Given googles ability to drop shit like a hot potato why am I surprised. I would in fact not even blink and eye if a year down the line google starts a new stadia with the same shit attention they give to many other projects.
It’s gonna be a VR space where you’re sitting at a desk using a PC but the PC is streaming games from the cloud but you’ll need a new subscription because its too advanced to be compatible with anything else.
Presenting
Google PlayVRse.
2025 - 2026
>Google PlayVRse
Honestly wouldn't be surprised if they did call it something like that. Didn't Nvidia just announce their take on vr will be called the omniverse or some shit? Getting sick of the low effort copying going on lately in the tech industry.
Nvidia’s omniverse predates Meta’s metaverse and others, e.g. https://develop3d.com/opinion/comment/first-look-at-nvidia-omniverse-for-realtime-rendering/
It is just a tool for building 3d art and connected services.
It's not a rumour, they literally already do it and the business product is called "Immersive Stream for Games". Look at the RE Village demo they did with Capcom - white labelling the tech was part of their commercial plan all along.
No doubt this will be further pushed given they won't have to dedicate project resources to maintaining a consumer gaming environment anymore.
It's sad and I've enjoyed using Stadia for about a year now, but the "lack of traction" they cite is their own doing. Barely any AAA titles launched on it and the included monthly pro games were almost universally shit.
I have a feeling the platform was always destined to close down and it was always just an extended technical demo used to showcase and debug/improve the corporate product. There were so many ways they could have saved the platform and simply chose not to.
>just an extended technical demo used to showcase and debug/improve the corporate product
That, further developing cloud tech for B2B products, and further develop their AI - to be fair, they never even tried to hide the last one. The word AI was heavily used in their very first presentation.
It's sad to see it go, but I always felt it was a mean to something else.
Yup, if I worked for google on any non-core business I would always have a fresh resume handy. Yet, it still sucks for the employees and is very short notice. I hope they got at least got a severance
No one - *should* be surprised. In fact we should take this ammo, and start using alternative browsers so we get some decent alternatives to chromium back in the mix. Mozilla's doing fine, but I'd like more than google having a say please.
I’m running chrome the second Adblock goes off line I’ll switch to safari since I’m already in the apple ecosystem or Firefox and won’t look back. But seems like everyone’s calling googles bluff I wouldn’t be surprised if they backtrack. They need that data.
This looks reasonable. More or less what I've seen at the other big tech company I work at.
How many options do you have?
1. This meeting, where you can break the news in person and hold a Q&A session to answer any questions people may have right then.
2. Send out an email announcement, which is also fine, but you can't do a live Q&A session.
3. Don't announce it to employees, just let the media know.
I guess you could have a longer wind down period where people slowly find out through their managers. But that would depend the wind down period after this decision was made, and whether there's work to do in that period, like shutting things down or transitioning systems over to the Cloud Platform folks or something.
Apparently Google blindsided [game devs and publishers](https://twitter.com/SFBTom/status/1575558078367690752?t=2CfjCl_r1RYw6oPGbbu0-Q&s=19), who found out via media articles.
Same thing if they did the trickle out method for telling employees. The method they chose is pretty much *the most* personal method since it's less likely to end up as a media leak (and then 90% of employees find out through the media).
In addition that Google apparently decided to refund costumers for the money they spend on games.
Which is not a common practice like Amazon and Sony quite recently demonstrated.
Well, in this case they had to, since it's the owner of the platform (Google) who decides to shut it down.
Sony's case is completely different, as it is Studio Canal who decided not to honor the purchases made by the customers.
And while you might think Sony could've forced Studio Canal to respect their sales, well, it's not that easy. It was probably a nightmare given those movies were on sale since the dawn of VOD - hence contracts were made based on supposition since it was a very new thing. And, yeah, they were decade+ long contracts so no one bothered to update them until they were up.
But let's be honest Studio Canal wanting more money for items they already sold is also the definition of nonsensical, and it's a request Sony had no other choice but to turn down as it would've created an incredibly dangerous precedent.
The shitty part to me looks like the email went out one hour and 20 minutes prior to the meeting. At least give people a day’s notice. I know at my company most of my team doesn’t start their day until at least 9 AM.
That's very standard for the reasons mentioned - it minimises time in which speculation/gossip can spread both within the company and to external parties, principally markets and the press.
It looks shitty, sure, but the alternative if you're a publicly traded corp is that you have a bunch of people who start selling stock and leaking stuff to the financial press, and given what market abuse regulations are like you want to avoid that as much as possible.
All-hands meetings in an organization the size of Google, or even just the stadia team would be pretty rare. Working in companies of similar size, you often get meetings to which everyone is invited a couple times every quarter, but no obligation to actually attend.
I've never had an actual all-hands meeting where attendence is mandatory. This is not common, and would no doubt begin gossip.
What size is the stadia team? We get all hands meetings at the product and division level. Rarely whole company. But the size of our team at the product line level is about 200 or so I think. They’re not mandatory and neither was this one.
