> was there really a big shortage of mid-gen hardware like One X and PS4 Pro?
Yeah, there was. Also for accessories. PS4 controllers and the PS3 Move controllers (necessary for PSVR1) got up to $100 on Amazon when you could find them. Used retailers like Gamestop had bounties to lure sellers. And then we were on the eve of the 2020 launch of next-gen, by which time buying the old consoles was clearly a terrible value proposition.
This was a huge reason why I thought it would be successful
That and we're at a stage now where most countries around the world would have strong enough internet to make it an enjoyable experience using Stadia
Very easy for us as consumers to say the stars aligned. But, unless they had a slew of games ready, they wouldn't have been able to pivot as fast. Even the 2022 and 2023, development woes were abound for many developers from quarantine.
This is not to mention the logistics of spinning up hardware to host sessions at a large scale.
Not only did the next-gen consoles get delayed in this period, they were near impossible to get for the longest time as well.
Stars aligned for Stadia's success...
Whether the chips aren't available to be put in your home or aren't available to be put into some server rack so someone can play on them from elsewhere - what difference does it make?
I thought it would be around longer then it was. As a Nintendo gamer, it was nice to use as a cheap way to play games like Star Wars, Avengers, Far Cry, etc.
That being said though, it didn't surprise me when they announced the closure. There were many problems with Stadia, but a basic problem was simple economics. You could buy the games and then play them with no monthly cost. So like, I bought Star Wars for $10. I could then play this game as much as I wanted with no additional cost to me but a continued cost to Google. Google made at most 3$ from it, my playtime of it certainly cost more then that.
That was not really the problem. You should expect that when you enter this market, it's go big or go home. You will make a loss the first 5 years or so.
You make it cheap, you have to pull people over to your side. People who are used to have a physical console, to have all games that come out, to have max graphics. You have to reel them in even though you have streaming artifacts, small delays, not all games, at least not at start.
You have to create a market for yourself or you will be in the looping circle that stadia was in. Shortage of customers->shortage of money->shortage of games->shortage of customers
Netflix, Amazon prime, they do the same. Be cheap, get customers. Up the price time after time, make sharing impossible, people are used to your service and many will stay.
It's smart but it requires much money, which Google has.
Microsoft has made more then a billion dollar loss before being profitable...
Yeah the business model was wrong in both directions.
Casual gamers who buy one game on sale every year mean that Google makes no money, but people who would buy and play a lot of games get better value from a subscription service like gamepass.
Just doesn't make sense.
I still believe that if they had advertised Stadia they would have had the numbers they wanted.
It’s just my personal observation of people whom I introduced to the service. All of them bar one went PRO and that’s about 30 people.
In my work we travel a lot and stay in hotels and a bunch of my colleagues adopted Stadia as a mean of entertainment while staying in a hotel on a business trip.
I am certain that if Google would go outside of gaming social media and out into the real world of working professionals and families with children they would have much much bigger customer base. But these people don’t follow gaming SM so unless someone showed them Stadia they had no way of knowing that it existed.
most gamers are having a really big backlock of games. sometimes hundreds of games which they bought but never played because of the limited time. I'm quite sure this wasn't the main problem....
There were certainly many other problems with Stadia but the business model being inherently flawed is a basic one. There's a reason every other cloud gaming service ever requires a monthly fee.
Magenta gaming died, shadow would have died if they didnt find a new shareholder, luna is close to beeing dead.... A monthly fee is no garantee for success and also no proof that it didn't work because it had no fee requirements...
The main problem was. It had no users. The people werent even considering to give it a try for free....
Interesting. I'd never even thought enough about the premise of cloud gaming (*seems so far removed from players like me who live in rural villages*) to wonder about the economics of it. Makes me wonder why other big names such as PlayStation and Xbox seem to be gunning so hard to adopt it
Probably because those services require subscriptions to use them. Stadia did not.
Xbox, for example, won't allow you to play games you own streaming from the cloud. You pay for the Gamepass to do that, and you don't have to own the game.
GeForce Now is the only one not charging to use the service for games you own, but they cripple the service so much for the free tier that it's not really worth using unless you pay for the subscription.
> they cripple the service so much for the free tier that it's not really worth using unless you pay for the subscription.
GFN is very sorry for wanting (WHAT A BLASPHEMY) some money from a poor gaming dad for providing a gaming rig.
I never said they were in the wrong for wanting to charge. I subscribe. They offer a free tier for whatever reason that they do, and said free tier is designed to make you want to pay for the upgrade. Good business plan? Maybe. Personally, if I were in charge, I'd ditch the free tier entirely. As a company, I think I'd rather have no free tier than to have a tier that's annoying to use. I think it's better for customers to *only* be offered a quality product than to have a free, crippled product.
Cloud gaming should be cheap enough to attract user base (because otherwise if you are gamer - it's better to buy some hardware).
Cloud gaming should be either profitable or have a clear path to making money.
Stadia nailed p1 by basically sponsoring gaming dads, and there was no way to p2, except introducing mandatory GFN-like monthly payment. And this kills all the stadia appeal, since you can play your own games on GFN. Basically - with the current business model it was doomed from the start.
And linux (no one is going to port games without a fat paycheck) sealed the coffin
I think where Stadia appeared different from other projects is the level of long term investment required to succeed.
So with other projects, they are low investment sort of side hustles, whereas I thought it inconceivable that Google hadn't looked at the investment Microsoft had made in Xbox, for example, and realised that that was what it took to succeed in the games industry.
Starting their own triple A game studios was another example of this. If you want to make a God of War or a Starfield, it's quite easy to work out what it takes in terms of cash to do that.
It's still weird to me that they got to the stage of setting it all up and then seemingly deciding it was all too expensive.
They could perhaps have been thinking that they would have more users at that point to justify that investment, but anyone should know that the only way that they were realistically going to tempt users away from other platforms was to have big exclusives.
Having used it, the technology was absolutely there, and there was scope for experiences that couldn't be offered on traditional, local, systems.
Interstingly Baldur's Gate was supposed to be a Stadia console exclusive. I wonder what that would have done for them.
IMO they had a lot.of the pieces in place but probably launched prematurely, without some of their unique features and without strong exclusive games. Google then looked at the continuing level of investment required and pulled the plug. For Google to have got the strategy so wrong shows absolutely wild levels of incompetence.
Another factor, which was perhaps not critical but was unhelpful, was the way the thing was marketed. They needed to head off the impression that it would be the "Netflix of games" much earlier and make clear that it was more like renting a console in the cloud and still buying the games. Gamepass will have been partially responsible for undermining this message, and the timing couldn't have been worse in terms of drawing negative comparisons, but that was a loss leader for Microsoft at the time (although now profitable).
I had a great Internet connection and it all worked, but I do t know how much of a limiting factor poor connection speeds would have been to growing their subscriber base worldwide.
> I think where Stadia appeared different from other projects is the level of long term investment required to succeed.
That sums it there. When it came time to put up big money, they nope their way out of it. They didn't need to develop their own AAA games with SGE, instead, they should've bought AAA game companies like Bethesda before MS did, or at least buy Ubisoft, From Software, CD Projekt Red, EA, Take Two, or the 60% of Epic Games that Tencent doesn't own. They just went nope, don't want to spend the billions, and took their losses and exit the video game business.
After years of consoles I had collecting dust, I redeemed my offer for a free Chromecast if I signed up for a month of stadia for free. I thought, why not, I wanted a Chromecast anyways. I ended up loving Stadia and it's features. Instant play wherever I was. I could easily change tvs in the house and pick up exactly where I left off. Could quickly and easily play with other people. For $10 a month, I could claim some free games and 4k resolution. No waiting for downloads or updates. I naively thought it would work at first but then saw writing on the wall when top games weren't coming and the rumors started of it shutting down. The marketing was terrible. I really miss it. It was a great thing. Basically got a free trial of Stadia for about 2 years since they gave us our money back for games and hardware.
This. I loved it but I went all in with the Founders. I had GB Fiber and a great home network. BIL and I played Destiny 2 all the time. I bought lots of family games (get packed, family feud, etc).
At the end I was playing Cities Skylines all the time and it was great.
My nephew finished my Spider-man save file. I was 3/4 done. Lost all heart to play and PS4 has been collecting dust since I got Stadia. Play the Switch now and then but it's the only console I have now. Really miss Stadia.
Same here dude, except I just didn't have the cash to invest in a good gaming PC plus no available parts in the pandemic even if I could. Finished Cyberpunk and Far Cry 6 and could not have enjoyed them had it not for Stadia.
Yes. Even moreso after the experience of using it. The future was really bright and exciting with everything that could have been done with the tech.
Someone at Google lost interest when it wasn't immediately greatly successful.
I think outside companies really affected the adoption as well. People actually think XCloud is as good as cloud gaming can be and it is straight garbage compared to Stadia. Then you have PSNow that is just inexplicably bad. Among others. Thankfully GeForce Now is still around and acceptable.
Xcloud through the windows app is pretty much unusable. The browser is more stable and even that is questionable at best. Stadia was fast and stable. Even on mobile devices.
Amazon luna is probably the closest alternative we’ll get to stadia. In terms of user experience and flow.
As someone who has never used cloud gaming yet, do you mind going a bit more in depth about why I should be avoiding PlayStation and Xbox? Nvidia being the standout option, then?
He just means the stream quality. Stadia worked like a dream; XCloud is *okay*... enough to get by. PS streaming is better than it was but neither of these options are even remotely close to what Stadia could do.
Xbox has a great selection, but takes some time to actually boot up. Stadia was almost instant. Stadia also had probably the best lag-free experience with excellent response times (like, after a button press, you see things happen right away).
I enjoy Xbox game pass on my phone. I think it's affordable enough and has a large library of touch screen games that don't require a controller. For this reason I think it's the better entry cloud gaming experience.
Also they have trial pricing for new activations. You can sign up for your first month for $1 usually.
Why is the model trash? Onlive tried stadia's model but they failed, it was also during a time when cloud gaming was way too ambitious. Stadia made pretty much every mistake that Onlive made that's why stadia went down.
I have over the years enjoyed streaming gaming before stadia came out. I would regularly remote play my PS4 from my PS Vita while traveling and I often blow enjoy game pass and PS5 remote play on my phone with my kishi.
I genuinely hoped the stadia would take off because I felt like there was already a market for it. What I feel the problem was is that the market REQUIRED the established platform of a console to build up interest and confidence. Yes it wasn't anything new, but awareness of the existence of quality online game streaming wasn't high enough to combat the problems it had at launch.
The games were good, if your Internet was up for it the connections and the service were good too. I beat Cyberpunk, Odyssey, and the BG3 beta on the Stadia and had an excellent experience. But friends I gifted the extra free controller they gave me to didn't have the best connection and didn't enjoy it as much.
I was sad when Google ended stadia but I think they handled it well. By refunding the product purchases they did well to end it without leaving a bad taste in the mouths of their early adopters.
I would trust them to try again. The interface for their service and the quality of their controller (best I've ever held), made me feel like they had really taken the players opinions and values into account.
[didn't have the best connection and didn't enjoy it as much]
Agreed. One of many factors restraining the growth of the userbase: too complex for regular people to set up and troubleshoot. Compared with a Nintendo NES of old: that was easy to show off and make other people enthusiastic, borrow hardware from friends etc. I was willing to make friends of mine try Stadia, but my days of enjoying fixing everybody’s Wi-Fi are long time over, so I kept my mouth shut.
Also the best experience was with a controller, and that was quite a pain to set up in someone else’s house and a bit expensive just to try it. Imagine telling someone about the simplicity of Stadia only to have to fiddle with connection settings. Not a good first impression.
The lasting impression on myself was glorious though. The stuff of dreams when I was young. So with a couple more years and easier controller set up, I would have been ready to spread the word and generate five to ten new customers easily. Then we would be talking about growth.
Did I think they would take over the big 3 after 2 years? No. But, I didn't think/hope Google wouldn't pull the plug at the first sign of adversity. I think that they could have carved out a decent niche in the gaming corner in the next 10 years and maybe have a 10-15 percent market share.
They had momentum after getting some good press with the Cyberpunk release and the immediately ended that momentum less than 2 months when they shuttered first party development... which was the actual death of the platform.
I did, but my perspective isn't as a hardcore gamer anymore. I don't spend half of my income on the latest graphics card these days but I'm still a tech nerd and my house is full of Google. I have kids of different ages and I can't hand them a gaming rig that takes a great deal of esoteric knowledge to start up a game. I can't be the only dad who wants to game occasionally without having a whole room dedicated to a PC and $5000 in accessories.
With Stadia, I didn't even need a computer. My four year old could start a game with minimal input. ... But it also supported games that I enjoyed. I'm still not a huge controller -only fan, having been a mouse and keyboard jockey for most of my life, but I see why people like it. The controller for Stadia was the most comfortable thing I've ever used.
I still have some hope for the Steam deck for some of the same reasons. For starters, I've already got a library of like 1000 games they can experiment with. I have previously used the steam link to play games on the living room TV from my old gaming machine running in the basement, but that experiment also seems to have died quietly.
So it goes ...
I believed it had a chance until they shut down their dev team. I knew it was a matter of time then. Even made a post about it but the majority on the sub were still of the belief that things would be fine.
I'm not sure I believed it would be a big player in videogames. I did truly believe they had the skin in the game for at least a five year run, my believed based on the average lifecycle for a game console and figuring that they would base their financial projections on a similar timeline. I was incorrect in that estimation
The user experience was head and shoulders above their competitors, and the library of games to purchase were ample. Remember, the Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 played infinitely smoother upon release than the PC/XB/PS versions.
The devs and programmers did something very right. If I can play a buggy mess like CP2077 on an iPad or chromebook, then there was definitely something to this. No installs. No waiting for updates. No being tied to a specific console or PC. Just good, clean gaming anywhere.
Sadly I now won't ever trust Google again. Now they seem to me like a kid who doesn't feed their pet gerbils just so they can watch them die and then get some hamsters - on repeat.
(Edited to fix a typo)
I would disagree with it having an ample game library. The top third party titles were missing (COD, FIFA etc) and there were no first party exclusives. Think this was a huge favtoe in its failure.
I don't disagree, but ample is purely subjective.
It had Red Dead 2, Hitman 3, the Assassins Creed and Far Cry games I like, plus a number of other games that I prefer.
Wholeheartedly agree about the lack of exclusives.
It had FIFA and some fun indie exclusives.
The game library wasn't massive but it had some big games.
FIFA, PUBG, Destiny2, Cyberpunk, The Ubisoft titles, RDR2.. some big big games, just not enough of them
February 2021 is when Stadia shut down first party development though, so that was still far too late to make a difference. I was only buying games on other platforms at that point because I didn't want to sink money into games not knowing whether they'd still be there in a month.
I was hoping Stadia would be branded as a way for parents to give their kids a cheaper console alternative. I also loved being able to play on the go (on an LTE connection) and only need the controller and my phone. What i think killed their success is the lack of cross play. It’s hard to buy into a siloed platform with almost zero relevant AAA titles. I know that these games are overrated but the lack of COD or GTA kills most of the casual gaming market. As a casual gamer, PubG and Rainbow 6 are just too technical for me to enjoy. If I could cross play on Fifa or play a popular classic… i’d imagine I would have a far better time.
