XboxEra Community Hangout |OT8| Waiting for E3 2023

There are a lot of indicators that the decision was made relatively fast.

No wonder Google is hated.

Here’s the description from the auction, which is for a videogame history preservation charity, btw.

Up for auction are the original items used for Google Stadia’s famous ā€œAnything you dream can be builtā€ grand reveal display at the 2019 Game Developers Conference! Through a series of mishandlings, miscommunications, misunderstandings and other general mishaps, the grand unveiling of Google’s now-doomed gaming service was stationed next to…three of the most famous commercial failures in video game history. Now these failures can be YOUR failures!

I work for a charity called Video Game History Foundation. In 2019 we were approached to help a marketing firm conceptualize a timeline of video game history leading up to the unveiling of the Stadia…a sort of ā€œhere are all of the innovations of the past, which are all antiques now that we are in the bright beautiful tomorrow of cloud gaming.ā€ We were also tasked with providing the items themselves.

So how did they end up sitting it next to these bizarre items? Well that’s a long story but let’s just say they changed scope and vision about three times in the process, it went through what felt like several committees and decision-makers who all disagreed with each other, they changed direction completely with like a week left before the show, and by the end it was a mish-mash of two entirely different concepts, ā€œa timeline of video game console innovationā€ and ā€œcollectibles people will take a selfie next to.ā€ The details don’t really matter, what really matters here at the end of the day is that it was not my fault.

All proceeds benefit our charity, which works to preserve the history of games by building a library and digital archive of material that helps people tell the stories of where your favorite games came from. I’ll throw in some stickers or something in the box! Learn more about us at http://gamehistory.org.

Bidding starts at a buck! Please bid more than that!

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Google should have shut it down a long time ago. I can’t believe they went with that business model in the first place.

They probably wasted so much money to get this thing started, even paying for games to come to the service and then picking big studio heads like Kojima for him to just jump ship probably after seeing the abysmal numbers of users.

I don’t get how these big tech companies like Google and Amazon cannot grasp the gaming industry. Actually, that’s reassuring if I’m honest.

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I am more curious why Kojima went to Google rather than Microsoft.

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I don’t think he jumped ship

They closed their entire division down/pulled funding and Kojima mentioned a while back that he had a game cancelled that he was kinda pissed about which im assuming was his Stadia project

Regardless though, they wasted a massive amount of money on this but they knew it was a massive money sink and if they were going to compete with MS they’d need to spend ludicrous amounts more

Maybe they went to him first

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And from the Epic v Apple trial we know Walmart was also looking to get in on game streaming as well. Wonder if those plans died around the time they decided to sell off Vudu as well, though I think that decision was announced before the trial started, so maybe it was already old info at that point too. Would have been interesting if they had done more with Vudu though.

Ok. I wasn’t sure what happened.

It was probably for the best, really.

Funny stuff. I can kind of see what they were getting at with the original idea, but winding up with the final display of Dreamcast, Power Glove, ET, and Stadia… Well it’s right in line with the signature characteristic of Stadia which was not understanding their audience.

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Gaming is hard to break into and even harder to have sustained success. You need to have a 100% vision and to execute it to be successful.

Even MS wasn’t immune to making mistakes, they were by far the richest company in the gaming space and still flopped with the X1.

Google and Amazon can’t break into this space by solely throwing money at everything, hopefully Google has learned that lesson but who are we kidding, it’s Google.

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They could but they were not willing. That’s the diffference.

Remember in the beginning of Xbox, Microsoft bought bunch of stuff - from Rare to even Bungie from Apple. And they were in negotiations with various other companies (SquareSoft and even EA I believe). They went with powerful device and were bleeding money for years and sold only 20m OG Xbox while PS sold 120m+. But they did not give up.

If Google was willing to bleed money and take gaming seriously they could succeed. They for example could try to acquire Valve or some big publisher for Stadia content. They could make deal akin Nvidia where people could play the games they own via Stadia, they could offer subscription and so on. They promised integration with their own services which they did not do. They had their own studios even with big names. But they were not willing to commit.

Amazon is a wild card. They can compete - they have Luna with Windows - so easy to port games - they also have money and the infrastructure. But again they are not willing bleed money.

Granted, Microsoft is well known for their common approach in competing - basically make competition bleed money faster than Microsoft.

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Easier said then done. They don’t have the stomach to bleed that much money to truly be a competitor in this space.

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For google, isn’t this failure #64738383 for discontinued, overpromised tech?

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They don’t indeed. Essentially if Google Search starts to decline, Google will be in trouble. Youtube could partially save them though, but only partially.

But it does not mean they cannot. For OG Xbox there was a vision and Microsoft backing (competing against Sony in the living room + bunch of guys who clearly knew gaming and wanted to do that). It is the same right now - there is a vision and Microsoft backing (expand Azure via Gaming + bunch guys who know gaming and wanted to do that) .

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switch tax. nintendo people are use and ok with paying high prices

At this rate, FFXIV and pixel art game remake or not are carrying Square.