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Google Games

Google Secretly Had a Giant Gaming Vision That Includes Bringing Games To Mac (theverge.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Apple's Mac has long been an afterthought for the video game industry, and few think of Google as a games company -- despite running Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world. But Google had a plan to change those things in October 2020, according to an explicitly confidential 70-page vision document dubbed "Games Futures." From a report: The "need-to-know" document, which was caught up in the discovery process when Epic Games hauled Apple into court, reveals a tentative five-year plan to create what Google dubbed "the world's largest games platform." Google imagined presenting game developers with a single place they can target gamers across multiple screens including Windows and Mac, as well as smart displays -- all tied together by Google services and a "low-cost universal portable game controller" that gamers can pair with any device, even a TV.
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Google Secretly Had a Giant Gaming Vision That Includes Bringing Games To Mac More

Google Secretly Had a Giant Gaming Vision That Includes Bringing Games To Mac

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  • they killed it before it even hit beta!

    I'm still playing Civ V, I don't want a game that disappears in a few months.

    • Love Civ V!
      One of the all time great games.

  • A better idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tabitha 696 ( 8554777 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @02:57PM (#61708525)
    Why not fix your software first?

    • Fixing their software won't make them more money.

      • Fixing their software won't make them more money.

        And gaming on a Mac will?

        As usual this sounds like a typical engineering lead project at Google -- i.e. a bunch of engineers thought it would be cool to game on the Mac, but failed to consider the commercial realities. And before you bitch and moan, I am an engineer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by khchung ( 462899 )

          Fixing their software won't make them more money.

          And gaming on a Mac will?

          Yes. Gaming on a Mac will get them much more personal data from Mac users who do not use Android phones.

  • Uhm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @03:12PM (#61708547) Homepage
    As described in the /. Article, that's exactly what Stadia is.

    • Yes, but the secret part is that they had planned from the beginning to shut it down after 5 years. Wait, google does that to everything. Ok, I give up, no news here.

  • Why does everyone want to be the Zune of gaming? (Score:3)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @03:49PM (#61708639)
    Apple, Google, Amazon, etc...all these non-gaming companies getting into the gaming market. I don't get it. The gaming market is finicky and these companies SUUCK at it. Apple Arcade sucks and I have yet to even hear of someone who likes it. Google stadia is the same. I have never met a happy stadia customer. I am sure someone somewhere on the planet enjoys those, but it's safe to say both were not as successful as either company hoped.

    Why is it not obvious? You're not gaming companies. You have no history of taking the market seriously. For Apple, they made Apple Arcade look like an Apple product...sparse, minimalist designer friendly, whimsical, non-offensive, respectable...but not fun. Everything I enjoy in a game is anti-Apple...take Doom Eternal...garish colors, ugly all over, gross, loud, violent...FUN...whatever your favorite game is, it probably looks out of place in Apple's lineup. Sorry, apple, you can't keep your turtlenecked hipster image AND please gamers. Even whimsical games, like mario kart are too garish for your design sensibilities.

    Google just half-assed it with Stadia, like they do most of the time these days.

    Why do these companies even want to be in this sphere? They clearly aren't trying too hard. It's a high risk environment with lots of failures from far more talented and dedicated companies. How many of the best games in the last 10 years were made by studios that went bankrupt within 5 years of release? It seems like they're rushing to be the Zune of games...with the exception that the Zune was actually good player for its time. You can't say MS didn't try...you can definitely say that about Apple and Google and I assume Amazon if they ever release any games.

  • Google sounds like that awkward kid with extreme ADHD who proclaims "I am going to do X, and it will be the biggest wonderfulist thing in the world!" and later, the "big wonderful" project is sitting in the corner, collecting dust in a mountain of barely started and half finished and ultimately abandoned projects while the kid works himself up for the next "big wonderful" thing. Over and over again.

    I read the site which lists all the stuff Google abandoned over the years, and not only was that list fucking

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      And it's likely already bit Google in a$$. Think anyone wants to put real money into Stadia just to have it shut down in a few years?

