Google Stadia failed, and the news certainly didn’t surprise us. It’s been over a year before the service seems to be stuck on a tightrope: no major news, no new games or new patches for existing ones. And given Google’s historian, a company that didn’t bother to reject an idea after spending large sums of money on it, only an incurable optimist could see the good news in the uncomfortable silence around Stadia.
For cloud gaming service Google Things never went as planned, even when it debuted without a plethora of features, some truly mind-blowing, top-notch promises. Functions that the company soon began to ignore, perhaps hoping users would forget about them as soon as possible. That said, Stadia certainly didn’t work well, indeed, it was the only cloud gaming service that offered borderline 4K streaming with zero lag even in the most demanding games like fighting and competitive action.
A failure on many fronts, but all can be attributed to the “Big G”. Despite Closing Google Stadia, cloud gaming has never been better.
comparative numbers
The biggest problem, truly insurmountable for Google, was that the third-party offering dried up quickly. Often times, we’ve tried to explain, through specials, videos on YouTube, and live streams on Twitch, over the past two years why the consolidation of the video game industry has crippled Turkey rather than strengthened Sony and Microsoft. Amazon and Google’s attempt to enter the industry. Very soon, Stadia and other potential competitors found themselves without games from former Zenimax group Activision Blizzard, Bungie, and without the internal work that could fill the void.
What’s left out of Bungie is now in the hands of Microsoft, one of the most successful companies in cloud gaming: Xbox Cloud Gaming had hundreds of thousands of access in 2020, but more than ten million users tried the Microsoft service in 2022. Sony, on the other hand, hasn’t reported any new data on PlayStation Now for a while: the service officially launches in 2015 and has around 700,000 users by 2019, but very low numbers that tripled in 2020 and certainly didn’t stop in the next two years. GeForce Now, which lets you play your PC games over the cloud, has grown from two million subscribers in 2020 to over twenty million in 2022.
This is not meant to be a comparison between services, cold numbers are instead needed to show two very important things: interest in cloud gaming not only does it exist, but it is growing quite rapidly. Other than that, largely and without surprise, users have chosen the services they offer or special details like Flight Simulator or the next Starfield on Xbox Cloud Gaming or access to PC games without the need to spin them. Stadia debuted with the public’s curiosity, but during its short life, it’s done nothing more than re-recommend games that anyone interested already owns.
It’s no coincidence then that Google never announced it had managed to include Stadia: we know there were two positive moments, the promotion to get two months of free Stadia Pro, and the release of Cyberpunk 2077, but both are unofficial and absolutely false. According to the censuses, they would not have significant impacts on the population standing at just over a million in 2020.
Cloud Gaming era
No, the failure of Google Stadia has nothing to do with the health of cloud gaming, which will further increase its impact on the public in the coming months. Millions of players will break away from the next big game, Bethesda, Starfield, and how will they try to make up for it, if not with Microsoft’s cloud in your opinion? The new Samsung televisions, and soon LG’s new televisions, will have their own gaming hubs where an increasing number of users will be able to access their software libraries without the need for any, if not all, controller.
5G contracts will become more and more common, allowing you to play the most hardware-expensive games on the most exhausted smartphones; but more generallybreaking the digital divide and the lines will become more performant and more capillary. Also, cloud gaming will be able to push video games towards new game formulas. There will still be some technical limitations, but for how long? And anyway, between Forza Horizon 5 in 1080p and consoles for 499 euros, the audience can only choose the first option.
(flour) keystone
After all, consoles were born with one purpose: to make video game access as easy and affordable as possible. Well, breaking news: There is nothing simpler and cheaper than clicking a title and playing anywhere in 30 seconds. I understand. Of course, there are also disadvantages, protecting only games released in the cloud, for example, will be an issue that needs to be resolved as soon as possible, but there is not a single moment where the public does not go in this direction. Stadium or not.
Source: Multiplayer
