A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).
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“However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia,” Zimring says.
According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia’s Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google’s eyes, this wasn’t enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
Google engineers always choose the hardest route to solve problems. Why wouldn’t they? If your products are going to be shutdown in a few years anyway, might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).
Think about it, every time Google made a product with sensible tech stacks, those products were actually started outside Google and later bought by Google (Android, YouTube, etc). If Google made Android from scratch, there is no way they’ll use java and Linux, they’ll invent a new language and made their own kernel instead (just like fuchsia os which might be canned soon).
This is so true. Getting promoted requires showing impact. If you use off-the-shelf tools (that happen to be easily maintainable) that’s not an impressive impact. If you invent a new language (and make up a convincing reason it was necessary) and so-on, that’s really impressive and you can get promoted. The minefield you leave behind that makes maintaining your solution so difficult is just another opportunity for someone else to get promoted.
TIL Fuchsia hasn’t been killed quite yet.
Does it actually even exist? I feel like I’ve been getting whispered rumours about it for years and years, but never anything sold!
Yes! Nest Hub devices run it
Oh wow, I’ll have to have a read up
But Kotlin is actually an improvement over Java.
Golang thoooooo
Kotlin was made by Jetbrains and later adopted by Google.