Stadia is Another Victim of Google’s Inability to Go Long
You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Stadia because Google did a terrible job advertising it.
Stadia had everything going for it any gaming startup could wish for: the financial backing from a company with deep pockets, Triple-A titles, a global pandemic keeping people indoors, a gaming console shortage, and a shortage of PC graphics cards that are clutch for gaming.
And yet it still failed.
@AaronCrocco as technology Stadia was great! But sadly it had Google behind it. Stadia wasn’t a technological failure it was a marketing failure, a great service killed too soon.
@gpowerf @AaronCrocco Gonna have to disagree on this one. Stadia was more heavily advertised than any Google product I've ever seen. It was just a bad business model.
Cloud gaming is a value add service to client gaming, which is why nobody thinks the version wrapped into Xbox Game Pass is failing but Stadia quickly bottomed out. There is simply no business case to sell you a PC game and not giving you access to the client instance, it's a terrible value proposition in this market.
@gpowerf @AaronCrocco Google talked a lot about Cloud-specific gaming use cases, but those never materialized (and most weren't that compelling anyway).
Stadia working out wasn't a matter of time and money, the business side was just poorly conceptualized on the business side in ways that relied on the tech not having limitations that it inherently has or early adopters fixated on those limitations suddenly ignoring them.
Cloud gaming can be useful, but you can't sell it like that.
@MudMan @gpowerf @AaronCrocco it was the business plan. If they’d done it like gamepass (I.e. Netflix of games) it might have done better. But still it’s being sold to people who don’t have one of the big three consoles and they must be a hard demographic to sell to. The tech was great in my experience (although I heard performance on e.g. Cyberpunk got turned down over time). Xbox streaming is far from perfect and I’m on 40 Mbps.
@gohod @gpowerf @AaronCrocco The tech worked alright, certainly better than many alternatives. But all tech goes first to early adopters, and early adopters could clearly tell that it was still worse than a local PC client of the same game.
That's a pretty hard stop when you are being asked to pay full price for a separate copy of the game, especially when Steam, Parsec and others let you do it for free if you have a host PC and Microsoft will do it for you if you're in their ecosystem.
@gohod @gpowerf @AaronCrocco There are a lot of good observations one can do about how poorly conceived Stadia was. I mean, if you're tech-savvy enough to tell the difference with cheaper, more convenient options you are probably savvy enough to tell the difference with client-run software and the visual shortcomings.
I frankly don't know what they thought the value proposition was. The tech could have turned into a product, just not THAT product. That was always obvious.
@gohod @MudMan @gpowerf Microsoft has done it the “right” way. Leverage the existing Xbox hardware to incorporate GamePass. While physical + buying individual games will never go away, MS is proving the tech works.
Google just went about it in their normal Google way. Which doesn’t work for this stuff.
@gpowerf If only Google could’ve had better timing to launch it! 🤣🤣🤣
Google and failed marketing: name a more perfect duo.