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[StreetsofBeige]

Good article. In a nut shell:

- Google is a tech company, not a content company
- Leadership didn't understand game making business
- Seemed to have butting heads between Stadia streaming tech and Stadia game development. Workers felt like Google cared more about promoting streaming tech than games
- Google too structured and takes too long to hire employees
- No first party games as they didn't plan early enough to make them in time to be at launch
- Covid happened and hiring freeze
- Workers felt Phil Harrison wasn't transparent with workers on Stadia. Workers got no updates to why they were getting shut down and reception to Stadia

How Google's Grand Plan to Make Its Own Games Fell Apart

The tech giant hired 150 game developers for Stadia Games and Entertainment, only to lay them all off. Sources say it never gave the studios a chance.

www.wired.com

 

[vaibhavpisal]

Reason for failure: Giving us same old streaming tech with marginal improvements. I dont want it.

RGB lighting on pc cases feels like bigger innovation than this.

A company shouldnt enter games business if it doesnt want to make games.

 

[RayHell]

Pretty much on point. Everyone but Google saw this coming. All the community features that was setting Google apart from other streaming service went missing at launch. It's just a matter of time before the board think it's enough money thrown into that firepit.

 

[Kumomeme]

 

[Dlacy13g]

The irony is I think Google doesn't care. I think they feel there still ahead of the game because they got the platform launched and it will be a store level service that will still make the money with minimal effort. The Tech leads the way and they don't need to do terribly much to maintain it at this point...

 

[MayauMiao]

Google thought every gamer have unlimited data with 0ms ping.

 

[FritzJ92]

Simple Google is passionate about the money not the content

 

[SNPlayen]

Good article. Much more in depth than the Schreiers rushed out article a few days ago. Is it just me or is his work on the decline?

On topic, I felt like everyone but Google was predicting this failure. I feel like Stadias days are truly numbered

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Out of the key points in the article, I can understand Google not understanding games. But the points about hiring freezes, taking forever to hire people when game development should be firing on all cylinders and even something like employees getting locked out of systems due to security or some shit doesn't make sense.

Google makes shit loads of money and covid is not a reason for hiring freezes. Our company still hired people all year in 2020. Ok, we didn't hire anyone in March or April when shit hit the fan asking everyone to work from home. But new hires flowed in from June to end of year. One person even got hired last week of November. (Edit: two new office workers got hired in Nov)

The only weird thing about hiring during covid is that the person jumps onboard digitally doing conference calls as you don't get the usual meet and greet when he or she gets paraded around the office for an hour meeting everyone.

 

[Kamina]

Google, just like many other companies trying to jump in the gaming business, didn’t understand that you need AAA exclusives to convince people to jump on. Simply offering the same games that are already available on other platforms isn’t enough.

 

[Harlock]

My dead grandmother already knew this could not work. No excuses for Google being so dumb.

 

[Bernd Lauert]

The tech is good, it works flawlessly for me. The problem is their business model.

 

[MayauMiao]

Can you imagine playing a Stadia game using all that 4K60fps bandwidth just to play a 5 dollars game for over a month?

 

[jakinov]

Google, just like many other companies trying to jump in the gaming business, didn’t understand that you need AAA exclusives to convince people to jump on. Simply offering the same games that are already available on other platforms isn’t enough.

You don't really need exclusives either. It would have helped a bit but their timing sucks, they didn't have all the features and they have no price/promotion incentive for the same content. You access Stadia using commodity hardware, they don't really need to convince you to buy hardware so that you continue to buy other crap because you can already buy other crap. Stadia's main revenue is going to be about getting people to choose to buy all/most future games on Stadia. There has to be a clear advantage today but it's hard to have one when there's 150 consoles and millions of PC that can already play most of your games. So there best bet is next-gen but they are too underpowered and came out too early. Building random exclusive games that they probably aren't going to get a good ROI on probably won't help much long term in getting people to use Stadia for other content. Instead of spending millions of dollars on convincing developers to release games that hundreds of millions could already access on the hardware they own; they should just have just gave up their royalties so that they could encourage games sales and attract developers by showing that people were willing to buy games on Stadia. Sort of like how Steam use to whore out games and now their promotions aren't like what they used to be.