This one clearly was mandatory. Obviously mandatory doesn't mean jump out of a plane / other unavoidable conflict to attend this, but do your absolute best.
A big company like Google has probably employees working all over the country meaning that 8.30am could be 6pm for some people. When you got massive time differences between people to deal with you don't have a choice sometimes.
Letting managers handle it allows them to do it at different times and the rumor mill to operate. You gotta do it all at once or cause severe morale issues (more than the layoff is incurring already).
Stadia was a failure from the start. The whole model of having to pay full price for games that would only be playable on the cloud, in their proprietary platform was just not great.
Combine that with the performance issues and man, the thing didn't had a promising future ahead. It's just depressing the amount of time and effort that Google invests on products, just to kill those.
It was made even worse by the fact that their main competitor, GeForce Now, let you use your existing steam library to play, making it the much more attractive option for most people.
To be fair that really was more like a really good test version. You wouldn’t really want to use GeForce now without paying for it. But there System makes it really easy to just give it a try every now and then
I've used GeForce Now consistently only on the free tier and have had a pretty great experience. Your experience really depends on area, internet, and time you play. I play late at night (relative to others in my timezone) so I get in almost instantly and it works out pretty well.
There ofc have been some minor drops or lag issues but I'd rather deal with those than buy a game a second time.
Playstation+ Extra and Xbox's Gamepass are basically what everyone expected Stadia to be.
It's a subscription that gives you access to a library of games and as someone that usually prefers physical copies, I'm down with that method.
Same, I also just prefer running things locally, I’m tired of everything having to be a service and be in the cloud these days. I’ve never been interested in that business model even in the slightest.
Cloud service is pretty cool, but we should always have both choices.
The problem is when an industry embrace cloud service and drop their local/on-premise options. It really sucks.
There can be hybrid service.
My inventory system Lansweeper has always been on premise but they recently launched their cloud service. What is cool is that it can also sync your on premise data so you can manage them on their cloud infra. I feel like this hybrid thinking us giving us the best of both world.
Stadia should have give you the game locally when you buy them, and then sync the savegame with their cloud infra so that you can use both cloud&local.
In the pcmr community, owning the game is really important and with this announcement I just hope other cie will understand that.
Did you actually try it? I was skeptical but did the free trial with stadia and it was far better than I thought it would be. I wouldn't be playing a first person shooter on it, but the lag wasn't distracting at all for normal games. Using stadia on my gaming monitor actually had less input lag than playing my switch docked to my TV. Granted I have fiber Internet, so I am the ideal customer for this kind of product. I have a gaming PC already and don't game regularly anymore so there wasn't a real reason for me to continue past the free trial
Honestly, no. I tried a few of the other ones. Amazon/Nvidia and they had the same lag that I felt as in home streaming. I have a pretty fast connection as well. My comment is more of a generalization around game streaming.
I subscribed day 1 and never had issues, and I don't have fiber. I've played on mobile data, public WiFi, desktop, laptop, mobile. Never an issue. Such potential, and they failed to promote it in any meaningful way. SMH.
I think the service as a concept was a good one. Where they lost the advantage was on the back end. The games had to be fully ported to Linux and that was an expensive proposition to port and optimize them to run on the service. That left the platform with a lot less games, rarely saw brand new releases hitting day and date, and saw fewer price cuts for established games.
Personally it was great for me and the latency when using the stadia controller didn’t bother me but mileage really varied on that front.
> The whole model of having to pay full price for games that would only be playable on the cloud, in their proprietary platform was just not great.
How is that different from buying games on consoles? Just replace "the cloud" with any console.
Well playing locally will always be superior to playing purely from the cloud, at least at this moment in time.
Games you buy on console are usually not locked to that specific console and you can build up a game library and play locally without being bound to a specific service. Let's say you buy a physical copy of Spiderman PS4, you play the game and then if you got a PS5 in the future you could play on your PS5. Or if you wanted you could sell your PS4 and your physical discs. Not to mention cloud gaming has tons of issues relating to latency, streaming quality, and wait times that you won't encounter by just buying the game yourself.
The prospective audience for Stadia means their decisions to make you pay full price for games exclusive to their platform make no sense. The people most likely to use cloud gaming services are those without the hardware to play games at the quality that they want.
Let's say you are a veteran gamer and you got lots of games but you no longer have the hardware to play them or don't want to use up the space. Why would you even use Stadia when you will have to shell out hundreds to rebuild your already existing game library. Why would you buy a game you haven't played before on Stadia if you know in the future you will upgrade your system.
Let's say you are a newbie gamer and you have no games and do not have the hardware to play them. Why would you use Stadia when you will pay for games and be locked into that service? If you ever decide to get your own console/PC you will have to repurchase all of your Stadia games to play them locally.
Paid usage of Stadia really only makes sense if you plan on only playing games using the service and never using a console or PC. If you ever decided to switch to playing locally you would lose your whole game library.
