This is absolutely true. Is google all-in on anything at all except search?
Oh look, Google killed another thing. I’m so glad I’m moving off of all of their shit. If you need a reminder of their track record:
Other than Search, Ads, YouTube, Maps, Cloud, Android, Chrome, Apps GSuite Workspace and Waymo, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Let’s be fair. While the writing is on the wall, they didn’t actually kill anything yet except two small game studios that had not even announced any games.
I guess that’s fair. Couldn’t think of the applications off the top of my head, but you’re right.
The problem isn’t that Google cancels stuff that doesn’t find a market, everybody does that. They never invested in Stadia in the first place. It was obviously going to fail.
Compare that to Game Pass way back on day 1. Wait, it’s $15/month, and includes tons of games released on day and date? Wait, that includes both Xbox and Windows games? Wait, I can convert my existing XBL Gold membership for $1? And I can do that up for 36 months? And they don’t care if I buy 3 years of XBL Gold and do the $1 thing? How is this such an incredible deal, holy shit!
Now thinking back to day 1 of Game Pass, maybe Microsoft was going to renege on their promise to put new games up the same day they were released for full price. Maybe the service itself was broken, or buggy. Who could tell the future? All we knew on day 1 was Microsoft was going out of their way to make it attractive, sexy, a great deal, all on day 1. They had confidence in their service. They were all-in. They were willing to bribe us, nearly give it away, just to get us through the door. They wanted people to try it.
Google didn’t.
What dumbass person thinks sending updates to DATA CENTRES is going to be quicker than relying on players to download and update themselves?
After spending development time for a special Linux version running Vulkan?
Only a twit would think it’s faster, but game streaming is perfectly workable for everything but titles requiring very fast reaction times like super meat boy or street fighter. GeForce Now is actually the best way to play Cyberpunk 2077, if you don’t have a high-end gaming PC.
Come on, is anyone surprised Google abandoned yet another half-baked project? At least we still got this:
Oh oh oh, probably also as evidence in any potential consumer lawsuit claiming misleading or deception conduct on Google’s part.
Is a good commercial. Rich didn’t like it though.
First time seeing that commercial. I love it.
Creating best-in-class games …
Not what I wanted from Stadia. I liked the idea of silly little games like Goat Simulator people would stream, and then we could hit a button on youtube to start playing from that point.
I may have misread but this seems like the right step, like they’re giving up on something they were never going to be good at (creating games) so they can do something they seem relatively okay at (publishing other people’s games.) Wasn’t Cyberpunk supposedly best played on Stadia? They should get more of that kind of press.
I’m not saying Stadia is good now, to be clear. And the tech licensing seems doomed because there is no company who wants to do this that isn’t investing in their own streaming.
Much better then lest gen consoles. Slightly better than new consoles. Still not better than a decent PC.
Hmm.
It’s been out for a year and they still have Premiere Editions in stock?
The data centres are running older AMD iron so no, it wouldn’t be the best without raytracing.
Has Stadia ever been sold in stores?
Sure. But 90% of the people who saw the news thought that this was Stadia shutting down entirely. From a messaging perspective, this was basically the worst way they could go about it. Just announce that you’re closing down the first party studios to concentrate on bringing more third party games to the platform (better yet, announce some of those third party games at the same time). At least that’s a crisp message, unlike this frankly pathetic flailing around with “maybe Activision will license the tech”.
And just what kind of clowns start a console with no first party game production, then realize it is a problem and buy a couple of C-tier studios a few months after launch, and then axe them 10 months later?
Right. Even if they somehow do manage to license this, it’ll be a small and low margin business. If that’s going to be the main focus, they might as well kill the project now.
Second-best way to play CP2077 is GeForce Now. Stadia is roughly equivalent to next-gen consoles though.
I wonder if this has anything to do with their shift with Stadia. Turns out Google Cloud is a huge money loser, and it would probably take another $2-4 billion in investments over the next few years to do Stadia right.
The unit’s losses appear to be growing as the company invests heavily in sales staff. The company said the cloud unit lost $4.65 billion on $8.92 billion in revenue in 2019, and lost $4.35 billion on $5.84 billion in revenue in 2018.
Nearly $15 billion in losses in three years. Damn.
AWS and Azure are printing money for Amazon and MS. What gives?