Another One Bites The Dust At Google
September 29, 2022 1:05 PM Subscribe

After a lackluster and botched launch, stronger competition pushing past them, and a lack of both industry support and public interest, Alphabet is finally pulling the plug on Stadia, their streaming gaming platform with a sunset date of January 18, 2023.

While initially promising a high performance "play anywhere" experience without needing expensive hardware, Stadia never reached those goals, and the launch went exceptionally poorly, causing the service to bleed support out of the gate. The technology behind Stadia, while impressive, required infrastructure support that just did not exist, further hampering the service.

With the end of support, users will be refunded for their purchases. Alphabet is expected to sell the technology to other businesses for their streaming ventures.

posted by NoxAeternum (68 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite

I never tried it, but I *was* pretty sure that it wouldn't exist for long. Three years is a lot of lag, but being right is still the best game.
posted by hoborg at 1:07 PM on September 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

And this not even three years after promising that they would be supporting this product well into the future and were going to stand by it until it found its core audience!
posted by hippybear at 1:09 PM on September 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

The idea that any company, even Alphabet/Google, could get entirely on-line games with rich graphics and fast-response gaming to work seamlessly -- in a time where I can't even co-op Mario Maker 2 without herky-jerky gameplay -- was a money-pit from the start.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 1:13 PM on September 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

It didn’t help that the VPs and other execs in charge were (and are) utterly utterly clueless about gaming (and, I would argue, also fundamentally clueless about building a functioning business).

Literally none of them know how to work without a firehose of unrelated money backing them up, so they have no idea how to approach actually thinking deeply about anything.
posted by aramaic at 1:26 PM on September 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

This was probably conceived during a period of rosy optimism about Google Fiber and other bandwidth initiatives.
posted by jamjam at 1:38 PM on September 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

What probably killed it, more than anything, is Google's reputation for killing things. When the press is openly speculating about how long a service will last during the launch, things don't look good.
posted by Spike Glee at 2:00 PM on September 29, 2022 [48 favorites]

The launch was a real flub, but Stadia is kind of amazing on a technical level. You can play Destiny 2 in a browser on a low-spec system and the experience is surprisingly good. So it doesn't surprise me it was overtaxing expensive infrastructure.

(That's probably the community that will be most impacted, given it was the big launch title and people use Stadia to make free-to-play accounts to hold raid checkpoints for community sharing or run matchmade content pseudo-solo, or login from auxillary systems to do mundane tasks.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:02 PM on September 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

Honestly, when I tried it it was great. Played Control, loved it.

I didn't subscribe for any longer than the trial because I didn't have any confidence Google would be in it for the long haul.
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:08 PM on September 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

I never tried it, but I *was* pretty sure that it wouldn't exist for long. Three years is a lot of lag, but being right is still the best game.

Speaking of a lot of lag, that was my experience with Stadia (as well as Luna and Playstation game streaming). Despite my gigabit fiber connection and bypassing the wifi via 1G ethernet, Stadia was mostly unplayable for me, so I immediately cancelled.

Maybe the GeForce Now experience is better, or maybe it's better if you're geographically closer to the servers, (I am in the wastelands of 100% flyover country), but right now it seems like the tech just isn't there to support the kind of response times necessary for consistent online game streaming.
posted by dis_integration at 2:16 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Previously, on Metafilter.

I went looking for the thread where Stadia was announced in 2019 because I assumed that I probably made a prediction about its eventual shuttering. And, of course, I did:

Kattullus: my initial reaction is that a whole generation of computer games will be accidentally deleted some day in 2031 and lost forever.

I mean, judging from the Google Cemetary, I'd wager that it'll likely be deliberate, not accidental. And that it'll be around 2024, not 2031.

Off by a year. Not bad.
posted by mhum at 2:18 PM on September 29, 2022 [26 favorites]

I think what doomed Stadia was that it was positioned as its own separate platform that required separate content purchases. Other existing cloud gaming services are linked with an existing library of games, or a subscription service:

GeForce Now: Steam
XBox Cloud Gaming: XBox Game Pass
Playstation Plus

And these are all from companies that are smaller than Google.

