Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Stadia is dead.

The cloud gaming service, developed by Google, was three years old.

To be honest, it's not surprising that Google shuts down its products. But this time Google's mode of operation, I have to say, has refreshed my understanding of the bottom line of this company.

At 7: 00 a.m. on Thursday, September 29, Stadia business executive Phil Harrison sent an email to all colleagues informing them that there would be an important meeting at 08:30, asking everyone to switch to other things and try to attend.

Photo Source: unknown at this meeting, the management suddenly announced that the Stadia business began to contract immediately and officially closed down in January next year. Immediately after the meeting, Harrison posted an article on Google's official blog, and the foreign official announced the bad news.

Photo: Google / a pair of interested parties, no communication at all / in this way, Google Stadia employees were surprised to find that they had been caught off guard by the company leader.

After four or five years of hard work, they were suddenly shut down-such a collapsing decision that no one had received any warning before.

According to Silicon people, two days before the news was announced, last Tuesday, the Stadia team provided the latest version of SDK; to game developers partnered by Stadia on Wednesday. The Stadia team has just pushed an update to the latest version of the user interface.

The news broke the day after netizens were discussing the new version of UI in the Reddit community. At that time, the community director (Google employee) also came out to thank the users, hoping that they would continue to use it and provide feedback:

Source: Reddit received a large number of responses to the Stadia community director's message after the news of the Stadia shutdown was made public. One netizen asked: why did you push this update yesterday when you knew the service would be closed today?

Another netizen replied:

"Welcome to Google, where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing."

As for the community director, he never showed up again.

Photo source: Reddit to employees, Google management at least gave them an hour in advance to react.

As for game developers, Google not only did not say hello in advance, but also did not do any communication and appeasement at the first time afterwards, so it simply left them outside the door.

Most developers say they learned about Stadia's imminent shutdown only through the media.

Independent game studio Pixel Games said that three games are about to launch Stadia, "everything is ready for Dongfeng", but received unexpected news.

Photo source: Rebecca Heineman, the original developer of @ pixelgames Baird Gate 3, said his new game was almost ready to log on to Stadia Pro and was set to launch on November 1.

She was supposed to have a meeting with Stadia contacts on Friday to discuss the arrangements for the game release. As a result, on Thursday morning, an employee sent her a link to a media report, asking her, "is Stadia really going to shut down?" Oh, that's when she learned that there was such a thing.

Photo source: @ burgerbecky has expressed anger and disappointment through public channels.

But none of the posts were more "tearful" than the one by developer Nikodem Swinder:

Photo source: @ SourceBytePublisher in order to be able to put their own game Jump Challenge! Porting to the Stadia platform, Swinder's team has spent as long as five months of development time and put a lot of effort into it.

"We could have spent five months doing something else and developing another game. But we decided to do a Stadia adaptation, fix all the bug and learn the technology behind it. Even yesterday I stayed up late in the office to develop the final build."

"We spent a lot of time and energy. I don't know what to do at the moment, and I don't know who to blame. It's a pity that our game couldn't be released. We really haven't slept much in the past few months. I'm trying to hold back my tears now."

Nikodem Swinder released a video about the difficulties behind Stadia's shutdown. Screenshot source: Source Byte / YouTubeSwinder describes the problems faced by many small developers of the Stadia platform.

Big companies like R Star and Ubisoft have thousands of engineers, so it's not difficult for Google to adapt to Stadia. Google pays tens of millions of dollars for each of the top publishers, such as "Wild Dart 2", "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey" and other triple-A games.

For small developers, especially independent game developers, cross-platform adaptation itself is already very difficult. These developers make the decision to log on to a platform, the cost of keeping their promise is high, and it takes a lot of time and effort behind it.

What's more, there are a small number of games exclusive to the Stadia platform, which are specially developed for Stadia from the very beginning, and it is very troublesome to transplant.

For example, Gylt, an independent game, has been monopolized by Stadia since its release in 2019. Google also closed Stadia Mall soon after the official announcement on Thursday, meaning that Gylt was suddenly "removed" for no reason.

As long as Google communicates with you in advance and allows developers to adjust their strategies in time, it will not make these small and medium-sized developers with limited resources even worse.

(with regard to small and medium-sized developers, there is one more detail: a week before the announcement of the Stadia shutdown, Logitech released a cloud game handset G Cloud that supports Xbox, GeForce and Steam cloud gaming services, but the absence of Stadia-- makes people wonder whether Logitech doesn't trust Google at all or may have received news from Google in advance. )

Photo Source: Tequela Works/ players lose Paradise / as for Stadia players, Google says it will refund all purchases made by all players on games and hardware.

A common complaint is: after all, there are only a dozen players on Stadia, and there is not much money for a refund.

