In 2019, a new challenger approached the
well-established heavyweights of gaming hardware, one with enough money, and a crazy enough vision,
to change the way we look at games forever. A challenger capable of really unthinking
things… wait what does that even mean? Stadia was set to be the cloud gaming service of
the future, promising instant 4K, 60FPS gameplay, entirely streamed through the screen of your
choice, without needing an expensive oversized wi-fi router or fridge-freezer
cluttering your living room.
On paper, it was the promised land. A utopia of
instantaneous gaming, wherever, whenever, and however you want. No disks or downloads, no more
waiting, no ‘minimum specs’ performance anxiety, no more checking frameratediagnostics
like an intern atDigital Foundry. And seemingly no practical limits, either. Play at
home on a TV, pick it up on your phone during the commute, boot it up on the work computer if you’re
feeling brave – just tell the boss you’re playing ‘Soul-Destroying Middle-Management Simulator’
for training purposes, they’ll understand. Throw in hyper-realistic VR and a
self-refilling Mountain Dew cup, and this was the ultimate “Future of
Gaming” players had dreamt of for decades. And yet, this video game revolution lasted
just a few years, before it was officially put down on the 18th of January 2023.
So how could anyone manage to fumble such a promising premise?
One word: Google. No, we’re not suggesting you Google
what happened to Stadia – that’s what we’re here for – although if the Stadia team
had Googled “how do I successfully force my way into the extremely competitive video game
industry?”, they’d probably have had more luck. After all, two of the biggest players today
were once just plucky upstarts themselves. All you need is several metric flip-tons
of money – Something Google definitely had – and a rock-solid business strategy
– something Google… thought they had. Even a monolithic tech conglomerate isn’t
guaranteed success, and apparently there’s one thing billions of Search Engine bucks can’t
buy you: good old-fashioned Common Sense. Let’s find out exactly how Google Stadia
managed to unthink everything, shall we? At the Games Developer Conference in
March 2019, Google unveiled Stadia, their vision for the future of gaming.
It wasn’t just an attempt to muscle into the competitive hardware market – it was
an attempt to subvert hardware altogether. This wasn’t the first attempt at
Cloud gaming we’d seen, of course. Back in 2010, OnLive challenged traditional
consoles with an incredibly ambitious, but ultimately doomed effort.
Around the same time, a company called Gaikai showcased their own
streaming tech, offering up instantly playable demos through the Power Of The Internet.
Both companies were later bought by Sony, and absorbed into their PlayStation Now service,
with Xbox following close behind with Project xCloud, and Nvidia establishing GeForce Now.
These were all cautiously dipped toes into the streaming, uhh, stream, but if anyone could
plunge right in and commit to the future, surely it’d be the tech giant that literally
defined how we use the internet, right? In 2018, Google partnered with Ubisoft
to test their new cloud service, dubbed Project Stream, heavily rumoured
to be a pre-cursor to something big. The following year at GDC, their self-professed
“worst-kept secret in the industry” was officially revealed: a fully-fledged Cloud
Gaming service, ready to wow onlookers. Phil Harrison, the former Sony and Microsoft
executive who somehow keeps failing upwards*, was appointed as product manager for Stadia,
and during the show, presenteda wild scenario: watching a YouTube video on Assassin’s Creed
Odyssey, you see a ‘Play On Stadia’ link; click it, and seconds later, you’re in control,
cruising around the Aegean sea, wading through map-markers and climbing on giant stone Wilsons.
The core concept was mind-blowing enough, but the tech specs weren’t too shabby either.
Google’s custom GPUs and worldwide network of data centres meant they could stream
the latest games in 4K and 60fps, still a pipedream for all but the beefiest PCs.
HDR, surround sound, future-proofedfor up to 8K, they even had 10.7 Teraflops, an extremely
important metric which made all the current consoles insecure about their own ‘flops.
