Google initially announced Stadia during the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco in 2019. Via Stadia, Google claimed, it would allow users to play video games via almost any networked device, via cloud access to Google’s servers.
The pitch to consumers was that you don’t have to spend thousands on high-end consoles or PCs to play video games when you can log into Stadia via your current tablet or phone and run the newest Assassin’s Creed on maximum settings.
Now four years later, or there about, it is being discontinued.
People using Stadia will still to be able to access to their game libraries, including Pro games if you had an active Pro subscription as of Thursday. In an email sent to players, Google warned that publisher support for games may vary, and it’s possible that your gameplay experience may be affected during the shut-down period (suggesting that some games could vanish or lose features early).
Explaining the move, Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison noted Google’s investments in gaming through its Google Play digital distribution service, its cloud tech and YouTube streaming.
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” he said in the blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.”
Many employees on the Stadia team will be reassigned to other roles within Google, the blog post noted.
Opinion:
Google could not deliver a healthy user base or eco-system for game developers. Stadia never had a huge number of users and the warnings and bannings did not help Stadia. Imagine if youtube were just starting today under its current censorship cloud, does anyone think they would succeed? Remember Google Video also was failing even before they bought and turned their focus toward youtube. And remember how google attempted to strong arm their users into using google plus and yet it also failed. I can’t remember the name of it but there was even a google version of twitter that didn’t survive. Right now, because of censorship, google search is crippled and in time even that may fail. It certainly is not what it was in 2018.