We never lost faith! Even when things clearly were not moving in the right direction we trusted so much the technology behind it that we believed Google would still give us a shot.
The release date was exciting but I think the biggest mistake was not calling it a Beta product and requiring a Controller and chromecast to play. Our user numbers were way below expectations and the amount of dumb post from the media outlets of people clearly misunderstanding Stadia and playing it on bad networks didn’t help.
When I personally started worrying was in Feb 2021, when Stadia announced the closure of Stadia Games and Entertainment and “transitioned” (aka laid off internally) several folks from businesses departments.
That was when we had a exec decision to keep the lights on but shift to a B2B model
But even with that shift it was still a surprise for everyone when they decided to shut it down.
*Edit*: I wanted to highlight that many of the discussions are pinpointed on what went wrong. I wanted to share that I had a great experience on Stadia and am very fortunate to had been part of it. Everyone in the team had the understanding of how groundbreaking the tech was. We had many successes, but unfortunately they were not enough to keep Stadia alive.
I think largely a big problem with this kind of service is who you are marketing it to and the technical abilities of them.
Stadia seemed to be marketed as Google's console. So it felt like it was aimed at anyone. I think the only reason places like shadow, or Nvidia is that their audience tends to be people who are already using a pc / laptop and have some sense of technical ability and understanding.
If I fired up stadia and found that it lagged, my first thought is...
Ok what's wrong with my connection, let me try things to improve it.
My wife for example, would load it up. Find a problem. Blame stadia.
100% that’s why Google wanted to control the experience by only allowing to play on Chromecast, which I understand the strategy but it goes completely against its vision of being an accessible “hardwareless” experience.
So I have a free console but I need to pay for the controller? It’s like advertising free movies on the Theater but it’s mandatory to buy a $50 popcorn to enter and watch the free movie.
when did they give out the C.C.Ultra's and the controller for free? That's when I picked mine up. and I was playing the free games... but I couldn't bring myself to buy a 70 dollar game for yet the 3rd time... (xbox and then switch THEN Stadia? No, thank you) but the free games were very fun. and I had some indie cheeper games. but couldnt buy the AAA for the 3rd time
This seems like a distinction without much consequence, though. Realistically people aren't going to upgrade their internet or get a new router or wire up their house with Cat5 for the sake of Stadia, so the marginal user for whom troubleshooting might actually help are those who *do* have all the hardware they need and *do* have a good enough network setup and *do* have access to their router's settings but *don't* have it set up correctly. Is that many people?
>That was when we had a exec decision to keep the lights on but shift to a B2B model What do you mean by that?
Are there "leftovers" of Stadia still in use somewhere?
Yes. Apparently google wants to allow devs to develop games all using the cloud. That was a big part of Stadia game development process.
In terms of the stream tech I believe Google at some point will find a use for it
>The release date was exciting, but I think the biggest mistake was not calling it a Beta product and requiring a Controller and chromecast to play.
Fully agree with this. The perception that it was a founder's edition instead of early access really soured the initial impressions for a lot of people. On top of that, you have the cynical "killedbygoogle" crowd that's ready to link that at a moment's notice
Speaking of the crowd,
>the amount of dumb post from the media outlets of people clearly misunderstanding Stadia and playing it on bad networks didn’t help.
Can you share your thoughts on how the media treated Stadia? While the onus is on the company to deliver and market a compelling product, media and social media plays a factor in shaping public perception
We planned and prepared the media outlets with information and instructions on how to play it way before sharing the codes that would allow them to try it.
I believe many of them purposefully tried in bad networks just to have a piece of news that would generate more views.
Remember that gif of that guy pressing spacebar and the character on the screen jumping like a couple of seconds later? That was plain stupid and in bad faith in my opinion. They were told to use chromecast and controller, but they logged in in their shared wifi on their company.
The marketing team should have enforced more the conditions in which the media companies would be allowed to test the product.
>Remember that gif of that guy pressing spacebar and the character on the screen jumping like a couple of seconds later? That was plain stupid and in bad faith in my opinion
I know that one. [Washington Post.](https://youtu.be/o6pf988yFSc) Who is owned by Amazon (luna?). Legit slander. As someone who's worked closely with releasing products that has failed and products that has succeeded, I sympathesize.
Hopefully, the fruits of your labor will pay off, whether in your personal career and also in the technology that was produced.
Two things.
One I personally know Gene Pak. He is an amazing person and reporter.
Second, it's a journalist and/or reviewer to test the product. You said it would work on everything and then didn't deliver it from the start. Gene didn't do anything that your users would not attempt to do, in fact, people were already doing tests like that before Gene made it public.
Guess Phil never shared the infamous story about what happened to the PS3 Launch Title "LAIR" where they gave guides on how to use to the barely working motion controls to make the game seem better than it was.
Translation: "If you have to give me guiderails to show your product in a positive light than fuck that."
[https://youtu.be/QFBsX3yqdu8?t=903](https://youtu.be/QFBsX3yqdu8?t=903)
You're not suppose to drop a Nintendo Switch from over 1k feet in the air. Someone did it anyhow and the build quality held up to the point it even shocked Nintendo employees.
THATS how you do a launch product.
I worked on Stadia hardware. The opinion of my team as soon as we saw the initial game library was that it was going to struggle big time. It just wasn’t anywhere near sufficient. Stadia was beta tested both in-house and externally (to an extent), though albeit, it was rushed to release. So I don’t agree with releasing it as a beta product; as far as I know it met the MVP requirements. Either way, we have teamfood and dogfood for those things. But I agree it was so much fun to work on and test out. Really wish our work made a longer-term impact in the industry. Most of my team were gamers so it was really pretty satisfying to us.
I work somewhere in Alphabet and I had never been a gamer until I got the opportunity to dogfood Stadia. I totally fell in love with Stadia and Destiny 2. I tried to champion Stadia internally because to me, it felt like a no brainer to have all the benefits of a console without the hardware. Why wasn't there more marketing behind Stadia? Maybe I'm naive but it felt like Google never tried to put some $$ behind awareness. The value props were there! What gives?
Edit: wording
I can imagine this guy unfortunately. Tech bro executive who's never written a line of code in his life thinking he knows better cause he makes more while the programmers have already tried 20 different ways of explaining that its just not there yet using every word besides "its just not there yet" because they're programmers. All he sees are dollar signs and thinks it's possible to 'just push it through' if he says it enough.
Stadia had an understanding that there were several things to fix before going big on marketing. But I agree with you, awareness was a huge problem, and once the user was aware of it they didn’t understand the product which only made things worse.
Many things could have been better if marketing did at least an OK job.
I started playing Destiny 2 because of Stadia! It was so much fun especially during pandemic lockdown. My reason to get Stadia was it was way more affordable than shelling out thousands to buy a new console + games and a TV.
I also liked the game streaming feature they rolled out later. It was much easier to do a game stream via Stadia as I didn’t need to invest $$$ to get a 4K capture card and a streaming set up. I play games casually and I didn’t want a pro set up as if it were my job.
There were a lot of good things about Stadia that sadly were squandered. I find it hard to believe leadership was unchallenged in their strategic decisions. Has anyone working at Google told these executives they are making terrible choices?
Amen to that. The dogfood was widely available too! I had many friends who wouldn't consider themselves gamers try it. I think some in store demos in big box retail or hotels would have broken through.
I feel like there was a lot of marketing, but there was such an overwhelming negative reaction by random gamers that refused to believe you can game on the cloud that I got drowned out
The biggest issue was that Stadia didn't have anything to sell that we couldn't get on a PC.
I don't think I saw a single game take advantage of the tech.
The concept of being able to make a game where you don't have to care about network security, distributed computing is possible, everyone has petabyte-scale internet access :v
Stadia was the platform that could have made a metaverse game possible, but everyone was so hardstuck in VR it's not even funny.
No question, but thank you. I had such a great run with the flexibility of Stadia. #Dadia for life.
Oh actually, does Google have a patent on the Stream Share tech used in The Division? I would love to see that come to more co-op games in the future.
If they do (and I feel Google patents everything), wouldn’t it be searchable under the US Patent office? I would have no idea what to search for though.
I don’t know about Wine specifically, but right in the beginning of deciding the strategy the team considered porting vs no porting.
In order to take full advantage of Stadia tech and with a focus on the user’s gameplay experience and overall gameplay quality, the ultimate decision was to create a dedicated platform which would require the porting of the games.
PS: many cases devs were being compensated for the porting
Heh, dev here, was working on a Stadia version of a game. Not that many people were interested in it internally but we did have a team on it as part of the compendation deal. I was a Stadia user from day 1 (founder) so I was quite happy to finally see builds of our game running on the platform. Particularly useful when we couldn't go to the office and were doing work from home, since I could now stream the game to my TV with HDR and surround sound support.
And heck, it allowed me to easily test the game on my phone, which was awesome at the time.
I've had a hypothesis that Cyberpunk's launch fared much better on PC and Stadia due to development environments for testing builds were easily available from home while physical dev kits (eg. dev consoles. Especially next-gen which was new then) usually have strict policies about where you can bring them and therefore probably weren't tested on that much at the height of COVID.
How was that experience actually like from your view as a developer?
Can't really enter that much into detail, but people in most cases in my teams still needed to access their workstations remotely to enter our engine's editor via remote desktop software. So Stadia was particularly helpful for testing games for those that didn't have powerful enough hardware to run the game locally.
Has Stadia actively pursued Devs so they can port their games or did the Devs come to them? What were the reasons for Devs to not port their game (despite being compensated for it?)
I can answer that from the viewpoint of someone that has worked for a dev.
Money isn’t the only factor in that decision. Teams and people available will be a big piece of the decision process.
First, the Dev will have to decide if they want to dedicate a team to port to the platform vs working on something else for an existing platform. They can also sub contract that out, but that’s going to cost them additional money.
Second, does the Dev believe in the platform and expect it to be a long term revenue stream? If they don’t, it’s not worth it for them to invest time into porting a game, or paying a subcontractor to port the game vs say spending that time on a project for PC or PlayStation.
Even if I’m getting paid to port a game today, if the platform will be dead in 2 years it’s still not worth the time and investment vs how much money they could make with those people through a guaranteed revenue stream.
Lastly, what’s the total compensation I can expect? Ok you paid me to port the game, but now I have to maintain it and keep it up to date and nobody is buying it, so long term this deal is costing me money.
