1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competitors are really active during the Christmas season because thats when so many sales are, but you see other studios like Dice's Battlefield V go utterly dark during this time.
2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise
3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against "reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you will.
Little bit silly about how on one end people stand united with gamedevs about the poor work/life balance and excruciating crunch time, yet they will complain when a company doesn't release any update during the holidays.
I think its less about the gap but more about the fact that the product was released in a not suitable state and then left like that for 40 days. If they had released it mid year and fixed all of the issues before the holidays people would be ok with that.
It gives off the vibe that this is another one of googles random side projects that no one really cares about and will be scrapped in a year. Which is extra concerning since people have spent real money on the hardware and games.
You're conflating two different sides of the industry (as is the parent comment.) A game dev studio is not expected to have monthly updates for any but the largest games. A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content.
Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away several games a month for a couple years now. Once a month updates at a $10 subscription is table stakes here.
> A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content.
I agree that content is important, but if you're talking about new games, Google doesn't have much control, the developers works on those not Google.
> Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar
But this isn't about the free monthy Stadia content. Stadia has been giving 2 free games the first of every month since launch and has not slipped a single day. The two games for February were just announced.
> I agree that content is important, but if you're talking about new games, Google doesn't have much control
Doesn't matter, Google's gonna get the flak for it. People bought hardware and a subscription from Google. If they're not getting value from it, for whatever reason and whomever's fault, they're going to be mad at Google.
Why did Google release a platform if they didn't have enough games lined up and ready? I assume they're hoping they'll be able to weather this negative sentiment and do have games planned in the wings, but we'll see.
Give the cadence in which Stadia could release new content, it would make sense to have had that pipeline filled so that they could release a new game every day.
At some point, there will be a zero-install gaming service like Twitch/Itch and devs can connect directly to fans for realtime playtesting, etc. So much, so little.
Yep. When I read somewhere here another article about thebpromotion processes at Google, the early Stadia launch started immediately making so much sense. It was a launch for internal reasons.
They're a "me too!" company that pretends they are the leader in all the projects that others are doing, and merely offer a service/product to tick a box next to their competitors.
The only case where this isn't true is Search (but getting worse), AdWords, and YouTube. But everything else is not uniquely Google (eg. Drive, GMail, phones, Android, Chromebooks).
Then they may or may not abandon the project based on the uptake, leaving the adopters high and dry. I personally would not risk buying anything from them based on their proven approach to product launches.
Not necessarily, because:
They can already see what the other major platforms in this space are doing, and learn from it.
They are already a large company that has other income with which to support this service through its initial growth.
They can hire/poach people from these existing companies to help give them a kick start.
I know just saying it makes it sound easy, but responsible executives and teams should be capable of doing better.
All the consoles go through the same thing every time there's a new generation. The consoles have never been backwards compatible, each generation invalidates your previous library. And they always begin with tiny libraries.
Here we are in 2020 and only now have Sony and Microsoft begun talking about backwards compatibility in future console generations.
All versions of PS2 have the PS1 hardware since it does I/O on the PS2. You are probably confusing with PS3, which had the PS2 hardware in the first versions specifically for backwards compatibility.
The first PS2 model came out ~20 years ago, and likely offered backwards compatibility only because very few developers then were building games to maximize the capabilities of DVD storage.
Excuse implies a value judgement that the explanation is acceptable and therefore blame should be reduced or completely forgiven. A reason is simply the explanation with no judgement of acceptability or blame.
I've been following this situation somewhat, and although Google's outreach has been lacking, there are signs that they're working hard behind the scenes. Apparently they have over 100 games launching this year [1], have been consistent in releasing new games with the pro subscription [2], and are delivering a number of talks at the upcoming GDC [3].
I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the community hasn't been particularly happy with any kind of news. Not to be derisive, but I don't really understand the tribal fanaticism both for and against the service.
Yes, the service is missing promised features, but it's actually pretty good. For someone like me (in my 30s, don't want another box that I have to keep upgraded), I've been enjoying it for what it is — with a decent internet connection, you can play a modern looking game with very little effort.
Google did promise more, but I still haven't given up on their ability to deliver. Seems like a lot of moving parts, and maybe only their community management is missing.
Hype is truly a double-edged sword, and its surprising to me that companies are so cavalier about it, especially in the gaming industry where the consumers are so brutal and unforgiving.
Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn't (yet). It very much smells like a disconnect between their business/marketing and the product development.
> They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard.
Stadia development is expected to pick back up as soon as the Google Fiber rollout is complete...
>They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard.
Yes they better because their advertising was at best misleading.
Stadia is centralized control and even more spying on end users, which this crowd constantly complains of in other cases. Why do people want google button/key/voice logging them any time they play a game? The value proposition is crap and the input latency makes lots of games clunky, incurring a handicap on players.
It seems like a terrible product to me from a "what kind of future do we want to live in" perspective, as well as UX.
Companies might be cavalier about these things because the consumers are so often brutal and unforgiving (irrationally so, in so many cases).
