A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).
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“However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia,” Zimring says.
According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia’s Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google’s eyes, this wasn’t enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
I will never, ever, understand why Stadia was something thay had to be “ported into” at such high cost. Specially for games that were ALREADY working on Linux. Like, what the fuck was the hold up. I read up stories that it was basically like porting to a fourth console and that just sounded outrageously stupid in my head.
Whatever tech stack they had, they could have made it way more profitable by making it generic windows boxes that partially run your library elsewhere. I dunno if there’s some hubris or some licensing bullshit behind it, but fact is, if I want to do this on GeForce Now, I can do it, no questions asked, and as the costumer, that’s the beginning and end of my concerns.
Google engineers always choose the hardest route to solve problems. Why wouldn’t they? If your products are going to be shutdown in a few years anyway, might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).
Think about it, every time Google made a product with sensible tech stacks, those products were actually started outside Google and later bought by Google (Android, YouTube, etc). If Google made Android from scratch, there is no way they’ll use java and Linux, they’ll invent a new language and made their own kernel instead (just like fuchsia os which might be canned soon).
This is so true. Getting promoted requires showing impact. If you use off-the-shelf tools (that happen to be easily maintainable) that’s not an impressive impact. If you invent a new language (and make up a convincing reason it was necessary) and so-on, that’s really impressive and you can get promoted. The minefield you leave behind that makes maintaining your solution so difficult is just another opportunity for someone else to get promoted.
TIL Fuchsia hasn’t been killed quite yet.
Does it actually even exist? I feel like I’ve been getting whispered rumours about it for years and years, but never anything sold!
Yes! Nest Hub devices run it
Oh wow, I’ll have to have a read up
Kotlin was made by Jetbrains and later adopted by Google.
But Kotlin is actually an improvement over Java.
Golang thoooooo
The thing was clearly designed to force you into paying a subscription fee. You can’t let people have something they could possibly easily use and play games that aren’t on your subscription if your entire purpose is to milk a monthly subscription from the users. Google, fuck you capitalism woohoo.
Only Microsoft can run decently windows in a decently big data centers. Because they can tweak it, as they do for Xbox os as well. For everyone else scaling windows server VMs or containers is a pain, because windows is a bad, poorly optimized, resources-hungry OS developed with main goal to make hardware obsolete every 3-5 years.
I don’t know what nvidia is doing, but when I use it at my friends’ places, lags are painful.
Linux was the right call in theory, in practice gaming industry is pretty broken on the PC side with its lock on windows, as we see on every new AAA port… Let’s hope valve can save it, but I doubt.
I don’t think the people downvoting you have ever experienced the pain of dealing with Windows in a cloud environment
No, we’re downvoting because of conspiracy theories about planned obsolescense.
Yes, it’s disappointing how hardware requirements climb for minimal appreciable improvement, but Hanlon’s Razor applies.
It is not a conspiracy though. Planned obsolescence is a well known real thing. There is a reason unix computers last on average longer than windows computers, and Linux is the stereotypical OS for old pcs.
If people are downvoting for this, they should learn how computers and operating systems work
Don’t worry, I was expecting the downvotes. This place is full of angry windows fan boys that believe they are tech expert because they watch ltt and can install a skyrim mod. Less than reddit luckily