Of course you can Monday morning quarterback this and point out Stadia's limitations (weak games library, hurr durr Google Reader, etc), but still, the cards were stacked in their favor and they still couldn't pull it off.
* Google has a reputation for abandoning services, and games bought on Stadia would be locked there. What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone."
* It's hard to get momentum when you're targeting hardcore gamers, who mostly already have consoles/PC's, thus removing one of your biggest advantages.
The idea might have worked if the subscription included access to games. Since at least then you aren't buying in to the platform with lock in.
I used to be a hardcore gamer but being in my forties with kids and job I dont have the time to game as much as I used to. The whole just stream the game, no fiddling with installs and patches were very tempting to me. Given that I dont game as much it would be nice not paying for a beefy gaming PC. I already have great internet, I need it for work.
I also have two preteens that are starting to game, its cheaper to get multiple stadia subscrptions that they can then play where they want, on my macbook, the TV or a cheap chromebook.
I think google's biggest mistake was requiring you to buy the controller up front. If they had let people sign up with just their existing PC it would have been much easier to get people onboard.
It's a separate subscription (free to $20/mo) for the streaming service, but you can play many of your current titles without re-buying them (not all, due to publisher withdrawals).
To play ALL your games, Shadow.tech will stream a full GPU-enabled desktop that you can run anything you want in.
I was able to loan friends my GeForce Now account so we could play something together (they didn't have a gaming PC). And streaming doesn't imply lock-in; GeForce Now just uses your Steam library, Shadow just streams you a virtual Windows desktop (with whatever software you want to install on it, you essentially have root).
If you live in a city, fast (enough) internet is like $50/mo and you need it for your work/TikTok anyway. A good gaming PC is like $1500-$2000+ and is noisy and hot and Windows is a pain to keep updated, etc.
I'm not saying game streaming is the future or that it will replace traditional PCs, but it's definitely a useful service!
But latency is an issue, so the experience will always be inferior in terms of responsiveness. Which, to a lot of gamers, means it would have to be a budget option, not a luxury one.
I have tried playing multiplayer games like CS:GO on geforce now, and that gave me latency issues and was not a great experience.
Hell, I'm a developer in my 40s, and I only got a decent-ish gaming PC at the start of the pandemic.
Stadia could be amazing if Google had any interest in it. Even OnLive of 10 years ago was amazing. LiquidSky knocked everyone out of the park, but had licensing issues unfortunately (play unmodified Steam games in the cloud what?!).
There are plenty of people who don't want to invest hundreds of dollars in consoles and gaming PCs but who still play plenty of games. Apple understands that with their Apple Arcade, but Apple doesn't understand gaming. Google doesn't understand gaming either.
The monthly fee was for 4k and other features that weren't necessary. You could stream anything you bought on Stadia for free at 1080p, no subscription.
It was like buying a game and getting a console for free, but with an optional upcharge for an even better console.
The marketing for all this was horrible. People still don't understand what Stadia was and wasn't. And the launch was limited to people willing to spend $130 for the custom hardware.
That hardware wasn't necessary. They just decided to do that at launch as a way to milk some gamers of their money in return for early access.
But again, the marketing was horrible. And the free access came many months later. For a system that it's best feature was the free streaming access, they completely destroyed it at launch.
And of course, as everyone pointed out back then, Google doesn't support the things they create unless they're related to advertising somehow. And they've already shut down all the studios they created to make games for Stadia.
And the big "wow" feature that they kept advertising, "negative latency", never got released. Many thought it was already in it, so the latency that Stadia has was very disappointing compared to the hype that Google gave it.
It's just a disaster from start to finish, marketing-wise.
This had now been answered [1]:
> We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.
1. https://www.ign.com/articles/google-is-shutting-down-stadia-...
Game streaming isn't for everyone, but there IS a market for it. In that market, though, Stadia is by far the worst offering. They should've had gamers lead its design and development, but they run it like it's some sort of business cloud offering... just totally missed the culture.
Of course I'm not claiming to speak for everyone in the industry, just for people in my network who I either discussed it with or whose opinions I saw online. But it very much isn't the case that everyone predicted success until "Monday morning quarterback"ing.
I play lots of games, have over 1000 of them on steam, and jet somehow stadia only had 5 that i was interested and already had on steam.
But hey, lets try anyway, so I try to subscribe and: its not available here.
Almost no promotion, most of my friends(some of whom live in USA where I presume stadia does work) who also game didn't even know about stadia.
And then when they didn't6 just autowin all the customers, they kind of just let it go.
Stadia would just not accept any credit card I threw at them, including a virtual card I created specifically for this service after the other ones failed. It also even refused those which Google happily uses to charge me for my GWS and YouTube Premium.
It was not a geolocation thing - Stadia happily serviced a neighbour.
Under these circumstances, I gave up. If you make it hard for me to give you money, I simply won't.
Once you have the platform, the bare minimum, you can start trying to get customer. You do that by playing on price, quality (within your platform parameters), catalog and since it's subscription base, long term commitment. Basically, either it was a hit, or they had to accept bleeding a lot of money to finalize their market entry.
They didn't push much and price and catalog, and they didn't commit either, as everyone expected.
They pull off a tech demo, they were never serious on the gaming market, and it showed.
This was only true during the first five months of release, when you had to buy the Founder's Edition, which came with hardware to access the service. All purchased games can be accessed without the subscription via Stadia Base, and they planned it this way from the start[1]. Stadia Pro primarily provides the perk of running games on better cloud hardware, providing a 4K HDR surround sound stream instead of the baseline 1080p stereo stream.
GeForce Now, Luna, PSNow, XCloud, etc. are doing much better. Stadia is just the neglected stepchild of game streaming, not representative of the overall health of the technology.
I should note that Google by no means invented game streaming. OnLive did it ten years ago, and today there are still other small providers like Shadow.tech, Parsec, Paperspace...
I think Nvidia has the real advantage here though, being the only ones who can produce those gfx cards at datacenter scale. Unless one of the other providers want to develop their own chips, they're always at the mercy of Nvidia. Even during the COVID GPU shortage, Nvidia was able to keep GeForce Now sustained with enough hardware while the other providers struggled... Shadow had a waitlist of several months, for example.