Innovation runs deep within Google’s philosophy, but persistence? Not so much, as evidenced by the recent announcement that Stadia would beshutting down at the start of next year. They had the creation part figured out, the “Okay, so how do we run it?” part is where they found themselves short-sighted. Business is all about dumping money to make more money, right? Unfortunately, Google invested money only to quicklyshut down their first-party studio, ostensibly to pourmoremoney into third-party offerings after havingalready spent millionsof dollars.
The first major part of Google’s failure was their inability to be a “gaming” company. How do you do that? By making a game, duh. First-party studios are crucial, just ask Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Despite havingHideo Kojimaat the ready to create another one of his quirky games, as well as Jade Raymond, best known as a founding team member of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, leading Stadia Games and Entertainment, Google never capitalised on their talent.
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Cloud gaming is still an emerging technology, but already has a good number of suppliers. The two pillars that are crucial for any cloud platform are content and accessibility, and Google did astonishingly poorly in both of them. For content, their exclusive library was pretty much non-existent. Their third-party library, however, was even grimmer, espeicially when you considering that they entirely ditched the former to facilitate the latter.
By September of this year, Google had 278 games on Stadia after almost three years. By the end of the inaugural year, Google welcomed 105 of those. Year two also saw a similar number of titles added, 121, leaving on 52 added in this third year. Most of Google’smassivelibrary are also older titles, and only a few of them were added on the same day or month of their original release.
This year, only seven games launched on Stadia on the same date as on other platforms. Google’s largest supplier, Ubisoft, has 40 titles themselves, accounting for 14.38% of Google Stadia’s current library. Ubisoft, in the end, was pretty much the only,AAA publishers to do Day One launches for Stadia.
Hoping to attract indie developers, last year the companyslashed its share of revenueto just 15% for games that make less than $3 million. The concessions weren’t enough to tempt small and medium-scale developers, and the platform didn’t exactly implode with new games.
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Failure for Google, though, was manifested from the very onset of the announcement of the platform. InStadia’s first live presentation, Google began with a statement that demonstrated the breadth of their reach - one that implied their ability to create the mostaccessiblecloud gaming service:
“Today, we are in 19 regions and in over 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables… with Google, your games will be immediately discoverable by over two billion people on a Chrome browser, Chromebooks, Chromecast, Pixel devices, and we have plans to support more browsers and platforms over time. That’s in addition to all the people playing and watching games across YouTube and Google Play.”
Let’s do some superficial armchair analysis. Of the 200 countries Google mentioned, more than half of them can comfortably run Stadia as the minimum required speed is 10 Mbps. Unfortunately, Stadia only made it to 23 of those countries. For reference, rival cloud gaming platform GeForce Now (championed by our own Features Editor) is available in 100+ countries, the scale that Google suggested.
In those 23 regions, Google was directly competing with other services, and some of them are more household names for gaming, like Xbox Cloud Gaming from Microsoft. On the hardware front, Stadia edges over Microsoft with lower latency and higher visual fidelity. Xbox’s cloud offering, however, is bundled with Game Pass Ultimate, which means that for the price you getmuchmore value than Stadia.
On launch, the only way to access Stadia was if you bought Founders Edition or Premium Edition for $130. That would give you a starter kit with goodies like a Stadia controller, Chromecast Ultra, and a three-month subscription to Stadia Pro. A free version didn’t launch until the following year and by then, Stadia’s reputation had tumbled with bad word of mouth and lack of games. People just didn’t really care any more.
Stadia was aimed at people who wanted to play top-tier games but either couldn’t afford the hardware or make the commitment to buying it. But it failed those people due to its stiff barrier to entry which, when finally lifted, didn’t matter that much because once you entered there wasn’t much of value that you couldn’t find elsewhere. Sony and Microsoft’s consoles would eventually bundle cloud gaming as a ‘bonus’ in their wider subscription packages.
Then there’s the inconvenient truth that people simply don’t trust Google all that much to stick by their projects. Remember when Google had toassure people they’d not abandontheir cloud services?
Stadia by no means fell short in terms of technical capabilities, and was widely regarded as the cloud gaming platform with the best performance, but their business model was doomed from the start. They could’ve focused on markets where gaming hardware was hard to access, they could’ve followed through with their first-party games, they could’ve made Stadia less of a closed-off ecosystem.
In the end, not only did Google have proper direction for the platform, they were also quick to give up on it.
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