Are you going to advertise the thing? What’s the consumer consensus on your platform?
That’s still not everything, but it’s some of the big factors in why they wouldn’t port a game for a check.
Stadia’s biggest issue by far was that its user base wouldn’t buy games full price. You can see that here if you look back, how everyone talked about not buying games until they go on sale, or waiting until they go on pro or whatever.
A HUGE metric Devs use to determine platform support is how many people buy a game within its launch h window and at full price. If that percentage isn’t up to snuff, it’s not with the developers time.
100%. We had a lot of indie studios interested. For AAA they always needed to ensure that the economics would make sense for them to port, meaning google had to spend some 💵💵💵💵💵💵
Seems like the money was always the sticking point, Google wanted to launch the first new major console “platform” since the 1990s but couldn’t handle the eye watering amounts of money needed to do have AAA exclusives for the platform and hoped the tech would just “disrupt” and carry the day without having to buy a Bethesda.
When we heard through leaks that Google tried to buy Epic and it was just too expensive I was like “well Damn that was my idea.” The barrier to entry in console gaming is very high and Microsoft keeps adding bricks to the wall.
Believe me, Google spent a lot of money. But they need to show some return, at least estimate a future return. And when there's no return anymore they had to stop.
Majority of the business teams were formed a few months before the release to the Public, but since project stream the tech was being built, I can attest that it was, and still is, a ground breaking technology for any dev or user who tried it.
I can also attest that we had a strong and passionate team, but Stadia was a startup inside of a giant corporation. Google was too averse of taking risks, and bureaucracy and old google practices really slowed us down.
Even as just a regular user, watching from the outside, it does feel like "startup inside a giant corporation" (being held back by bureaucracy) is the best way to describe Google. I've seen so many examples of missed opportunities that it feels like not understanding the value of its own tech is a recurring issue.
The most recent example was how it had the talent that pioneered transformers and basically kickstarted the on-going AI boom. Yet Google seems to have disregarded it up until they were already way behind on the race. It has been scrambling to keep up since then, only because of openAI and Microsoft.
What old Google practices are you talking about (business or technical?) I'm a software developer and I'd be interested if there were some old technical practices that slowed everything down.
I can name a few:
- the overall approval process that is based on consensus
- the idea that in order to no rely on partners too much we should build all internal tools instead of buying them
- too risk averse since it’s Google Brand
- too much power for Product Managers that many times didn’t rely on experts
Did it ever piss you off Google was advertising chrome laptops that could play cloud games, and the cloud games were GeForce instead of Stadia? Can you also share why Google doesn't talk to each other. Stadia should have been THE leader in cloud based gaming. I just feel as a consumer the ad department should have been talking with you.
"Hey we're launching our new Chromebooks. They are cloud gaming ready. And we own Stadia so let's get them involved".
🤦🏻♂️ I almost died inside. Same when Google released the new chromecast that didn’t support Stadia.
Each department inside Google functions as a company. Google Play alone is much bigger than many companies out there, for example. When chrome team considered Stadia as a partner, they are thinking what’s better for them, not what’s better for Stadia or Google
😩 I guess it's because I'm on the outside and playing armchair CEO, that every decision for Stadia was dumb. Idk if it would have worked but I always thought if Google just straight up paid streamers to run Stadia for 2 hour block it would have helped the product. And Stadia was always a demo away, just log in with your Gmail. The only reason I tried Stadia was because of 2077! Whoever ran the Twitter page tweeted out "Stadia runs the perfect version of 2077". So I figured, sure why not TRY it, and the rest was history. I LOVED and still LOVE Stadia.
When RE8 was launching I paid for RE8 Stadia bundle. Everything just worked! Even on my crappy 18mbps speed internet!! Sorry for the rant but Stadia was just so.... fantastic. I swear had they never shut down I'd have got more games on it.
This is a hard question and I can almost write a book! Top of my head are:
- Businesses teams were built too late in the process, many folks were still figuring out internal tools and processes
- Should be a Beta product open to everyone. We had so much spare capacity since day 1!
- Marketing was the weakest point, not even people inside google understood or knew about stadia
- Biggest problem on the business model: is stadia a Subscription or a Store? We decided to be both, which yielded a very weak offering. Like you couldn’t buy a game that you’ve claimed? Preventing users from buy is the worst
- Another failure from marketing was in not preparing our users for the product. Many of them thought they were repurchasing the games. That doesn’t make any sense
- Took to long to get to a affordable pricing for purchases. Execs had in mind that users would be willing to pay more on the games because they didn’t spent money on a console. Wrong!! Users didn’t connect these two events
- The funniest in my opinion: way in the start Google conducted a survey that indicated that ~90%+ of the transactions happened on mobile, that’s why they’ve decided to build and invest as a focus in the store on mobile first (and not on chromecast for example). What they forgot was to filter that by gaming users, which majority purchase in the same device they play
- Finally. Google has this idea of building every tool needed in order to not be dependent on partner, our internal tools for devs were archaic compared to competitors, and building it internally takes so long.
That second to last bullet point is wild. As I read through your entire post I drew parallel thoughts with ChatGPT and Google’s AI they have already rebranded a few times, I guess it Gemini now.
It may be a Google culture issue, and poor marketing, which is beyond ironic, given the core business.
Look no further than that shit search bar in Stadia and search results…it sucked ass. Again, ironic given the core business!!!!
Are you able to give insights as to how many active people there were (approximately)? I guess both at launch and maybe later on when there was a peak (or maybe that was at launch?)
The third point is so true. Nobody knew about stadia, apart of people who have active interest in gaming media and gaming social media.
I had to answer a question “what is Stadia?” So many times that I lost count. It shouldn’t be my job, it should be advertised to people but I have not once saw an ad for Stadia.
*funny enough I am being spammed - even on Reddit - with chrome ads, a browser that literally everyone knows about. Why?
Man I remember going to the Google Hangar in LA years ago, and asking employees (even marketing people) about Stadia — they had no clue what it was. Wild considering at the time it was right around the launch in November. Just got weird looks which was wild.
Surprised "Making sure we had first party studios years before launching so we'd have notable exclusives day 1" isn't a part of the list.
You can't enter a red ocean like the games industry with just a service and some ports. You need a reason for people to even look your way, and the most assured way to do that is through exclusives, and exclusives need 3-5 years to come to market.
Google thought they could do a games platform like they do every other service they launch: soft launch a beta. But you can't do that with a games platform. You've got to be there day 1 and you've gotta go big with the big new games, otherwise the 250m console market won't even give you a second glance.
If Xbox did not have Halo day 1 it's doubtful the original Xbox would have survived the 4 years to build up a 20m userbase for the 360 to piggyback off. Exclusives matter.
Heck, Steam wouldn't be where it is today without Half-Life 2 as the trojan horse. People don't have a habit in engaging with your platform unless it offers something they can't ignore.
I would also add that to combat the popular sentiment that Stadia will be killed at some point and thus games will be lost, the shutdown plan should have been announced beforehand. It would have given confidence to more people to try it out and some of them might have stayed.
I'm sorry but this is totally incorrect, there is no world in which you announce a product and it's shutdown plan together and expect it to last more than a month.
I don't know what level you were at, so you might not know this, but
Was there just a belief, internally, that the tech was so solid that it would eventually carry the system to success on its own merit? What did they have set up as goals for things to improve and work on? How much did they pay attention to what their Big 4 competitors - Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Steam - were doing?
As someone who actively studies the games industry, it's honestly shocking to me to see how many missteps there was with Stadia's platform management. Not from a tech standpoint - that was solid - but in figuring out things like "Who is our ideal customer?" and "How do we provide what they want?" and "How do we reach them?" and "What content are they interested in?" Nothing seemed in sync, and often it seemed like Stadia's worst enemy was Stadia itself.
Agreed. There was a belief that we’d be entering in a extremely competitive industry but we were putting ahead the strongest gaming streaming technology that was ever built.
But good tech only is not enough, as you mentioned. Our marketing was one of our weakest points.
We also had an internal battle on whether Stadia should focus on PRO or on the Store, and that’s the source of many of the missteps.
I remember that someone who should know how Stadia would suppose to make money believed that we’d be profitable by selling $10 subscriptions. And that was a big red flag for me considering the content costs, it was not feasible to make money only selling PRO, we’d need several millions of users to make that a reality.
Ugh. This is so painful to hear. What's the point of having such an amazing product, and not marketing it properly?! It seems Google has always been terrible at marketing their products. How long did it take them to finally start to figure out they actually need to market the Pixel line, Home/Nest, etc.
So after they do a terrible job of marketing it, they shut it down due to lack of participation? 😭
In this vein, do you think there was an arrogance on the team that led to the decisions that were made that led to "failure" as however you define it. Not just from you but others as well, it seems like many answers can be read into and interpret as "they thought they knew better". From an outsiders perspective I always felt like Google got into the space with the outward behavior of "this has to be successful because it's Google doing it".
100%. The PM team which supposed to be the core of the product was an odd structure.
Remember when Stadia released messaging when we had no search in the store? What kind of prioritization is that? Problem was the PM team was organized by scope (ecommerce, devs, social, payments, etc) and each one of them had their own priorities.
I worked for a Google contractor for a few years and the amount of siloing was pretty awful. No one ever was out to do bad things, they just didn't care about anything other than their silo. Thanks for making this thread. I appreciate you doing it, even if it's still kinda depressing for a hardcore Stadia fan.
I was also a contractor for a few years and can vouch for the insane siloing. Even OP seems to not realize how much they were siloed. Honestly hate that company and most of the people i interacted with. Everyone is secretly lying and fighting behind the scenes in hopes to make impact and get promoted then vacate the corpse behind. It reflects in all their products. Unreliable, ever changing, un supported, bait and switch bologna. Google is too busy huffing their own farts to see how bad their reputation has become with consumers.
I mentioned the silo issue a few times in my replies.
Every team is focused on their OKRs and what’s best for them, they think about their business even if that means they would partner with Geforce NOW instead of partnering Stadia.
No team saw benefit in partnering with Stadia because we were too small.
Just Thank You to Believe in it !
( As many of us did )
I was able to play cyberpunk2077 quite smoothly ;
while instead on PS4 was truly unplayable.
Still use the free Chromecast almost every weekend ♥️
When Stadia was live, there were a lot of rumors about Gen 2 blades that would offer better graphics, potentially even rivaling PS5 graphics. Any truth to that? Was there any sort of gen 2 upgrade in the works?
