I'm really curious the calculation here. That's a lot of money, and I'm certainly glad they're doing it, but feels both out of character for Google, and I'm surprised they have the budget allocated to just "doing the right thing". What goodwill is this saving that they aren't burning by shutting down Stadia?
I think it saves a ton of goodwill. Yes, you’re taking a platform from people, but it’s much better to not take their money too. Nobody is losing their livelihood, it’s a gaming service that can easily be replaced.
Does it though? It doesn't seem to be in keeping with how the rest of Google functions with their general lack of care, customer service, or recourse on anything. It also don't paper over the fact that they killed a service that, just 3 months ago they said wasn't being shut down.
If there was some new Google paid service that I cared about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in a couple years.
If this is for goodwill, they have to start somewhere.
Google hasn’t remained the same company through its history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a radical departure from their past.
Maybe Google is realizing they can’t keep being this cold company forever.
Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn’t get me to trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse. It would have to be done a few more times.
I don’t disagree with that, but I think it’s somewhat orthogonal. If you pay people back, the general reception is now “eh, assumed this was going to happen. Glad I’m not out hundreds of dollars.” compared to fire and pitchforks if there’s no refunds. Google already has the rep for shutting things down. This doesn’t really move the needle besides showing that they will at least financially compensate your loss.
I'm hesitant to claim exceptionalism, but history supports the claim that gamers are (a) quick to claim umbrage, (b) VERY vocal on social media, (c) have a LOT of free time to shitpost, (d) have long memories, and (e) are a younger demographic (aka future consumers).
Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the cheaper option.
Perhaps, but I wonder if that class of gamers you're talking about is the target/actual audience for Stadia. The folks I knew who had/used Stadia were a lot more casual and non-traditional gamers, since why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
It's not like Google has a good rep in that community already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube, and especially in its gaming community, complains about YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively to move over to YT.
A lot of gamers are the sort of people that flame a developer of a bad game they never even bought/played in the first place. Attacking corporations is itself a sort of game they enjoy, having a personal stake in the fight isn't necessary for them.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that "lot of gamers" in my experience is the type to flame Stadia without playing or buying it anyway. I highly doubt the overlap of the population of /v/ and Stadia owners was that large, but maybe I'm wrong.
>why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
Lots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me were portability (playing my games at max settings while traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops, etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home, but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks like using less battery life / hard drive space / time updating / etc than the native alternative.
In other words, if I have the choice between playing the same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going to pick the latter.
I guess they're keeping the subscription fees for those who subscribed, not sure what percent of their revenue that would have been. All in all the total sales are probably paltry relative to the investment they've made in it (though surely they'll find other uses for the servers and tech), so it's not a big sacrifice to give that back to avoid anger and lawsuits
I dunno, Google has never really seemed to care about consumer anger and lawsuits. Like I said, it's a welcome change, and I'll be happy if they keep up this new pro-consumer attitude, but this feels a lot more like a weird one-off than a new policy or commitment.
But if it wasn't that much money, then it wasn't that many people who would be upset about not getting a refund, which for a company with the cashflow that Google has feels like not worth not pissing off.
2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years" into broad public consciousness
3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try again
4. It's probably not that much money, relatively speaking. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two other people who'd ever even heard of Stadia
It's not out of character. They did exactly the same thing for "Google Offers," the old Groupon competitor from a decade ago. They refunded ALL of the purchased deals, even the ones that had been redeemed.
12 years ago, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion and Groupon declined. Those were the second and first dumbest business decisions I've ever heard of, respectively.
People were extremely cautious about stadia from day 1 because while Google may be the single most capable company of actually making cloud gaming workable, this specific product required a lot of money input that had a fairly good chance of being completely wiped out based on Google's track record.
With this, next time there's a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"
The simple answer is that it's legal hedging. They don't want anything related to this closure of Stadia to lead to a lawsuit that might impact the concept of software licensing, particularly in the EU. This is a move out of pure self-interest (not that I see anything particularly wrong with that).
I’m surprised, but I’m also glad they are doing this. It could be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5 minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished product they shipped thinking they’ll solve it. But the reality is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were barely playable. I’m talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps upload speed.
I'm somewhat surprised the 4 sibling comments as of this writing don't even mention the latency/jitter issue-- to me, that's always been one of the obvious biggest flaws with game streaming. Your average consumer has little to no awareness of it, it's beyond Google's control, and it has a very noticeable impact to anyone experiencing it. Not a good combination.
Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.
Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is also a major problem when it comes to latency & jitter. It doesn't even have to be game streaming, any real-time application such as calls suffer from it as well, despite not actually requiring much bandwidth at all.
Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.
I remember it using a Java applet. I think the reason none of the online test sites support it is because it’s hard to test latency & jitter in the browser as the lower layers try hard to compensate for it.