And as for the games built on such mighty hardware, Google promised an internal
studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment, 100 developers strong, led by Jade
Raymond, an EA and Ubisoft veteran. All very impressive. Until the
cracks began to show before launch. At June’s E3, further details were revealed:
launching November of 2019, you could opt for the fancy Founder’s Edition, which quickly sold
out, or the Premiere Edition, although either one would set you back $129 for Day 1 access to
Stadia, costing $10 a month afterwards… but at least there was a free version on the way! At...
some point in 2020. Not a worrying sign, right? On top of a subscription fee, you’ll still have to
pay for most games, but no need to fret, I’m sure! And what a line-up, consisting of fresh new
exclusives such as Destiny 2, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Farming Simulator 2019,
err, the Tomb Raider trilogy… ok, not that exclusive, and not that fresh
either. But at least they had some games! Surely the launch can’t have gone that bad- oh. Oh dear.
On November 19th, 2019, Stadia landed
–in desperate need of a dentist, because oh boy, were there some teething problems.
Key featurespromised before launch, like 4K PC support, achievements, family sharing, and their
Buddy Pass referral incentive, were all missing. Wireless controller support was only available for
TVs through Chromecast – PC, Mac, and mobile users had to be cabled up to even use their new toy.
Only 22 titles were available from day one. This doesn’t sound so bad when compared to
other console launches*, but 10 of those were only announced 8 days before opening
night, hastily pulled forward last minute, and ALL were third-party titles that already
existed elsewhere, except for Stadia’s only true exclusive: indie survival horror title,Gylt.
On the big day itself, many Founders Edition codes weren’t sent out on time,
so the early adopters got it late, with many missing their shot at claiming unique
usernames that were first-come, first-serve. Founders couldn’t even sign up a friend
with their Buddy Pass, either – that feature hadn’t been implemented yet, remember?!
Sorry Billy, big internet company Google couldn’t work out how to add invites to their
permanently online platform, so you’ll have to play Destiny with filthy randoms.
All this is especially egregious when you consider the minimum cost of entry -with
compatible controller and Chromecast - was $99, a huge barrier for a platform
promising to remove such barriers. Speaking of limitations, Stadia launched in just
14 countries – just a tad less than the ‘200 countries and territories’ Google CEO Sundar
Pichai boasted about back at the GDC reveal. But worst of all were reports of latency and
performance issues – you know, that one core USP of Stadia, the seamless streaming experience?
Many disgruntled users reported horrendous input lag, which sometimes wouldn’t even stay
consistent, destroying any hope of even adjusting to the lag, and in some
cases, some real choppy stuttering, along with drops in visual quality too.
Stuttering and dips in resolution are still common when streaming video, but the impact is
amplified when you’re actively interacting with a game, rather than just passively watching
– a second of buffering is annoying enough when watching The Witcher, but it’s a thousand
times more infuriating when playing The Witcher. When your flagship title is Destiny 2, a game
with pitch-perfect gunplay that lives and dies on its airtight responsiveness, feeling any
kind of delay is unacceptable, as is having any form of online ‘lag’ in a single-player
experience like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. A troubled launch can be enough to stop a
promising console dead in its tracks before it’s even begun, but the problems didn’t end there.
Just one month in, Stadia Pro subscribers saw their library of included games double – that’s
a whopping total of four games, before you get carried away – with Farming Simulator 19 and Tomb
Raider: Definitive Edition added to the pile. This only highlighted Stadia’s insane pricing
structure, requiring you to pay once for controllers and other hardware, then pay again for
a subscription, and pay ONCE MORE for each game. Naturally, anyone who initially paid for those
two titles were understandably miffed that it took just one month for it to become
basically free for anyone subscribed. Google offered pre-emptive refunds,
but this lack of foresight was just a preview of the baffling business model
that would plague the system’s lifespan. And the pitiful number of games included
in the subscription points to one of the worst sins you can commit as a video game
console, or Non-Console, in this case… We have a feeling ‘Lack of Games’ will
be a recurring theme on What Went Wrong… Having a good variety of high-quality
games seems like the biggest no-brainer way of building a successful video game
platform, but the phrase ‘easier said than done’ is a massive understatement here.
Even mainstream consoles with critically acclaimed titles have fizzled out way before
their time, thanks to stronger competition, a lack of variety, or plain bad luck.
