Stadia shutting down their in-house game development

[Middcore]

Summary

Google has announced they are winding down SG&E, the development studio that was supposed to make original exclusive games for Stadia. It appears Stadia will only have ports from now on. 

 

Quotes

Quote

 Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games. With the increased focus on using our technology platform for industry partners, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Google to pursue other opportunities. 

 

My thoughts

My first thought is that I sincerely hope that "Actually people should really have to pay for the right to stream a game" guy will now be out of a job. My second thought is that maybe Jade Raymond is under some sort of curse. 

 

I'm not sure what "beyond any near-term planned games" means because I wasn't aware Stadia had any exclusives of their own coming out any time in the near future. Anyway, I think Stadia exclusives as a "killer app" was always a dumb strategy for drawing people to Stadia. Even if Stadia had a desirable, AAA-level exclusive game, I think the idea of people in large numbers signing up to play it and then being so impressed they stick with the service after they finished that game is a fairy tale, and Google is better off positioning themselves as a partner to established players in the industry rather than a competitor. 

 

Sources

 https://blog.google/products/stadia/focusing-on-stadias-future-as-a-platform-and-winding-down-sge

 

 

 

[CommanderAlex]

Never really believed in these game-streaming services anyway and hope to see them disappear in the coming years. By cutting exclusive titles, this will hopefully accelerate my hypothesis/wish. 

[soldier_ph]

Another week another killed Product by Google. Now they really are just a Geforce Now competitor in some sense.

[Middcore]

6 minutes ago, soldier_ph said:

Another week another killed Product by Google.

 

I mean not really. They're not killing Stadia, they're just not going to try to make exclusive games for it anymore. Of course this will do nothing to counter the narrative that expects Google to kill Stadia itself sooner or later. 

 

While I can see the value of services like Stadia in making games accessible to more people in a world where PC hardware and new consoles are difficult to acquire, I sort of resent it because I resent these mega-corps with no prior connection to the industry trying to muscle into the gaming space just because they want new worlds to conquer. It probably makes me a bad person but I sort of hope The New World fails like Crucible did and Amazon bails on games because the gaming industry and gamers were doing just fine before Jeff Bezos woke up one morning and asked himself "Why am I not making money from video games yet?" 

 

[RejZoR]

And so it begins lol

[samcool55]

Did they even develop a single game?

[Middcore]

2 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Did they even develop a single game?

 

No. They had studios in LA and Montreal, about 150 people total apparently. I don't anything even got far enough for word to get out about what type of game or games they were working on. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

34 minutes ago, Sakuriru said:

They sent me a free Stadia thing.

 

Here's the thing. The game selection was awful. The only free game worth playing was Celeste. Everything else wanted me to pay full price for a game, kind of like Steam, but without Steam's reputation, selection, or promise that you keep the games you buy.

 

The controller is one of the worst I've ever used. It made your hands hurt after only half an hour. I used it for awhile and then moved back over to my Switch Pro controller and the difference is like night and day.

 

Oh, and I have to pay a monthly fee for this privilege.

 

No thanks.

The fact that you called a game selection with Toumb Raider and Serious Sam terrible makes me sad.

[Nowak]

tbh this kinda sucks a lot, because there were a number of indies who relied on Google funding for their projects and now they're losing that funding.

[Giganthrax]

I didn't even know they were developing exclusives.

 

You'd think they'd actually have some of these exclusives ready for launch or at least start building hype for it a lot earlier, but apparently these basic video game marketing techniques elude Google. 

7 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

The fact that you called a game selection with Toumb Raider and Serious Sam terrible makes me sad.

Even if Tomb Raider wasn't a generic 3rd person cinematic Sony-style action adventure that you can finish in 8 hours, it's still an old game that people who cared about it already finished awhile ago. 

[Middcore]

9 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

The fact that you called a game selection with Toumb Raider and Serious Sam terrible makes me sad.

Got nothing against either franchise. However, the most recent TR game is from 2018 so I think most people who love the franchise would have played it on some other platform well before it was available on Stadia. Serious Sam is a niche appeal title at best these days and the most recent one got pretty average reviews I think. Wouldn't really hang my hat on either one as an example of outstanding game selection.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

22 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Got nothing against either franchise. However, the most recent TR game is from 2018 so I think most people who love the franchise would have played it on some other platform well before it was available on Stadia. Serious Sam is a niche appeal title at best these days and the most recent one got pretty average reviews I think. Wouldn't really hang my hat on either one as an example of outstanding game selection.

as a fan of serious sam I'm hurt. But as someone who can see reason I'm not going to say your wrong.

[BuckGup]

Wait what no one saw this coming

[TetraSky]

Well, that didn't last long.
Next in the news, they will shut down the service altogether.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, SpiderMan said:

Never really believed in these game-streaming services anyway and hope to see them disappear in the coming years. By cutting exclusive titles, this will hopefully accelerate my hypothesis/wish. 

They will not. Expect every MMO and Visual novel to move to them due to hacks/piracy.

[CommanderAlex]

21 minutes ago, Kisai said:

They will not. Expect every MMO and Visual novel to move to them due to hacks/piracy.