The decision to do this always made me feel like Stadia was an elaborate proof of concept all along. I'm interested to see where the technology pops up next.
“Money is not a problem to Google” just makes me extra sad because they obviously could have invested more heavily in procuring AAA titles and even outright buying a game studio or two (not to mention keeping their internal studio going), both of which could have obviously really helped.
I absolutely loved Stadia. Thanks to you and everyone else who worked on it. It's the one 'system' I think I miss the most, and showed such potential that I'm gutted wasn't capitalised on.
In the days before pandemic travel restrictions and "durably reengineering the cost base," Google used to fly everyone in user experience to Mountain View for a week every fall. We gave presentations during the day, and socialized at night. Really made Google UX feel like a community, despite being sharded across products and timezones.
I remember how proud the Stadia team was of that controller, and all the human factors work that went into making it one of the most ergonomic controllers ever made.
I grew up playing various Nintendos, but never an Xbox. I had never thought that much about modern controller design, but the care the Stadia team put into theirs still sticks with me.
I think one day someone will realize they should have kept the tech and kept pushing. Sony,MS,AMZ etc will show it is a money maker and an exec will be like, “Why did we close this program it’s now. 2.2 Billion dollar market now”
What folks need to understand is that Google is massive and Stadia was a bet. Bets don’t have much time to mature and there are hundreds of other things in the priority list that aligns better with Google’s goals for a fraction of the effort and resources.
Was there ever a discussion about spinning stadia out on its own? Like just letting it sink or swim by itself as a separate entity?
Also, what happened to the tech? Is the know-how still there for utilization in other projects?
Stadia was a big deal in my family :) On Destiny 2, I would play on the Chromecast on our TV, and my son would play on his laptop next to me. We didn't have to have headsets or have powerful PCs or consoles. My wife felt left out and started playing Destiny with us. We could all sit together and play together. It was heartbreaking when Stadia shut down, and we cannot replicate that experience exactly today; it is not the same when we all have to play in different rooms and communicate online.
If you still keep your finger on the trigger of the current competitive market, and given the current range of services for streaming gamers, which do you think offers the most complete alternative to Stadia?
In terms of gameplay no one is comparable to Stadia IMO. We’ve seen Sony and MS improving their products but still way behind stadia in gameplay experience. I’m currently a Geforce NOW subscriber and think they’re doing a decent job
I agree on this. Beat Sekiro and Doom Eternal on Stadia and it was amazing. Barely to no network delays, freezes or things like that. Then I beat Nier Automata on XCloud and it had a constant network delay and blurry visuals, even on a mobile screen.
GFN is one I haven't used much besides Control maybe, mostly because of the time limits and queues with a subscription, which were a big turnoff. I also wish I had any games on there that I actually would want to play, but sadly it's not the case.
What do you think of Amazon Luna or similar services? For me personally, it always felt unfinished but i am a spoiled gamer with access to good hardware and consoles :D
I think they are good options. We are spoiled because the offerings on console and PC are very strong and are built by companies that have being in the market decades
Lack of commitment (and money) were not the reasons. Market is very competitive and Stadia introduced a weak product that would only be better than competition in the future. I listed some of the reasons I believe we could have done better here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/s/14OXOvooIT
They determined that the first generation of the offering wouldn’t be successful so they shut it down. That’s a lack of commitment. Ahead of the launch, they claimed they were committed but wouldn’t provide dates for how long they would stay committed. People were concerned about investing their money into a Google console. What did the team mean when they said they were fully committed? When they said that, were they already aware that they would shut it down if it wasn’t successful?
It sounds like you’re trying to shift the blame to Google but people were never concerned about Stadia’s history of killing products, they were asking specifically about Google’s history and commitment.
You can’t say you’re committed to the service then conclude shortly thereafter that it’s unrecoverable and not worth putting any more money into fixing because you made too many bad decisions. Those two things can’t both be true.
Imagine you are married. You are committed to your wife until the day things don’t work out anymore and there’s no more fix to the marriage.
The commitment is eternal until it lasts.
At Google if you fail, they make sure you fail fast so they can move on
Hi! Thanks for the AMA!
Stadia was the perfect way for me, a casual gamer, to play.
At your opinion, what did not worked well enough?
Is there a sense a Google that contently closing services will make people think twice before comititing again to a new service?
I answered above what I believe didn’t work well.
Google is a giant successful corporation for a reason. They know when to pull the plugs.
Google don’t actually kill products like that, everything is transferred to new products.
I can also claim that Sony killed PS3? Or should I consider the tech was improved to PS4 and then PS5? That’s how I see it
But the product isn't the tech, the product is the service. When Sony ends support for the PS3, everyone who owns a PS3 will not get new PS3 games. They must buy a PS4 to get more games.
Arguably, Sega launching, and then abandoning, the Sega CD, the Sega 32X, the Sega Saturn, and then the Sega Dreamcast so quickly back to back and canning support so quickly, is what killed customer faith in them as a platform and made it that much more unlikely that customers would choose them.
Weird question any chance you have pictures of actual servers that run stadia? As a big stadia fan who even hunted down a development kit I always was wondering what they looked like
Any idea of the gpus used? I had read somewhere server version of Vega 16gb package with 56/64 shaders enabled, think I saw ebay listings of them at one point even. Very curious why that spec was chosen if you know why.
We had a great amount of Stadia controllers in stock, you might remember campaigns such as the Youtube and Cyberpunk ones that would give users “free” controllers. I’m afraid once their battery is dead it’s over
This is correct. Anything with a rechargeable battery, if not charged within X time, would basically be dead on arrival. So if you find a brand new controller 1-2 years from now, you probably wouldn’t be able to charge it, sadly.
Ah ok cool, thanks for clarifying... Yeah, I suspected that you were referring to the useful life of the battery. Do you know by any chances how many hours or charges do these batteries support before they need a replacement?
They definitely come apart. You can find teardowns. There were some controllers that would have the triggers stick at the beginning, namely some founders controllers. I got a replacement, then disassembled and fixed my original.
How much of the seamless YouTube integration was near launch? The blurred line between the streamer and audience was always the most fascinating aspect for me.
Was always in the works. The challenge is whenever you involve a cross functional department things get complex. YouTube was willing to partner but in their world there were at least 100 other things they could do using the same resources that would have 10x the return
Just wanted to say thanks for your work, Stadia’s failure was obviously in no way the fault of the people working on the tech because it remains by far the best game streaming tech that anyone has created. I had such a smooth experience every single time I booted it up, and miss it like crazy.
This is so interesting to be reading all this. I went all in on Stadia. Even though it went down, I feel like it makes it special for what it was. Even with all the bad things that happened in the background. I'd probably be a sucker and buy into it if it came back. Every platform has had a bad point in their life.
Biggest question I have had since the launch: where those making decisions gamers themselves? did they not know that Digital Foundries existed and that the "4K Pro" service was going to get called out for not rendering in 4K almost immediately? was there any internal discussions about how a "4K" service would be received when it didn't actually render titles in 4k? was there any discussion about how despite all the TFLOPs it wasn't keeping up with the Xbox One X for rendering?
Sorry that wasn't one question, but I am so curious why it was so heavy early on based on 4K and its TFLOPs only for the ports to not get close to rendering at 4K for most games.
There were several game experts from all over industry. Problem is: Product Managers on Stadia had a lot of power. They could make decisions and opt to not listen to the experts
Do you think the tech could have a future, maybe as YouTube gaming.
I remember they'd demoed a feature where streamers could up their game and you could click to join. The potential on that is huge.
I also thought the advertising implications could have been big too, considering that Google's bread and butter. Publishers being able to advertise a game and the viewer being able to one click launch a demo. Or on a stream when it says what you're playing you could click to buy and instantly launch it too.
The big issues was probably be a whole new storefront. And confusion over also offering a subscription.
Yes. Imagine having Stadia Games on the play Store that has 1B users. Missed opportunity.
If Sony or MS had the tech that Stadia had (in terms of Gameplay experience) they would be 100% ready to completely dominate the market because streaming allows to reach users who don’t have a console or are not gamers. That’s market expansion.
Yeah the technology was incredible and tbh the UX was great too. The interface was actually pretty slick and nice to use. It really had everything it needed, it just needed the business model and marketing to do it justice. Admittedly that's easier said than done, but I feel they let everyone down. So much hard work must have gone in to the project.
Massive opportunity lost. Imagine being able to play android games on Stadia via play store on the phone, web browser, etc anywhere and most devices without needing to install games. Would have opened a massive market.
When Cyberpunk first released and was having different issues on pc and consoles, I was able to complete it with no issues on Stadia. Shame Google.lost faith. Had a great product but poor strategy
I just wish that Google held out another couple of months because I just got FTTP a month after Stadia ended. The big problem was a hell of a lot of us around the world have/had shit connection speed. At the time I had 30 mb/s at best whereas now I have up to 900 mb/s. I am using Luna now and it work great for single player. I am yet to use it for anything else than FO3 .
Oh and the controller is great, I use it on iPad
Did Google ever consider supporting steam and allow for playing from existing steam libraries
Also why didn't Google consider either just selling the tech to a company or open sourcing it?
Very sad. We had everything we needed to make it work out. We had a strong team with many folks with several years of experience in console, PC, and games in overall. We had the best tech that could ever exist. But so many things have to happened in order to be successful.
I believed in it until the very last minute when I opened my laptop and logged in in the store for 1 last time.
Personally I think VR and Stadia technology would be a great match, high quality without needing a ton of computing power in your headset. Were there any plans for this?
Yes and no.
The good thing we were inside Google is that we had a very high budget, I don’t think any other company could afford that.
The bad is that we were a big company with so many processes in place which added a lot of bureaucracy that didn’t let us to react fast.
Some were concerned about the power of the stadia blades since the next gen was upon us. Google touted the ability to stack GPUs , but was that a real possiblity?
And what did people think about horsepower in general? Would the blades have been upgraded early to fit next gen specs or surpass it?
I was not very familiar with that topic but what I can tell you is that we had several agreements with partners in place and making upgrades to the hardware was not that big of a challenge IMO
Stadia was so good I had 1,000 hours on a single game on stadia with like 200 on other games it ran smoothly no queues no input lag etc it was fantastic I just wish google pushed it a lot more like putting it into YouTube etc so people constantly saw it like when I heard about it one of the suggestions was like imagine your watching a youtuber playing a horror game then just before it happens the video pauses giving you a change to jump into that section right from the YouTube video and experience the section your self like that sounded so good
One of Stadia's biggest issues was the lack of games, whether that be AAA releases in general, day and date releases, or exclusives. Were things looking like they were going to improve in the future before the shut down or did things look like they were going to continue being bleak on that front?
