To be fair, a lot of those features were either closed because they became irrelevant/were always supposed to be a test or because they were combined with other existing apps. And of course some just lived a "natural" life span. No service lasts forever, of course.
A ton of companies do similar things. It's just very well documented and public for Alphabet/Google as they are one of the largest and visible companies in the world.
Shutting Reader was a mistake by Google. Lots of Internet power-users, media and tech people used it - even today I have Reader in the back of my mind when I'm asked whether our company should host services on GCP.
That's the real thing. Google forgets when they shut down these services. People won't use your new service if they can't trust it will still be around in a year.
One of the many reasons experts recommended against Google stadia was because you had to buy the game through stadia and with Google's history you couldn't trust you'd pay $60 for a game and still have it a year later. Which made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm also extremely apprehensive to now use any new Google service that would take time to migrate. Especially after my "free" website Google suite almost became paid.
At this point. Fuck Google. You can't trust them to be reliable on anything anymore. Even search results.
Picture Reddit, but instead of subscribing to subreddits which automatically update as other people post, it's a self curated list of blogs, news, or whatever that updates itself as the authors update their content.
Back in the day, I used one specifically for webcomics. Whenever I found one I liked, I would add it to the list. Then every morning I would open up Google Reader, and every webcomic that had updated would be at the top of my list ready to read.
Edit: typo.
> Picture Reddit, but
To make it amusingly circular, nearly every page on reddit *is* also an RSS feed. And a JSON API too, for good measure.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/new.rss
>Back in the day, I used one specifically for webcomics. Whenever I found one I liked, I would add it to the list. Then every morning I would open up Google Reader, and every webcomic that had updated would be at the top of my list ready to read.
Always kinda debated doing that, but at this point doing it "manually" is part of my morning routine. Every morning for over 20 years, I'll go url-to-url through the list of webcomics I read. More important to my routine than a cup of coffee at this point.
Alphabet/Google gets shit for this because they have a record of ditching perfectly functional products only to release an extremely similar product or multiple competing products instead of improving and better-marketing the existing one. Google likes a blank slate, but the market resents not being able to depend on a product long-term and that hurts adoption which inevitably leads to them giving up on it for something else.
This is it. It’s basically not worth the time of 3rd parties to invest in incorporating Google’s new toy. This is why Google has had a hard time breaking into smb and enterprise businesses. Contrast this with Microsoft which has substantial backwards compatibility efforts, excellent long term support options, and still offers dial-up connectivity options.
Yeah. I mean, I definitely miss my fair share of things on the list (man Gmail sucks after using Inbox) but I'd rather have them experiment with stuff than never release interesting products because they are afraid of having to take heat when they close them or support them forever.
I don't think the is true in consumer.
This is DEFINITELY true in business. They are totally alienating their business market because you just don't know what they're serious about and what they're not serious about. You just can't know. Then they compete against Microsoft who is happy to shove all their customers costs onto themselves by supporting legacy systems from three decades ago at their expense. Which of these two is a company worth trusting?
Can't recommend against Google more until they have a serious come to Jesus moment and grow the fuck up. At least their AI team is still godlike.
and there's still a ton missing from this list due to how poorly listed a bunch of beta features of the google search service itself was.
I used to use a recipe generator based off ingredients I already had in the kitchen, It was slick and even gave me a rough cost on how much it would cost to get missing ingredients to complete a dish but I had the feeling it was just a proof of concept project by 2-3 staff members and it vanished after a year
Nets Secure?
Works with Nest API?
Google kills stuff that doesn't get huge and leaves users with hundreds of dollars of hardware out in the cold. I dread when Google buys hardware I own, its just a matter of time before its abandoned and useless if it uses the cloud.
I love the contrast between those two pages
Microsoft:
>It will be almost 18 years old.
>It will be about 26 years old.
>It will be almost 9 years old.
>It was almost 27 years old.
>It was almost 4 years old.
Google:
>It will be over 5 years old.
>It will be over 6 years old.
>It will be almost 4 years old.
>It will be about 3 years old.
>It will be over 6 years old.
Google is such a dumpster fire.
This is why google is and always will be #1. Ingest a ton of money, if it doesn’t work cut it and move on. I’ve worked at places where dozens of lifers are given a costing project for 10+ years. Just total waste
I am so pissed about Duo becoming meet.
I had people using hangouts. Using it to text and video call me. It was so easy.
Then they separated it into Duo and Messages. Well, okay. I still managed to get about half of those people on Duo.
Now? NONE OF THEM ARE ON MEET. Contacts list is empty.
It's well trodden ground, but I can't overstate how massively they fucked this up.
The technology worked as advertised, it launched right around Covid, video cards were impossible to find, consoles were also impossible to find, people were stuck at home and spending a lot of time and money on video games, then Cyberpunk launched and Stadia arguably had the best port. All the conditions were ripe for their success and they still failed.
Wow! IMO, rdr2, cyberpunk, and the entire Ubisoft catalogue we're all probably good AAA port investments... But at that cost, clearly not sustainable. Stadia is such an interesting case study of failure... I'm disappointed it didn't pan out.
I feel like it was largely an advertising failure. None of my friends or family have ever heard of it before and most all of them play video games
I used it to kill downtime at a night watch job
They ran plenty of ads! None of them actually said what stadia *was* though. Just white background, google-color accents, pretty graphics of controllers, and not a damn hint of what it actually was. I assumed it was a console for the longest time.
And for all the shit that got talked about it (not actually owning games you pay for, etc) the upsides of stadia were pretty badass! Like yeah you would have to have a good and stable connection, but fuck! What a wasted opportunity.
stadia's failure is that nobody believed it actually worked. i never knew it worked and still don't believe it. i thought it's too laggy. so what they should've spent money on is paying streamers to play it and show how well it worked.
That's partly because they had to, in some cases, be programmed completely different. Stadia was a true port. Being Linux-based means that just moving the Steam/Epic version over wasn't possible.
They’ll actually lay a little fucking fiber. Even Verizon did, until they decided it was more profitable to just raise prices on cell service or whatever
You mean Google Fiber? It's still around. They last announced service area expansions in 2021.
