2034

AKA company purchased “influencer” time?

2035

Kids fucking love it. I guess the streamers helped, but it has built quite a base of support with young kids.

2036

So that happened.

2037

I don’t care about Apple, so it’s news to me that Stadia didn’t already work on the device. I was under the impression it was supposed to work anywhere.

2038

Same reason xCloud doesn’t, I would reasonably assume. Except nobody noticed.

2039

Wait, so Reggie Watts lied to me?

2040

Yup. Except Microsoft was working on a build for iOS. Something happened along the way and it got pulled before deployment.

2041

Apple being dick about it. Their “workaround” was to make each streaming service submit every single game separately for approval as an app.

2042

So much for sneaking Fortnite in through xCloud.

2043

Yup - the infamous walled garden.

2044

Nothing to see here. Just Google being Google.

2045

Some site already tested sideloading the app and it works fine. Still, just another brick propping up the argument that Google doesn’t care about Stadia.

2046

Yup. But I personally don’t buy the arg that Google doesn’t care about Stadia. I know and have dealings with some of the top people involved; and so I can safely say that the notion is pure nonsense. Sure, they spectacularly botched the release and misjudged the reception of - yet another Beta Google product. The issue going forward is whether or not it will survive in the long-term or just face a sunset fate similar to so many other failed Google experiments. Especially with the advent of Amazon’s Luna which, as I’ve stated in another thread, is on track to win the games streaming wars if Amazon doesn’t somehow botch it down the road.

2047

Their lack of investment in the product, its marketing, and the service offering itself exposed their lack of interest. I’m sure the people actually working on it care a great deal, they dedicated years of their lives.

2048

Fair points

2049

It is amazing how a company that’s so massively successful in many ways like Google can spend a pile of money and just basically bomb like this. It’s clear this was an initiative greenlit/pushed by suits who have no idea of the gaming world at all.

If you don’t have the games then news flash, gamers won’t give two shits about your fancy technology Google.

2050

I still think it’s baffling that Google managed to nail the part that people were worried about going in - whether the tech would work sufficiently well - and instead managed to utterly botch almost everything else.

And now their new Chromecast, coming out during next-gen console season, isn’t planned to have Stadia support added until sometime in the first half of next year. Just… baffling.

2051

It feels like they throw money at stuff and then just walk away all the time.

2052

At least they get to appear in one of those boxes at the bottom of Wikipedia articles for “Cloud Gaming Services”.

2053

That kind of thing is easy to explain just by company structure. Why would any other product spend time propping a complete turkey from a different product area? It’s easier to make happen if your product is successful, or at least unlaunched so that your projections of massive future popularity are actually plausible.

There’s two fundamental mistakes that Phil “PS3” Harrison made running Stadia.

One was Stadia Pro. It was a moronic idea on basically every axis. The base tier of Stadia was already technically superior to the competition. There was absolutely no need for 4K streaming, but all that emphasis on 4K streaming meant that many games being upscaled made it look like a technical failure. And it created the narrative of needing a $130 physical unit + a subscription + having to buy the games on top of that. Who is the target customer for that? While it could have been no up-front purchase of hardware, no subscription needed, just buy the games.

(And, haha, a year later they still have not launched the free tier. They just ended up doing it via a free trial of Stadia Pro. So even at this point, they suffer the stigma of being a subscription service that does not provide enough value.)

The second was launching too early. They couldn’t help the Doom Eternal delay, which was supposed to be the heavy hitter of the launch lineup. Given how much of the platform was missing at launch, they should probably have used that excuse no matter how many contractual penalties they would have had with other publishers. In particular, none of the cool features they demoed with e.g. the YouTube integration had been finished when they launched. By launching a product directly into failure, they disincentivized YT from actually implementing that stuff.

The game library wasn’t the problem. A better business model would have allowed for a successful launch even with this library. With no up front hardware purchase needed, a narrow library is not a fatal problem. And on the other hand, more games would not have helped make it any more successful. Stadia Pro would still have been a counter-productive idea, and the product would still have been launched with crucial features missing.