With its Stadia service, Google tried to make an early breakthrough in publishing and developing cloud-based video games, but an incomplete launch product and poor sales model nearly took it off the air as soon as it started.
Now that Google is announcing the impending closure of Stadia, it is starting from a cloud gaming market built primarily as a response to it. Stadia was the first to arrive, but Amazon, Microsoft, Sony and others took advantage of Stadia’s weaknesses.
In 2022, cloud gaming will become more popular and affordable, thanks in part to learning what Stadia has done wrong.
Google announced Thursday that it would be ending Stadia. Stadia’s various storefronts have already closed, but users can continue to play games already in their Stadia library until the service officially shuts down on January 18.
“…While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users we expected,” wrote Phil Harrison, Google vice president and Stadia general manager. .
“We remain deeply committed to gaming,” Harrison continued, “and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that enable the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.”
Stadia’s current team members will be reassigned, while the service’s underlying technologies will be reused for use on YouTube, Google Play, and augmented/mixed reality projects. Users who have purchased Stadia games and hardware through the Google or Stadia stores will receive a refund over the next few months.
Google initially announced Stadia at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco in 2019. Through Stadia, Google claimed, users would be able to play video games over almost any networked device, via cloud access to Google’s servers.
The pitch to consumers was that you don’t have to spend thousands on high-end consoles or PCs to play video games if you can sign in to Stadia via your current tablet or phone and have the latest Assassin’s Creed at maximum settings.
Furthermore, Google had already made significant investments showing its intention to become a major player in publishing and developing mainstream games. This included opening two game studios in Los Angeles and Montreal, and hiring industry veterans such as Harrison, who worked at Sony, Atari and Microsoft before coming to Google, and former Ubisoft producer Jade Raymond.
The hype was real for much of the following year, but when Stadia launched in November 2019, it did so with incomplete software and with a really bizarre sales model. Google’s vision for Stadia was clear that it was intended to be a sort of virtual console, to the extent that it charged users full retail price for its cloud versions of individual games.
Stadia then struggled to find an audience. Despite the massive growth in video game popularity over the course of 2020, Google opened up 2021 by scaling back its expectations of the Stadia project. It abruptly closed its internal development studios and turned Stadia into an effective low-overhead game publisher.
Conversely, other companies’ cloud gaming ventures have focused on reducing consumer costs. For example, Amazon’s Luna was first announced a few months after Stadia and made visible in response to it. Instead of charging users for individual games, Luna offers a monthly fee for unlimited access to a library of titles, with additional features such as a Couch mode for online multiplayer or additional thematic “channels” of games for an additional fee.
Similarly, Microsoft has used its Xbox Cloud Gaming initiative as a value addition to its Xbox Game Pass, rather than as a standalone service. You can subscribe to Game Pass on the Ultimate tier to get the choice from playing games via the cloud on console, PC or supported mobile devices. It’s just another added value for a subscription that’s already wrapped up pretty thick.
Sony jumped into action earlier this year when it merged its two subscription services into one option, the rebranded PlayStation Plus, which includes an expanded version of Sony’s cloud services as a bonus for higher subscription levels. This includes using cloud technology to effectively emulate the PlayStation 3, which is otherwise notoriously difficult, for streaming games from the library.
Analysts released data just this week that indicates that enthusiasm for cloud gaming is slowly growing in the US market. Research firm Parks Associates released a report Monday morning showing that at least 35 million American households would be interested in picking up a cloud gaming service at a price of about $9.99 a month.
The overwhelming impact of Stadia thus seems to have been a negative example. Playing games on Stadia is quite an experience right now, as long as you have a stable fast internet connection (source: me, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia this morning), no one else in the cloud gaming space has come close to its sales model.
Users could only purchase individual games on Stadia for their standard retail price, or play them for free as a demo for a short period of time. Stadia wanted to charge the full MSRP for what amounts to conditional server access, which could theoretically be pulled at any time due to contract expiration or license conflict. There was no streaming equivalent, like Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus.
This includes the relative handful of exclusive Stadia, which will basically disappear from the market completely when Stadia shuts down until or unless their publishers put them on other platforms. This includes Tequilaworks’ GylttinyBuild’s Hello EngineerQgames’ Pixel Junk RaidersBandai Namcos PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle, and Splash damage Outcastersthe last of which came out last July.
(It’s hard not to draw a parallel here between Stadia and the current HBO Max controversy, where new business executives have thrown multiple seasons of animated programming into memory, reportedly to get a tax write-off. Physical media and local installation have both have their drawbacks, but neither will abruptly cease to exist due to a sudden business quirk.)
Analysts expect Stadia to have been sent to the “Google graveyard” for at least the past year, but Harrison’s announcement was still quite sudden. As Stadia winds down, the last word on its cloud gaming efforts seems to have been that it went first, so it had to make all the big mistakes first.
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