Well it has happened. Google Stadia is officially a dead platform. For the vast majority of gamers this is pretty meaningless because most of us never even tried Stadia, or quickly abandoned it if we did. For a few people it means they have lost their main way of interacting with games, and I feel bad for them though at least they got their money back and in some cases were able to export their saves.
The fascinating thing about Google Stadia is that by all rights it should have been at least a modest success. It had everything you need to do well in the gaming space. Tech that most people agree was impressive and worked well. Brand awareness. A massive corporation with the deepest imaginable pockets backing it. It even had a pitch; play anywhere any time with no installations or patches. A perfect way to fit gaming into your life the same way that video now fits into our lives, where you have services you use across multiple devices on demand and it all just works.
There were a few obvious issues with Stadia from the outset. The first was the lack of a killer app. There have been a few Stadia exclusive games but nothing that people were like "you need to find a way to play this." The conventional wisdom is that you need some special game to get people to invest in a platform. However Stadia didn't really require an investment at all, so this doesn't seem like a deal breaker for me. The Epic Store and Good Old Games don't have killer apps, and while Steam launched with Half Life 2 it was never really driven by exclusives after that. You may need a killer app to get someone to buy a $500 console to put under their TV but not to play games on devices they already own. Stadia did have a controller you were supposed to use with the service but it offered those for free to many people at various times.
The second issue with Stadia was the lack of universal compatibility. This is a bigger issue because it undercut Stadia's whole appeal. If Netflix only worked on IOS and Linux it would not be Netflix today. Of course Stadia's compatibility issues weren't nearly that bad, but the fact that Google had trouble making Stadia work with its own Chromecast devices was a serious issue. I don't think that this was a total platform killer but I do think it was a major dent in Stadia's armor.
But the real thing that sank Stadia was not the lack of games (there were a LOT of games on the service) or the lack of compatibility. It was the business model. Asking people to buy games that they couldn't download and use locally but could only use with a service that 'lived in the cloud' and could only play at high quality with a monthly subscription doomed the thing before it launched. All the other major problems stemmed from that.
For example one issue a lot of people bring up regarding Stadia is that a lot of people have bad Internet connections. Stadia was developed by a team of Google employees often living in major cities and having expensive connections they needed for work and that the company might even be subsidizing. By all accounts it did a decent job of streaming games even with more representative connections but people were understandably worried about this, and while you definitely could test your connection for free with various FTP games and trials the fact is that you wouldn’t really know how input delay will impact a given game until you try it, and asking people to plunk down $60 for a game that might not work well was never going to work well. Especially given that Google has a reputation for pulling the plugs on even big well-funded projects pretty regularly. People didn’t want to spend a bunch of money for games they might not be able to play and wouldn’t own in any meaningful way even if they did. Of course Google DID pull the plug on Stadia early, though it refunded all purchases, which meant concerns about losing your ‘investment’ were actually overblown (though the fact that Google could happily hand back all the money Stadia pulled in probably shows just how poorly it performed, especially because they weren’t able to recoup the portion they paid out to developers.)
Stadia was overly ambitious in that it tried to get people to embrace an all streaming model instead of going with some kind of hybrid model like Xbox has, where you can download games or stream them. Just allowing downloads would have done a lot to make Stadia more appealing, but it wanted to jump headlong into the all streaming future even I customers were not ready. But it was not ambitious enough in that it didn’t try to disrupt the basic retail model of video games. If Stadia had been a subscription service people would have been more willing to try it and it could have offered something that people might check out multiple times as their internet connection improved and streaming games became more generally popular. Or if Stadia had offered downloads along with streaming it would have been just another PC game store but with a unique additional feature that could have made it appealing. There is an argument that either method would have been more expensive for Google, but I’m not sure that’s true given that they were already spending tens of millions to get ports of pre-existing games. I can’t imagine they couldn’t have worked out a deal for games to be added to a subscription or to permit the download of pre-existing PC versions.
Of course there were lots of other problems in Stadia’s execution too. Google’s game development program never really got off the ground and while some additional services and options were added after the initial launch the messaging remained murky and confusing. Stadia’s compatibility issues with Google’s own hardware made it look half-assed and like the company wasn’t fully behind it. These things acted like ballast on what was already an uphill battle.
Still I can’t help but see Stadia as a missed opportunity. Game streaming will be mainstream one day soon. It’s basically inevitable. More and more games essentially live in the cloud anyway, with local versions being paperweights once the servers come down. Gamers have mostly moved from physical media to downloads and gaming will follow the same route that film and music have. Physical to downloads to streaming. It’s just a matter of the tech being there and customers getting used to it but it will happen. Stadia could have been a leader in this. Instead it’s like any number of start ups that tried to get into an industry before that industry was ready for its ideas. Except this startup was backed by Google so it didn’t have to die. At least if it had been more ambitious from the outset (Music and movies are consumed by streaming but people aren’t buying streaming rights, they’re renting them.) Or maybe a little less in its desire to force an immature technology on an unwilling market.
Oh well. It’s gone now. At least they unlocked the controllers for use with other games.
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