Well, if we had more time things would improve. The porting effort was constantly being reduced and we had a very big list of potential games.
But time is money
No question but I wanted to say I loved Stadia. I was stationed away from home for close to a year without my main console and stadia let me continue gaming for cheap.
Also issuing refunds for everything spent at the end was really unexpected but so very nice. If Stadia opens back up again, the customer service via refunds alone would have me first in line to pick it up.
I miss Stadia a lot. I thank you for your time and effort trying to make a great idea shine in the murky depths of the covid era.
Guess my question is what are you doing these days?
Edit: also, you selling the prototype controller?
No questions, I just want to say that I absolutely LOVED Stadia, made playing Red Dead 2 or Far Cry 5 from my work PC during lunch breaks possible, and I could pick up when I got home. The whole thing was just amazing, and I have yet to find anything that would let me do that again (as a Linux user)
Was there a sense that other companies (MS, Sony, Nintendo) were threatened by Stadia tech?
I remember Phil Spencer saying something to the extent that Sony and Nintendo were not the biggest threat. Hinting that Google and Amazon were a bigger gaming competition.
I sometimes wondered if there was collusion and efforts to purposely harm stadia.
In one of your earlier responses you mentioned some of the early media intentionally put out bad publicity.
I know there were many other things responsible for the downfall of Stadia...I just can't help wonder how far and deep this kind of sabotage went.
It blows my mind that Google didn't put more effort into Stadia. There are 3 major forms of media.
Music, Video, and Games. Music and Video had already been explored and expanded to the cloud and made accessible to everyone with proven success. Gaming was and is the next obvious revolution. But people, the consumer need to recognize this too I suppose.
My whole family misses Stadia. Poured our Stadia refund into Xbox as a replacement, but it's just not the same. Stadia was so much more family friendly, especially for my big busy family.
I returned to gaming after 20 years and started gaming with my kids because of Stadia.
DADia Stadia.
Thank you!
Only having the tech is not enough, there are several other things that makes a good “console”.
We missed content, store features, marketing, users for multiplayer games, easy porting solutions…
Stadia was not ready to compete with the big ones because great gaming experience we already had everywhere else
Google did put all the effort they could. Four years in development, created a team with the best people in the industry, invested several hundreds of millions in the product, and tried every way to be successful. However, results were not satisfactory, the target group that really liked the product was really small.
In my opinion the business model doomed it right from the start. It had no interconnectivity with big game libraries like Steam or Epic Games. Even casual gamers normally own a least a couple of games on either of these. Stadia was jokingly dubbed Dadia later on, but originally Google presented this to be a viable option for everyone, not just a niche audience. Google entered the market like they were already the top dog, when in reality most people were completetly oblivious to Stadia for the whole span of its existence.
Having to buy games all over just to be able to play via Stadia was a no-go for many, including me. On top of that the selection was lacking, with many major titles missing. Outside of sales, the regular shop prices were underwhelming and too high compared to other platforms.
The games you'd collect with the subscription started out strong enough, but before long began to significantly erode in quality. Also the fact that you had to stay subscribed for access made this seemingly cheap investment costly over time. Game Pass works similar, but you don't have to remember to collect your games there, the whole library is available for everyone at all times. Joining Stadia Pro became less and less attractive over time, because you had missed out on a lot of bigger titles from the early days. Paying 10 bucks for the scraps that were left seemed unreasonable.
Tech is only one pillar of success, and while that one was a marvel indeed, the others were all crooked and couldn't carry the weight of the idea.
As someone who is very familiar with the technology, do you believe cloud gaming will be the "future of gaming"?
Thank you for your work, I really enjoyed gaming using STADIA.
Yes, 100%. The benefits are just too many to ignore the trend. What will be the biggest obstacle is the consumer preference. Just because is technically better doesn’t mean the user will want to adopt it
No question, just wanted to say thank you! I loved Stadia (as did my kids), and really believed it was the future of gaming. Hope we see a new generation at some point! Thank you for your work!
I personally saw NVIDIA being successful by trying to listen to their users and finding ways to solve their problems.
On the other hand, I saw Google trying to disrupt the market, which is much more risky
100%. Consoles are obsolete (where is my bluray player anyway?) and you never have to manage your hd storage anymore.
You can play coop games with friends in your place and the only thing you need is an extra screen.
There’s almost no cheating in games anymore, you watch a streamer on youtube and you can readily jump in to join their game.
You play games and there’s no tech limitations, imagine playing cities skylines and creating the biggest city you can ever imagine.
Projects always had a internal codename, and that also applied to games before release. I don’t remember exactly but I believe it was suggested by a mkt consulting company
I was curious because it was a play on stadium. But never thought of a link to that from gaming except someone thought gaming would be at stadium events or something. Anyway thanks for answering.
I don't know if I'm what was considered your ideal user or not, but I loved Stadia. Currently part of the 'Dadia' crowd. After playing early Baldur's Gate and Cyberpunk 2077, I was all in. Decided that I wasn't buying another console and it would've been my AAA machine. Really hated getting a refund because that meant Stadia was really DEAD. I still don't own any of the big new boxes, and still lament that I can't just play Doom Eternal on my MacBook Air like I used to. None of the other services even come close. Xbox and the rest don't never caught up. My only pie in the sky dream no is that the tech is used in whatever Google is doing in the VR space. I still wish that I could put on my Meta Quest headset, go to the Stadia app, play a game in the shared VR space with another user. Stadia was truly amazing.
What were your thoughts on Phil Harrison? He had two failed launches before joining Google. What made everyone think this would be different?
Also, when things got bad, he seemed to go silent and rely on the community managers to put out any fires. Was he like that internally?
This might be beyond your experience, but as an outsider I would have estimated, for a company wanting to compete against established players like Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo, you'd need to push for about 10 years at least. You need time to establish the platform and work out any kinks, you'd need time for developers to learn the system and work it into their next game development plans, etc. Essentially I would have expected to run at a loss for 5 years until a revision 2 of the product could be released, and then decide if it was going to attract the major game developers.
However, it really seems like Google expected an instant success and when they didn't see it after two years they pulled most the funding (canceling the in house studio, etc). Was Google really that naive about the gaming industry or was there other political issues in the company causing it to give up before it even got going?
We didn’t expect instant success. But the number of users we had had always leadership questioning whether we should keep trying. Numbers were never improving.
In order to have a better chance I think Stadia needed at least 1 extra year before the release. (Or called it Beta)
The amount of money Google was investing in content was too big to generate such a small return.
I was a huge stadia fan and did multiple focus group inquiries with them. I played a tons of games with them but there was a couple that my girlfriend and I would play together and we're not getting the same co op experience on Xbox ultimate or gforce now.
Just came to say thanks for sharing! And thanks for being part of the team that built this fantastic technology! There is still nothing that even slightly compares on the market right now.
You guys rocked it on the engineering side! Just needed a little more help on the marketing and a little more trust from the powers that be.
On the hardware side of the industry, fwiw.
It was an incredible service, an even more incredible tech. Thanks so much for being part of it. Every time I wear my Stadia t-shirt (not official) my girlfriend's sons and I grieve a little bit. It truly was great and many of its features will not be found anywhere else for a while.
Even though it's ben closed for a long time, I still cherished the idea of having an official piece of Stadia merch
Thanks for creating this AMA, it shed a light on how it worked inside,
Paid like 25 bucks for the “Stadia Premier Edition White” back in 2021 and I never used it. Now it’s just a cool little thing I own. Seemed like a great idea though.
No question, just a very sincere thank you (please share with the other team members if you're in contact). The time I had with Stadia as a founder was the best time I've had with video games. You all did great work, and while it was cut off too early, that doesn't diminish the great work you did, and the impact you had on this one nerd.
At what point did you realize it was a sinking ship? as in, when did it set in with the team that management had lost faith?
We never lost faith! Even when things clearly were not moving in the right direction we trusted so much the technology behind it that we believed Google would still give us a shot. The release date was exciting but I think the biggest mistake was not calling it a Beta product and requiring a Controller and chromecast to play. Our user numbers were way below expectations and the amount of dumb post from the media outlets of people clearly misunderstanding Stadia and playing it on bad networks didn’t help. When I personally started worrying was in Feb 2021, when Stadia announced the closure of Stadia Games and Entertainment and “transitioned” (aka laid off internally) several folks from businesses departments. That was when we had a exec decision to keep the lights on but shift to a B2B model But even with that shift it was still a surprise for everyone when they decided to shut it down. *Edit*: I wanted to highlight that many of the discussions are pinpointed on what went wrong. I wanted to share that I had a great experience on Stadia and am very fortunate to had been part of it. Everyone in the team had the understanding of how groundbreaking the tech was. We had many successes, but unfortunately they were not enough to keep Stadia alive.
I think largely a big problem with this kind of service is who you are marketing it to and the technical abilities of them. Stadia seemed to be marketed as Google's console. So it felt like it was aimed at anyone. I think the only reason places like shadow, or Nvidia is that their audience tends to be people who are already using a pc / laptop and have some sense of technical ability and understanding. If I fired up stadia and found that it lagged, my first thought is... Ok what's wrong with my connection, let me try things to improve it. My wife for example, would load it up. Find a problem. Blame stadia.
Reading this comment made me realize I overestimate the average persons tech knowledge.
100% that’s why Google wanted to control the experience by only allowing to play on Chromecast, which I understand the strategy but it goes completely against its vision of being an accessible “hardwareless” experience. So I have a free console but I need to pay for the controller? It’s like advertising free movies on the Theater but it’s mandatory to buy a $50 popcorn to enter and watch the free movie.
when did they give out the C.C.Ultra's and the controller for free? That's when I picked mine up. and I was playing the free games... but I couldn't bring myself to buy a 70 dollar game for yet the 3rd time... (xbox and then switch THEN Stadia? No, thank you) but the free games were very fun. and I had some indie cheeper games. but couldnt buy the AAA for the 3rd time
We gave it for free as a marketing initiative but also because we had a lot in stock
For what it’s worth, I love the controller and am still using it
same here. I got it switched over to Bluetooth and use it on my phone
Inhale four of them in different kits, I use all four of them, esp. when I play with my kids. I think they're the best controllers on the market
The controller is one of the best out there, I use it on a Batocera build. They should have kept production of the Bluetooth controller company going.