When Stadia was announced, there was speculation that this was the start of the "Netflix-ization" of gaming with subscriptions. Which absolutely happened, but not for Stadia. And Netflix has games now that no one knows about.

Stadia had the worst of both online and offline gaming. You had to purchase both hardware and games that would only work on Stadia, online, at full price. And the in-house Stadia game development studios produced absolutely nothing, because games aren't like Google Pay or another-Google-messaging-service. You can't just throw a bunch of project managers and software developers at something to make a game.
posted by meowzilla at 2:20 PM on September 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

I suspect a severe outbreak of infection from Engineer’s Disease loomed quite large over the creation of this. “We’re smart guys! We work for Google! We did all this other cool techy stuff (in an entirely different domain, different customers, different PnL) ! So yeah, can we build a gaming platform? Of course we can! We’re smart guys! We work at Google!”
posted by armoir from antproof case at 2:34 PM on September 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

See also: Killed by Google.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 2:34 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Game streaming tech absolutely does work and has for a surprisingly long time. It's a core offering from both Xbox and Playstation. Stadia worked too.

I think the real problem was as my friend Ben said

Customer distrust of Google’s commitment to consumer products has become self-fulfilling

From the day it launched Stadia was dogged with questions about "is Google committed to this?" That hurt both consumer adoption and uptake by game developers. I think the "buy the game then pay a monthly fee to play also" model was also a mistake.

Still it lasted longer than Google Lively, the 2008 entry in what we're now supposed to be calling the Metaverse. (Ie: clumsy graphical chat rooms, like The Palace but not as successful.)

Fascinating Google is refunding all the money to consumers though. Presumably they've also paid out a lot to game developers. Expensive product failure! Although maybe not so expensive, depending on what those final subscriber numbers were.
posted by Nelson at 2:38 PM on September 29, 2022 [8 favorites]

I'd be willing to take over product development for Google. I'm sure I could do a better job in my spare time.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:13 PM on September 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

See also: Killed by Google.

Man, browsing that entire list... so many products are just rehashes of previous ones with just small tweeks.
posted by The Power Nap at 3:35 PM on September 29, 2022

See also: Killed by Google.

I'm still mad about Cloud Print. It worked great; I could print from my phone or Chrome book and they replaced it with ... nothing. There's absolutely no substitute for it from anyone.
posted by octothorpe at 3:43 PM on September 29, 2022 [8 favorites]

Google doesn't seem to understand that the reason so many of their projects fail is because so many of their projects fail. Why would anyone put their trust in a company that has no consistency?

They're the new Yahoo!

The only products of theirs I use regularly are Maps and Gmail because they're the only ones that seem that they'll stick around.

When I realized I needed an excellent notes-taking app, I hunted for ages to find something that wasn't Google Keep — as decent as Keep is, I wasn't about to use it to store 1000s of notes over years because I know that eventually they'll kill it. (Instead, I went to Bundled Notes, which I love.)

I'm sure plenty of people feel likewise. Simply put, Google cannot be trusted.
posted by dobbs at 3:43 PM on September 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

My sympathy goes out to both people who paid money for this product.
posted by acb at 3:44 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Reportedly Stadia works pretty well on the Steam Deck through Chrome on SteamOS. Maybe Valve will be interested in acquiring some part of the tech?
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:51 PM on September 29, 2022

It's not as up-to-date as Killed by Google, but I found Failory Graveyard which also lists failures by Amazon. I didn't know Amazon bought the carcass of Egghead Software.
posted by meowzilla at 4:08 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Now perusing Ben & Jerry's flavor graveyard. I feel like it's time for Economic Crunch to get a rerelease.
posted by kkar at 4:16 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the 1-2 punch of "no-one expected Google to be in this for the long haul" and "the product needed to be developed over the long haul to really capitalise on its promises" was the killer for Stadia.

My favourite thing, though, was that apparently their GDC display showed Stadia as part of a long line of imaginative innovations, specifically: E.T. for the Atari 2600, the Power Glove, and the Dreamcast. So maybe I should add on "the people in charge of Stadia were going into an extremely competitive industry in blissful ignorance".
posted by Merus at 4:18 PM on September 29, 2022 [15 favorites]

See also: Killed by Google.

