I’ve talked before in Pushing Buttons about how difficult it is for giant companies to succeed in the video game industry. And it had no prospect of establishing its own development culture, because that takes years – you can’t just magic great games and studios out of thin air. It had nothing to compete with Mario and Zelda, Forza Horizon or The Last of Us. And it had the same perennial problem as any new entrant in the games world: it didn’t have its own good titles. There was, fundamentally, no significant need for Stadia to serve. But given the enormous development costs involved in video games, itis impossible to offer a game streaming service at a cheaper price and turn a profit. We expect streaming to cost less, and that’s the model established for music, film and TV.
Stadia dispensed with troublesome retail and distribution expenses, but charged customers the same price anyway. People also clearly don’t want to pay the same price to stream a game as they would to own it. In theory, cloud gaming frees us from console updates and patches and other inconveniences, but it requires a good, stable internet connection to work, so it’s not as if you can use it while travelling, which is the only time I don’t have access to my consoles. There appears to be almost nobody who wants to play games such as Assassin’s Creed and Destiny and doesn’t already have a console at home, making Stadia a luxury that would allow you to, say, get a few quests in on your lunch break. I am forced to conclude that people actually like consoles and PCs – and hundreds of millions already have one. People at Pixel Games had just finalised a contract to distribute their games on Stadia the day before. But the Verge revealed last week that developers who were working on games for the service only discovered that their projects were being cancelled when the news started proliferating across Twitter. And the writing had been on the wall for a while: Google started shutting the game studios it had established to make Stadia games early last year, and in February it was reported that it had begun attempts to sell the streaming tech that powers it to other companies.
At least that one guy who used to tweet at me every time we published a review to point out that the game in question was also available on Stadia can finally stand down.Ĭustomers, meanwhile, are being looked after: Google is refunding every purchase made through Stadia, from controllers to subscriptions to the games themselves. Two years and 11 months after its launch, it will wind down in January, marking the end, for now, of the tech company’s aspirations in video games.
Alas, game-streaming service Google Stadia is no more.
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