Don't get me wrong but this service is ok if you don't use your computer a lot for other things and need the performance by shelling out hundreds, if not, thousands and you just want to play some games. Other than that, I think there are issues with it, especially input lag. 

[Bombastinator]

My memory is stadia was a big cockup.  Bad functionality (fixed?) bad monetization (not fixed?) and apparently bad strategizing.  An exclusive could work as a draw IF it was a really unusually good game.  The problem is that kind of thing is at least as random as filmmaking.  Telling what is going to hit is just really hard.  There’s just too much butterfly effect.  There are ways to reduce the miss chance, the problem is they are very well known and thus everyone is doing them. Already.  Trying it wasn’t the worst idea, depending on cost,  but killing it makes sense too.  Stadia’s biggest issue remains its monetization structure.  It makes the thing effectively non-competitive.  It might not survive even as a monopoly, and it isn’t one. 

[Middcore]

5 hours ago, Sakuriru said:

You had to pay for this so if you're going to pay for it why not just buy it on Steam.

Because you didn't own a gaming PC capable of playing it. (Or one of the consoles it came out on.) But you have a fast enough internet connection to make streaming it a good experience. 

 

If it feels like I'm stating the obvious I'm just reminding everybody who the target audience niche that Stadia needs to build from is. And I still don't think there are enough people who meet all those criteria AND care about playing video games at all to make Stadia a viable service. And maybe Google had doubts about that too, which is why their plan to give Stadia some appeal to people who already have lots of other ways to play games was to make their own exclusives.

 

But I still don't think it would have worked. For one thing, in general, gamers dislike exclusives. (Except Sony fanboys who for some reason seem to think PlayStation exclusives are Sony doing them a favor rather than making a calculated business decision to sell hardware, but let's not talk about them.) An exclusive from a service that many gamers were already deeply suspicious of, if not outright hostile towards? Some percentage is just going to say, "No, screw you Google" right off the bat. Most of the rest who you get to actually bite are going to play your exclusive and then never touch Stadia again until lure them with another exclusive, because you haven't given most of them an experience that's better than playing the game some other way that they already have. (Google had a small opportunity here with Cyberpunk, where the game by most accounts played well on Stadia while it was a shitshow on console and left even many gaming PC's crying uncle. Unfortunately for them they failed to do basically anything to capitalize on it.) 

 

But anyway we'll never know because Google realized, like Amazon is perhaps realizing, that entering the industry with a "silver bullet" AAA game isn't easy, even if you're a corp with more money than God and have hired a bunch of industry veterans with lengthy if undistinguished resumes (looking at you again, Alex Hutchinson). And if you've invested all of the resources into actually completing such a game, wouldn't you rather maximize your possible return by selling it on as many platforms as possible anyway?
 

I would agree with someone (not sure who) that commented above saying that the time to staff up with devs and get an exclusive game in the oven was well before Stadia launched... like, years before... not after. Basically Stadia's fate was going to be sealed for good or ill long before there was any chance of the in-house dev team managing to create a real product. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 hour ago, Sakuriru said:

You had to pay for this so if you're going to pay for it why not just buy it on Steam.

I didn't pay for it. I got it with the free pro for 1 months thing.

[S w a t s o n]

I was so hyped when I thought Stadia was going to Xbox Game Pass + Geforce Now, it's just Geforce Now but maybe a little bit less of a meme. Oh well.

[IAmAndre]

I never believed in Stadia. I should be able to find my post on this forum about it being the next Google Plus. Two years in, it still hasn't taken off and it's still very hard to recommend to anybody with the poor pricing decisions and lack of availability/poor performance.

[Taf the Ghost]

1 hour ago, Middcore said:

Because you didn't own a gaming PC capable of playing it. (Or one of the consoles it came out on.) But you have a fast enough internet connection to make streaming it a good experience. 

 

If it feels like I'm stating the obvious I'm just reminding everybody who the target audience niche that Stadia needs to build from is. And I still don't think there are enough people who meet all those criteria AND care about playing video games at all to make Stadia a viable service. And maybe Google had doubts about that too, which is why their plan to give Stadia some appeal to people who already have lots of other ways to play games was to make their own exclusives.

 

But I still don't think it would have worked. For one thing, in general, gamers dislike exclusives. (Except Sony fanboys who for some reason seem to think PlayStation exclusives are Sony doing them some a favor rather than making a calculated business decision to sell hardware, but let's not talk about them.) An exclusive from a service that many gamers were already deeply suspicious of, if not outright hostile towards? Some percentage is just going to say, "No, screw you Google" right off the bat. Most of the rest who you get to actually bite are going to play your exclusive and then never touch Stadia again until lure them with another exclusive, because you haven't given most of them an experience that's better than playing the game some other way that they already have. (Google had a small opportunity here with Cyberpunk, where the game by most accounts played well on Stadia while it was a shitshow on console and left even many gaming PC's crying uncle. Unfortunately for them they failed to do basically anything to capitalize on it.) 