Depressing to still see Google buy startups, game companies, etc. and kill them. Is headcount going to get shuffled or let go? Gamers have lots of options to keep playing, but I'd be interested to know the human cost on the maker-side of things.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:08 PM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have been a stadia pro subscriber since they offered me the free premium package (chrome cast ultra plus the wireless controller) for free if I signed up. It was really great when it worked!! But that turned out to be not often.

But it did introduce me to Darkside Detective... which I loved.

Will have to play the sequel before January.
posted by one4themoment at 5:30 PM on September 29, 2022

I am still carrying a torch for Google Reader.
posted by grobstein at 5:30 PM on September 29, 2022 [28 favorites]

Oh and Pac-Man. I played a lot of that at work when it first came out. That was more fun to me than the Mario or Tetris many player games on the switch. The Pac-Man we got on the switch that was many player wasn’t as good.
posted by one4themoment at 5:32 PM on September 29, 2022

I am still carrying a torch for Google Reader.

+1!

I wonder if there's a connection to be made, "where did google go off the rails?" - "when they axed Google reader"
posted by slater at 5:37 PM on September 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

Can't say I'm too sad to see it go. I understand that streaming has the potential to make things more equitable for people who can't afford high-performance systems, but the idea of streaming exclusives is just terrifying. Game preservation is already problematic enough.

Sadly, this certainly isn't why it failed, which probably means it's just a matter of time until someone does it well enough for it to catch on.
posted by nosewings at 5:57 PM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm always a little sad when people make fun of Google for cancelling so many products. Some of that churn is healthy: they try things out and when they don't work, they stop. I took a snipe at Google Lively before but it's a good example of this ethos in action. They empower engineers and product managers to create new things and launch them, which is great, but one consequence is that they're gonna have a bunch of failures. And IMHO Google has been mostly pretty responsible about shutting things down when they do, giving long notice or doing something like these Stadia refunds to take some of the sting out.

But it certainly has a cost, consumer confidence. Also some of the changes are real messes that reflect the lack of a coherent product strategy for Google beyond showing ads. A bunch of stuff getting killed for the disastrous Google+ is one example of a real failure. Also the confusing litany of different text and chat apps. And then there are near misses too, like Google Wave was so close to what Slack became.

(My own personal experience of this was the original Google search API that I launched and maintained, it reached end of life in 2006 and was actually shut down in 2009 or so. It was definitely the right business decision to end that product but it still stings.)
posted by Nelson at 5:58 PM on September 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'd be willing to take over product development for Google. I'm sure I could do a better job in my spare time.

This may in fact be true -- the Product people at Google are almost universally terrible. I have never once met a Google PM who was any good at all. TPMs, yes. PGMs, you bet! PMs? Never once.

Every single one I've met has been that specific type of professional bullshitter and ruthlessly ambitious person that does well in MBA programs without understanding anything they're being taught. Combine those people with the completely fucked-up promotion system at Google, and you get this -- product after product being poorly designed (because the PM doesn't understand the market or the audience and cannot be bothered to find out), launched to great fanfare (so the PM can get promoted), then left to wither and die (because, once promoted, the PM leaves). New PM arrives, decides they need to get promoted, well hey, let's axe that old piece of shit and build MY new shiny piece of shit instead! It's the American Business Mindset in a nutshell.

The only exceptions to this pattern appear when there's a PM that's exceptionally good at political knife-fighting; then they get OTHER projects cancelled in order to secure their promotion OR a product that somehow falls under the purview of a well-respected tech god who can stomp on any interlopers.

Google does not have any product strategy at any level -- they merely have a pile of PMs who are all trying to reach the top of the pile, all happening beneath a level of VPs who have no idea what's going on, or where they've left their socks this morning.
posted by aramaic at 6:03 PM on September 29, 2022 [21 favorites]

Oh I managed to keep from commenting in that original thread. At that moment I had already moved on from developing on it, I believe we were some of the early teams having access to it in late 2017.