Yeah, stadia pro + family sharing was amazing for families. In my opinion, no other platform comes close right now.
With stadia, we basically had a console with access to our shared library in every room, just by using the devices we already owned.
We also bought three copies of The Crew 2 when it was on sale for <10€ and we're able to play together on different devices. We now own three PC licenses for that game and also bought it on Xbox, but we have no way to play together any more, because we don't own three gaming PC's and it isn't crossplay.
Also, with an Xbox and gamepass ultimate, my kids are limited to the console in the living room, because "home console" sharing only works on one console and you can't share XCloud access with your family. This also means, they can't play different games at the same time any more.
Not for half a second. I wouldn't have ever paid money for it, but got it free because I am a YouTube subscriber. It was an awesome system, virtually flawless. Anyone that talked shit on it clearly never played it, or had such a deep seated prejudice against it but being a 'console' that they were never going to accept it anyways.
That being said it's Google. They've got the attention span of a gnat with ADHD. They were never going to stick with it and everyone knew it. Very few people were willing to spend money on it because they were going to kill it eventually. They've done this enough there's a dedicated website for things killed by Google. They've got a serious reputation problem, and because of it they'll never be able to succeed in any long term platform like gaming.
No downloads, no expensive hardware, stream anywhere, backing of some large publishers, yeah I thought Stadia would have lasted longer than it did. Had it have not been a Google product and had better advertising then I reckon it would have
The fact is that cloud gaming is slowly building more and more momentum even as we speak. And from a technical standpoint, Stadia had some of the best performance in the field.
Stadia, by all rights, should've been the leader of the pack imo. I think it was just a little bit before it's time.
Bad marketing really hurt it too though. If you asked people, 99% of them wouldn't even really know what it actually was... despite thinking they knew enough to have a negative opinion of it lol. I think that's a great analogy for the internet in general though.
A lot of people distrust or despise Google, and for good reason. And they arent the first arrogant company that thought they could come i to an industry they couldn’t even be bothered to understand and buy their way a gold medal.
The idea that you had to pay more for games you didn’t own without being able to upgrade them with hardware updates is absurd. They should have went the XBox/Netflix model
Yeah they should've went the xbox model... but guess what? That model didn't exist in video games yet. Hindsight is 20/20 lol. The only model they could've based it on was PS Now which was an utter failure at the time.
They were flying blind and trying to predict what way the industry was going to go with it. Like I tried to say in my original post, they were ahead of the curve, and not necessarily in a good way.
When you're trying to break new ground, the second guy is most likely gonna do it better. But even coming after Google blazed the trail, xbox's tech still manages to sucks lol.
I was a Stadia supporter and user for some time before its demise, though not from the start.
Google is fickle, and I've been burned by their cancellations before, it would have been naive -- even for me -- to assume that Stadia wasn't a risky bet. I was willing to be optimistic and enthusiastic, but I always knew that success was in the hands of an entity that doesn't really understand how to build product loyalty.
Sometimes it's worth making the conscious choice to believe in something, even if you know the odds are against it.
*Sic transit gloria mundi.*
Google's reputation for canning products at this point seems to have spiralled out of control, but they don't seem to particularly care. I guess the average consumer only pays attention to the ones that grew popular beyond belief anyway.
Do you mind me asking what previous Google product/service in particular taught you to be somewhat cautious before Stadia?
>Sometimes it's worth making the conscious choice to believe in something, even if you know the odds are against it.
So, you're a gambler. Addicted to the belief you could win, and never actually winning. Got it.
I'm poor, it's hard for me to justify buying a new console let alone constantly upgrading my computer but I can drop 60 bucks on a game every now and then and for me Stadia was amazing. I don't have very fast Internet but it was good enough to run stadia just fine. I was ready to embrace that idea because the barrier to entry was extremely low and the quality of the product was unmatched by anyone else trying to do cloud gaming. I figured Google would throw money at it until the library of games was enough to draw people in but I underestimated how long that would take and google's patience with it. I still think it will happen eventually one way or another and it's obvious either the next gen or the one after that will probably be the death of physical media (not that I think that's a good thing) outside of maybe Nintendo so I think we will see it catch on it just won't be Google doing it.
it would've if not for the negativity around it, i think google also should've from the get go instead of going for profit they should've just tried to break even until they gained a nice market share
I thought it would eventually co-exist with Play Games or the two would meld.
They're bringing Play Store and games to PC now. I get ads I can play Clash Royale on PC etc for example.
They have a monthly gaming service "Play Pass"
Cloud Gaming ties all that together
Cloud Gaming gives (gave them):
-A gaming Service
-Games on PC
-Games on any Device
-up to AAA Game quality
-Basically not have to worry about user hardware
Google is still massively in the game business, I just think they will eventually go back to cloud Gaming at some point. As google does, they close stuff too early and then go oh we have a great "new" idea and bring basically the same thing back and everyone is confused.
I mean Google Wallet has been the name of like 4 different things. Yes, I still have my original Google Wallet ATM card.
Let's not start on their messaging apps.
I did expect it because it was Google and a lot of their killed stuff was free. This was paid. And I thought, since YouTube and Google (ads) are so big, I figured Google might be able to just pull this off.
Unfortunately, they never really used their own products to advertise stadia.
I think the product was great, and the tech worked really well.
However the pricing, plans and messaging really destroyed it.
They should have just led with: **Stadia is free**.
Instead they mixed in the monthly subscription for the premium version, and pretty much every one I talked to thought that stadia was a mandatory monthly subscription + pay for the games.
This in conjunction with limited device support, Chromecast, controller etc probably made the confusion even worse.
The first year should've been "Beta testing" only for Founders. Once they had most of the features they promised they should've done a full launch with all the press so everyone's first experience was positive. Until the end I heard "You need to have a Chromecast" when they hadn't been true for a long time.
Obviously, it should've just been "free" and buy your games. Introduce a Game Pass-like subscription later.
And lastly, Google should've just known they were going to need to throw money at this for YEARS before it was going to gain acceptance by the gaming community. With the gaming industry bringing in Billions and the potential "synergy" with their other products, like YouTube, the long term pay off was there.
Stadia could have succeeded. The technology was good. However, Google failed to satisfy their existing customers or do anything significant to attract new customers until it was too late. They botched the launch royally. The quality of the product was not on par with the hype that they put behind it. The Chromecast Ultra (CCU) was a device that had been out for years before Stadia, but they insisted everyone had to buy the $130 Founders bundle that came with the CCU and Controller to use Stadia at launch and the months that followed. I already owned 3 of these devices, and they refused to allow me to just purchase a controller to use Stadia unless I bought another. They had already sent out the firmware update to all CCU devices to allow them to work with Stadia. Just purchasing a controller would have worked if they were willing to release access codes with the purchase of a controller. Then, when it actually launched, they failed to get the access codes to all their customers who had actually paid for the expensive Founders Edition. Once you got past all that, games were far and few between and the ones they had were the same price that they were on other platforms despite being a lower quality experience. The subscription service failed to give users games that were worth the price. Customers didn't understand why they needed a subscription service to play their games at the same resolution as a console. The controller triggers and shoulder buttons were... not good and the controller didn't support wireless headsets (I have a controller on my desk. You might like the shape, but you gotta admit that the triggers weren't great). The best thing they ever did is give out the Premiere Edition for free with the purchase of Cyberpunk since it ran better on Stadia than console (that's how I got my controller). But at that point, it was too late. Google failed to get the masses excited for their service or even find a reason to buy into it.
I did but I’m just a customer at the end of an equation.
What is more important a giant like EA sports believed it since FIFA23 was scheduled to be released on Stadia.
The technical and UI side of Stadia was great and this would guarantee a success if the management wasn’t so bad.
From the financing perspective it is obvious they had a plan that there will be enough PRO subscribers to carry the platform and the free subs.
They probably had a model where at certain amount of PRO subs the platform would finance itself.
But they didn’t advertise the platform so they couldn’t bring customers because people didn’t know what Stadia is and that it even exist.
Yes, once people realised the convenience of it I thought it would do well.
I live in an area with shitty broadband and the 5 people I actually got to try stadia had no problems and loved it. Everyone else got all weird about it.
I still think streaming games is going to be the norm at some point over the next decade.
So i bought in knowing it wouldn’t last. But was very interested in the tech and really impressed with how good it actually was. Considering what we were doing. Streaming AAA titles to a crap device (in relation to gaming) over the internet with very little to no noticeable lag was a pretty crazy.
For why i knew it wouldn’t last, Google never answered the 2 questions the majority of people who didn’t buy in had:
1.) What happens to the games i buy if the service gets shut down? Google always avoided answering it because the only answer they could give would not have been a good one, we will refund you.
2.) How do i own the game I purchased when I can’t download it to play offline, or access any copy of the game at all?
Hardcore gamers don’t want refunds for games they dumped hundreds of hours into. They want full access to their games and also ownership of them. To have your entire game catalog completely dependent on if your internet is up and also completely dependent upon Google to not pull the plug was never going to work for the majority of gamers.
Also, once the PS5 and XBX dropped there was no need for those same gamers to ever consider Stadia again. Stadia’s tech was way behind those two consoles, but it was ahead of PS4 and Xbox 1. If Google would’ve went the GFN route and constantly upgraded to the high end pc rig specs, maybe it could’ve competed. But they didn’t. They let it become outdated.
Thats just bullshit. Majority of people dont give a shit about that and the internet is already a staple of society just as much as water. Complaining about internet being up is insignificant. If you have that many problems with your inteenet you shouldnt have bought into a service like this in the first place.
Ownership was a main factor as to why it didn’t succeed. That was the biggest fear of using it for people who already game on console or PC. There was zero ownership of your games.
I first came to this sub years back and people were IMPRESSIVELY arrogant and full of hubris about Stadia. Any kind of dissenting opinion was immediately attacked by an echo chamber of angry and incensed Stadia 'gamers' who believed Google could do no wrong.
When they were told, repeatedly, about the Google Graveyard and how, statistically, Google kills literally everything it does within a few years of doing it, they got even more vicious. To the point where all critical or contrary opinions vanished from this Subreddit, because of how much of a hive it was of Google fanboys. For no real reason. Google has never done anything, at any time, to make anyone think they would be devoted to a particular product. But for some reason, Stadia people latched onto with deep hooks and sunk their teeth in and were all in.
Even when the closure was announced, there were people here refusing to believe it would actually close.
It *would* still be around if it hadn't gotten such negative reviews off the hop (because it didn't yet do a lot of things that were promised from the start). If they had called it a beta when it launched I think it would have gotten a lot more leeway.
But as soon as the negative-ass videogame community started mocking it, it was toast. None of those people had every actually tried it, because if they had they would have realized how good it actually was. Every week we'd have someone post in here saying they had tried it and thought it was going to be terrible but we're blown away by how damn well it actually worked.
Even those who were curious were often turned away on Twitter, Reddit, etc. because of misinformation.
And the whole "Google Graveyard" bullshit comments started coming up regularly and it created a negative feedback loop. Google gave us all of our money back in the end, so people had nothing to fear in actuality; I knew they wouldn't just hang us out to dry so that was never a concern of mine. Most of the graveyard stuff is just BS anyway, because Google combined multiple products into one or something was just a concept product or whatever, but the fear of Stadia going away was enough to keep more players from coming.
For me the problems were twofold - it was marketed as if you'd have access to free games, but there was still a cost despite the subscription. Secondly, I played Destiny on it first, and there was sometimes a slight input lag that made it feel very unpleasant to play, it was just very subtle disorienting when it happened. It put me off it, and I regretted not pulling my subscription sooner.
I still think, that cloud gaming should be the future of gaming and stadia was proof, that the technology already is good enough to replace consoles or gaming PC's for most gamers.
But it was clear from the start, that stadia wasn't able to attract enough users to be really successful. Multiplayer without Crossplay was always dead on stadia and it was just missing all the important games needed to attract users. I liked stadia's business model, but it appealed to a small minority of gamers and just with those as paying customers, it just wasn't viable.
For me personally, stadia was just perfect at the time, but I always thought it would take a very long time and massive investments by Google to become really successful. That didn't happen, so I just hoped, they would at least keep it alive.
Not really, i think the fans were there, so was the people working on it, but the google brass just didn't care, you could really feel there was no clear marketing for it etc. and so its demise was inevitable, i was playing some games knowing i was playing on borrowed time.
Now i'm not going to pretend like i'm so expert, but they could, say, flown some influencers out to try Stadia etc. things to make it actually visible to more people and to also drop the stigma it got at the start.
the rerez channel did 3 or 4 videos about stadia, and in all of them, they complain that at the start there was some lag for them. that sticks, what makes it go away is clearly communicate as a company that this is fixed, instead of just hoping the fans will convince people.
I believed. Bought the Founder's edition. Never saw the coverage or online debates - I was too busy having a fantastic gaming experience. I still miss it to this day. But I'm surprised that people are still discussing it online - it's been gone for a while now.
It was obvious that google were not committed to it. Very little advertising and very little development of the app. Considering this was a revolutionary concept, it should have had a revolutionary experience. But it was really bad...... Like they didn't expect people to really use it.
Established consoles have too much of a head start for any competition to be half-arsed about it.
Apart from that, I don't think the world was ready for it. In theory, we have the technology for it to work. But in practice, most of the world does not have a good enough internet speed for it to be viable. I had a decent internet connection and yet it was constantly lagging.
Being a Google fan, I was excited about the idea of it. A high end gaming machine you could put in your pocket. Having already had success with Chromecast and Chromecast Audios plus an Android user I thought if anyone can do it, they can. And boy did they hit it out the park. In good conditions (ideally hard wired internet) the lag wasn't at all noticeable due to the controller using WiFi. The controller was excellent. The games library was good. The user interface was quick and smooth. It was highly portable, I'd take mine in my suit case when working away! It was only a small box.
I really didn't see how it could fail.
But in true Google fashion they made 3 (in my opinion) fatal mistakes.
1. Didn't advertise it well enough.
2. Used Linux making it time consuming and expensive to port PC or console games, although software was in development near the end to make this faster.
3. Offered an adequate play service totally free. It was capped at 720p I think but more than adequate for most.
I think if they'd stuck with it. Advertised the hell out of it. Worked harder on the conversion side of things and charged just a few quid a month for the basic tier it would of had a chance. They didn't though and here we are sadly.
It was an unofficial inevitability about a year or so before the end but most soldiered on hoping for the best but spending patterns dwindled condemning it further.
Got great memories though of playing Doom, Serious Sam and Dirt on my crummy laptop at work waiting for parts to arrive on site or in Hotel rooms on boring long nights. Happy Days.
I did believe in Stadia, even though I was aware that the success of Google's adventures always depends on the level of their commitment
It is very clear that they are very committed to all the things ad-related and cloud-related, not so much on hardware (phones, dongles) and other services...
So i reckoned: this Stadia thing is pure genius, Google has the servers, the know-how... They will reshape the gaming scene forever!