Photo source: there are still a considerable number of LTT players who say it doesn't matter if they get a refund: the biggest headache is their game archives on Stadia, as well as friend lists, which will cease to exist as the platform shuts down.

The platform competition in today's game market is very fierce, and game publishers also want to sell more copies and make more money, so it is almost impossible to transfer purchased games and archiving progress across platforms. Stadia is no exception, even if the games purchased above may be bound to the same R Star / Ubisoft / EA account, there is no way to migrate purchase records and game archives to the PC / host platform.

For example, the following anchor Colour bought a number of games such as "Wild Dart 2" and "Assassin's Creed" on Stadia. Especially on the online version of dart 2 (RDO), the game time has reached an astonishing 6000 hours.

Colour's big dart game time displayed on Stadia Photo Source: @ ItsColourTV "the current situation is that if R Star does not allow us Stadia players to move progress, all of our archives on RDO will disappear completely. Including the unique props, clothes, money spent and game coins we got, will no longer exist."

Since the news broke, Colour has been talking to R Star every day through social networks and various channels, hoping that it will accept Stadia players and move archived records to other optional platforms. "even if you just give me a crisp answer, can you do it or not?"

Unfortunately, of all the major companies, only Ubisoft has indicated that it is willing to transfer players' game purchase records to the PC platform. At present, there is no exact information on whether the game archived records can be migrated.

As for R Star, no statement has been made on the request for Colour.

Some netizens satirized this player, saying that who told him to believe Stadia foolishly at first, but now it is all retribution. His response is: Stadia's technology and experience are great, and a big company like Google endorses it. He himself was a user of Google buckets and really believed that Stadia would succeed.

"more importantly, Stadia is aimed at casual players who can't buy or can't afford high-end PC and mainframe. Many of the friends I know in RDO are like this. They are not rich. They only have a little leisure time a day. They just want to relax online in the game."

Indeed, Stadia is the lowest threshold, or even the only viable option. You don't need to buy any special gaming equipment to use the Stadia service, and you don't have to be a premium member. You just need a computer plus an ok network, play the free basic service (1080p+60fps), and buy "Wild Dart 2" on Stadia.

Now, the last paradise that can accommodate these players will finally be demolished by Google.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai image source: after Google shuts down Stadia, they will have to pay extra if they want to continue playing RDO. At present, the most feasible solution is to buy a low-end Xbox Series S ($249), buy the game again (about $30), and then add money to buy Xbox Live Gold members ($10 a month).

In other words, the cost of playing RDO on Stadia for one year is the copy price of Wild Dart 2, while the cost of playing on Xbox for the first year is $24930,1012,399.

This difference may not matter to most people. However, for those poor players, it is possible to cause them to give up completely, the happiness that could have been achieved in the game.

Colour wrote:

"most of the friends I know on RDO are playing on Stadia because it is essentially a free platform. Losing my games and progress is certainly bad, but what makes me even more uncomfortable is that I can't continue to play with these friends."

Photo source: @ ItsColourTV/ this trust, does Google deserve it? To be clear, Stadia is a good product.

Regular Silicon readers may recall that I deeply experienced the test version of Stadia in 2018 and wrote a more detailed evaluation report, especially in terms of access threshold, multi-device support, and so on. At that time, I thought highly of Project Stream (the predecessor of Stadia).

And this comment was maintained until the official version of Stadia was released. Until recently, I thought that Stadia was one of the best cloud gaming service platforms in technology and experience.

However, Google strangled Stadia in this way, and did not mind or take responsibility for the damage done to players and developers.

Stadia could have lived a more meaningful life, but its owner was Google.

I tested Project Stream in a crowded library in 2018. Source: Duchen / Silicon is no stranger to Google's love of self-eating, and I believe friends who have been in the tech world are no stranger to it.

Google is famous for its internal competition in the technology circle, often letting two or more teams work on the same business product at the same time, then keep only one, and kill the others directly, regardless of whether the killed product already has millions or even tens of millions of users.

A Google employee I know once joked with me that he would be embarrassed to call himself an old employee if he hadn't changed jobs internally (because the business was shut down). (this friend has been with Google for only 3 years and has changed jobs twice. )

Since its inception, Google has killed 274 internal and external products and services more than the average person can count. So much so that someone made the website Killedbygoogle and wrote an epitaph for all the dead products. You can check it out on the website and you'll be surprised: "has Google ever done this?"

Photo source: after the revelation of KilledbyGoogle's Stadia shutdown, there has been a lot of satire and criticism on Google.

Some people recall the 2019 GDC conference, when Google set up a booth to create momentum for Stadia. The problem is that in this booth, Google put together Stadia and Atari "ET", red and white machine "Power Glove", and three of the most famous failed works in Sega DreamCast-- game history:

Photo source: @ AllGamesDelta_, then someone dug up the complaints made by netizens at that time:

"A mainframe that brings Sega's hardware team into the ditch, a useless peripheral that is better known as a joke than as a product, and a game whose reviews are so bad that inventory is buried in the desert. I don't know what's going to happen next, but I'm very interested."

