https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-youtube-is-testing-an-online-games-offering-16d1e772
Development of the new product, called “Playables,” signals ambitions to move beyond video hosting.
Did anyone want YouTube games?
If they had competent management who knew that things like this were an investment they would take the time go use it, gain market share, and slowly build up their library. Over time a streaming service like that on youtube could be huge in the market.
Unfortunately they are so hyper capitalistic if it's not profitable within the first quarter they'll start talking about axing it.
I don't trust a single google product anymore.
Even if it IS profitable in the first quarter, they'll kill it anyway. It seems like Google just gets bored of products and moves onto a new thing
Or my favorite, "We made 3-4 different versions of the same thing, and we're switching to the one you aren't on" Is this what is happening?
Their strategy did not make sense at all. They wanted to make a game streaming service yet they were acquiring a bunch of game studios... To the contrary of GeForce NOW, its arch competitor, Stadia forced you to purchase games that were only playable within the service in its store. It is a complete shit show.
As a stadia user, I loved it.
It made gaming accessible in a way that GeForce definitely doesn’t. It felt more like a console than GeForce, which feels like… well honestly like emulation.
I think they had 3 solid strategies, each of which they fucked up in execution. First they were trying to compete against consoles (hence the studio acquisitions as they were trying to make exclusives). Then they gave up. Then they were trying to compete against steam by being a Netflix-like library online. But then they gave up. Then they tried to build a new “cloud gaming” market (maybe whitelabel to existing game companies).Then they gave up that too.
Throughout the whole time, they were great from a user perspective.
I believe the tech is solid given how people have praised it over its short span of life. It sounds like they were trying to kill too many birds with too few stones...
To us and everyone else, no. To their weird corporate thinking, still no. Given hardly any money, they expected it to take over PS/Xbox within months, and didn't market it to anyone correctly. Seriously, they marketed it to people who already had big gaming rigs, why would anyone give that up?
Indeed. My PC has a decent enough GPU and I also own a PS4. The Stadia exclusives at the time was not enticing enough for me to try, let alone paying $9.99 per month.
Yeah - I certainly don't hold out a ton of hope - glad I got my Stadia money back though. Makes it hard to have a ton of hard feelings about the whole thing.
I literally just bought domains off of Google Domains last month and this past week they announce they're shutting it down. I am so mad.
Ironically, if they had just outlined their eventual plan for what they would do in the event that the service was ever shut down I think more people would have been willing to try it. At least some portion of potential users chose not to use the service because they thought it likely Stadia would eventually get shut down and the money they spent on those games would just be lost. But at the end of the service, the users basically got refunded for everything.