Google reportedly paid tens of millions for Stadia ports

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A new report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has been released detailing the current state of Google's Stadia streaming platform. The piece gives a short history on Stadia's troubled development, mainly focused on the decision to launch Stadia as a traditional console, immediately competing with Playstation and Xbox, rather than a slower rollout like streaming competitors xCloud and Luna. There were concerns among developers on the Stadia team that the hard Fall 2019 deadline would not give them enough time to deliver on all promised features, and they felt that Google should launch Stadia in beta, as they have for many of their other services. However, Phil Harrison, the head of the Stadia project, was more used to traditional console launches, having been President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios during the Playstation 3 launch and part of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Team during the Xbox One launch, and wanted to continue on the path with which he was more familiar.

Knowing he would need big titles to entice players to Stadia, Harrison's team reportedly spent more than the budget of some AAA games just to secure ports. While no exact numbers are given, according to several anonymous sources Schreier spoke to for the story, Google spent "tens of millions" of dollars for ports like Red Dead Redemption II or The Division 2 (Schreier clarified in a later Tweet that this was tens of millions of per port, not cumulative). Harrison also began building an in-house development team to create exclusive content for Stadia. Unfortunately, Stadia failed to catch on--according to Schreier's sources, it missed targets for controller sales and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands--which led to Google shutting down its internal game development studios on February 1st of this year.



:arrow: Source (Bloomberg article behind a paywall)
 

MikaDubbz

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As an extra for gamepass its kind of nice, I dont want it to be my primary way to game but its nice to have. I think almost all gamers will agree.

For sure, by no means was I saying it was going to be anyone's preferred method of gaming. I only think that cloud gaming absolutely has a market which will only grow with time, and as a medium has plenty of room for improving as technologies advance. Had Google taken their time, and not had a direct competitor that was more prepared and well suited for the same market readying the launch of their similar service around the same time, then maybe Google would have had a more promising future with Stadia. As things stand now, I expect Stadia to fade away while Xcloud grows, PS Now chugs along, and even Nintendo receives the occasional cloud-only title for the Switch. Google thought they were cornering a market, yet it seems there is no place for them in that specific market, despite it not being a completely terrible idea.
 

Taleweaver

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You're conflating valid concerns over not actually owning your games with conspiracies?
Google wasn't "ahead of the times", they failed where other companies have found moderate success because they're too greedy.
That's not what I was saying at all.
Look... I remember when people said the same about steam. "no physical game and you need to be online all the time? Then what if they pull the plug?". It's now fifteen years later and they're doing fine. More so : they're industry leaders because they weathered the criticism. It's just too early to tell whether or not they're ahead of the curve.

But those arguments aren't what I was getting at. Even assuming stadia failed (which I don't dispute), they've learned important knowhow. Gaming is but one outlet for that knowledge. A very lucrative one, yes, but not the only one.
 
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Edgarska

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That's not what I was saying at all.
Look... I remember when people said the same about steam. "no physical game and you need to be online all the time? Then what if they pull the plug?". It's now fifteen years later and they're doing fine. More so : they're industry leaders because they weathered the criticism. It's just too early to tell whether or not they're ahead of the curve.

But those arguments aren't what I was getting at. Even assuming stadia failed (which I don't dispute), they've learned important knowhow. Gaming is but one outlet for that knowledge. A very lucrative one, yes, but not the only one.
That's another factually incorrect argument, Steam doesn't require always online, and even the inclusion of steam DRM is left to the developer.

You say they learned something that can help in other areas, which is true, but them being "ahead of the curve" in regards of game streaming is demonstrably false, which is what is being discussed right now.
 

Dimensional

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maybe 5 more years...
EDIT:
although, i remember making a school report on OnLive around 8 or 9 years ago and it didn't go anywhere either. yeah 5-10 more years probably...
Well, OnLive was killed by the CEOs ego. He wanted things a certain way, and didn't matter how far into development or partnership was for something, if he found out that he couldn't get it, he would cancel all plans for it. For example, OnLive advertised they would have a bunch of EA games on their platform, but he demanded exclusivity from EA afterwards, when he learned there was a multi-year deal with another rival company. When they said no, he had the EA games removed from the listings, on the very day OnLive launched.

For OnLive, it was the ego of one man that lead to a lot of poor decisions. For Google, it's just bad management general. Not sure which would be the better of the two, but it still ends in failure.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report
 

Pipistrele

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another dead google project?

wen is it on here ? https://killedbygoogle.com/
To be fair, a lot of these "killed" projects are simply things re-inserted into other apps/sites to alleviate redundancy, while some others (Science Journal for example) were renamed or given to non-Google developers. Not to defend Google (bweh), just to say their project-killing reputation is somewhat overblown.
 
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gnmmarechal

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Explain this to me:
Why do they need ports for games?
Can't they just runthese games on Windows or something and stream that?
Stadia runs on Linux.

What makes me sad is that there are *good* Linux ports being used on Stadia that may never see the light of day for us common mortals

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

To be fair, a lot of these "killed" projects are simply things re-inserted into other apps/sites to alleviate redundancy, while some others (Science Journal for example) were renamed or given to non-Google developers. Not to defend Google (bweh), just to say their project-killing reputation is somewhat overblown.
Yeah I loved it when they took Google Play Music down to replace it with the shitfest that is YouTube Music. Fuck that, honestly
 

shfil

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About why linux, not windows:

1) Let's think about issues which can happen with games. You cannot just pass video to monitor, because there's no monitor. The same with audio and user's controller. It's difficult and has to be handled on level of OS and gpu drivers. You cannot modify windows and drivers for windows. So it' more possible vs impossible.

2) It's just too expensive to use one computer per each user. It's better to prepare one big batch of resources and divide it per users. Not sure if google is doing it now, but it's probably long term goal and windows is bad in this stuff.

tldr: Google tends to do poor strategic decisions, but their software is usually top notch.
 
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Edgarska

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About why linux, not windows:

1) Let's think about issues which can happen with games. You cannot just pass video to monitor, because there's no monitor. The same with audio and user's controller. It's difficult and has to be handled on level of OS and gpu drivers. You cannot modify windows and drivers for windows. So it' more possible vs impossible.

2) It's just too expensive to use one computer per each user. It's better to prepare one big batch of resources and divide it per users. Not sure if google is doing it now, but it's probably long term goal and windows is bad in this stuff.

tldr: Google tends to do poor strategic decisions, but their software is usually top notch.
1) This isn't true, you can enable dummy display devices on Windows, so that's not a problem. The controller also isn't a problem, you can set up the controller driver to always be listening to inputs regardless of whether the controller is present or not, this is how Mayflash controller adapters work on Windows, the controller always shows up as connected to Windows.

2) VMs also work for Windows, I don't know who told you they don't.
 
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