 

But anyway we'll never know because Google realized, like Amazon is perhaps realizing, that entering the industry with a "silver bullet" AAA game isn't easy, even if you're a corp with more money than God and have hired a bunch of industry veterans with lengthy if undistinguished resumes (looking at you again, Alex Hutchinson). And if you've invested all of the resources into actually completing such a game, wouldn't you rather maximize your possible return by selling it on as many platforms as possible anyway?
 

I would agree with someone (not sure who) that commented above saying that the time to staff up with devs and get an exclusive game in the oven was well before Stadia launched... like, years before... not after. Basically Stadia's fate was going to be sealed for good or ill long before there was any chance of the in-house dev team managing to create a real product. 

Since we got into the 3D era, it takes at minimum 2 years to make a good game; 4 years to make a great game. We're well in the 5-7 year development cycles already. Stadia launched 3 months after announcing they'd started a studio, which means it was a solid 3 years before anything would even be out.

 

Stadia failed before it launched because of the people they hired. They managed to hire a guy that's now 0 or 3 on "console" launches, while fundamentally missing where their Product would have had a market. i'm pretty sure I can dig up posts of me saying it back then, but there were 2 things they absolutely had to do: 1) Get Civilization 6 on the platform and 2) get every F2P game they could find. That'd let them get started. Then they needed to make it so you could play Mobile Games in the Cloud. It'd be much lighter on the local processing to stream a Mobile Game than it would be to play them locally. Would also allow for all sorts of games to be played on any Android device.

 

Basically, Google looked at a market nearly as big as the entirety of Google, went "nah, we don't want any of that money" and threw everything in the garbage. This is a "Classic Google" move if there is one.

[Andreas Lilja]

Platform makes sense but wasn't fond the idea of exclusives.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

I never believed in Stadia. I should be able to find my post on this forum about it being the next Google Plus. Two years in, it still hasn't taken off and it's still very hard to recommend to anybody with the poor pricing decisions and lack of availability/poor performance.

Honestly, anyone expecting something novel about Stadia, was sorely mistaken.

 

I've been paying for it since it launched, but honestly I think I've only played/finished two games on it, most of the time it's just too painful to use the faster the game moves.

 

That's why I said MMORPG's (think FFXIV, WoW, and other subscription games) because if they make the game entirely on data-center sided, then there is no advantage to having a beefed up computer, all the hacks, nonsense "quality of life" cheats, and so forth no longer give people any advantage. But the MMORPG has to be designed for that kind of latency, which most MMORPG's are tolerant of, but you'll still have people in Australia and Europe unable to play with Americans and Japanese friends, and some countries like Brazil and Russia will continue to be ignored.

 

So if you run them in the data center, people who can't afford a PS4 quality system are on the same playing field as the people who bought a $3000 PC Master Race ThreadRipper RTX 3090 type of system, rather than trying to play on potatoes.

 

Now the other category, eg Visual Novels, I mentioned because VN-style games (including 2D RPG/TRPG/SRPG's, but not Metroidvanias) and mobile-styled RPG games (where most actions are automatic and you're making more tactical decisions) aren't sensitive to latency. So if you want to keep the story a surprise and keep the idiot data-miners out of spoiling it, Stadia is the PERFECT use of the tech.

 

It's also a good way to prevent piracy of games, at least 0-day piracy. However if your game isn't good enough to justify Stadia, people will just upload recordings (directly from Stadia) to youtube and never pay for it at all. However Stadia does create a way to make a "sandboxed" demo of a game where you could put chapter 1 on Stadia, with incremental chapter purchases, and make all non-Stadia releases full-purchase only. No hacking demos into full versions.

 

The thing is, I think stadia is a poor choice for DRM itself. Sure, it might prevent piracy of the game, but if a game is very cinematic, there's likely no point in purchasing the game once you've seen it. There has to be enough interactivity to justify doing more than "press X to win". So something like Kingdom Hearts (which is very cinematic) and "Last of Us" (which uses environmental storytelling and engine-rendered cutscenes) has a lot of gameplay to it, make less sense to play on a Stadia-like service.

 

In my opinion, Google perhaps had the right idea, but the wrong business model. Stadia Pro is more like Epic Game Store, only it costs money. And since I can't transfer the game licence in or out of Stadia, it makes be unwilling to buy anything on Stadia if I can buy it on Steam. So logically exclusives would be the carrot to get people on the service, but there are no AAA titles on Stadia that are exclusive, most of the stuff on Stadia is 2-5 year old games. Why would I pay to play the same game on Stadia that I already paid for on Steam.

 

 

[RejZoR]

6 hours ago, James Evens said:

If you do the math with current GPU pricing they look better then ever before. 

The best of all: not out of stock  Just kidding they are out of capacity.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/

If you just assume everyone has fiber optics at insane speeds. You do realize there is still HUGE number of people still on crappy copper connections? It'll run like crap on that. Plus, the way Stadia is being operated is just rubbish. GeForce Now if anything makes more sense. You're just renting GPU compute power, you need to already own games and prove ownership by connecting your Steam profile with GeForce Now (which makes the outrage of developers/publishers from the past weird). Where with Stadia, you're expected to invest in a thing by buying games AGAIN and hoping Google doesn't shit it down like everything they make that isn't search engine...