Comment by nvarsj
5 years ago
I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting:
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
nvidia has a competing service that supports that title, and it honors your steam account instead of needing you to re-buy it
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/
15 replies →
The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough).
If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
7 replies →
I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find a market, but I think there are several hurdles that (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no experience in the industry:
1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that.
2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones.
3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as...
4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction
Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful:
An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well.
That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that.
Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders).
And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.
But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.
Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above
32 replies →
i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your customers are still in the age of horse and buggy.
terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
>stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well
To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable
3 replies →
The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals.
When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies.
For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product.
There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"?
Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison).
Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
> Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
There are also many prestigious and lucrative engineering goals at Google that are totally untouchably intractable because money is involved. The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review. If an established app is deluged by negative reviews, take a look at what’s happening. It’s either become a Trojan horse or a victim of 3rd world scamware competition. The average review for an app does not go from 4.5 stars to 1.5 stars overnight without cause!
Attempting to address this glaring deficiency leads to the following problem: the other engineers who rallied to solve it, in the past, are no longer with Google. Do you like your job? Find a technical problem with no downside, in that case!!!!!!
1 reply →
my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.
Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and Chromecast stick is frankly amazing.
Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out.
Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I have seen, and just magically works.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the latency challenge.
1 reply →
they need an experience that sells the actual upsides of game streaming in the same way that mario 64 sold 3d movement and the analog stick. 'here's popular game except worse' will never be a winnable pitch. even casual users who don't know what latency means will instinctively recognize that all the games just feel kind of shitty to play. you need a tailor made experience where latency is a much more negligible factor.
Check out the stadia subreddit. It seems they've managed to connect with a pretty passionate group of innovators/early adopters.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/
To be fair, that described Google Glass as well and look where that product went.
How do you know not many people actually want it?
This is not just Google. All other tech companies including Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a result:
* Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded.
* Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.
I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a certain management level, the most effective way to pad out your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if they just updated the definition of a successful launch to include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.
I wonder if it's the lack of a single founder?
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who owned it.
More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve.
It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be found.
Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.
Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you.
Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.
Sort of, but it's really a goog HR problem.
That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.
I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.
Quite ironic that it's an engineering company and stuff doesn't work how it's supposed to so often. I'm looking at you, Google Cloud :P
Brilliant comment