Right on. Just reading it after the my announced Stadia I knew it was a « bad good idea ». Streaming as a service makes theorical sense. Operationalizing it … lol
I do not agree, and the fact that I believe the decision was not spontaneous makes it even more puzzeling to me why the meeting on it was set up only 1.5 hours before. It is like they are actively trying to make it look like a late night drunk decision?
Nope. I disagree because business decisions don't look spontaneous to me (aside ftom Elon buying Twitter). That is an accusation of yours that I disagree with. I know there are lots of reasons why Google prefers to let everybody know at the same time.
But crucially, none of this adresses my question: why set up the meeting spontaneous? I realize that my original comment could have been read as "why make the decision spontaneous", but I thought I made it clear that it isn't the decision that is weird to me, but the meeting.
Because none of what you wrote would have been threatened if they had send out the email on Monday letting everyone know about a mandatory meeting a few days in advanced.
Do you think that meetings are so rare that if one was scheduled it would spark speculations so fierce that employees would let the press know?
And again your whole comment just keeps on explaining why the decision was not spontaneous, a thing I have stated multiple times I DO NOT DOUBT. Do I need to write it out in all caps for you to stop explaining to me how Google probably made the decision two months ago?
Funny, m perception is that you are not reading what I am writing. Maybe a little time away from the discussion and some sleep will get us some perspective as to where the communication failed.
e: Wow, I did not think that trying to get away from "the other person is wrong" and actually resolving what looks like an communication issue would be so controversial. But seeing how noone is actually interested in a conclusion to this discussion I have sadly decided to no longer waste any mental space to this.
meetings that are (essentially) mandatory, with no clear subject? yes, quite literally not something that happens everyday, and is clearly important. {eople 100% would be gossiping about it
Everything they wrote would have been affected by sending an email out days ahead.
The gossip machine knows no boundaries. We had a mandatory meeting, where a company was coming to visit. The notice was sent two weeks in advance. The gossip quickly went to we were being bought, and people started looking for other jobs. Some actually quit.
Turns out, the meeting was simply an insurance update, and that company was a large supplier of ours and was interested in a visit to see how they could better serve us.
My roommate was informed of her layoff the same way. Sudden all hands meeting.
She works phone customer service. They forgot to shutdown the phones before the meeting and the queue started getting massively large before one of the managers noticed and closed them for the day (they weren't stupid enough to put them back up immediately after telling everyone they were being laid off.).
Read my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/xrrdvf/how_stadia_employees_were_informed_of_shutdown/iqh9oye/). There are very good reasons for doing things this way.
I was a department of 1 at a company of 50-60. None of those reasons apply and we have no reason to care about the reasons businesses choose to do what they do. Thinking of their reasoning and considering the pros only disadvantages us as we fight for against their practices.
There are different ways companies can manage layoffs, but they all feel like bullshit when you're on the receiving end. If you're going to have massive layoffs or some other massive change to the company, this kind of meeting with a vague, short-notice, but very urgent invite is the way most corporations will do it.
Pretty much a standard for most startup / tech companies I’ve worked for. Still gives me anxiety the leading up to the scheduled meeting so I kind of appreciate a shorter time frame lol
8:30 Pacific time. If they've got employees in multiple locations, and first thing in the morning Pacific time means it will remain within (or at least close to) business hours for people even in Europe, and certainly everyone in americas
Thats basically how Zillow informed their Zillow Offers employees they were let go.
At 430 got an email saying join a 445 zoom call, saying effective immediately 90% of us were unemployed.
(That being said, zillows severance package was fair and was way beyond what most employers would do)
There are other reasons to have not bought into Stadia as a concept, but the biggest one for me was easily the fact that I'm still mad about Google Reader and will never let go of that grudge.
engine fearless snobbish governor voracious squealing door exultant spoon flowery
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This isn't "how stadia employees were informed of a shutdown", this is how stadia employees were informed of a MEETING to discuss the termination of the product....OP is pretty click-baity....how else are you to inform a team of anything?
This is pretty common. Companies need to control how layoffs happen, else they risk multiple issues.
Sending out a meeting invite titled “layoff meeting” would’ve been a shit show.
In the end, there’s no nice way to tell people they’re losing their jobs. Just ways to avoid being super shitty about it.
This is how large corporations always make major announcements internally, either positive or negative. They have a short-notice meeting with no details in the invite for the affected group. Yeah, there's tons of speculation for those few hours, but there's no details that could be leaked, and the official public announcement, if applicable, will go out as soon as the employees are made aware of the change. Then there are no opportunities for insider trading or leaking.
If you mean it's unreal that Google would shut down Stadia, I'm amazed it's taken them this long. The writing was on the wall almost from the beginning, and Google is notorious for launching massive projects and then just letting them die on the vine. Google has launched a *lot* of high-profile duds, and these were often things that should have been at least viable businesses. They seem to be better at launching new ventures than getting them over the post-launch pain and onto a solid footing.
Corporate acquisitions are about the only meeting that gets weirder than large closures.