Sometimes, life is cruel. Sometimes, people just don’t appreciate the unlimited possibilities
of having a three-pronged controller, perfectly future-proofed for the impending apocalypse,
when nuclear fallout makes us grow a third handand then you’ll finally understand why Turok’s
controls were ahead of its time, you ignorant fu- But sometimes, a platform’s lack of games
is a problem entirely of their own making. Stadia launched with 22 titles.
Yes, a traditional console would kill for that many day-one games, but
this wasn’t a traditional console. All but one of these games
already existed elsewhere, and some were years old – the oldest being 2013’s
Tomb Raider reboot, and the sequel in 2015. Just one game could be classed as a true
exclusive: Gylt, an indie horror title that took a commendable swing at complex
themes, but failed to impress critics. The Destiny 2 Collection was the heavily marketed
poster child, but was never an exclusive, timed or otherwise, just a neatly packaged
set of DLC,also available on other platforms. By our count, a grand total of 16
exclusives were released during the three years of Stadia’s existence, and this
generous number includes timed exclusives. Since most of these were barely promoted, we may
have missed a name or two, but that speaks volumes about Google’s general disregard for Stadia.
Such names included: Hello Engineer; Pac-Man: Mega Tunnel Battle; Pixeljunk
Raiders; Gunsport; Lost Words; Crayta; Orcs Must Die! 3; and Super Bomberman R Online.
Many of these exclusives have a lot of merit, and we’d never dismiss the value of
smaller titles, but none of these names carry that blockbuster ‘Must Play’ hype.
There are no big system sellers. No pulling power. No reason to boldly declare Stadia as your
platform of choice, renouncing all other systems. Exclusives aren’t the only factor considered in
people’s purchasing decisions for a new console, but they’re rather bloody important.
Then again,Stadia’s approach wasn’t the same as other historical challengers of the
gaming status quo, like the Sega Mega Drive, the PlayStation, or the original Xbox.
It presented itself as an equivalent to Steam, a distribution platform with a variety of titles,
focusing not on exclusives, but on flexibility and convenience of playing established hits.
Unfortunately, Stadia never got close to the staggering scale of Steam. In total,
Stadia clocked up just 278 games in 3 years. Let’s compare that figure with the
previous generation of consoles: Xbox One totted up 2,990 titles, at the time
of writing. The PS4 has racked up 3,282 and counting. The Nintendo Switch has a whopping 4,478
games. We haven’t bothered counting Steam games, but let’s assume it’s about 1.7 billion.*
Stadia couldn’t even top the Nintendo 64 and its humble headcount of 388.
Once again, a strong sense of irony in the limited number of games on a platform
aiming to remove all limits in gaming. “BUT THIS ISN’T A FAIR COMPARISON”, you
might say. “IT’S A SUBSCRIPTION MODEL!”. Firstly, is it? Is it really?
It offered a free tier, called Stadia Base, before dropping that branding,
but the Pro tier, once costing $10 a month, only drip-fed a few freebie titles a month,
comparable to Xbox’s ‘Games with Gold’ or the old ‘PlayStation Plus Essential’ model.
Secondly, compare it to Xbox Game Pass – running since 2017 and arguably the most successful gaming
subscription model of its kind, Game Pass had 477 titles available just on console, as of July 2022.
At just over half the lifespan of Game Pass, Stadia’s total output matches a bit closer,
but remember, Stadia Pro didn’t give you unlimited access to every single game
with that subscription, only a select few. Stadia tried to be both a Game Pass-style
subscription model, AND a Steam-like online store with individually priced games, and
unfortunately, it failed to be either. When you not only lack games, but the ones
that are available require some users to pay twice – once for subscription, and again
for retail price – it’s not a good look. -- Stadia’s overall game count
might not have been high, but the costs of securing third-party
support certainly was, as Not-So-Frugal Google threw more money at publishers,
occasionally securing a ‘timed exclusive’, but rarely an actual exclusive.
Their long-standing partnership with Ubisoft helped secure their
collection of tower-climbing sims, and Take-Two Interactive provided the pulling
power of Red Dead Redemption 2 and NBA 2K20. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot assured investors
in 2019 that the cost of porting games to Stadia wasn’t that high – probably because
Ubisoft wasn’t footing the bill, Google was. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier discovered in
2021 that Google paid Ubisoft a staggering$20 MILLIONto port Assassin’s Creed and The
Division, and Take-Two were also ‘raking in’ millions for their properties.