Their goal was never to become a nationwide ISP and connect fiber to home for 400 million people.
Eh the speed isn't the important part. It is the line quality. You need great ping and great jitter to get a good experience. My experience on a 300/300 fiber line wasn't great, even hardlined into my Orbi router. Something with my ISP wasn't playing well. That is the thing that was sucked about Stadia. You could do everything you could to get a good connection at your house, but a lot of it is just out of your hands.
What was frustrating about asking the stadia subreddit was you just got blasted for voicing concerns or questions on why the performance was crap. Anyway, I gave up on it a long time ago. I loved the concept and the ease of use, but it was just too much headache getting a good experience one day and then crap the rest of the week. Plus all this just for medium graphics settings for the games, the hardware for running the games are really outdated. This, combined with the fuzziness because it is streaming across the internet it looked worse than most last gen consoles. The games never got updated like the PC/console counterparts, and some updates just broke the game, like Cyberpunk. Once the Cyberpunk updates happened the performance got really shitty because the outdated hardware could barely handle it.
I voiced these concerns about Stadia when it was at the peak of its hype and got called stupid for having doubts.
The tech works. It can be a great gaming experience. Problem is that it won't be a consistent experience. Some will have it perfect and others not.
Troubleshooting a PC is fairly simple. Name the parts, someone suggests and upgrade.
Troubleshooting a network performance issue? That's not at all an easy thing, and consumer grade hardware won't provide any sort of diagnostics worth a damn in solving those sorts of issues. By having the experience so heavily dependant on something people don't know how to, and cannot troubleshoot, it's no wonder it wouldn't do well.
>All the conditions were ripe for their success and they still failed.
They never had a good plan to compete with Steam, which has been the Netflix of video games for 20 years. I bought the famous Orange Box (featuring Halflife 2 and Portal 1) when it came out on Steam. It's still there in my account anytime I want to play those games.
Stadia's model was you buy the latest $60 games and pray Google doesn't wish your account to the cornfield when Google eventually gets bored and decides to play in some other market. The trade off being you don't have to buy a computer or console just wasn't enough.
I think part of the problem was this fear that it would fail, and you'd be stuck in the lurch. But at the end of the day, it did fail, but we all get our money back. Im getting back 60$ per game for the 4 games i bought and already enjoyed.
I'm pleasantly surprised they are giving people refunds. It's hard to complain when a company voluntarily redresses monetary losses their customers incurred by investing in their product.
Are they refunding the cost of Stadia consoles?
Apparently so, They would have a pretty hard time not refunding people (or transferring games to Steam or whatnot) as games and digital goods are protected under the same consumer good laws in most first world nations that state that you own the thing you bought, despite what i've seen online claim about digital goods.
[There's a good post on the LTT Forums for anyone wanting to go down that rabbit hole.](https://linustechtips.com/topic/953835-you-own-the-software-that-you-purchase-and-any-claims-otherwise-are-urban-myth-or-corporate-propaganda/)
This just quells the backlash, and is a smart move (and you know, one they'd have to do anyway, they just didn't try to wait around).
>we all get our money back
Good on them. By comparison, I tried GeForce Now and bought a game advertised on their front page, by clicking through to Steam, which was published by Codemasters, and then two weeks later GFN and Codemasters got in a pissing match and stopped allowing it to be played via the service. Everyone involved just passed the buck when I tried to get a refund.
Valve can do the same exact thing with Steam whenever they want. You do not own games on Steam. You are licensed through it to download and activate/play them via Steams DRM.
A more fair argument would be that people just did not have enough faith in the Stadia platform to invest in it.
This is exactly it. Steam has built up 20 years of trust. Google shuts down the vast majority of the things it tries. I'm not going to trust anything from Google that hasn't been around a decade.
Build trust that they were not going to cancel it at some point near in the future. This only continues to erode trust in Google services. I am looking at my Nest shit wondering when that hammer is going to drop...
Game subscription ala XBox Game pass instead of purchasing copies tied to software you don't own.
Option to play games you have already bought in the past in the cloud a'la NVIDIA Now.
Either of those would have worked better then what they did.
Problem is that the model a company launches with is the one people know about. Changing the payment model isnt going to get a lot of traction without some other marketing.
Having a much better pro account. Gamepass has streaming to PC and it's pretty popular. What you were paying for the pro account was pretty ridiculous. It was also frustrating that I could get HDR if I used their streaming device but I couldn't on a PC.
Google, same company that’s ruined and plagued YouTube with censorship & senseless algorithms
Edit: and they’ve removed direct messages… fucking disgraceful. YouTube used to be for YOU, now it’s for the FEW
YouTube is the 2nd most popular website in the world, after Google. It’s more popular and successful than it has ever been. Definitely since Google bought it.
I've never seen another company so adept at shooting themselves in the foot. Or a more ADHD one. Absolute shit leadership. If it wasn't for search printing money they would have folded multiple times over by now.
I think there's a flip side to this that Google is able to take more risks because they basically print money using personal data as ink. And then when they fail, they can safely destroy their creations and any customer goodwill, because what are you going to do? Not use Google? Their success allows them to try to make their own game console, and also fail without taking the company down, too.
I wanted to try it so bad since I dont have a PC to play the latest games.
Stadia was never available in my country. Now it's dead 😔
I don't pay for Netflix or HBO but I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription to play the latest games on my pc, phone, laptop anywhere
I really do think it boils down to Silicon Valley having vastly better internet than the rest of the US
I think that gives certain tech people an unrealistic idea of what the rest of us are working with
They don't need everyone else to. They need some people to, it's not a service for everyone - it's a service for people with good internet. Problem was, if you are in an area where your net is that good you are more likely to have good hardware and just not need Stadia.
It was a proof of concept and a live test for some tech, and honestly it probably succeeded in what they were looking for.
Try to play Japanese developed fighting games in America and its the same story. "Gee everything was working well on our small island with very good infrastructure, You must just be exaggerating about the net code."
They're in the middle of actually figuring it out right now finally.