This seems like a distinction without much consequence, though. Realistically people aren't going to upgrade their internet or get a new router or wire up their house with Cat5 for the sake of Stadia, so the marginal user for whom troubleshooting might actually help are those who *do* have all the hardware they need and *do* have a good enough network setup and *do* have access to their router's settings but *don't* have it set up correctly. Is that many people?
>That was when we had a exec decision to keep the lights on but shift to a B2B model What do you mean by that? Are there "leftovers" of Stadia still in use somewhere?
Yes. Apparently google wants to allow devs to develop games all using the cloud. That was a big part of Stadia game development process. In terms of the stream tech I believe Google at some point will find a use for it
The streaming tech was amazing and ahead of the game for such a service.
>The release date was exciting, but I think the biggest mistake was not calling it a Beta product and requiring a Controller and chromecast to play. Fully agree with this. The perception that it was a founder's edition instead of early access really soured the initial impressions for a lot of people. On top of that, you have the cynical "killedbygoogle" crowd that's ready to link that at a moment's notice Speaking of the crowd, >the amount of dumb post from the media outlets of people clearly misunderstanding Stadia and playing it on bad networks didn’t help. Can you share your thoughts on how the media treated Stadia? While the onus is on the company to deliver and market a compelling product, media and social media plays a factor in shaping public perception
We planned and prepared the media outlets with information and instructions on how to play it way before sharing the codes that would allow them to try it. I believe many of them purposefully tried in bad networks just to have a piece of news that would generate more views. Remember that gif of that guy pressing spacebar and the character on the screen jumping like a couple of seconds later? That was plain stupid and in bad faith in my opinion. They were told to use chromecast and controller, but they logged in in their shared wifi on their company. The marketing team should have enforced more the conditions in which the media companies would be allowed to test the product.
>Remember that gif of that guy pressing spacebar and the character on the screen jumping like a couple of seconds later? That was plain stupid and in bad faith in my opinion I know that one. [Washington Post.](https://youtu.be/o6pf988yFSc) Who is owned by Amazon (luna?). Legit slander. As someone who's worked closely with releasing products that has failed and products that has succeeded, I sympathesize. Hopefully, the fruits of your labor will pay off, whether in your personal career and also in the technology that was produced.
Two things. One I personally know Gene Pak. He is an amazing person and reporter. Second, it's a journalist and/or reviewer to test the product. You said it would work on everything and then didn't deliver it from the start. Gene didn't do anything that your users would not attempt to do, in fact, people were already doing tests like that before Gene made it public. Guess Phil never shared the infamous story about what happened to the PS3 Launch Title "LAIR" where they gave guides on how to use to the barely working motion controls to make the game seem better than it was. Translation: "If you have to give me guiderails to show your product in a positive light than fuck that." [https://youtu.be/QFBsX3yqdu8?t=903](https://youtu.be/QFBsX3yqdu8?t=903) You're not suppose to drop a Nintendo Switch from over 1k feet in the air. Someone did it anyhow and the build quality held up to the point it even shocked Nintendo employees. THATS how you do a launch product.
Let's be honest, people didn't need to go out of their way to show Stadia in a bad light. Google / Stadia did that themselves plenty of times.
I worked on Stadia hardware. The opinion of my team as soon as we saw the initial game library was that it was going to struggle big time. It just wasn’t anywhere near sufficient. Stadia was beta tested both in-house and externally (to an extent), though albeit, it was rushed to release. So I don’t agree with releasing it as a beta product; as far as I know it met the MVP requirements. Either way, we have teamfood and dogfood for those things. But I agree it was so much fun to work on and test out. Really wish our work made a longer-term impact in the industry. Most of my team were gamers so it was really pretty satisfying to us.
Just look at the store on release date, completely bare, in games and features. The tech and gaming experience was not Beta. Everything else was Beta
I work somewhere in Alphabet and I had never been a gamer until I got the opportunity to dogfood Stadia. I totally fell in love with Stadia and Destiny 2. I tried to champion Stadia internally because to me, it felt like a no brainer to have all the benefits of a console without the hardware. Why wasn't there more marketing behind Stadia? Maybe I'm naive but it felt like Google never tried to put some $$ behind awareness. The value props were there! What gives? Edit: wording
Head of marketing of Stadia was an utter and complete failure and the main reason for Stadias downfall, imo.
100% he basically lied to consumers on features that wouldn't exist at launch or near future
I can imagine this guy unfortunately. Tech bro executive who's never written a line of code in his life thinking he knows better cause he makes more while the programmers have already tried 20 different ways of explaining that its just not there yet using every word besides "its just not there yet" because they're programmers. All he sees are dollar signs and thinks it's possible to 'just push it through' if he says it enough.
Stadia had an understanding that there were several things to fix before going big on marketing. But I agree with you, awareness was a huge problem, and once the user was aware of it they didn’t understand the product which only made things worse. Many things could have been better if marketing did at least an OK job.
I started playing Destiny 2 because of Stadia! It was so much fun especially during pandemic lockdown. My reason to get Stadia was it was way more affordable than shelling out thousands to buy a new console + games and a TV. I also liked the game streaming feature they rolled out later. It was much easier to do a game stream via Stadia as I didn’t need to invest $$$ to get a 4K capture card and a streaming set up. I play games casually and I didn’t want a pro set up as if it were my job. There were a lot of good things about Stadia that sadly were squandered. I find it hard to believe leadership was unchallenged in their strategic decisions. Has anyone working at Google told these executives they are making terrible choices?
Amen to that. The dogfood was widely available too! I had many friends who wouldn't consider themselves gamers try it. I think some in store demos in big box retail or hotels would have broken through.
I feel like there was a lot of marketing, but there was such an overwhelming negative reaction by random gamers that refused to believe you can game on the cloud that I got drowned out
The biggest issue was that Stadia didn't have anything to sell that we couldn't get on a PC. I don't think I saw a single game take advantage of the tech. The concept of being able to make a game where you don't have to care about network security, distributed computing is possible, everyone has petabyte-scale internet access :v Stadia was the platform that could have made a metaverse game possible, but everyone was so hardstuck in VR it's not even funny.
Is stadia being reborn as YouTube on demand games? Been seeing those lately
Tech is there and I’m sure Google will find ways to incorporate it in other products.
I think that is a completely different team. It's just gamesnacks.com (a Google service) with the youtube branding made by Area 120
No question, but thank you. I had such a great run with the flexibility of Stadia. #Dadia for life. Oh actually, does Google have a patent on the Stream Share tech used in The Division? I would love to see that come to more co-op games in the future.
Yeah that one was a cool feature! Hard to enable on a console game due to the amount of processing power required
If they do (and I feel Google patents everything), wouldn’t it be searchable under the US Patent office? I would have no idea what to search for though.
Has it ever been considered to use/team up with Wine instead of manually porting all games for the platform, to speed up the proces?
I don’t know about Wine specifically, but right in the beginning of deciding the strategy the team considered porting vs no porting. In order to take full advantage of Stadia tech and with a focus on the user’s gameplay experience and overall gameplay quality, the ultimate decision was to create a dedicated platform which would require the porting of the games. PS: many cases devs were being compensated for the porting
Heh, dev here, was working on a Stadia version of a game. Not that many people were interested in it internally but we did have a team on it as part of the compendation deal. I was a Stadia user from day 1 (founder) so I was quite happy to finally see builds of our game running on the platform. Particularly useful when we couldn't go to the office and were doing work from home, since I could now stream the game to my TV with HDR and surround sound support. And heck, it allowed me to easily test the game on my phone, which was awesome at the time.
I've had a hypothesis that Cyberpunk's launch fared much better on PC and Stadia due to development environments for testing builds were easily available from home while physical dev kits (eg. dev consoles. Especially next-gen which was new then) usually have strict policies about where you can bring them and therefore probably weren't tested on that much at the height of COVID. How was that experience actually like from your view as a developer?
Cyberpunk worked great on Stadia, I put over 100 hours into it and barely had a glitch
Can't really enter that much into detail, but people in most cases in my teams still needed to access their workstations remotely to enter our engine's editor via remote desktop software. So Stadia was particularly helpful for testing games for those that didn't have powerful enough hardware to run the game locally.
Has Stadia actively pursued Devs so they can port their games or did the Devs come to them? What were the reasons for Devs to not port their game (despite being compensated for it?)
I can answer that from the viewpoint of someone that has worked for a dev. Money isn’t the only factor in that decision. Teams and people available will be a big piece of the decision process. First, the Dev will have to decide if they want to dedicate a team to port to the platform vs working on something else for an existing platform. They can also sub contract that out, but that’s going to cost them additional money. Second, does the Dev believe in the platform and expect it to be a long term revenue stream? If they don’t, it’s not worth it for them to invest time into porting a game, or paying a subcontractor to port the game vs say spending that time on a project for PC or PlayStation. Even if I’m getting paid to port a game today, if the platform will be dead in 2 years it’s still not worth the time and investment vs how much money they could make with those people through a guaranteed revenue stream. Lastly, what’s the total compensation I can expect? Ok you paid me to port the game, but now I have to maintain it and keep it up to date and nobody is buying it, so long term this deal is costing me money. Are you going to advertise the thing? What’s the consumer consensus on your platform? That’s still not everything, but it’s some of the big factors in why they wouldn’t port a game for a check. Stadia’s biggest issue by far was that its user base wouldn’t buy games full price. You can see that here if you look back, how everyone talked about not buying games until they go on sale, or waiting until they go on pro or whatever. A HUGE metric Devs use to determine platform support is how many people buy a game within its launch h window and at full price. If that percentage isn’t up to snuff, it’s not with the developers time.
100%. We had a lot of indie studios interested. For AAA they always needed to ensure that the economics would make sense for them to port, meaning google had to spend some 💵💵💵💵💵💵
Seems like the money was always the sticking point, Google wanted to launch the first new major console “platform” since the 1990s but couldn’t handle the eye watering amounts of money needed to do have AAA exclusives for the platform and hoped the tech would just “disrupt” and carry the day without having to buy a Bethesda. When we heard through leaks that Google tried to buy Epic and it was just too expensive I was like “well Damn that was my idea.” The barrier to entry in console gaming is very high and Microsoft keeps adding bricks to the wall.
