Google Stadia is shutting down for good

[DarthGaymer]

https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-streaming-strategy/

 

Google has killed yet another half-baked idea with no long term plan for a product. How many people called this over the past year?  It very much seems that the company takes a shotgun approach to their ideas, make tons of randam, vaguley related products and hope one or two sticks around and is a success.

Edited September 29, 2022 by DarthGaymer

[jaslion]

Cheap controllers for all!

[yolosnail]

In other news, it has recently been discovered that water is in fact wet

[Skiiwee29]

@DarthGaymer Please update your thread to follow the established posting requirements as outlined in:

 

 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Google allows users to retain the metadata of the games they bought on Stadia and can never be accessed again.

 

Google move for sure addressed the fear that they would kill the service and caused all the bought games to be lost. Well done, Google! /irony

[GuiltySpark_]

This will become a collectors item, right? 

 

...right? 

 

[SignatureSigner]

Google glass... we killed it

google stadia... we killed it

 

(a full list is on google lol)

https://killedbygoogle.com/

[tim0901]

Quote

Q: Will I get a refund?  What is available for a refund? 

A:  We will be offering refunds for all Stadia hardware purchases (Stadia Controller, Founders Edition, Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages) made through the Google Store and software transactions (games and add-on purchases) through the Stadia store. Stadia Pro subscriptions are not eligible for refund, however you will be able to continue playing your games in Pro without further charges until the final wind down date.

At least they're doing the right thing and giving people refunds for the things they've purchased.

 

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/12790109

[tikker]

56 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Google move for sure addressed the fear that they would kill the service and caused all the bought games to be lost. Well done, Google! /irony

It looks like they will refund your purchases, so at least there's no money lost in that case. Great example to lead with if they actually pull through on that.

Quote

We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start. 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. Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center.

 

[Jito463]

1 hour ago, DarthGaymer said:

How many people called this over the past year?

I've been saying that since day one.  I'm more surprised it took this long.

[DildorTheDecent]

58 minutes ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

This will become a collectors item, right? 

 

...right?

Getting Ouya vibes from that controller. Different layout, but overall shape is very similar.

[GuiltySpark_]

13 minutes ago, Communist_Empire said:

How are the controllers btw?

 

13 minutes ago, DildorTheDecent said:

Getting Ouya vibes from that controller. Different layout, but overall shape is very similar.

There is absolutley nothing special about its operation though it feels like a nice product just to hold. The joysticks and triggers feel pretty low rent. Don't even get me started on that clicky d-pad...

 

Its not really that straight forward to just use it as a normal controller on PC either which is a little annoying. 

 

I should probably look around for some homebrew hacks to make it more useful, its usually just decoration.

[Senzelian]

1 hour ago, SignatureSigner said:

Google glass... we killed it

 

https://www.google.com/glass/start/

 

Google never just "kills" a product. They usually do it with the intend of coming back to it later. 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, DarthGaymer said:

https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-streaming-strategy/

 

Google has killed yet another half-baked idea with no long term plan for a product. How many people called this over the past year?  It very much seems that the company takes a shotgun approach to their ideas, make tons of randam, vaguley related products and hope one or two sticks around and is a success.

Literately everyone called it.

[dilpickle]

[Middcore]

Back when they shut down their in-house game studios to make Stadia-exclusive games, I said that the time to form studios and start game development would have been at least 2-3 years before Stadia launch, not simultaneous with it.

 

In retrospect I think the only way to make this work would have been to do that, create a game (or two) people genuinely wanted to play, then use that as the hook when Stadia launched. Like maybe even give the game away for "free" with a x-months Stadia subscription. Closest they came was that Cyberpunk apparently performed well on Stadia while the legacy consoles and even many PC's were getting skull-fucked by it at release, but Google did nothing to promote that fact. 

 

As it was, there was absolutely no strong case for most people to use Stadia. Gaming enthusiasts were skeptical of the idea at best (partially because of Google's track record of losing interest in products and services and summarily axing them) and actively hostile to it at worst. The remaining market of people who had fast enough internet connections to enjoy Stadia and were interested in games but weren't playing them already some other way was far too small for the service to be viable. 

 

It feels like Google realized they had the technology to make this function and then threw the whole idea together hastily without actually thinking through what would be necessary to get people to buy into it.

[NoWaterCooling007]

Not surprising. I never really understood who would want to pay for a service like Stadia when Xbox, Geforce Now are so much better value. 

[Kisai]

24 minutes ago, Middcore said:

 

 

As it was, there was absolutely no strong case for most people to use Stadia. Gaming enthusiasts were skeptical of the idea at best (partially because of Google's track record of losing interest in products and services and summarily axing them) and actively hostile to it at worst. The remaining market of people who had fast enough internet connections to enjoy Stadia and were interested in games but weren't playing them already some other way was far too small for the service to be viable. 

 

It feels like Google realized they had the technology to make this function and then threw the whole idea together hastily without actually thinking through what would be necessary to get people to buy into it.