It’s still pocket change for Google, but if they spent THIS much on third-party
properties, they must’ve valued their first-party studios even higher… right?
……. No. Not even a little bit. At GDC 2019, Google announced their very own
in-house developers, Stadia Games & Entertainment. 100 developers split between LA and Montreal,
led by Jade Raymond, an industry powerhouse who worked on Assassin’s Creed 1 & 2, Splinter Cell:
Blacklist, Watch Dogs,and Far Cry 4, among others. And this shrewd move to prioritise first-party
output paid off bigtime, as you can see by all these top-quality exclusives!
Oh, strange, where’d they all go? Well, approximately 1 year and 3 months
after Stadia exploded onto the scene, Google announced the closure of these studios,
affecting 150 employees, including Raymond, effectively ending the dream before it began.
Another casualty was Typhoon Studios, who were working on their debut title, Journey
to the Savage Planet, when Google snapped them up in December 2019 – only to spit them
out into the Google Graveyard along with Stadia Games & Entertainment. At least their
whimsical space adventure actually released - on old-school plastic consoles as well as cloud ones.
Reports later emerged that game development never had the full support of Google, to the surprise
of absolutely nobody, summed up by a company-wide email from Chief Googler Phil Harrison praising
the “great progress” from their internal studios, literally ONE WEEK before shutting it all down.
Rather duplicitous behaviour, given Harrison knew the fate of those studios
when he penned the email. Lord knows what ridiculous expectations
Google held, but anyone who’s developed a game since 1983 can tell you, they almost
always take longer than a year to make. This was a huge blow to their legitimacy, further
proof of Google prioritising tech over games. Stadia’s official strategy then shifted focus
towards third-party titles along with a push for indie games through the Maker’s program, to
desperately plug the rapidly leaking player base. It’s not like porting third-party games
was always easy, either – Google just didn’t want to do the hard work themselves.
We don’t have many details on how easy or difficult developing a cloud-optimised port was,
but we’re sure it was more complicated than simply streaming the output from a high-spec
PC, and those unexpected complications could explain the lacklustre line-up.
One hint of theseproblems can be found with the master of ‘technical oopsies’, Cyberpunk 2077.
For all its faults, Cyberpunk was an unexpected win for Stadia, briefly boosting
sales and subscriber numbers. The pre-release hype, followed by the buggy
launch, meant there were many people desperate to experience the game in as bug-free a way as
possible, so when the rumour spread that Stadia’s high-end cloud hardware ran the game relatively
smoothly, players jumped on the opportunity. But that wasn’t necessarily true – the Stadia
build was a different beast, developed by a company called QLOC in tandem with CD Projekt,
and while performance was better, a good amount of detail was altered, heavily scaled back in some
places, and still had its fair share of bugs. So, how about a half-time recap?
From the beginning, Stadia didn’t have enough games, and most launch titles were
old anyway; it had barely any true exclusives throughout its lifespan; its first-party studio
was axed after just a year; Google spent way too much on third-party ‘prestige’ signings,
followed by a half-hearted drive for indies; and their confused business model tried to be both
Game Pass and Steam, ultimately failing at both. It's almost as if Google didn’t care about
backingStadia at all, but that’s crazy, because Google has literally all the money
in the world to support whatever it wants- Anyone vaguely familiar with how Google treats
its projects would’ve seen this coming a mile off. There’s a reason the website ‘Killed By
Google.com’ exists, with over 280 occupants of this digital graveyard.
Remember Google Cardboard, anyone? What about Google Plus? YouTube
VR? Google Flu Trends? You don’t remember Google Flu Trends?! Where have you been?
Had Google put its full financial power behind Stadia, it could’ve avoided the
long dirt nap, but Ebeneezer Goog can be surprisingly miserly – NO PHIL, no more
coal for the fire, just put another coat on! Much like any endeavour from Big G, it
started out with promise. Stadia had a huge marketing push to begin with, even if
the early ads had a bit too much high concept weirdness and not enough clear communication.