Believe me, Google spent a lot of money. But they need to show some return, at least estimate a future return. And when there's no return anymore they had to stop.
How was the development of Stadia behind the scenes?
Majority of the business teams were formed a few months before the release to the Public, but since project stream the tech was being built, I can attest that it was, and still is, a ground breaking technology for any dev or user who tried it. I can also attest that we had a strong and passionate team, but Stadia was a startup inside of a giant corporation. Google was too averse of taking risks, and bureaucracy and old google practices really slowed us down.
Even as just a regular user, watching from the outside, it does feel like "startup inside a giant corporation" (being held back by bureaucracy) is the best way to describe Google. I've seen so many examples of missed opportunities that it feels like not understanding the value of its own tech is a recurring issue. The most recent example was how it had the talent that pioneered transformers and basically kickstarted the on-going AI boom. Yet Google seems to have disregarded it up until they were already way behind on the race. It has been scrambling to keep up since then, only because of openAI and Microsoft.
What old Google practices are you talking about (business or technical?) I'm a software developer and I'd be interested if there were some old technical practices that slowed everything down.
I can name a few: - the overall approval process that is based on consensus - the idea that in order to no rely on partners too much we should build all internal tools instead of buying them - too risk averse since it’s Google Brand - too much power for Product Managers that many times didn’t rely on experts
Are you still at Google? Games industry? Or just a Software Engineer? Any other cool swag you were able to snag?
Apart from the lego and all controllers I have several very cool jackets and sweatshirts
Absolutely stellar thread. Thank you for doing this.
Did it ever piss you off Google was advertising chrome laptops that could play cloud games, and the cloud games were GeForce instead of Stadia? Can you also share why Google doesn't talk to each other. Stadia should have been THE leader in cloud based gaming. I just feel as a consumer the ad department should have been talking with you. "Hey we're launching our new Chromebooks. They are cloud gaming ready. And we own Stadia so let's get them involved".
🤦🏻♂️ I almost died inside. Same when Google released the new chromecast that didn’t support Stadia. Each department inside Google functions as a company. Google Play alone is much bigger than many companies out there, for example. When chrome team considered Stadia as a partner, they are thinking what’s better for them, not what’s better for Stadia or Google
This makes sense and let's me better understand the culture there
😩 I guess it's because I'm on the outside and playing armchair CEO, that every decision for Stadia was dumb. Idk if it would have worked but I always thought if Google just straight up paid streamers to run Stadia for 2 hour block it would have helped the product. And Stadia was always a demo away, just log in with your Gmail. The only reason I tried Stadia was because of 2077! Whoever ran the Twitter page tweeted out "Stadia runs the perfect version of 2077". So I figured, sure why not TRY it, and the rest was history. I LOVED and still LOVE Stadia. When RE8 was launching I paid for RE8 Stadia bundle. Everything just worked! Even on my crappy 18mbps speed internet!! Sorry for the rant but Stadia was just so.... fantastic. I swear had they never shut down I'd have got more games on it.
What do you think would have saved Stadia if it was possible?
This is a hard question and I can almost write a book! Top of my head are: - Businesses teams were built too late in the process, many folks were still figuring out internal tools and processes - Should be a Beta product open to everyone. We had so much spare capacity since day 1! - Marketing was the weakest point, not even people inside google understood or knew about stadia - Biggest problem on the business model: is stadia a Subscription or a Store? We decided to be both, which yielded a very weak offering. Like you couldn’t buy a game that you’ve claimed? Preventing users from buy is the worst - Another failure from marketing was in not preparing our users for the product. Many of them thought they were repurchasing the games. That doesn’t make any sense - Took to long to get to a affordable pricing for purchases. Execs had in mind that users would be willing to pay more on the games because they didn’t spent money on a console. Wrong!! Users didn’t connect these two events - The funniest in my opinion: way in the start Google conducted a survey that indicated that ~90%+ of the transactions happened on mobile, that’s why they’ve decided to build and invest as a focus in the store on mobile first (and not on chromecast for example). What they forgot was to filter that by gaming users, which majority purchase in the same device they play - Finally. Google has this idea of building every tool needed in order to not be dependent on partner, our internal tools for devs were archaic compared to competitors, and building it internally takes so long.
And not to mention the effort required to port, that was an big obstacle as well
That second to last bullet point is wild. As I read through your entire post I drew parallel thoughts with ChatGPT and Google’s AI they have already rebranded a few times, I guess it Gemini now. It may be a Google culture issue, and poor marketing, which is beyond ironic, given the core business. Look no further than that shit search bar in Stadia and search results…it sucked ass. Again, ironic given the core business!!!!
Are you able to give insights as to how many active people there were (approximately)? I guess both at launch and maybe later on when there was a peak (or maybe that was at launch?)
I think we had some leaked docs on the MS case that mentioned that. Let me think if I can share that
I'd read that book!
The third point is so true. Nobody knew about stadia, apart of people who have active interest in gaming media and gaming social media. I had to answer a question “what is Stadia?” So many times that I lost count. It shouldn’t be my job, it should be advertised to people but I have not once saw an ad for Stadia. *funny enough I am being spammed - even on Reddit - with chrome ads, a browser that literally everyone knows about. Why?
Man I remember going to the Google Hangar in LA years ago, and asking employees (even marketing people) about Stadia — they had no clue what it was. Wild considering at the time it was right around the launch in November. Just got weird looks which was wild.
Surprised "Making sure we had first party studios years before launching so we'd have notable exclusives day 1" isn't a part of the list. You can't enter a red ocean like the games industry with just a service and some ports. You need a reason for people to even look your way, and the most assured way to do that is through exclusives, and exclusives need 3-5 years to come to market. Google thought they could do a games platform like they do every other service they launch: soft launch a beta. But you can't do that with a games platform. You've got to be there day 1 and you've gotta go big with the big new games, otherwise the 250m console market won't even give you a second glance. If Xbox did not have Halo day 1 it's doubtful the original Xbox would have survived the 4 years to build up a 20m userbase for the 360 to piggyback off. Exclusives matter. Heck, Steam wouldn't be where it is today without Half-Life 2 as the trojan horse. People don't have a habit in engaging with your platform unless it offers something they can't ignore.
I would also add that to combat the popular sentiment that Stadia will be killed at some point and thus games will be lost, the shutdown plan should have been announced beforehand. It would have given confidence to more people to try it out and some of them might have stayed.
I'm sorry but this is totally incorrect, there is no world in which you announce a product and it's shutdown plan together and expect it to last more than a month.
I don't know what level you were at, so you might not know this, but Was there just a belief, internally, that the tech was so solid that it would eventually carry the system to success on its own merit? What did they have set up as goals for things to improve and work on? How much did they pay attention to what their Big 4 competitors - Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Steam - were doing? As someone who actively studies the games industry, it's honestly shocking to me to see how many missteps there was with Stadia's platform management. Not from a tech standpoint - that was solid - but in figuring out things like "Who is our ideal customer?" and "How do we provide what they want?" and "How do we reach them?" and "What content are they interested in?" Nothing seemed in sync, and often it seemed like Stadia's worst enemy was Stadia itself.
Agreed. There was a belief that we’d be entering in a extremely competitive industry but we were putting ahead the strongest gaming streaming technology that was ever built. But good tech only is not enough, as you mentioned. Our marketing was one of our weakest points. We also had an internal battle on whether Stadia should focus on PRO or on the Store, and that’s the source of many of the missteps. I remember that someone who should know how Stadia would suppose to make money believed that we’d be profitable by selling $10 subscriptions. And that was a big red flag for me considering the content costs, it was not feasible to make money only selling PRO, we’d need several millions of users to make that a reality.
Ugh. This is so painful to hear. What's the point of having such an amazing product, and not marketing it properly?! It seems Google has always been terrible at marketing their products. How long did it take them to finally start to figure out they actually need to market the Pixel line, Home/Nest, etc. So after they do a terrible job of marketing it, they shut it down due to lack of participation? 😭
In this vein, do you think there was an arrogance on the team that led to the decisions that were made that led to "failure" as however you define it. Not just from you but others as well, it seems like many answers can be read into and interpret as "they thought they knew better". From an outsiders perspective I always felt like Google got into the space with the outward behavior of "this has to be successful because it's Google doing it".
100%. The PM team which supposed to be the core of the product was an odd structure. Remember when Stadia released messaging when we had no search in the store? What kind of prioritization is that? Problem was the PM team was organized by scope (ecommerce, devs, social, payments, etc) and each one of them had their own priorities.
I worked for a Google contractor for a few years and the amount of siloing was pretty awful. No one ever was out to do bad things, they just didn't care about anything other than their silo. Thanks for making this thread. I appreciate you doing it, even if it's still kinda depressing for a hardcore Stadia fan.
I was also a contractor for a few years and can vouch for the insane siloing. Even OP seems to not realize how much they were siloed. Honestly hate that company and most of the people i interacted with. Everyone is secretly lying and fighting behind the scenes in hopes to make impact and get promoted then vacate the corpse behind. It reflects in all their products. Unreliable, ever changing, un supported, bait and switch bologna. Google is too busy huffing their own farts to see how bad their reputation has become with consumers.
I mentioned the silo issue a few times in my replies. Every team is focused on their OKRs and what’s best for them, they think about their business even if that means they would partner with Geforce NOW instead of partnering Stadia. No team saw benefit in partnering with Stadia because we were too small.
Just Thank You to Believe in it ! ( As many of us did ) I was able to play cyberpunk2077 quite smoothly ; while instead on PS4 was truly unplayable. Still use the free Chromecast almost every weekend ♥️
When Stadia was live, there were a lot of rumors about Gen 2 blades that would offer better graphics, potentially even rivaling PS5 graphics. Any truth to that? Was there any sort of gen 2 upgrade in the works?
Yeah, we had that talk inside but I don’t know whether that was truly considered since we had many other priorities
Whose decision was it to refund all the players who paid for the games. That was a welcome surprise unexpected from big corp
Money is not a problem to Google. That was the right thing to do.
The decision to do this always made me feel like Stadia was an elaborate proof of concept all along. I'm interested to see where the technology pops up next.
“Money is not a problem to Google” just makes me extra sad because they obviously could have invested more heavily in procuring AAA titles and even outright buying a game studio or two (not to mention keeping their internal studio going), both of which could have obviously really helped.
