Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.
> Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.
They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take.
How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former.
Edit:
To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions.
Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important:
- Iterate on the user experience
- Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc..
- Fix bugs, keep it running
- Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
- Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
The other issue is that search makes A LOT of money. Even if they find oil, it’s such a small amount compared to search that it doesn’t seem to move the needle internally.
If you look at the opportunity cost of supporting a small side business va building a bigger business.. you drop the small thing. Google engineering is expensive and they have a somewhat polished brand that they don’t want to muddle with a bunch of “non winners”.
Amazon has the opposite problem. They build everything and have to find a way to scale their internal orgs to handle lots of tiny side revenue streams. I signed up for a magazine subscription through Amazon and they had a website redesign that accidentally (?) removed the management portal link for a few weeks. They do so much they can’t even stay internally consistent.
Right, that's why for example it made sense from Google's perspective to kill things like Google reader because that doesn't really move the needle.
The biggest issue with that approach is that they're burning customer goodwill, and that affects their odds down the line of getting customer acceptance. Stadia is just another project in a long line of cancelled projects that leaves customers screwed over and less willing to use Google products in the future.
Your point about Amazon is pretty interesting, IMHO I think that's why in the long term Amazon will keep on beating GCP in the cloud space. Amazon having such a large set of offerings is that it makes their cloud offering particularly compelling, especially considering they seem to keep old services alive and have relatively stable interfaces. Their offerings might not be as polished as GCP's, and some of them are laughably awful, but at least I feel confident that Amazon won't change the API or deprecate/retire the service.
Nobody understands where oil comes from. Anyone who did would have drilled there already and would be a new letter in FAANG (maybe MANGA instead now that FB -> Meta?).
Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.
Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).
In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.
Hindsight is not all it is though. Plenty of people here, myself included, were calling that the need to rebuy games (compared to MS's all in one sub model, or nvidia letting you use your existing licenses), combined with Google's track record with lacking commitment to its services were fatal flaws to Google's value proposition.
The reply was that Spotify and Netflix worked, but all music streaming services have basically the same selection these days, and movies are deemed more disposable than games as seen by the rise of people rotating subscriptions as movie video streaming fragments, so they were never perfect indicators. The one worry was that Google would buy its way in with exclusives and introductory pricing a la Epic, but Google's pride probably prevented that.
What? The streaming games market started way before Google (OnLive, Sony, etc.) and now it's mostly Nvidia and Microsoft. Google entered late, never invested much in it, never advertised much... they just totally botched the execution and their competitors got all the players. Nvidia's service is getting better all the time.
In this case, I think that's a good thing in the long run. This entire class of game streaming product is as anti-customer as it's possible to be. It's basically the wet dream of DRM control freaks in the industry.
If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
That only plays out if you offer anything to customers once the competitors are gone. Also: there’s still PlayStation, Xbox and even Apple Arcade doing perfectly fine in this space
Looks like overall Apple subscriptions have solid growth. [0]
I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization.
I have arcade through their Apple One subscription and uh I think sometimes my family tries to buy a game and it’s free so that’s nice?
But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
That being said, the user experience of Stadia is so much cleaner, GEforce now has much jank in linking accounts, staring up your instance, checking if a game you might buy is even supported, and then deciding the storefront to get it from if it is.
But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.
lol yes, the uh "traditional" approach is just... discover market, deliver product, profit. This "new" strategy of "deliver product, lose money, shut product down" seems like it may not work well long term.
They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take.
How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former.
Edit:
To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions.
Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important:
- Iterate on the user experience
- Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc..
- Fix bugs, keep it running
- Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
- Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.