Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

It’s even stranger how some indie port terms weren’t due to pay out until after the game launched making all their porting effort unpaid

Who could possibly have foreseen that Stadia was hot garbage and would be shut down by a company that has a long history of shutting shit down?

I hope Google quickly reallocates these freed-up resources to bringing back Google Reader.

They considered that, but they have a really exciting project that synergizes Zoom with iMessage and RCS and Whatsapp and Instagram and Tiktok to build the future of interpersonal communication coming up, and they’re really excited about the possibilities of this new service. Expect it to launch in March 2023 and shut down in May.

They’re going to copy TikTok some more too.

Thumbs up for Muse Games (Embr, Wildmender, Hamsterdam):

Thanks for supporting Embr on Stadia, Respondrs. If you own Embr on Stadia and want to keep playing, we’ll help you out. : Stadia (reddit.com)

For sure. First time losing my digital library on anything without any warning. I expected stadia to shut down soon, but not that. Thankfully I spent under 50$.

Whatever you spent, Google is going to refund it. Any hardware, too. Savegames are another story, they’re tricky.

Odd, I thought Stadia had already shut down a while back. Maybe that negative latency did work after all…

Not pro, aka add this to your library to play it later. It was like xbox games with gold / playstation plus with rotating titles every month.

Right, they aren’t refunding the subscription service.

I really enjoyed Stadia’s tech but a streaming-only mobile-first platform launching just a few quarters before the pandemic was about a poorly timed launch as you can muster. It never really had a chance.

A real pity, esp since I know some folks who were on dev side.

Honestly its failure seems overdetermined. Apart from the core tech, it seems pretty much every decision Google made was dooming it failure (and indeed people said so at the time).

Yep, all of those articles could have been written two years ago, pretty much. I HRose’d it myself here tons of times.

Google’s reputation or decisions didn’t help, but I think the fundamental problem is that game streaming is incredibly expensive per user. I’d wager this was doomed from the start by tech math, where a project is only profitable if it achieves some sort of monopoly. “If we capture just 1% of the total market with exclusives…”

I mean, my immediate reaction when they announced it was “this pricing model is doomed”, so I’m sticking to my guts and blaming that.

Was it really “mobile-first”? I saw people armchair-executiving on Twitter about how the pandemic should have actually helped Stadia. No one’s going anywhere, everyone wants entertainment at home, other subscription services all saw a surge, and cheap Stadia hardware should’ve been an easy edge against new expensive consoles that you also couldn’t easily buy if you wanted to.

All of that should’ve helped a well positioned streaming entertainment platform, but Stadia failed there—not because of the pandemic, but for all the other reasons discussed.