I think it saves a ton of goodwill. Yes, you’re taking a platform from people, but it’s much better to not take their money too. Nobody is losing their livelihood, it’s a gaming service that can easily be replaced.

I guess they&#x27;re keeping the subscription fees for those who subscribed, not sure what percent of their revenue that would have been. All in all the total sales are probably paltry relative to the investment they&#x27;ve made in it (though surely they&#x27;ll find other uses for the servers and tech), so it&#x27;s not a big sacrifice to give that back to avoid anger and lawsuits

1. Gamers are particularly vindictive2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding &quot;don&#x27;t even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years&quot; into broad public consciousness3. It&#x27;s an enormous market and they know they&#x27;ll want to try again4. Maybe it&#x27;s relatively not that much money. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two people who&#x27;d ever even heard of Stadia

It&#x27;s not out of character. They did exactly the same thing for &quot;Google Offers,&quot; the old Groupon competitor from a decade ago. They refunded ALL of the purchased deals, even the ones that had been redeemed.

People were extremely cautious about stadia from day 1 because while Google may be the single most capable company of actually making cloud gaming workable, this specific product required a lot of money input that had a fairly good chance of being completely wiped out based on Google&#x27;s track record.With this, next time there&#x27;s a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying &quot;yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia&quot;

The simple answer is that it&#x27;s legal hedging. They don&#x27;t want anything related to this closure of Stadia to lead to a lawsuit that might impact the concept of software licensing, particularly in the EU. This is a move out of pure self-interest (not that I see anything particularly wrong with that).

I&#x27;m really curious the calculation here. That&#x27;s a lot of money, and I&#x27;m certainly glad they&#x27;re doing it, but feels both out of character for Google, and I&#x27;m surprised they have the budget allocated to just &quot;doing the right thing&quot;. What goodwill is this saving that they aren&#x27;t burning by shutting down Stadia?

It would be great if they could somehow open up the API of the controllers, they are nice.

Bandwidth isn&#x27;t that important with game streaming after ~40-70 Mbps, latency and jitter (essentially latency consistency) is.

I&#x27;ve used Stadia for the past year exclusively and it&#x27;s been fine 99% of the time. I guess I&#x27;m relieved from defending Stadia duty now though, sigh

I&#x27;d be shocked if their contracts&#x2F;EULA wasn&#x27;t structured to avoid risk of suit around something like this. Shutting down a live service feels pretty defensible as not a crime or tort, and they could almost definitely fight the lawsuit for less than this costs in refunds, which makes it all the weirder.

Anytime I see an asymmetric upload bandwidth like 600&#x2F;100, I assume the ISP is just advertising temporary burst speeds and does not actually allocate enough upload bandwidth to the neighborhood for people to sustain usage at 100Mbps.

Speed alone isn&#x27;t what matters here - latency and jitter are more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is meaningless.I&#x27;ve played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might&#x27;ve worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.Is it possible for the average user who doesn&#x27;t have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it&#x27;s a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don&#x27;t expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP&#x27;s network or the customer-premises equipment), people don&#x27;t know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they&#x27;ll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn&#x27;t live up to expectations.Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.

I’m surprised, but I’m also glad they are doing this. It could be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5 minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished product they shipped thinking they’ll solve it. But the reality is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were barely playable. I’m talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps upload speed.

Probably the cost is small compared to their development budget.

I think hardware was a loss-leader anyway. They were generously giving them out for free. Games are probably the biggest loss for them as a majority of that money was handed off to publishers.

Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones, IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don&#x27;t recall), and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they drastically overestimate how many people would buy their hardware.

Maybe it is cheap. Any idea how many units they sold?

Kudos to Google for doing right by their customers without being prompted.  They could’ve said “$5 off a Nest Thermostat” or some crap and instead they manned up.

Not quite hardware&#x2F;software sales, but a lot of people pegged Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the beginning of the year. It&#x27;s also unclear how many of those break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-game-once-and-play-it-now users.Here&#x27;s one that showed their work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allstadia.com&#x2F;how-many-users-does-google-stadia-have" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allstadia.com&#x2F;how-many-users-does-google-stadia-have</a>

Does anyone have sales numbers on hardware and software?If the actual sales were low (and that&#x27;s part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they&#x27;ll get refunds. And maybe it&#x27;ll build momentum for them.

Most Google products are free. That&#x27;s the difference.

Yeah, if I had known this would be how they would have handled a hypothetical shutdown, I would have very happily used the service. Instead I signed up for GeForce Now since I can buy games through Steam and play them there. The main thing that stopped me from going with Stadia instead was that I was pretty confident that at some point it would shut down and I&#x27;d lose access to $xxx worth of games. If they had promised up front to do this in case of failure, maybe it wouldn&#x27;t have failed.

This is the exact reason that I don’t mind purchasing Amazon’s experiments. If it doesn’t work out, I get my money back and Amazon has more data for product dev

I&#x27;m a Stadia user, and Google&#x27;s handling of the shutdown of Google Play Music is what gave me confidence to purchase anything on Stadia (~$500 on a quick review).  I actually thought we&#x27;d be sent personal links of our games, which would live-on in Google&#x27;s white-list stadia product called Google Stream - they did something similar for GPM which merged into Youtube Music.  I&#x27;m fine with a refund though.

I think it begins to address mistrust of new Google products. Which is worth a lot to Google.If they consistently take this approach for other cancellations, it could change the the common view from:&quot;why use this? They&#x27;re just going to shut it down in a few years anyway&quot;to:&quot;oh neat, Google&#x27;s experimenting with something new. Let me try it out. If it doesn&#x27;t work out, they&#x27;ll take care of me.&quot;

It&#x27;s a remarkable decision to refund! I&#x27;m assuming all the game developers are keeping their revenue from Stadia gameplay, so it&#x27;s a meaningful net loss for Google overall. Maybe not that much though; I hope someone publishes an accounting.

&gt;That can&#x27;t be cheap.Yeah, seriously.I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed &quot;normally&quot; for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn&#x27;t really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.And now I&#x27;m getting a 50€ refund?

