you can do this this is my job do you have
any idea do you have any idea how games were developed for Google stadia because
I don't but it has got to be totally different and I bet it's fascinating and
if we don't learn about it now we may never get the opportunity the thing is
for traditional consoles there's always
some development hardware and documentation that goes missing and
finds its way onto eBay even if it takes years but this time everything's in the
cloud so next month when Google presses that button it's gone or is it see the
thing about rug pulling an entire industry of passionate creatives is that
someone is going to end up salty enough to say screw it to your NDA and talk to
the press and we found one such someone
we not only got our hands on extensive documentation and screen capture so that
we can preserve this important little piece of gaming history but we also got
a stadia development node a piece of Hardware designed to play stadia Cloud
games but from right in front of you
time really is a flat circle isn't it I had no idea that these things even
existed but they do and we're going to
be taking a close look you know what else exists this message from our
sponsor hetzner hesner offers high performance Cloud servers for a great
price they Now cover the east and west coast of the United States with their
latest location in Hillsboro Oregon use the code ltt22 at the link below for 20
off
thank you when you create a game
particularly AAA assets are often version controlled by perforce and
stored on a local server as well as on your own workstation as you develop team
members submit their changes to the server and new builds get created for QA
to test these builds are then loaded onto Dev kits that will attempt to run
them locally on pre-production Hardware that's pretty much the workflow that
we've shown before and the process with stadia game development was similar but
with a key difference and that's that for most developers there is no local
testing Hardware at all instead you would have to submit your build and wait
for it to transfer to Google servers a process that could take up to 40 minutes
for wait for it about two gigabytes of
content for context a 60 Gigabyte game
should take just a few minutes to load onto a dead kit console as long as
you've got good infrastructure talk about an efficiency nightmare there are
workarounds if you're desperate someone can make a change in unity for example
and then just try it on their development workstation to see if it
works but to properly verify you need to
run it on the same Hardware that the user will have in a build package that's
why in a typical Studio most devs would have their own console or more than one
console at their desk so they can quickly verify changes of course that
version of things you know where stadia doesn't have local dead kits doesn't
really jive with the existence of this does it ah well when these slow transfer
speeds become an insurmountable problem for you
you can actually reach out to Google and request a local Dev node like this one
which is basically a stadia Cloud Server
that sits right on your desk as far as
our friend could tell they didn't just hand them out to anyone though you had
to justify why you needed one and
even once you were approved the experience wasn't exactly uh the white
glove for example they asked Google about providing controllers and the
reply was a link to the product page where they could buy them for MSRP
nice so with all that work out of the way what exactly is it do you get in the
mail on the surface it appears to be a stadia branded Lenovo think station but
maybe we're going to find something more interesting on the inside
there we go a little Dusty what are we looking at here well it
isn't getting less standard looking I love that Lenovo does their front i o on
an actual hard PCB instead of with wires
so that's pretty cool for cable management wow 64 gigs of RAM that's a
lot for a gaming PC I wonder if that's just lenovo's minimum spec mind you
think they're ordering enough to customize The Branding on the front oh
that's apparently really easy to do
modular even the CPU is only a six core
meaning that this thing pedestrian spec other than you know
obviously having a workstation class GPU in it and even this workstation GPU it's
not exactly a powerful one not that we'll have any way of knowing that for
sure because unfortunately we couldn't find any reference to the Radeon Pro
v320 on AMD's site whatsoever and in
fact the only resource we could find was a tech power up page that had different
specs listed than the card that we have the page says 16 gigs of RAM but ours
apparently only has eight so it's actually even worse than a basic v320 no
it's not bad is our basic blank t-shirts ltdstore.com
so if this thing isn't powerful then how could it be useful for development well
it's because it's not for actually doing development like a console dev kit this
station is for testing to see how your game is going to run stop for making the
game so it makes sense that you would want a test node that isn't too powerful
you'd want something that's as close to the servers that Google is using to run
the service as possible that way what the dev sees there at their station
should be representative of the end user experience now
obviously an army of Lenovo think stations isn't exactly what Google is
using in their data centers they actually confirmed the hardware specs
for stadia and we know that each of their servers can run four 1080p
instances ours can only do one but it
seems to be pretty close airing on the side of not as powerful our Dev friend
who sent us the node mentioned that with how well some games ran at 1080p through
the cloud the data center nodes might actually have better gpus and I guess
obviously the 4K nodes would be substantially better than this but we
weren't able to get our hands on one of those stadia splash screen in the BIOS this is
what happens this is it the fan gets louder okay
fans ramping up
and fits so much fan in this bad boy and that's actually as far as we're
gonna get with the software if we connected this Ethernet cable it might
boot up but our kit would immediately
phone home reporting a location that is hundreds or thousands of kilometers from
where it's supposed to be and our friend would get a nasty letter in the mail
from Google's lawyers but that doesn't mean our adventure is over if we could
plug it into a network and launch a game it might look a little something like
this you launched the stadia partner portal on your PC and select a node from
the pool it'll either be a remote one or
your local one if you're so lucky once it's reserved you then create an
instance of your game by selecting the application and which version of it you
want to launch there's a one terabyte drive in our node so you can store
plenty of iterations of your projects as long as you have the space you select
which end point you want your instance to launch from and boom we're in at this
point you're testing your game like you would on any other dev kit pretty cool
but this local node actually still
suffers from a problem that the main servers at Google also have when you're