Speedtest for random server (servers listed on Ookla is quite random) is useful but ping for random server is a bit useless. Just ping for targeted server that runs service you use.
The problem with such statements is that game streaming services are INSANELY dependent on literally a century of cruft and how it was handled on a house to house basis. You can have great performance in your house, but your neighbor across the street could have utterly useless behavior.
Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem your ISP sent you when you first got service.
I'd be shocked if their contracts/EULA wasn't structured to avoid risk of suit around something like this. Shutting down a live service feels pretty defensible as not a crime or tort, and they could almost definitely fight the lawsuit for less than this costs in refunds, which makes it all the weirder.
It's the most likely reason. We've seen plenty of cases were EULAs were declared void and that won't hold in a place like the EU. You can't sign away your rights as consumers here. They might be able to fight individual lawsuits in some places, but it might eventually escalate into an investigation by the EU. There's significant legal risk there that is being avoided by just refunding a few millions. It's the sensible move.
It's also just a good marketing move. "they made people pay full-price for games and deleted them shortly after" is the kind of association that sticks around and even Google has an interest to avoid.
Honest curiosity, has that actually been proven in EU court? The sort of "licensing as a service" that Stadia did doesn't seem that different from the business models of something like Audible, or even iTunes in the DRM era. I totally agree that it's a predatory and anti-consumer model, but I wasn't aware that anywhere in the EU had successfully argued that removing access to something you were essentially "renting" access to was a violation of consumer protection laws.
These sorts of EULA arrangements are essentially the foundation of almost all modern media consumption - if anything Stadia is on better ground than most since it's not just a DRM layer like Steam or iTunes. If Steam disappears, I have a bunch of entirely playable game files on my computer that I can't use. When Stadia shuts down, you have a client for nothing. You're not paying $60 to own a copy of a game, you're paying $60 for an unlimited term license to play the game on Stadia's servers. Legally, it feels odd to claim in court that that should be the same as a purchase of the game in some other method. If Google had turned off Stadia, but transferred everyone's purchases to Steam or EGS, that wouldn't be providing the same service you purchased from Stadia.
Anytime I see an asymmetric upload bandwidth like 600/100, I assume the ISP is just advertising temporary burst speeds and does not actually allocate enough upload bandwidth to the neighborhood for people to sustain usage at 100Mbps.
I assume you mean same argument regarding download. In my experience, the download is always far less over-provisioned than the upload.
For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a neighborhood of 500 houses.
It actually just means they're using DOCSIS to carry the signal, which has asymmetric bandwidth allocations for upstream and downstream. 600/100 is a standardized allocation too.
In practice, it is always a heavily oversubscribed network that never delivers sustained bandwidth for either up or down.
Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency. Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the USA).
Speed alone isn't what matters here - latency and jitter are more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is meaningless.
I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).
This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.
Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.
Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.
Game streaming is great for casual gamers. A lot of games are perfectly playable even with 200ms tacked on, actually.
It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games
Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry making these streaming products are adults with real lives who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore players
200ms?? it's really frustrating in my experience for every game (I had 180ms when Xbox Cloud Gaming connects server over pacific ocean for unknown reason).
Yeah, a lot of people play games with their TV not in game mode, which is a ticket straight to +300ms City
Not only that, but a lot of AAA games nowadays have super long animations, tons of post-processing slapped on the tail end of the rendering engine, etc, so you end up with 300+ ms from "button pressed" to "something happens"
I suspect most of those games played on TVs would be running on consoles which are much more forgiving as their games are optimised for that use-case and there’s built-in assistance for inputs (aiming with controllers is much more difficult without it).
My understanding is that Stadia and most other game streaming providers run PC games which are developed with the assumption of precise mouse/keyboard inputs where there’s no assistance.
I think hardware was a loss-leader anyway. They were generously giving them out for free. Games are probably the biggest loss for them as a majority of that money was handed off to publishers.
Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones, IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don't recall), and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they drastically overestimate how many people would buy their hardware.
Kudos to Google for doing right by their customers without being prompted. They could’ve said “$5 off a Nest Thermostat” or some crap and instead they manned up.
Does anyone have sales numbers on hardware and software?
If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.
Not quite hardware/software sales, but a lot of people pegged Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the beginning of the year. It's also unclear how many of those break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-game-once-and-play-it-now users.
Free at time-of-service (and as mentioned, of course you're paying with your privacy anyway) doesn't mean there's not very real costs to the customer if the service goes away though.
Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say, gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around shifting sands like that.
Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.
So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra months of service on a second line) even to migrate off "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a business.
Yeah, if I had known this would be how they would have handled a hypothetical shutdown, I would have very happily used the service. Instead I signed up for GeForce Now since I can buy games through Steam and play them there. The main thing that stopped me from going with Stadia instead was that I was pretty confident that at some point it would shut down and I'd lose access to $xxx worth of games. If they had promised up front to do this in case of failure, maybe it wouldn't have failed.