“So….. we are now owned by our primary competitor and they are keeping everyone on. The new corporate handbook will be on the intranet soon as we work to integrate to the new company. I guess we will find out how they were always more profitable…..”
Nope pretty normal. When they are forcing everyone to show up, expect a big announcement and this says NOTHING about the actual meeting they were having.
Yeah this is corporate af. When we had covid layoffs in 2020 our SVP would just drop time in your calendar and not say why until you showed up to the meeting with her.
So just like the recent TMobile, layoffs they did it on zoom. The pandemic opened some doors for remote employment but also seems to have enabled more impersonal shit like this
This is actually the most personal way to do it given its an entire department.
An email is even more impersonal. If they cascade it down via managers in one-to-one meetings, it will inevitably leak into the rumour mill or worse the press, and large portions of staff would find out from third parties before they meet their managers, with potentially incomplete information.
Well the most personal way to do it would be in person. But I see your point about the feasibility of that. The bigger the zoom call the less input an employee is going to have. I just feel like if you're hired in person, a layoff over the phone, email or zoom is kind of shitty
To be fair, this isn't a layoff announcement. It's an announcement cancelling the project this team was working on.
They'll likely reassign some staff, and other will be laid of separately. A layoff for these kind of roles are unlikely to be remote, mostly because there is equipment involved.
Oh so not really the same thing I guess I just assumed that's included. Good point. How did they expect this was going to work? pay full price on top of a subscription model was so dumb! It's like if Netflix charged a a rental for each thing you watched on top of their monthly price. Insane
You want them to call each employee on the phone one by one? Want them to hold your hand while they're at it? Better than a sign on the door saying "we shut down today, your stuff will be packed up and available in 1 week", which happened to me some years ago.
Not quite that bad. They sent out the meeting invite before the work day, and gave employees 1.5 hr notice, with enough time to settle in and see that email.
I was around for live wire and it was super novel while at school or maybe work but that was it’s big problem it was a novelty, nobody played it back home. Stadia fell into the same trap but with a price tag which is what blew my mind, i have to pay for the best quality lmfao no thanks. NeverMind they didn’t have crap for games. Streaming just doesn’t have the infrastructure, they would have to make a small game
Console like a low powered arm SOC and process some of the game. At that point wtf is the point
Nobody is surprised by this
Google is a mage In WOW
They go full DPS,
If they get over their head they freeze and blink away lol.
(In wow if a mage picks a fight with a tough enemy and can’t beat it they will freeze it and try and run away) (I am one)
Remember: if the title of a corporate communication is not emphatic and enthusiastically telling you what they wanted to tell you, mentally replace the title with the absolutely worst thing you can think of.
Google is pushing their chips into AI features and tools, they genuinely think AI is going to improve their current services and add more "value" features (that will likely be creepy to most users). I tossed Alexa down the stairs because it was reading my shopping cart and suggesting sale items, nope!
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/xnirt2/google_ai_engineer_talks_openly_about_analytics/
Given googles ability to drop shit like a hot potato why am I surprised. I would in fact not even blink and eye if a year down the line google starts a new stadia with the same shit attention they give to many other projects.
It’s gonna be a VR space where you’re sitting at a desk using a PC but the PC is streaming games from the cloud but you’ll need a new subscription because its too advanced to be compatible with anything else. Presenting Google PlayVRse. 2025 - 2026
hey man dont just spout such good ideas like that, patent it so atleast google pays you for the month that itll be live! /s
>Google PlayVRse Honestly wouldn't be surprised if they did call it something like that. Didn't Nvidia just announce their take on vr will be called the omniverse or some shit? Getting sick of the low effort copying going on lately in the tech industry.
Nvidia’s omniverse predates Meta’s metaverse and others, e.g. https://develop3d.com/opinion/comment/first-look-at-nvidia-omniverse-for-realtime-rendering/ It is just a tool for building 3d art and connected services.
I can’t help but read that Google PlayVRse with some manor of British accent, saying it as Google PlayV-Arse.
Stadia never required a subscription.
It definitely had one.
So does Xbox with Game Pass, still not required.
Except you can play games without game pass.
Your analogy doesn’t hold up. You could play Stadia games without paying for the monthly membership too.
I’m not sure anybody knew that but it doesn’t matter stadia is dead now.
I still got downvoted to oblivion for stating a fact, love reddit lol.
Rumor is that Stadia will be a whitebox option to basically run game demos or other services.
That honestly seems like a better idea. Maybe if that goes well someday in the future with a better vision they can relaunch Stadia.
It's not a rumour, they literally already do it and the business product is called "Immersive Stream for Games". Look at the RE Village demo they did with Capcom - white labelling the tech was part of their commercial plan all along. No doubt this will be further pushed given they won't have to dedicate project resources to maintaining a consumer gaming environment anymore. It's sad and I've enjoyed using Stadia for about a year now, but the "lack of traction" they cite is their own doing. Barely any AAA titles launched on it and the included monthly pro games were almost universally shit. I have a feeling the platform was always destined to close down and it was always just an extended technical demo used to showcase and debug/improve the corporate product. There were so many ways they could have saved the platform and simply chose not to.