My main computer is a MacBook 2103 running Linux. Stadia was my only way to play games. I’m kinda mad I’m losing my save progress on some games.Ironically I will probably use my refund to buy a steam deck.

It&#x27;s probably cheaper than the lawsuits.

If you actually get access for the term of the subscription you paid for, I don&#x27;t see an issue with not refunding subscription fees.

The Ars Technica article about this notes a few caveats:- They are not refunding the &#x27;pro&#x27; subscription charges- They are not refunding hardware purchases made from 3rd partiesThe first is a bit sus, the second does make sense unfortunately.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;google-stadia-officially-shuts-down-january-2023-will-refund-game-purchases&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;google-stadia-offici...</a>

I deleted my Stadia account a few months ago, and it had $400 in purchases. I assume that I won’t be getting the refund. Oh well, RIP.

While inevitable, I am impressed they are refunding all purchases, including hardware. That can&#x27;t be cheap.

Agreed. The upfront cost of games and a new Stadia-specific controller was too much. I subscribed to PS Now to play Spider-Man. I still had to buy a PlayStation controller, but it was reusable for other PC games.Ironically, I am now only subscribed to a visit GeForce Now, which requires game purchases. This is primarily due to Sony’s lack of macOS support for PS Now, and my owning an M1 with no Bootcamp support.

I think there would have been more interest if they didn&#x27;t launch with folks having to the purchase games instead of it just being a subscription plan like most were expecting. Of course, pure subscriptions came later, but that was an odd way to roll it out.

&gt; It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive games.Stadia was cool and I think there is a future for this sort of gaming in some genres and for some audiences, but I play fighting games and it absolutely did not work &quot;fantastic&quot; for them, even living in Boston and having a sporting symmetric-gigabit connection.

Everyone based it on inaccurate predictions though, namely that it wouldn&#x27;t work. It worked fantastic even for the most latency sensitive games.

Yup, that&#x27;s exactly what everyone expected since the beginning. And that&#x27;s why publishers were not very interested, because they always suspected that&#x27;s what would happen. Why invest when Google will get bored and shut it down in a couple years?

I think you&#x27;re probably spot on about the latter. Besides, attempting to find out if their reputation has been damaged in a measurable way wouldn&#x27;t get anyone promoted. :)

I wonder if Google&#x27;s tried to study &amp; put some numbers on how much harder it is for new products of theirs to take off, due to their reputation, and decided it&#x27;s not worth the cost to fix, or if they just don&#x27;t care to even find out.

laughing-tom-cruise.jpgWe all saw this coming years ago when it was first announced.

&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a> does not confirm it.So what? Are you in doubt of the veracity of the post? Look at the URL.

Yes it does; it&#x27;s listed below Currents.

Takes a couple minutes for the PR to merge. :D

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a> does not confirm it.EDIT: it appeared now. This is confirmed.

&gt;It never had any traction at any point in its history.B&#x2F;c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and stops carrying afterwards... and b&#x2F;c it was marred with promises like &quot;negative latency&quot;. But mostly it required to purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock in.

Nah. Google execs and others keeping making the mistake that cloud gaming should target the high-end gamers. It should be the middle-ground between mobile gaming and pc&#x2F;console gaming, IMO. Low barrier to entry with some AAA games.Stadia users often joked about how it was really &#x27;Dadia&#x27;, since so much of the player base was younger dads that wanted to game with their friends from time to time but couldn&#x27;t justify purchasing the required hardware. These are the users Google should have been targeting - along with less tech-inclined crowd.The entire pandemic I had this vision of a Stadia commercial where a younger family member sends a link on the family group chat or over zoom and then next minute everyone is playing Among Us or some other casual party game together. Even grandparents and click a link to open their chrome browser.You don&#x27;t need fiber for casual games like these. You need enough internet to stream netflix - which almost everyone does.Stadia leadership just didn&#x27;t have vision.

Nobody at Google ever thought to put together the venn diagram of:* People interested in playing high end games* People who don’t own modern consoles or gaming PCs* People with access to fiber

The real question here is why it took so long to shut down Stadia, especially from Google. It never had any traction at any point in its history.

Not surprised at all.The refunds are a very nice, unexpected touch.

Game streaming struggles because your average American has like four different TERRIBLE networking devices between them and any service. Those devices will not be upgraded just because google wishes the internet was more like home. If you do not have a good streaming experience, there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

I used it a bit. The performance was exceptional. I enjoyed playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my phone with a Razer Kishi controller. Although I&#x27;m not surprised Stadia struggled to find traction, I think this is mostly due to Google&#x27;s ongoing struggle with entertainment branding, and despite this, I do agree with their sentiment that streaming is the inevitable future of mainstream gaming.

I tried a bit. I don&#x27;t have space in my life for dedicated gaming hardware or a PC, so seemed to be a way I could play a game once in a while without commitment. Was ok. Didn&#x27;t get hooked.

I use it and it works surprisingly well even on UK DSL (80&#x2F;20). I found it useful to play games that insist on anti-cheat systems that deeply embed themselves into your machine. Also my PC is a bit ancient, built in 2015 and running a 4690K, DDR3 with a 750Ti so I get access to games that need a bit more poke.

I&#x27;ve been using for about two years I&#x27;d guess. I have a pretty fast connection and it worked pretty flawlessly at home. I used it while traveling too, and if the connection was good enough for streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, it was typically totally fine for Stadia. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the highest settings while playing on an iPad was pretty damn cool, and meant I could slim down a ton when traveling.That said, I haven&#x27;t played any multiplayer FPS games. The multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though &quot;seems totally fine&quot; is obviously a subjective observation.The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn&#x27;t use your Steam library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that they&#x27;re refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google, I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that&#x27;d be it, and I was ok with that.

used it exclusively for gaming the last year and a half. mostly just for Destiny 2, but bought a few other games on the platform as well. worked very well for my purposes. even pre-ourchased the next year&#x27;s content for destiny as well. I&#x27;m very sad.