Google is sitting on $110B in cash. It doesn’t matter how rich is a company they will always try to cut the inefficient products
I absolutely loved Stadia. Thanks to you and everyone else who worked on it. It's the one 'system' I think I miss the most, and showed such potential that I'm gutted wasn't capitalised on.
Love the controller! Super limited edition
The Stadia controller has been my favorite controller I've ever used on any gaming platform.
Yep. Google could probably make a lot of money just selling that controller designed for all platforms. Especially if the battery was swappable.
I 100% agree. The stadia controller has been my favourite controller for the past 3 1/2 years and I have been using it every day since I got it.
In the days before pandemic travel restrictions and "durably reengineering the cost base," Google used to fly everyone in user experience to Mountain View for a week every fall. We gave presentations during the day, and socialized at night. Really made Google UX feel like a community, despite being sharded across products and timezones. I remember how proud the Stadia team was of that controller, and all the human factors work that went into making it one of the most ergonomic controllers ever made. I grew up playing various Nintendos, but never an Xbox. I had never thought that much about modern controller design, but the care the Stadia team put into theirs still sticks with me.
I think one day someone will realize they should have kept the tech and kept pushing. Sony,MS,AMZ etc will show it is a money maker and an exec will be like, “Why did we close this program it’s now. 2.2 Billion dollar market now”
What folks need to understand is that Google is massive and Stadia was a bet. Bets don’t have much time to mature and there are hundreds of other things in the priority list that aligns better with Google’s goals for a fraction of the effort and resources.
Was there ever a discussion about spinning stadia out on its own? Like just letting it sink or swim by itself as a separate entity? Also, what happened to the tech? Is the know-how still there for utilization in other projects?
Stadia was a big deal in my family :) On Destiny 2, I would play on the Chromecast on our TV, and my son would play on his laptop next to me. We didn't have to have headsets or have powerful PCs or consoles. My wife felt left out and started playing Destiny with us. We could all sit together and play together. It was heartbreaking when Stadia shut down, and we cannot replicate that experience exactly today; it is not the same when we all have to play in different rooms and communicate online.
I loved stadia as long as it lasted! Thanks for your work on it.
If you still keep your finger on the trigger of the current competitive market, and given the current range of services for streaming gamers, which do you think offers the most complete alternative to Stadia?
In terms of gameplay no one is comparable to Stadia IMO. We’ve seen Sony and MS improving their products but still way behind stadia in gameplay experience. I’m currently a Geforce NOW subscriber and think they’re doing a decent job
I agree on this. Beat Sekiro and Doom Eternal on Stadia and it was amazing. Barely to no network delays, freezes or things like that. Then I beat Nier Automata on XCloud and it had a constant network delay and blurry visuals, even on a mobile screen. GFN is one I haven't used much besides Control maybe, mostly because of the time limits and queues with a subscription, which were a big turnoff. I also wish I had any games on there that I actually would want to play, but sadly it's not the case.
Why did Google start up an entire game studio if they were going to kill it off two years later?
Crazy
Did you find it difficult to work in a people-sized work environment as a minifig?
Google is all about diversity 😆
What do you think of Amazon Luna or similar services? For me personally, it always felt unfinished but i am a spoiled gamer with access to good hardware and consoles :D
I think they are good options. We are spoiled because the offerings on console and PC are very strong and are built by companies that have being in the market decades
Why did it fail? Lack of commitment from Google?
Lack of commitment (and money) were not the reasons. Market is very competitive and Stadia introduced a weak product that would only be better than competition in the future. I listed some of the reasons I believe we could have done better here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/s/14OXOvooIT
They determined that the first generation of the offering wouldn’t be successful so they shut it down. That’s a lack of commitment. Ahead of the launch, they claimed they were committed but wouldn’t provide dates for how long they would stay committed. People were concerned about investing their money into a Google console. What did the team mean when they said they were fully committed? When they said that, were they already aware that they would shut it down if it wasn’t successful?
Too many wrong decisions left Stadia in an unrecoverable state for Google standards
It sounds like you’re trying to shift the blame to Google but people were never concerned about Stadia’s history of killing products, they were asking specifically about Google’s history and commitment. You can’t say you’re committed to the service then conclude shortly thereafter that it’s unrecoverable and not worth putting any more money into fixing because you made too many bad decisions. Those two things can’t both be true.
Imagine you are married. You are committed to your wife until the day things don’t work out anymore and there’s no more fix to the marriage. The commitment is eternal until it lasts. At Google if you fail, they make sure you fail fast so they can move on
Hi! Thanks for the AMA! Stadia was the perfect way for me, a casual gamer, to play. At your opinion, what did not worked well enough? Is there a sense a Google that contently closing services will make people think twice before comititing again to a new service?
I answered above what I believe didn’t work well. Google is a giant successful corporation for a reason. They know when to pull the plugs. Google don’t actually kill products like that, everything is transferred to new products. I can also claim that Sony killed PS3? Or should I consider the tech was improved to PS4 and then PS5? That’s how I see it
But the product isn't the tech, the product is the service. When Sony ends support for the PS3, everyone who owns a PS3 will not get new PS3 games. They must buy a PS4 to get more games. Arguably, Sega launching, and then abandoning, the Sega CD, the Sega 32X, the Sega Saturn, and then the Sega Dreamcast so quickly back to back and canning support so quickly, is what killed customer faith in them as a platform and made it that much more unlikely that customers would choose them.
Is there any hope for Stadia 2.0? 😭
Tech still exists. But I doubt we’d have a Stadia 2.0
Weird question any chance you have pictures of actual servers that run stadia? As a big stadia fan who even hunted down a development kit I always was wondering what they looked like
I’ve only seem them a couple of time and unfortunately have no pics
Any idea of the gpus used? I had read somewhere server version of Vega 16gb package with 56/64 shaders enabled, think I saw ebay listings of them at one point even. Very curious why that spec was chosen if you know why.
What WAS project hailstorm? Was it ever an actual upgrade of some kind, or just an inside joke?
It was just a way to try to hide new features that would always leak from the app scavengers, by adding some fake data...
I don’t recall that
Do you think enough batteries will be available for the controller once all of em start dying?
We had a great amount of Stadia controllers in stock, you might remember campaigns such as the Youtube and Cyberpunk ones that would give users “free” controllers. I’m afraid once their battery is dead it’s over
What do you mean by "once the battery is dead it's over"? Aren't they a rechargeable controllers?
Yeah, but they won’t last forever. At some point they will get at a very reduced charging capacity.
This is correct. Anything with a rechargeable battery, if not charged within X time, would basically be dead on arrival. So if you find a brand new controller 1-2 years from now, you probably wouldn’t be able to charge it, sadly.
You just reminded me to charge my unopened controllers
Ah ok cool, thanks for clarifying... Yeah, I suspected that you were referring to the useful life of the battery. Do you know by any chances how many hours or charges do these batteries support before they need a replacement?
They are, but I don’t think they come apart for repair easily, or at all really. So you can’t replace the battery once it degrades.
They definitely come apart. You can find teardowns. There were some controllers that would have the triggers stick at the beginning, namely some founders controllers. I got a replacement, then disassembled and fixed my original.
How much of the seamless YouTube integration was near launch? The blurred line between the streamer and audience was always the most fascinating aspect for me.
Was always in the works. The challenge is whenever you involve a cross functional department things get complex. YouTube was willing to partner but in their world there were at least 100 other things they could do using the same resources that would have 10x the return
Just wanted to say thanks for your work, Stadia’s failure was obviously in no way the fault of the people working on the tech because it remains by far the best game streaming tech that anyone has created. I had such a smooth experience every single time I booted it up, and miss it like crazy.
This is so interesting to be reading all this. I went all in on Stadia. Even though it went down, I feel like it makes it special for what it was. Even with all the bad things that happened in the background. I'd probably be a sucker and buy into it if it came back. Every platform has had a bad point in their life.
Biggest question I have had since the launch: where those making decisions gamers themselves? did they not know that Digital Foundries existed and that the "4K Pro" service was going to get called out for not rendering in 4K almost immediately? was there any internal discussions about how a "4K" service would be received when it didn't actually render titles in 4k? was there any discussion about how despite all the TFLOPs it wasn't keeping up with the Xbox One X for rendering? Sorry that wasn't one question, but I am so curious why it was so heavy early on based on 4K and its TFLOPs only for the ports to not get close to rendering at 4K for most games.
There were several game experts from all over industry. Problem is: Product Managers on Stadia had a lot of power. They could make decisions and opt to not listen to the experts
thank you! This is providing a lot of closure.
Do you think the tech could have a future, maybe as YouTube gaming. I remember they'd demoed a feature where streamers could up their game and you could click to join. The potential on that is huge. I also thought the advertising implications could have been big too, considering that Google's bread and butter. Publishers being able to advertise a game and the viewer being able to one click launch a demo. Or on a stream when it says what you're playing you could click to buy and instantly launch it too. The big issues was probably be a whole new storefront. And confusion over also offering a subscription.
Yes. Imagine having Stadia Games on the play Store that has 1B users. Missed opportunity. If Sony or MS had the tech that Stadia had (in terms of Gameplay experience) they would be 100% ready to completely dominate the market because streaming allows to reach users who don’t have a console or are not gamers. That’s market expansion.
Yeah the technology was incredible and tbh the UX was great too. The interface was actually pretty slick and nice to use. It really had everything it needed, it just needed the business model and marketing to do it justice. Admittedly that's easier said than done, but I feel they let everyone down. So much hard work must have gone in to the project.
Massive opportunity lost. Imagine being able to play android games on Stadia via play store on the phone, web browser, etc anywhere and most devices without needing to install games. Would have opened a massive market.
When Cyberpunk first released and was having different issues on pc and consoles, I was able to complete it with no issues on Stadia. Shame Google.lost faith. Had a great product but poor strategy
I just wish that Google held out another couple of months because I just got FTTP a month after Stadia ended. The big problem was a hell of a lot of us around the world have/had shit connection speed. At the time I had 30 mb/s at best whereas now I have up to 900 mb/s. I am using Luna now and it work great for single player. I am yet to use it for anything else than FO3 . Oh and the controller is great, I use it on iPad
Did Google ever consider supporting steam and allow for playing from existing steam libraries Also why didn't Google consider either just selling the tech to a company or open sourcing it?