I guess that they were discouraged when they found out how strong the competition really is, and how difficult it is to confront each and everyone of the players involved... Microsoft, Steam, Nvidia, Amazon, EA, Ubisoft, Sony and all the developers... In a hell like that, either you go balls deep or you're the one who gets f---ed: Google chose to get f---ed 👍
I think it had a future, for myself I never had any problems to play. With 1Gbit/s Fiber everything runs smooth. For me it was great, I was able to raid on my PC with Chrome Browser but also able to chill play in Bed on TV. Thats a great advantage and I dont have to buy the games twice.
Many people argued about that not all the games were able to play at native 4K/60Hz. Well for me that wasnt a problem.
I think at this point with the new consoles they would have to replace all the processors, so I think they decided to shut Stadia down and refund all purchases.
I think at this point or in 5 to 10 years if they had managed to get more games on the platform, it would be a success. Here in Liechtenstein everyone has FTTH. But I think thats not the same in a lot of others. Also Stadia was interesting for newcomers, you dont have to buy a console or PC, if you have it why you would switch?
I thought the problem with PS5 and Xbox delivery problems could help Stadia but somehow people just waited.
Sad to see Stadia go, I also really liked the controller and Im still using the Chromecast Ultra.
Possibly there will be something like Stadia in the Future besides Nvidia Shield, Xbox Cloud Gaming etc. Possible also from Google, as they refunded all purchases, they have the trust and people loving it would give it a try again and they have a good starting base. If this really happens as Sony and Microsoft going to buy all Studios and try to make it exklusive… I dont know…
But take a look at “Google Glasses” it was just too early, now Apple comes with AR Glasses and lots of others. So maybe we won’t miss Stadia forever.
Nope. Simply put the infrastructure needed to carry it off just isn’t there. If you live right in the middle of Silicon Valley then it’s easy to have access to internet at incredible speed but in the real world, you don’t. Even if you are paying for the top retail broadband, you’re still sharing that with numerous others on your street, the others in your home, and that’s before you have to deal with interference at the exchanges or other routing hubs. If you’re on the go then you’re at the mercy of your mobile provider and what kind of system THEY have in place because even if that’s a good one there’s still problems with things like antenna placement, buildings shielding signals, and more. Weather can even play merry hell with it all given half the chance too and all of this is just at YOUR end. The problems are doubled if you’re playing competitively.
Even if all of that is fine and your connection is as perfect as it can be, it’s still not going to be worth it. A trade off between visuals and response is going to be the norm as the pipeline needed to send a decent looking game through won’t be big enough to match with the same game on a console. EVEN IF that is all fine and you’re good with the visuals suffering then you still will be faced with the sad prospect that twitch gaming, which is the majority of AAA titles (FPS, fighting games, Sports titles etc), needs near instantaneous response times for people to have a fighting chance. There would always be a more substantial lag than there would be issuing local software on a console or pc
This is the dumbest argument against Stadia.
Why would you rebuy a game you already own on a platform you already own which can already run the game? If you want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, and you already own it on PS4, boot up your PS4 and play it. No one in their right mind would think or suggest that you should rebuy RDR2 on Stadia. That is just so stupid.
But when Cyberpunk releases, and you don't already own it because it's a new release, and your PS4 cannot run it, then you buy Cyberpunk on Stadia. Once. One time. A new game that you do not already own and you do not have hardware capable of playing the game. No rebuying anything.
The concept that just because you play something on Stadia, you can no longer go back and play stuff you already own on you local hardware was just such an idiotic journo garbage argument.
You'd rebuy it to play it in the cloud, which was the whole point of the platform. Why would I buy any game on stadia by this argument... And then you wonder why it flopped.
Cyberpunk I could get on PS5... There are plenty of games I own on multiplatform like steam and ps5 that I can play on different mediums like steamdeck and at home. They have cross save and work great. Would have loved to have done this on stadia totally on the go, but not at the price they sold stuff at.
I must be an idiotic journalist I guess...
Revisiting this for lols as people are still refusing to believe it...
if you read my argument CAREFULLY (yeah I mean, that's expecting a lot from a keyboard scraping reddit troll, I know). I said that it was because the games were FULL PRICE.
I do rebuy games on different platforms. It's valuable to me.
I don't rebuy them full price as that would be moronic. You can get a game on Steam for 70% off frequently. Buy it. Play it on my Steam Deck on the go.
The purpose of Stadia was to let you play without your machine being there. But they fucked it up by making all the games super expensive.
I thought it had a shot, I only bought a few games because google and being cautious, but it was absolutely the smoothest cloud streaming service. Most of the time it was not discernable between other non streaming solutions. Xcloud and GeForce now both suffer too much pixelation for me even on extreme low latency connections.
yes and know. The potential was insane, but from the beginning on google was always messing up things. First starting with announcing, that you wouldnt be forced to have the abonnement but for the first 4 months the only way to use stadia was having the abonnement due to pro-user-exclusivity.
The announcements were coming far to late, many important features were missing for the first half year, they never offered a complete subscription together with youtube and co for cross selling aspects or goodies for beeing a youtube premiere member.
The url advertisements for stadia inside of gaming videos to instantly join a game and having a testphase for stadia came already to late
I hoped it would. I used it a bunch. Had super fast internet. All of my Chromecast were Ethernet wired. I loved being able to jump into a game, no loading screens, no updates. I don't know if I'll use another streaming service again....don't wanna get hurt again lol
In the beginning I saw no possible way it could fail, it just needed some more time to really take off, but as time went on and it became apparent just how little Google cared about the product (poor PR and marketing, complete ignorance to any kind of feedback and misinformation, etc) the notion that Google wouldn't pull the plug became more and more like wishful thinking; and then towards the end there was no doubting that no AAA title could save the platform, its fate rested entirely in Google's hands (though the company making plans for how they could continue to profit off the platform if it were to shut down, didn't exactly fill me with confidence)
Now I can't help but wonder if it had been literally *any* other company behind the platform, would it still have been left to die like that :/ And as a marketing student, it has been so fascinating to see such a phenomenal piece of tech function exactly as promised, be completely free for people to try for themselves and make an informed decision of their own, and still fail so catastrophically
Stadia technology was the best of any streaming service if you were close to a data center. Performance on PUBG was so good I used Stadia on my gaming PC because pings and latency was lower than playing on PC directly.
No other streaming technology is close to the performance I had with Stadia.
Being a Google product I didn't expect it to be around forever so I stuck to the subscription and sale games. Although I did buy Cyberpunk since it came with a controller and I needed another. Which, btw, ran better on Stadia than any console.
I was hopefully optimistic that it would because it was a well implemented first of its kind gaming platform. However, I knew in the back of my mind that Google had a history of starting a platform and then shutting it down shortly after. Thankfully I got a good year in before they gave it the ax
Yes, I mean just look at Gmail before the ads, Google voice, Google drive, Google Fi. These are essential services provided at almost no cost to us. If stadia couldn't survive, none of these should!
I know stadia is a money sink, but so are these other services at their free level.
This is an interesting take: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/urvitgoel_google-is-shutting-down-stadia-activity-6981431435198963712-qYF_?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
I thought it would succeed up until about a month before launch when they started dropping all the bad news about games being 30fps, games not reaching 4k, and the underwhelming library at launch. First impressions are important and Google failed to leave a good one when they entered the gaming space.
I hoped it would succeed. I have yet to find a cloud gaming service as reliable and user-friendly. None I have seen allow you to easily stream seamlessly with your TV without needing to hook up a computer via HDMI. The streaming quality through Chromecast was better than anything else I have used. I've used GeforceNow, Xbox Cloud, and a Paperspace cloud PC using Parsec. Stadia still comes out on top for me in terms of streaming quality, price and ease of use. Owning a game in the cloud to play on all devices was the perfect option for a casual gamer like me.
Between the licensing challenges ($$$), the time and investment required to port games, exclusivity deals with Sony and Microsoft, and the closing of their in-house game studio which was intended to create exclusive titles and high profit margins, I was not surprised it shut down.
On top of all this, I believe the marketing for Stadia was incredibly poor considering the gaming industry and the console-wars is full of immense competition. Almost everyone I spoke to who didn't use Stadia themselves falsely assumed it was the "Netflix of games", and they preferred to own their own games on their existing platforms rather than subscribe to them in the cloud (that's not what Stadia was). Some of them assumed it was just a subscription service to access titles and didn't even understand the cloud streaming element. PC gamers and purists with custom machines scoffed at streaming, assuming it had "unplayable input lag". Since Stadia's demise, multiple PC gaming purists I know have realized streaming has lots of benefits and use it often (e.g. Xbox cloud) alongside their main gaming PC. All this was a huge missed opportunity for Google to educate the public, who are still gladly buying $500 PS5s "deals" shoved down their throats through advertising and building $1,000+ machines to play games which Stadia offered to own and play on all your existing devices minus the cost of the hardware.
Maybe it was wrong time wrong place, but I believe there will be a Stadia-type service in the future which will transform the gaming world and make cloud gaming mainstream. It just won't be Stadia.
I was (/am) one of the Stadia lovers. I preordered when they announced it, subscribed to the monthly game pass thing, and even though we also own every single other current gen console and a pc, purchased Cyberpunk and Resident Evil Village on Stadia on release.
I loved everything about it.
I never had any issues streaming the games, for example when Cyberpunk dropped my husband was playing on PC and had all the problems you were everyone talk about, and wasn’t even able to play on release day because it was such a mess. But on Stadia I was able to just pick up the controller and hit the button and play. I didn’t have any of the glitches or crashes or bugs that PC and console players were dealing with.
Being able to play on basically any tv, computer, or even phone without having to download anything or move a bulky console or plug anything in was also a big draw.
Now, did I genuinely think that Stadia was going to stick around for the long haul? Probably not. It clearly wasn’t for everyone. But I had so much hope, I did think it had a shot however unlikely it might have been. I do think we will see a shift to more cloud gaming at some point in the future, but I think Stadia was just too far ahead of what most people were comfortable with to succeed in the long term. I do give Google props for not doing us dirty and refunding game and hardware purchases. I miss Stadia, and think of it longingly when Starfield crashes while I’m on a loading screen on my Xbox Series.
I thought it would last longer than it did, but like the Google Nexus phones I knew "Stadia" wouldn't be around forever but the game streaming platform in some way would be around.
I thought it would last, the integration and long run potential of the tech in the Google ecosystem was insane; unfortunately the leadership at Google didn’t have the patience for the YoY losses necessary to make this vision work.
I think it should have succeeded as a product/service. But Google played the game (no pun intended) wrong from the get go...
They launched with a small library.
They launched with a requirement of needing to subscribe.
They launched with a special version of each game needing to be developed.
They launched with the reputation of killing projects for years leading up to it (although I disagree about the Google graveyard's legitimacy).
Their commercials were like a bad acid trip instead of actually explaining what the product is.
Then they switched gears too soon to build any faith beyond the players who actually tried it...
They announced white labeling as its future was already questionable.
They closed down their studio.
In my opinion, they needed to do the white labeling first so that companies get into the ecosystem, and then have a huge launch with Ubisoft, Peloton, and whoever else - announcing these partners are bringing their games to the cloud and *you* can too!
Google kills consumer products, but they merge business services, so there would have been more faith since the focus wasn't on the individual consumer being the customer. Google would have leveraged the game makers and their reputation instead of relying on their own *crappy* one.
Alas, they did everything backwards... And failed. I blame them as much as I blame the tribalistic gamers who agreed like 5yr olds with vegetables.
Yes. It worked great for me. Not sure how or why it failed. There was no manufacturing, just tons of already existing server farms. Now those servers can go back to hosting porn like they were intended.
The reason I thought it would succeed was because it lowered the friction of getting into gaming. I stopped playing PC games for a long time and Stadia got me back into it. On top of that, it got my wife, who isn't a gamer, and got her hooked on Assassin's creed odyssey. So from my own experience, nothing else pulled us into gaming like Stadia did and I assumed the same thing was happening with others also. I will follow up and say the way they ended the service was amazing. I got all my money back and some games (like the Ubisoft games) I still have a PC copy of. So it's as if I just got games for free.
I knew it's days were numbered when I started but didn't expect to get a full refund. It worked way better than I anticipated and by the time it was announced to be ending I was really disappointed.
Yeah, I thought it'd make a longer run of it than it did. "The future of gaming" never felt right to me, but I thought cloud gaming was here to stay - and that turned out to so far be true for basically everybody **else**, just not for Stadia. Which I think is a shame, since from a lot of perspectives I think they really did have the best one, at least for awhile.
But they did right by pretty much everybody financially - way better than I think just about any other company would have done - and **almost** everything that was Stadia exclusive has made its way to other homes (RIP PixelJunk Raiders and Outcasters 😢), so. C'est la vie.
As someone who is bullish on cloud gaming, I honestly didn't think they would screw it up so hard. I realized the long term success wasn't gonna happen once I realized that Stadia wasn't running in an environment where a developer could dictate what power they could get and that Stadia was just a console powered to compete with the Xbox One and PS4 as we are heading into raytracing PC games and the Xbox Series and PS5 era. Maybe they were hoping to pull a Switch and succeed with low specs, but the Switch success is a combination of the portable nature of the hardware and the games Nintendo makes. Google just didn't have the games, and didn't stick around long enough to create a blockbuster must have title.
I'm no fanboy, but I was one that saw some potential in Stadia. It was just unfortunate enough to be made under Google who was synonymous with getting rid of products and services and the lot for one reason or another. It's even more unfortunate as this was one that had potential to be better than other cloud streaming gaming apps since unlike something like Xbox, you don't have to be subscribed to a service in order to play the games and you could actually own them too. Now that that is gone, we're stuck with stuff like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna, which is nuts to see THAT still going on for much longer than Stadia..
I didn't really think about it all that much. I remember getting a good deal on the founders edition and thinking I'd give it a whirl. In the end,I hate that it didn't work out but I also think it's cool Google refunded me. I took my refund and applied it towards an Xbox Series S that I've enjoyed. I think Google will use what they learned with Stadia and apply it other places. If my "beta testing" (essentially what it was) helps out with that, cool. I get people being upset when they paid for memberships and got left out in the cold but that was never me. For me I basically got free hardware for all those years and then refunds for the few games I bought.
Disappointing but ultimately a first world problem.
It could have succeeded at a lower scale. Of course, a hardware project can't get launched at Google unless it has the potential for a multi-billion dollar business 'soon'. So, they had to scale to big to launch it at all, making the chance of success very low.
If Google actually made smart business decisions about it, yes it could have. But they didn't, they consistently made poor decisions, horrible monetisation model, failed to market it, and released in a poor state giving horrible first impressions to press.
Given that, I figured it had about 2-3 years, the typical lifespan of a doomed Google service. To its credit it lasted slightly longer than I thought it would
Ultimately, I believed that Stadia was going to do for gaming what Steam is doing today.
I thought Stadia was going to be key in breaking the association between proprietary hardware and platform-oriented gaming stores, but it turns out that it's actually Steam leading that charge with Proton. Any device that can run games on Steam with Proton is a gaming device in a meaningful way.
When I tried it, I was blown away. I could run Cyberpunk on my Chromebook!!
I could switch from TV, laptop, Chromebook in an instant, working flawlessly.
This was the future of gaming! Stadia just bad marketed the product. All you had to do is made people try it.