I was a user from the beginning.For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad&#x2F;phone when you have 30 minutes free and don&#x27;t want to buy&#x2F;build&#x2F;maintain a PC or Console.That said, I haven&#x27;t played in around a year. The games catalog was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call of Duty, EA games etc)

I&#x27;ve used it almost exclusively for gaming since it was released. I&#x27;ve occasionally had issues with poor connection over WiFi but most of the time it has worked flawlessly. I know the latency is higher than a locally running game but I&#x27;m not doing side by side comparisons so I don&#x27;t notice it. With this news I guess I&#x27;ll be switching to GeForce Now which supports higher quality and framerates but a worse UX in my experience. In my opinion the business case for GeForce Now makes less sense than Stadia but I guess the numbers of overs makes more of a difference.

I like GFN and I agree the experience is not seamless. It still takes a long time to launch the game VM, and you feel it; but a lot of these other issues are much better or nonexistent now. In particular having to re-auth to Steam is much rarer now; launching the VM for a newly-purchased game often used to take a long time, with you waiting for the Steam launcher go through some kind of &quot;Preparing&quot; state for a long time (you don&#x27;t have to be in-session for this), but this hasn&#x27;t happened for me in some time. I haven&#x27;t had a problem with any settings like language, resolution or video, and I think performance, while highly dependent on your own network and ISP, is much improved and hasn&#x27;t been a problem in a while. So I do think, while the &quot;remote desktop&quot; approach is inevitably going to have some clunkiness, it has improved quite a bit and continues to do so.

Yes. I only tried Destiny 2 because no other game (that was available without extra purchase) was of interest to me. It worked very well and I _really_ liked the experience. Just open the website in Chrome, click on the game you want to play and it launches in seconds. Certainly faster than launching Destiny 2 on my own PC, which is also a gaming rig.For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now. Technologically, it’s basically… remote desktop to Steam? From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam. Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it could be more like Stadia.I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new platform and getting software on it is very hard.Stadio was awesome. It also never had a chance.

I&#x27;m a little bit of an enthusiast (tried all of the major platforms). I have shitty rural internet, Stadia is (was) by far the best of the bunch by far, especially with the controller. Near-native for latency and crystal clear image. 40ms ping to Google.Currently I use xcloud, its &quot;acceptable&quot; with certain games that don&#x27;t require low latencies but its picture quality in particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.

I use it... and honestly I&#x27;m really bummed by this. I&#x27;ve avoided owning a console mostly because I didn&#x27;t want to drop $500 just to get started. Stadia launched CP2077 with a free Chromecast and controller, so it ended up fitting my use-case rather well.They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any room in my house and I just needed the controller.I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from the beginning... I&#x27;m just bummed because I quite enjoyed the ride.

Not stadia, but I tried Steam In Home streaming (basically you stream from one PC in your house to another), with ethernet and it was NOTICEABLY laggier (because of input lag). It was probably like 33ms+ of added input lag. From that point I knew cloud streaming (which is basically this plus network latency) wasn&#x27;t going to be pretty.

Anyone here use Stadia? Not much of a gamer but very interested in the tech of cloud gaming.

What a shame. The technology was fantastic. Good news about all the refunds but still sad.

&quot;Yah, hear me now and believe me later.&quot;

Well, those comments were responding to a July 2022 article stating: &quot;Google Stadia denies the recent claims online that it would be shutting down its services by the end of the summer, promising more games to come.&quot;So technically, the commenter was right, as Stadia did survive the summer and will be operational for a whole 3+ months!

Aged like milk indeed.Writing was on that wall a long long time ago.Thanks for pointing it out so that I could have a good laugh :D

Heh, the comments in this thread[1] are hilarious in hindsight.&gt;Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don’t have to believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in October.[2][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32276188" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32276188</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32278402" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32278402</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;</a>

They sure do try out a lot of stuff. Google really need to do the reverse an create &quot;productsbygoogle.com&quot;. Many of the products are pretty unknown, until they get publicity for being killed.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a>

100ms times are cheaters; 200ms is probably closer to the absolute lower bound of human reaction time.

Agree. I used Shadow for a bit something like 2 years ago and it was pretty seamless. Sure, not as good as having a PC but it was pretty darn close.

Pro gamers can definitely feel +&#x2F;- 10ms of lag. It makes a difference at that level.

Maybe not 10ms but anything above 50ms is known and proven to degrade pro players&#x27; performance in competitive FPS games

Humans can detect 10ms of latency easily. The problem is more than just reacting slightly later to events, its also how quickly the game&#x2F;system responds to your inputs because its a round-trip interaction. This ends up usually being where the latency becomes more noticeable to most people. People can generally adjust for consistent latency, but any latency gains are pretty noticeable once you get used to looking for it.Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a single frame.

I tried Shadow and, well, you could really tell they host in a budget datacenter with how often there was stutter or missing keyframes (they host with OVH in Europe). I never had such issues with GeForce Now.Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually tell you what hardware you&#x27;ll be getting beyond &quot;4c&#x2F;8t&quot;. Mine turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.

You&#x27;re definitely right for most people, but even 10-20ms is noticeable by experienced players and can be very impactful at pro-level -- e.g. some high-level LoL players feel 35ms ping is unacceptably high for competitive play: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;afkgaming.com&#x2F;esports&#x2F;news&#x2F;ls-talks-about-why-35-ping-in-msi-2022-is-horrendous" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;afkgaming.com&#x2F;esports&#x2F;news&#x2F;ls-talks-about-why-35-pin...</a> (though it probably doesn&#x27;t matter much for Stadia&#x27;s use cases)

Wow, this site is cool. I consistently get ~188, best was 176ms. I wonder what some of the esport gamers get!After doing it several times it let me save the score.Reaction Time 181ms74.46% percentile

You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80</a> (Microsoft Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop things, so it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s just first person shooters that suffer from latency.You&#x27;re a lay person, you couldn&#x27;t have known this, you&#x27;re using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you&#x27;re comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you&#x27;re not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don&#x27;t have a concrete grasp of what it is they&#x27;re even talking about, so it&#x27;s understandable when it&#x27;s laypeople shouting at laypeople that it&#x27;s just a bunch of blah.One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll&#x27;s law than actual journalism.

