Stadia Exodus Continues As Product Head For Stadia Exits

from the exit-stadia-left dept

The troubling signs for Google's video game streaming platform Stadia continue. While I have to admit that I had really high hopes for Stadia, nothing about this has been smooth from launch to its current state of, well, who the hell knows what is going to happen to it. From a poor initial reception to questions about failed promises on performance, the conversation about Stadia quickly focused on the platform not offering much in the way of an actual game catalogue to play. Less than a year later, Google made this problem even worse by disbanding its own in-house game developers, leading to more fallout when Stadia could suddenly not support its own internally developed game.

And, as I mentioned above, the issues continue. Stadia's product head, John Justice, has left Google entirely.

Another executive has left Google Stadia, and this time it's John Justice, vice president and product head of Stadia at Google. Along with Phil Harrison, Justice was the face of the project, frequently giving interviews and talking to the press. Justice hasn't updated his LinkedIn profile yet, but following a report from The Information, Google told 9to5Google, "We can confirm John is no longer with Google, and we wish him well on his next step."

This latest departure is just another sign that Google's game-streaming service is circling the drain. A Bloomberg report from February revealed that the service missed Google's internal sales estimates by "hundreds of thousands" of users. Shortly before the release of that report, Google shut down its in-house game studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment, after less than two years of operation, citing the high cost of operating it. This move led to Stadia's other high-profile departure, the exit of Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond.

On some levels, this all feels a bit silly. Google has enormous resources from which to draw and game streaming is certainly going to become a massive force in the future of the gaming industry. It appears to certainly be the case that Google flubbed the Stadia launch and let that flub linger. But there is zero reason why Google should let this "circle the drain" if that is in fact what they're doing. Instead, it would be nice if, for once, Google did the un-Google thing and bulwarked a project like this with more resources, seeing it to fruition.

And, to be fair to Google, perhaps they do have a coherent plan for Stadia. They lightly hinted as much in a blog post recently.

After shutting down its game studio, Google seemed to hint at a change of strategy for Stadia. Google's blog post said the company is looking for a "path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry," which indicates that the current strategy of selling games to customers was not a "sustainable business." The post highlighted Google's "platform technology" that could help studios deliver games "directly" from publishers (as opposed to through the Stadia store?) and that Google saw this as "an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia's advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools."

If I'm reading that word salad correctly, this is hinting that Stadia might be less the gaming industry's version of Netflix and more about building a platform that works with game developers so that they can offer cloud-gaming experiences directly to customers. Perhaps that's the right way to go, though I still can't see why a service like Stadia, were it actually running properly and populated with a good catalogue of games, can't work.

In fact, it seems somewhat obvious that that's the future, though it may not be a future run by Google.

Filed Under: game streaming, stadia, streaming, video games
Companies: google

Study Says Broadband Caps Are A Big Problem For Google's Game Streaming Ambitions

from the arbitrary-limits-on-innovation dept

For years broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused to hamstring competitors. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its own creatively-named streaming video service (AT&T TV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.

For more than a decade ISPs have slowly but surely imposed such limits hoping that consumers wouldn't notice (think of the frog in the pot of boiling water metaphor with you as the frog). But as video streaming services have increasingly embraced high-bandwidth 4K streaming, consumer usage has started to collide with these arbitrary restrictions. And with new game streaming services like Google Stadia on the horizon (which eliminate the local console and stream everything from the cloud), the public is about to get a crash course in the stupidity of these unnecessary limits.

At full 4K resolution, Stadia, which launches in November, can consume upwards of 15 gigabytes per hour. When you figure that many ISPs (like AT&T's DSL services) impose caps as low as 150 GB per month before socking you with costly overage fees, you should be able to see the problem. A new study by broadband availability tracking firm Broadband Now shows that around 6 million of the US's estimated 34 million daily gamers will run afoul of their caps in the months to come. Since a sizeable chunk don't even know they have caps, that's going to create some bill shock for some:

According to data from The NPD Group, America's estimated 34 million gamers play 22 hours per week on average. Were those gamers to all shift to Stadia as their primary game platform at 4K, they’d burn through 1,386 GB of data monthly. And that’s just the bandwidth consumed by gaming; it doesn’t include music and video streaming or other activities.

The result will be an even higher broadband bill for US consumers who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for bandwidth. For many this will be a surprise. Of the 943 gamers surveyed by the company, only 17 percent were certain they had a broadband cap. 21 percent say they weren’t sure one way or the other whether their broadband was metered.

Again, there's no reason for these limits to exist outside of telecom industry greed. Even the telecom industry has (after years of criticism) acknowledged they don't actually help manage congestion, and serve no real technical purpose. They're a glorified price hike and the clear result of the lack of competition in broadband. In an interview with Gamespot earlier this year, Google VP Phil Harrison tried to downplay the impact caps would have on the service, insisting the broadband industry has a long history of staying ahead of consumer demand:

“ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends and if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets...the trend over time, when music streaming and download became popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up,” he said. “Then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up, and we expect that will continue to be the case.”

