...Google, I know you all knew this was going to be poorly received, but I don't know if you knew how poorly. To have this news hit after a couple months of the only good press Stadia ever got is rea...
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...Google, I know you all knew this was going to be poorly received, but I don't know if you knew how poorly. To have this news hit after a couple months of the only good press Stadia ever got is really, really not great. The promise of Stadia was games that could only happen in the cloud, not just everybody else's games running (at best) as good as or slightly worse than on the competition. And a year in, you're shutting down the only source those magic experiences were going to come from. No 3rd party is going to make a Stadia exclusive game that needs their distributed computing to function when Google themselves won't do it even after building two studios with that purpose. We might get more neat side features like the picture-in-picture stuff, but I expect that's gonna be it. This is a reasonable thing to be disappointed about. It's a huge (speculative, but the speculation came from Google) promised upside to the platform that is no longer going to happen. As a founder I have plenty of stuff I'm still actively playing and enjoying on the platform, I'm not goin' anywhere, but it's hard to see how this doesn't trigger a massive wave of "told you so" negative press and make user retention a nightmare. Everything Google has said publicly for the last year, in the very rare instances they've chosen to say anything outside a blog post at all, has been 100% committed to the message of long term, confident investment in this platform. And a lot of us bought that, because, you know, you're Google. You have the money. You did the R&D. You hired Jade Raymond. I think you just shot a lot of that credibility right in the knees, folks. All that said, Grace, thank you for your tireless commitment to this community. I'm sure it absolutely sucks having to handle this news.