Yesterday The Verge broke the story that Google is shuttering Stadia and will be refunding all purchases. I guess it is good on Google for refunding those purchases, but it does make me question how much they actually made on the platform as a whole. I know I never spent a dime on it, but still had pro access to the service for a few months. You could get the starter bundle of hardware shipped to you if you had a paid subscription to YouTube. Last year if you bought any single game on the service, they would also ship you the hardware for free. Both of these promotions tell me that no one actually wanted to pay money for the service or the hardware and as a result, they had many units just warehoused and waiting to be shipped. Admittedly I have both a Steam Link and Steam Controller when they did similarly nonsense liquidation practices to get rid of stock.
I would love to say we all saw this coming. I’ve been pretty vocal over the years about just not really understanding the value proposition of the network. However, it seems that specifically, developers who had partnered with Stadia did not see this one coming. Yesterday in my travels I came across the above twitter thread where a developer was set to launch their game in just a few days on the platform. It seems as though this decision was not widely communicated until the article and official blog post were released. I feel bad for the folks who worked on the Stadia project because in spite of all of my complaints the technology was actually really good. The big problem however is that a reasonable product offering never really coalesced around that excellent technology.
I think Google made the false assumption that if they created the technology, the games side of the equation would just sort itself out. I have had the benefit of being on this blog platform for almost fifteen years at this point, and as a result, I have all of the images that I originally used when I talked about the not-great lineup of games at launch. That is it folks, an image I clipped from a website showing the games that would be available on Stadia day one. It looks less like the launch of a new platform and more like a Humble Bundle deal from five years ago. Worse yet, and this is something I am going to dive into a bit further is that most “core” gamers that they were marketing the system towards already had access to these titles.
I think one of the biggest problems with Stadia was its marketing and who it thought was the core audience. A lot of effort was spent marketing stadia towards core gamer audiences including the big reveal taking place at E3… a core gaming event. Even this commercial from the launch of the platform seems to indicate that Stadia is a replacement for PC and Console gaming, and that core gamers should want their console to have “no smell”? However, the ideal audience for Stadia was the person who USED to play games regularly but life has now gotten in the way. Someone with maybe an Xbox 360 from the glory days of playing COD with friends, and just fell out of the upgrade cycle and now maybe wants to dip in and play with their buddies again. The idea of just buying a game without a hardware lock-in is likely incredibly appealing to that audience.
The problem is that dream never really fleshed itself out. Even Destiny 2, one of the launch titles that was given away to every single member… was isolated so that you could only play with other Stadia users. It was not until two years later when Bungie focused on cross-play functionality that Stadia finally became open to actually playing with already entrenched Destiny 2 players. This same story played out on a few other games so the idea of using Stadia as a way to jump-start into group play never really worked either. Again the tech was great and could have been this awesome in-between option for folks who did not have the time or desire to maintain hardware, but that reality never fully materialized.
There was a very snarky tweet floating around yesterday essentially presenting the facts that Stadia has had what could have been a massive headwind over the last few years. It is true, the pandemic and boom in gaming caused so many other platforms to thrive. The global chip shortage and insane aftermarket prices drove people to look for other alternatives. Even the very rough launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and the high system demands, made Stadia one of the best platforms to play that game on. None of this was really enough to every truly jump-start this platform. What the snarky tweet does not go into however is just how stiff the competition for the cloud gaming space has been.
In very short succession Stadia had GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming (XCloud), Amazon Luna, and the aging PlayStation Now infrastructure getting a fresh coat of paint. In all of those cases, they were offering a similar streaming platform with its own baked-in library of games, and other than Luna… some significant benefits to choosing those platforms. Let’s talk about each of them a bit.
GeForce Now
It was really hard to find a number of games that you can play on this platform because it supports multiple existing storefronts… but one site indicated that you could play 1311 games. The huge benefit of GeForce Now is that you can bring your existing game licenses from Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, or UPlay and then are only really paying for the streaming service itself. It was not trying to be a new competitor on the game buying landscape and as a result, remains extremely competitive if the games you want to play are supported.
Xbox Cloud Streaming
If you have Xbox Game Pass you have access to Cloud Streaming as part of that and can play 186 games completely through streaming. This library continues to grow as the Game Pass ecosystem expands and since you are not paying any additional fees on top of that service, it is a really compelling offering. Even more compelling is that Microsoft has gone out of its way to make Cloud Streaming work on unaffiliated platforms like the Steam Deck.
PlayStation Now or Whatever they are calling it today
This was another service that I had a hard time getting data on, but based on one site they indicated that there are 750 games available through streaming. I do not think the number is that large, but regardless…. it is a large library that you now gain access to through various premium tiers of the PlayStation Plus subscription. This is the oldest of the streaming infrastructures, but it still seems to work remarkably well.
Amazon Luna
I really feel that Amazon Luna is another service that doesn’t really make much sense. I fully expect we will be hearing that Amazon has canceled it any day now. The service supports 96 games based on a wiki post, and some of those games require additional subscriptions to UPlay in order to access. As bad as I personally feel the product offering is… it does not push aside that this is also a direct competitor to Stadia and that if you have an Amazon Prime subscription you are getting access to several games each month on Luna.
Stadia
While Stadia was a better product offering than Luna, it doesn’t really stack up to any of the others. If you pay for the now $9.99 a month pro subscription you get access to 57 games. Then you can purchase another 233 games for the full market price through their storefront. I think what ultimately killed the service is trying to be its own unique competitor to the other storefronts. It never seemed to be able to cut the deals required to get the games it needed on its platform. Cyberpunk 2077 was the one shining example of a must-play game actually playing as good if not better on the platform, and even it was not enough to make the service viable.
I guess one of the sad things is that Stadia works extremely well on the Steam Deck. Granted this has nothing to do with anything that Google did and relies entirely upon the legwork that Microsoft did with the Edge browser and full native support for the Steam Deck controller, but it still worked beautifully. I do wonder what will happen to the Stadia tech now because it really did work extremely well. Will they rebrand this and try and turn it into something that they sell to publishers in order to let YouTube users launch directly into game demos while presentations are being streamed? There are a lot of possibilities here, and I really hope that it isn’t just going to rot somewhere in a git repository. If anything I think my biggest fear is that the takeaway is going to be that cloud gaming is dead.
I am thoroughly committed to cloud gaming, and I use Parsec streaming every single night to play my gaming desktop across my network from my laptop. In my working world, I use a Microsoft Azure Virtual desktop as my daily driver system. I think hardware virtualization is going to become the reality for the consumer in the same way that it is for server infrastructure currently. It is absolutely certain that gaming will be coming along for this ride, even if it is only to augment the processing power of existing console hardware. Stadia died because it never could quite create a product offering that made sense, not because the technology was bad. I expect to see cloud gaming as a continued presence for years to come.
I have Amazon Prime and I have never even heard of Luna. They certainly don’t seem to be promoting it. Maybe it’s not available in the UK.
GeForce Now is very handy, not least because it has a solid free-to-play option. I use it for New World, which my PC struggles with, and it makes playing that game much less stressful. I’ll certainly use it for more games if they’re on the platform and my rig won’t run them well.
I think the real market for all this is via TV, where all you need to do is subscribe in exactly the same way as you subscribe to a channel and you get access to a large library of newish games you can play on the screen in your living room with no other hardware than a controller. Core gamers are hobbyists who won’t be interested, just like HiFi enthusuasts weren’t interested in the kinds of combo units that filled every living room in suburbia in the 80s and 90s but enthusiasts and core gamers are a tiny corner of the potential mass market.