Google Stadia: Thread 01

[Brad]

Their fail fast mentality seems to have gone awry. This should have died at early prototypes stage. No, before that. It should have died when everyone else who tried this also failed, before them.

[kryss]

Finally I can get back the $0.11 I spent on Borderlands 3.

[Asura]

Just another flashy proposed solution to an unsolvable problem, with a ****-looking controller.

I stand by my earlier comments.

[Neon Ignition]

Google dreamed it and it was built

[fuse]

The very crappy side to this is that seemingly Google didn't think to communicate any of this to their dev community beforehand. Folks with games due to launch in a matter of days are finding out via an article in The Verge that this isn't going to happen.

[Lebowski]

The very crappy side to this is that seemingly Google didn't think to communicate any of this to their dev community beforehand. Folks with games due to launch in a matter of days are finding out via an article in The Verge that this isn't going to happen.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2?r=US&IR=T

An article i posted quite a while back now showed that a lot of Dev's where not actively looking to program games for Stadia as the audience just wasn't there, and google offered no incentive to developers to entice them to the platform. Anyone that was still programing for this thing seriously needs their head examining.

[QualityChimp]

Shame we'll never get to a Google Stadia Thread 2.

[Asura]

An article i posted quite a while back now showed that a lot of Dev's where not actively looking to program games for Stadia as the audience just wasn't there, and google offered no incentive to developers to entice them to the platform. Anyone that was still programing for this thing seriously needs their head examining.

As a counterpoint to this - there's something to be said for being a comparably big fish in a drying pond. Sometimes small developers can make a lot of money this way. Ubisoft might ignore Stadia in its death throes, because £250k is small change to them, but £250k can be a life-changing sum of money for a 4-person dev team, especially if they're just porting a game which available elsewhere anyway. If there were as few as ~10k people who were pretty core Stadia users, if nothing is coming out on the platform, releasing something, anything, can be quite lucrative.

[fuse]

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-...20-2?r=US&IR=T

An article i posted quite a while back now showed that a lot of Dev's where not actively looking to program games for Stadia as the audience just wasn't there, and google offered no incentive to developers to entice them to the platform. Anyone that was still programing for this thing seriously needs their head examining.

In contrast:

Embedded Tweet

[MartyG]

I stand by my earlier comments.

The controller is actually very good. Excellent D-Pad on it. What Google needs to do is open up the BlueTooth functionality so it can be used wirelessly on PC. You can use it wired, but who wants to be tethered in this era of gaming?

[wakka]

Sucks big time for those devs, and I totally get the big fish in a small pond thing (plus it's cool how Stadia paid better than other platforms). But you would HAVE to know that you are proceeding at risk developing with Stadia in mind as a major income stream. I mean it would be common sense at this point. Putting myself in the shoes of an indie dev, considering the big-fish-small-pond/high commission of Stadia, I can totally see myself making the call to develop for it, but I would've probably considered it an educated gamble.

Not that that doesn't give them the right to complain on Twitter. Or to say that Google shouldn't have given them a heads up. Although it's difficult to see how they could do the latter without being assured that it wouldn't have quickly leaked via anonymous sources to someone like Schreier, thereby quickly becoming a de facto announcement.

[MartyG]

Unless there's some kind of massively different structure for Stadia titles (and I suspect there isn't), then they should be talking to Uncle Tim for some Epic Games Store exclusivity.

If there is, then that was just another nail in the coffin for Stadia right from the start.

[Lebowski]

In contrast:

Embedded Tweet

As a counterpoint to this - there's something to be said for being a comparably big fish in a drying pond. Sometimes small developers can make a lot of money this way. Ubisoft might ignore Stadia in its death throes, because £250k is small change to them, but £250k can be a life-changing sum of money for a 4-person dev team, especially if they're just porting a game which available elsewhere anyway. If there were as few as ~10k people who were pretty core Stadia users, if nothing is coming out on the platform, releasing something, anything, can be quite lucrative.

And their in lies the risk being a big fish in a drying pond if you stay their your gonna end up in a bad way, google essentially just filled in the pond by nuking the whole area.

[Asura]

But you would HAVE to know that you are proceeding at risk developing with Stadia in mind as a major income stream.

Certainly. But all game development is risk, really. You could release a game on Steam and it could get lost in the absolute melee of the dozens of releases every day.

Stil, I absolutely agree that anyone had "all their eggs in one basket", where Stadia was the basket, was acting quite foolishly if Google weren't directly bankrolling them.

[nonny]

I think the benefits to developers through decent incentives is irrelevant given Google utterly failed to grow the business / user base.

The service has to be sustainable...