Almost four years ago, Google announced Stadia, and I wrote a post about it. I asked whether Stadia is the end or the future of gaming. Now, four years later (I still can't believe that this was already 4 years ago), we know the answer: today, 18.1.2023, marks the end of Stadia, and it is shutting down.
Google is infamous for killing off their projects, even if they are doing relatively ok, but are not a huge success. So, a lot of critics were already arguing that Stadia will land on that list, before it even launched. Unfortunately, they proved right. Stadia was in general up to a rather rough start, before it even launched. A lot of gamers were/are not too fond of the idea of streaming games instead of having them installed locally. The most common criticism was, that streaming is just too slow and has too much latency to make for a good gaming experience. Turns out the problem was not the technology, but rather the business model behind Stadia and the way Google communicated it.
When I bought a new phone, I got a free trial of Google One which included a 3-month trial of Google Stadia Pro. If it weren't for the free trial, I most likely would have never tried it. But I did, and I was very positively surprised. Testing it myself, I can stay, that the technology wasn't the problem. I would even argue that the technology was the best thing about Stadia, because it did work very well. Playing in more rural areas worked much better than expected (at least for the internet connection I had there). So, Google proved all of their critics wrong in that regard.
Google manged to execute the difficult part very well, but failed on the "easy" part, the business model. Before Stadia started, everybody expected something like "Netflix, but for games", meaning that you pay a fixed subscription fee each month and for that you get access to all of their games. This was not the case, Stadia could be more thought of as a gaming PC which you rent, but you still have to buy the games extra. Yes, games were not included in Stadia by default, at least "normal" games, you could play free-to-play titles on Stadia for free (which shouldn't be a surprise). But there were Stadia Pro and Stadia Free, the main differences between the two are that Pro users can stream up to 4K resolutions and get free games each month, which they can keep as long as they are Stadia Pro users, if they cancel their subscription, the games are gone.
Are you confused? Well, you are not the only one, because Googles marketing department did quite a bad job at getting the word out. My free trial was for Stadia Pro and until that ran out, I wasn't really aware that there exists a free version as well. Stadia Pro gave me a couple of games each month for me to play (e.g. MotoGP 2021 or Darksiders II), but after me free trial ran out, I could no longer play them, unless I purchased them separately. That didn't bother me too much, since most of the time I played a free-to-play game: Destiny 2 (which, again, ran quite well, given it is a fast-paced shooter). IMHO, they should have marketed it as a never obsolete gaming PC, which runs in the cloud, and you can use for free and access on almost any device. Sure, many people still would have expected Stadia to be Netflix-for-gaming, but again IMHO, their marketing did a bad job at correcting this narrative.
Reading my old post, some of the speculations I made in that post turned out to be quite wrong: I assumed that they will go with the Netflix or Game Pass approach of flat rate gaming. Unfortunately also my prediction about Stadia being good for gaming on Linux turned out to be wrong. Luckily, Valve took this position with the release of the Steam Deck (although we still can't play Destiny 2 on it, because Bungie keep being jerks about it, c'mon guys, you used to be cool, you even released the source code and all assets for Marathon, one of your fist successes). I also expected Google to focus more on their in-house studio to create a killer-application for Stadia, but that studio got already killed in early 2021. Google is first and foremost a technology company and not a content producer, great technology unfortunately is not always a sure recipe for success. I guess this is the biggest take-away message from this whole story.
While Stadia never gained a lot of traction after its release, it also was never met with as much hostility as other developments in gaming (the list is very long, but there was a time, now almost 20 years ago, when people hated Steam). Stadia was a well executed but ultimately unsuccessful attempt of trying to shape the future of gaming. I don't know in which direction gaming will develop, but the success of Microsoft's Game Pass (and them buying almost any gaming company they could find) indicates, that Netflix-for-gaming might be the future. And with xCloud Microsoft also has a streaming solution in their portfolio, which is tightly connected to the Game Pass.
It could be that Stadia just was ahead of its time, similar to how they were with Google Wave. A few years after Wave was shut down, Slack came along and developed something similar (IMHO not as ambitious), but way more successful. At least all Stadia customers get a refund and can use their Stadia controllers for other games. Stadia will be remembered as yet another very ambitious Google project, that got shut down too early. And probably the best place to have played Cyberpunk 2077 at launch.