      I mean, it's at the point where if Google wants Stadia to succeed, they need a succession plan - what would happen to my games I "bought" when you shut down Stadia? It's needed to build confidence that Google just wouldn't shut it down on a whim or when ads stop being sold on it.

      Unlike Sony and Microsoft, who seem to be in the gaming thing for the long haul, Google's perchant

      • when Stadia drops the game you own?
        needs to be covered or can then just say the fine print says you rent the game and don't own it.

        • If I can't have a copy of my own that I have on my own computer, one that no corporation can just up and take from me, then I would only use a service like Stadia to rent a game.

          To pay in full for a cloud game is foolish, and after so many stories of people losing their movie and music collections (drm or cloud) because the server shut down during the past 20 years, people should know better. If not, then they deserve what happens to them.

  • Easier said than done... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Huitzil ( 7782388 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @03:58PM (#61708673)
    I've worked in gaming for the past 15 years, and have seen a good amount of speculation, sometimes fear, of tech giants disrupting the industry. Most of the FAANGs have failed in one way or another to truly deliver on their visions to compete in the gaming ecosystem. And at the risk of over simplifying the reasons why they've failed - there is a common pattern that should be a learning lesson on what not to do. First of, these companies will go out and buy / hire expensive EXECUTIVE talent - folks that have had experience in producing successful video games and running large dev ops, but they fail to attract the critical story tellers and game designers that are really the reason why big games are successful. They don't attract the right boots on the ground, because they don't know how to find them. Second, these large companies are quick to set large dev ops / gating processes to take products to market, in the same way that they'd take a new version of a web store front, or other pieces of software, to market. Overly defined product requirements. They fail to understand that creating the fun (not finding it) is an iterative process that sometimes takes multiple alpha prototypes in the wild to find the right formula. And it takes years of patience. Third, they massively underestimate the sophistication of the large (and medium, and small) videogame developers and publishers already in existence - I think some of this is human bias - because the folks in the current establishment in large part are non-descript hippie gamers, of course, with a few exceptions - not VC types. Last but not least - they dismiss their player audiences and never listen to them in a meaningful way - they chalk controversy to social media activism, and genuine discontent from player bases, as outliers, because their listening mechanisms (mostly surveys) are terrible.
    • Your comments apply to companies who are trying to create games, not gaming platforms. The two things are very different.
      • Most times the two go hand in hand: successful platform build outs are iterative but also anchored on successful game experiences. Nintendo, Atari, Sega, were all tied to the hip to their IP and built consoles that would super charge experiences they (for the most part) already owned or worked with. Sony might be the one outlier where the development of the platform succeeded without Sony creating massively distinct IP, but I'd argue that the environment at the time of the original PlayStation launch wa
  • Ideas that Google killed before they badly attempted them.

  • " Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world"

    We have a different idea of what "games" are. I don't consider glorified slot machines games.

  • they've been fucking with it since 2008... [wikipedia.org] oh, and it doesn't even mention that they own Fitbit [blog.google] ... But don't worry, they were/are working with Apple/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon - and they're all trustworthy too, right?

  • Are they done with that? Or was that getting boring? Because I still think thatâ(TM)s interesting, but I donâ(TM)t see Google doing a lot in that space.

  • At some point, as a company you have to stop growing horizontally. Look what happened to GE, they expanded horizontally into other markets until they had so many divisions the management probably couldn't even wrap their heads around all of it and they lost focus.

  • I suspect they were super fired up about Apple since they are both sympathetic to the far Left and wanted to put a bit more shine on the Mac where, arguably, it needs it most (gaming). Birds of a feather, now. They ought to get together and make a laptop that automatically sends everything you type to a politburo for approval.

    • Re:Political Suspicious: Two Lefties in bed togeth (Score:4, Funny)

      by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @05:24PM (#61709033)

      I suspect they were super fired up about Apple since they are both sympathetic to the far Left and wanted to put a bit more shine on the Mac where, arguably, it needs it most (gaming). Birds of a feather, now. They ought to get together and make a laptop that automatically sends everything you type to a politburo for approval.

      Do you ... like.. see 'lefties' everywhere?