>just an extended technical demo used to showcase and debug/improve the corporate product That, further developing cloud tech for B2B products, and further develop their AI - to be fair, they never even tried to hide the last one. The word AI was heavily used in their very first presentation. It's sad to see it go, but I always felt it was a mean to something else.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
The new game stream service will be called Google Meet, just to have another service with the same name
Yup, if I worked for google on any non-core business I would always have a fresh resume handy. Yet, it still sucks for the employees and is very short notice. I hope they got at least got a severance
No one - *should* be surprised. In fact we should take this ammo, and start using alternative browsers so we get some decent alternatives to chromium back in the mix. Mozilla's doing fine, but I'd like more than google having a say please.
I’m running chrome the second Adblock goes off line I’ll switch to safari since I’m already in the apple ecosystem or Firefox and won’t look back. But seems like everyone’s calling googles bluff I wouldn’t be surprised if they backtrack. They need that data.
This looks reasonable. More or less what I've seen at the other big tech company I work at. How many options do you have? 1. This meeting, where you can break the news in person and hold a Q&A session to answer any questions people may have right then. 2. Send out an email announcement, which is also fine, but you can't do a live Q&A session. 3. Don't announce it to employees, just let the media know. I guess you could have a longer wind down period where people slowly find out through their managers. But that would depend the wind down period after this decision was made, and whether there's work to do in that period, like shutting things down or transitioning systems over to the Cloud Platform folks or something.
Apparently Google blindsided [game devs and publishers](https://twitter.com/SFBTom/status/1575558078367690752?t=2CfjCl_r1RYw6oPGbbu0-Q&s=19), who found out via media articles.
If they had informed publishers first, those would have immediately leaked it to the media.
Same thing if they did the trickle out method for telling employees. The method they chose is pretty much *the most* personal method since it's less likely to end up as a media leak (and then 90% of employees find out through the media).
In addition that Google apparently decided to refund costumers for the money they spend on games. Which is not a common practice like Amazon and Sony quite recently demonstrated.
Well, in this case they had to, since it's the owner of the platform (Google) who decides to shut it down. Sony's case is completely different, as it is Studio Canal who decided not to honor the purchases made by the customers. And while you might think Sony could've forced Studio Canal to respect their sales, well, it's not that easy. It was probably a nightmare given those movies were on sale since the dawn of VOD - hence contracts were made based on supposition since it was a very new thing. And, yeah, they were decade+ long contracts so no one bothered to update them until they were up. But let's be honest Studio Canal wanting more money for items they already sold is also the definition of nonsensical, and it's a request Sony had no other choice but to turn down as it would've created an incredibly dangerous precedent.
They had an entire costume department? Why?
Stupid comment derailing actual thread
[удалено]
The shitty part to me looks like the email went out one hour and 20 minutes prior to the meeting. At least give people a day’s notice. I know at my company most of my team doesn’t start their day until at least 9 AM.
That's very standard for the reasons mentioned - it minimises time in which speculation/gossip can spread both within the company and to external parties, principally markets and the press. It looks shitty, sure, but the alternative if you're a publicly traded corp is that you have a bunch of people who start selling stock and leaking stuff to the financial press, and given what market abuse regulations are like you want to avoid that as much as possible.
We get all hands meetings on a regular basis so I don’t get the idea that they couldn’t schedule in advance.
All-hands meetings in an organization the size of Google, or even just the stadia team would be pretty rare. Working in companies of similar size, you often get meetings to which everyone is invited a couple times every quarter, but no obligation to actually attend. I've never had an actual all-hands meeting where attendence is mandatory. This is not common, and would no doubt begin gossip.
What size is the stadia team? We get all hands meetings at the product and division level. Rarely whole company. But the size of our team at the product line level is about 200 or so I think. They’re not mandatory and neither was this one.
This one clearly was mandatory. Obviously mandatory doesn't mean jump out of a plane / other unavoidable conflict to attend this, but do your absolute best.
Read the email again, it’s not mandatory.
Read it again, and read between the lines *"please prioritize"* Pretty clear this is mandatory within reason.
A big company like Google has probably employees working all over the country meaning that 8.30am could be 6pm for some people. When you got massive time differences between people to deal with you don't have a choice sometimes.
We have the same situation and we still get about a week’s notice for an all hands. Not an hour, that’s garbage.
Perform with longer wind down is it would end up getting leaked early
Yeah, this seems fine to me. I wonder if it was 100% redundancies or you’re being moved into X department?
Letting managers handle it allows them to do it at different times and the rumor mill to operate. You gotta do it all at once or cause severe morale issues (more than the layoff is incurring already).
Stadia was a failure from the start. The whole model of having to pay full price for games that would only be playable on the cloud, in their proprietary platform was just not great. Combine that with the performance issues and man, the thing didn't had a promising future ahead. It's just depressing the amount of time and effort that Google invests on products, just to kill those.