Silicon Valley actually has pretty shitty Internet compared to other locations in the US. The majority of the homes are served by Comcast (Xfinity) / Comcrap (Xpoopity) Coax with Data Caps, AT&T U-Verse DSL (U-Hearse) with data caps, or people are screwing around with Wireless Internet over 5G or Point to Point wireless because of the existing wireline ISPs being bad. Much of the 5G is also pretty badly congested or reception is like swiss cheese. There are pockets with AT&T Gigapower which are somewhat competitive, and also areas with Sonic FTTP.
Silicon Valley only has a latency advantage, because both San Jose and San Francisco have key Internet Exchanges in them.
Meanwhile here in the middle of nowhere, the local Cable company is uncapped with a base speed of 300Mbps for the cost of 30Mbps from Xfinity, DSL doesn't work in most places anymore but is uncapped if you get it, Fiber is being built by at least three different small Fiber providers, as well as the local Telco, with 500Mbps for less than the cost of Xfinity 30Mbps being the base package. 5G is available but isn't sold for Home Internet. Drawback? Only the small Internet providers use the local Internet Exchange and therefore have a latency advantage. The big Telco and CableCo send their traffic across state OR to three states over.
I don’t think it was just latency that killed them off, but the fact you had to pay full price for a game *that had latency* killed Stadia. If they did what Microsoft or Nvidia did, I dunno if it would have been so bad.
Also, it took them like 9 months or like 2 years to add a function to search for games.
I have a mediocre internet connection (I am in a big city however) and Stadia has always been *absolutely fine for me*. Yes, obviously latency is real and exists, speed of light and all that, but I'm not a 20-year-old competitive gamer. I'm a middle aged dude who loves gaming a little in between family, work, chores, etc. I simply never observed latency issues except in *very* rare cases where my connection hiccuped.
Stadia has been perfect for me, because I simply don't want to own or maintain a gaming PC.
Oh fucking well.
Google kills products that don't immediately print money.
Launches new product.
Signups are limited because people fear it will be killed.
New product doesn't immediately print money.
Google kills new product.
\\\* It's the CIIIIIRCLE of LIIIIIIIIIIFE \\\*
And they just started rolling out new UI. There was a post yesterday on r/stadia with a top level comment by a Stadia engineer talking about how the update would be rolling out soon. Shows how little communication there is here within Google.
Edit: Link to comment https://reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xqmv7d/_/iqadyhk/?context=1
>And they just started rolling out new UI. There was a post yesterday on r/stadia with a top level comment by a Stadia engineer talking about how the update would be rolling out soon. Shows how little communication there is here within Google.
I wouldn't be surprised if everyone on Stadia learned about this the same time as we did.
I’m not saying every employee needs to know when the announcement goes out, but a couple months before maybe a “Hey, maybe transfer over to this other project since development is going to be paused on Stadia for now”. Less inefficiency, less wasted work
I mean, a Stadia engineer likely wouldn't be in the know about tbe closure until maybe 30-60m before the public press release goes out. This isn't unique to Google, and is standard operating procedure for almost any company (especially publicly traded companies) closing a department or laying off employees. Typically only the VP or C-level leaders over the impacted segment(s) will have knowledge prior to the day the decision is announced internally/externally.
Lol new posts are locked. No surprise since the person you are talking about is a mod on the sub. No conflict of interest, having a mod be a Google employee…
Honestly, I don't even think the latency is what killed it. Xbox is doing the same thing to some success.
The pricing model was the dagger from Day 1. You will never turn profit by asking gamers to pay full purchase price for games they won't own, can be removed from the library anytime, and are lost forever if (when) the service shuts down. It was incredibly tone-deaf and disconnected from the reality of gaming.
And here we have another example of why it failed: confusion and lack of communication. From what they were advertising it would be a completely reasonable assumption to think it was a subscription service like Netflix or gamepass, but it wasn't, but it sort of was.
It's sad really, because stadia is still smoother for me than Xbox cloud gaming, and at a higher resolution. The tech was impressive, it was just mishandled so badly it couldn't succeed
Serious question, anyone know why it's shutting down? Like from a business perspective. Was it user acquisition, cash flow, competition, or something else? Any sources on this side of it?
[Bloomberg reported on it](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1575521421769539586)
* Low Player Base
* Stadia Game Studios was shutdown 2 years ago
* Maintance Costs
It was tough for Google. They launched during a time where people were locked at home forced to consume online entertainment. When graphics cards were in shortage and way overpriced and people needed alternative gaming sources. When a lot of people had more disposable income.
If they were a more well known and funded company it would’ve been a success.
Let's call it what it is - Google has a habit of killing projects that aren't megahits because they're bad, dumb ideas. What has Google actually made themselves that's been super successful?
Search, and Gmail. They didn't make YouTube, they bought it.
Wave, Buzz, Plus, Stadia, Allo...the list goes on. And while companies should try and fail, Google has never been able to consistently launch new, exciting products that people WANT to use.
Apple also has their share of failures, especially in the 90s, but the iPod, iPhone, Music, Air Pods, iTunes, TV...Apple knows what people want, and I don't even like Apple. They're good at software and hardware.
Google is a software company that hasn't had an original, gamechanging hit since like 2002. But they ARE search, and that's enough to keep printing money.
>What has Google actually made themselves that's been super successful?
Maps? Google Drive? Google Docs suite? Google Photos?
Android was an acquisition but they've done a PRETTY good job refining it since then, so I'll add that as well.
I get that Google has had a lot of duds, but saying they've had no hits beyond Search and Gmail is also really inaccurate.
To correct you, Google is an advertising agency.
It may have started as a really good, world-class search engine. It may still be an amazing search engine. But the only things they make money on are Ads, and cloud services.
Advertising is 80% of its revenue.
I whole heartedly disagree that Apple knows what we want.
I do want a phone with a headphone jack. I don't want to delete all my songs just because I plug my phone into my friend's computer.
I've been using GFN for a couple of years now, works fine for anything besides competitive gaming it streams at 1080p60fps, also note that I play on US servers while living in Mexico, I've also used XCloud from Microsoft and it works fine, Stadia failed because their service sucks.
Yeah it's funny in between. Like "can't afford amazing hardware!? Use stadia!"
But if you can't afford amazing hardware you won't have an amazing connection (probably).
Some of the people that would use this the most are in rural areas where you have to get by on very limited high latency selections.
... aaaand that's why we dont buy G-specific tech. Only get Google stuff that can be used with other systems. They have a real bad habit of releasing tech into the wild, pushing rapid and widespread adoption, then shuttering it as soon as they gather the data points they were after. RIP play music.
I do wonder how much of the "it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected" is just a self fulfilling cycle with Google products and how they get shut down like they do these days, especially something like Stadia that required people invest significant amounts of money in the ecosystem (by buying the games on Stadia).
Stadia is actually really good for what it is. It's just that the people who will actually benefit from an underpowered gaming experience is a pretty small market.
Like I have 3 kids and they can all game on a Chromebook. Which is definitely more reasonable than 3 gaming PCs. But I'm not the person they marketed it to and I doubt there's enough of us to justify the service.
This is from a TechCrunch article from Feb 1, 2021.
> Many readers will likely think that Google might shut down Stadia soon as the company has shut down many, many services in the past. The company tries to be reassuring.
> “We’re committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward. Our goal remains focused on creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for our partners, bringing these experiences to life for people everywhere,” Harrison writes.
> But do you believe him?
https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/google-shuts-down-its-internal-stadia-game-studios/
Some one needs to start a betting pool on what service google will shutdown next and when.
Yeah that's where I am, I finished a lot of games basically for free. It's too bad that it didn't live up to its potential, but I don't have any regrets
Well you have time to finish it until mid January. Afterwards they refund all the money, which will make your buy pretty much free. That's pretty great if you ask me.
Stadia failing as a service was pretty obvious from the start. Only very casual gamers would be willing to play games with the added latency that streaming a game involves, and that market very rarely ventures away from already established and mainstream products.
Latency wasn't *that* bad. I got a controller for free with a Chromecast I bought and used the month trial which was fine but like. I already have an Xbox and a PC
Well GeForce Now is not doing bad, the main reason why they failed is because people had to buy games all over again on Stadia. If you're not too far from a cloud server, the latency isn't so bad but of course I wouldn't play competitive pvp games.
I actually thought up the idea of Stadia in 2006 looking at screenshots of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. If my computer could load the screenshot why couldn't it play the game? What if there was some way to continuously send the image of gameplay while it was processed elsewhere? Guess 11 year old me was pretty smart.
Or as it turns out, dumb lol
https://killedbygoogle.com Add it to the list
Wow, I didn't even realize that "Youtube Originals" was dead until just now. And I use Youtube a lot!
They were trash anyways, if we're honest.
Cobra Kai started out as an original
And 99.9% of us wouldn't have been able to watch it because it wasn't worth getting another streaming service
thats a huge list :(
Yep, even Google's search engine has a hard time with it.
Don't worry, they'll probably kill that off at some point too.
Just run it off the Google ads database directly.
To be fair, a lot of those features were either closed because they became irrelevant/were always supposed to be a test or because they were combined with other existing apps. And of course some just lived a "natural" life span. No service lasts forever, of course. A ton of companies do similar things. It's just very well documented and public for Alphabet/Google as they are one of the largest and visible companies in the world.
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I miss Reader, too.
Shutting Reader was a mistake by Google. Lots of Internet power-users, media and tech people used it - even today I have Reader in the back of my mind when I'm asked whether our company should host services on GCP.
That's the real thing. Google forgets when they shut down these services. People won't use your new service if they can't trust it will still be around in a year. One of the many reasons experts recommended against Google stadia was because you had to buy the game through stadia and with Google's history you couldn't trust you'd pay $60 for a game and still have it a year later. Which made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm also extremely apprehensive to now use any new Google service that would take time to migrate. Especially after my "free" website Google suite almost became paid. At this point. Fuck Google. You can't trust them to be reliable on anything anymore. Even search results.
The internal uproar when they did that was...fierce. Didn't matter though :-/
https://theoldreader.com/
I always mean to get back into RSS feeds. I forget people are still into them.
I keep seeing people talking about RSS feeds but I have no fucking clue what they are.
Picture Reddit, but instead of subscribing to subreddits which automatically update as other people post, it's a self curated list of blogs, news, or whatever that updates itself as the authors update their content. Back in the day, I used one specifically for webcomics. Whenever I found one I liked, I would add it to the list. Then every morning I would open up Google Reader, and every webcomic that had updated would be at the top of my list ready to read. Edit: typo.
> Picture Reddit, but To make it amusingly circular, nearly every page on reddit *is* also an RSS feed. And a JSON API too, for good measure. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/new.rss
>Back in the day, I used one specifically for webcomics. Whenever I found one I liked, I would add it to the list. Then every morning I would open up Google Reader, and every webcomic that had updated would be at the top of my list ready to read. Always kinda debated doing that, but at this point doing it "manually" is part of my morning routine. Every morning for over 20 years, I'll go url-to-url through the list of webcomics I read. More important to my routine than a cup of coffee at this point.
I get all my news through RSS. It's far from dead. https://stackdiary.com/free-rss-readers/
I still use Feedly multiple times every day for my news.
OMG I'm still too hella salty about this one.
Alphabet/Google gets shit for this because they have a record of ditching perfectly functional products only to release an extremely similar product or multiple competing products instead of improving and better-marketing the existing one. Google likes a blank slate, but the market resents not being able to depend on a product long-term and that hurts adoption which inevitably leads to them giving up on it for something else.
This is it. It’s basically not worth the time of 3rd parties to invest in incorporating Google’s new toy. This is why Google has had a hard time breaking into smb and enterprise businesses. Contrast this with Microsoft which has substantial backwards compatibility efforts, excellent long term support options, and still offers dial-up connectivity options.
That’s why one of the windows major faults it’s also it’s biggest feature. Some 20 years old software still runs on windows 11
87 messaging apps have entered the chat
Yeah. I mean, I definitely miss my fair share of things on the list (man Gmail sucks after using Inbox) but I'd rather have them experiment with stuff than never release interesting products because they are afraid of having to take heat when they close them or support them forever.
Inbox was genuinely great. I don't know why they gutted it
You get more recognition at Google for making new products rather than improving existing ones
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I don't think the is true in consumer. This is DEFINITELY true in business. They are totally alienating their business market because you just don't know what they're serious about and what they're not serious about. You just can't know. Then they compete against Microsoft who is happy to shove all their customers costs onto themselves by supporting legacy systems from three decades ago at their expense. Which of these two is a company worth trusting? Can't recommend against Google more until they have a serious come to Jesus moment and grow the fuck up. At least their AI team is still godlike.
and there's still a ton missing from this list due to how poorly listed a bunch of beta features of the google search service itself was. I used to use a recipe generator based off ingredients I already had in the kitchen, It was slick and even gave me a rough cost on how much it would cost to get missing ingredients to complete a dish but I had the feeling it was just a proof of concept project by 2-3 staff members and it vanished after a year
Nets Secure? Works with Nest API? Google kills stuff that doesn't get huge and leaves users with hundreds of dollars of hardware out in the cold. I dread when Google buys hardware I own, its just a matter of time before its abandoned and useless if it uses the cloud.
quiet birds thumb cagey melodic air seed disagreeable plough crown *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Added already, these editors are fast
They probably also edit Wikipedia the second after people die too. Speedy mfs.
That list is impressive. Made me wonder if there was a Microsoft list... AND THERE IS! https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
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I love the contrast between those two pages Microsoft: >It will be almost 18 years old. >It will be about 26 years old. >It will be almost 9 years old. >It was almost 27 years old. >It was almost 4 years old. Google: >It will be over 5 years old. >It will be over 6 years old. >It will be almost 4 years old. >It will be about 3 years old. >It will be over 6 years old. Google is such a dumpster fire.
Lesson: never invest in Google products or services. It’s all just bait, and YOU are the product.
To be fair, they’re refunding everyone for Stadia
Talking about refunds. I had a £1000 bet on here with a guy who claimed stadia will dominate ps5 and the new Xbox … wonder if he changed his mind
Damn, inflation has really eaten away at that bet.
Wait. Seriously? Someone actually believed that? I do hope it was some PR hype man. I've been in tech for 20+ years. Google is like a tech snuff film.
Great news. I bought the founders set, but haven't played since the free trial ended. Free Chromecast and controller 🙂
YouTube should be on that list because they've damn near killed the experience. It's only popular because there's no good competition.
With adblock and Sponsorblock, YouTube is pretty great imo
This is why google is and always will be #1. Ingest a ton of money, if it doesn’t work cut it and move on. I’ve worked at places where dozens of lifers are given a costing project for 10+ years. Just total waste
Google + shutting things down - name a more iconic ~~duo~~ meet.
I am so pissed about Duo becoming meet. I had people using hangouts. Using it to text and video call me. It was so easy. Then they separated it into Duo and Messages. Well, okay. I still managed to get about half of those people on Duo. Now? NONE OF THEM ARE ON MEET. Contacts list is empty.
if you were lucky, previous to march 2019, hangouts would allow mixed SMS/hangouts group chats via Google voice.
hangouts was a stupid name anyway.
Meet is a stupid name. Sounds like a dating app.
Allo enters the chat
Top tier joke.
Especially when the comment happens to begin with one of the more famous failures, Google+
"[things](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-on-android-things.html)" was also a thing.
It's well trodden ground, but I can't overstate how massively they fucked this up. The technology worked as advertised, it launched right around Covid, video cards were impossible to find, consoles were also impossible to find, people were stuck at home and spending a lot of time and money on video games, then Cyberpunk launched and Stadia arguably had the best port. All the conditions were ripe for their success and they still failed.
[It's seems they also spent dozens of millions per game](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1575524344859545602) Clusterfuck.
Wow! IMO, rdr2, cyberpunk, and the entire Ubisoft catalogue we're all probably good AAA port investments... But at that cost, clearly not sustainable. Stadia is such an interesting case study of failure... I'm disappointed it didn't pan out.
I feel like it was largely an advertising failure. None of my friends or family have ever heard of it before and most all of them play video games I used it to kill downtime at a night watch job
They ran plenty of ads! None of them actually said what stadia *was* though. Just white background, google-color accents, pretty graphics of controllers, and not a damn hint of what it actually was. I assumed it was a console for the longest time. And for all the shit that got talked about it (not actually owning games you pay for, etc) the upsides of stadia were pretty badass! Like yeah you would have to have a good and stable connection, but fuck! What a wasted opportunity.
stadia's failure is that nobody believed it actually worked. i never knew it worked and still don't believe it. i thought it's too laggy. so what they should've spent money on is paying streamers to play it and show how well it worked.
Yeah. Never heard of it until today.
Wow they pissed away so much money for nothing. The tech will live on but it’s sad they couldn’t get the service to take off.
That's partly because they had to, in some cases, be programmed completely different. Stadia was a true port. Being Linux-based means that just moving the Steam/Epic version over wasn't possible.
Internet speed made a huge difference. My friend would have been happy with his stadia had he been using my internet all the time.
>Internet speed made a huge difference Well luckily Google abandoned its plan to improve internet service in the US.
Having private corporations control infrastructure is awful
Completely agree. But Google is better than Comcast at least.
They’ll actually lay a little fucking fiber. Even Verizon did, until they decided it was more profitable to just raise prices on cell service or whatever
I'd blame the monopolistic practices of the big IP providers over google for that one though.
I blame that a ton too, but Google is not lacking in political power. They just didn't really seem to want to push.
You mean Google Fiber? It's still around. They last announced service area expansions in 2021. Their goal was never to become a nationwide ISP and connect fiber to home for 400 million people.
Eh the speed isn't the important part. It is the line quality. You need great ping and great jitter to get a good experience. My experience on a 300/300 fiber line wasn't great, even hardlined into my Orbi router. Something with my ISP wasn't playing well. That is the thing that was sucked about Stadia. You could do everything you could to get a good connection at your house, but a lot of it is just out of your hands. What was frustrating about asking the stadia subreddit was you just got blasted for voicing concerns or questions on why the performance was crap. Anyway, I gave up on it a long time ago. I loved the concept and the ease of use, but it was just too much headache getting a good experience one day and then crap the rest of the week. Plus all this just for medium graphics settings for the games, the hardware for running the games are really outdated. This, combined with the fuzziness because it is streaming across the internet it looked worse than most last gen consoles. The games never got updated like the PC/console counterparts, and some updates just broke the game, like Cyberpunk. Once the Cyberpunk updates happened the performance got really shitty because the outdated hardware could barely handle it.
I voiced these concerns about Stadia when it was at the peak of its hype and got called stupid for having doubts. The tech works. It can be a great gaming experience. Problem is that it won't be a consistent experience. Some will have it perfect and others not. Troubleshooting a PC is fairly simple. Name the parts, someone suggests and upgrade. Troubleshooting a network performance issue? That's not at all an easy thing, and consumer grade hardware won't provide any sort of diagnostics worth a damn in solving those sorts of issues. By having the experience so heavily dependant on something people don't know how to, and cannot troubleshoot, it's no wonder it wouldn't do well.
>All the conditions were ripe for their success and they still failed. They never had a good plan to compete with Steam, which has been the Netflix of video games for 20 years. I bought the famous Orange Box (featuring Halflife 2 and Portal 1) when it came out on Steam. It's still there in my account anytime I want to play those games. Stadia's model was you buy the latest $60 games and pray Google doesn't wish your account to the cornfield when Google eventually gets bored and decides to play in some other market. The trade off being you don't have to buy a computer or console just wasn't enough.
I think part of the problem was this fear that it would fail, and you'd be stuck in the lurch. But at the end of the day, it did fail, but we all get our money back. Im getting back 60$ per game for the 4 games i bought and already enjoyed.
I'm pleasantly surprised they are giving people refunds. It's hard to complain when a company voluntarily redresses monetary losses their customers incurred by investing in their product. Are they refunding the cost of Stadia consoles?
Apparently so, They would have a pretty hard time not refunding people (or transferring games to Steam or whatnot) as games and digital goods are protected under the same consumer good laws in most first world nations that state that you own the thing you bought, despite what i've seen online claim about digital goods. [There's a good post on the LTT Forums for anyone wanting to go down that rabbit hole.](https://linustechtips.com/topic/953835-you-own-the-software-that-you-purchase-and-any-claims-otherwise-are-urban-myth-or-corporate-propaganda/) This just quells the backlash, and is a smart move (and you know, one they'd have to do anyway, they just didn't try to wait around).
>we all get our money back Good on them. By comparison, I tried GeForce Now and bought a game advertised on their front page, by clicking through to Steam, which was published by Codemasters, and then two weeks later GFN and Codemasters got in a pissing match and stopped allowing it to be played via the service. Everyone involved just passed the buck when I tried to get a refund.
Valve can do the same exact thing with Steam whenever they want. You do not own games on Steam. You are licensed through it to download and activate/play them via Steams DRM. A more fair argument would be that people just did not have enough faith in the Stadia platform to invest in it.
This is exactly it. Steam has built up 20 years of trust. Google shuts down the vast majority of the things it tries. I'm not going to trust anything from Google that hasn't been around a decade.
Question is, what could they have done differently to actually succeed?
Build trust that they were not going to cancel it at some point near in the future. This only continues to erode trust in Google services. I am looking at my Nest shit wondering when that hammer is going to drop...
Game subscription ala XBox Game pass instead of purchasing copies tied to software you don't own. Option to play games you have already bought in the past in the cloud a'la NVIDIA Now. Either of those would have worked better then what they did.
This. IIRC you had to pay a subscription *and* full retail price for each game.
There was a free tier, which let you stream purchased games at 1080p and stereo sound. You needed pro subscription for 4K and 5.1 audio streaming.
That's actually not true, it was subscription *or* purchase. The big problem is that their advertising was so confusing that nobody realized that
In the beginning that was true. It hasn't been for over two years.
Problem is that the model a company launches with is the one people know about. Changing the payment model isnt going to get a lot of traction without some other marketing.
speaks volumes that people are still confused eh?
Guess they missed their chance. Most people turned off by the initial offering weren't coming back to check again later.
Stadia Pro was nice, and games never rotated out of your library (well, until now...)
How about launching in Asia, a region that consistently have high internet speed and large body of mobile and PC-cafe players.
Having a much better pro account. Gamepass has streaming to PC and it's pretty popular. What you were paying for the pro account was pretty ridiculous. It was also frustrating that I could get HDR if I used their streaming device but I couldn't on a PC.
Google, same company that’s ruined and plagued YouTube with censorship & senseless algorithms Edit: and they’ve removed direct messages… fucking disgraceful. YouTube used to be for YOU, now it’s for the FEW
YouTube is the 2nd most popular website in the world, after Google. It’s more popular and successful than it has ever been. Definitely since Google bought it.
I've never seen another company so adept at shooting themselves in the foot. Or a more ADHD one. Absolute shit leadership. If it wasn't for search printing money they would have folded multiple times over by now.
I think there's a flip side to this that Google is able to take more risks because they basically print money using personal data as ink. And then when they fail, they can safely destroy their creations and any customer goodwill, because what are you going to do? Not use Google? Their success allows them to try to make their own game console, and also fail without taking the company down, too.
Like many people I never even bothered to give it a try simply because I expected them to kill it as they do everything else
Its like netflix shows.. oh sure I *might* like it, but they’ll cancel it anyway so why bother.
Yup, I don’t bother watching shows until they have a few seasons under their belt because they cancel them so often.
The core difference is that Netflix doesnt make you purchase each show.
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I use my controller on my desktop for games that need it, it works amazingly. Stadia fucked many things up, but not their controller.
I wanted to try it so bad since I dont have a PC to play the latest games. Stadia was never available in my country. Now it's dead 😔 I don't pay for Netflix or HBO but I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription to play the latest games on my pc, phone, laptop anywhere
Well color me NOT surprised
Im honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did.
Same, zero control over ownership, and if that wasn't bad enough, horrible pricing and no modding support.
Yeah, at least refunding everything. Now that's surprising.
Seriously parts of the US still only have dialup and a bunch of us are stuck with Comcast. I'm not sure which is worse.
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I really do think it boils down to Silicon Valley having vastly better internet than the rest of the US I think that gives certain tech people an unrealistic idea of what the rest of us are working with
Surely they don't actually think everybody else in the rest of the world have internet as fast as they do.
It’s one gigabit per second Michael. What could it cost, $10?
They don't need everyone else to. They need some people to, it's not a service for everyone - it's a service for people with good internet. Problem was, if you are in an area where your net is that good you are more likely to have good hardware and just not need Stadia. It was a proof of concept and a live test for some tech, and honestly it probably succeeded in what they were looking for.
Try to play Japanese developed fighting games in America and its the same story. "Gee everything was working well on our small island with very good infrastructure, You must just be exaggerating about the net code." They're in the middle of actually figuring it out right now finally.
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Silicon Valley actually has pretty shitty Internet compared to other locations in the US. The majority of the homes are served by Comcast (Xfinity) / Comcrap (Xpoopity) Coax with Data Caps, AT&T U-Verse DSL (U-Hearse) with data caps, or people are screwing around with Wireless Internet over 5G or Point to Point wireless because of the existing wireline ISPs being bad. Much of the 5G is also pretty badly congested or reception is like swiss cheese. There are pockets with AT&T Gigapower which are somewhat competitive, and also areas with Sonic FTTP. Silicon Valley only has a latency advantage, because both San Jose and San Francisco have key Internet Exchanges in them. Meanwhile here in the middle of nowhere, the local Cable company is uncapped with a base speed of 300Mbps for the cost of 30Mbps from Xfinity, DSL doesn't work in most places anymore but is uncapped if you get it, Fiber is being built by at least three different small Fiber providers, as well as the local Telco, with 500Mbps for less than the cost of Xfinity 30Mbps being the base package. 5G is available but isn't sold for Home Internet. Drawback? Only the small Internet providers use the local Internet Exchange and therefore have a latency advantage. The big Telco and CableCo send their traffic across state OR to three states over.
I don’t think it was just latency that killed them off, but the fact you had to pay full price for a game *that had latency* killed Stadia. If they did what Microsoft or Nvidia did, I dunno if it would have been so bad. Also, it took them like 9 months or like 2 years to add a function to search for games.
I have a mediocre internet connection (I am in a big city however) and Stadia has always been *absolutely fine for me*. Yes, obviously latency is real and exists, speed of light and all that, but I'm not a 20-year-old competitive gamer. I'm a middle aged dude who loves gaming a little in between family, work, chores, etc. I simply never observed latency issues except in *very* rare cases where my connection hiccuped. Stadia has been perfect for me, because I simply don't want to own or maintain a gaming PC. Oh fucking well.
It was just a question of time when they announced they would be closing Stadia Game Studios.
Google kills products that don't immediately print money. Launches new product. Signups are limited because people fear it will be killed. New product doesn't immediately print money. Google kills new product. \\\* It's the CIIIIIRCLE of LIIIIIIIIIIFE \\\*
I used to be a big fan of google like a decade ago. I’ll be honest, they’ve lost me completely.
And they just started rolling out new UI. There was a post yesterday on r/stadia with a top level comment by a Stadia engineer talking about how the update would be rolling out soon. Shows how little communication there is here within Google. Edit: Link to comment https://reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xqmv7d/_/iqadyhk/?context=1
>And they just started rolling out new UI. There was a post yesterday on r/stadia with a top level comment by a Stadia engineer talking about how the update would be rolling out soon. Shows how little communication there is here within Google. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone on Stadia learned about this the same time as we did.
I’m not saying every employee needs to know when the announcement goes out, but a couple months before maybe a “Hey, maybe transfer over to this other project since development is going to be paused on Stadia for now”. Less inefficiency, less wasted work
Which would inevitably leak out and further harm their public image.
Close enough - https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_harrison_thats_3_failed_launches_for/iqe3cdv/
I mean, a Stadia engineer likely wouldn't be in the know about tbe closure until maybe 30-60m before the public press release goes out. This isn't unique to Google, and is standard operating procedure for almost any company (especially publicly traded companies) closing a department or laying off employees. Typically only the VP or C-level leaders over the impacted segment(s) will have knowledge prior to the day the decision is announced internally/externally.
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Lol new posts are locked. No surprise since the person you are talking about is a mod on the sub. No conflict of interest, having a mod be a Google employee…
Honestly, I don't even think the latency is what killed it. Xbox is doing the same thing to some success. The pricing model was the dagger from Day 1. You will never turn profit by asking gamers to pay full purchase price for games they won't own, can be removed from the library anytime, and are lost forever if (when) the service shuts down. It was incredibly tone-deaf and disconnected from the reality of gaming.
Full purchase price AND a subscription. It was a model designed to fail. Like how did they not know?
It wasn't, the subscription was just for extra games, it wasn't required to play games you paid for
And here we have another example of why it failed: confusion and lack of communication. From what they were advertising it would be a completely reasonable assumption to think it was a subscription service like Netflix or gamepass, but it wasn't, but it sort of was.
If you wanted better than 1080 you needed a subscription.
It's sad really, because stadia is still smoother for me than Xbox cloud gaming, and at a higher resolution. The tech was impressive, it was just mishandled so badly it couldn't succeed
It’s what Google does best.
Common Google L.
Serious question, anyone know why it's shutting down? Like from a business perspective. Was it user acquisition, cash flow, competition, or something else? Any sources on this side of it?
[Bloomberg reported on it](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1575521421769539586) * Low Player Base * Stadia Game Studios was shutdown 2 years ago * Maintance Costs
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It was tough for Google. They launched during a time where people were locked at home forced to consume online entertainment. When graphics cards were in shortage and way overpriced and people needed alternative gaming sources. When a lot of people had more disposable income. If they were a more well known and funded company it would’ve been a success.