Except that's not true. AT&T's 150 GB DSL cap, imposed in 2011, hasn't been hiked once. Comcast's 300 GB cap has been hiked exactly once in the last decade (to 1 terabyte) since it was imposed. There's no competitive incentive to raise or eliminate these caps because these companies face little to no competition and (now thanks to the Ajit Pai FCC) even less regulatory oversight. And while Stadia games can be streamed at a lower resolution to conserve bandwidth, that deflates Google's quest to have Stadia be a symmetrical equivalent to game consoles like the Switch, Xbox One, or Playstation 4.

Another looming wrinkle in this saga? The death of net neutrality. AT&T already uses usage caps to penalize customers for using a video streaming competitor like Netflix or Hulu, allowing it to use its broadband monopoly to tilt the playing field in its favor. With ISPs working on their own cloud game streaming platforms--and the FCC having just abdicated its authority to police such behavior--can you perhaps see a looming issue? Google abandoned giving a damn about net neutrality circa 2010 or so, and with game streaming, that decision may just come home to roost.

In the interim, get ready for 2020 to be filled with sudden complaints about broadband usage caps, and lots of tap dancing by the telecom industry as to why these arbitrary, punitive limits exist in the first place.

Filed Under: data caps, game streaming, stadia, streaming, video games
Companies: google

Google's Dead Wrong If It Thinks Broadband Caps Won't Hurt Game Streaming

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For a decade we've pointed out how broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused anti-competitively. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its streaming video service (DirecTV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.

For years, ISPs have slowly deployed these unnecessary limits, hoping consumers wouldn't notice they're the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water. But as higher-bandwidth services like 4K video streaming have arrived, consumers have started to notice the unnecessary limits in greater numbers. But, however tight caps may become with 4K Netflix, that's nothing compared to what's going to happen as companies like Google begin pushing game streaming services like Stadia, which eliminate local game hardware, move all processing power to the cloud, and then stream everything to the end user.

Early analysis suggests that at full 4K, users will burn through Comcast's monthly 1 terabyte usage cap in a matter of just three days. Many ISPs have far lower caps; AT&T for example imposes a 150 GB monthly cap on the majority of its DSL customers, who then have to pay $10 per each additional 50 GB of data consumed. It's fairly obvious that as game streaming expands, users are going to be looking at some significant sticker shock (which, from the ISP perspective, was the whole point).

Enter Google executive Phil Harrison, who this week in an interview was asked about the impact broadband caps will have on the company's game streaming ambitions. Harrison suggested the company isn't worried, though his justifications for that confidence are laughable:

"ISPs are smart [and] they understand that they’re in the business of keeping customers happy and keeping customers with them for a long time."

LOL, what? US broadband providers have the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any industry in America because they lack real competition in most of their markets. When you consider that means toppling the likes of the airlines, banking, insurance, and medical sectors, that's no small feat. ISPs don't have to "keep customers happy," because there's no penalty for not doing so. These customers usually have no alternatives to switch to, and rampant regulatory capture means there's no real penalty from regulators for bad behavior either.

Harrison's theory rests entirely on the false idea that ISPs will be shamed into raising usage caps:

"The ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trend and if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets--and it’s actually a relatively small number of markets that have [data caps]--the trend over time, when music streaming and download became popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up. Then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up, and we expect that will continue to be the case."

Harrison's wrong here too. Comcast is the country's biggest broadband provider, and is increasingly nabbing a monopoly in more and more markets thanks to telcos that refuse to upgrade aging DSL lines. In the last decade, Comcast has raised its usage cap exactly one time since it was implemented, from 300 GB to 1 terabyte in 2016. Numerous other ISPs, with caps as low as 50 GB, have been just as stubborn. US ISPs already charge some of the highest rates in the developed world. Usage caps and overage fees are just double dipping on captive customers.

It's like Harrison is basing his entire argument on a reality that doesn't exist. To stay ahead of game streaming, ISPs like Comcast would need to raise their caps exponentially to 10 terabytes or even higher. But that would defeat the entire reason ISPs imposed these limits in the first place (read: make even more money off of emerging new services). You can't shame natural monopolies into doing the right thing. Even if the inevitable stories blasting usage caps do force ISPs to raise caps, the new limits are going to be chosen based entirely on how to make the most possible revenue from captive customers.

Harrison also tries to claim in the interview that this will all work out thanks to 5G, which ignores that 5G isn't some competitive panacea, is barely available, and in most instances will cost users significantly more money, while bringing some obnoxious, creative restrictions (Verizon already bans 4K video on its "unlimited" wireless data connections, for example). That's before we even get to net neutrality, a concept Google hasn't actually supported in any meaningful capacity since 2010 or so. Most ISPs are busy testing their own game streaming services and, like video, are likely to exempt those services from caps while still penalizing competing services like Google Stadia.

Harrison may just be naive, or he may believe that Google is big and powerful enough to buy ISPs off should they try to get in the way of Stadia. But, either way, consumers are inevitably going to be seeing some bandwidth sticker shock as they blow through their usage caps. And with little competition and no meaningful oversight, "public shame" isn't likely to have nearly the impact Harrison seems to believe it will.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, competition, game streaming, gaming, phil harrison, stadia
Companies: google