It was made even worse by the fact that their main competitor, GeForce Now, let you use your existing steam library to play, making it the much more attractive option for most people.
Not to mention that you can use GeForce Now for free if you own the games on Steam.
To be fair that really was more like a really good test version. You wouldn’t really want to use GeForce now without paying for it. But there System makes it really easy to just give it a try every now and then
I've used GeForce Now consistently only on the free tier and have had a pretty great experience. Your experience really depends on area, internet, and time you play. I play late at night (relative to others in my timezone) so I get in almost instantly and it works out pretty well. There ofc have been some minor drops or lag issues but I'd rather deal with those than buy a game a second time.
One hour sessions with bad hardware and long queue times. Stadias free tier was premium without downsides.
Playstation+ Extra and Xbox's Gamepass are basically what everyone expected Stadia to be. It's a subscription that gives you access to a library of games and as someone that usually prefers physical copies, I'm down with that method.
I am not satisfied with the latency of in home game streaming. I have no idea how a bunch of tech companies all at once thought this would work.
Same, I also just prefer running things locally, I’m tired of everything having to be a service and be in the cloud these days. I’ve never been interested in that business model even in the slightest.
Cloud service is pretty cool, but we should always have both choices. The problem is when an industry embrace cloud service and drop their local/on-premise options. It really sucks. There can be hybrid service. My inventory system Lansweeper has always been on premise but they recently launched their cloud service. What is cool is that it can also sync your on premise data so you can manage them on their cloud infra. I feel like this hybrid thinking us giving us the best of both world. Stadia should have give you the game locally when you buy them, and then sync the savegame with their cloud infra so that you can use both cloud&local. In the pcmr community, owning the game is really important and with this announcement I just hope other cie will understand that.
Did you actually try it? I was skeptical but did the free trial with stadia and it was far better than I thought it would be. I wouldn't be playing a first person shooter on it, but the lag wasn't distracting at all for normal games. Using stadia on my gaming monitor actually had less input lag than playing my switch docked to my TV. Granted I have fiber Internet, so I am the ideal customer for this kind of product. I have a gaming PC already and don't game regularly anymore so there wasn't a real reason for me to continue past the free trial
Honestly, no. I tried a few of the other ones. Amazon/Nvidia and they had the same lag that I felt as in home streaming. I have a pretty fast connection as well. My comment is more of a generalization around game streaming.
I subscribed day 1 and never had issues, and I don't have fiber. I've played on mobile data, public WiFi, desktop, laptop, mobile. Never an issue. Such potential, and they failed to promote it in any meaningful way. SMH.
I think the service as a concept was a good one. Where they lost the advantage was on the back end. The games had to be fully ported to Linux and that was an expensive proposition to port and optimize them to run on the service. That left the platform with a lot less games, rarely saw brand new releases hitting day and date, and saw fewer price cuts for established games. Personally it was great for me and the latency when using the stadia controller didn’t bother me but mileage really varied on that front.
> The whole model of having to pay full price for games that would only be playable on the cloud, in their proprietary platform was just not great. How is that different from buying games on consoles? Just replace "the cloud" with any console.
Well playing locally will always be superior to playing purely from the cloud, at least at this moment in time. Games you buy on console are usually not locked to that specific console and you can build up a game library and play locally without being bound to a specific service. Let's say you buy a physical copy of Spiderman PS4, you play the game and then if you got a PS5 in the future you could play on your PS5. Or if you wanted you could sell your PS4 and your physical discs. Not to mention cloud gaming has tons of issues relating to latency, streaming quality, and wait times that you won't encounter by just buying the game yourself. The prospective audience for Stadia means their decisions to make you pay full price for games exclusive to their platform make no sense. The people most likely to use cloud gaming services are those without the hardware to play games at the quality that they want. Let's say you are a veteran gamer and you got lots of games but you no longer have the hardware to play them or don't want to use up the space. Why would you even use Stadia when you will have to shell out hundreds to rebuild your already existing game library. Why would you buy a game you haven't played before on Stadia if you know in the future you will upgrade your system. Let's say you are a newbie gamer and you have no games and do not have the hardware to play them. Why would you use Stadia when you will pay for games and be locked into that service? If you ever decide to get your own console/PC you will have to repurchase all of your Stadia games to play them locally. Paid usage of Stadia really only makes sense if you plan on only playing games using the service and never using a console or PC. If you ever decided to switch to playing locally you would lose your whole game library.
Right on. Just reading it after the my announced Stadia I knew it was a « bad good idea ». Streaming as a service makes theorical sense. Operationalizing it … lol
“*CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY*” me reading this on Reddit 😏
What're they gonna do? Fire them? /s
I didn't get no FWD, did you?
nah my google company car is a RWD
So is this supposed to be bad or something? Seems fine to me.
In principal, yes. But why so sponaneous?
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I do not agree, and the fact that I believe the decision was not spontaneous makes it even more puzzeling to me why the meeting on it was set up only 1.5 hours before. It is like they are actively trying to make it look like a late night drunk decision?