      • I suspect they were super fired up about Apple since they are both sympathetic to the far Left and wanted to put a bit more shine on the Mac where, arguably, it needs it most (gaming). Birds of a feather, now. They ought to get together and make a laptop that automatically sends everything you type to a politburo for approval.

        Do you ... like.. see 'lefties' everywhere?

        They do tend to be exhibitionists, that's true. So one tends to see them whether one wishes to or not.

      • I definitely see at least one lefty who apears annoyed. That'd be YOU. I'm basing my opinion on the amount of well documented political censorship (conspiracy-fact, not theory) done by both Apple [wikipedia.org] and Google [wikipedia.org]. They've been caught red-handed countless times and it often turns out that the information they are blocking is truthful and meritorious. If you bother to look at what they've censored, it's obvious and overwhelmingly topics the Left wants to censor. So, it sounds to me like you are attempting to paint

  • New Google form (Score:3)

    by Malays2 bowman ( 6656916 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @04:51PM (#61708859)

    Could use a little polish but here it is

    Standard Google Topic Reply Form v0.1 (alpha)

      Mark all applicable items with an X

    I see that this is about

    [ ] "/\ n3w iNn0VaT1On bY gOoGl3!!!!"
    [ ] Google is invading privacy (again)
    [ ] Google claiming new privacy features (again)
    [ ] Chromebooks are catching fire (again)
    [ ] Chromebooks all stopped working
    [ ] Google got hacked

    People should know by now that

    [ ] Google has a long history of abandoning projects
    [ ] Google products are all in forever beta stage
    [ ] Google is one of the worst privacy invaders of them all
    [ ] Google, like all big companies will gladly hand over your info to $BIG_SCARY_GOVERNMENT_AGENCY
    [ ] Google, like all big companies will gladly change stuff around for the sake of change
          [ ] and that all "feedback" forms are routed to /dev/null
    [ ] When you depend on "The Cloud", you give up control of your device/files
    [ ] When you depend on "The Cloud", other people can read your sensitive files
    [ ] When you depend on "The Cloud", hackers may gain access to your sensitive files
    [ ] Chromebooks are made in China like everything else is, so counterfeit batteries can wind up in Chromebooks like any other product.

      To remedy this, you should

    [ ] Start making local backups of your sensitive documents
    [ ] Don't put your sensitive documents on somebody else's mainframe (cloud)
    [ ] Switch to a different service/product
    [ ] Always remember that Google will likely abandon/shut down the service within a week of you discovering it
    [ ] Look for alternatives *before* using a Google product
    [ ] Ask yourself "Do I really need this Google product?"

  • Meanwhile, *real* cross-platform compatibility has improved by leaps and bounds thanks to Proton, which has a very good track record for me of working pretty well for the things I want to play.

    It seems like more things these days have native Linux clients, too.

    I am finally getting rid of the Windows box I kept around for games and image editing, thanks to Darktable and Proton.

  • Marathon ... made by Bungie, which was bought by Microsoft so they could have an exclusive for the Xbox (Halo). The first and third (Marathon Infinity) were Mac exclusives for many years ... Marathon 2 was released on Windows, too.

    Dark Castle [wikipedia.org] ... made by Silicon Beach Software (makers of SuperPaint and SuperCard), which was bought by Aldus. It was a side-scrolling puzzle game (mostly timing related); you moved with the keyboard, while you aimed with your mouse. It's believed to be responsible for WASD mo

    • Maybe I'm imagining it, but it seemed me that it was around the time of MacOS X that companies stopped developing many games for the Mac ... although that was also about the time when the XBox and PS2 were out, so maybe they took the attention.

      I think a couple of things happened around the same time. Most notably, Microsoft's DirectX started to gain traction. This also coincided with GPUs starting to be more standardized components. 3dFX and other hardware vendors had card-specific graphics acceleration, meaning that games had to have different modes based on which particular cards the games would run on (the start screen of "Forsaken", where a list of 3 or 4 modes, stands out to me for some reason). With DirectX, the cards were abstracted away.

  • I thought that was what they brought PCs for - the Mac being indubitably superior for all work related things, and not having games, is easier to claim against tax.

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