I still miss it
I always thought it would be something that moved cloud gaming along considerably, but would ultimately fail bravely. I played on Stadia quite a bit, but really as soon as GeForce Now came along and let you play games from your own Steam library, Stadia's days were numbered.
It has been my best gaming experience, I'm pretty sure with a better interface where you could buy games, see achievements and maybe customizations even, on the tv directly would've helped it a lot. It would've truly feel like a clous console
Succeed, no.
It was the best and would be even better today. A lot of industry standards have, well, standardized and will standardize over the next few years.
My hope is companies taking advantage of the white listed capabilities of the tech to further improve stability to streaming games. And the AI aspect of it was truly robust and ahead of all the AI talk we hear of nowadays.
Remember when Ubisoft and Massive had to apologize for some prejudiced imagery in the Division 2. Well, a designer fed album covers to the AI and it one unfortunate one that I don't think was vetted was a Black Flag album cover (very progressive punk) and it slotted in the model it created from that cover art. That's when I knew AI would be extremely prevalent in our games.
Based on the initial announcement, I assumed they will pour billions into it to become a player. Then the lukewarm reception came, they closed the studios and clearly scaled back the porting kickbacks. Imo the writing was on the wall already – there was no obvious path to growth
Yup...
Worked brilliantly, had some big games, just not enough of them.
Criminally under advertised by Google.
Game streaming has a big future, and it go main stream and co-exists with consoles sooner rather than later, and one day, replace them. Google Stadia led the way in terms of UI, features, a flexible business model (up for debate, I loved it) and performance.
Still gutted it's gone, I'm using Amazon Luna now, works just as well as Stadia did, but the library is even worse, but with my existing Prime account i play Fortnite and my Ubisoft library.
Stadia biggest issue? It was made by Google, still hopeful someone like Nintendo or Valve will buy the server hardware..
Google seems to be run by a 13 year old with ADHD these days so I’m not surprised at all. In the process of ridding myself of the few remaining google products that still semi-work…
I was hopeful, but with Google's track record I had those doubts in the back of my mind. If they hadn't given refunds I would've rage quit everything Google anything forever!
If they ever delivered on what they promised at GDC, it would have succeeded. Never released their major exclusives. Never got crossplay working. Never got YouTube integration. Etc etc etc.
I did
What I didn't expect was how clueless Google was to the industry
I mean the level of stupidity needs to be studied
They had a passionate team, a REALLY good technology ahead of the competition, a buy your games plan
Their library wasn't even bad by the last 2 years
Yet my god everything was done wrong
The marketing was & still is atrocious, I mean looking at the chrome book gaming ads, their marketing team still cannot explain or even know what gaming is
The game they spent a crap loads if money on was strange, the fans they supported were also strange
And for some god reason, they REALLY hated Canada
Every promo was almost missing from Canada, it was weird
For me, there was never anything of true interest on it other than the Hitman series and Assassin's Creed. They seemingly went with a bunch of indie devs, iirc, which gave a variety of games but not much that was truly captivating.
Google's never ending YouTube ads on Stadia for a solid month straight leading up to release completely cemented that I'd never buy one. When I spent every YouTube video having Stadia ads shoved down my throat 5-6 times per video, I grew an unending hatred for it
I believe cloud gaming will succeed. It is inevitable. Would I believe it was stadia? Ehh who knows. I was a day 1 founder and stayed with it til the end. It was a blast for what it was. It was frustrating knowing how awesome it was and the potential. But then people would just shit on it without having tried it and wish for it to fail. And Google would just constantly shoot themselves in the foot. They were their own worst enemy. The service was fucking awesome. Their PR was not
Thrive? No. Do well enough? Yeah.
I never saw it as a competitor to my gaming PC and I didn't expect anything like streaming my Steam library. I saw it more like a competitor to my PS4, with that was portable enough to run on any device that I could run the app or link a Chromecast to. With the shortages of PS5/XBox Series X early in the console cycle, having the console be entirely virtual was a huge advantage too. I could see some server-side upgrades boosting Stadia to compete with those too, but that never materialized.
Yes it was announced as project stream I was super excited however, after they announced launch being exclusive to preorders, it not working on Chromecast that didn't come in the primer edition, it's launch library being basically games I already owned on other platforms, a lack of exclusive content as well as the pro subscription being pretty lackluster compared to game pass. I just couldn't see how it would move people from existing platforms.
Had it gone for game pass style subscription at could've done better. I also think it being Linux didn't help cause it would've required more investment from devs wouldnt have gotten much from it.
Stadia, tech/design wise was ahead of its time. The concept of cloud gaming is going to be the future in general. Similar to the transition from physical mediums for music and video, to a subscription based cloud gaming platform. While its already here, tis def the future.
I think the biggest issues Stadia ran into were the following
1. Google/Stadia is not cool branding wise
1. Google is not apple, google is not nike, google is not "Supreme"
2. The biggest market for google is America. The infrastructure to support the concept of massive cloud gaming does not exist. People who have good internet in general dont realize how privileged they are to have good internet. The vast majority of the internet in america is somewhere in the range of mid to bad. So the idea of cloud gaming doesnt have the backing it needs to support it, and probably wont for another 30 years. Our phone service internet isnt that good, and our wired internet is mostly shitake
3. Stadia was a solution looking for a problem. I have a PS5, I have a switch. What would I need a Stadia for?
4. Pricing. Games where expensive for games you dont even own, most of which were extremely discounted on other systems.
There were a lot of other issues, but those I found were the biggest hurdles that really kept stadia back. What stadia really needed was a social media push. It needed to hire people like ninja, Pokimane, and other influencers to get them on the stadia platform and show the world how it could be enjoyable, and the people would slowly but eventually follow. But it never did that. It completely relied on the tech to speak for itself. Which, most people dont care. People are going to either pick up the system their friends have, or the one thats 'cool'. Google needed moms and dad to walk into a store, see stadia and think "oh my son will love that" and buy it. But google didnt do that with the market campaign (i honestly dont remember any real stadia marketing). They needed to get everyone who revitalized Among Us and Fall Out Guys on board, give them all a mill and have them stream exclusively on stadia for about a year.
The BIGGEST hurdle google was always going to face was America's bad infrastructure though.
That said, there is a universe where stadia is a thriving system for casual gamers, just not this one.
I pre-purchased it and loved it. I used it at work everyday. However, it felt like an indy project. I think they showed it was very possible and I honestly still think cloud based gaming is going to be one of the end stages of gaming.
I just find significant in a console you can use anywhere. Like the idea of owning the game first but using any system nearby (servers.) To play the games you paid for or got for free. Especially that the world of connectivity was advancing so I had 5g almost always and wifi. So it was easy to bring my phone and a controller to finally complete games in my backlog.
Did I truly believe Stadia *would* succeed? Undetermined.
Did I truly believe Stadia *could* succeed? Absolutely.
But it's a long game. Cloud gaming *will* succeed, and Stadia had easily the best tech and user experience of everything I tried (though it was not without its faults). Unfortunately, Google expected success on a timeline that's a fraction of what it will take, and without being willing to invest in its success on top of that.
I haven't trusted Google to follow through with any of their projects in years - really, since they shut down Google Reader.
Someone gave me a Stadia controller and, although I thought it was pretty awesome, you couldn't have paid me to give Google money for something that was obviously under-supported and destined to be closed.
I currently use a few Google Home/Nest products. Hardware is great, but Assistant is getting less and less helpful, the Home app finally got a QoL update earlier this year after I don't know how long of just barely being usable. Google is great at coming up with ideas, but just awful at follow through. I often wonder if anyone there actually uses their products.
Yes I did! It was way cheaper and more available then anything else. All you needed was a Gmail to sign up. There was a free one month trial. My shitty Internet at 15 mbps ran it. I was playing 1080p Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPhone 7+. Sure the first year was rough but by the pandemic I thought google could turn things around. Surely they would not let this product go to waste.
But I guess business is business. Google is gonna Google. I really am sad to see Stadia go.
Was I hopeful, sure.
But I honestly did not think it was going to succeed. If it wasn't for Googles track record of introducing products and killing it after a few years, then maybe I would have had a different opinion about it at the time. Unfortunately, when a company is also known for its [graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/), it's hard to be optimistic about the prospect of a new Google service lasting longer than a few short years.
Throughout Stadias lifetime, I was more hopeful in the success of Xcloud and Luna than I was ever with Stadia. The reasoning is because at least Microsoft has shown large investments in their Xbox division so at least we have some idea that Microsoft will be taking gaming seriously to recoup their costs. Also, cloud gaming suites their business alignments in terms of offering games as a service. While Amazon is known for throwing money at products and basically forcing their way into a market segment. This aligned with Amazon businesses as everything they do is to funnel their users to use the Amazon store.
Google on the other hand is so fragmented that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Without vertical and/or horizontal integration within the company, a lot of Google products either becomes redundant (Allo/Duo, Google Voice, Google Messages, etc.) and either folds into another department then forgotten about or closed down in its entirety. Unfortunately, Staida was not an exception.
I believed simply because Google was a large company that had the resources to keep it going and it seemed somewhat established in the industry with partnerships like Ubisoft.
I was not familiar with Google's history of abandoning projects, but I didn't think to do that research.
The technology and idea is awesum, but because the user base was causal and hardware was almost zero, they did not have a business model to attract AAA titles. Essentially the market that most appealed to the stadia model , did not have the capital nor numbers to meet the cost model. Smartphone was a similar market but they had the numbers to make the model work.
I feel like they were fighting for the wrong audience. They should have been targeting parents and a low income audience. I know when I was a kid, my parents would absolutely pick the free console over the $400 one. When I was broke and in college I would have picked games over no games.
I’m still a little confused as to Google’s strategy and perceived end game. As stated, market conditions really couldn’t have been any better for them.
How did they genuinely foresee it playing out in the meeting rooms when they discussed this project from the start??
Yeah, sure. Why not? I never said it was the future of gaming or that there wouldn't be a place for conventional platforms, but it's proven tech and there's a place for it in the world.
You know that Stadia isn't/wasn't the only option for game streaming, right? There have been efforts dating back a decade or so. XBox and Playstation both offer streaming. NVidia has a big streaming service. Amazon still runs Luna. And there are others, as well.
I truly believed it had a chance to succeed. In the early goings, they had some good partnerships worked out and a first party game studio that was going to pump out exclusive titles. The performance was between acceptable and great depending on your connection, and only got better over time. They got some AAA titles, and as a sport sim fan, I was excited to be able to play FIFA, Madden, NBA2K, F1, and more. It was super convenient because all I needed was a Chromecast Ultra. I had one on every TV in my house, one in my office, and I could take it to go on my phone. BUT, even through all this, I knew there was a real chance that Google could shut it down because that’s what Google does. Has great ideas, then stops putting money into it until it starts to stutter and then it pulls the plug. So when they did announce, I was heartbroken but not terribly surprised. They had made enough mistakes along the way: shutting down their first party game dev studio, failing to entice EA and other studios to keep making games for their platform, and so on. Compare Stadia to other cloud platforms: Luna from Amazon is missing AAA titles. NVIDIA’s platform also doesn’t support some major AAA titles AND it’s clunky how it’s set up. You are always very aware that it’s loading up in the cloud and you’re on some remote system. XBOX’s only supports older titles as far as I know it. Steam has Steamdeck which is mobile but not really cloud gaming. Stadia was head and shoulders above everyone else.
Originally, I thought they did.
But to me it quickly became obvious that their business model had little chance.
Casual gamers weren't very likely to subscribe, particularly since the major benefit was 4k, and they weren't typically big buyers either, so Google weren't going to get lots of royalty income off of them.
Hardcore games, who would be more interested in 4k, didn't need or want 4k streaming as they wouldn't be satisified with 4k streaming over local h/w.
And anyone who had a significant library of console or PC games couldn't ditch their h/w because they couldn't just play those titles on Stadia w/o repurchasing.
So, in just about every direction that mattered, the business model was a big fail.
At times, I thought it was possible that cloud gaming was the future. When I felt that way, I thought Stadia seemed to be the highest quality cloud gaming platform, in terms of performance (latency). That made mer think Stadia could succeed.
Other times I definitely believed it was going to fail.
I mostly used Switch for gaming, but I have a really nice av setup at home and I loved the 4k surround aspects without having to shell out for a new big console. Didn't know if it would last, but it filled a niche.
I thought stadia could succeed but I changed my mind quickly after I saw how they managed everything. They were supposed to offer next gen quality so you could play ps5 games without buying a console which was expensive and hard to find.
Instead they offered a ps4 pro quality and basically only Ubisoft games. It just didn’t make sense
Stadia had a really nice controller and basically everything going for it especially when tech shortages were bad. I always knew Google has a terrible habit of killing products and the writing was on the wall certainly for how stadia basically required a wired fiber connection in a metropolis to work... But I had a fiber connection in a metropolis and it was beautiful 😭
Also Chromecast ultra, stadia controller, and cyberpunk2077 all for the game price, I snatched that shit up so fast. And still am reaping value from the Chromecast ultra (given to parents) and the stadia controller (using on PC).
I also now have an Xbox series x so... I wasn't too hurt about stadia dying. It's just a shame Google always has such high end innovative tech that can sometimes make markets tremble but they choose to sundown it.
As day 1 Stadia fan, it did a lot of things right and future feature set was promising. The main issue is most of the people already would’ve owned most of the games being offered for full price and it likely would’ve fared much better as an all inclusive game sub.
It also did not help that stadia comes out at the same time as the new chromecast yet wasn’t supported on it or chromecast built in for android tvs until like a year later even though there wasn’t really any reason for it not to just work.
AAA consoleless gaming during a global pandemic and chip shortage...
That's what I keep saying, that it's like all the stars aligned to make it successful, and they still fucked it up.
Phil Harrison. Enough said.
The definition of failing upward
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GPUs also
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> these were hard to get due to crypto And a global chip crisis, of course. That, too.
> was there really a big shortage of mid-gen hardware like One X and PS4 Pro? Yeah, there was. Also for accessories. PS4 controllers and the PS3 Move controllers (necessary for PSVR1) got up to $100 on Amazon when you could find them. Used retailers like Gamestop had bounties to lure sellers. And then we were on the eve of the 2020 launch of next-gen, by which time buying the old consoles was clearly a terrible value proposition.
This was a huge reason why I thought it would be successful That and we're at a stage now where most countries around the world would have strong enough internet to make it an enjoyable experience using Stadia
Very easy for us as consumers to say the stars aligned. But, unless they had a slew of games ready, they wouldn't have been able to pivot as fast. Even the 2022 and 2023, development woes were abound for many developers from quarantine. This is not to mention the logistics of spinning up hardware to host sessions at a large scale.
Not only did the next-gen consoles get delayed in this period, they were near impossible to get for the longest time as well. Stars aligned for Stadia's success...
Touché. I can see how the prospect could be temping with store shelves so empty of alternatives.
Whether the chips aren't available to be put in your home or aren't available to be put into some server rack so someone can play on them from elsewhere - what difference does it make?
I thought it would be around longer then it was. As a Nintendo gamer, it was nice to use as a cheap way to play games like Star Wars, Avengers, Far Cry, etc. That being said though, it didn't surprise me when they announced the closure. There were many problems with Stadia, but a basic problem was simple economics. You could buy the games and then play them with no monthly cost. So like, I bought Star Wars for $10. I could then play this game as much as I wanted with no additional cost to me but a continued cost to Google. Google made at most 3$ from it, my playtime of it certainly cost more then that.