It was interesting to work with google coming from the game dev side of things since basically forever for me. But it was clear from the get go, they didn't understand how game dev worked and personally feel we spent quite a lot of time teaching them how it worked "from our side" since none of their devs had much experience in the field. Basically they bribed us to to early work on the kits and share a lot of knowledge with them.

I'm pretty sure, unless they would have gone in hardcore profit sharing mode, most developers were not interested in having their prime AAA catalog launching on it, hence the reason for the weird subscribe + buy. But of course, buying games that just stopped to work if google shut down the service is not very enticing for gamers and google doesn't have a good reputation. Executives were absolutely thrilled with the idea they could sell games to audience that aren't the kind to buy consoles or beefy PCs hence the momentum it managed to get for a while.

On the tech side, they made all the bad choices, linux based to save on cost. But vulkan wasn't ready at all on the shading language side, and that held back a LOT of devs for a long long time and also held back the platform. This made for especially slow progress, on the part of most teams porting big games, and surely delayed the launch. They also had this idea that CPU & GPU scaled similarly with resolution and wanted to use this to co-host more games in the same machine depending on resolution that of course was a non starter.

They also had the worst deployment process, I thought they would be made hella relevant during the early days of WFH but headless XBSX kits and PS5 on remote display through RDP still were more productive.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:14 PM on September 29, 2022 [18 favorites]

Today Stadia, tomorrow GCP.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:53 PM on September 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

I honestly had never even heard of it.
posted by biogeo at 6:56 PM on September 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

I wonder if there's a connection to be made, "where did google go off the rails?" - "when they axed Google reader"

I really think that’s true, for two reasons: Reader was a successful product which a lot of people liked, and it was crudely sacrificed trying to force people to use Google+ which was just a non-stop QA failure clearly released not because it filled a need for its users but because Google needed people to use it in their competition with Facebook. Google+ sucked in so many ways, not least because most of them could have easily been fixed (except for the broken circles design) if anyone cared. Uncontrollable notification spam was especially good at training people to ignore it or delete the app - it was almost never something you cared about - and by the time they fixed it half a year later, nobody I knew even mentioned Google+.

The second reason is that Google massively misunderstood their users. They never tried to monetize Reader because it wasn’t a smash hit but the users were disproportionately influential: journalists, bloggers, tech people, librarians, academics, etc. That marked a turning point where Google’s reputation didn’t get benefit of the doubt any more and people started questioning their commitment and motives far more noticeably. Working in the cultural heritage community, there’d always been some questions about what you’d do if they shut something down but after Reader people just started asking Google reps why they should even bother trying something which would likely get the axe. I remember one conference where the Google Cultural Institute people got only variations of that question after a presentation, two people who weren’t me explicitly citing Reader, and have heard it several times in connection to GCP.

When it comes to switching, I will just note that I really like having a personal domain. After years of Google’s mismanagement, it took about 20 minutes to switch to Fastmail. The things which would have been stickier like chat and Reader had already been killed.
posted by adamsc at 8:09 PM on September 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

I feel like we should be talking more about Stadia's absolutely bonkers, completely incomprehensible launch trailer.
posted by mhoye at 8:23 PM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Zero surprise here. I have the same opinion wrt Stadia pricing and that the cloud gaming competitors are all better. I did almost buy it at launch just because the preorder chromecast deal was pretty good and I thought a more powerful chromecast would be nice.

I regularly use Microsoft's take on cloud gaming via Game Pass and it works a lot better than I expected it to. I would recommend people interested in the promise of game streaming to give it a try. It does work best with games where the occasional latency issue isn't going to ruin your game, but I was surprised how viable it was even for action games.

Those still salty about Reader should really check out Newsblur. I have tried all of the Reader replacements that have come and gone and nothing has been as good a fit as Newblur. Tons of great little features like keyword filtering and signing up for Email newsletters to treat them like any other feed and keep them out of your inbox.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 8:37 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm typing this on my $7000 gaming dream. When I first heard about Stadia, I read the headline and just kept scrolling. It's not for me, obviously.