The bigger issue is jitter. People can compensate for consistent delay (e.g. by leading shots in an FPS game). But when the delay is inconsistent and varies quickly, it becomes much more difficult to anticipate movements and execute time-sensitive maneuvers.

This is confused. Reaction time is irrelevant, you can still notice very short delays between two events. The fundamental issue is that when you make an input that corresponds to an action in a game, you expect that to action happen near-immediately, and anything else feels terrible.

Human reaction times have nothing to do with perceived input latency. There is a latency budget that is different for every individual that determines whether or not something will be an acceptable experience. This budget is divided between everything in the signal chain like the input devices, the computer&#x2F;console, the monitor&#x2F;tv, and any other processors along the signal path. Streaming games adds additional latency to the signal chain. Generously if your target is 60fps and you have a round trip latency to their server of 8ms, that&#x27;s a half frame of added latency. On its own it&#x27;s almost certainly imperceptible to most people, but it&#x27;s not working in a vacuum and most people don&#x27;t live right next to the datacenter. It can very easily go over the threshold for what is acceptable to most people.

It matters for MMOs. If there are two pro gamers A and B both with 100ms reaction time, but gamer A has 10ms ping while gamer B has 30ms ping, gamer A has a consistent advantage.  This is not strictly a Stadia problem but it may be exacerbated if the display data adds latency on a slower line.

Unless cloud gaming company intend to put servers in every single city across the globe it&#x27;s not going to work. Even in Boston with good, fiber internet streaming games have too much lag and the compression artifacts are horrible.When there is fast movement the compression is much more noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing graphical comparisons do it with static images. It&#x27;s quite common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup.Also, you are misunderstanding what &quot;reaction time of 100ms&quot; means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length so long as they are bright enough.What 100ms reaction time means is that you can&#x27;t react to a given stimulus in less then that. Here&#x27;s the important distinction, you don&#x27;t react to lag, you perceive it.To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms, and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skytopia.com&#x2F;stuff&#x2F;lag.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skytopia.com&#x2F;stuff&#x2F;lag.html</a>

a test on a mouse click? really? finger travel time is going to dwarf and eat up whatever reaction time you have.

I disagree. The fastest human reaction time is something around 100ms. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;humanbenchmark.com&#x2F;tests&#x2F;reactiontime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;humanbenchmark.com&#x2F;tests&#x2F;reactiontime</a>). I&#x27;ve just measured, and mine is 230ms. As such 10ms lag wouldn&#x27;t make any difference. I&#x27;ve used Shadow Tech PC for a while during pandemic. With good upstream and downstream bandwidth it was a fairly decent experience, even for playing something like competitive Overwatch. I noticed the difference with normal gaming PC due to some other factors (quality of sound, etc.). Standard accessories worked seamlessly for USB-over-UDP.

This logic doesn&#x27;t apply to single player games. I tried playing a racing game on Stadia and it just didn&#x27;t feel good.On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for PC. But that game is slow anyway.

I think there is an argument that you can level the playing field by making everyone&#x27;s lag suck equally.  I don&#x27;t know if stadia did that though

10ms is an extremely generous estimation of the amount of lag you&#x27;d get playing with a device like Stadia at any rate.

Yep if people were bothered by 10ms then everybody would be on CRTs. But... nobody is doing this except some extreme speedrunners and fighting game players.

10ms isn&#x27;t even one frame at 60 FPS. Modern consoles have more &quot;native&quot; input lag than that.

&gt; I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.Something like Stray that doesn&#x27;t really require &quot;hundreds of dollars regularly&quot;. Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that was definitely &lt; $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then also not on the cloud...On the other hand, it&#x27;s highly likely that you won&#x27;t be able to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as providers will drop it down (or outright close...).

&gt; I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.If you take a look at the 25 games with the most current players[1] I would argue at least 20&#x2F;25 would either be annoying to play with increased input lag, or outright highly disadvantageous.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamcharts.com&#x2F;top" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamcharts.com&#x2F;top</a>

When Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Switch came out I did alright on Super Mario 64 until I encountered a level that required precisely timed wall jumps in order to advance. I consistently missed my jumps and wondered what was up. I plugged in my controller via USB and was still failing to do the jumps properly. What finally fixed it was putting the input on my TV into &quot;game&quot; mode, which reduced the amount of processing&#x2F;latency. If local display latency can cause issues with gaming, network latency would be a non-starter in a lot of cases.

It&#x27;s absolutely noticeable. The question is whether it&#x27;s tolerable, and people do seem to tolerate increasing latency both from networks and their TV.But, personally, I find the experience much less enjoyable as the latency goes up. It&#x27;s not about being competitive either. (I don&#x27;t play games online.) It just feels sticky and sluggish and I don&#x27;t enjoy it. I miss the crisp responsiveness of older consoles. :(

&gt; I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.I agree with your disagreement here. For me streaming game services don&#x27;t have a lot of technical hurdles.&gt; Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.I disagree here. I hate the idea of streaming&#x2F;cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don&#x27;t want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.The subscription model I think has already proven it self be consumer hostile. I don&#x27;t want to subscribe to Adobe, I don&#x27;t want to subscribe to Office, just let me buy the damn thing outright.

Splatoon 3 is already one of the best-selling Switch games ever released - a competitive online shooter on a console most popular with casual gamers. Games like Fortnite and Overwatch are massively popular. 99% is a real over-estimation.

If there is demand, and the tech is fine, then why is Google shutting down Stadia?

I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable.I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my partner on Stadia, and we’ve never noticed any significant problems - even when using non-stadia controllers.Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud gaming market, and even the Switch supports “cloud version” games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon’s Luna service continues to grow and improve.

I use GeForce now for singleplayer games and I&#x27;m super happy with it as long as I&#x27;m on an ethernet connection.