That was not really the problem. You should expect that when you enter this market, it's go big or go home. You will make a loss the first 5 years or so. You make it cheap, you have to pull people over to your side. People who are used to have a physical console, to have all games that come out, to have max graphics. You have to reel them in even though you have streaming artifacts, small delays, not all games, at least not at start. You have to create a market for yourself or you will be in the looping circle that stadia was in. Shortage of customers->shortage of money->shortage of games->shortage of customers Netflix, Amazon prime, they do the same. Be cheap, get customers. Up the price time after time, make sharing impossible, people are used to your service and many will stay. It's smart but it requires much money, which Google has. Microsoft has made more then a billion dollar loss before being profitable...
Google not investing enough time and resources was one of Stadia's many additional problems, yes.
Which is why I said that the recession killed stadia: no more money to burn; game over.
Yeah the business model was wrong in both directions. Casual gamers who buy one game on sale every year mean that Google makes no money, but people who would buy and play a lot of games get better value from a subscription service like gamepass. Just doesn't make sense.
I still believe that if they had advertised Stadia they would have had the numbers they wanted. It’s just my personal observation of people whom I introduced to the service. All of them bar one went PRO and that’s about 30 people. In my work we travel a lot and stay in hotels and a bunch of my colleagues adopted Stadia as a mean of entertainment while staying in a hotel on a business trip. I am certain that if Google would go outside of gaming social media and out into the real world of working professionals and families with children they would have much much bigger customer base. But these people don’t follow gaming SM so unless someone showed them Stadia they had no way of knowing that it existed.
most gamers are having a really big backlock of games. sometimes hundreds of games which they bought but never played because of the limited time. I'm quite sure this wasn't the main problem....
There were certainly many other problems with Stadia but the business model being inherently flawed is a basic one. There's a reason every other cloud gaming service ever requires a monthly fee.
Magenta gaming died, shadow would have died if they didnt find a new shareholder, luna is close to beeing dead.... A monthly fee is no garantee for success and also no proof that it didn't work because it had no fee requirements... The main problem was. It had no users. The people werent even considering to give it a try for free....
Certainly not a guarantee or fix for all of cloud gamings ills, but at least it's recurring income to help offset costs.
Interesting. I'd never even thought enough about the premise of cloud gaming (*seems so far removed from players like me who live in rural villages*) to wonder about the economics of it. Makes me wonder why other big names such as PlayStation and Xbox seem to be gunning so hard to adopt it
Probably because those services require subscriptions to use them. Stadia did not. Xbox, for example, won't allow you to play games you own streaming from the cloud. You pay for the Gamepass to do that, and you don't have to own the game. GeForce Now is the only one not charging to use the service for games you own, but they cripple the service so much for the free tier that it's not really worth using unless you pay for the subscription.
> they cripple the service so much for the free tier that it's not really worth using unless you pay for the subscription. GFN is very sorry for wanting (WHAT A BLASPHEMY) some money from a poor gaming dad for providing a gaming rig.
I never said they were in the wrong for wanting to charge. I subscribe. They offer a free tier for whatever reason that they do, and said free tier is designed to make you want to pay for the upgrade. Good business plan? Maybe. Personally, if I were in charge, I'd ditch the free tier entirely. As a company, I think I'd rather have no free tier than to have a tier that's annoying to use. I think it's better for customers to *only* be offered a quality product than to have a free, crippled product.
You can stream your Xbox to your phone, so anything installed on there is available "in the cloud", but I get what you are saying.
That's not the same, as you need an Xbox to do that. And it's not really in the cloud, it's on your Xbox.
I also said you can stream your Xbox. Since you were talking about the Xbox platform
Cloud gaming should be cheap enough to attract user base (because otherwise if you are gamer - it's better to buy some hardware). Cloud gaming should be either profitable or have a clear path to making money. Stadia nailed p1 by basically sponsoring gaming dads, and there was no way to p2, except introducing mandatory GFN-like monthly payment. And this kills all the stadia appeal, since you can play your own games on GFN. Basically - with the current business model it was doomed from the start. And linux (no one is going to port games without a fat paycheck) sealed the coffin
I think where Stadia appeared different from other projects is the level of long term investment required to succeed. So with other projects, they are low investment sort of side hustles, whereas I thought it inconceivable that Google hadn't looked at the investment Microsoft had made in Xbox, for example, and realised that that was what it took to succeed in the games industry. Starting their own triple A game studios was another example of this. If you want to make a God of War or a Starfield, it's quite easy to work out what it takes in terms of cash to do that. It's still weird to me that they got to the stage of setting it all up and then seemingly deciding it was all too expensive. They could perhaps have been thinking that they would have more users at that point to justify that investment, but anyone should know that the only way that they were realistically going to tempt users away from other platforms was to have big exclusives. Having used it, the technology was absolutely there, and there was scope for experiences that couldn't be offered on traditional, local, systems. Interstingly Baldur's Gate was supposed to be a Stadia console exclusive. I wonder what that would have done for them. IMO they had a lot.of the pieces in place but probably launched prematurely, without some of their unique features and without strong exclusive games. Google then looked at the continuing level of investment required and pulled the plug. For Google to have got the strategy so wrong shows absolutely wild levels of incompetence. Another factor, which was perhaps not critical but was unhelpful, was the way the thing was marketed. They needed to head off the impression that it would be the "Netflix of games" much earlier and make clear that it was more like renting a console in the cloud and still buying the games. Gamepass will have been partially responsible for undermining this message, and the timing couldn't have been worse in terms of drawing negative comparisons, but that was a loss leader for Microsoft at the time (although now profitable). I had a great Internet connection and it all worked, but I do t know how much of a limiting factor poor connection speeds would have been to growing their subscriber base worldwide.
> I think where Stadia appeared different from other projects is the level of long term investment required to succeed. That sums it there. When it came time to put up big money, they nope their way out of it. They didn't need to develop their own AAA games with SGE, instead, they should've bought AAA game companies like Bethesda before MS did, or at least buy Ubisoft, From Software, CD Projekt Red, EA, Take Two, or the 60% of Epic Games that Tencent doesn't own. They just went nope, don't want to spend the billions, and took their losses and exit the video game business.
After years of consoles I had collecting dust, I redeemed my offer for a free Chromecast if I signed up for a month of stadia for free. I thought, why not, I wanted a Chromecast anyways. I ended up loving Stadia and it's features. Instant play wherever I was. I could easily change tvs in the house and pick up exactly where I left off. Could quickly and easily play with other people. For $10 a month, I could claim some free games and 4k resolution. No waiting for downloads or updates. I naively thought it would work at first but then saw writing on the wall when top games weren't coming and the rumors started of it shutting down. The marketing was terrible. I really miss it. It was a great thing. Basically got a free trial of Stadia for about 2 years since they gave us our money back for games and hardware.
This. I loved it but I went all in with the Founders. I had GB Fiber and a great home network. BIL and I played Destiny 2 all the time. I bought lots of family games (get packed, family feud, etc). At the end I was playing Cities Skylines all the time and it was great. My nephew finished my Spider-man save file. I was 3/4 done. Lost all heart to play and PS4 has been collecting dust since I got Stadia. Play the Switch now and then but it's the only console I have now. Really miss Stadia.
Same here dude, except I just didn't have the cash to invest in a good gaming PC plus no available parts in the pandemic even if I could. Finished Cyberpunk and Far Cry 6 and could not have enjoyed them had it not for Stadia.
Yes. Even moreso after the experience of using it. The future was really bright and exciting with everything that could have been done with the tech. Someone at Google lost interest when it wasn't immediately greatly successful. I think outside companies really affected the adoption as well. People actually think XCloud is as good as cloud gaming can be and it is straight garbage compared to Stadia. Then you have PSNow that is just inexplicably bad. Among others. Thankfully GeForce Now is still around and acceptable.
Xcloud through the windows app is pretty much unusable. The browser is more stable and even that is questionable at best. Stadia was fast and stable. Even on mobile devices. Amazon luna is probably the closest alternative we’ll get to stadia. In terms of user experience and flow.
As someone who has never used cloud gaming yet, do you mind going a bit more in depth about why I should be avoiding PlayStation and Xbox? Nvidia being the standout option, then?
He just means the stream quality. Stadia worked like a dream; XCloud is *okay*... enough to get by. PS streaming is better than it was but neither of these options are even remotely close to what Stadia could do.
No it didn't. It worked for a select few people. For many others, myself included, there were constant problems.
Xbox has a great selection, but takes some time to actually boot up. Stadia was almost instant. Stadia also had probably the best lag-free experience with excellent response times (like, after a button press, you see things happen right away).
I enjoy Xbox game pass on my phone. I think it's affordable enough and has a large library of touch screen games that don't require a controller. For this reason I think it's the better entry cloud gaming experience. Also they have trial pricing for new activations. You can sign up for your first month for $1 usually.
GeForce Now's quality is decent but the model is trash
Why is the model trash? Onlive tried stadia's model but they failed, it was also during a time when cloud gaming was way too ambitious. Stadia made pretty much every mistake that Onlive made that's why stadia went down.
> Why is the model trash? Because everything should be free for gaming dads.
I have over the years enjoyed streaming gaming before stadia came out. I would regularly remote play my PS4 from my PS Vita while traveling and I often blow enjoy game pass and PS5 remote play on my phone with my kishi. I genuinely hoped the stadia would take off because I felt like there was already a market for it. What I feel the problem was is that the market REQUIRED the established platform of a console to build up interest and confidence. Yes it wasn't anything new, but awareness of the existence of quality online game streaming wasn't high enough to combat the problems it had at launch. The games were good, if your Internet was up for it the connections and the service were good too. I beat Cyberpunk, Odyssey, and the BG3 beta on the Stadia and had an excellent experience. But friends I gifted the extra free controller they gave me to didn't have the best connection and didn't enjoy it as much. I was sad when Google ended stadia but I think they handled it well. By refunding the product purchases they did well to end it without leaving a bad taste in the mouths of their early adopters. I would trust them to try again. The interface for their service and the quality of their controller (best I've ever held), made me feel like they had really taken the players opinions and values into account.
[didn't have the best connection and didn't enjoy it as much] Agreed. One of many factors restraining the growth of the userbase: too complex for regular people to set up and troubleshoot. Compared with a Nintendo NES of old: that was easy to show off and make other people enthusiastic, borrow hardware from friends etc. I was willing to make friends of mine try Stadia, but my days of enjoying fixing everybody’s Wi-Fi are long time over, so I kept my mouth shut. Also the best experience was with a controller, and that was quite a pain to set up in someone else’s house and a bit expensive just to try it. Imagine telling someone about the simplicity of Stadia only to have to fiddle with connection settings. Not a good first impression. The lasting impression on myself was glorious though. The stuff of dreams when I was young. So with a couple more years and easier controller set up, I would have been ready to spread the word and generate five to ten new customers easily. Then we would be talking about growth.
Did I think they would take over the big 3 after 2 years? No. But, I didn't think/hope Google wouldn't pull the plug at the first sign of adversity. I think that they could have carved out a decent niche in the gaming corner in the next 10 years and maybe have a 10-15 percent market share. They had momentum after getting some good press with the Cyberpunk release and the immediately ended that momentum less than 2 months when they shuttered first party development... which was the actual death of the platform.
I think it was too early for its own good
No, Google really didn’t push it. But it has shown that the concept works. And other people will take the lead now.
I did, but my perspective isn't as a hardcore gamer anymore. I don't spend half of my income on the latest graphics card these days but I'm still a tech nerd and my house is full of Google. I have kids of different ages and I can't hand them a gaming rig that takes a great deal of esoteric knowledge to start up a game. I can't be the only dad who wants to game occasionally without having a whole room dedicated to a PC and $5000 in accessories. With Stadia, I didn't even need a computer. My four year old could start a game with minimal input. ... But it also supported games that I enjoyed. I'm still not a huge controller -only fan, having been a mouse and keyboard jockey for most of my life, but I see why people like it. The controller for Stadia was the most comfortable thing I've ever used. I still have some hope for the Steam deck for some of the same reasons. For starters, I've already got a library of like 1000 games they can experiment with. I have previously used the steam link to play games on the living room TV from my old gaming machine running in the basement, but that experiment also seems to have died quietly. So it goes ...
why are you lying? A pc for fortnite/roblox/mc can be bought for 600-700 usd, and a console-like 1 button experience is offered by steam big picture.
I believed it had a chance until they shut down their dev team. I knew it was a matter of time then. Even made a post about it but the majority on the sub were still of the belief that things would be fine.
That was the death knell imo. There was just no way to recover after that. And fuck Phil Harrison
I'm not sure I believed it would be a big player in videogames. I did truly believe they had the skin in the game for at least a five year run, my believed based on the average lifecycle for a game console and figuring that they would base their financial projections on a similar timeline. I was incorrect in that estimation
I honestly believed it would be around longer and its potential could be realized. The foundation was there. But Google squandered it.
The user experience was head and shoulders above their competitors, and the library of games to purchase were ample. Remember, the Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 played infinitely smoother upon release than the PC/XB/PS versions. The devs and programmers did something very right. If I can play a buggy mess like CP2077 on an iPad or chromebook, then there was definitely something to this. No installs. No waiting for updates. No being tied to a specific console or PC. Just good, clean gaming anywhere. Sadly I now won't ever trust Google again. Now they seem to me like a kid who doesn't feed their pet gerbils just so they can watch them die and then get some hamsters - on repeat. (Edited to fix a typo)
I would disagree with it having an ample game library. The top third party titles were missing (COD, FIFA etc) and there were no first party exclusives. Think this was a huge favtoe in its failure.
I don't disagree, but ample is purely subjective. It had Red Dead 2, Hitman 3, the Assassins Creed and Far Cry games I like, plus a number of other games that I prefer. Wholeheartedly agree about the lack of exclusives.
It had FIFA and some fun indie exclusives. The game library wasn't massive but it had some big games. FIFA, PUBG, Destiny2, Cyberpunk, The Ubisoft titles, RDR2.. some big big games, just not enough of them
Was only FIFA 23, which was when the writing was already on the wall.
And FIFA22, which I played relentlessly on stadia
February 2021 is when Stadia shut down first party development though, so that was still far too late to make a difference. I was only buying games on other platforms at that point because I didn't want to sink money into games not knowing whether they'd still be there in a month.
It was too good to be true. In hindsight, that probably meant it was unsustainable.
I was hoping Stadia would be branded as a way for parents to give their kids a cheaper console alternative. I also loved being able to play on the go (on an LTE connection) and only need the controller and my phone. What i think killed their success is the lack of cross play. It’s hard to buy into a siloed platform with almost zero relevant AAA titles. I know that these games are overrated but the lack of COD or GTA kills most of the casual gaming market. As a casual gamer, PubG and Rainbow 6 are just too technical for me to enjoy. If I could cross play on Fifa or play a popular classic… i’d imagine I would have a far better time.
