Why Did Google Stadia Fail to Impress Gamers?

Q: What happened to Google Stadia?

Google Stadia was stagnated on 1st February 2021 after its unfortunate failure in creating a name and meeting the user target.

🔍Insights

Aishani Biswas, Bhoraniya Huda Hifzur Rehman

Jun 8, 2022 — 7 min read

If you are someone who loves gaming, Google’s Stadia is perfect for your games and entertainment purposes. Launched in November 2019, Stadia make your favourite games instantly accessible no matter where you are.

It's apparent that Stadia's technology has been proven and works at scale, as evidenced by the recent successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia, gameplay on all types of platforms, including iOS, extending our slate of YouTube integrations, and our global expansions.

It was an attempt by Google to join the video games and entertainment industry by creating this platform. Unlike Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, Google's focus was on cloud-based streaming, which means that instead of purchasing real gear like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, consumers only need a compatible device, such as a phone or tablet, and they can play from anywhere.

Unsuccessful Launch
Poor Advertising Plan
Falling Back in Delivering Better Service
Misconceptions About the Gaming Market
Stadia Was Like a Stranded Product on Google's Platform

What Is Google Stadia?

Stadia is a cloud gaming service introduced by Google. It was a new type of gaming platform that does not involve any console requirement to gain gaming experience. Instead, Google Stadia allows the users to play their games on any available screen over the internet.

Google Stadia was introduced on 19th November 2019 and discontinued on 1st February 2021. Even after being a Google product with a great concept, Stadia failed to create its place in the market.

There can be many reasons for the failure of the Stadia such as:

Unsuccessful Launch

Unfortunately for Google, the program received backlash when it first launched about a year and a half ago. The reviews suggested that the management could have devoted more effort to working out Stadia's faults. From there, things only seemed to become worse, culminating in the latest studio shutdown and discoveries that made social media news.

Whenever one adds in claims of odd money management and an apparent misunderstanding of how the games industry works whenever it comes to AAA ports, the streaming service has had a hard go of it recently. Stadia's potential employers dropped 68% lower according to the business reports, a year after its unsuccessful launch.

Critics instantly warned users against using the service because of its limited game catalogue and several technical concerns. It has also failed to acquire traction, even though COVID-19 was witnessing one of the most significant increases in gaming popularity in the medium's history. So, when other gaming platforms gained popularity Stadia was losing its day by day. Which was strange because Google had Stadia’s back.

Google Stadia Active User Count Of The Year 2019-2020.

Poor Advertising Plan

Now, in circumstances like these, at least the advertisements and brand awareness go up. Since this was a gaming platform the creators did try and reach out to its audience (Gen Z) but, Stadia had received its fair share of setbacks on social media. On February 26, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published an article explaining, Google's Stadia strategy and also tweeted about it.

The article gave details outlining the platform's growth from inception to debut in November 2019, “although Schreier claimed that the corporation was spending tens of millions of dollars on each Stadia port that went viral on social media.

Essentially, instead of investing those resources toward independent developers or Stadia's studios to create unique content for the service, Google was paying Ubisoft and other AAA video game developers ridiculous sums to bring their latest titles to Stadia.”

Paying millions of dollars for games that had already been launched was even more distressing news, given that Google had only announced the closing of its in-house studios a few weeks previously. Instead of being developed by Google, all original content created solely for Stadia will have to come through partnerships with other studios.

Overall, Google STADIA has failed to live up to its creator's expectations of being a game-changing platform. It doesn't appear to be getting any better, either, given its bumpy history.

Falling Back in Delivering Better Service

During the launch event of Stadia, There were many promises done by the speaker.

Stadia is not constrained by the limitation of traditional console systems. Instead, we have built a truly flexible, scalable, and modern platform that allows us to push performance beyond what was previously considered possible. This architecture gives us even more flexibility to scale. And thanks to fast transfer speeds between the Stadia instances in our data center, our platform can connect instances to dynamically expand the capabilities, along with the need of your games. As a developer, you're used to being forced to tone down your creative ambition, [which is] limited by the hardware. But our vision with Stadia is that the processing resources available will scale up to match your imagination. In this new generation, the data center is your platform. Revealed by Stadia Head of Engineering Majd Bakar during the launch event.

However, when the product was made in use, the reality found was quite different from the explanation. Stadia failed to survive users test and create a place in the market. Many users report claiming Stadia slow servers with poor resolution. Hence, this also added to the list of "drawbacks of Stadia".

Misconceptions About the Gaming Market

Google is a big name in the market. However, this name is majorly applied in cloud services only. It was the first time creation of a gaming product by Google. Hence, it can be assumed that Google was not aware of the trends going on in the market and might have a misconception about it.

The gaming market no longer lacks any technology-related limits. Instead, it is the place where much new technology takes part as the first trial. Google might have taken the gaming market still as a newbie and didn't minded to work more on the project.

Stadia's Game and Entertainment was the first in-house gaming studio developed by Stadia. It was pulled off after one year of discontinuing Stadia. The gaming studio was given the charge of creating exclusive games. However, the decision of pulling it off caused others a hazy impression of Google.

Creating games takes time and the decision of closing the Studio within one year of stadia affected the employees working in the studio with multi-year reassurance. All these indicate the misconception that Google has related to the gaming industry and indirectly caused the failure of the platform as a whole.

Stadia Was Like a Stranded Product on Google's Platform

The sentence stranded in a place might seem like an exaggeration to use for Stadia. However, in reality, the only connection between Stadia and other Google platforms was from 4K live on YouTube.

These factors can indirectly affect the popularity of newly introduced products. Stadia was too late to realize this. It took the whole year for Stadia to be included in the 2020's Chromecast with Google TV.

For the initial months, Stadia was known to work with Pixel phones only. However, with the launch of Pixel 6, Stadia was nowhere to be seen in its bundle. Whereas, Stadia was marketed as a major point in the selling of Pixel phone.

Stadia was forgotten by Google at such limits that Xbox provides YouTube premium as its perk. However, Google didn't consider using the same tactic for its brand. With all these points, it can be assumed that Stadia was long forgotten even before its discontinuation causing a few percent of damage to its popularity which led to its failure.

Conclusion

Google Stadia was created with much hope and as a Google-backed product. Yet, at many points, Google failed to impress the gamers with Stadia causing an ultimate decision of discontinuing the service. Stadia was created as a gaming platform that can be used on any normal screen rather than using the console. However, due to many issues, it was pulled off in 2021 by Google. Some of the estimated reasons behind the failure of Stadia are shared above.

FAQs

What is Google Stadia?

Google Stadia is a gaming platform developed by Google that allows its users to play games on a single platform using the same screen. It is a cloud video gaming platform that does not require any additional hardware to play games in it.