Even Google doesnt want to make games for Stadia anymore

https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/02/01/even-google-doesnt-want-to-make-games-for-stadia-anymore/

by royka118 • 5 years ago

18 16 5 years ago

PaulHoule4• 5 years ago

If Google regularly kills products that people use and love, why can't they kill this one that nobody uses and nobody loves?

lrossi• 5 years ago

Potential. The gaming market is very profitable since the pandemic started.

dado3212• 5 years ago

Isn’t that the case for most of the things that they kill? You’re just on the other side for this one.

mpalmer4• 5 years ago

...speak for yourself?

PaulHoule4• 5 years ago

you use Stadia?

gcatalfamo• 5 years ago

Amazon game studio is struggling the same, so it’s not totally put of place this time. However:

FWIW, Stadia the console is an amazing product. It rendered useless buying a console in theory.

If any Stadia team member is reading: I want to work with you in this amazing project.

Unfortunately you need to have games on a console if you don’t want to make games (making them even at loss benefitted stadia image nonetheless) you need to license them and this is the turning point: you need a stronger acquisition strategy.

JauntTrooper• 5 years ago

I was so tempted by their “buy cyberpunk on Stadia and the hardware is free” deal they did in December but they ran out of inventory too soon for me to buy it.

And that’s from someone who has never really considered getting it before; I don’t even own a console and do all my gaming on PC and phone.

Im hoping they consider more and broader partnerships that like going forward.

5bolts• 5 years ago

their hardware adds a noticeable audio lag to the experience though. shoot a gun, like .3 of a second later you hear it go off.. lots of complaints about it, i don't get anything on pc or even phone.. all on the same connection, so its just the chromecast thing they sell.

its a much smaller complaint but the controller choice was strange too, flipped the analog and digital controls - or at least feels like it compared to switch pro controller or xbox. Guess its more like the playstation setup that i never liked

mpalmer4• 5 years ago

I've been surprised we haven't seen Google try to play with the pricing model at all; I would be more than willing to consider a per-hour rate for gameplay, even higher tiers for AAA properties.

Buy the game outright if you want, but pay, shall we say, .40 per hour of playtime with a minimum of 5 hours.

Are publishers not interested in terms like these? Google's clearly interested in the "start playing from Youtube with your favorite streamer" angle. A per-hour pricing model would click so well with that. Maybe streamers even get a cut from the first-time player fees.

PaulHoule4• 5 years ago

If they were honest about the pricing model it would go something like this.

A cloud server capable of gaming costs about $1 an hour. It has to be an on demand price, not a spot price because people won't accept their game being turned off arbitrary.

Don't get started with "it doesn't really cost Google $1 an hour to host a $1 hour server" because Google is forgoing $1 they could have gotten from selling it to a real customer.

Also cloud providers charge $0.10 a GB for bandwidth, and if the game sucks down 5 GB of bandwidth an hour we are talking $1.50 an hour.

If you play a game for 50 hours then you are talking $75 in recurring costs and that's before you pay for the actual game.

The "all-you-can-eat" plan is something that cloud gaming companies are offering now because it is familiar to people (e.g. the bloated cable bundle and Netflix following in its footsteps) and people just think it is natural and don't think "hmmm... is this a real business?" the way they would if you started writing down what things cost.

===

What we know is that software devs use Javascript on the front end because they don't care how efficient it is (you are paying for it) but they use Rust and Go on the back end because they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to when they're paying.)

Thus with cloud gaming the cloud gaming company will always have a reason to Scroogle you with the hardware.

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If cloud gaming is really a scam to drive up the stock prices of companies like Google, or if it is an attempt to intimidate serious companies like Sony and Valve out of the business, the story that Google is telling makes sense.

If they think that somebody somewhere somehow plans to make money off cloud gaming that's another thing all together.

PicassoCTs• 5 years ago

Youtube is the ideal partner for stadia- just allow players to run "SavedGames" out of Lets-plays from the site directly.. and voila...

andrewmcwatters• 5 years ago

Comparatively, making games is harder than making gaming hardware. It's incredible that I find fewer and fewer great games on the market these days when both the barrier to entry is lower, and the available technologies are so much more powerful.

But I think the problem results from the above. The barrier to entry is so low that entrants don't make many fun games (there's just more of them), and the available technologies to saturate usage of are so expensive to fully utilize and staff for that making a fun game falls by the wayside (too few games produced by those that can make great games, and of those, most of them are not even good).

Even Google doesnt want to make games for Stadia anymore

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