 

[Kamina]

You don't really need exclusives either. It would have helped a bit but their timing sucks, they didn't have all the features and they have no price/promotion incentive for the same content. You access Stadia using commodity hardware, they don't really need to convince you to buy hardware so that you continue to buy other crap because you can already buy other crap. Stadia's main revenue is going to be about getting people to choose to buy all/most future games on Stadia. There has to be a clear advantage today but it's hard to have one when there's 150 consoles and millions of PC that can already play most of your games. So there best bet is next-gen but they are too underpowered and came out too early. Building random exclusive games that they probably aren't going to get a good ROI on probably won't help much long term in getting people to use Stadia for other content. Instead of spending millions of dollars on convincing developers to release games that hundreds of millions could already access on the hardware they own; they should just have just gave up their royalties so that they could encourage games sales and attract developers by showing that people were willing to buy games on Stadia. Sort of like how Steam use to whore out games and now their promotions aren't like what they used to be.

Let me refrase: AAA exclusives would help to ignite interest. But there is more to it than that, so i agree.
They ultimately failed to convince people that their platform is better. Pricing is one point for example.
Just one more example that Google simply didn’t understand the gaming market and just decided to jump on because it os cool.

 

[Bonfires Down]

Stadia has just been horribly, horribly mishandled. I absolutely think there is a place for streaming services but they need to be handled properly. If Stadia can’t be successful at a time when it’s impossible to buy a new console or GPU then yeah, they might as well throw it in the trash and let MS win this battle.

Considering what a disaster this has been I wonder whether Google’s successful products have succeeded just because of their early mover advantage.

 

[Areiz]

Their ambition goes to high too fast, and the infrastructure it's here and it works. I only wish that they will support this in the year to come

 

[SSfox]

The only succes of Stadia is that they were able to make Xbox looks good.

 

[carlosrox]

F their idiotic arrogance. Do they think people are stupid? I mean, some are but...c'mon.

 

[Rudius]

Streaming is worse than local hardware, can get closer, but never match, and local hardware is not that expensive.

 

[carlosrox]

This is all you need to know. Out of touch shit.

 

[Barakov]

Hey Google(this goes for Apple as well) : Get out and stay out.

 

[Woo-Fu]

The tech is good, it works flawlessly for me. The problem is their business model.

Which is painfully obvious to any of us on the outside. The real story should be why it wasn't obvious to anybody on the inside, or if it was obvious why they didn't speak up or if they did why they were ignored.

 

[Mikey Jr.]

Man,harrison really has an amazing career.

Being part of so many fucked up console launches.

Yet he keeps getting hired.

 

[Mikey Jr.]

Can you imagine playing a Stadia game using all that 4K60fps bandwidth just to play a 5 dollars game for over a month?

Seriously.

10.7 teraflops for some indie game I could run on an ouya and 1tb a month of data.

 

[FreedomOfSpeech]

Google prods work fine if you're on google LAN.

If your latency is more than 2ms, things deteriorate.

 

[Azurro]

Interesting article. How Phil Harrison keeps getting high profile positions is beyond me.

 

[Elios83]

They failed because they don't have contents. Plain and simple. A cloud infrastructure with a streaming technology is not a gaming service by itself.
Also the business model of buying games full price on a cloud streaming service was simply out of touch with what gamers want these services to be (subscription based with access to the whole catalogue).
We can't say that they didn't realize about the contents issues and they tried to build their own studios but they eventually realized that it's a really expensive endeavour that takes years to make fruits and the results are uncertain unless you simply acquire already established and successful studios with well known IPs, which is what Microsoft has been doing.
In any case I don't know how after this failure Harrison is still in his position, his career has been a total disaster since he left Sony in 2007/2008. It's obvious that he's put in charge of tasks that are bigger than his abilities.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

A company shouldn't enter games business if it doesn't want to make games.

This.

This so fucking hard it hurts.

This needs to be repeated a million times, pasted onto the top of the computer of every exec coming to work in the gaming industry, and parroted as a mantra by every gaming employee in every gaming company as their morning ritual.

If your goal isn't to delight gamers with innovative and/or immersive new games, you're adding nothing to the game industry and you should just bow out.

 

[Mithos]

Google thought every gamer have unlimited data with 0ms ping.

Even if I did. Wouldn't pay €60 a pop for a game I do not really own, that goes POFF, if Stadia shutsdown or a person besides myself decide to POFF my account the games are linked too.

 

[Shmunter]

Anything about diversity being primary objective?

 

[Fuz]

Google thought every gamer is stupid.

Fixed.

 

[IbizaPocholo]

Stadia was working on Savage Planet 2, a multiplayer project and more | VGC

This month’s decision to end internal development resulted in dozens of cancellations…

www.videogameschronicle.com

 

[TVexperto]

Good article. Much more in depth than the Schreiers rushed out article a few days ago. Is it just me or is his work on the decline?

On topic, I felt like everyone but Google was predicting this failure. I feel like Stadias days are truly numbered

His bloomberg articles are so short and empty that if I would have turned that in back when at university I would have failed. I have no idea how he earns his paycheck with those awful short and empty articles.