Some manager at Ubi got a fat bonus last year for taking free money
[Bloomberg] Google’s Stadia Problem? A Video Game Unit That’s Not Googley Enough
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Wasn't there some rumblings about Sega wanting to get back in the console business?
If not they sure deserve one lol.
You would think that Google would 'only' have to pay for the cost of the ports, so that every copy that is sold is instant profit for Ubisoft. However, Ubisoft instead got their cake, ate it, and then asked for more.
The problem with this take is that it isn't an either/or situation. You have to have both of those things to succeed. Google was never willing to do the groundwork in the trenches to become a serious competitor in this industry.
That ET
They dug up the ET cartridges from the landfill for that documentary, so there is plenty of room for Stadia Controllers.
They dug up the ET cartridges from the landfill for that documentary, so there is plenty of room for Stadia Controllers.
Reddit comments VS giving away free controllers and shutting down all first party development. 🤔
Who do I believe?
Can Google make the Stadia controller work on PC already please mines just there wasting away not doing anything
It works wired. Not sure if they'll ever make it work wireless. It does have a Bluetooth radio inside it but that's only used during initial pairing.
This kind of launch sounds like it'd be extremely difficult to manage. They didn't have anywhere close to 100 games at launch (the 100th game to appear on Stadia was Assassin's Creed Valhalla) and the launch itself was hardware-gated so if they had managed to get millions of people interested in that launch, they wouldn't have been able to accommodate them. Once that period ended they'd be back to the same business model they have now, which I think would be difficult to sell (and difficult even to explain to people).
It's perhaps also worth noting that a Stadia Pro subscription (which is free for the first month) has been adding and subtracting games each month, but generally has been adding more than subtracting, and currently offers access to several dozen games. If paying US$10 for a month of access to 100 games was going to attract significant interest, there should be some moderate level of interest in paying US$0 for a month of access to around 28 games. There doesn't seem to be.
We don't know that they didn't try. All we can say for sure is that they didn't succeed.
My expectation is that they approached every major publisher and made similar offers to them all - millions of dollars in return for each big-name game. The big names that exist on the service now are from publishers who said yes, but not all of them would have wanted that.
They got fleeced.
They probably knew that they were getting fleeced as well, and accepted it as the reality of trying to enter the market. They were going to publishers asking them to shift development to include Stadia. Publishers would have pointed out that this meant allocating resources away from their other projects (or hiring new people and devoting resources to training them). They'd have said that instead of working on Stadia ports, those developers could be helping to release games sooner, or making ports for other more established platforms, or working on updates for released games. As a new entrant in a weak bargaining position, Google didn't have many ways to respond to that other than just asking publishers to name their price.
To add some clarity to the "reddit Stadia community is growing and people are ditching the PS5 for Stadia" idea. Here is a Google Trend graph on the popularity of Stadia and PlayStation 5 as search terms on Google.
Here's a link to Google Trends if anyone wants to test it for themselves.
Google Trends
Here's a link to Google Trends if anyone wants to test it for themselves.
Google Trends
Everything involving Stadia is just hilarious. Imagine burning this much money to rehash the OnLine model that has already failed. While internet infrastructure is garbage and data caps exist.
Just what the fuck was anyone expecting?
Just what the fuck was anyone expecting?
Oh interesting last time I tried connecting it wired nothing was really happening on Steam guess I either messed something up or something changed then, I remember looking in Google Reddit people said the same thing, gonna try again tomorrow thanks
They wanted Quibi to length of time, but it became another unit of measure
Weird. It's HID compliant so should work like any other HID controller. I double checked online just to make sure I wasn't mis-remembering and yeah that seems to be the case. Not sure if it was like that to begin with or updated later. But yeah, give it a shot again, it should work.
You keep seeing it, corpos salivating at the mouth for those game industry profits, they rush in grovelling and foaming with their special executive business room ideals on how to squeeze microtransactions out of the freshest live service obsessions.
Anthem, Avengers, Stadia, Luna... just reek of that special kind of big brain business room decision making on the quickest way to fleece the customer.
$9.99/mo to be able to play a full priced title that vanishes into thin air the minute their eyes latch on to the next big sparkling thing.
