Google Stadia

» see stadia.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

stadia did not launch in turkey. the founder's edition went live on 19 november 2019 across 14 countries, mostly western europe plus the us and canada. you needed a google account in one of those regions, a stadia controller, and a chromecast ultra. anyway, the rest of us watched the keynote in english and moved on.

the pitch was simple in a way that only google can make sound simple. you would not own a console and you would not download a game. you would press play in a chrome tab and a gpu somewhere in a google data center would run the game and stream it back to you at 4k, 60fps, with hdr if your tv supported it. the controller used wifi to talk directly to the data center, skipping your phone or laptop, which was meant to shave latency. in fairness, the demos at gdc 2019 looked clean.

phil harrison led the project. jade raymond came in to head stadia games and entertainment, the first-party studio arm, in march 2019. the studios closed in february 2021 without shipping a finished exclusive. by then google had already stopped pretending stadia was a console competitor, and started rebranding the underlying stack as a white-label streaming product for partners. that product, immersive stream for games, was also discontinued by march 2023.

i was on a ps4 the whole way through, and stadia was something i read about in english tech blogs without much skin in it. the closest i ever came to the service was watching a digital foundry latency test on youtube. that distance was the entire problem with stadia in turkey: it never showed up, and by the time it might have, it was already dying.

~ the case file ~

~ the launch ~

the founder's edition cost $129 and bundled a controller, a chromecast ultra, three months of stadia pro, and one buddy pass. the first batch of supported games was 22 titles at launch, including red dead redemption 2 and destiny 2. you still had to buy each game at full price on top of the subscription. that pricing was the first sign that the netflix comparison did not really hold. anyway, netflix did not ask you to buy each show.

the launch reviews were polite about the streaming tech and brutal about everything else. the linux desktop the data center ran on was actually fine and the latency was usable on a wired connection. the library was small. family-sharing did not ship at launch. the wifi-direct controller did not work at launch either and had to fall back to bluetooth through your local device, which defeated half the latency story.

~ the slide ~

by july 2020 stadia had missed its targets badly enough that bloomberg was reporting the numbers in print. cyberpunk 2077 in december 2020 was the one moment where stadia briefly looked like a useful product, since it ran cleanly on stadia while the ps4 and xbox one versions were a public disaster. that lasted about two months. in february 2021 google announced it was closing its internal studios and pivoting to a platform-only model, which in practice meant abandoning the netflix-for-games framing.

the publisher side never warmed up either. ubisoft kept shipping games on stadia until close to the end. most other major publishers treated it as an afterthought. without exclusives, stadia was a more expensive way to play the same games you could already play on a ps4 or a gaming pc, with the added risk that google might switch off your library at any time.

~ what really happened ~

the shutdown announcement came on 29 september 2022. the service kept running until 18 january 2023 at 11:59pm pacific. google did one thing that surprised people. it refunded every stadia controller and every chromecast ultra sold for stadia use, plus every game purchase made through the store. the refunds rolled out automatically through the year. for some reason that gesture is the part of stadia people remember warmly.

on 17 january 2023, the day before the lights went out, google released a bluetooth conversion tool for the stadia controller so it would keep working as a generic gamepad. the conversion deadline kept getting extended. the controller itself was actually decent hardware. it survives in living rooms attached to whatever console its owner already had, which is more than most google products from that era can say.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »