I think of what a missed opportunity Stadia was because they didn't have a culture where people who are knowledgeable about game dev were listened to.
Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud and Stadia could have done the same for game streaming -- any new platform needs it's Super Mario Brothers that makes you rethink what games can be, otherwise players will ignore it.
I was also thinking about how MS Flight Simulator used all of that satellite imagery. You can’t tell me that someone couldn’t find an awesome game using their maps and street view horde which by now includes 3D models of a ton of places, but I don’t see anyone betting on Google for a critical dependency until they have a new CEO and convincing culture change.
Definitely, imagine coming to game studios talking them into rewriting into Linux/Vulkan, using command line and gdb, when the culture is using Windows and Visual Studio, including the devkits plugins for Sony and Nintendo consoles.
This with Google's background in long term investments.
And to come back to my point, many of the talks I was referring to, were in the context of Android games and Stadia, most still available online.
If you had to define one characteristic of Google, it is "they just don't listen". I think it comes from a viewpoint of social status in which "high status people talk and low status people listen" and they think they can maintain high status if they only never listen. (Wouldn't want to become a low-status company like Microsoft that listens sometimes)
I'd contrast that to Meta which has been through various waves of scathing criticism and often comes across as responsive, for instance they've listened a lot to devs about weaknesses in the Quest platform.
Steve Yegge had an interesting perspective that Google as a company is incredibly arrogant, but is staffed with humble individuals. I can't see how that persists though, without their people getting cocky, or at least ignorant and out of touch. None of these scenarios ends with a responsive company that listens to stakeholders and acts in their best interests.
Systems of standardized evaluation inevitably get captured by the masters of self-presentation who, in our culture, are narcissists and psychopaths.
The person who is stuck at the bottom will be humble but as you go up systems like that filter for morally worse people. You might as well try summoning demons.
> Definitely, imagine coming to game studios talking them into rewriting into Linux/Vulkan, using command line and gdb, when the culture is using Windows and Visual Studio, including the devkits plugins for Sony and Nintendo consoles.
And yet towards the end Stadia had a plethora of games from multiple big name studios (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar) and a ton of indie games.
Where Google screwed up with Stadia was expecting it to hit big immediately, being a bit slow with games, not talking enough about it and the games that were actually on it, not advertising what their shutdown plan is.
The vast vast vast majority of Stadia negative commentary was about how Google will shut it down, and "there are no games". The second point wasn't true for the majority of the platform's existence, but nobody bothered to check because they were afraid of Google killing it. If everyone knew Google will reimburse all game purchases, and they advertised stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, EA's latest hits, and they managed to bring in the big studios a bit earlier (when I started using it about a year in, RDR2 was the only big game I cared about; GTA V would have been massive to have too), it would have been a massive hit. A lot of people would game casually on a basically-no-hardware-required platform.
To this day Xbox Cloud Gaming isn't close, performance and UX wise. GeForce Now is good performance wise, but UX is meh. Stadia was a golden opportunity for Google but they just blew it.
I really don't remember a plethora, rather some games.
Go search for last edition of Stadia developer conference, where something like Proton for Stadia was announced, alongside the acknowledgement it wasn't working as expected.
> I really don't remember a plethora, rather some games
Ubisoft's whole catalogue going all the way back to Black Flag, RDR2, EA's latest titles (FIFA, Star Wars), Cyberpunk, and tons of indie games (I had Premium, every month I got ~2 new indie games; by the end I had something like 50+ games).
They demoed some pretty cool tech that is really only possible via streaming and then nobody leveraged it so Stadia was just another boring game streaming service.
To be specific: Google could have deployed large games to large cloud services with a large number of GPUs attached. Such a system could support a world with a working set of 128GB or more and draw all the graphics for all the players with everything closely coupled (like very big couch multiplayer with multiple screens!)
Wargaming it though there is no such thing as a "128GB world" from the player's perspective and for a long time high-end games have used many tricks to shoehorn huge worlds into small boxes such as
which was released for the PS2 with just 36MB of RAM! A "128GB world" that is cheaply developed could probably be crunched into a 8GB world that looks good enough with an expensive development process (you need much more out of your systems programmers and artists.) To make something that's truly a different experience you need a "2TB world" shoehorned into a 128GB world which would be an expensive proposition.
I don't think Google could have talked any game dev shop capable of that sort of thing into doing it, it was something Google was going to have to do itself. They could have afforded it. And they could have entirely changed people's expectations about games.
where you can walk through all the doors. A single SMP computer (kinda like couch multiplayer but with multiple screens attached) would run the whole thing which would put a limit on the player count, I can't see it exceeding 100 but the selling point would be the complexity of the world. If anybody could build a gaming cluster that could scale up to more players it would be Google.
Not to beat a dead horse, but looking at Microsoft or Sony, when they come up with rare or exclusive mechanisms they'll straight pay the game devs to specifically develop for it, to bridge the financial gap. Not just offer reduced store fees.
And Google was already pouring money into Stadia on the infra side, hell they could have bought a whole studio to make games tailored for Stadia.
Then they didn't.
As a bystander, Stadia looked to me as the most egregious dropping of the ball, in a field where reputation is worth so much.
They spent a really large amount of money getting studios to port, and then proceeded to be the worst partners ever, so nobody continued when the incentives went away.
> Stadia was just another boring game streaming service
Only it actually worked (unlike Microsoft's poor excuse of an attempt at the time, it's finally decent), and it was cheaper and with better UX than GeForce Now. For a few years it was unquestionably the best.
Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud and Stadia could have done the same for game streaming -- any new platform needs it's Super Mario Brothers that makes you rethink what games can be, otherwise players will ignore it.