Anthem, Avengers, Stadia, Luna... just reek of that special kind of big brain business room decision making on the quickest way to fleece the customer.
$9.99/mo to be able to play a full priced title that vanishes into thin air the minute their eyes latch on to the next big sparkling thing.
Stadia is technically still alive, so it could possibly make it to three Quibi's before it dies. No way it makes it to four Quibi's though.
That's exactly what it looks like. Can't believe more people on the inside didn't see this for what it was and what the inevitability was.
amazing how some people are given money just to burn, but i can't get funding for my owl cafe/comicbook store
You need to explain how you are going to leverage the power of the cloud to create paradigm shifts and growth hack the disruption you are leveraging.
If Google wants to get involved in the games industry they should start by becoming a publisher and using their overflowing pot of gold to fund the development of promising indie titles.
Hmmmm.
If you're willing to wear a black turtleneck and drop your voice two octaves, we might have a deal.
All these stories are depressing because there is so much I find in Stadia to be fucking great. The people I play it with are cool. The accessibility is cool. It has the best and most consistent performance of any streaming solution I've used. Destiny PvP has a fraction of the networking jank than it has on the other platforms. I can jump on to Destiny from my desk at work, or in bed on my phone, or on my TV with the CCU.
They've blown so much potential here. I've met multiple people on Stadia that didn't play video games before now and I'm playing fucking Destiny with them. That's crazy to me.
They've blown so much potential here. I've met multiple people on Stadia that didn't play video games before now and I'm playing fucking Destiny with them. That's crazy to me.
To add some clarity to the "reddit Stadia community is growing and people are ditching the PS5 for Stadia" idea. Here is a Google Trend graph on the popularity of Stadia and PlayStation 5 as search terms on Google.
Here's a link to Google Trends if anyone wants to test it for themselves.
Google Trends
Oh so you doubt Google re: Stadia, but then turn around trust their Trend Search results.
#hypocrisy #logicalfallacy #debateowns
This checks out.
lmao
Commercially viable consumer products are not one of Google's core competencies, agreed.
Hell even companies who are extremely experienced at this fuck up a console launch every now and again. It's a very tough industry where you need to thread the needle.
This is exactly it basically - these modern attempts by tech companies to kind of just dump money on people to jumpstart their entrance into the video game space tend to just blow up or get bogged down forever in various instances of dev and mismanagement hell because they simply just don't have the patience that this industry requires. They see lots of money, think "hey what if we made some of this money?" and expect to be major players inside of a couple years. There is no fast track here. You have to actually put in the effort to make your own shit and build those relationships with partners and the public and that takes time.
The only person I know who was interested in Stadia was interested because they thought it was $10 a month for All The Games. When they learned it was $10 a month and then you had to buy the games, they were like "wait, what? what's the point?"
(Weirdly, they have an Xbox but not a Game Pass subscription.)
(Weirdly, they have an Xbox but not a Game Pass subscription.)
That's actually a bit off.
You don't have to pay $10 a month to play the games you buy. If you buy a game then you can play it whenever you want without a subscription. Online play is also free so a Pro subscription is not required for that.
The $10 a month is for the Pro subscription. This is sorta like a Games with Gold/Gamepass hybrid. It gives you games you can claim every month plus an expanding list of around 30 games (currently) that you can play regardless when you join. With the Pro subscription you also get a bump in streaming resolution (4k instead of 1080p), HDR, and 5.1 audio plus some special Pro discounts on games.
Ah, okay. I think this was during the beta phase, wasn't it Pro-only for a while?
In any case, the point is that the $10/month "all the games" subscription, the only think that made them interested in Stadia, didn't exist.
When it initially launched it required a Pro subscription. The free tier came out around 4 months after the initial launch (April of last year). But yeah, there is no "one price for everything" subscription. The Pro (if you've claimed every game since launch) I think puts you around 70ish games now. Not every Pro game ends up on the "claim whenever you join" list (like I was saying, it's up to around 30ish now). Ubisoft+ came out several months ago as well which is a subscription that basically gets you access to every Ubisoft game on Stadia.
It shows up as a HID controller and works with Steam.
However it's also possible to use it with a wrapper to get it recognized as an Xinput compatible controller.
Only works wired though.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Controller:Stadia_Controller