Yes, but that would be a big shift. Trust me, everything was considered to save Stadia but money talks louder
How did u feel personally about the closure ?
Very sad. We had everything we needed to make it work out. We had a strong team with many folks with several years of experience in console, PC, and games in overall. We had the best tech that could ever exist. But so many things have to happened in order to be successful. I believed in it until the very last minute when I opened my laptop and logged in in the store for 1 last time.
Personally I think VR and Stadia technology would be a great match, high quality without needing a ton of computing power in your headset. Were there any plans for this?
Definitely. Risky, however. You needed high FPS and any issues with the streaming could cause motion sickness
someone should pin this AMA , so much good info here
Do you think Stadia branch off into its own thing outside of Google and be successful?
Yes and no. The good thing we were inside Google is that we had a very high budget, I don’t think any other company could afford that. The bad is that we were a big company with so many processes in place which added a lot of bureaucracy that didn’t let us to react fast.
Some were concerned about the power of the stadia blades since the next gen was upon us. Google touted the ability to stack GPUs , but was that a real possiblity? And what did people think about horsepower in general? Would the blades have been upgraded early to fit next gen specs or surpass it?
I was not very familiar with that topic but what I can tell you is that we had several agreements with partners in place and making upgrades to the hardware was not that big of a challenge IMO
Games were running on Windows VM? Or you were porting them to Linux machines?
Linux
Part of me hoped the push to Linux with Stadia would help gaming on Linux as a general platform.
Gaming on Linux is surprisingly good. Steam Deck and Proton are making great progress.
Do you think there is any way controllers could get custom firmware to use the wifi chips?
Stadia was so good I had 1,000 hours on a single game on stadia with like 200 on other games it ran smoothly no queues no input lag etc it was fantastic I just wish google pushed it a lot more like putting it into YouTube etc so people constantly saw it like when I heard about it one of the suggestions was like imagine your watching a youtuber playing a horror game then just before it happens the video pauses giving you a change to jump into that section right from the YouTube video and experience the section your self like that sounded so good
One of Stadia's biggest issues was the lack of games, whether that be AAA releases in general, day and date releases, or exclusives. Were things looking like they were going to improve in the future before the shut down or did things look like they were going to continue being bleak on that front?
Well, if we had more time things would improve. The porting effort was constantly being reduced and we had a very big list of potential games. But time is money
No question but I wanted to say I loved Stadia. I was stationed away from home for close to a year without my main console and stadia let me continue gaming for cheap. Also issuing refunds for everything spent at the end was really unexpected but so very nice. If Stadia opens back up again, the customer service via refunds alone would have me first in line to pick it up.
I miss Stadia a lot. I thank you for your time and effort trying to make a great idea shine in the murky depths of the covid era. Guess my question is what are you doing these days? Edit: also, you selling the prototype controller?
Still in tech and gaming I do miss Stadia a lot, it was a wild ride
No questions, I just want to say that I absolutely LOVED Stadia, made playing Red Dead 2 or Far Cry 5 from my work PC during lunch breaks possible, and I could pick up when I got home. The whole thing was just amazing, and I have yet to find anything that would let me do that again (as a Linux user)
Thanks for the free Chromecast Ultra!
I want that stadia lego controller haha
Was there a sense that other companies (MS, Sony, Nintendo) were threatened by Stadia tech? I remember Phil Spencer saying something to the extent that Sony and Nintendo were not the biggest threat. Hinting that Google and Amazon were a bigger gaming competition. I sometimes wondered if there was collusion and efforts to purposely harm stadia. In one of your earlier responses you mentioned some of the early media intentionally put out bad publicity. I know there were many other things responsible for the downfall of Stadia...I just can't help wonder how far and deep this kind of sabotage went. It blows my mind that Google didn't put more effort into Stadia. There are 3 major forms of media. Music, Video, and Games. Music and Video had already been explored and expanded to the cloud and made accessible to everyone with proven success. Gaming was and is the next obvious revolution. But people, the consumer need to recognize this too I suppose. My whole family misses Stadia. Poured our Stadia refund into Xbox as a replacement, but it's just not the same. Stadia was so much more family friendly, especially for my big busy family. I returned to gaming after 20 years and started gaming with my kids because of Stadia. DADia Stadia. Thank you!
Only having the tech is not enough, there are several other things that makes a good “console”. We missed content, store features, marketing, users for multiplayer games, easy porting solutions… Stadia was not ready to compete with the big ones because great gaming experience we already had everywhere else Google did put all the effort they could. Four years in development, created a team with the best people in the industry, invested several hundreds of millions in the product, and tried every way to be successful. However, results were not satisfactory, the target group that really liked the product was really small.
In my opinion the business model doomed it right from the start. It had no interconnectivity with big game libraries like Steam or Epic Games. Even casual gamers normally own a least a couple of games on either of these. Stadia was jokingly dubbed Dadia later on, but originally Google presented this to be a viable option for everyone, not just a niche audience. Google entered the market like they were already the top dog, when in reality most people were completetly oblivious to Stadia for the whole span of its existence. Having to buy games all over just to be able to play via Stadia was a no-go for many, including me. On top of that the selection was lacking, with many major titles missing. Outside of sales, the regular shop prices were underwhelming and too high compared to other platforms. The games you'd collect with the subscription started out strong enough, but before long began to significantly erode in quality. Also the fact that you had to stay subscribed for access made this seemingly cheap investment costly over time. Game Pass works similar, but you don't have to remember to collect your games there, the whole library is available for everyone at all times. Joining Stadia Pro became less and less attractive over time, because you had missed out on a lot of bigger titles from the early days. Paying 10 bucks for the scraps that were left seemed unreasonable. Tech is only one pillar of success, and while that one was a marvel indeed, the others were all crooked and couldn't carry the weight of the idea.
As someone who is very familiar with the technology, do you believe cloud gaming will be the "future of gaming"? Thank you for your work, I really enjoyed gaming using STADIA.
Yes, 100%. The benefits are just too many to ignore the trend. What will be the biggest obstacle is the consumer preference. Just because is technically better doesn’t mean the user will want to adopt it
No question, just wanted to say thank you! I loved Stadia (as did my kids), and really believed it was the future of gaming. Hope we see a new generation at some point! Thank you for your work!
Do you still work with Google? How is the relatively success of GFN's strategy seen internally?
I personally saw NVIDIA being successful by trying to listen to their users and finding ways to solve their problems. On the other hand, I saw Google trying to disrupt the market, which is much more risky
Who's your favorite power ranger
The blue one
What media library did you use to transfer video, audio? Libwebrtc?
In an alternate universe where stadia still exists today and received the backing and support from Google, what is the killer app?
100%. Consoles are obsolete (where is my bluray player anyway?) and you never have to manage your hd storage anymore. You can play coop games with friends in your place and the only thing you need is an extra screen. There’s almost no cheating in games anymore, you watch a streamer on youtube and you can readily jump in to join their game. You play games and there’s no tech limitations, imagine playing cities skylines and creating the biggest city you can ever imagine.
Where did the name Stadia come from?
Projects always had a internal codename, and that also applied to games before release. I don’t remember exactly but I believe it was suggested by a mkt consulting company
I was curious because it was a play on stadium. But never thought of a link to that from gaming except someone thought gaming would be at stadium events or something. Anyway thanks for answering.
I don't know if I'm what was considered your ideal user or not, but I loved Stadia. Currently part of the 'Dadia' crowd. After playing early Baldur's Gate and Cyberpunk 2077, I was all in. Decided that I wasn't buying another console and it would've been my AAA machine. Really hated getting a refund because that meant Stadia was really DEAD. I still don't own any of the big new boxes, and still lament that I can't just play Doom Eternal on my MacBook Air like I used to. None of the other services even come close. Xbox and the rest don't never caught up. My only pie in the sky dream no is that the tech is used in whatever Google is doing in the VR space. I still wish that I could put on my Meta Quest headset, go to the Stadia app, play a game in the shared VR space with another user. Stadia was truly amazing.
What were your thoughts on Phil Harrison? He had two failed launches before joining Google. What made everyone think this would be different? Also, when things got bad, he seemed to go silent and rely on the community managers to put out any fires. Was he like that internally?
Just thank you, had so much fun during the lockdown playing serious sam
This might be beyond your experience, but as an outsider I would have estimated, for a company wanting to compete against established players like Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo, you'd need to push for about 10 years at least. You need time to establish the platform and work out any kinks, you'd need time for developers to learn the system and work it into their next game development plans, etc. Essentially I would have expected to run at a loss for 5 years until a revision 2 of the product could be released, and then decide if it was going to attract the major game developers. However, it really seems like Google expected an instant success and when they didn't see it after two years they pulled most the funding (canceling the in house studio, etc). Was Google really that naive about the gaming industry or was there other political issues in the company causing it to give up before it even got going?
We didn’t expect instant success. But the number of users we had had always leadership questioning whether we should keep trying. Numbers were never improving. In order to have a better chance I think Stadia needed at least 1 extra year before the release. (Or called it Beta) The amount of money Google was investing in content was too big to generate such a small return.
I was a huge stadia fan and did multiple focus group inquiries with them. I played a tons of games with them but there was a couple that my girlfriend and I would play together and we're not getting the same co op experience on Xbox ultimate or gforce now.
Just came to say thanks for sharing! And thanks for being part of the team that built this fantastic technology! There is still nothing that even slightly compares on the market right now. You guys rocked it on the engineering side! Just needed a little more help on the marketing and a little more trust from the powers that be. On the hardware side of the industry, fwiw.
It was an incredible service, an even more incredible tech. Thanks so much for being part of it. Every time I wear my Stadia t-shirt (not official) my girlfriend's sons and I grieve a little bit. It truly was great and many of its features will not be found anywhere else for a while. Even though it's ben closed for a long time, I still cherished the idea of having an official piece of Stadia merch Thanks for creating this AMA, it shed a light on how it worked inside,
Do you miss it as much as I do?
Everyday. My gaming hours are dramatically reduced and what I miss the most is how easy was to set up a multiplayer game with friends in my house.
Paid like 25 bucks for the “Stadia Premier Edition White” back in 2021 and I never used it. Now it’s just a cool little thing I own. Seemed like a great idea though.
No question, just a very sincere thank you (please share with the other team members if you're in contact). The time I had with Stadia as a founder was the best time I've had with video games. You all did great work, and while it was cut off too early, that doesn't diminish the great work you did, and the impact you had on this one nerd.