Latency really isn&#x27;t a problem in many contexts. I&#x27;ve got some prototype streaming solutions running in an azure region near me and I can&#x27;t perceive any round trip latency compared to localhost.There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time.Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.

the 10ms or whatever the real amount is, is in addition to tbe monitor lag, etc.i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.

&gt; 10ms is not perceptible . . . less than 1%The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and can easily tell if their game isn’t running with optimal fps. High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you might be right about the general population, but were talking specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more doubtful that it’s just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching yourself can mean death).Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also cars.Agree that many casual people don’t care much, but casual people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or wouldn’t be in the know enough to try out a streaming game service that wasn’t advertised much.

I’ll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99% (99.9%?) of cases.Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is &gt;100ms.I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag.I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games.But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.

10ms is completely fine for any game you can possibly think of. Including competitive FPS e-sports. We are not superhumans and your monitor alone probably adds more lag than that.What&#x27;s not acceptable is jitter. If it&#x27;s a constant 10ms delay, it&#x27;s easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That&#x27;s even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.If latency is constantly changing, that&#x27;s where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it&#x27;s on wifi, this whole point is moot.

I think this is right for games that are ported to streaming from a traditional PC or console release, but presumably if some studio cared, they could design games with streaming in mind. As an extreme example, imagine the original NES Final Fantasy, or the SNES Monopoly on Stadia: with mainly turn-based interaction, they would be basically indistinguishable from playing locally.

Highly disagree. Seems you have not tested current game streaming as Gamepass or GeForce Now.

&gt;extra 10msThat won&#x27;t even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher.

&gt;extra 10msThat won&#x27;t even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags, etc... )

I tend to only play &quot;non-competetive&quot; solo games, so I dont care much about input lag. Wasnt a problem for me in Destiny, Assasins Creed or Cyberpunk.

That&#x27;s completely false. Streaming works great even for latency sensitive games.

I was cloud gaming for 2 years and recently switched to PC. I&#x27;ve been gaming for about 30 years or more. I can confidently say you wont notice anything up to around 60ms latency. I could still twitch aim and play and compete in online shooters no problem.Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection starts to become unstable, even if it&#x27;s a fast connection, it becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and I&#x27;m out.

(For context, this thread originally linked to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;stadia&#x2F;message-on-stadia-streaming-strategy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;stadia&#x2F;message-on-stadia-stream...</a> &quot;A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy&quot;)

You know it&#x27;s gonna be bad news when you see a title like that.I&#x27;ve always been bearish on game streaming because it&#x27;s just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.

But this is from 60 days ago, and Google has now announced they are shutting Stadia down.While &quot;cover your ass&quot; posts may need a grain of salt, there&#x27;s no logic in &quot;we&#x27;re killing a product&#x2F;service&quot; being lip service.

Also from the horse&#x27;s mouth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoogleStadia&#x2F;status&#x2F;1552989433590214656" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoogleStadia&#x2F;status&#x2F;1552989433590214656</a>Not saying it to argue with your point, just to highlight that we generally shouldn&#x27;t put much trust into Google.

Direct from the horse&#x27;s mouth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33022775" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33022775</a>

It was always a strange sell, especially since you had more accommodating options like nVidias GeForce Now.

The main thing that initially got me excited with Stadia were the ideas around having much bigger shared gaming worlds enabled by google-scale cloud expertise.Too bad that all it turned out to result in was video streaming optimisation.

They have by far the most awful customer service of any big tech company. One or two experiences of dealing with issues (in my case Google Fi) turns you into a life long hater.

Because in the 2000, many of use got fooled believing &quot;do no evil&quot; and their hacker heart, only to see unfold the next 2 decades with sadness.

They turned evil when they started putting ads inline with search results. The main utility of that is to trick unsophisticated or unwary users, so basically they&#x27;re preying on the elderly (among others), but it made the line go up and to the right, so they don&#x27;t care.Plus any company with a core business model of &quot;being a super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal memory&quot; is inherently terrible and shouldn&#x27;t exist.

I think it stems for their beginning. The Google search page was innovative, in showing that you didn&#x27;t need to be flashy, just good at what you do. The same for Gmail, which was an awesome product and completely changed how people use email. Even the original Google ads where viewed extremely favorable, as it showed that you could make money on ads, without them being obnoxious.Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google adopted all the things we had hoped they&#x27;d save us from, just so they could make more money.That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google these days. The only two Google products I use are Google Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.

As an ex fanboy (or fanboy lite) who has circled into hater section of recent, I can give you MY reasoning.For starters theres the whole &quot;we&#x27;re not evil&quot;, and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it&#x27;s a huge company, so only strike 1.They haven&#x27;t released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don&#x27;t even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it&#x27;s a platform problem. Strike 3, I&#x27;m a hater.Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.

It’s not just Google, but the cause for embarrassment at other formerly prestigious places is different and not relevant.I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.

Because they started out good (&quot;dont be evil&quot; and all), providing an exceptional yet fundamental internet service but somewhere along the way they lost the plot. They now hoard enormous wealth by shoving ads to our faces yet have done nothing with the money. Not to mention their engineering culture goes directly against the spirit of this site (rest&#x27;n vest vs startup&#x27;s hustle culture). They&#x27;re the hero turned villain all start ups fear they&#x27;ll become

Mainly because of wasted potential, in my case. They revolutionized the internet (repeatedly) with a great product and found a reasonably unobtrusive method to monetize it, then moved into creating replacements for Microsoft products (browser, calendar, email, documents) and I thought they would then pivot into cloud as a good competitor to AWS, whilst also spending their copious profits on long-term scientific research projects and helping bring ML advances to the larger community.It&#x27;s even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn&#x27;t really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google&#x27;s products worse. What&#x27;s really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.

They have&#x2F;had incredible potential. Imagine what a company with Google&#x27;s resources could do. They have simultaneously the sharpest minds on the planet and a vast treasure chest of unprecedented proportions at their disposal.What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it functioning.It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it isn&#x27;t, but it certainly feels like it.

When they literally had to remove &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; as their company slogan, on account of how evil they are, that did it for me.