The following netizen replied: brother, your prophecy came true.

Photo source: @ Nibellion another netizen Kelsey Lewin revealed that the booth was designed by the Game History Foundation, which he worked for, in cooperation with Google. At first, the proposals given were all normal, but they were rejected by Party A's father, and then two different plans appeared. Somehow they were screwed together, and finally became such a strange combination.

"of course, this cooperation has made money and supported us to do a lot of meaningful things. so if other giant companies want to hire us as consultants and completely ignore any advice we offer, but still pay for it, please feel free to contact me."

Photo source: @ kelslewin senior game developer Aadit Doshi gave a rather "pertinent" comment:

"Google Stadia has faced great difficulties over the past three years, including:

-A global disease pandemic, forcing people to turn to online entertainment

-there is a shortage of graphics cards and hosts, creating huge demand for alternatives.

If they had had a better time to enter the market, it might not have been so. "

Photo Source: @ AaditDoshi someone raised a key point: Phil Harrison, the current head of Stadia business, whose past experience is also very suspicious, can be called a model of failing upwards.

(failing upwards refers to the phenomenon of poor executives moving back and forth in the industry for promotions and raises. )

Let's take a look at what Harrison has done in the past:

In his early years, he worked in Sony's European department, where he was responsible for the release of PS3 and PSP mainframe products. As a result, he "resigned" (his responsibility was taken over by Kazuo Hirai, and Sony mainframe sales rebounded significantly).

After leaving Sony, he joined Infogrames / Atari and made a shocking statement that "stand-alone games are about to withdraw from the historical stage", which has led the market for at least 10 years. The company in charge of the company quadrupled its losses in the past year and resigned again.

Joined the cloud game technology company Gaikai (offshore), and I don't know why I left after less than two years (Gaikai was later acquired by Sony and became the later PlayStation cloud game service PS Now).

He joined Microsoft again. It is rumored that the sales volume of Xbox One was less than half of PS4, and he "left" after three years.

He joined Google in 2018 and was appointed to lead the entire Stadia business.

The Chronicle of Electronic Games, a game media, wrote a comment on Harrison:

"Harrison is a big mystery in our game industry. he has been failing over the past 20 years, but he has been promoted. Everyone else is very confused except for the companies that have to hire him."

Of course, when he screwed up Stadia this time, he was probably giving heads to two former employers he had failed.

Photo source: @ XB2podcast incidentally: the experience of Harrison reminds me of another well-known executive in the technology industry: he held a high position at Microsoft and Nokia, dragged down the mobile phone division of both companies, and almost became Stephen Elop of Microsoft CEO. If you are interested in his experience, you can click "read the original" to see an article I wrote in 2015.

Despite the abuse of Google, there are still a few people in the industry who give Google and Stadia the most positive comments.

Joe Blackburn, an executive of well-known game developer Bungie and game director of Destiny 2, said that the epidemic has had a great impact on the working environment in the past two years, and many developers have to work from home in order to protect the health of their employees. The emergence of Stadia, especially the various toolkits it provides for game developers, has significantly improved the efficiency of remote development and collaboration within Bungie teams.

"I know today's news is very difficult for many friends. I'm here to thank Stadia for his help in our development process."

Background: destiny 2 is one of the few multiplayer games supported by Stadia. It has more than 5000 people online at the same time on Stadia, higher than the 3000 online people on the Steam platform of another Bungie game, Halo: infinite.

Photo Source: @ joegoroth of all the criticisms, my favorite comes from Ron Amadeo, an Ars Technica journalist who specializes in Google. He said:

Google's self-fulfilling prophecy came true again: no one used Stadia because everyone thought Google would kill it; Google was forced to kill Stadia because no one used it.

Today, this infamous tradition kills another service of its own. I really don't know if Google can solve this problem in its lifetime. "

Source: @ RonAmadeo, he added:

"I think from now on, Google will have to attach a product support commitment when it launches its products."

Photo source: @ RonAmadeo finally, this tweet from netizen Consigno is closer to my mindset.

He said: I don't regret maintaining Stadia. I don't regret sharing my love for Stadia publicly. I don't regret making new friends on Stadia and becoming a member of this community. What I regret is that I gave my trust to Google. That's all.

Photo Source: @ Consigno10 Yes, I should have taken back my trust in Google long ago when Google killed Google Reader, Picasa, Globe, and Inbox.

Maybe it's not too late today.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Silicon Man (ID:guixingren123), author: spectrum du Chen Editor | VickyXiao

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