'Morale is at an all-time low': Ex-Googler writes scathing letter slamming layoffs and 'eroded' culture
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An ex-Googler wrote a 1,500-word letter criticizing the firm and CEO Sundar Pichai's lack of "visionary leadership."

‘Morale is at an all-time low’: Ex-Googler writes scathing latter slamming layoffs and ‘eroded’ culture::An ex-Googler wrote a 1,500-word letter criticizing the firm and CEO Sundar Pichai’s lack of “visionary leadership.”

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    They did produce something of value, Stadia, but instead of investing in it further with some exclusive games to show off its capabilities and lure more people and developers in … or just outright signing a deal to paying for the development cost to port some hits or Call of Duty to Stadia, they wrote it off, refunded everything, and shut it down.

    It’s a major fail, they tried next to nothing to fix their messaging issues, failed to invest in areas that would’ve made a difference, and didn’t stick with it to challenge people’s beliefs that Stadia was going to be shut down.

    They should’ve:

    • Made a guarantee that if they shut down within the next 10 years, every game you play will be refunded in full.
    • Did a hardware upgrade to bring Stadia past consoles.
    • Never shut down their in house studios and invested even more into bringing other studios in.
    • Really upsold the cheat free experience (with no client side anticheat spyware necessary) and the ability for the platform to make even the games with the worst netcode stable multiplayer experiences.
    • Made something like steam workshop for Stadia and worked with at least one developer to prove that it works (they said they were open to mods, but they needed developers to take interest)
    • Potentially resolved the “you have to buy all your games again” concern by offering to buy everything on the platform in your steam, xbox, or PlayStation library 1 time (so you couldn’t “import” multiple times or buy new games on another platform and then import them for free).

    Imagine if people literally just pressed a few buttons on their old gaming computer and suddenly could play a bunch of their steam library in the cloud with better graphics for free on any device they wanted. I can’t imagine folks wouldn’t have stuck around with that kind of a deal.

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Made a guarantee that if they shut down within the next 10 years, every game you play will be refunded in full.

      This would have given people confidence, but really doesn’t reflect on Google as a whole, and just reinforces that they as a company will kill things at a moment’s notice.

      I think in addition to all your points, they could have distanced Stadia from Google, and announced a new gaming company under the Alphabet umbrella. The hardware bundles they were selling with Chromecasts probably wouldn’t have been a thing, but I’m not sure if that would have been a bad thing. Having stadia as a completely separate entity from Google may have given it the breathing room it needed to get a good user base, without the stigma of google killing products.