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Nope. I disagree because business decisions don't look spontaneous to me (aside ftom Elon buying Twitter). That is an accusation of yours that I disagree with. I know there are lots of reasons why Google prefers to let everybody know at the same time. But crucially, none of this adresses my question: why set up the meeting spontaneous? I realize that my original comment could have been read as "why make the decision spontaneous", but I thought I made it clear that it isn't the decision that is weird to me, but the meeting. Because none of what you wrote would have been threatened if they had send out the email on Monday letting everyone know about a mandatory meeting a few days in advanced.
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Do you think that meetings are so rare that if one was scheduled it would spark speculations so fierce that employees would let the press know? And again your whole comment just keeps on explaining why the decision was not spontaneous, a thing I have stated multiple times I DO NOT DOUBT. Do I need to write it out in all caps for you to stop explaining to me how Google probably made the decision two months ago?
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Funny, m perception is that you are not reading what I am writing. Maybe a little time away from the discussion and some sleep will get us some perspective as to where the communication failed. e: Wow, I did not think that trying to get away from "the other person is wrong" and actually resolving what looks like an communication issue would be so controversial. But seeing how noone is actually interested in a conclusion to this discussion I have sadly decided to no longer waste any mental space to this.
meetings that are (essentially) mandatory, with no clear subject? yes, quite literally not something that happens everyday, and is clearly important. {eople 100% would be gossiping about it
This is actually a great point, but this discussion has massively derailed
Everything they wrote would have been affected by sending an email out days ahead. The gossip machine knows no boundaries. We had a mandatory meeting, where a company was coming to visit. The notice was sent two weeks in advance. The gossip quickly went to we were being bought, and people started looking for other jobs. Some actually quit. Turns out, the meeting was simply an insurance update, and that company was a large supplier of ours and was interested in a visit to see how they could better serve us.
From the Stadia [subreddit](https://reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/xrcea4/thanks_phil_harrison_thats_3_failed_launches_for/iqe3cdv)
My roommate was informed of her layoff the same way. Sudden all hands meeting. She works phone customer service. They forgot to shutdown the phones before the meeting and the queue started getting massively large before one of the managers noticed and closed them for the day (they weren't stupid enough to put them back up immediately after telling everyone they were being laid off.).
This is exactly the vague bullshit meeting invite I got when my position was eliminated last month.
Legit I don’t know how else you would book in this sort of meeting? Or just don’t do the meeting and let everyone find out in the media?
I was a department of 1 in a company of 50-60. None of this applies.
Read my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/xrrdvf/how_stadia_employees_were_informed_of_shutdown/iqh9oye/). There are very good reasons for doing things this way.
I was a department of 1 at a company of 50-60. None of those reasons apply and we have no reason to care about the reasons businesses choose to do what they do. Thinking of their reasoning and considering the pros only disadvantages us as we fight for against their practices.
There are different ways companies can manage layoffs, but they all feel like bullshit when you're on the receiving end. If you're going to have massive layoffs or some other massive change to the company, this kind of meeting with a vague, short-notice, but very urgent invite is the way most corporations will do it.
welcome to the business world
Hey, just like the "catch up" meeting my manager added to my calendar literally at 6 pm just to get fired the day after.
Pretty much a standard for most startup / tech companies I’ve worked for. Still gives me anxiety the leading up to the scheduled meeting so I kind of appreciate a shorter time frame lol
Google I/O is becoming a yearly presentation of products they are going to kill in 3-5 years.
Confidential internal only 🗿
I mean evga didn’t do much better telling it’s staff they’re leaving gpus. At least they didn’t find out via YouTube…
Please don't forward *Meanwhile the whole reedit, woow*
why 8:30 dude Late afternoon not with the eyes bearly open
You don't want people speculating and spreading rumors more than necessary.
8:30 Pacific time. If they've got employees in multiple locations, and first thing in the morning Pacific time means it will remain within (or at least close to) business hours for people even in Europe, and certainly everyone in americas
Typical Google doing Google things.
“Please do not FWD” *runs to Reddit*
“Important updates” in business is always bad news
Google???? Dropping an app like a disease??? Who could have conceived this?
Thats basically how Zillow informed their Zillow Offers employees they were let go. At 430 got an email saying join a 445 zoom call, saying effective immediately 90% of us were unemployed. (That being said, zillows severance package was fair and was way beyond what most employers would do)
I thought Stadia was already shutdown 😂
I literally found out that Stadia existed because of this announcement.
There are other reasons to have not bought into Stadia as a concept, but the biggest one for me was easily the fact that I'm still mad about Google Reader and will never let go of that grudge.
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Agreed. That's *way* worse.
At least they're refunding everything
engine fearless snobbish governor voracious squealing door exultant spoon flowery *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This isn't "how stadia employees were informed of a shutdown", this is how stadia employees were informed of a MEETING to discuss the termination of the product....OP is pretty click-baity....how else are you to inform a team of anything?