Sadly, this initial promotion quickly died down, and support for core features
was far too slow to warm up. In January 2020, Google promised
more than 10 timed exclusiveswould arrive in the first half of the year
– they only delivered 4 before July. In fairness, 2020 saw plenty of release dates
pushed back, thanks to certain events that caused global disruption – we’re talking about
the release of Animal Crossing, obviously. A few of the missing launch features
mentioned earlier were introduced quickly, like achievements and the Buddy Pass referrals,
but other elements took much longer to arrive. 4K streaming wasn’t properly implemented
until March, and even then, some games were being upscaled from 1080p or 1440p, rather
than streaming at a true 4K resolution. Family Sharing, allowing more than one
person in a household to play simultaneously, took a full year to arrive, in November 2020.
State Share, a clever concept that basically worked like an emulator save state you could share
with friends, had a beta version in June 2020, alongside sandbox title Crayta, but wasn’t fully
rolled out until January 2021, with Hitman 3. Also in 2021, we saw the most revolutionary
feature yet: a Search Bar.That’s right. A feature that literally made Google its billions of
dollars, and it took them THIS long to include it. Then there was the hardware problem.
Stadia promised a world where you could play on any screen, but that took
its sweet time to come to fruition, too. Most browsers could manage Stadia, including
Google Chrome, naturally, so along with having a desktop app, PCs and laptops were covered.
Amusingly, the Xbox console browserdid eventually support Stadia!For‘weirdest
devices that ran Stadia’, see also: cars, treadmills, refrigerators, cash
registers, and the Nintendo 3DS XL. As for phones, only select Google
Pixelmodels were supported at launch, with further Android support being slowly
drip-fed over time. It wasn’t until December 2020 that Apple users could join the party,
and even then, only through the Safari browser! TVs had similar awkward stipulations. At launch,
there was no native integration on smart TVs, only through a strictly Stadia-specific
Chromecast Ultra – people with existing Chromecasts couldn’t even get involved, it
HAD to be this VERY SPECIAL one, alright?! Then the new Chromecast with Google
TV launched in September 2020, but didn’t even support Stadia – it took almost a
year before it was finally added in June 2021, along with support for other
TVs and Android TV devices. Smart TVs didn’t get native Stadia apps until 18
months in, and that was woefully piecemeal, too. If you got a bit lost amongst the details
just now, you’re not the only one. It was a mess, and the confusion around exactly
what devices and screens can support Stadia, combined with the staggered rollout
of compatibility for said devices, showed just how few flips were given by Google. A few other controversies were thrown in
to give this hot mess a bit of extra spice, most notably the “Streamers Should Pay
Companies to Stream Their Games” debacle. Surprisingly, this hot take wasn’t from
an out-of-touch executive, but a senior game developer, Stadia Montreal’s
Creative Director Alex Hutchinson, leading toGoogle spokespeople publicly
distancing themselves from the comments, in much the same way Google distanced
itself from Stadia as time went on. Other hits include blaming Publishers for slow
announcements, and sabotagingTerraria’s Stadia port by locking the co-creator Andrew
Spinks out of his own Google account. While Stadia hammered the self-destruct
button at every turn, maybe it was the very concept of Cloud Gaming that
was doomed to fail from the start… In theory, everyone would’ve picked up what
Stadia was putting down – instant access to your favourite games, without hardware barriers
or downloads, whenever and wherever you wanted. But the biggest question about Stadia’sviability
came down to one thing: internet speed. Google was catering to an idealistic utopia
where everyone had lightning-quick broadband and 100% reliable connections, but that
still isn’t a reality for many people, even in the few core western
markets Stadia focused on. Average internet speeds have come a long way
in the last few years – perhaps accelerated by multiple lockdowns and the necessities
of working from home – but in 2020, the first full launch year of Stadia, numbers
were much lowerin countries with Stadia access. Median download speeds in the US were 54
megabits per second, The UK was only 28 megabits, Canada was 23. Most of Europe were sub-50, apart
from those lucky Scandinavians and the Dutch. Yes, this all technically should work under
Google’s optimistic minimum requirements of 10 megabits, but you needed a solid,
unbreaking 20Mbps for full 1080 HD. In a Eurogamer and Broadband Genie survey
in 2019, they found almost a quarter of 3000 respondents couldn’t meet the
minimum speed required for 1080p. And that’s just for a small sample size. Given how
massive gaming has become, to truly crack the big time, you have to consider everyone, not just
those in areas with high-speed infrastructure. And it’s not just raw download and upload
speeds – reliability of your connection is vital, and let’s not forget about data caps
either, which is still a reality for some. Stadia’s biggest promise was that their service
would be consistent enough to replace traditional hardware, but it wasn’t their promise to make.