Had the pandemic and GPU shortage continued, Stadia might have slowly gained users. People unable to buy PS5's or high end phones and so forth.

 

However I feel the target market was sorely missed. This was a product that should have been pushed in India and Brazil where the high import costs of gaming hardware is extortionate. Or to places like Argentina where the local currency is absolutely worthless, thus people might only have the option of playing web-browser games. Pushing it to US residents who already had better value options was just not going to happen.  Pushing it to Canadians, with the expensive bandwidth caps, wasn't going to happen.

 

If ISP's weren't pushing bandwidth caps, Stadia might have had more success. But you can't get a usable amount of bandwidth on a mobile device to play Stadia, and coverage gaps would likely not have you playing it the back seat of a car.

 

[SADS]

I'm surprised this idea/project even got out of the board room to be honest.

It was doomed before it even started and I thought everyone already knew that?

[Middcore]

8 minutes ago, Kisai said:

However I feel the target market was sorely missed. This was a product that should have been pushed in India and Brazil where the high import costs of gaming hardware is extortionate. Or to places like Argentina where the local currency is absolutely worthless, thus people might only have the option of playing web-browser games.

 

 

What type of internet speeds do people there have, though? (I honestly have no idea.)

[KaitouX]

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Had the pandemic and GPU shortage continued, Stadia might have slowly gained users. People unable to buy PS5's or high end phones and so forth.

 

However I feel the target market was sorely missed. This was a product that should have been pushed in India and Brazil where the high import costs of gaming hardware is extortionate. Or to places like Argentina where the local currency is absolutely worthless, thus people might only have the option of playing web-browser games. Pushing it to US residents who already had better value options was just not going to happen.  Pushing it to Canadians, with the expensive bandwidth caps, wasn't going to happen.

 

If ISP's weren't pushing bandwidth caps, Stadia might have had more success. But you can't get a usable amount of bandwidth on a mobile device to play Stadia, and coverage gaps would likely not have you playing it the back seat of a car.

 

When new games cost a third of the minimum wage, and fast internet for reasonable prices are usually only available in big cities, I don't think it would've worked that well in Brazil, at least not without cutting into the profits to be really cheap. If the service was something like Gamepass where games are included with the subscription, or if you were allowed to use your own games like Geforce Now it could've worked better though.

People that have enough money to get games and fast internet, probably also have enough money to get a PC/Console for the ridiculous prices they go for here, or are able to go to the US and bring it with them.

 

In my opinion Stadia was bound to fail from the moment they decided that you couldn't use games you already owned and required a subscription for "higher quality" streaming. They improved it a bit later(still not good enough imo), but at that point no one really paid attention to it anyway.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Oh no, where will I go now for my negative latency?

[JoshB2084]

1 hour ago, Middcore said:

 

What type of internet speeds do people there have, though? (I honestly have no idea.)

Average U.S. Internet Speed is about 40 Mbps. I don't know if it is accurate speed, I just found out on Google.  Mine is 350 Mbps at my home, but my upload is 10 Mbps.

[Middcore]

Just now, JoshB2084 said:

Average U.S. Internet Speed is about 40 Mbps.

 

I asked about the countries like Brazil that were being suggested in the post I replied to.

[Taf the Ghost]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Had the pandemic and GPU shortage continued, Stadia might have slowly gained users. People unable to buy PS5's or high end phones and so forth.

 

However I feel the target market was sorely missed. This was a product that should have been pushed in India and Brazil where the high import costs of gaming hardware is extortionate. Or to places like Argentina where the local currency is absolutely worthless, thus people might only have the option of playing web-browser games. Pushing it to US residents who already had better value options was just not going to happen.  Pushing it to Canadians, with the expensive bandwidth caps, wasn't going to happen.

 

If ISP's weren't pushing bandwidth caps, Stadia might have had more success. But you can't get a usable amount of bandwidth on a mobile device to play Stadia, and coverage gaps would likely not have you playing it the back seat of a car.

 

We probably need to go back and see if it was the ESG backing that was pushing the "Game Streaming is the future!" stuff. Because only Xbox seemed to understand it was only ever an Add-on service. The numbers were never going to work for what they were pushing. But, we made note at the time, they brought in staff that had poorly launched multiple consoles and they poorly launched another one!

 

That being said, there was a way to make this work and it offered some very interesting social interaction effects with streamers. The problem is they wanted to launch while "Game Streaming" was the hot topic. They needed 3+ years of backside work and time for GPUs to develop. But the real thing is they completely missed the audience this actually made sense to sell to: this should have been the best Mobile Gaming Platform available. Which they could have used to also push their Pixel phones. And for the couch/computer players, they needed Civ 6 and games like that. And it needed to be purely a subscription service with downloadable saves (for the games it makes sense).

 

Now, the important question: what were they actually planning to do with likely the largest collection of Vega GPUs ever assembled?