There's no winning the PR game on Reddit or other social media sites when you have some motivated psychopathic shit-posters drumming up the negative sentiment - especially when the conversation gets titled that way early. There are a few sacred cows, but almost every other noteworthy game or console at some point goes through a similar phase. If the company keeps things afloat long enough while iterating on their product, the shit-posters generally get bored or move on to something else.
In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for Google to do so too.
They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.
Except the 2nd most popular post on /r/Games is about how Artifact hasn't had any updates in over a year now... So 4 weeks in the middle of the holidays seems a lot more trivial.
Try asking the CSGO community whether or not Valve manages to communicate at all. It's a very common refrain in that area about how silent Valve is and the lack of attention the game gets, despite being the most played game on Steam.
Largely CSGO seems like a finished product. Its the result of almost 2 decades of refinements and other than a map change or weapons price adjustment it doesn't need anything done.
"While I don't have product updates to share right at this second, I can promise you that I have been, and will continue taking feedback posted to r/Stadia and other channels, like the Stadia Community Forum, back to the Stadia team."
They can't even scrape together an update for a thread of thousands of people who paid good money and are foaming at the mouth.
Gaming, community, and customer service could not be further from Google's DNA.
This was my main concern when Stadia was launched. I knew that Google could figure out the tech but their product development and customer support would be their Achilles heel, especially when it comes to gaming. Gamers go all in with their passion and if you as a company aren't heavily* community oriented, their passion can quickly turn destructive.
* Their reputation for prematurely closing down products too but that's not something they can directly affect.
Did people not see this project as clearly stillborn? The radio silence (when it comes to fixes, issues) is not new, nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service. This feels like investors and users alike got scammed by a product not ready for prime time. Did they assume they could fix it after boot? I really, really hate this trend of building the plane in flight with passengers present (paying customers), and coasting on expectation of fixes.
> nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service.
Really? I have it and it works just as well as when I had a xbox and gaming pc. You can look through some of the other stadia threads here and on reddit and find plenty of other people who think it works well too.
This was predictable both specifically and in general. Google does not support their products, period. They stop updating them meaningfully -- years before announcing that they're terminated -- and they refuse to have a human customer service team. G Suite is possibly the only exception.
I'm sorry, but 4 weeks, 2 of weeks were the holidays, is by NO means "not supporting their products". What company releases an update faster than every 4 weeks?
If radio silence (and ignoring users) were abnormal for them, sure. I could give them the benefit of the doubt.
With the context of Google's history though, this looks exactly like what it is: Google underestimating the amount of support and reassurance users need.
They had years to plan for the months after launch. They have 110k+ employees around the world with different holiday schedules. It's not like the holiday season took them by surprise.
Google is not a hapless toddler of a company. They've been around for 21 years, they have $40B in annual revenue, and they should figure out how selling things to humans works.
This is a company that fails at absolutely everything except ads, which is a dubious business to begin with.
Closer to 6 weeks. 40 days, not 4 weeks. And for a platform that under-delivered so dramatically on its launch and who postponed so many features, being radio silent for over 2/3 of its lifespan is not a good sign.
People put down a lot of money for the right to purchase games at higher-than-normal (compared to a PC) prices. I can certainly understand the ire at the radio silence.
What? The product works just fine, people use it and can play games. How is it useless? Just because brand new flashy features weren't released doesn't make it "useless".
I would never buy in because I just know they will kill the product in a couple of years. If they have been having moments of weakness regarding GCP I find it hard to imagine that management will keep a cloud gaming service around.
Someday someone is going to write a Management book about short term thinking and it will feature Google.
Customer service for G Suite us terrible too. We have a file on Google Drive that cannot be opened, and have been waiting months for support to resolve it. We have backups independent of Google, but, without them, we'd have basically just lost our data, and their support seems to be doing basically nothing.
As someone who helps support it in a medium sized business, do not use G Suite in your business.
Yep, Google has over delivered by giving two free games per months instead of the promised one. Yes, since they are more of a tech company and don't do crunches, updates can be a bit slower, but 4 weeks is nowhere close to "abandoning a product"...
When you are as big and as powerful as Google, the more your every action will be scrutinized. Thats the way it should be, as any move an entity of their size makes will cause waves the world over. Is all the criticism justified? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact that people are criticising is only beneficial.
Good. I really hope Stadia fails. Gaming is one of the major drivers of continued demand for "real computers" at the edge. Take that away and we'll lose even more momentum there.
On the other hand, its an inefficient allocation of resources for infrequent gamers (who might play games 100 hours a year or less) to need to own expensive consoles or PCs to play games.
I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.
You can just sign up for Geforce NOW beta, it's free for now, you automatically get all the games you have on Steam, it works and it probably won't go away anytime soon.
I doubt Stadia will replace computers for people who take gaming more seriously than the average gamer. It's a large market segment that isn't going away.
Anecdotally, as someone who games regularly, I never even looked at the Stadia. It was of 0 interest to me. I suspect most people in my position feel the same.
I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.
Clearly I can’t trust Googles marketing or Sales copy after how it handled this initial launch.
There are a lot of videos and reviews that mark it as a poor product I.e. it’s launch title Destiny having an impossibly small player population for multiplayer activities.
And then there are people who give it shining reviews such as yourself who seems like a reasonable human but is still only one data point.