We already saw how poorly Stadia ran at launch, even with a mighty 1 Gigabit download speed.
Google’s natural habitat may be online, but outside of the US, they are
not internet service providers. They’re still reliant on millions of unique
circumstances,each one at the mercy of their respective Internet Gods to keep things quick and
reliable enough to do their dailies on Destiny. Even 3 years on, with better infrastructure
and faster speeds, competitors are wary of committing wholesale to streaming. Xbox,
PlayStation, and Nvidia’s GeForce Now all offer great cloud services, but they understand
the importance of streaming as one option of a greater whole, because streaming still
isn’t ready to stand on its own feet. And we don’t think the wider audience are ready
either, not just because of internet speeds, but because of sceptical attitudes to online
storefronts. The fragile nature of digital ownership is still a contested issue for many
dedicated gamers, even after years of Steam, Game Pass and the like. Case in point, Nintendo’s
storefront closures for the 3DS and Wii U. Players may demand innovation in the games
themselves, but when it comes to platforms, we’re still a fickle bunch,terrified of change.
Between ongoing console allegiances and huge outcries against new PC launchers, new things
take time to sit and percolate, before we’re ready to drink a new dose of digital Kool Aid.
Steam has earned its trust from PC owners after years of reliability – and more than
a few wild Steam Sales – and only now are digital-only consoles more widely accepted.
But Stadia proposed even less tangible ownership, where you didn’t even have the
box your game’s code lived in, because it all existed in the Cloud.
That’s a level of abstract ownership that only Ape-obsessed NFT bros would jump
on, without at least some level of doubt. Because this wasn’t just a subscription-based
model – you also paid for each game, in many cases. Never before had we felt
less in control of what we supposedly owned. And when Stadia collapsed, anyone who didn’t
trust digital ownership was proven right. Call us nostalgia-obsessed OAPs if you
want, but it’s actually quite nice to point to a shelf of physical games, and know
without any doubt, you own these. No outside force can take these experiences away,
unless you get burgled by Google Goons. This is YOUR collection. Online support may
fade, servers may die, but you’ll always have the option to dust off an old console, eagerly
pick out your favourite classic, and gaze on with reverence as you hear that familiar boot-up sound.
That sentiment holds true for modern hardware too. Seeing a dedicated machine, whether it’s a
console, PC, handheld, or any combination of the above, sitting pride of place by your
TV or monitor, ready to go, even if your internet drops out… there’s still something
magical about having Ol’ Reliable, right? Or maybe that’s just us. We did have to knock
through a couple walls and a ceiling to make room for our PS5, so it’s little
wonder we’ve turned it into a shrine. In their haste to crack the video game market,
Google missed some of the magic that makes gaming so special. In fact, they missed the mark on
pretty much everything, right up to the end… The entire Stadia timeline was underpinned by poor management and ill-informed decisions
right up to its final curtain call. Warning signs were there from the start of 2022,
with reports of Google deprioritising Stadia, relabelling their technology first to ‘Google
Stream’, then to ‘Immersive Stream for Games’, and attempting to flog it to business
partners as a ‘white label’ service for them to license and rebrand as they see fit.
Their streaming tech was offered to actual video game companies who make actual
video games, such as Bungie and Capcom. With that shift in business strategy came
major shakeups to Stadia leadership, notably Phil Harrison, former Head of Stadia Operations,
now reporting to Google’s Head of Subscriptions. Stadia were haemorrhaging staff
almost as quickly as players. Then, the inevitable happened – on the 29th of
September 2022, Google announced Stadia would be shutting down. The streaming dream would
officially end on the 18th of January 2023. While it was sad news for the handful
of die-hard supporters who remained, nobody could say it was a shock… except for
the developers still working on Stadia titles, who hadn’t even been told the news, finding
out the same time as the general public. This revelation hit the smaller studios
particularly hard, especially those about to release games* – one studio, W.R.K.S
Games, had only just signed a publishing deal, oblivious to Stadia’s impending doom.
