featured image

Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service will soon cease to exist as the company has announced it will be ending the service early next year. Google touted ambitious plans when Stadia launched, but it never posed a real threat to established players like Sony and Microsoft. And because of Google’s general lack of commitment to anything but its biggest cash cow – digital advertising – Stadia never really stood a chance.

When Google first showed Stadia at GDC 2019, it discussed sky-high ambitions that looked disruptive. You could stream games to all your devices! You could jump into a game from a YouTube clip! The company was even setting up its own game studio for exclusive titles headed by vet Jade Raymond.

It was easy to dream about the potential of Stadia

It was easy to dream along with Google. Perhaps one of the biggest tech companies in the world, one that knows a thing or two about streaming stuff, could succeed where others failed. And when Stadia finally launched in November, it kind of worked. Sure, it was pretty messy and there were still a lot of missing features, but you could play a handful of video games with just an internet connection.

Things slowly fell apart there. Although the company added a free Stadia tier six months after launch and addressed minor issues like getting the Stadia wireless controller to work with computers, there just weren’t many people playing Stadia games. Google offered some promotions to try and get Stadia into the hands of more people, but that wasn’t enough.

In February 2021, the company announced what was clearly the beginning of the end. It closed its own development studios, saying it would instead offer Stadia primarily as a platform for other partners to build on. Now, nearly two years after that news, Stadia is closing for good.

A person has a Stadia controller in their hands. The controller is connected to a Chromebook, on which a game is played.

a:hover]:text-black [&>a]:shadow-underline-gray-63 [&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-black text-gray-63″>Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

In the end, Stadia barely made a dent. Yes, it probably set fire to Amazon, which launched its Luna cloud gaming service about a year after Stadia, and Microsoft, which started rolling out Xbox Cloud Gaming in April 2021. But cloud gaming didn’t rock the gaming industry when it arguably had the best chance. When we were all stuck at home early in the pandemic and couldn’t find PS5s, Stadia felt like it should have been the perfect solution to allow large numbers of people to easily play games from any screen.

But as my colleague Sean Hollister wrote in March 2021, cloud gaming still has too much friction. Can my internet connection run the game? Is the game I want available on the platform of my choice? Do I have to buy it separately or is it part of a subscription? The questions go on and on and Stadia was no exception. Compare that to my Nintendo Switch, which lets me insert a game cartridge and just start playing, and you can see why cloud gaming still hasn’t quite caught on. (Cloud gaming is also an option for a handful of Switch games, and it’s generally not a good one.)

If Google wasn’t willing to invest in Stadia, why would anyone else?

Obviously, Stadia was never that important to Google either. Most budget video games take years to develop, but the company closed its own studios just over a year after Stadia officially launched. If Google wasn’t willing to invest in its own platform, why should other developers?

developers who did Support Stadia was as surprised as anyone about Thursday’s news. Bungie, on his Lot 2 forums, said it “just learned” of the closure and would send information to affected Stadia players “as soon as we have a plan of action”. Mike Rose of No More Robots tweeted his frustration at Google’s lack of communication, say that “Hours later and I still have no email from Stadia and no clarity on what’s happening with our games, deals, whatever.” Even Stadia staff apparently had small notice.

Cloud gaming is not dead. Xbox’s offerings are pretty good and keep getting better. The same goes for Nvidia’s GeForce Now. PlayStation shut down PlayStation Now but folded in cloud streaming to the most expensive PlayStation Plus tier. Amazon’s Luna is also expanding. Logitech just announced a dedicated cloud gaming handheld. But early next year, Stadia, the service that made one of the most spectacular forays into cloud gaming, will be the next big, ambitious project Google sends to the graveyard.