The irony being that almost all of Google’s successful products are “free” to use.*
*Because in the end, you are ultimately what Google is selling.
Right, but that’s because of all the monetizing points that they gained by giving all that software away.
That’s probably, basically, why Google is the world’s most overactive pruner of their own products. They seem to have a really hard time monetizing other products as well as they can with search and ads.
They really should have thought about subscription + in-game ads somehow… i’m sure in fact they did, but couldn’t figure out a way to do it without angering everyone using the service, plus the work required that they certainly didn’t want to invest. If you think Stadia is “YouTube w/ ads, that is games!” you can see how it was sold. What someone should have stopped and asked is “Ok, so how are you going to monetize those games? People don’t mind ads in YouTube the same way they would mind a pop up ad in the middle of a multiplayer game.” When the last resort answer comes back as “… well, i guess the players will have to pay full price for the games. Maybe marketing can make up the difference?” everyone involved knew it was doomed, but rolled the dice anyway, crossed their fingers and passed their fates off to marketing.
I wonder who thought the “I only have money for a potato machine” group intersected with “I pay full price for games” group. Which is a little unfair, they do have that $10 a month sub that I actually forgot about for a bit. But $10 a month for a bunch of games is…your average humble bundle…back when they were awesome. Other folks have already mentioned that $5 a month is more expensive than GamePass (edit: GamePass on sale). Their big difference was … “you own the games…as long as keep the subscription”. Which basically sounds like you don’t own the games, it’s a sub, and is strictly worse than Prime gaming’s we give you the games for free and you own the games forever.
I looked hard to see the deal in the Stadia things - I subscribe to the Google storage things, so the free trial is already extended to a 3 month free trial. But I don’t see any reason to start it early, I was going to wait till my GamePass sub ran out. I guess now there’s a little bit of a impetus because it looks like maybe the deal is only getting worse?
I didn’t try Stadia because I don’t trust Google. It to kill things I love (RIP Reader) but I’ve been using Luna and GeForce Now for a few months and I love it; I don’t want to go back. I’m playing Cyberpunk on ultra settings on a 6 year old laptop. I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Immortal Fenyx on my 65 in tv using a $30 fire stick. And if my son wants to watch cartoons, I switch my Luna session to my phone.
I’m not buying a new $500 console any time soon, even if I could find one. But when XCloud launches on PC and iOS I am going all in on that. I don’t think consoles or massive video cards are going away, but I can see them being much smaller pieces of the pie in a few years.
How many millions of people do we have unemployed right now? I mean this is bot the time to get people who are stuck at home without the ability to do what they normally do AND get people who are really struggling and a low cost barrier ought to do the trick… Stadia attracted neither.
Yeah, Game Pass cloud streaming (they changed the name from xCloud) seems the clear winner here-- $4.19/month to stream hundreds of games. This will really come into its own when they put Xbox Series-class consoles on the backend, currently it still uses XboneS.
I’m sure this was one of the reasons Google decided to pull back. They couldn’t get people to buy into Stadia even with all the promotions and the fact that gaming has been red hot. And it’s not like they had a line of publishers out the door super excited to port their games over to Stadia either.
So it seems like they had two choices:
- Quadruple down on the bet and spend way, way more than what they had planned. I’m thinking they’d need to put aside $2-3 billion over the next 3-5 years to both acquire games and develop their own.
- Cut their expenses down to the bare minimum and change their business model to see if they can salvage something from the effort.
Just speaking from the point of view of someone who loves the gaming industry and likes to see interesting things happen in it, I’m disappointed they didn’t go with #1. They’re one of the few companies not already in gaming that could afford a big bet like that.
What promotions? Was stadia sponsoring streamers, advertising on YouTube, etc?
Exclusives would be one way to ascendancy, but the much more risky one. Would have been smarter to offer consumers a deal too good to be true, like Microsoft.
I was going to ask the same thing.
Only things I heard about was the 1 dollar games a couple months ago, and a free trial that required a credit card.
Didn’t they do a thing where you could get a Chromecast Ultra and controller for free?
Also -
Eligible users who pre-order or purchase Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia between October 15, 2020 and December 17, 2020 receive a Stadia Premiere Edition (Stadia Controller and Chromecast Ultra) at no additional charge, subject to these terms and conditions (the “Offer”).
But I didn’t mean to suggest that they were doing tons of promotions. They didn’t do nearly enough to be successful.
I also think it was a huge slap in the face of the Stadia team that Google shipped their shiny new Chromecast with Google TV but didn’t include Stadia support out of the box. That really showed how little the company as a whole valued Stadia. I mean that should have been a highlighted feature on the box.
Yep, that’s another mark against it. They should have launched AndroidTV, Roku, Samsung TV, and FireTV clients right away.
Also I did see nonstop Stadia ads for months on YouTube. Months! Almost every third or fourth ad it seemed like. But that’s just paying themselves in a sense. I don’t know if they sponsored some streamers, though surely they sponsored some content.
I don’t think I saw any Stadia ads outside of here. I do not pay for YouTube, so if they were on there, they maybe only targeted premium which is dumb. I subscribe to some silly videos, and all I get is endless ads for weird products or what looks like casino games disguised as mobile games without the actual fun of being able to actually win money.
Heck the only time I saw that bearded guy ad is when someone said Rich hated it, I think, like a year later.
Too little too late. It was pretty obvious Stadia wasn’t going to get the appropriate amount of support to be successful by late 2020. They should’ve had strong promos right out of the gate.
Ahh, that makes sense. I block YT ads.
Every mature person knows that you ought to expect everyone to lie about everything to their own advantage and throw you under the bus whenever possible.
What a lizard.
I don’t think even normal exclusives would justify buying both Stadia and the games. You need exclusives that you can’t truly get somewhere else because you’re using tech other people don’t have, because your cloud tech allows you to do something a normal CPU + GPU can’t.
I’m not sure that’s a thing right now, or if it is, I’m not aware of it, no 2D to 3D jump or 8 bit to 16 bit graphics, I’m sure you can get current gen games with I dunno, better explosions or something, but that’s not exactly earth shaking.
Were you able to get geforce now to run on a firestick? I tried but couldn’t get it to work well.
Because most of the country is on data caps and it’s only getting worse as Comcast and others put the squeeze on us where they can. I got hit with overages last month and it sucked. I don’t even play mp or stream games and I hit 95% of my cap every month now.
Stadia is not realistic for too many people until we get better data caps or remove them entirely.
Downloading games will use more data than streaming them over any normal time horizon, excepting MMOs. If your caps are so tight that you buy physical disks then sure that’s completely valid.