I am not a fanboy, have never been a fanboy and never cared about the &quot;do no evil&quot; marketing motto or any other Google crap. I am bitter against Google because it plainly sucks. Their products suck, they have &quot;soft monopolies&quot; and they have used them to Embrace Extend and Extinguish any alternatives. They are what Microsoft was in the 1990s-2000s. If you are young enough to remember the 90s and 00s Microsoft you will understand.Note that I not only hate Google, I hate Google, Apple, Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes me an old fart.

I imagine everyone here has had at least one beloved service end up on this list - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com</a>

Why are so many of you here so bitter against this company?

If you&#x27;re a manager, why the hell are you going to risk your career trying to get the last guy&#x27;s project to work? There are two incentives in corporate America: start a project to get the praise for something new, and kill a project to get the praise for saving money. Is it any wonder projects keep popping in and out of existence?

&gt; You&#x27;re being downvoted, and I have no idea why.Because calling people&#x27;s job choices &quot;embarrassing&quot;, no matter how right you may be, isn&#x27;t a good starting argument against the people in those jobs. Not to mention that it comes off as pretentious.

&quot;fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success...focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors&quot;A nice distillation of most of SV these days.

Full disclosure: I work at AT&amp;T but not directly on fiber. My views are my own and do not represent my employers.Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t &#x2F; weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.

started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.Haha, imagine them shutting it down eventually.

&gt;If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 yearsSad thing is they did not even have to do that. all they had to do was put some lobbying effort in empowering municipalities to do their own broadband and the rest would take care of itself. ISP monopolies have been kneecapping municipal broadband effort right and left and just some push from otherside would have cleared up the way for some competition. But they did not, as you said, its classic short term thinking and &#x27;not my problem&#x27; syndrome. What really troubles me is that Google &amp; FB have sucked up almost all of ad market but none of that revenue is trickling back into society except for these &#x27;promotion packet&#x27; side hustles.

You&#x27;re being downvoted, and I have no idea why.It is embarrassing. It&#x27;s not just embarrassing, it&#x27;s fucking embarrassing.Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in this country - poor broadband Internet service.But... oh God, if only... if only Google had something they could use... something they could do to solve this problem!?Oh... wait, yeah. They have their own fucking fiber ISP! Google could have ponied up money and started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you&#x27;re stupid and&#x2F;or naïve enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and Verizon and Charter and AT&amp;T are just going to let you waltz in and steal their customers (and yes, these ISPs do think this way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you should never have entered into the ISP business in the first place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, &quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;lobby&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot; all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials - they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP&#x27;s territories, laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems: fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success. The road to becoming America&#x27;s best ISP will be a long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but when you&#x27;ve got literally billions of dollars of cash at your disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors... or you could build something that would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of revenue in a decade or two.Too bad they&#x27;re focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors.

Well, we&#x27;re still at the point where, for nearly everyone who worked on Google products between 2008 and now, it was financially lucrative and great for their resumes.

Didn&#x27;t know about this website. Rankings results are interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Still top on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prestigehunt.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prestigehunt.com</a>!

At what point does working for Google (on anything released after 2008) go from being prestigious to embarrassing?

Unsurprising, as I knew it was going to shut down already as I said in 2021: [0]&gt;&gt; I&#x27;m from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard. [0]This is the second time I have seen them shutdown as I already said this before: [1][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27039202" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27039202</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32278255" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32278255</a>

Or even more likely, management changes their mind.It is obvious that Google is battening the hatches for a recession. Economic conditions looks worse than just a few months ago. They’ve already reduced their Area 120 investments. This makes sense to cut as well.Disclosure: Googler but have no inside info.

That remains a lie by incompetence. Just because Google can&#x27;t be bothered get their product and PR people on the same page doesn&#x27;t excuse the entity named Google from making misleading statements.

That&#x27;s a leadership problem, not a rogue intern problem.And I&#x27;m sure some Google Shareholders will be grumbling about it too, since this represents a non-trivial loss of revenue thanks to the (IMO appropriate) refunds, since it represents a material change in the value of stocks purchased between 60 days ago and today.

That&#x27;s still a lie from whichever individual or group of individuals you consider to have agency over the matter. Like sure, maybe the individual who physically typed the tweet had little or no agency, but it&#x27;s still reasonable to call it a lie when the responsible agent was deliberately making a false statement.

Is it even in the realm of possibility that Google, of all companies, has an intern with zero insight into the long term strategy manage the twitter account AND make definitive public statements?

Or the PR teams are just misinformed?Some intern doing customer support on twitter isn’t going to be invited to long term strategy&#x2F;budget meetings

They shut down everything that does not &quot;print&quot; money for them. I guess they were expecting to beat Steam and that didn&#x27;t happen so... bye bye

This is also a great example of why you can never trust Google.

As a rule, with corporations, official denials can be thought of as unofficial confirmations. Occasionally this is not true, but for the most part they wouldn&#x27;t be responding unless the issue was credible and at least a few parties had strong reason to believe whatever it is they&#x27;re denying.

July 29:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoogleStadia&#x2F;status&#x2F;1552989433590214656" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoogleStadia&#x2F;status&#x2F;1552989433590214656</a>

Wonder if the CEOs can be made to sign (and stand behind) such statements, like CEOs&#x2F;CFOs were made to stand behind financial statements.Although I guess financial statements are quarterly, PR statements are dime a dozen.

This is a great example of why you can never trust PR statements. They outright lie. We&#x27;re not working on X. We won&#x27;t shut down Y. Bald faced lies.Edit: Missed that they&#x27;re doing refunds. That part&#x27;s good.EDIT2: Why I&#x27;m calling it a lie: These decisions are not made on a whim. They&#x27;re made months if not years in advance. A public company making public statements about how you&#x27;re not shutting something down while you&#x27;re internally mapping out the shutdown process... that&#x27;s a lie.

I agree, I have the controller and it&#x27;s pretty decent ergonomics-wise for me. Just hate that I have to use it wired if I want to use it for other PC games.

