It appears that Stadia's future as a game platform is pretty grim.

This is almost certainly the death knell for Stadia as any kind of important stand alone platform. Games will keep coming to it for a while and it will stay up for at least a while but who knows. Google kills its babies all the time.

This is why I was never interested in Stadia even though I had multiple opportunities to get it for free. If Google pulls it down all the investment you've made in it is worthless.

With something like Xbox online purchases: first of all the servers are still up 17 years after the 360 launched, many 360 games can be played on modern hardware, and Microsoft is clearly very committed to the Xbox brand. But even if Microsoft gets out of the games business I can download all my purchases to hard drives, back them up, and play them until the media goes bad or my Xbox breaks (assuming the login servers also come down and I can't just get a used replacement.) That's much more security than Stadia offers. Sony has very much deprioritized the PS3 but I can still download my purchases and play them if I want, and even if the stores and servers close I will be able to play the games I downloaded.

If you're going to keep everything in the cloud then just rent stuff to me, like Luna or Game Pass, so I'm not investing money for a 'permanent' purchases that is anything but.,

I think that's one of the big reasons why Stadia failed and we all saw this coming. We'll see how long Google leaves the servers up, but all the Stadia service project accomplished was flushing hundreds of millions down the drain and doing big damage to good will and trust with the gamers who used it. They should have just licensed the tech from the get go.

Yeah, the writing was on the wall the second they talked about subs and purchases. If it was just a subscription then they would have had something. The people who thought someone would pay full price for a game, and on top of that a subscription, for a product that they cant download and keep if things go bad, was not thinking 5 mins ahead. You can still download things to a wii it looks like. So i now have more confidence in Nintendo somehow being more forward thinking then Google on the internet. And even if Nintendo shuts the servers down, there are still options.

The good news is that Google has to keep the servers up so long as they are trying to sell it to other company's. But how long before some of those old games are possibly not compatible with there new server tech they use in the future even? Or if the device i have doesn't support the Stadia app? And how many company's have some computationally heavy task that needs to be streamed at low latency to a customer?

Games seem like the only major use case. And for now i think more people are comfortable knowing they can download and play something on there hardware. There are benefits to the cloud, but in terms of games the cons have outweighed the benefits for me personally.

PS Now figured out people didn't even want to rent games in the cloud for cheap early on, let alone purchase for full price. How someone didn't even look at the competition and take notes is beyond me.

What a sadly predictable outcome. They never understood the market they were wading into and that's been clear since before it launched. Glad that maybe this will find its way to be used elsewhere, but what a waste of time and money on their part.

@lego_my_eggo: Google isn't likely to sell the Stadia platform itself, which is almost certainly a huge money sink, but rather license out the technology (and their server farms) for other companies to do things like stream games or demos or whatever Peloton did with it.

Why would anyone want to buy the Stadia brand? All you'd be doing would be paying to keep the servers up so people who already bought the games can play them. Google wasn't able to get new games to come to the platform without paying for them and wasn't able to sell enough games to offset the costs.

The only reason this thing stays up for any period of time is that it's not that expensive to run because nobody uses it. Also if they killed it now they would incur even more backlash than if they kill it in a year or two after nobody has bought new games for a while and the active userbase is even smaller.

@bigsocrates: I know, what i meant by sell to other company's was rent out the servers/sell the service. You cant sell a service to Bungie to stream there game if the servers are shut down. Unless a company wants to get in the cloud game themself, which would be a massive investment, having Microsoft, Amazon or Google handle the work for a fee is much better then actually buying the hardware across the world.

@lego_my_eggo: You can shut down the Stadia service as a product but rent out the tech and servers. Like closing a store but keeping the building it was in and rent that out.

Bungie will be using Sony’s servers now anyway. Sony would be a potential customer if it has PC versions that can be ported to Stadia’s architecture I guess.

Regardless I think we agree that Stadia the product can die even if the tech lives on.

@bigsocrates: Sony's server might actually be Microsoft's servers.

I saw a tweet that I can't find again, but it was essentially to the effect of "Google should have spent a few billion dollars funding 1000 indie games for their platform, it would have cost them nothing relative to their size but signaled that they were serious about games" and I think that's mostly right. They were clearly never serious, and they weren't serious about convincing anyone they were serious.

The pricing stuff isn't great and the crossplay is weird and cloud doesn't work for everyone, but honestly you don't need to make a thing that works for everyone, you just need people to believe you want to.