I don't know why a console gamer would want this either.

Phone gamers? They just want something to play at the bus stop or on the toilet.

Who was asking for this? No-one! No-one but some daydreamer at google.

Someone mentioned that a launch title was Destiny 2. That game is a commitment. If you've played it for 100 hours, congratulations on finishing the tutorial, one day you might get to the real game. And take $100 to your nearest pawn shop and buy a last-gen console to play it with. Stream it? That's ... I admire your resolve, but you're just making it harder than it needs to be.
posted by adept256 at 9:27 PM on September 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Goo...
posted by fairmettle at 9:36 PM on September 29, 2022

My rule of thumb as to whether or not a game will work seamlessly on a streaming platform is simple. Can I play it on a TV that has the input lag that was typical until about 2015? If yes, streaming will be fine unless your internet connection is bad and drops packets. If it's something you wouldn't consider playing on a TV, then no, streaming will probably not work for you

For me, pretty much the only thing I ever had trouble with was certain pinball titles that require timing to within a frame or two to not be frustrating. I've been using GeForce Now since 2015, back when it was pretty much the Stadia model except the games didn't have to be ported and the hardware you had to buy was a lot more expensive than a controller.

When they dropped that and went to the "play games you already own on Steam" model they gave away Steam codes for all the games you'd purchased (they had a few good sales that enticed me to buy a few games rather than just play the included ones), which I thought was reasonable.

Now that it's "play (some) games you already own on (a few) other people's storefronts", GFN has lost some of its appeal to me, to be honest. It's annoying to figure out whether it's worth buying something that my 10 year old computer can't run well since it's difficult to tell if it's actually supported or not. They have a list, but it's not really complete and things do sometimes disappear. (Though so far none have been rendered unplayable if you had played them before they were removed, AFAIK)

Basically, the biggest problem is (some) publishers who refuse to wrap their head around the idea that I'm renting a PC instead of using my own because they think they'll somehow get more money by pretending streaming is a different platform and they are somehow entitled to get paid by Nvidia when I play a game I bought for use on a PC and then play it on a PC that happens to not be in my house.

In some ways I blame Stadia. In their case it really was a different platform, but it put ideas in publisher's heads that all streaming was that way and that they deserve to be consulted and paid to allow people to stream their games. In the US, anyway, case law is conflicting on the copyright implications. They may well have the right to be obstinate, but it's not right.
posted by wierdo at 9:52 PM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Google+ sucked in so many ways, not least because most of them could have easily been fixed (except for the broken circles design) if anyone cared.

This is curious to me, because the circles thing seemed like the only salvageable idea from Google+. One of the endemic problems of social media is that your friends and family are different audiences. The context collapse that comes from things intended for one audience reaching another audience ranges from embarrassing (your grandma commenting on a furry picture) to catastrophic (Twitter's many raging bands of extremely passionate posters, as distinct from the trolls). Circles seemed like they'd fix that issue by letting you split your followers into audiences.
posted by Merus at 10:14 PM on September 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

So, if you worked at a company that really believed in Stadia and decided to develop a game for it, starting the day it launched, you would just barely had time to release it before it shut down?
posted by Harald74 at 2:30 AM on September 30, 2022

I'm also still annoyed about the shutting down of Reader, in addition I'm on of the few people (mostly RPG nerds) who found Google+ to be useful for something.
posted by Harald74 at 2:31 AM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

The shutting down of Reader was qualitatively worse than this, or most if not all other Google product sunsettings: there's a case to be made that it marked the death of RSS feeds and the pull model of media propagation, created the vacuum to be filled with behaviourist engagement-maximising algorithms, and ushered humanity into the Covfefecene.

Insiders have reported that Reader was shuttered because RSS was quickly becoming a much harder sell elsewhere on the web, and they were seeing increasingly less traffic to Reader. If they'd known how many people whose opinions they respect would still be mad about it in the Year of our Luigi 2022, they probably would have thought twice. Many of the businesses keen to wipe out RSS feeds to drive traffic to their own ads would likely also think twice if they knew that the marginalisation of RSS created a vacuum to be filled by social media, where people don't click through and also if you don't give them priority access to your content, you become irrelevant, when the platform isn't baiting you into making content there's no audience for but that they can sell ads for at a premium.
posted by Merus at 4:10 AM on September 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Google+ sucked in so many ways, not least because most of them could have easily been fixed (except for the broken circles design) if anyone cared.

