Has anything in video games launched hotter and returned to Earth harder than Google Stadia? This still maturing industry has seen many ambitious plans explode on the path over the past decade, but in 2019, the unveiling of Stadia at the Game Developers Conference had the air of history. Less than a year later, it was just another Google experiment that didn’t catch fire.
Thursday’s announcement didn’t come as a shock to Google pulling the plug on its vegetative streaming gaming platform; it was notable because Google offered refunds to anyone who spent money (other than the monthly subscription fee) on the service.
For some, the handwriting for Stadia’s demise hung on the wall 18 months ago, when Google stopped developing first-party games — for which Google acquired two studios and hired A-lister Jade Raymond. For a lot more, if not most, it was in Google’s anemic value proposition. Stadia Pro, the premium subscription tier of the service, gave players access to an overwhelming library of unknown indie games, boutique racing sims, and THQ fire-sale IPs. It also largely failed to deliver on its promises for 4K streaming resolution.
When it was announced in 2019, Stadia set out to push the idea of dedicated equipment — $500 PlayStations or even more expensive PC gaming rigs — by giving you AAA gaming quality from anything that can use its Chrome browser. What Google has learned is that even if you build a virtual console, that console still needs some exclusive titles that make headlines to get people to it.
Google instead paid eight figuresaccording to some reports, to bring established console and PC titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2, the division, or the latest NBA 2K, to their platform – at full price. Sharp-eyed Google observers, and there are many, noted Stadia’s very un-Google-esque launch; usually the company starts small – even acknowledging the beta status of its ideas – and expanding. As of the GDC 2019 announcement, Stadia was marketed as a finished product.
But behind the scenes, Stadia’s managers seemed to spend as much money as possible to create the most redundant platform of its time. Meanwhile, the truly distinctive features that Google vice president Phil Harrison promised at GDC 2019 never fully materialized. “Innovations like distributed physics can be built into your games,” with Google servers handling all the processing, he said on the Moscone Center podium. “Battle Royale games can go from hundreds of players today to thousands of players tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, that claim comes at the right time, as last week the group of Battlefield alumni that founded Embark Studios announced: The finale, a multiplayer shooter whose complicated destruction-based physics engine is handled on the server side. The game’s creative director called that type of rendering “a holy grail” that the studio, founded in 2018, “has been looking for for a long time.” No less than Microsoft’s Crackdown 3 tried to pull it off in 2019, and it didn’t quite make it.
Harrison said on Thursday that Google would apply the technology the Stadia team developed to other parts of Google, “and also make it available to our industry partners.” But it looks like studios are now able to replicate one of Stadia’s original promises without its technology.
Ultimately, perhaps the only innovation Google will bring to video gaming is the idea that when a platform really dies, people who put skin into their games can expect some cash back. Google will shut down Stadia for good on January 18, 2023; anything other than Stadia Pro subscriptions will be refunded, but whether that’s automatic or must be claimed is unknown at this time. Still, those who bought the games, expansions or downloadable content from Google Stadia at full price will be compensated, Google said Thursday.
But it’s doubtful that Google’s gaming industry partners will be as grateful as Stadia’s customers. When OnLive rang in 2015, anyone who bought one of their set-top boxes before February of that year had an expensive dining table coaster. When Ouya’s vision to bring Android mobile games to home theater setups imploded the same year, none of the crowdfunded consoles got anything back.
The real bottom line here is that if game development is difficultplatform development is multiples more difficult, and requires as much willpower from its creators as vision and capital. Marketing, including spiffy GDC keynotes, accounts for zero.
You think back to the earliest days of another tech stock’s ill-advised console venture, how much they paid for exclusives, how much money it lost, how investors and rivals piled on that bad news – it seems a miracle, 20 years later, that Xbox is even viable, let alone the leader in video game streaming and subscriptions. At Google, Stadia was just another expensive experiment.
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