combination of flashing utility version + firmware image + my hardware + my OS + the current stellar constellation aligns, and I will still have a working device after this ceremony.
I'd recommend waiting on updating some controllers until later in the year in the hope that someone is able to reverse the firmware and bring back the play-over-IP functionality. I'm assuming that controllers with the Bluetooth firmware are harder to unlock.
My router has a latency of 1ms. Why doesn't the controller send input to the PC like a regular controller, which can then send it to the cloud? That would add 2ms of latency.
The controller connected to wifi instead of the device you were playing on. That meant it could send inputs directly to the game servers in the cloud (without knowing anything about the device you were playing on) and not worry about extra hops or performance bottlenecks in trying to route through e.g. smart TVs, Chromecasts, laptops, etc.
This update allows it to pair with devices like a normal controller, so input from the controller will be sent to that device instead of some cloud server.
Did my freebie. The update behavior is interesting.
The tool is picky (in that "Flashback to ActiveX bullshit" kind of way) about the platform that does the update. Has to be a real computer (won't work from Android). Has to be running Chrome 108+ (My out-of-support chromebook with 106 or whatever won't work). Can't be a Linux box with Chromium or Chrome (always fails with "Close other tabs using the controller Couldn’t connect to your controller because it’s currently being used by another tab or program."). I eventually passed it through to a Windows 10 VM with google-brand Chrome and got it to work, and that exposed some extra details.
Instructions and responses:
Hold "..." during plug in
press "..." + Assistant (the other button with 3 dots below it) + A + Y all at once
Re-enumerates as "NXP Semiconductors SP Blank RT family"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Freescale Semiconductor USB Composite Device"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Google LLC Stadia Controller rev. A"
... it looks like it's temporarily nudging the NXP (formerly Freescale) MIMXRT1061 processor into some kind of DFU-like firmware update mode via the button combos, loading a different bitstream so it can act as a USB composite device to expose the update mechanism of the BCM43458 (radio), flashing that, then rebooting the main CPU back into the USB HID controller mode.
You do lose the headphone jack, which is a bit of a shame because having it work as a Bluetooth audio device would make it even more useful - but at least it's a Bluetooth controller.
97 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 58.4 ms ] threadI can't blame them; the value proposition for most gamers was approximately zero.
Question though: Did you get to keep your progress in the games, or did you lose that with the shutdown?
I did think about the money and Google angle up front. I saw no reason Google could get away with no refunds under Dutch law. That might have been optimistic, but in the end might also have driven them to refunds. Same risk is in my eBook or audiobook collection.
>Question though: Did you get to keep your progress in the games, or did you lose that with the shutdown?
You can get all your game savedata from Google Takeout, but in order to actually use it you'd need to own the game on another platform that lets you import that save data (like PC). The refund for each game is nice for re-buying the games elsewhere, but some consoles aren't that easy to import existing save data into. Some games implemented some cloud saves to help move data around, but there's probably some games where you're SOL getting your progress into your next platform.
Partly as the service had games like Monopoly and Uno on it, lots of casual party games, that is all it needed. Bad marketing from Google here, they should have pivoted to that market once they lost the toxic gaming community.
Counterexample: I was happily playing Destiny (a "twitchy" FPS) on an iPad in AirBnBs by Lake Tahoe or in Washington. I was really impressed.
In contrast, one of my friends who migrated to Geforce Now has been complaining about much worse latency, graphical and audio glitches. I assume Google's excellent ISP peering helped Stadia.
Another anecdote: I played through the entirety of Celeste (an extremely difficult frame-perfect platformer) on Stadia with almost no issues.
I switched to GeforceNow when Stadia announced they were shutting down. It's comparable in quality most of the time, but has quite a few quirks and the UX leaves a lot to be desired.
That really has no relation to the inherent problem of cloud gaming: latency. In fact, an Apple II can have better latency than a modern computer! [1]
And as a counterpoint to Celeste, they recently released their toy/testing game "The Worm Game" as a sort of parting gift, and I was shocked at the latency on that, where I had to really anticipate turning the snake. It was a completely different experience, and had I tried that first I never would've believed in the platform.
[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/
I have two dedicated gaming computers (one at a desk and one at a TV) and apparently still ended up putting in 828 hours of Stadia because it was just a nicer experience to have a single "gaming PC" with all of my games/saves that I could access from anywhere (even from either of my "real" gaming PCs!).
I disagree with the characterization of Destiny as twitchy. Maybe at higher skill tiers, but it feels Halo-y in that the combat is more methodical against larger targets. It feels controller-first design, which limits how precise and quick players need to be.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/
Anecdotal numbers: I have a Steam library of 197 games and 44 of them are available on GFN.
It wasn't DOA, it was killed by Google's poor marketing, strategy and reputation (which could have been compensated if they had done the first two right).
I blame their feeble marketing. For example I remain flabbergasted that the landing page for Stadia always redirected to a "Need Chrome" page if you weren't already on it, with zero enticement for why you should.
In theory, cloud-only gaming would make it possible for low budget gamers to experience high budget gaming. To play games they normally can't run because they can't afford the hardware. That should be the entire point of moving heavy compute to the cloud.
That theory doesn't work out because the network requirements to make this playable correlate with people that are NOT on a budget. Plus, you still have to pay full price for individual games, so in any case it's not low budget gaming.
Which brings into view the more likely target audience: the convenience gamer or "dad gamer". Gamers constrained by time but not money.