This is curious to me, because the circles thing seemed like the only salvageable idea from Google+. One of the endemic problems of social media is that your friends and family are different audiences. The context collapse that comes from things intended for one audience reaching another audience ranges from embarrassing (your grandma commenting on a furry picture) to catastrophic (Twitter's many raging bands of extremely passionate posters, as distinct from the trolls). Circles seemed like they'd fix that issue by letting you split your followers into audiences.

I think the idea was well-intended but the problems stem back to that mad rush trying to block Facebook. Facebook is a [mostly] private social network where friendship is confirmed by both parties but Google+ was trying to be some kind of Facebook/Twitter mashup, driven at least in part by the desire to catch up to Facebook's network size as quickly as possible (this is the same reason it had notification spam, trying to build the feeling that other people were using it). It's really easy to understand sharing a photo only with other people who were at that party last weekend, etc. but that model doesn't work so well on a public network when you don't know exactly why someone followed you and it doesn't allow followers to select what they're interested in (maybe I like both your open source software and your dog or photography, but do you know that when you're putting me in a circle?).

This wasn't helped by the UI being so confusing and sluggish, but the other big killer was their failure to design an algorithm which surfaced things you cared about and, fatally, not to keep redisplaying things you've already seen. For at least the first year, logging into Facebook was seeing posts about people you knew doing things you understood and likely cared about but Google+ was basically a stream of uninteresting noise: “some rando who asked about that couch on Craigslist 5 years ago just had their Gmail account railroaded into G+!!!” and “hey, you know that funny XKCD cartoon someone shared yesterday? Well, 12 other people reshared it and we're going to show you each one as if it never happened before!”. Beyond the obvious problem of noise, this was also unrewarding for anyone writing posts: there was no guarantee that someone would read anything you wrote and after having the first few posts fall into the void where they likely weren't even shown to the people you wanted to see them you probably stopped posting there. If you wanted someone specific to see a message, you used Facebook or email; if you wanted a wider reach public post, you used Twitter because it had far more real user activity (Google misrepresented someone clicking on the G+ notification widget in Gmail as an active G+ user even if they were just trying to make the red spam counter go a way) and appropriate user expectations.

I'd have hoped they learned from that but no longer believe that after seeing Search de-featured and more and more queries falling into the void of promoted content and GPT-3 SEO spam.

Bringing that back vaguely on topic, I think Stadia showed the same unwillingness to listen to normal people about what they wanted and instead designing the service around what some random executive needed to justify their next promotion. They acted like the Google brand was strong enough to get developers on-board without making any serious effort to do so, they ignored that most people are not FAANG engineers making $500k/year and thus totally cool writing off the cost of paying full price for copies of games which can't be used anywhere else, and they demonstrated the usual Google pattern of giving up as soon as it wasn't an immediate smash hit and pulling everyone off of the project. I don't see them getting a new product out of the death spiral until they fix their internal promotion model, which might take the ad business contracting to the point where basic competence becomes a managerial requirement.
posted by adamsc at 4:56 AM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

For anybody skeptical about the overall idea of streaming games: I was highly skeptical, too, but GeForce Now made a believer out of me. I can stream a AAA game at a resolution far above what my 7-year-old Mac can handle with absolutely no perceptible lag. This includes games PC-only games, saving me the effort of rebooting into Boot Camp.

The problem was very much Google's implementation of game streaming, rather than the general idea. I don't know if Stadia's technology worked as well as GeForce's does-- but I do know that the crazy model of forcing me to buy a game that was only playable through a single subscription service stopped me from trying.

GeForce lets you play games you've already bought through Steam or Epic. Xbox Cloud Gaming gives you complete access to their subscription library for a single monthly fee. Stadia had the worst of both worlds.