How is GeForce Now with Steam? I have a Steam link but find it to be a pain in the rear. It's also difficult / clumsy to use for non Steam games. Does GeForce Now solve this or is it just ... different?
GeForce Now gives you a Windows box with Steam on it, and you log into your Steam account on it. They pair it with a super fast cache of the Steam Depot so your first install is speedy. That way, there's no integration necessary, and Nvidia doesn't have to reinvent the achievement/launcher/licensing wheel.
It's probably just different. I don't know what the Steam Link is like. GFN streams the games from a datacenter, so the quality will depend on the quality of your internet connection. Also, GFN can't play all Steam games; publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN, and several major publishers don't agree (eg Bethesda, Rockstar). All that said, I'm happy with it. Usually I can't tell at all that it's being streamed, and it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
> publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN
Hrm. I have an "eclectic" mix of native Steam games, non-Steam games (added to my Steam library) and some emulators. I can't imagine those will be available, thanks for this info.
>it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
I certainly like this.
Do you use it with your TV? Do you need a Shield too for the controller?
If you have an Nvidia graphics card that supports game streaming, install Moonlight on the steam link and look up how to stream the entire desktop using Moonlight.
It works perfectly for non Steam games and usually works better for Steam games as well.
I would recommend a wireless keyboard and mouse to launch the games or if you just want to use a controller to launch your games the Playnight launcher.
This is the exact reason that I don’t mind purchasing Amazon’s experiments. If it doesn’t work out, I get my money back and Amazon has more data for product dev
I'm a Stadia user, and Google's handling of the shutdown of Google Play Music is what gave me confidence to purchase anything on Stadia (~$500 on a quick review). I actually thought we'd be sent personal links of our games, which would live-on in Google's white-list stadia product called Google Stream - they did something similar for GPM which merged into Youtube Music. I'm fine with a refund though.
It's a remarkable decision to refund! I'm assuming all the game developers are keeping their revenue from Stadia gameplay, so it's a meaningful net loss for Google overall. Maybe not that much though; I hope someone publishes an accounting.
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.
Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally" for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).
I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.
Yup, that's exactly what everyone expected since the beginning. And that's why publishers were not very interested, because they always suspected that's what would happen. Why invest when Google will get bored and shut it down in a couple years?
I think there would have been more interest if they didn't launch with folks having to the purchase games instead of it just being a subscription plan like most were expecting. Of course, pure subscriptions came later, but that was an odd way to roll it out.
Agreed. The upfront cost of games and a new Stadia-specific controller was too much. I subscribed to PS Now to play Spider-Man. I still had to buy a PlayStation controller, but it was reusable for other PC games.
Ironically, I am now only subscribed to a visit GeForce Now, which requires game purchases. This is primarily due to Sony’s lack of macOS support for PS Now, and my owning an M1 with no Bootcamp support.
> It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive games.
Stadia was cool and I think there is a future for this sort of gaming in some genres and for some audiences, but I play fighting games and it absolutely did not work "fantastic" for them, even living in Boston and having a sporting symmetric-gigabit connection.
>It never had any traction at any point in its history.
B/c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and stops carrying afterwards... and b/c it was marred with promises like "negative latency". But mostly it required to purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock in.
Nah. Google execs and others keeping making the mistake that cloud gaming should target the high-end gamers. It should be the middle-ground between mobile gaming and pc/console gaming, IMO. Low barrier to entry with some AAA games.
Stadia users often joked about how it was really 'Dadia', since so much of the player base was younger dads that wanted to game with their friends from time to time but couldn't justify purchasing the required hardware. These are the users Google should have been targeting - along with less tech-inclined crowd.
The entire pandemic I had this vision of a Stadia commercial where a younger family member sends a link on the family group chat or over zoom and then next minute everyone is playing Among Us or some other casual party game together. Even grandparents and click a link to open their chrome browser.
You don't need fiber for casual games like these. You need enough internet to stream netflix - which almost everyone does.
I used it a bit. The performance was exceptional. I enjoyed playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my phone with a Razer Kishi controller. Although I'm not surprised Stadia struggled to find traction, I think this is mostly due to Google's ongoing struggle with entertainment branding, and despite this, I do agree with their sentiment that streaming is the inevitable future of mainstream gaming.
Game streaming struggles because your average American has like four different TERRIBLE networking devices between them and any service. Those devices will not be upgraded just because google wishes the internet was more like home. If you do not have a good streaming experience, there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
I tried a bit. I don't have space in my life for dedicated gaming hardware or a PC, so seemed to be a way I could play a game once in a while without commitment. Was ok. Didn't get hooked.