When you game infrequently yet consistently, a console is still the superior deal. They are heavily subsidized hardware, don't have the network overhead for rendering, a very long lifecycle (7 years), a huge selection of games, additional functionality (a media center for your TV), supports fully offline games, and are backed by actual gaming companies rather than the erratic toddler named Google.
Why would you possibly go for Stadia? To experiment? To not want to commit to owning a console? Fine, all valid. But you can't seriously think that's a sizable market. Simple market research or basic common sense should have revealed this prior to this disaster.
I'm especially calling it a disaster because during launch, Google got roasted with questions about the platform being future-proof, given their questionable reputation. They promised to commit this time, for real. Just 14 months later their internal game studio got shutdown, and things started rolling from there.
Zero market research and just throwing things at the wall, business as usual. Any other company being this unreliable would have been out of business long ago, but Google's arrogance knows no bounds as it prints money with ads.
They should not be celebrated for a graceful shutdown. They should be thought of as an unserious business to avoid. Don't ever put anything of value (time, money, energy, emotion) into a Google product.
To be fair, any product that allows them to capture data about your habits and improve their ability to push Ads at you is generally good (e.g., Google Account, Gmail, Android).
But I completely agree with you. They used OR instead of AND in their market research.
That's the thing with Google. They can get away with anything and keep failing upwards.
Meaning that controllers that have the old firmware will be unable to switch after that date? This seems like a weird restriction to have if this is a firmware update?
*I've heard from firmware engineers inside and outside of Google that licensing is the biggest reason why stuff isn't open sourced.
Unfortunately these companies control the drivers and have the strictest licenses imaginable, so even companies like Samsung or Google can only offer updates as long as their suppliers allow them, after that it's just waiting for the ABI to break and the old drivers to stop working
The Bluetooth functionality is nice, though. I've gone through the process and for what it was (putting a controller into flash mode, then flashing a new bootloader(?), then flashing Bluetooth firmware) it was a very smooth process.
Especially for a browser-based process. I may not like the direction WebUSB is taking browsers, but the process was quite smooth and will work on pretty much any device with a USB port (except for platforms like iOS that limit browser availability).
A cookie for whoever's the first to snarf the firmware in-flight and whip up a standalone updater.
I can't think of much else they could have done to make things smoother for customers, short of not shutting it down at all of course. (And undoubtedly, the fact that they are killing yet another product is inescapable, and doesn't help their reputation for doing that.)
Link? I remember lots of people asking about this at launch and I don't remember there being a public statement from Google.
Like, look at the ongoing train-wreck that is the messaging (Gtalk/Hangouts/Chat/RCS/...) strategy.
It wasn't amazing though. GeForce NOW is so much better, at least for me. Higher resolution, more responsive, better selection of titles.
I'm an early adopter of cloud based GPUs. I've tried them all. Inn the last ~6 months GeForce NOW has finally made it so I can play AAA titles seamlessly. I can't tell the difference between local vs. cloud. Your experience may differ if you play competitive online games, but for single player games -- it's replaced any desire I have for a gaming PC.
I tried it yesterday and it crashed within 30 seconds after multiple issues and the image quality is far worse than Stadia, it also doesn't have all the nice features Stadia has.
I was using Geforce now when it was beta, but you can tell it's just streaming a PC, where as with Stadia everything was purpose built and worked great from Chrome.
Geforce now sucks compared to Stadia.
Anyone know if it's possible to buy one anywhere? I recall hearing that it was a decent controller.
My platform of choice is now a Steam Deck so my first test will be there, hoping it'll work.
Has anyone tried one of the controllers with a Nintendo switch?
Had to use Chrome to do all the updating though.
Firefox and Safari don't support WebUSB because they don't use a Blink-based engine. iOS browsers also won't work because they're Safari under the hood (as all browsers must be under current iOS rules, though that may change soon).
Maybe this is better than downloading a one-off utility from a manufacturer's slow FTP and selecting a firmware file in its file picker and hoping that the combination of flashing utility version + firmware image + my hardware + my OS + the current stellar constellation aligns, and I will still have a working device after this ceremony.
As terrible as this is to say, it could have been an Electron app.
This update allows it to pair with devices like a normal controller, so input from the controller will be sent to that device instead of some cloud server.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34391742
The tool is picky (in that "Flashback to ActiveX bullshit" kind of way) about the platform that does the update. Has to be a real computer (won't work from Android). Has to be running Chrome 108+ (My out-of-support chromebook with 106 or whatever won't work). Can't be a Linux box with Chromium or Chrome (always fails with "Close other tabs using the controller Couldn’t connect to your controller because it’s currently being used by another tab or program."). I eventually passed it through to a Windows 10 VM with google-brand Chrome and got it to work, and that exposed some extra details.
Instructions and responses:
Hold "..." during plug in
press "..." + Assistant (the other button with 3 dots below it) + A + Y all at once
Re-enumerates as "NXP Semiconductors SP Blank RT family"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Freescale Semiconductor USB Composite Device"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Google LLC Stadia Controller rev. A"
... it looks like it's temporarily nudging the NXP (formerly Freescale) MIMXRT1061 processor into some kind of DFU-like firmware update mode via the button combos, loading a different bitstream so it can act as a USB composite device to expose the update mechanism of the BCM43458 (radio), flashing that, then rebooting the main CPU back into the USB HID controller mode.
You do lose the headphone jack, which is a bit of a shame because having it work as a Bluetooth audio device would make it even more useful - but at least it's a Bluetooth controller.