That’s it, Google Stadia, it’s over. Will you regret it? To be honest, we don’t.
It’s done ; Google Stadia has been closed for a few hours; a shop that had obviously not attracted enough customers. This closure, or this death, as you wish, was announced. At the end of September, Google had warned that its cloud gaming service, inaugurated in 2019, was living its last months. Now, the Google Stadia page displays this epitaph: “Thank you for playing with us. Stadia has not been available since January 18, 2023. ” The American company’s cloud gaming service will have deceived for 1,156 days.
Here lies Google Stadia (November 19, 2019 – January 18, 2023)
Google had formalized with great fanfare the birth of its Stadia, called Project Stream during the gestation phase (or development if you prefer) on March 19, 2019. In its announcement at the time, the Mountain View giant proclaimed: “The future of video games is not in a console” Google promised a gaming platform thanks to which we would be able to “play AAA games on all types of screens”.
Less than four years later, we were still waiting for AAA games, and we would be tempted to respond to Google’s first assertion that the future of video games was obviously not at Stadia either.
All the cards in hand to succeed
When it came into the world in November 2019, Google Stadia seemed to have all the cards in hand to succeed in establishing itself as THE cloud gaming service and make home consoles old-fashioned.
Born with a golden spoon, it benefited from the firm’s enormous popularity with the general public, and, of course, from the financial power as well as the vast geographical presence of dad Google, which bequeathed it 7,500 servers spread across the globe. In short, an ecosystem that seemed ideal.
And, to top it off, a few months later, a good part of the world found itself confined, hungry for digital content of all kinds.
Google’s credo for Stadia was summed up in one word: accessibility. The general idea of the company was to allow users to enjoy the service seamlessly on different screens: computers, tablets, smartphones, televisions… During the presentation of Stadia in March 2019, Google showed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey played successively on different devices, without the slightest hitch. We also remember that promise of being able to watch a YouTube video of a game and then launch a game of it in seconds with a single click.
Finally, for the more technical aspect, Google bet on servers based on AMD hardware, offering 10.7 TFLOPS FP32; the power of a PlayStation 5 approximately (which was not released at the time). The company offered 4K at 60fps when it launched in November 2019, and was already dangling 8K at 120fps.
A service weighed down by its technique?
We won’t dwell too much on the technical aspect of the service, simply because we don’t consider that to be the root cause of this rout.
In fact, regardless of the provider, cloud gaming remains very dependent on the user’s connection and location. However, on the whole, if you have a good connection with sufficient speed and above all low and stable latency, the main cloud gaming services on the market are relatively on point now.
Well, in our humble opinion, when it comes to image quality, Google Stadia was beaten by Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming and NVIDIA’s GeForce Now. To date, the latter remains, in our opinion, the best cloud gaming service in terms of rendering/latency. This is perhaps what distinguishes a company specializing in hardware, whose engineers have been working on the cloud gaming service since 2013 (NVIDIA GRID initially), and a company which, if the quality and relevance of its algorithms are proven, primarily earns money through advertising.
The reasons for failure: a crappy business model, where the customer went to checkout twice
No, the real Achilles’ heel of Stadia would rather be to look for its economic model, a somewhat bastard model, which required you to go through the checkout twice.
The economic system of the GeForce Now is crystal clear. You rent access to servers to enjoy games in your Steam, Uplay, etc. libraries. You “own” these games from other companies but they are not related to NVIDIA in short, which ultimately provides a service provider role.
Are you traveling for a few weeks or months, do you want to continue your Cyberpunk 2077 adventure started on your gaming PC, but only have a low-powered laptop? NVIDIA simply rents you access to GeForce RTX for a month or more, you are then free to resume your adventure on your fixed PC. Your graphics card is broken, you can’t afford a new one right now, but you still want to play your hundred Steam games? The GeForce Now is an option. Clearly, NVIDIA’s service is primarily aimed at players with a well-stocked toy library, but whose current PC and/or living conditions do not allow local play. If, tomorrow, the service closes, they no longer have access to the service, but keep their games.
On the Microsoft side, Xbox Cloud Gaming is based on a different philosophy: it relies on an all-in-one formula at a very attractive price. For 12.99 euros per month, the GamePass Ultimate subscription gives access to a large catalog of games, including many recent productions, playable locally or, for some, via the cloud. An occasional player wants to test some titles from this catalog for a month? This is possible for a relatively small sum given the price of the games when they come out, and he can do it locally, simply by installing the game on his PC. A big player wants to consume games like others consume series and movies on Netflix? It will cost him 13 euros per month, more or less the equivalent of two new games for one year.
Stadia essentially took the bad side of these formulas: users had to pay for both the subscription, but also the games, which were confined to this platform. Customers were paying twice for the same service in a way, and their purchases were circumscribed to Stadia. The customer who bought Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Stadia store (at a high price by the way) had to play it exclusively on this platform, with no other alternative.
Basically, if you allow us this comparison, the early Google Stadia reminded us a bit of Amazon Prime Video. If you are a subscriber, you have certainly already had the unpleasant surprise of wanting to watch a film on the platform and finding that you still had to go through the checkout, in addition to the Prime subscription. So maybe Amazon Prime Video is saved by the delivery service that motivates most subscribers, but not Stadia. Especially since for the cloud gaming service, it was not videos at 3 or 4 euros, but games sold for 60 euros!
A hungry catalog
Google then corrected the situation a little with its Pro offer, granting a few games here and there and ending up giving access to the entire catalog to its subscribers. However, this reaction came too late to change the game and correct the bad trajectory taken by the service from its inception.
In addition, despite these adjustments, the catalog remained very starved, with around 300 games (the GeForce Now offers more than 1,000), extremely low in AAA, contrary to the initial promise.
Tak, fordi from spillede med
Either way, Google has now turned the Stadia page. The company refunded all purchases of games and other expansion packs to customers. It also unlocked Stadia controller Bluetooth support to allow customers to continue using this precious relic with other platforms.
From now on, the official Google Stadia page simply displays the farewell message reported in French at the start of the article. It is also possible to display it in different languages. In Danish for example, hold “Tak, fordi du spillede med. Stadia lukkede den 18. januar 2023”, or in Polish “Dziękujemy za wspólną grę. Platforma Stadia zostanie wyłączona 18 stycznia 2023 roku”. So, failing to have shaped the future of video games, Stadia can ultimately serve to make us polyglots with a few words.
Finally, we were going to forget them: the consoles are doing very well, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X / S and Nintendo Switch in the lead. Victims of very high demand, they unfortunately did not have time to go to the Google Stadia funeral!
Source : Google
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