I use it and it works surprisingly well even on UK DSL (80/20). I found it useful to play games that insist on anti-cheat systems that deeply embed themselves into your machine. Also my PC is a bit ancient, built in 2015 and running a 4690K, DDR3 with a 750Ti so I get access to games that need a bit more poke.
I've been using for about two years I'd guess. I have a pretty fast connection and it worked pretty flawlessly at home. I used it while traveling too, and if the connection was good enough for streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, it was typically totally fine for Stadia. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the highest settings while playing on an iPad was pretty damn cool, and meant I could slim down a ton when traveling.
That said, I haven't played any multiplayer FPS games. The multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though "seems totally fine" is obviously a subjective observation.
The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn't use your Steam library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that they're refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google, I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that'd be it, and I was ok with that.
used it exclusively for gaming the last year and a half. mostly just for Destiny 2, but bought a few other games on the platform as well. worked very well for my purposes. even pre-ourchased the next year's content for destiny as well. I'm very sad.
For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad/phone when you have 30 minutes free and don't want to buy/build/maintain a PC or Console.
That said, I haven't played in around a year. The games catalog was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call of Duty, EA games etc)
Yes. I only tried Destiny 2 because no other game (that was available without extra purchase) was of interest to me. It worked very well and I _really_ liked the experience. Just open the website in Chrome, click on the game you want to play and it launches in seconds. Certainly faster than launching Destiny 2 on my own PC, which is also a gaming rig.
For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now. Technologically, it’s basically… remote desktop to Steam? From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam. Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.
I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it could be more like Stadia.
I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new platform and getting software on it is very hard.
I like GFN and I agree the experience is not seamless. It still takes a long time to launch the game VM, and you feel it; but a lot of these other issues are much better or nonexistent now. In particular having to re-auth to Steam is much rarer now; launching the VM for a newly-purchased game often used to take a long time, with you waiting for the Steam launcher go through some kind of "Preparing" state for a long time (you don't have to be in-session for this), but this hasn't happened for me in some time. I haven't had a problem with any settings like language, resolution or video, and I think performance, while highly dependent on your own network and ISP, is much improved and hasn't been a problem in a while. So I do think, while the "remote desktop" approach is inevitably going to have some clunkiness, it has improved quite a bit and continues to do so.
I'm a little bit of an enthusiast (tried all of the major platforms). I have shitty rural internet, Stadia is (was) by far the best of the bunch by far, especially with the controller. Near-native for latency and crystal clear image. 40ms ping to Google.
Currently I use xcloud, its "acceptable" with certain games that don't require low latencies but its picture quality in particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.
I use it... and honestly I'm really bummed by this. I've avoided owning a console mostly because I didn't want to drop $500 just to get started. Stadia launched CP2077 with a free Chromecast and controller, so it ended up fitting my use-case rather well.
They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any room in my house and I just needed the controller.
I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from the beginning... I'm just bummed because I quite enjoyed the ride.
Not stadia, but I tried Steam In Home streaming (basically you stream from one PC in your house to another), with ethernet and it was NOTICEABLY laggier (because of input lag). It was probably like 33ms+ of added input lag. From that point I knew cloud streaming (which is basically this plus network latency) wasn't going to be pretty.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768, which was posted slightly earlier and also isn't a press release - we generally prefer third-party articles to the latter.
> we generally prefer third-party articles to the latter.
Why do you? I've noticed several times when a journalistic article was discussing a scientific paper, the preference from some community members was to link to the paper itself.
Shouldn't there be a similar preference for a first-party source such as this? I found both links on an HN reddit bot, and read the press release first - to learn what the Stadia team had to say - before coming to HN to see what the community had to say about what the folks at Stadia announced.
Why are you giving preference to a 3rd party article in this case?
By "the latter" I meant corporate press releases. The link explains why (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). To add to that: the best third party articles tend to quote the salient bit from the press release as well as adding additional background and dropping the most embarrassing spin.
I appreciate this very much. When a press release does make it to the front page (often from the SEC or another US government agency), I click straight through to the HN comments to get some context and perspective.
Google's tendency to do this is why I will never pay Google for any of their services, nor jump onboard any that don't already have widespread adoption. I knew Stadia wouldn't last, and I knew it'd be a better choice to stick with companies that actually have some experience in the games industry instead.
So good job guys. You proved that yet again, Google will kill off a new service/product before it ever has the chance to get good, and validated everyone's fears about the same.
It's easy to say this now that they've shitcanned it, but this product was doomed from the start. They simply did not have a market. The people who care enough to play AAA games are the kind of people who already have PCs or consoles, and the notion of paying a subscription fee on top of the actual cost of games is astoundingly stupid. You buy a game and decide to stop paying and suddenly you can no longer play that game (at least in the fidelity you originally played it).
It's such a non starter and I've been saying it for years. For having so many smart people working for them, Google sure makes some absolutely braindead decisions. They lost hundreds of millions if not billions thanks to their own hubris.
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