Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

[stusser]

They’re not necessary, but sometimes you go a couple levels without getting a great gun and they help fill in that gap. That’s all.

[rei]

Anyways, more Stadia fail. I wonder how much porting you Stadia’s Linux backend from the Windows versions is. This is not a good look for Google to have devs be uninterested in maintaining patch parity with consoles or PC.

[Kadath]

Anyone got any unused buddy passes?

[Woolen_Horde]

Fascinating leak if true. One of the keys to Stadia’s business strategy is that it is a customer for Cloud and smooths out demand for its development. Cloud is more important than Stadia, so it’s a) probably not given as generous a timeline, b) can probably have its deal altered if Cloud deems it necessary to make itself look good or whatever.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock

That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information. The group, which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page, discussed whether Google could “win” in the business, who would be best to lead the effort and the difficulties of competing on things other than technology, such as sales and marketing. The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said.

Some evidence that Stadia is a potential future victim of Cloud:

Google’s growth goals for its cloud platform business have also had an impact on its apps division. A person directly familiar with the matter told The Information that the company halted new engineering hires for G Suite in 2019. Instead, Google shifted headcount growth to its cloud platform sales and engineering teams. (The company said in mid-2019 that the sales force for its cloud division would triple in size over the next three years.)

That and other changes rattled the department, the person said. Leaders in the group began departing, including vice president of engineering Garrick Toubassi and vice president of user experience Amy Lokey, both of whom exited Google altogether. The division’s head, Prabhakar Raghavan, became the head of ads in October 2018. In August, the company announced it would be shutting down Google Hire, which levered G Suite apps, like Gmail and Calendar, to help recruiters manage their pipeline of candidates.

Will Hamill (willhamill)

Krish Subramanian (krishnan)

[rei]

Haha oh man now that self imposed deadline is backfiring?

[Aceris]

And it’s unrealistic. MS and Amazon are very very serious competitors with a substantial lead. A clearer strategic thinker would have a longer term plan, probably based around leveraging AI to build something MS and AWS cannot easily match.

But no, Google’s leadership is way too arrogant for that. They think they can win just because they are google.

[Charlatan]

At work people use AWS or Azure. I have never heard someone even make a reference to GCP. They’ve got a ways to go to get into the headspace.

[cornchip]

I had an opportunity to choose any of those three last year and considered Google. There are some attractive aspects to Google‘ tools and services. However, we work with clients and would need to repeatedly explain why we didn’t “just use Amazon,” so we just used Amazon. Really thankful the leading company prices aggressively and frequently releases updates; that’s not something to take for granted and the latent threat of Google pulling self-serve market share towards it deserves some credit. It’s just hard to actually use. Anyway, same goes for Stadia; whether it succeeds, it’s probably made XBox’s services and stuff like Apple Arcade better.

[Telefrog]

Stadia (GoogleStadia)

[rei]

…who?

[Nesrie]

Based on articles, I don’t think they’ve released a game yet. It’s… coming.

[kerzain]

From Wikipedia:

The developer was founded by veterans of Electronic Arts, WB Games Montreal and Ubisoft, mainly Alex Hutchinson known for being the director of video game Far Cry 4.[2] On December 6 of 2018, during the show of The Game Awards 2018, the first was presented trailer of his first project called Journey to the Savage Planet which is a first person game focused on a world of aliens full of creatures, in which the main mission of the player is to explore the planet for the displacement of the human colony. The launch date of the game is January 28, 2020 for the current generation platforms published by 505 Games, who is responsible for distributing the game.[3]

Google, under their Stadia brand, acquired Typhoon in December 2019. Jade Raymond, head of Stadia’s Games & Entertainment division, said that Typhoon has shown triple-A quality work in a short time, and will be using Typhoon to help develop additional content for the Stadia platform.

[Ex-SWoo]

Huh - as a thank you for being on the beta I got a number of Stadia Buddy Passes that I can give out to anyone interesting in trialing this out.

Basically these passes gives folks a free 3-month subscription to Stadia Pro. No hardware, so you won’t get a free Stadia controller or stream 4k on a TV, but if you’re interested in giving the service a go on your PC/Laptop/Smartphone and you have an existing controller that you can use feel free to shoot me a DM.

[rei]

That’s without any games right?

[Ex-SWoo]

The pro subscription should give you 1 or 2 free games a month, but yes - without games aside from Destiny 2 I think.

[Alistair]

Er, which controllers are required?

[Ex-SWoo]

Anything that connects to whatever machine you want to play it on. If you have a controller you already use for PC gaming it should just work. Mouse + Keyboard should also be supported for most games too.

[Alistair]

Ooh, in that case - me, me :)

[rei]

All the Stadia games are ports from PC and not console versions. Do they obfuscate/hide the graphics settings in game vs the PC version or simplify them into quality/balanced/performance?

Kind of you to offer, @Ex-S_Woo and I’m a little tempted because it’s currently the only way to play Samurai Shodown on PC!

[Ex-SWoo]

In the games I’ve tried what’s most common is a simplified menu customized for Stadia. I don’t believe they let you tweak graphics settings manually in any Stadia game - they want the system to dynamically do it based on the amount of network lag, etc.

@Alistair - enjoy the pass ;)