There is a lot of talk now about the “sudden” shutdown of Stadia, Google’s game-streaming service. While it’s true that competitors like Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming have offered solid competition, and that Google knows nothing about gaming, the main problem – as with most of its products these days – is that no one trusted them to keep it alive for a while. Longer than a year or two.
It’s really that simple: nobody trusts Google. It has shown such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for at this point, people are wary of investing in even their most popular products.
The technical implementation was certainly not flawed. I’ll admit I was skeptical when they said they could come up with the response times and response times they advertised, but by Jove they did. At its best, Stadia was way better than its competitors and was almost magical in how it delivered on its promise to go from zero to the game in one second.
The business side of things has never been so inspiring. There’s now so much recollection of pre-launch hype show for Stadia: the doomed Dreamcast, the no-nonsense Power Glove, and ET for Atari, the game so bad that they buried it in a shallow grave, followed by a blank base on which Stadia will soon sit.
Although this was clearly a funny misunderstanding…just about everything, it turned out to be a perfect fit. Stadia was doomed, meaningless, and destined for an unkind death.
last first. It’s only been two months since Stadia’s Twitter account Confirm to the respective user That service was not actually closed.
Image credits: Google / Twitter
In fact, the wheels may have already been moving, but the senior officials didn’t tell their social team, the developers, or pretty much anyone that this was the plan. It has been reported that many people close to the service were shocked by the decision – and who wouldn’t, after the company publicly declared that all was well?
For some, the writing was on the wall earlier, when the first-party development team Google had set up to create exclusive games shut down before it had a chance to do almost anything. The company may have miscalculated the time it would take to develop a game from scratch. At least Google Doodle.
However, you could have succeeded even without exclusivity if you presented a compelling product. Unfortunately, Google Stadia was as useless and flashy as Power Glove. “that’s it bad,Like in a meme.
As impressive as his execution was, I couldn’t tell who he was. A very large percentage of gamers who want to play the latest song, Deathloop says, will already have either a console, a gaming PC, or both. Why would I buy Deathloop for Stadia instead of PS5 or Steam? It’ll play and look better locally (although Stadia looked surprisingly good), and of course they’ve already invested hundreds in those platforms.
Sure, you can play on the go, on your laptop, or something else. But… Not only are there services to actually do this, but the experience isn’t really great. Full-price games these days are big, immersive activities where you sit for an hour or two on the couch and get into it with the surround sound blasting off. Sure, I wouldn’t mind doing a bit of inventory management on my laptop during my coffee break at the office, but after that, constant access to AAA games isn’t a huge advantage.
Meanwhile, games like Genshin Impact have reached AAA levels and are already portable – millions are playing on phones. Again, why was Stadia a better deal?
It would make sense if the suggestion would be to pay $20 a month, and some juggling from Google would let you play PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, or PC games wherever you want. It’s a real bridge builder thing that doesn’t know the platform, and Google will likely pay millions behind the scenes for the franchise. Kind of like what Samsung is trying to do:
but not. You can’t access your existing games – you can’t even use your console! It costs you a bill to get to the door, plus the monthly fee, and then you had to buy the games on top of that, at full price.
And here’s where her fate really was. Because while people happily take a few bucks here and there for a Google service, no one will pay hundreds for something that has a sneaky feel that will be completely worthless in no time.
Google’s legacy of killing products is notorious. Their ups and downs around priorities, brands, standards, and everything else have made it clear to everyone that they cannot be trusted with anything beyond their basic services, and they even like to spoil it now and then.
I still have my original Super Nintendo game, which plays just as well as it did the day I brought it home. Mario Kart and Super Metroid cartridges have been working for… my God, 30 years now. I have games on Steam that I bought a decade ago and more that I can download and play as easily as I did back then. There are digital copies of games on my PS3 that will start playing right away if I feel like taking them out of storage. These companies and services have built trust over decades to show that they either can’t or won’t pull the rug out from under their customers.
Why do you think the whole PT drama was so annoying? It was really unexpected: the aggressive and unnecessary destruction of a digital product that people thought they had. The players felt betrayed.
But with Google, the boot is on the other end. Google has built nothing but distrust, out of a set of products that no one wants or needs to change. For me (and dozens of us) the turning point was the Google Reader assassination – which I will never forgive, and I try to do their best regularly by stating it like this – but a lot of other products have been extended, embraced, and then extinguished (to repurpose the term) .
Google can’t betray me now if they try – because there’s nothing to betray. To be honest, I’d be relieved if they messed up Gmail so badly that I had no choice but to switch – I can’t act at will otherwise.
And while there’s no doubt that the people Stadia was meaning to for whatever reason (and I was happy for them) feel betrayed, the millions of others who stared, smiled and said “Not this time, Big G!” They feel validated. I’ll say I’m surprised Google did the right thing by offering a really solid refund. It’s the least they can do, and God knows they have the money.
I don’t think Stadia could have been really successful. Her entire model was likely doomed from the start. But even a long shot can be turned into a successful product with a few pivots if the core is solid and develops a large investing community. it was no more, Ever It will be the case for Stadia. Google has built such a strong argument against itself that, whether it’s creators on YouTube, programmers and scientists on Colab, or media and search advertisers, no community will truly trust it again.
from San Jose News Bulletin https://sjnewsbulletin.com/stadia-died-because-no-one-trusted-google-techcrunch/
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