17
votes
The standalone YouTube Gaming app and standalone gaming.youtube.com website have shut down
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- Title
- Google kills its Twitch killer-the YouTube Gaming app shuts down this week
- Authors
- Ron Amadeo
- Published
- May 28 2019
- Word count
- 754 words
Yet again google are killing off another service that isn’t pulling in enough people rather than make an attempt to verify the problem.
Normally I wouldn’t be so interested in another google shutdown but google are planning to release Stadia, and I wonder how much of these shutdowns will deter people from using their platform? Sort of a snake eating itself issue.
Huh? It's being/been rolled into YouTube as a core feature. YouTube gaming is just a brand (and a poorly conceived app), and a not-particularly-successful one at that.
Not sure what these overblown articles are on about.
It started as an astroturfing campaign by Google's competitors, and now It's a trope that smart guys on the internet keep repeating.
Google gets all the hate, but you could pick any large company and find many discontinued products.
From memory and with a few quick searches, here's a list of discontinued Microsoft products. I'm sure there are many I'm missing.
Technology changes. Products get upgraded, replaced and discontinued. This is normal.
Media Center
Kinect
Zune
PlaysForSure DRM
Microsoft Money
Windows Home Server
Microsoft Kin Phone
Microsoft Mobile, previously known as Nokia
Windows 10 Mobile
The Band
TechNet
Hotmail
Live Messenger
Live Mesh
Groove Music Pass
Groove Music for iOS
Groove Music for Android
Encarta
Windows Small Business Server
Flight Simulator
Microsoft Works
Microsoft FrontPage
Windows Embedded Automotive
Microsoft Auto
Windows CE for Automotive
Windows Automotive
Windows Mobile for Automotive
Did you just exclusively pick Microsoft products by accident? Because I don't think Microsoft is a good pick to "disprove" the negative impact of half-assed products failing like clockwork.
Well they said "here's a list of discontinued Microsoft products", so I don't see how it could be an accident. I'm guessing they were just contrasting another large tech company on the same scale of Google.
Absolutely - but how many of those Microsoft products do you think your average consumer has heard of? In contrast, how many of Google's discontinuations have affected the "typical" consumer?
This has no impact on my decision to avoid Stadia because Google's well-documented history of doing this kind of thing means I already don't trust them enough to be an early adopter of anything of their's. Especially not something that costs me money. Then add in the fact that Google's entire business model is built around violating your privacy and using your information to sell ads, and I'm left with absolutely no interest in anything Google pumps out these days.
Latency is already enough reason to avoid Stadia like the plague. There's just no way they have the latency over the internet nearly as low as the latency over a single displayport cable.
I'm sure they have it "good enough" for casual players, but given my sensitivity to lag from things like vsync, Stadia just isn't even worth looking at. They haven't even mentioned anything about support for VRR technologies like FreeSync and G-Sync.
I hope it fails and Google shuts it down because I don't want publishers releasing games exclusively on it as a form of draconian DRM.
It's similar to Microsoft, now: Whenever I worry about a Microsoft technology taking over, I remind myself that they simply don't know how to make a product that isn't Windows/Office (and I can't resist the snarky side-note that they can't even do that very well). Think Windows Store, Windows Phone, GFWL, all that crap. It mostly fails because of some little technical detail or usability issue, but it almost always fails. It's almost like these giant companies became big because they're good at one specific thing and should stick with it.
Same thing with Google+ and – likely soon – Stadia. I don't like a streaming-only utopia where you don't even have physical access to the game code, anymore. It would destroy a lot of software the moment it gets shut down or is no longer profitable. But I'm not worried. Stadia will fail like all the other Google moonshot programs. There is no real passion, it's a see-what-sticks project, a billion to spare and dead the moment they realize it's actual effort to keep it running.
It's been about 5 years since I switched to an iPhone and I still miss my old Nokia Windows Phone. Microsoft is absolutely capable of making good products, but they're also capable of making deeply flawed products, and seemingly incapable of marketing any of them well.
Every time Google discontinues a product, it's worth re-reading stories about Google's internal culture and promotion process (for example).
They place a very high value on shipping new things, and much less value on maintaining existing things.
I also feel vindicated in moving away from Google.
For search I’m using DuckDuckGo although it does give me dud search results from time to time. I’m considering using StartPage.
For mail, I’m using FastMail. I was using Mailfence but I moved away after realising how young they were compared to FastMail. Also, their 2FA implementation left a lot to be desired. Plus, FastMail seems easier and secure to set up, at least on Mac/iOS.
Has anyone got any other alternatives to any other Google services?
I have always used Google because I had way better search results, but lately, especially on mobile, my search results sucked so bad. Literally 3 results of ads before the actual thing I looked for. Which means my initial screen is just ads and I need to scroll down to see what I wanted to see.
I've been using bing maps over google maps for a while now. Seems to load a bit quicker and I find their UI to be a lot less frustrating to use.
DuckDuckGo is definitely my favorite google alternative though. And if for some reason I do need to make a google search I can do it from DDG very easily.
Woelkli cloud services for storage and contacts/calendar sync.
For search i use searx and sometimes duckduckgo.
I never understood the purpose of YouTube gaming. I've always just watched gaming videos on YouTube.