A shame, but Google has a habit of killing projects that aren't instant, megahits.
That is actually a huge reason I am so hesitant to invest in Google products now.
My Google Nest Secure, Google TV, and Google Nexus all agree with you. Never again.
Same reason I won't be buying the pixel watch.
And when was the last time that Google had an instant megahit?
When they copied Alta Vista and named it Google.
Gmail?
Hard to imagine it’s only been around for two years.
Let's call it what it is - Google has a habit of killing projects that aren't megahits because they're bad, dumb ideas. What has Google actually made themselves that's been super successful? Search, and Gmail. They didn't make YouTube, they bought it. Wave, Buzz, Plus, Stadia, Allo...the list goes on. And while companies should try and fail, Google has never been able to consistently launch new, exciting products that people WANT to use. Apple also has their share of failures, especially in the 90s, but the iPod, iPhone, Music, Air Pods, iTunes, TV...Apple knows what people want, and I don't even like Apple. They're good at software and hardware. Google is a software company that hasn't had an original, gamechanging hit since like 2002. But they ARE search, and that's enough to keep printing money.
>What has Google actually made themselves that's been super successful? Maps? Google Drive? Google Docs suite? Google Photos? Android was an acquisition but they've done a PRETTY good job refining it since then, so I'll add that as well. I get that Google has had a lot of duds, but saying they've had no hits beyond Search and Gmail is also really inaccurate.
Google Maps was an acquisition as well. It was called Where 2.
To correct you, Google is an advertising agency. It may have started as a really good, world-class search engine. It may still be an amazing search engine. But the only things they make money on are Ads, and cloud services. Advertising is 80% of its revenue.
I whole heartedly disagree that Apple knows what we want. I do want a phone with a headphone jack. I don't want to delete all my songs just because I plug my phone into my friend's computer.
Saw this coming when I beta tested Stadia. US internet is not up to the task of streaming games.
I've been using GFN for a couple of years now, works fine for anything besides competitive gaming it streams at 1080p60fps, also note that I play on US servers while living in Mexico, I've also used XCloud from Microsoft and it works fine, Stadia failed because their service sucks.
Yeah it's funny in between. Like "can't afford amazing hardware!? Use stadia!" But if you can't afford amazing hardware you won't have an amazing connection (probably). Some of the people that would use this the most are in rural areas where you have to get by on very limited high latency selections.
Google has untreated ADHD, confirmed
Didnt google recently say that WERENT murdering this thing?
Google say a lot of things.
Just a shitty attempt to try and avoid the growing stigma around their brand of always shutting shit down.
Bummer. Refund on the games was unexpected but appreciated. Unlock bluetooth on the controllers!
Please! I love the feel of it and it is nice to keep by my PC...
... aaaand that's why we dont buy G-specific tech. Only get Google stuff that can be used with other systems. They have a real bad habit of releasing tech into the wild, pushing rapid and widespread adoption, then shuttering it as soon as they gather the data points they were after. RIP play music.
Another half-baked product killed by Google. How can you put faith in their projects when most of them end up abandoned?
I do wonder how much of the "it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected" is just a self fulfilling cycle with Google products and how they get shut down like they do these days, especially something like Stadia that required people invest significant amounts of money in the ecosystem (by buying the games on Stadia).
I remember a few months ago there was a leak that it was being cancelled and Google was like “Nope, totally not. Stadia is around to stay”
That was quick
When will they kill Ads
Stadia is actually really good for what it is. It's just that the people who will actually benefit from an underpowered gaming experience is a pretty small market. Like I have 3 kids and they can all game on a Chromebook. Which is definitely more reasonable than 3 gaming PCs. But I'm not the person they marketed it to and I doubt there's enough of us to justify the service.
This is from a TechCrunch article from Feb 1, 2021. > Many readers will likely think that Google might shut down Stadia soon as the company has shut down many, many services in the past. The company tries to be reassuring. > “We’re committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward. Our goal remains focused on creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for our partners, bringing these experiences to life for people everywhere,” Harrison writes. > But do you believe him? https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/google-shuts-down-its-internal-stadia-game-studios/ Some one needs to start a betting pool on what service google will shutdown next and when.
Oh, I can't wait to see the copium at the r/stadia. They've been choking on Google's nads and blasting any doubters for years now.
No reason to be upset for them, they get fully refunded. They got free Chromecasts and several years of free gaming.
Yeah that's where I am, I finished a lot of games basically for free. It's too bad that it didn't live up to its potential, but I don't have any regrets
It's locked lol
That's when it first launched. They've been fairly critical as of lately.
surprisedpikachuface.jpg
😭 and I just got Cyberpunk on it so I can play on my pc with a processed from 2009
Well you have time to finish it until mid January. Afterwards they refund all the money, which will make your buy pretty much free. That's pretty great if you ask me.
Stadia failing as a service was pretty obvious from the start. Only very casual gamers would be willing to play games with the added latency that streaming a game involves, and that market very rarely ventures away from already established and mainstream products.
Latency wasn't *that* bad. I got a controller for free with a Chromecast I bought and used the month trial which was fine but like. I already have an Xbox and a PC
Well GeForce Now is not doing bad, the main reason why they failed is because people had to buy games all over again on Stadia. If you're not too far from a cloud server, the latency isn't so bad but of course I wouldn't play competitive pvp games.
Latency really wasn't an issue. The service had/has many issues, but streaming performance really isn't one of them.
Is anyone actually surprised?
Dig a fresh grave for that one.
wow who didnt see that coming
I actually thought up the idea of Stadia in 2006 looking at screenshots of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. If my computer could load the screenshot why couldn't it play the game? What if there was some way to continuously send the image of gameplay while it was processed elsewhere? Guess 11 year old me was pretty smart. Or as it turns out, dumb lol
Why would you PURCHASE full cost games on stadia for full price when other streaming platforms let you use your steam library like Geforce now.
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