Unfortunately, game streaming is now facing the same problem that has hit video streaming-- companies deliberately keep their wares off competing streaming services, so no single streaming service has every game, and many games are not streamable anywhere.
posted by yankeefog at 5:23 AM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

The circles thing seemed like the only salvageable idea from Google+.

You can achieve the same thing by just having multiple accounts, having a single 'real' ID may be useful to advertisers but I can live with less targeted adverts.
posted by Lanark at 5:58 AM on September 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not a super gamer, but Stadia works pretty well for me. I only bought two or three games and mostly played the monthly freebies, though.

It was a surprise to me when I got that email yesterday.
posted by lordrunningclam at 5:59 AM on September 30, 2022

Who was asking for this? No-one! No-one but some daydreamer at google.

Me? I would love to play the latest and greatest single player games without having to keep up with console releases or play the GPU upgrade game. I'm old now and have no interest in opening up my computer case and smearing cooling paste on something. I'd like to dip in, play through Elden Ring, then dip out for 6 months and come back for, I dunno, the next naughty dog release. I like to play video games but I'm not *passionate* about them and would pay a monthly fee (cancelled during downtime like I do with streaming) for the pleasure. But the experience was pretty bad! You'd have 3 minutes of smooth play during cutscenes or follow-this-guy-to-the-waypoint boring parts, and then it would go to shit and be unresponsive just when it was getting good. In the end I got a lucky break and snagged a PS5.
posted by dis_integration at 6:42 AM on September 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

Red Dead Redemption 2 fan with nearly 6,000 hours on Stadia begs Rockstar for character transfer. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...
posted by Nelson at 7:25 AM on September 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

@Patio11 (Patrick McKenzie):

"It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you; they'll rotate outwards after next perf cycle and it will be a new PM who will be utterly powerless to stop Google's mismanagement from shutting down the project you rely on.

You have to treat all non-core products as ephemeral."

As an embedded systems engineer I've slowly worked away from touching anything Google puts out that isn't AdWord-related. I used to fall for the enchanting presentations at I/O for all the nifty projects: Brillo, Weave, Things, etc. I wouldn't rule out AOSP as being nuked one day in the future because Fuschia will be the new shiny. Matter might live a little longer because Apple is involved but, still, no touchy.

And, holy crap, they even killed a cloud-based system with IoT. Even as they hard-sell new customers on migrating their AWS and Oracle shit into GCP. A friend of mine is a DBA for a massive financial firm and he got the word one recent weekend from the golf course that everything is moving to Google NOW. So they're selling it hard.

The poor dumb fucks. They'll learn.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:34 AM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

“We worked for four months to build a port for Stadia and today we finished it“
posted by egypturnash at 7:34 AM on September 30, 2022

Also I sure hope that anyone who signed a Stadia exclusivity deal in exchange for a huge chunk of funding made damn sure there was a “this exclusive is null and void when Stadia gets closed” clause.
posted by egypturnash at 7:43 AM on September 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

But the experience was pretty bad! You'd have 3 minutes of smooth play during cutscenes or follow-this-guy-to-the-waypoint boring parts, and then it would go to shit and be unresponsive just when it was getting good. In the end I got a lucky break and snagged a PS5.

Yep. I am also one of the people for whom this was intended. I tried a free month, and it suuuuuuucked. Terrible experience.

Then I tried a free month of Xbox Game Pass on a (terrible, old) PC and it was fantastic. Night and day. So great that I actually bought a Series X so I could also play games locally. But I still play plenty of cloud games. The experience isn't always as fantastic as it was when I first tried it (I played through all of Jedi: Fallen Order without, really, a single hiccup, which was incredible), but it's still very good, and the variety of games is unmatched, and you can be pretty sure Microsoft isn't going to pull the rug.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:54 AM on September 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

I blame bad timing on Google's part.

What they really needed was a good 2 year span where everyone was stuck at home with nothing to do and graphics cards / consoles were insanely expensive and scarce.