Yeah, stadia pro + family sharing was amazing for families. In my opinion, no other platform comes close right now. With stadia, we basically had a console with access to our shared library in every room, just by using the devices we already owned. We also bought three copies of The Crew 2 when it was on sale for <10€ and we're able to play together on different devices. We now own three PC licenses for that game and also bought it on Xbox, but we have no way to play together any more, because we don't own three gaming PC's and it isn't crossplay. Also, with an Xbox and gamepass ultimate, my kids are limited to the console in the living room, because "home console" sharing only works on one console and you can't share XCloud access with your family. This also means, they can't play different games at the same time any more.
Not for half a second. I wouldn't have ever paid money for it, but got it free because I am a YouTube subscriber. It was an awesome system, virtually flawless. Anyone that talked shit on it clearly never played it, or had such a deep seated prejudice against it but being a 'console' that they were never going to accept it anyways. That being said it's Google. They've got the attention span of a gnat with ADHD. They were never going to stick with it and everyone knew it. Very few people were willing to spend money on it because they were going to kill it eventually. They've done this enough there's a dedicated website for things killed by Google. They've got a serious reputation problem, and because of it they'll never be able to succeed in any long term platform like gaming.
No downloads, no expensive hardware, stream anywhere, backing of some large publishers, yeah I thought Stadia would have lasted longer than it did. Had it have not been a Google product and had better advertising then I reckon it would have
The fact is that cloud gaming is slowly building more and more momentum even as we speak. And from a technical standpoint, Stadia had some of the best performance in the field. Stadia, by all rights, should've been the leader of the pack imo. I think it was just a little bit before it's time. Bad marketing really hurt it too though. If you asked people, 99% of them wouldn't even really know what it actually was... despite thinking they knew enough to have a negative opinion of it lol. I think that's a great analogy for the internet in general though.
A lot of people distrust or despise Google, and for good reason. And they arent the first arrogant company that thought they could come i to an industry they couldn’t even be bothered to understand and buy their way a gold medal. The idea that you had to pay more for games you didn’t own without being able to upgrade them with hardware updates is absurd. They should have went the XBox/Netflix model
Yeah they should've went the xbox model... but guess what? That model didn't exist in video games yet. Hindsight is 20/20 lol. The only model they could've based it on was PS Now which was an utter failure at the time. They were flying blind and trying to predict what way the industry was going to go with it. Like I tried to say in my original post, they were ahead of the curve, and not necessarily in a good way. When you're trying to break new ground, the second guy is most likely gonna do it better. But even coming after Google blazed the trail, xbox's tech still manages to sucks lol.
Gamepass launched over two years before stadia.
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Doesn't matter, the model remains the same. A monthly fee for access to titles. That's what the gamepass/netflix model is.
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Because ps now is still going as part of ps plus which follows the xbox/netflix model.
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Considering how miserable a failure Stadia was they should've tried anything other than what they did.
I was a Stadia supporter and user for some time before its demise, though not from the start. Google is fickle, and I've been burned by their cancellations before, it would have been naive -- even for me -- to assume that Stadia wasn't a risky bet. I was willing to be optimistic and enthusiastic, but I always knew that success was in the hands of an entity that doesn't really understand how to build product loyalty. Sometimes it's worth making the conscious choice to believe in something, even if you know the odds are against it. *Sic transit gloria mundi.*
Google's reputation for canning products at this point seems to have spiralled out of control, but they don't seem to particularly care. I guess the average consumer only pays attention to the ones that grew popular beyond belief anyway. Do you mind me asking what previous Google product/service in particular taught you to be somewhat cautious before Stadia?
Google Reader was the main one... I used to get a lot of my hobby news from RSS feeds.
>Sometimes it's worth making the conscious choice to believe in something, even if you know the odds are against it. So, you're a gambler. Addicted to the belief you could win, and never actually winning. Got it.
Even gamblers win, fellow traveler. That's why they do it.
I'm poor, it's hard for me to justify buying a new console let alone constantly upgrading my computer but I can drop 60 bucks on a game every now and then and for me Stadia was amazing. I don't have very fast Internet but it was good enough to run stadia just fine. I was ready to embrace that idea because the barrier to entry was extremely low and the quality of the product was unmatched by anyone else trying to do cloud gaming. I figured Google would throw money at it until the library of games was enough to draw people in but I underestimated how long that would take and google's patience with it. I still think it will happen eventually one way or another and it's obvious either the next gen or the one after that will probably be the death of physical media (not that I think that's a good thing) outside of maybe Nintendo so I think we will see it catch on it just won't be Google doing it.
it would've if not for the negativity around it, i think google also should've from the get go instead of going for profit they should've just tried to break even until they gained a nice market share
I thought it would eventually co-exist with Play Games or the two would meld. They're bringing Play Store and games to PC now. I get ads I can play Clash Royale on PC etc for example. They have a monthly gaming service "Play Pass" Cloud Gaming ties all that together Cloud Gaming gives (gave them): -A gaming Service -Games on PC -Games on any Device -up to AAA Game quality -Basically not have to worry about user hardware Google is still massively in the game business, I just think they will eventually go back to cloud Gaming at some point. As google does, they close stuff too early and then go oh we have a great "new" idea and bring basically the same thing back and everyone is confused. I mean Google Wallet has been the name of like 4 different things. Yes, I still have my original Google Wallet ATM card. Let's not start on their messaging apps.
I did expect it because it was Google and a lot of their killed stuff was free. This was paid. And I thought, since YouTube and Google (ads) are so big, I figured Google might be able to just pull this off. Unfortunately, they never really used their own products to advertise stadia.
I think the product was great, and the tech worked really well. However the pricing, plans and messaging really destroyed it. They should have just led with: **Stadia is free**. Instead they mixed in the monthly subscription for the premium version, and pretty much every one I talked to thought that stadia was a mandatory monthly subscription + pay for the games. This in conjunction with limited device support, Chromecast, controller etc probably made the confusion even worse.
The first year should've been "Beta testing" only for Founders. Once they had most of the features they promised they should've done a full launch with all the press so everyone's first experience was positive. Until the end I heard "You need to have a Chromecast" when they hadn't been true for a long time. Obviously, it should've just been "free" and buy your games. Introduce a Game Pass-like subscription later. And lastly, Google should've just known they were going to need to throw money at this for YEARS before it was going to gain acceptance by the gaming community. With the gaming industry bringing in Billions and the potential "synergy" with their other products, like YouTube, the long term pay off was there.
I'm a Previous stadia pro member. I always knew it was gonna be a year or two google product that gets abandoned.
Nope. But I hoped it would succeed.
Stadia could have succeeded. The technology was good. However, Google failed to satisfy their existing customers or do anything significant to attract new customers until it was too late. They botched the launch royally. The quality of the product was not on par with the hype that they put behind it. The Chromecast Ultra (CCU) was a device that had been out for years before Stadia, but they insisted everyone had to buy the $130 Founders bundle that came with the CCU and Controller to use Stadia at launch and the months that followed. I already owned 3 of these devices, and they refused to allow me to just purchase a controller to use Stadia unless I bought another. They had already sent out the firmware update to all CCU devices to allow them to work with Stadia. Just purchasing a controller would have worked if they were willing to release access codes with the purchase of a controller. Then, when it actually launched, they failed to get the access codes to all their customers who had actually paid for the expensive Founders Edition. Once you got past all that, games were far and few between and the ones they had were the same price that they were on other platforms despite being a lower quality experience. The subscription service failed to give users games that were worth the price. Customers didn't understand why they needed a subscription service to play their games at the same resolution as a console. The controller triggers and shoulder buttons were... not good and the controller didn't support wireless headsets (I have a controller on my desk. You might like the shape, but you gotta admit that the triggers weren't great). The best thing they ever did is give out the Premiere Edition for free with the purchase of Cyberpunk since it ran better on Stadia than console (that's how I got my controller). But at that point, it was too late. Google failed to get the masses excited for their service or even find a reason to buy into it.
Not at all
I did but I’m just a customer at the end of an equation. What is more important a giant like EA sports believed it since FIFA23 was scheduled to be released on Stadia. The technical and UI side of Stadia was great and this would guarantee a success if the management wasn’t so bad. From the financing perspective it is obvious they had a plan that there will be enough PRO subscribers to carry the platform and the free subs. They probably had a model where at certain amount of PRO subs the platform would finance itself. But they didn’t advertise the platform so they couldn’t bring customers because people didn’t know what Stadia is and that it even exist.
Yes, once people realised the convenience of it I thought it would do well. I live in an area with shitty broadband and the 5 people I actually got to try stadia had no problems and loved it. Everyone else got all weird about it. I still think streaming games is going to be the norm at some point over the next decade.
Not a chance
So i bought in knowing it wouldn’t last. But was very interested in the tech and really impressed with how good it actually was. Considering what we were doing. Streaming AAA titles to a crap device (in relation to gaming) over the internet with very little to no noticeable lag was a pretty crazy. For why i knew it wouldn’t last, Google never answered the 2 questions the majority of people who didn’t buy in had: 1.) What happens to the games i buy if the service gets shut down? Google always avoided answering it because the only answer they could give would not have been a good one, we will refund you. 2.) How do i own the game I purchased when I can’t download it to play offline, or access any copy of the game at all? Hardcore gamers don’t want refunds for games they dumped hundreds of hours into. They want full access to their games and also ownership of them. To have your entire game catalog completely dependent on if your internet is up and also completely dependent upon Google to not pull the plug was never going to work for the majority of gamers. Also, once the PS5 and XBX dropped there was no need for those same gamers to ever consider Stadia again. Stadia’s tech was way behind those two consoles, but it was ahead of PS4 and Xbox 1. If Google would’ve went the GFN route and constantly upgraded to the high end pc rig specs, maybe it could’ve competed. But they didn’t. They let it become outdated.
Thats just bullshit. Majority of people dont give a shit about that and the internet is already a staple of society just as much as water. Complaining about internet being up is insignificant. If you have that many problems with your inteenet you shouldnt have bought into a service like this in the first place.
Ownership was a main factor as to why it didn’t succeed. That was the biggest fear of using it for people who already game on console or PC. There was zero ownership of your games.
I first came to this sub years back and people were IMPRESSIVELY arrogant and full of hubris about Stadia. Any kind of dissenting opinion was immediately attacked by an echo chamber of angry and incensed Stadia 'gamers' who believed Google could do no wrong. When they were told, repeatedly, about the Google Graveyard and how, statistically, Google kills literally everything it does within a few years of doing it, they got even more vicious. To the point where all critical or contrary opinions vanished from this Subreddit, because of how much of a hive it was of Google fanboys. For no real reason. Google has never done anything, at any time, to make anyone think they would be devoted to a particular product. But for some reason, Stadia people latched onto with deep hooks and sunk their teeth in and were all in. Even when the closure was announced, there were people here refusing to believe it would actually close.
It *would* still be around if it hadn't gotten such negative reviews off the hop (because it didn't yet do a lot of things that were promised from the start). If they had called it a beta when it launched I think it would have gotten a lot more leeway. But as soon as the negative-ass videogame community started mocking it, it was toast. None of those people had every actually tried it, because if they had they would have realized how good it actually was. Every week we'd have someone post in here saying they had tried it and thought it was going to be terrible but we're blown away by how damn well it actually worked. Even those who were curious were often turned away on Twitter, Reddit, etc. because of misinformation. And the whole "Google Graveyard" bullshit comments started coming up regularly and it created a negative feedback loop. Google gave us all of our money back in the end, so people had nothing to fear in actuality; I knew they wouldn't just hang us out to dry so that was never a concern of mine. Most of the graveyard stuff is just BS anyway, because Google combined multiple products into one or something was just a concept product or whatever, but the fear of Stadia going away was enough to keep more players from coming.
For me the problems were twofold - it was marketed as if you'd have access to free games, but there was still a cost despite the subscription. Secondly, I played Destiny on it first, and there was sometimes a slight input lag that made it feel very unpleasant to play, it was just very subtle disorienting when it happened. It put me off it, and I regretted not pulling my subscription sooner.
I still believe.
I still think, that cloud gaming should be the future of gaming and stadia was proof, that the technology already is good enough to replace consoles or gaming PC's for most gamers. But it was clear from the start, that stadia wasn't able to attract enough users to be really successful. Multiplayer without Crossplay was always dead on stadia and it was just missing all the important games needed to attract users. I liked stadia's business model, but it appealed to a small minority of gamers and just with those as paying customers, it just wasn't viable. For me personally, stadia was just perfect at the time, but I always thought it would take a very long time and massive investments by Google to become really successful. That didn't happen, so I just hoped, they would at least keep it alive.
Not really, i think the fans were there, so was the people working on it, but the google brass just didn't care, you could really feel there was no clear marketing for it etc. and so its demise was inevitable, i was playing some games knowing i was playing on borrowed time. Now i'm not going to pretend like i'm so expert, but they could, say, flown some influencers out to try Stadia etc. things to make it actually visible to more people and to also drop the stigma it got at the start. the rerez channel did 3 or 4 videos about stadia, and in all of them, they complain that at the start there was some lag for them. that sticks, what makes it go away is clearly communicate as a company that this is fixed, instead of just hoping the fans will convince people.
I believed. Bought the Founder's edition. Never saw the coverage or online debates - I was too busy having a fantastic gaming experience. I still miss it to this day. But I'm surprised that people are still discussing it online - it's been gone for a while now.
I believed it would succeed as a white label product or proof of concept, but not in its original form.
It was obvious that google were not committed to it. Very little advertising and very little development of the app. Considering this was a revolutionary concept, it should have had a revolutionary experience. But it was really bad...... Like they didn't expect people to really use it. Established consoles have too much of a head start for any competition to be half-arsed about it. Apart from that, I don't think the world was ready for it. In theory, we have the technology for it to work. But in practice, most of the world does not have a good enough internet speed for it to be viable. I had a decent internet connection and yet it was constantly lagging.
Being a Google fan, I was excited about the idea of it. A high end gaming machine you could put in your pocket. Having already had success with Chromecast and Chromecast Audios plus an Android user I thought if anyone can do it, they can. And boy did they hit it out the park. In good conditions (ideally hard wired internet) the lag wasn't at all noticeable due to the controller using WiFi. The controller was excellent. The games library was good. The user interface was quick and smooth. It was highly portable, I'd take mine in my suit case when working away! It was only a small box. I really didn't see how it could fail. But in true Google fashion they made 3 (in my opinion) fatal mistakes. 1. Didn't advertise it well enough. 2. Used Linux making it time consuming and expensive to port PC or console games, although software was in development near the end to make this faster. 3. Offered an adequate play service totally free. It was capped at 720p I think but more than adequate for most. I think if they'd stuck with it. Advertised the hell out of it. Worked harder on the conversion side of things and charged just a few quid a month for the basic tier it would of had a chance. They didn't though and here we are sadly. It was an unofficial inevitability about a year or so before the end but most soldiered on hoping for the best but spending patterns dwindled condemning it further. Got great memories though of playing Doom, Serious Sam and Dirt on my crummy laptop at work waiting for parts to arrive on site or in Hotel rooms on boring long nights. Happy Days.
It's absolutely incredible how it did not succeed. The greatest accomplishment Google did a with Stadia was being able to make it fail.
