Good clarification!
…and it’s (mostly) gone.
Wow, that’s pretty fast even by Google standards.
Technically the service isn’t dead yet. They just won’t have any more exclusives or potentially new games at all. And I assume their consumer marketing budget just went to $0.
Hard to see how a white label Stadia tech offering to devs/publishers is any better. You still have to make a unique version of the game which I figured was always the challenge.
They founded that studio way too late in the process.
100% true. They should have had one or more first-party games that really showcased what Stadia can do on day one.
The whole effort should probably end up being a case study. I was working at Shadow, a much smaller, very different kind of cloud gaming company when Google announced Stadia, and I can tell you it was like a nuke got dropped on the (nascent) industry. Everyone was sure they’d transform it and take over.
I see Jade Raymond also left the building.
I think it’s kind of like filming yourself playing football on your favorite team’s pitch versus filming them playing. Do you pay the team a fee?
Heck, don’t even know if there will be a Pixel 6 at this rate.
Google should start a rumor about a hedge fund sniffing around Stadia.
Ok, I’ll eat some crow. I really did think Google would be in for at least a console generation. (And after the Bethesda deal, was half expecting a Ubisoft-sized acquisition, keeping their games multiplatform but keeping streaming exclusivity).
This is clearly two bullets to the neck for Stadia. Not closing a couple of tiny studios, that part is irrelevant. But this bizarro “industry partnerships” plan is just doomed to irrelevance. Who is seriously going to benefit from this? The publisher needs to be large enough to bring their own audience, but small enough that they won’t run their own infra. If that niche exists, it can’t be large enough for anyone at Google to care about.
I’m sure they have their internal analysis about uptake - if anyone does, it’s Google. It feels like there were a ton of Stadia ads yet something like close to 0% interest in it. There were Stadia ads almost nonstop on places like YouTube. If uptake of Stadia hardware was bumped by something like <1% after all that investment, it looks like a DOA product. But this is just a guess. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not if nobody cares.
Maybe? When I worked at 38 Studios as the company headed towards insolvency (which none of us knew was happening) there was lots of talk about licensing our “platform” and we even hired a high-powered hotshot sales guy who was going to work off commission. The “platform” team made a tech demo, which was basically a turn-based gladiator arena that they were super proud of, but was total garbage.
In other words, the decision to move to monetizing the platform wasn’t made because we even had a viable platform or due to a bunch of research that showed it could work - it was just the only thing they could think of to salvage some money from the dying wreck of a business.
Right. If there was any actual demand for this, they’d wait until there were some deals in hand and announce the deals together with the refocus. This looks more like they were told to cut down massively, and are desperately trying to pivot.
With the pandemic, nobody wants to sit at home all day and stream stuff.
Google never gave a shit about Stadia. They never invested in it, offering an attractive service for consumers. They never marketed it. They never offered a too-good-to-be-true introduction to the service. They priced it like it had to make a profit from day one. They didn’t care.
It was in all ways the polar opposite of Microsoft Gamepass.
We don’t know the Gamepass financials. Microsoft sank so much money into it that it could well take years to turn a profit. But what’s clear is Microsoft is all-in. They care about Gamepass in the same way Google cared about Google+ back in the day. It may not succeed just like Google+, but it’s not going to fail from lack of effort or investment.
Maybe they couldn’t get GPUs for the data centres.