One can dream.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:22 PM on September 30, 2022 [13 favorites]

Jason Scott (of textfiles.com) had this prophecy when Stadia launched.
posted by drfu at 1:25 PM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Stadia had timing issues related to the next-generation console releases. It was launched one full year right before the new XBox and Playstation were released in late 2020, but previews of those consoles dominated the news headlines the entire year.

Stadia could have gotten some traction if it was promoted heavily in early 2021 when graphics cards and consoles were in short supply; but in Google time, it had already been out for over a year, a lot of the enthusiasm had already faded, it was already failing to meet expectations, and Google was busy laying off the games division.
posted by meowzilla at 3:04 PM on September 30, 2022

Fifteen years past when Google started to suck and it still, somehow, blows my mind that they went from as beloved and trusted as they were early on to as shit as they've become.

A tiny child in me still remembers how it felt to use Gmail and Chrome and Reader and Google Notes—hell, even Google Talk—back in the early days. And I remember the terrific Google+ community that MeFites formed in its early days, too.

That tiny child hasn't received a Google Docs link without wincing for years, or trusted a single Google product enough to use it since... man, I can't even remember.

So sad to see it become so wretched. It feels inevitable now, but it didn't then, and I really miss those days.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:23 PM on September 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

I have mixed thoughts about the end of Google Reader. Switching to Feedly was ridiculously easy - just a few clicks to export and import the list of feeds. And now I've been using Feedly for longer than I've been using Reader, and even paying for the privilege. Feedly is a company that actually makes money from selling an RSS aggregator, not as an adware company's ignored side project.

I think I tried Feedly a bit in the immediate aftermath of Google Reader. I tried some other feed readers too. Nothing stuck though and now I don't use RSS except for podcasts. Now that's partly cuz the world moved on. But if I still had Google Reader, I might still be using it.

The biggest thing Reader had that all the other ones I tried lacked was, my friends were on it. I used it to read, but also to share. You could add a little note to your shares saying what you thought, and then your friends could comment. We had a little community. It was lovely. A very intimate and fun form of social media. There was no way to "go viral" with your Google Reader shares (as far as I know), but you could stay in touch with a circle of friends by sharing your little interests with them, and vice versa -- a really homey and fun as well as intellectually engaging experience.

Even if Feedly or some other site has these features, I'm not sure it's possible to recreate the experience I had. Even recruiting my friends wouldn't quite be enough -- on Reader, you could make new friends in your friends' comment sections. It was lively enough that you could always bump into someone new, but private and low-key enough that you could just chill with them. If I have to recruit my friends to a new product, that larger friend-of-friend community probably wouldn't exist. (If I'm wrong about Feedly, I'd love to hear about it.)

Maybe all this is just telling me that I should have a blog again.
posted by grobstein at 3:51 PM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted, I think since they did away with "Don't Be Evil" it was inevitable.
posted by VyanSelei at 4:39 PM on September 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted

David S Pumpkins was proof of that.
posted by hippybear at 5:44 PM on September 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ubisoft, Bungie and IO confirm Stadia salvage plans: ways to rescue saved games.

Stadia’s death isn’t the end of cloud gaming, a decent product landscape overview.
posted by Nelson at 10:09 AM on October 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Never used Stadia but always vaguely figured google would half ass it and shit the bed. Seemed to be the pattern.

A few years ago I was looking for a content management solution to tag and archive digital photos. A lot of people seemed surprised that I wouldn't just use google photos. Cripes. (I ended up going with ACDSEE for what that's worth...a single use license I could pay for once and install on a physical machine).

I have a client recently, a major multinational chemical manufacturer, who uses google docs as their content creation platform (vs eg. openoffice or MSoffice stuff). When they mentioned it in the kickoff I chuckled because I assumed they were joking. It's been A W F U L.
posted by hearthpig at 5:36 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Insiders point out the perverse incentives behind Google's repeated failures. Short version - Google pushes launching products, but not maintaining/growing them, so projects wither on the vine as talent leaves post-launch.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:39 PM on October 4, 2022

Great news, everyone! The Stadia laptops just launched!
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:57 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, they come with three months free of the top tier of GeForce NOW. Such synergy.
posted by wierdo at 8:09 AM on October 12, 2022

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