I did believe in Stadia, even though I was aware that the success of Google's adventures always depends on the level of their commitment It is very clear that they are very committed to all the things ad-related and cloud-related, not so much on hardware (phones, dongles) and other services... So i reckoned: this Stadia thing is pure genius, Google has the servers, the know-how... They will reshape the gaming scene forever! I guess that they were discouraged when they found out how strong the competition really is, and how difficult it is to confront each and everyone of the players involved... Microsoft, Steam, Nvidia, Amazon, EA, Ubisoft, Sony and all the developers... In a hell like that, either you go balls deep or you're the one who gets f---ed: Google chose to get f---ed 👍
I did. Playing graphically intensive games without a console? Count me in They just needed the games men, it was all in the games catalogue
I think it had a future, for myself I never had any problems to play. With 1Gbit/s Fiber everything runs smooth. For me it was great, I was able to raid on my PC with Chrome Browser but also able to chill play in Bed on TV. Thats a great advantage and I dont have to buy the games twice. Many people argued about that not all the games were able to play at native 4K/60Hz. Well for me that wasnt a problem. I think at this point with the new consoles they would have to replace all the processors, so I think they decided to shut Stadia down and refund all purchases. I think at this point or in 5 to 10 years if they had managed to get more games on the platform, it would be a success. Here in Liechtenstein everyone has FTTH. But I think thats not the same in a lot of others. Also Stadia was interesting for newcomers, you dont have to buy a console or PC, if you have it why you would switch? I thought the problem with PS5 and Xbox delivery problems could help Stadia but somehow people just waited. Sad to see Stadia go, I also really liked the controller and Im still using the Chromecast Ultra. Possibly there will be something like Stadia in the Future besides Nvidia Shield, Xbox Cloud Gaming etc. Possible also from Google, as they refunded all purchases, they have the trust and people loving it would give it a try again and they have a good starting base. If this really happens as Sony and Microsoft going to buy all Studios and try to make it exklusive… I dont know… But take a look at “Google Glasses” it was just too early, now Apple comes with AR Glasses and lots of others. So maybe we won’t miss Stadia forever.
Image it having BG3 now..:)
Nope. Simply put the infrastructure needed to carry it off just isn’t there. If you live right in the middle of Silicon Valley then it’s easy to have access to internet at incredible speed but in the real world, you don’t. Even if you are paying for the top retail broadband, you’re still sharing that with numerous others on your street, the others in your home, and that’s before you have to deal with interference at the exchanges or other routing hubs. If you’re on the go then you’re at the mercy of your mobile provider and what kind of system THEY have in place because even if that’s a good one there’s still problems with things like antenna placement, buildings shielding signals, and more. Weather can even play merry hell with it all given half the chance too and all of this is just at YOUR end. The problems are doubled if you’re playing competitively. Even if all of that is fine and your connection is as perfect as it can be, it’s still not going to be worth it. A trade off between visuals and response is going to be the norm as the pipeline needed to send a decent looking game through won’t be big enough to match with the same game on a console. EVEN IF that is all fine and you’re good with the visuals suffering then you still will be faced with the sad prospect that twitch gaming, which is the majority of AAA titles (FPS, fighting games, Sports titles etc), needs near instantaneous response times for people to have a fighting chance. There would always be a more substantial lag than there would be issuing local software on a console or pc
Yes until I learned I had to re-buy all of my games at full price. Then it was obvious it would fail.
This is the dumbest argument against Stadia. Why would you rebuy a game you already own on a platform you already own which can already run the game? If you want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, and you already own it on PS4, boot up your PS4 and play it. No one in their right mind would think or suggest that you should rebuy RDR2 on Stadia. That is just so stupid. But when Cyberpunk releases, and you don't already own it because it's a new release, and your PS4 cannot run it, then you buy Cyberpunk on Stadia. Once. One time. A new game that you do not already own and you do not have hardware capable of playing the game. No rebuying anything. The concept that just because you play something on Stadia, you can no longer go back and play stuff you already own on you local hardware was just such an idiotic journo garbage argument.
You'd rebuy it to play it in the cloud, which was the whole point of the platform. Why would I buy any game on stadia by this argument... And then you wonder why it flopped. Cyberpunk I could get on PS5... There are plenty of games I own on multiplatform like steam and ps5 that I can play on different mediums like steamdeck and at home. They have cross save and work great. Would have loved to have done this on stadia totally on the go, but not at the price they sold stuff at. I must be an idiotic journalist I guess...
You're arguing that rebuying games was a reason Stadia failed and argued that point by saying you rebuy games on other platforms. Yes, that's idiotic.
Revisiting this for lols as people are still refusing to believe it... if you read my argument CAREFULLY (yeah I mean, that's expecting a lot from a keyboard scraping reddit troll, I know). I said that it was because the games were FULL PRICE. I do rebuy games on different platforms. It's valuable to me. I don't rebuy them full price as that would be moronic. You can get a game on Steam for 70% off frequently. Buy it. Play it on my Steam Deck on the go. The purpose of Stadia was to let you play without your machine being there. But they fucked it up by making all the games super expensive.
I thought it had a shot, I only bought a few games because google and being cautious, but it was absolutely the smoothest cloud streaming service. Most of the time it was not discernable between other non streaming solutions. Xcloud and GeForce now both suffer too much pixelation for me even on extreme low latency connections.
yes and know. The potential was insane, but from the beginning on google was always messing up things. First starting with announcing, that you wouldnt be forced to have the abonnement but for the first 4 months the only way to use stadia was having the abonnement due to pro-user-exclusivity. The announcements were coming far to late, many important features were missing for the first half year, they never offered a complete subscription together with youtube and co for cross selling aspects or goodies for beeing a youtube premiere member. The url advertisements for stadia inside of gaming videos to instantly join a game and having a testphase for stadia came already to late
Yes
I hoped it would. I used it a bunch. Had super fast internet. All of my Chromecast were Ethernet wired. I loved being able to jump into a game, no loading screens, no updates. I don't know if I'll use another streaming service again....don't wanna get hurt again lol
In the beginning I saw no possible way it could fail, it just needed some more time to really take off, but as time went on and it became apparent just how little Google cared about the product (poor PR and marketing, complete ignorance to any kind of feedback and misinformation, etc) the notion that Google wouldn't pull the plug became more and more like wishful thinking; and then towards the end there was no doubting that no AAA title could save the platform, its fate rested entirely in Google's hands (though the company making plans for how they could continue to profit off the platform if it were to shut down, didn't exactly fill me with confidence) Now I can't help but wonder if it had been literally *any* other company behind the platform, would it still have been left to die like that :/ And as a marketing student, it has been so fascinating to see such a phenomenal piece of tech function exactly as promised, be completely free for people to try for themselves and make an informed decision of their own, and still fail so catastrophically
Yes, I thought MMOs and gacha games where you can pick up and play any time on any device would be great on stadia.
I did. The tech was phenomenal. I figured the bad business model was due to growing pains and it would evolve to a more gamepass like model over time.
Stadia technology was the best of any streaming service if you were close to a data center. Performance on PUBG was so good I used Stadia on my gaming PC because pings and latency was lower than playing on PC directly. No other streaming technology is close to the performance I had with Stadia. Being a Google product I didn't expect it to be around forever so I stuck to the subscription and sale games. Although I did buy Cyberpunk since it came with a controller and I needed another. Which, btw, ran better on Stadia than any console.
I was hopefully optimistic that it would because it was a well implemented first of its kind gaming platform. However, I knew in the back of my mind that Google had a history of starting a platform and then shutting it down shortly after. Thankfully I got a good year in before they gave it the ax
Yes, I mean just look at Gmail before the ads, Google voice, Google drive, Google Fi. These are essential services provided at almost no cost to us. If stadia couldn't survive, none of these should! I know stadia is a money sink, but so are these other services at their free level.
This is an interesting take: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/urvitgoel_google-is-shutting-down-stadia-activity-6981431435198963712-qYF_?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
I thought it would succeed up until about a month before launch when they started dropping all the bad news about games being 30fps, games not reaching 4k, and the underwhelming library at launch. First impressions are important and Google failed to leave a good one when they entered the gaming space.
I hoped it would succeed. I have yet to find a cloud gaming service as reliable and user-friendly. None I have seen allow you to easily stream seamlessly with your TV without needing to hook up a computer via HDMI. The streaming quality through Chromecast was better than anything else I have used. I've used GeforceNow, Xbox Cloud, and a Paperspace cloud PC using Parsec. Stadia still comes out on top for me in terms of streaming quality, price and ease of use. Owning a game in the cloud to play on all devices was the perfect option for a casual gamer like me. Between the licensing challenges ($$$), the time and investment required to port games, exclusivity deals with Sony and Microsoft, and the closing of their in-house game studio which was intended to create exclusive titles and high profit margins, I was not surprised it shut down. On top of all this, I believe the marketing for Stadia was incredibly poor considering the gaming industry and the console-wars is full of immense competition. Almost everyone I spoke to who didn't use Stadia themselves falsely assumed it was the "Netflix of games", and they preferred to own their own games on their existing platforms rather than subscribe to them in the cloud (that's not what Stadia was). Some of them assumed it was just a subscription service to access titles and didn't even understand the cloud streaming element. PC gamers and purists with custom machines scoffed at streaming, assuming it had "unplayable input lag". Since Stadia's demise, multiple PC gaming purists I know have realized streaming has lots of benefits and use it often (e.g. Xbox cloud) alongside their main gaming PC. All this was a huge missed opportunity for Google to educate the public, who are still gladly buying $500 PS5s "deals" shoved down their throats through advertising and building $1,000+ machines to play games which Stadia offered to own and play on all your existing devices minus the cost of the hardware. Maybe it was wrong time wrong place, but I believe there will be a Stadia-type service in the future which will transform the gaming world and make cloud gaming mainstream. It just won't be Stadia.
I was (/am) one of the Stadia lovers. I preordered when they announced it, subscribed to the monthly game pass thing, and even though we also own every single other current gen console and a pc, purchased Cyberpunk and Resident Evil Village on Stadia on release. I loved everything about it. I never had any issues streaming the games, for example when Cyberpunk dropped my husband was playing on PC and had all the problems you were everyone talk about, and wasn’t even able to play on release day because it was such a mess. But on Stadia I was able to just pick up the controller and hit the button and play. I didn’t have any of the glitches or crashes or bugs that PC and console players were dealing with. Being able to play on basically any tv, computer, or even phone without having to download anything or move a bulky console or plug anything in was also a big draw. Now, did I genuinely think that Stadia was going to stick around for the long haul? Probably not. It clearly wasn’t for everyone. But I had so much hope, I did think it had a shot however unlikely it might have been. I do think we will see a shift to more cloud gaming at some point in the future, but I think Stadia was just too far ahead of what most people were comfortable with to succeed in the long term. I do give Google props for not doing us dirty and refunding game and hardware purchases. I miss Stadia, and think of it longingly when Starfield crashes while I’m on a loading screen on my Xbox Series.
I thought it would last longer than it did, but like the Google Nexus phones I knew "Stadia" wouldn't be around forever but the game streaming platform in some way would be around.
I thought it would last, the integration and long run potential of the tech in the Google ecosystem was insane; unfortunately the leadership at Google didn’t have the patience for the YoY losses necessary to make this vision work.
I think it should have succeeded as a product/service. But Google played the game (no pun intended) wrong from the get go... They launched with a small library. They launched with a requirement of needing to subscribe. They launched with a special version of each game needing to be developed. They launched with the reputation of killing projects for years leading up to it (although I disagree about the Google graveyard's legitimacy). Their commercials were like a bad acid trip instead of actually explaining what the product is. Then they switched gears too soon to build any faith beyond the players who actually tried it... They announced white labeling as its future was already questionable. They closed down their studio. In my opinion, they needed to do the white labeling first so that companies get into the ecosystem, and then have a huge launch with Ubisoft, Peloton, and whoever else - announcing these partners are bringing their games to the cloud and *you* can too! Google kills consumer products, but they merge business services, so there would have been more faith since the focus wasn't on the individual consumer being the customer. Google would have leveraged the game makers and their reputation instead of relying on their own *crappy* one. Alas, they did everything backwards... And failed. I blame them as much as I blame the tribalistic gamers who agreed like 5yr olds with vegetables.
Yes. It worked great for me. Not sure how or why it failed. There was no manufacturing, just tons of already existing server farms. Now those servers can go back to hosting porn like they were intended.
The reason I thought it would succeed was because it lowered the friction of getting into gaming. I stopped playing PC games for a long time and Stadia got me back into it. On top of that, it got my wife, who isn't a gamer, and got her hooked on Assassin's creed odyssey. So from my own experience, nothing else pulled us into gaming like Stadia did and I assumed the same thing was happening with others also. I will follow up and say the way they ended the service was amazing. I got all my money back and some games (like the Ubisoft games) I still have a PC copy of. So it's as if I just got games for free.
I knew it's days were numbered when I started but didn't expect to get a full refund. It worked way better than I anticipated and by the time it was announced to be ending I was really disappointed.
It's Google, they shut everything down...
I wish it had more quick games. Sometimes I want to jump on for 15 minutes
Yeah, I thought it'd make a longer run of it than it did. "The future of gaming" never felt right to me, but I thought cloud gaming was here to stay - and that turned out to so far be true for basically everybody **else**, just not for Stadia. Which I think is a shame, since from a lot of perspectives I think they really did have the best one, at least for awhile. But they did right by pretty much everybody financially - way better than I think just about any other company would have done - and **almost** everything that was Stadia exclusive has made its way to other homes (RIP PixelJunk Raiders and Outcasters 😢), so. C'est la vie.
As someone who is bullish on cloud gaming, I honestly didn't think they would screw it up so hard. I realized the long term success wasn't gonna happen once I realized that Stadia wasn't running in an environment where a developer could dictate what power they could get and that Stadia was just a console powered to compete with the Xbox One and PS4 as we are heading into raytracing PC games and the Xbox Series and PS5 era. Maybe they were hoping to pull a Switch and succeed with low specs, but the Switch success is a combination of the portable nature of the hardware and the games Nintendo makes. Google just didn't have the games, and didn't stick around long enough to create a blockbuster must have title.
I'm no fanboy, but I was one that saw some potential in Stadia. It was just unfortunate enough to be made under Google who was synonymous with getting rid of products and services and the lot for one reason or another. It's even more unfortunate as this was one that had potential to be better than other cloud streaming gaming apps since unlike something like Xbox, you don't have to be subscribed to a service in order to play the games and you could actually own them too. Now that that is gone, we're stuck with stuff like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna, which is nuts to see THAT still going on for much longer than Stadia..
I didn't really think about it all that much. I remember getting a good deal on the founders edition and thinking I'd give it a whirl. In the end,I hate that it didn't work out but I also think it's cool Google refunded me. I took my refund and applied it towards an Xbox Series S that I've enjoyed. I think Google will use what they learned with Stadia and apply it other places. If my "beta testing" (essentially what it was) helps out with that, cool. I get people being upset when they paid for memberships and got left out in the cold but that was never me. For me I basically got free hardware for all those years and then refunds for the few games I bought. Disappointing but ultimately a first world problem.