They have bluetooth and wi-fi hardware but currently locked and can&#x27;t be used outside of Stadia. Wired USB works as a normal controller though.

A friend gave me a Amazon Luna controller he didn&#x27;t want.I was pleasantly surprised that the controller synced via BT. I was able to play non-Luna FireTV games with no problems.It even worked without the Luna software installed on my FireTV Stick (I don&#x27;t recommend you buy a FireTV stick, nor any FireTV product really).The concept of the Luna software is interesting: Cloud streamed HD gaming on low-end hardware. Game play was really responsive. Very little video artifacts. But like all other FireTV products, the UX was geared towards sales, not user ergonomics.I plan to uninstall the Luna app and just play the few FireTV games that I have. Sadly Alto&#x27;s Adventure is too resource intense for my FireTV Stick.

No, that how google was able to achieve better latency and allowed using it on Chromecast devices. The controller has Bluetooth used only for setting it up, from there it&#x27;s Wi-Fi that used to send input directly to the cloud instead of &quot;BT to showing the stream and then to the cloud&quot;.I wish they enable Bluetooth for it because it&#x27;s an excellent controller. I use it to play Halo on xCloud via iPad...

They aren&#x27;t just regular old Bluetooth?

they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of itThis would have no impact on anything. If they had to share IP after shutting it down they&#x27;d just restructure the business so that Stadia licensed IP from Google Streaming Gaming Technology LLP, and do the all the real work in that absolutely-definitely-a-separate-company-look-the-logo-is-a-different-shape part of Alphabet instead.

You know, this gave me an idea: I&#x27;d love to see legislation that states that when a company the size of Google, Microsoft, etc. launches a product like this, then kills it off, that they MUST open source the proprietary parts inside of it. Not just for hardware like controller firmware etc. but also for software they used to create it. Obviously the games themselves in the case are IP owned by other firms so that would be exempt, but I think this would go a long way to forcing companies to stick it out with supporting products and customers they create over longer periods of time or not launch things flippantly in the first place.

It&#x27;s a great controller, you&#x27;re right! Very comfortable and my goto on emulators.I also looked into the weird WiFi&#x2F;Bluetooth hybrid protocol stack. It&#x27;s really impressive, and as far as I know, not jailbroken. Also massively overengineered.They tried really hard with Stadia, at least at the hardware and streaming level. It&#x27;s just that no one wanted it. They are before their time; PS Plus and GeForce Go are seeing adoption for streaming games. I bet it&#x27;ll be popular in 3-5 years, maybe sooner. It&#x27;s just that Google isn&#x27;t a reliable carrier for this service, and they don&#x27;t have enough patience.

I got one of the free promotional Controller + Chrome Cast Ultra &quot;Premier Edition&quot; bundles they were seeding to YouTube Premium customers out of sheer curiosity. I tried it for the free month, and hadn&#x27;t taken the controller out of its box since (I do get a fair amount of use out of the Chromecast).The whole system is a _staggering_ technological achievement of (unnecessary) complexity getting a pile of devices closely synchronized over the network with ... absolutely no realistic use case.I just dug the controller out, it does work wired as a USB-C HID1.1 Gamepad device (18D1:9400). 2 analog sticks, 2 analog triggers, 15 buttons (including pressed&#x2F;not pressed for the analog triggers), and an analog alias for the D-Pad (just returns min&#x2F;max when pressed). Doesn&#x27;t look like the 3.5mm headphone jack does anything when connected via USB, I&#x27;m not seeing a bonus audio device or anything.It doesn&#x27;t look like it presents as a normal Bluetooth controller (by testing or by the docs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;stadia&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9338851?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;stadia&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9338851?hl=en</a> ), I think the weird hybrid WiFi for comms&#x2F;Bluetooth for pairing thing they did would require some hacking and&#x2F;or published specs to use it wirelessly with anything other than a Stadia setup - or for Google to politely release a firmware update to enable normal BT controller behavior since they imply it&#x27;s possible. They are apparently pretty nasty to get apart ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Device&#x2F;Google_Stadia_Controller" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Device&#x2F;Google_Stadia_Controller</a> ) for physical tampering, though there is a fairly substantial computer system in it <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Stadia_(H2B)" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Stadia_(H2...</a> .It&#x27;s actually a pretty comfortable controller, but it just became an amusing collectors item so I think mine will continue to sit in its box.

Google need to open source and unlock the controllers - otherwise they just created a mountain of e-waste.

Same here. If they intended to use this buyback as a strategy  so next round we’re more comfortable buying into their project: it’s working.

This was a concern with early adopters of Steam, as well; and Valve made it clear that if Steam were to shut down that purchasers would have an opportunity to download their purchases.Of course, this was long before they sold ephemeral digital things like trading cards and stickers, and before many games were heavily dependent on the continuation of online services.

Same. If they told me &quot;we&#x27;ll refund you 100% if we shut down go nuts&quot; I would have gone nuts as the service was solid.  The funny thing is it would have helped their &quot;uptake&quot; numbers and might have stalled or prevented the shutdown!

Yeah, I&#x27;m not using any new Google products unless it&#x27;s for a one off use.And I&#x27;m reconsidering the existing services I&#x27;m dependent on as well.GMail, for example. While I have no doubt GMail will continue to exist as long as email exists, Google&#x27;s spam blocking (not just filtering...blocking, where the email doesn&#x27;t even make it to the inbox), has become far too aggressive. And the frequent UI changes are becoming unsustainable.Also, the nagging suspicion that Google is having silent data loss issues across their products is not helping either.

Exactly! Google doesn&#x27;t get this. Google has a commitment image problem. As a consumer I&#x27;ve not seen them address this with the seriousness it deserves.Since they won&#x27;t commit to their products, their customers are reluctant to commit as well.

I actually bought one of their controllers, and it&#x27;s quite nice. I&#x27;m pumped it&#x27;s free now. Works great on Linux.