So I’ll wait and remember this consumer experience for every google product that gets pitched to me.
On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time: https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png
I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.
Related - I think instead of Stadia being pitched as a competitor to cutting edge gaming platforms it would have been interesting if they had started out with offering "classic" gaming content. A cloud service which offered me the ability to switch between (for example) Atari 2600, SNES, NeoGeo, Dreamcast and old school PC games is something I might consider depending on the price model. Yes, emulators exist but they can be fiddly to setup depending on the platform and not everyone is comfortable with downloading ROMs of questionable legality. Presumably, Google engineers could get older games running pitch-perfect on their server hardware and we could stream the results.
Once people were comfortable with "game streaming" they could move forward with new/exclusive content. Which is basically what Netflix has been doing. I appreciate licensing old games is probably a nightmare, but a service offering opportunities to play old classics would have got a lot more goodwill than this mess.
There's nothing stopping someone from adapting an emulator to Stadia's rendering framework, although I'm not sure Google would approve the result. I agree with you that Google acquihiring (for example) Good Old Games might have been cool, but IMHO Google is pitching the other end of the performance spectrum: play AAA games on a Chromebook.
If they had done both then they could have released GOG titles as filler between AAA releases and that would have been something.
My family couldn’t afford a PS2 or N64. I certainly can now - my library of games over the past few years has been all PS2, N64, and Dreamcast games. Aside from The Witcher 3, I have had a hard time finding great games in the newer generation of consoles and PC games. The older games have character, beautiful animations, tons of creativity. I’m sure not all new games are bad, but just doing a direct comparison I don’t see the creativity of the games in the previous generations. During the holidays, I spent some time playing Star Wars Knights of the old Republic. What a fantastic set of simple mechanisms and amazing story telling- I’m not even much of a Star Wars fan. But I don’t see these kind of games these days.
Don’t forget section bias. There were a lot of trash games in the PS2 era and before, and worst of all, many of them barely functioned on a technical level compared to today’s games.
Of course KOTOR is good, it was probably the best RPG of its half decade and it won GOTY awards all over the place.
The same year KOTOR came out, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was also released. And besides abysmal games like that, a lot of relatively forgettable games that might not stand up to another go-around in 2020 were critically acclaimed: perhaps selections like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, or even the original Call of Duty, depending on your point of view.
I found this to some degree with Vice City. I didn't end up getting very far in it and didn't enjoy it like San Andreas... Which I loved, and could probably even still play. I think it was something about the gameplay being frustrating. This wasn't exactly recent either, I played in between San Andreas and GTAIV.
Sands of time, however, was different. If memory serves, it holds up okay. I played it around the same time. It's an old game, so you have to factor that in, but I recall it being pretty decent. COD type games tend to suffer, due to their draw being state of the art shooters, vs. true "creativity". For some reason, I don't feel that way about UT2004, CS:Source, and others. Maybe that's just bias.
can't say we didn't see this coming. unfortunately this a pattern that google has exhibited again and again with consumer based products. you think that people would have learned after the google glass fiasco, but i guess not.
There are a number of things it offers. Being able to play high end triple A games on a chromebook or a cheap computer would be a huge boon. Not everyone wants to(or has the means to) spend 1300+ dollars on a gaming computer. Also there is also the casual market. Even the people who do want to play games and have the money, it's hard to justify the cost if you just play like 1 or 2 games per year. Another huge boon is the ability to switch between devices and places. Going from your television to your office to your laptop, or from your house to a hotel, to a friends house, or whatever has huge amounts of utility.
It lets you play a selection of current games without buying & maintaining expensive on-prem gaming systems, and works on the go as well.
It also promises to have longevity while following latest hardware developments, without having to upgrade your pc or replace your console with this year's hw generation. Of course the uncertainty about the longevity of the Stadia service counters this somewhat.. but the model technically solves longevity which is cool.
I totally understand the draw. No need for equipment, and works on any platform, everywhere. Steam streaming was an interesting game-changer for me, until I gave on it, due to performance concerns. You could play it in every room, on any machine, and it worked pretty darn well; I was impressed.
Right. The same thing happened with Spatial OS from Improbable, a back-end system for big-world MMOs. They announced a deal with Google where you have to host on Google's servers. Expensively. The AAA title people then totally lost interest, and two of the major indy games shut down. The Worlds Adrift people wrote: "The network of Worlds Adrift is built on top of SpatialOS, a proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside of SpatialOS’s infrastructure. This requirement prevents us from making it P2P or allowing players to host their own servers."
In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you can now go with the other evil empire.
(There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really. That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out. Land and in-world items are really expensive.)
Google, a company that sells adds for a living, has absolutely no marketing skills whatsoever. Anyone that uses any of Google's products, you are living on borrowed time. This has been illustrated over and over and over. Its not even a meme anymore.
I wanted to say that I fear for the "do no evil" Google, but that company has long since disappeard.
When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the computing power and software infrastructure for large scale simulation, which at present is limited to some big university, corporations and large government organization.
But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of users.
Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other products.
This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable.
I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.
2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise
3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against "reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you will.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_o...