The cloud advantage was one of the main pillars upon which the Stadia business was built, and there just isn't any evidence that this theoretical benefit is working to Google's benefit in real life.
Has better latency != can have better latency. If there's demand for Stadia I assume they could use more of those data centers. But not sure the performance of Stadaia is the problem here, it's far far easier to use Stadia than Gefore NOW. Yet, people don't use it.
"The fundamental benefit of our cloud-native infrastructure is that developers will be able to take advantage of hardware and power in ways never before possible, and that includes taking advantage of the power of multiple GPUs at once."
Notably, this goal has been stated before, I believe by Microsoft for the Xbox 360? Running demanding workloads in the cloud elastically makes a lot more sense than buying hardware you rarely use.
Google killed SG&E about one year after Stadia launched, before the studio had released a game or done any public work. In a blog post announcing Stadia's pivot to a "platform technology," Stadia VP Phil Harrison explained the decision to shutter SG&E, saying, "Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially."
I suspect Google wanted faster, more measurable results than is possible with game development. There's a reason why tech companies are vastly more profitable than game companies.
I don't particularly see the shame in changing a strategy that isn't working. As an early user of Stadia I do see the lost potential though, maybe that's where this is coming from.
With Stadia's consumer model going down the drain, Google announced it would pivot Stadia to become a behind-the-scenes, white-label data center service that the company will reportedly re-brand as "Google Stream."
I think that makes a lot of sense. Google doesn't want to do the "platform building" Microsoft and Sony excel at, and it doesn't have to.
Imagine playing or trying out video games simply on the developers website.
One of the many problems the platform faces is that Stadia hardware is only good for Stadia. It can't run anything other than Stadia, so Google is reluctant to invest in this single-use hardware and keep it up to date. The Stadia computer you're renting from Google is pretty outdated.
I would love some sources on this.
Stadia certainly isn't available in "over 200 countries." It's available in just 22 countries, or about 10 percent of the scale Pichai heavily implied Google could work at.
Do the other countries have sufficiently fast internet infrastructure to make streaming work well for many people? Is there demand for Stadia there? What's the criticism regarding this exactly?