The thing is that nothing is bricked \o&#x2F;I end up with a Chromecast and a gamepad that are both compatible outside of Stadia and played a few games, all of that for free.

lol, props to Google for refunding the costs of the hardware, games, and DLC, though.I might&#x27;ve actually bought one, except that I didn&#x27;t want to be stranded with an outlay of hundreds of dollars for a bricked streaming device. If I&#x27;d known up front that they&#x27;d have refunded my costs (or even a percentage of them) if they shut down the service in some timeframe, I&#x27;d have totally bought one.

Great question! Two people actually guessed correctly (not posting their names for privacy), but the average date across for all users (October 6, 2022) was surprisingly close to the date they announced it would be shutting down.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whenwillgooglekillstadia.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whenwillgooglekillstadia.com</a>

I think the best thing is wait 5 years and see if they are going to shitcan it or not...

Takeaway - next time you decide to buy a google product and have choice through their store or 3rd party retailer, best to go through their store!

Remember like three weeks ago when some news about this came out and they were like no we promise we are not shutting it down?Glad they are doing refunds though.

Facebook is dumping money into VR to try and push their boulder of a terrible idea (the &quot;metaverse&quot;) up a hill. Except the hill is a solid 90 degree angle cliffNobody wants to go to Walmart in VR and artificially grocery shop. That&#x27;s a dystopian misery. But Facebook is happy to try!Their counterparts at places like VRchat meanwhile realized that just making a sandbox environment for people to do whatever they wanted is far more enticing to users. Valve meanwhile is happy to chug along and putter out critically acclaimed games to go with their own bespoke hardware releases

They are losing stupid amounts of money on VR (as part of the R&amp;D thing) in the hope that people will use it for work. The awesome value of Oculus Quest 2 will probably never be seen again.

well said, literally it&#x27;s getting old. no one trusts amazon&#x2F;google&#x2F;fb new ventures. atleast fb is going all in on vr

That wouldn&#x27;t work because their tooling is so custom you could never run it.  Also the code is probably in an embarrassing state, especially if the product is getting shut down.

They could mitigate this by always releasing the source code for shut down projects so that it could be self hosted or third parties could continue the work.

Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony have all launched game streaming products without this kind of coverage. It&#x27;s a Google problem.

&gt;What&#x27;s the best way to launch new, risky things?Slow-roll invite-only launch to establish a core user base, work out the bugs, show staying power, and build from there. Exactly what Google did in 2004 with Gmail.

Shutting down most product lines doesn’t mean said product is rendered unusable.It does mean any further support is non-existent. With PaaS and SaaS, this implicit contract between buyer and seller no longer holds.

&gt; every company is going to shut down productsThere&#x27;s typically a fight, though.

&gt; I&#x27;m not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company.AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB). And only when they had a viable alternative (DynamoDB) and helped their biggest users make the move.I can&#x27;t recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They&#x27;ve certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn&#x27;t break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted.And Microsoft is the king of long term support. How long did they keep supporting DOS in Windows? Or 32 bit programs. Or Windows 2000!

&gt; What&#x27;s the best way to launch new, risky things?To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible.I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it&#x27;s harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature.With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it&#x27;s a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes.With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it:- It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in- It obsoletes as soon as it&#x27;s too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their lossesMy guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn&#x27;t want to invest time into it. I&#x27;m not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That&#x27;s 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going &quot;welp&quot;.So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn&#x27;t an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google&#x27;s interest.Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn&#x27;t quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn&#x27;t really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google)[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;krisholt&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;google-stadia-low-change-porting&#x2F;?sh=7bb6b1804816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;krisholt&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;google-stad...</a>

It does sound like their distribution power is a double-edged sword when it comes to launching new products.On one hand, the distribution power makes it extremely easy for new products to get lots and lots of users really quickly. On the other hand, it can give a false sense of security when it comes to product-market fit.The only real solution I can think of is deliberately launching new products without the Google branding and without relying on the built-in distribution channels, working towards product market fit the hard way, and only after that should they consider taking advantage of Google&#x27;s distribution power to accelerate growth.

They should have split Stadia into two conceptual halves: one with the technology to split the processing from the input and output, and one to do the hosting of the processing. Then when they decided to kill Stadia, they could have let other people run the latter, so that the former would still be useful to people who already owned it.

It&#x27;s a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What&#x27;s the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason.I&#x27;m not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it&#x27;s certainly shut those products down in such a way that it&#x27;s generated far more backlash and ill will than anyone else.Just brainstorming, but perhaps a large company, when launching a new product, could establish some kind of dedicated trust to provide credible assurances that e.g. the product would be supported for at least 10 years.

Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google product that isn&#x27;t ad-supported dies, with very few exceptions.Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. &quot;Google Cloud is now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but Google&#x27;s ad business is likely to subsidize it for the foreseeable future.&quot;[1] AWS makes money in that business, but Google does not.So, don&#x27;t depend on Google Cloud for anything critical. Only a few months ago, Google was saying they were not going to shut down Stadia. So, any PR statement about Cloud not shutting down can&#x27;t be believed. Stadia, after all, was a cloud service.

It was always strange that Google would decide to dabble in the brutally expensive and competitive games market, of all things.

On the other hand, I also remember all the hype that it received (though maybe I live in a tech-obsessed bubble). &quot;OMG, it will change everything you know about gaming&quot;. All my colleagues were so convinced that it was a technical breakthrough (maybe it was, I dunno), and that everyone will be playing with it because it is simply so amazing and revolutionary.My opinion was &quot;yeah, cool, but I just don&#x27;t see it&quot;. It was very annoying when these coworkers judged me, thinking I am simply too stupid to realize how amazing this is...

I remember every single article when they first announced contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was doomed from the start.

Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might kill it.  If they promised me a refund I would have probably spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a pro membership.

That&#x27;s a promise you can only keep if almost no one buys anything, though. :-)

Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would&#x27;ve done much better if it had launched with the promise of &quot;if we do shut it down, we&#x27;ll refund all your purchases&quot;

Google&#x27;s reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways.Developers didn&#x27;t onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.

Google is shutting down Stadia