The Fall of Stadia
Just a few weeks ago, on 29th September 2022, Google announced that they were ‘to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service’. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Google Stadia was a video game streaming service, a system which some have likened to a video game equivalent of Netflix. The core premise of this service was to provide ready access to a variety of games on a flexible basis - utilising Google’s servers for the actual processing of the game and simply using the player’s setup for controller input and visual output. This solution would be particularly beneficial for players whose personal device does not have the requisite processing capability for many of the graphically intense modern games, or for those who prefer to play on the go, or for those who want to switch easily between games without having to install and uninstall frequently; for the last 3 years, since its launch on 19th November 2019, Stadia provided just that.
However, Google recently cited that ‘it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected’ as the reason for its closure; the likelihood is that this product had not reached the critical mass that Google had predicted and that the commercial viability was not acceptable to them. This is, perhaps sadly, not the first (nor likely to be the last) time that Google has shelved or shut down one of their products or features. Google has a rather infamous approach to culling services which they deem to be not commercially viable, not culturally relevant, or which might be interrupting their strategy for other more successful products. A website called ‘Google Graveyard’, to be found at https://killedbygoogle.com/, provides a full breakdown of all of the services and features which were dropped by Google - an impressive 274 at the time of publication. These range from such popular and well-known products as Hangouts (launched in 2013 and shutting down in November 2022) to services from the earlier days of Google which Google itself deprecated with newer alternatives like Writely (launched in 2003 and shut down in 2006) a browser based word processor. Whilst Google’s approach to product turnover is something which does not look like it will change, this website does provide an interesting history of the ghosts of the internet past.
This service had been used by several Butterfly Data members over the years, with one going as far as to undertake a presentation, in our weekly team meeting, about Stadia and how cloud computing might change over the next few years. Their disappointment over the cancellation of the service is partly the inspiration for this post, as they had become comfortable with this particular iteration of cloud computing. After all, with the general centralisation of computing and the move towards cloud processing for more and more tasks, game streaming may become the de facto approach to gaming in the near future. However, for those who are interested in the potential of this style of service or who used Stadia and are now uncertain on how you can play video games as flexibly and with as little processing power as Stadia exerts on user’s devices, there are plenty of other options out there. For those who already own consoles, but who want to be able to stream games flexibly there are Xbox Game Pass and Playstation Now subscriptions which use cloud processing to stream games onto consoles. Or for those using computers, televisions, or mobile phones there are such services as NVIDIA GeForce Now or Amazon Luna which will now have more of the market to try and take. For now, for those who are users of Stadia, there are a few short months left until 18th January 2023, so now is time to make the most of your final playtime, to look at seeking the Google-approved refunds of Stadia hardware and games, and to say goodbye to a rather short lived runner in the race towards video game streaming dominion.
