After Trying To Deny The Obvious, Google Announces It’s Shutting Down Stadia
from the we-hardly-knew-ya dept
While Google’s Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a disappointing thud.
A limited catalog, deployment issues, and a quality that couldn’t match current gen game consoles meant the service just never saw the kind of traction Google (or a lot of other people) originally envisioned. Developers have been consistently abandoning the platform, and Google has consistently sidelined the service, even shutting down its own development efforts as a parade of executives headed for the exits.
Back in July, rumors began to emerge that Google would soon kill the effort. Google tried to deny those rumors at the time, insisting that the project was very much alive:
As it turns out, the leaks were right. In a blog post, Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison announced that Google would soon be shutting down the platform:
…while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.
The service will remain live until January 18th, 2023. Google is refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made via the Google store, and all game purchases made through the Google Play store (I have a Premiere edition Stadia bundle I never bothered to even open). Employees will be shifted to other parts of Alphabet, and the promising underlying tech will likely be used on other Google platforms.
Game streaming does probably have a future, but it was simply too difficult to disrupt an industry dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, whose products (including some of their own streaming efforts) still generally provided a superior gaming experience with a far larger catalog of actual titles.
Filed Under: 4k, console wars, game streaming, gaming, stadia, video games
Companies: google
Comments on “After Trying To Deny The Obvious, Google Announces It’s Shutting Down Stadia”
Nobody seems to have told the website admins...
For fun, why not take a look at Stadia’s website? (Or this archive link from a few minutes ago.)
Anyone want to try ordering a controller? With the left hand apparently not knowing what the right hand is doing, maybe they’ll actually ship it before refunding it in January.
Re:
Presumably they wrote this before Stadia was shutting down. In retrospect, the wording is pretty amusing.
What? That may be true, but it was never Stadia’s problem. From the beginning, nobody believed Google was going to stick with this. The constant “we’re not going anywhere!” quotes may as well have been written by the Iraqi Information Minister.
Some of the biggest problems?
1) Google itself. Or rather the reputation it has garnered for shutting down any new initiative a few years after launching said initiative.
Sample size is only my circle of friends. The consensus there is that it is a good thing that they waited out trying the Stadia since they expected it to be binned, especially when Google made it clear that Stadia wasn’t supported from within Google by closing down the in-house developer.
2) Stadia is just gaming in the cloud. For example Microsoft is/was better positioned (Cloud services and an existing gaming network plus existing hardware) then Google to gain market share. Others can (and have done so) setup their own network to enter the cloud gaming market. You need that something extra that draws people in which Google didn’t have and didn’t want to spend resources on to get/create.
Google Graveyard and the Self Fulling Prophecy
This isn’t just a Stadia problem, it’s a problem across all of Google’s products.
Nobody invests time or money in Google’s products because we know from experience that they’ll be canned in a few years. A decade ago any Google product launch would have tens of thousands of fanboys lapping it up and extolling the virtues of whatever came out of the Chocolate Factory. But not any more, or at least not without the cancellation caveats.
Google just doesn’t seem to care about the collateral damage these product cancellations cause, but it’s a cumulative problem. Every cancellation results in less trust in the next product, meaning an inevitable poor take-up and early death.
Here’s Ars Technica’s closing comment on their review piece of Stadia when it came out, under the heading of “The Ugly”:
It wasn’t prophetic, it was inevitable.
And nothing of value was lost.
I’ll just repeat what I’ve said before here – Stadia was an interesting platform, but they were killed by timing and business model. Had they released 5 years ago, the hardware combined with the requirement to buy game at retail prices might have had an impact, even with their weird adherence to older games. But, since they released when xCloud and others were already on the horizon, with subscription access and even no additional hardware requirement in some cases, they were doomed before they released.
Re:
It launched 3 years ago (November 2019), which to me is probably a point in their favor: shortly afterward, video cards became quite hard to get at reasonable prices. 2 years prior, the prices were less inflated, and broadband was slightly shittier, so I don’t see how it would’ve helped.
As others have said, Google’s reputation was probably a significant problem. They’d have been better off being a technical contractor for someone with a better reputation, such as Valve. It probably would’ve also been a good idea to concentrate on areas with decent broadband—perhaps South Korea, especially if they could get some well-known pro gamers on board. (They did have Sweden, known for fast internet, as a launch country. I wonder whether many people in Sweden even knew.)
Companies need to stick with their products and also picks the right products. Google not supporting Stadia was pedicted; they should have proven naysayers false. On the other hand, Meta is wrong about VR and that will fail regardless of how much effort they put behind it.
stadia was always one-trick pony
What was the target audience.
While it’s nice that the technology worked well, the more basic issue is that serious gamers already have a good graphics card, and the only point of the service (since you had to buy the games) was not needing a good graphics card…
Ah, it took long enough. Never saw Stadia taking off, mainly cause it was pretty obvious that Google was attempting to force itself into an emerging market that it’s only plan for was to ride the popularity of being the first consumer available cloud gaming platform and then figure out the rest along the way.
Meanwhile Xbox had been developing their plan for cloud gaming years prior which also didn’t involve it being the main product.