These developers’ livelihoods were counting on Stadia’s generous revenue share,
but their titles weren’t even given a chance. As usual, the little guys paid the
price for mistakes made at the top. But the larger third-party partners weren’t safe
from the fallout either, as the closure left Ubisoft, Bungie, CD Projekt Red, Rockstar,
and many others quickly scrambling to provide players with replacement copies on other
platforms, along with ways to transfer save data. One silver lining to this dying
Cloud: it could’ve been worse. Google offered refunds for all software and
hardware purchases, including controllers, Founder’s Edition, Premiere Editions,
and the Play & Watch Google TV packages. In most cases, you didn’t even need to
return your controller to get the refund, and one of Stadia’s last acts
was to provide a firmware update, converting it into a general
use Bluetooth controller. Stadia Pro subscriptions were not offered refunds,
however the final months were free of charge. And, as promised, most games were playable
right up until the 18th January, with the notable exception being Destiny 2, as Stadia’s old
posterchild decided to cut ties a little early. This is fine, but we can’t praise a company too
much for a failed service. It’s like saying “sure, they drove the party bus straight off
a cliff, but at least it made a pretty rad explosion when it hit the ground!”
Instead, you should probably question the decisions of the one steering that bus
in the first place, why they kept swerving in dangerous directions, and how much longer
we can drive this metaphor before it crashes. Phil Harrison’s track record wasn’t exactly
sparkling before this latest misadventure, and we’re sure he’ll be hastily scribbling out
the word ‘Stadia’ in his CV before he pops along to the gaming executive job centre.
But it’s hard to tell just how much was on him and his team at Stadia, and
how much was simply Google being Google. They could afford to pay tens of millions for
a few third-party licenses. They could afford to offer developers fantastic revenue splits.
They could even afford to absorb a significant cost in refunds, to avoid further backlash.
Apparently, the only thing they couldn’t afford to do, was simply wait. Be patient. Stay
the path and slowly build a reliable service. Outside factors must also be considered. It’s
true that their first full year coincided with a virus nobody could predict,
and many are still recovering from. After all, in a global pandemic that kept
everyone indoors, driving demand for online entertainment like never before, combined
with a hardware shortage making graphics cards and next-gen consoles impossible to
attain, leaving the market wide open for alternatives… what possible chance
did Google Stadia have, really? We’re being flippant obviously, but there’s
some truth in how Stadia missed an open goal. They had a golden idea, but the
execution was mismanaged on every front, whether it was the expensive multi-step pricing
structure, overspending on third-party titles, undervaluing first-party studios, or
constant miscommunication with developers. Google were so focused on bringing the
“Future” of gaming, they seemingly forgot about the “Present”, and in doing so,
forever condemned Stadia to the Past. Poor, poor Google Stadia. With so many issues,
it would’ve been easier to ask:“What Went Right?” The launch was a mess of missing
features, inconsistent performance, and questionable decision-making.
It lacked games, both in terms of quantity and quality, with no
must-have exclusives to tempt players. Their strategy went all-in on streaming, when
rivals understood that players needed more. The pricing structure demanded several layers
of payment, as Stadia couldn’t decide between a subscription model and an online storefront.
They overvalued third party games and undervalued their own first party studios, underpinned
by bad communication from poor leadership. And perhaps the most damning indictment –
they couldn’t even deliver on their USP of game streaming, as both Google’s technology,
and the infrastructure for the wider public, simply wasn’t good enough to
support streaming video games. And it’s a real shame. In 2019, their cloud
technology looked genuinely impressive, and for a second, we almost believed a
gaming revolution was just around the corner. But Stadia simply couldn’t hold up to
scrutiny when released into the wider world. There’s no doubting that streaming presents
an incredibly exciting future for gaming. Spotting this trend and bravely forging
a path ahead was a very Google move. Sadly, so was axing Stadia
before it had a chance to grow. Google once promised “The next
generation is not in a box.” Maybe not, but Stadia certainly is.