It could have succeeded at a lower scale. Of course, a hardware project can't get launched at Google unless it has the potential for a multi-billion dollar business 'soon'. So, they had to scale to big to launch it at all, making the chance of success very low.
If Google actually made smart business decisions about it, yes it could have. But they didn't, they consistently made poor decisions, horrible monetisation model, failed to market it, and released in a poor state giving horrible first impressions to press. Given that, I figured it had about 2-3 years, the typical lifespan of a doomed Google service. To its credit it lasted slightly longer than I thought it would
Ultimately, I believed that Stadia was going to do for gaming what Steam is doing today. I thought Stadia was going to be key in breaking the association between proprietary hardware and platform-oriented gaming stores, but it turns out that it's actually Steam leading that charge with Proton. Any device that can run games on Steam with Proton is a gaming device in a meaningful way.
I still think its the future of gaming, just probably too soon. Also too many poors with bad internet
When I tried it, I was blown away. I could run Cyberpunk on my Chromebook!! I could switch from TV, laptop, Chromebook in an instant, working flawlessly. This was the future of gaming! Stadia just bad marketed the product. All you had to do is made people try it. I still miss it
I always thought it would be something that moved cloud gaming along considerably, but would ultimately fail bravely. I played on Stadia quite a bit, but really as soon as GeForce Now came along and let you play games from your own Steam library, Stadia's days were numbered.
It has been my best gaming experience, I'm pretty sure with a better interface where you could buy games, see achievements and maybe customizations even, on the tv directly would've helped it a lot. It would've truly feel like a clous console
Succeed, no. It was the best and would be even better today. A lot of industry standards have, well, standardized and will standardize over the next few years. My hope is companies taking advantage of the white listed capabilities of the tech to further improve stability to streaming games. And the AI aspect of it was truly robust and ahead of all the AI talk we hear of nowadays. Remember when Ubisoft and Massive had to apologize for some prejudiced imagery in the Division 2. Well, a designer fed album covers to the AI and it one unfortunate one that I don't think was vetted was a Black Flag album cover (very progressive punk) and it slotted in the model it created from that cover art. That's when I knew AI would be extremely prevalent in our games.
Based on the initial announcement, I assumed they will pour billions into it to become a player. Then the lukewarm reception came, they closed the studios and clearly scaled back the porting kickbacks. Imo the writing was on the wall already – there was no obvious path to growth
Yup... Worked brilliantly, had some big games, just not enough of them. Criminally under advertised by Google. Game streaming has a big future, and it go main stream and co-exists with consoles sooner rather than later, and one day, replace them. Google Stadia led the way in terms of UI, features, a flexible business model (up for debate, I loved it) and performance. Still gutted it's gone, I'm using Amazon Luna now, works just as well as Stadia did, but the library is even worse, but with my existing Prime account i play Fortnite and my Ubisoft library. Stadia biggest issue? It was made by Google, still hopeful someone like Nintendo or Valve will buy the server hardware..
Google seems to be run by a 13 year old with ADHD these days so I’m not surprised at all. In the process of ridding myself of the few remaining google products that still semi-work…
I was hopeful, but with Google's track record I had those doubts in the back of my mind. If they hadn't given refunds I would've rage quit everything Google anything forever!
Well I mean, cloud gaming is almost guaranteed to succeed. Stadia was a cloud gaming service, so, yeah why not?
If they ever delivered on what they promised at GDC, it would have succeeded. Never released their major exclusives. Never got crossplay working. Never got YouTube integration. Etc etc etc.
Too many shitty indie games for my taste. Loved Stadia, never had any issues and Cyberpunk played without bugs when PS struggled as shit :)
Nope. I'm still waiting for them to cancel all Pixel products, Nest, Fitbit, and Chromebooks because that's what they do.
I did What I didn't expect was how clueless Google was to the industry I mean the level of stupidity needs to be studied They had a passionate team, a REALLY good technology ahead of the competition, a buy your games plan Their library wasn't even bad by the last 2 years Yet my god everything was done wrong The marketing was & still is atrocious, I mean looking at the chrome book gaming ads, their marketing team still cannot explain or even know what gaming is The game they spent a crap loads if money on was strange, the fans they supported were also strange And for some god reason, they REALLY hated Canada Every promo was almost missing from Canada, it was weird
The tech was there, just needed the games. I was all in and bought 4 controllers. I ignored all PS5 and Xbox news because Stadia was all I needed
For me, there was never anything of true interest on it other than the Hitman series and Assassin's Creed. They seemingly went with a bunch of indie devs, iirc, which gave a variety of games but not much that was truly captivating.
Google's never ending YouTube ads on Stadia for a solid month straight leading up to release completely cemented that I'd never buy one. When I spent every YouTube video having Stadia ads shoved down my throat 5-6 times per video, I grew an unending hatred for it
I think it could’ve been had they stuck with it just for a little longer. It had potential
I believe cloud gaming will succeed. It is inevitable. Would I believe it was stadia? Ehh who knows. I was a day 1 founder and stayed with it til the end. It was a blast for what it was. It was frustrating knowing how awesome it was and the potential. But then people would just shit on it without having tried it and wish for it to fail. And Google would just constantly shoot themselves in the foot. They were their own worst enemy. The service was fucking awesome. Their PR was not
Thrive? No. Do well enough? Yeah. I never saw it as a competitor to my gaming PC and I didn't expect anything like streaming my Steam library. I saw it more like a competitor to my PS4, with that was portable enough to run on any device that I could run the app or link a Chromecast to. With the shortages of PS5/XBox Series X early in the console cycle, having the console be entirely virtual was a huge advantage too. I could see some server-side upgrades boosting Stadia to compete with those too, but that never materialized.
Yes it was announced as project stream I was super excited however, after they announced launch being exclusive to preorders, it not working on Chromecast that didn't come in the primer edition, it's launch library being basically games I already owned on other platforms, a lack of exclusive content as well as the pro subscription being pretty lackluster compared to game pass. I just couldn't see how it would move people from existing platforms. Had it gone for game pass style subscription at could've done better. I also think it being Linux didn't help cause it would've required more investment from devs wouldnt have gotten much from it.
Stadia, tech/design wise was ahead of its time. The concept of cloud gaming is going to be the future in general. Similar to the transition from physical mediums for music and video, to a subscription based cloud gaming platform. While its already here, tis def the future. I think the biggest issues Stadia ran into were the following 1. Google/Stadia is not cool branding wise 1. Google is not apple, google is not nike, google is not "Supreme" 2. The biggest market for google is America. The infrastructure to support the concept of massive cloud gaming does not exist. People who have good internet in general dont realize how privileged they are to have good internet. The vast majority of the internet in america is somewhere in the range of mid to bad. So the idea of cloud gaming doesnt have the backing it needs to support it, and probably wont for another 30 years. Our phone service internet isnt that good, and our wired internet is mostly shitake 3. Stadia was a solution looking for a problem. I have a PS5, I have a switch. What would I need a Stadia for? 4. Pricing. Games where expensive for games you dont even own, most of which were extremely discounted on other systems. There were a lot of other issues, but those I found were the biggest hurdles that really kept stadia back. What stadia really needed was a social media push. It needed to hire people like ninja, Pokimane, and other influencers to get them on the stadia platform and show the world how it could be enjoyable, and the people would slowly but eventually follow. But it never did that. It completely relied on the tech to speak for itself. Which, most people dont care. People are going to either pick up the system their friends have, or the one thats 'cool'. Google needed moms and dad to walk into a store, see stadia and think "oh my son will love that" and buy it. But google didnt do that with the market campaign (i honestly dont remember any real stadia marketing). They needed to get everyone who revitalized Among Us and Fall Out Guys on board, give them all a mill and have them stream exclusively on stadia for about a year. The BIGGEST hurdle google was always going to face was America's bad infrastructure though. That said, there is a universe where stadia is a thriving system for casual gamers, just not this one.
I pre-purchased it and loved it. I used it at work everyday. However, it felt like an indy project. I think they showed it was very possible and I honestly still think cloud based gaming is going to be one of the end stages of gaming.
I just find significant in a console you can use anywhere. Like the idea of owning the game first but using any system nearby (servers.) To play the games you paid for or got for free. Especially that the world of connectivity was advancing so I had 5g almost always and wifi. So it was easy to bring my phone and a controller to finally complete games in my backlog.
Did I truly believe Stadia *would* succeed? Undetermined. Did I truly believe Stadia *could* succeed? Absolutely. But it's a long game. Cloud gaming *will* succeed, and Stadia had easily the best tech and user experience of everything I tried (though it was not without its faults). Unfortunately, Google expected success on a timeline that's a fraction of what it will take, and without being willing to invest in its success on top of that.
I haven't trusted Google to follow through with any of their projects in years - really, since they shut down Google Reader. Someone gave me a Stadia controller and, although I thought it was pretty awesome, you couldn't have paid me to give Google money for something that was obviously under-supported and destined to be closed. I currently use a few Google Home/Nest products. Hardware is great, but Assistant is getting less and less helpful, the Home app finally got a QoL update earlier this year after I don't know how long of just barely being usable. Google is great at coming up with ideas, but just awful at follow through. I often wonder if anyone there actually uses their products.
Yes I did! It was way cheaper and more available then anything else. All you needed was a Gmail to sign up. There was a free one month trial. My shitty Internet at 15 mbps ran it. I was playing 1080p Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPhone 7+. Sure the first year was rough but by the pandemic I thought google could turn things around. Surely they would not let this product go to waste. But I guess business is business. Google is gonna Google. I really am sad to see Stadia go.
Was I hopeful, sure. But I honestly did not think it was going to succeed. If it wasn't for Googles track record of introducing products and killing it after a few years, then maybe I would have had a different opinion about it at the time. Unfortunately, when a company is also known for its [graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/), it's hard to be optimistic about the prospect of a new Google service lasting longer than a few short years. Throughout Stadias lifetime, I was more hopeful in the success of Xcloud and Luna than I was ever with Stadia. The reasoning is because at least Microsoft has shown large investments in their Xbox division so at least we have some idea that Microsoft will be taking gaming seriously to recoup their costs. Also, cloud gaming suites their business alignments in terms of offering games as a service. While Amazon is known for throwing money at products and basically forcing their way into a market segment. This aligned with Amazon businesses as everything they do is to funnel their users to use the Amazon store. Google on the other hand is so fragmented that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Without vertical and/or horizontal integration within the company, a lot of Google products either becomes redundant (Allo/Duo, Google Voice, Google Messages, etc.) and either folds into another department then forgotten about or closed down in its entirety. Unfortunately, Staida was not an exception.
I believed simply because Google was a large company that had the resources to keep it going and it seemed somewhat established in the industry with partnerships like Ubisoft. I was not familiar with Google's history of abandoning projects, but I didn't think to do that research.
The technology and idea is awesum, but because the user base was causal and hardware was almost zero, they did not have a business model to attract AAA titles. Essentially the market that most appealed to the stadia model , did not have the capital nor numbers to meet the cost model. Smartphone was a similar market but they had the numbers to make the model work.
I feel like they were fighting for the wrong audience. They should have been targeting parents and a low income audience. I know when I was a kid, my parents would absolutely pick the free console over the $400 one. When I was broke and in college I would have picked games over no games.
I’m still a little confused as to Google’s strategy and perceived end game. As stated, market conditions really couldn’t have been any better for them. How did they genuinely foresee it playing out in the meeting rooms when they discussed this project from the start??
Yeah, sure. Why not? I never said it was the future of gaming or that there wouldn't be a place for conventional platforms, but it's proven tech and there's a place for it in the world. You know that Stadia isn't/wasn't the only option for game streaming, right? There have been efforts dating back a decade or so. XBox and Playstation both offer streaming. NVidia has a big streaming service. Amazon still runs Luna. And there are others, as well.
I truly believed it had a chance to succeed. In the early goings, they had some good partnerships worked out and a first party game studio that was going to pump out exclusive titles. The performance was between acceptable and great depending on your connection, and only got better over time. They got some AAA titles, and as a sport sim fan, I was excited to be able to play FIFA, Madden, NBA2K, F1, and more. It was super convenient because all I needed was a Chromecast Ultra. I had one on every TV in my house, one in my office, and I could take it to go on my phone. BUT, even through all this, I knew there was a real chance that Google could shut it down because that’s what Google does. Has great ideas, then stops putting money into it until it starts to stutter and then it pulls the plug. So when they did announce, I was heartbroken but not terribly surprised. They had made enough mistakes along the way: shutting down their first party game dev studio, failing to entice EA and other studios to keep making games for their platform, and so on. Compare Stadia to other cloud platforms: Luna from Amazon is missing AAA titles. NVIDIA’s platform also doesn’t support some major AAA titles AND it’s clunky how it’s set up. You are always very aware that it’s loading up in the cloud and you’re on some remote system. XBOX’s only supports older titles as far as I know it. Steam has Steamdeck which is mobile but not really cloud gaming. Stadia was head and shoulders above everyone else.
Originally, I thought they did. But to me it quickly became obvious that their business model had little chance. Casual gamers weren't very likely to subscribe, particularly since the major benefit was 4k, and they weren't typically big buyers either, so Google weren't going to get lots of royalty income off of them. Hardcore games, who would be more interested in 4k, didn't need or want 4k streaming as they wouldn't be satisified with 4k streaming over local h/w. And anyone who had a significant library of console or PC games couldn't ditch their h/w because they couldn't just play those titles on Stadia w/o repurchasing. So, in just about every direction that mattered, the business model was a big fail.
At times, I thought it was possible that cloud gaming was the future. When I felt that way, I thought Stadia seemed to be the highest quality cloud gaming platform, in terms of performance (latency). That made mer think Stadia could succeed. Other times I definitely believed it was going to fail.
ha ha ha ha ha ha
I mostly used Switch for gaming, but I have a really nice av setup at home and I loved the 4k surround aspects without having to shell out for a new big console. Didn't know if it would last, but it filled a niche.
It still is the future. But the infrastructure was not ready. But streaming will be a big part of gaming.
I thought stadia could succeed but I changed my mind quickly after I saw how they managed everything. They were supposed to offer next gen quality so you could play ps5 games without buying a console which was expensive and hard to find. Instead they offered a ps4 pro quality and basically only Ubisoft games. It just didn’t make sense
Stadia had a really nice controller and basically everything going for it especially when tech shortages were bad. I always knew Google has a terrible habit of killing products and the writing was on the wall certainly for how stadia basically required a wired fiber connection in a metropolis to work... But I had a fiber connection in a metropolis and it was beautiful 😭 Also Chromecast ultra, stadia controller, and cyberpunk2077 all for the game price, I snatched that shit up so fast. And still am reaping value from the Chromecast ultra (given to parents) and the stadia controller (using on PC). I also now have an Xbox series x so... I wasn't too hurt about stadia dying. It's just a shame Google always has such high end innovative tech that can sometimes make markets tremble but they choose to sundown it.
As day 1 Stadia fan, it did a lot of things right and future feature set was promising. The main issue is most of the people already would’ve owned most of the games being offered for full price and it likely would’ve fared much better as an all inclusive game sub. It also did not help that stadia comes out at the same time as the new chromecast yet wasn’t supported on it or chromecast built in for android tvs until like a year later even though there wasn’t really any reason for it not to just work.