testing unfinished software crashes and hangs are inevitable and they can
sometimes be so bad that you need to restart your test console with stadia
that takes at least 10 to 15 minutes for
it to reboot and re-register itself with
the back end I don't know when the last time you restarted your PS5 or your Xbox
was but I mean a minute maybe two minutes tops
so it's easy to see why developers might want to avoid this sort of workflow
considering how much time is potentially wasted at all these steps of the game
creation process but somehow they were
still doing it developing for stadia and everything seemed to be going pretty
okay so why did Google just kill this
entire project the memes have certainly been fun but humor aside there are also
Legions of satisfied stadia customers and successful devs who were making
money hand over fist at least once the payment model got changed from getting
cash up front to a cut of the subscription Revenue based on time
played so there are people whose lives have been affected in a very negative
way by ghoul's decision here like if you had a big chunk of the user base playing
your game every day we're talking potentially hundreds of thousands of
dollars a month without hard numbers we can't say exactly how many stadia users
and stadia pro subscribers there were but a few rough internet put the Peak at
about 2 million and that sounds realistic given that anyone with a phone
could install the free app however stadia Pro was a monthly 10 subscription
and the estimates seemed to vary for that one between 160 to 180 000 active
users if we average to 170 that's 1.7
million dollars in Revenue per month which is a lot of money
but not nearly enough when you consider
the overhead that it needs to support the stadia team at Google was apparently
hundreds of employees nearly 300 at its peak plus they needed to maintain
hardware and programs for Distributing it and infrastructure and obviously they
needed to pay out a significant chunk of that Revenue in shares to game
developers but in spite of how obviously
unsustainable all of that sounds now in the aftermath apparently at no point did
anyone internally at Google seem to acknowledge that stadia was on its
deathbed despite all of the outside rumors it was seemingly business as
usual right up until the very bitter end
in February of 2021 Google shut down their in-house Dev Studio but insisted
that it was for the best so they could focus on the business side of things
then in July they tried lowering their cut of the sales then in September they
moved Jack buser to Google Cloud's head of gaming Solutions in November they cut
the price of the hardware from 60 to 22 dollars as the program was now two years
old cute and then in February of 2022
they said that everything was perfectly fine despite rumors of an internal
stadia deprioritization right our inside source says that they
and every other Studio were being lied to just as much as we were and we have
no way of knowing how high up the chain you actually needed to be to know what
was going on when rumors popped up in the summer they emailed corporate the
dev friend and they got a reassuring reply a couple of days before the
announcement they actually got a new version of the SDK the software
development kit that was pushed out to developers to work on stadia an industry
colleague of our friends from another Studio even flew from Japan to San
Francisco to talk about the future of stadia with Google the day before they
shut it all down now luckily for the team we got this unit from the writing
was on the wall and they had already pivoted to porting their game to other
platforms as for others Google's actually trying pretty hard to properly
pay out Studios Fair shares almost like like a severance for a fired employee
customers have already been refunded or are going to get refunds and Google is
isn't broke so hopefully the check's clear and that's all sorted out pretty
quickly in fact it they've done such a good job of canning this thing that the
person we spoke with only had good things to say about their experience
dealing with Google they all seem friendly they're nice to work with it
almost has this like super weird mutual breakup Vibe will anyone ever trust
Google if they try to re-enter the gaming space almost certainly not but
there doesn't seem to be a lot of anger either with the entirety of what's
referred to as the Google graveyard being in plain view for anyone to see
it's almost like everyone kind of knew this was coming but they were willing to
take the bag of money for their work and see if who knows maybe this is one of
those projects that stays hey maybe let's hear the game the name came from
stay the uh not so much though maybe it
will stay around in some form I have no evidence to support either of these
theories but I think it's possible that Google could sell the technology to an
interested party and I also don't think it's impossible that stadia could reach
surface as a business to business product say a mobile carrier wanted to
introduce a cloud gaming service they could use white label stadia to spin it
up extremely quickly until that happens though it's yet another line on killed
by google.com which for those who are not in the know is an amazing site that
Chronicles all the products and services that Google has launched ran sometimes
for years and ultimately killed at least in this case unlike Google play music
which is still better than YouTube music they have fully compensated their
customers and seemingly Partners but there is one more thing that I would
like to see resolved that's the stadia controller while it can be used on your
PC with a USBC cable I suspect that many
gamers in 2022 and Beyond are not going to want to deal with that and are going
to end up junking them so Google I'm asking you please either provide a fix
or open up the firmware so that the community can work on getting it working
wirelessly over Bluetooth please and
thank you and thank you for checking out our
sponsor Squarespace if you need to build a brand online you need a website but
but Linus I just learned how to turn on the little flashlight on my phone how am
I going to build a whole website you ask with Squarespace Squarespace is a
One-Stop No Frills all-in-one platform for expanding your presence on the
internet Squarespace lets you build beautiful websites engage with your
audience and sell anything and everything from products to content
without needing to attend the Linus techwort School of tech Wizardry we love
Squarespace so much that we use it here at Linus Media Group it's custom
templates make it easy to stand out with a plethora of themes and customization
options to fit your needs and you can maximize your visibility thanks to their
Suite of integrated SEO features there's also analytic insights to help you
optimize for performance so you can see what's working well and What needs
tweaking so don't wait get started today and head to squarespace.com forward
slash LTT to get 10 off your first purchase if you guys enjoyed this video
maybe check out the last time we tried all the streaming services that that was
our last chance to do it what's over
stadia probably Luna at some point