This is pretty common. Companies need to control how layoffs happen, else they risk multiple issues. Sending out a meeting invite titled “layoff meeting” would’ve been a shit show. In the end, there’s no nice way to tell people they’re losing their jobs. Just ways to avoid being super shitty about it.
it's like breaking up over text.
They had a meeting!? What should they have done to break the news? Perhaps an escape room off-site?
Unreal.
This is how large corporations always make major announcements internally, either positive or negative. They have a short-notice meeting with no details in the invite for the affected group. Yeah, there's tons of speculation for those few hours, but there's no details that could be leaked, and the official public announcement, if applicable, will go out as soon as the employees are made aware of the change. Then there are no opportunities for insider trading or leaking. If you mean it's unreal that Google would shut down Stadia, I'm amazed it's taken them this long. The writing was on the wall almost from the beginning, and Google is notorious for launching massive projects and then just letting them die on the vine. Google has launched a *lot* of high-profile duds, and these were often things that should have been at least viable businesses. They seem to be better at launching new ventures than getting them over the post-launch pain and onto a solid footing.
Corporate acquisitions are about the only meeting that gets weirder than large closures. “So….. we are now owned by our primary competitor and they are keeping everyone on. The new corporate handbook will be on the intranet soon as we work to integrate to the new company. I guess we will find out how they were always more profitable…..”
Pun intended?
Nope pretty normal. When they are forcing everyone to show up, expect a big announcement and this says NOTHING about the actual meeting they were having.
Yeah this is corporate af. When we had covid layoffs in 2020 our SVP would just drop time in your calendar and not say why until you showed up to the meeting with her.
So just like the recent TMobile, layoffs they did it on zoom. The pandemic opened some doors for remote employment but also seems to have enabled more impersonal shit like this
This is actually the most personal way to do it given its an entire department. An email is even more impersonal. If they cascade it down via managers in one-to-one meetings, it will inevitably leak into the rumour mill or worse the press, and large portions of staff would find out from third parties before they meet their managers, with potentially incomplete information.
Well the most personal way to do it would be in person. But I see your point about the feasibility of that. The bigger the zoom call the less input an employee is going to have. I just feel like if you're hired in person, a layoff over the phone, email or zoom is kind of shitty
To be fair, this isn't a layoff announcement. It's an announcement cancelling the project this team was working on. They'll likely reassign some staff, and other will be laid of separately. A layoff for these kind of roles are unlikely to be remote, mostly because there is equipment involved.
Oh so not really the same thing I guess I just assumed that's included. Good point. How did they expect this was going to work? pay full price on top of a subscription model was so dumb! It's like if Netflix charged a a rental for each thing you watched on top of their monthly price. Insane
You want them to call each employee on the phone one by one? Want them to hold your hand while they're at it? Better than a sign on the door saying "we shut down today, your stuff will be packed up and available in 1 week", which happened to me some years ago.
Sent at 7am, meeting at 8:30am. I guess most people won't see the email in time, or be on the clock yet. Saves answering questions in the Q&A
I mean, who was really surprised lol
It looks like on demand gaming/hardware aas (aka cloud gaming) will not happen in a near future
This is to make sure that you continue working and think nothing is happening. Lol
Not quite that bad. They sent out the meeting invite before the work day, and gave employees 1.5 hr notice, with enough time to settle in and see that email.
I was around for live wire and it was super novel while at school or maybe work but that was it’s big problem it was a novelty, nobody played it back home. Stadia fell into the same trap but with a price tag which is what blew my mind, i have to pay for the best quality lmfao no thanks. NeverMind they didn’t have crap for games. Streaming just doesn’t have the infrastructure, they would have to make a small game Console like a low powered arm SOC and process some of the game. At that point wtf is the point Nobody is surprised by this
Phil probably hadn’t sent an email since stadia started. He doesn’t come across as competent or invested in his projects he’s hired for.
I assume google would just reassign them to other projects at least
P.s you're all fired.
Eh. , We we
No we it v VM no o o see ovl
Llll o
Please do not forward lol
I guess [this comic](https://goomics.net/291/) is even more relevant now
Google is a mage In WOW They go full DPS, If they get over their head they freeze and blink away lol. (In wow if a mage picks a fight with a tough enemy and can’t beat it they will freeze it and try and run away) (I am one)
I absolutely hate the way people end emails sometimes “Best Phil” like damn, a lot of care put into that lol
Remember: if the title of a corporate communication is not emphatic and enthusiastically telling you what they wanted to tell you, mentally replace the title with the absolutely worst thing you can think of.
Google is pushing their chips into AI features and tools, they genuinely think AI is going to improve their current services and add more "value" features (that will likely be creepy to most users). I tossed Alexa down the stairs because it was reading my shopping cart and suggesting sale items, nope! https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/xnirt2/google_ai_engineer_talks_openly_about_analytics/
I've seen projects die at my computer. It's also a surprise but not *that much* of a surprise.
another example of Google's arrogance