Google to shut down Stadia cloud-based game streaming service
Google is winding down its Stadia game streaming platform.
Google is no stranger to taking risks and admitting defeat. Most of the public failures in the history of the company have been chat apps, but sometimes Google shuts down truly innovative and cool things. Google Reader, iGoogle, and now Google Stadia joins the pile of shuttered projects born out of innovation and the hard work of the teams based in Mountain View, California. Google Stadia VP and General Manager of Stadia Phil Harrison announced the platform will be winding down.
Thanks for the memories, @GoogleStadia. 😢https://t.co/qXXi3N5hm8 pic.twitter.com/WyYFoQUFJm
— Productive Citizen ✌🏾💙🙏🏾👊🏾 (@technosucks) September 29, 2022
Here's the full statement from Phil Harrison's blog post:
For many years, Google has invested across multiple aspects of the gaming industry. We help developers build and distribute gaming apps on Google Play and Google Play Games. Gaming creators are reaching audiences around the world on YouTube through videos, live streaming and Shorts. And our cloud streaming technology delivers immersive gameplay at massive scale.
A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. 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.
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.
The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed. We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.
For the Stadia team, building and supporting Stadia from the ground up has been fueled by the same passion for games that our players have. Many of the Stadia team members will be carrying this work forward in other parts of the company. We’re so grateful for the groundbreaking work of the team and we look forward to continuing to have an impact across gaming and other industries using the foundational Stadia streaming technology.
Source: Shacknews Direct: Introducing Shackpets!
While today's news is a gut punch to any Stadiacs out there, the good news is that the platform will stay live until January 18, 2023. In a truly classy move, all game and DLC purchases made through the Stadia Store and all hardware purchased in the Google Store will be refunded to customers.
While Google Stadia may be dying, the underlying technology will live on and potentially be applied to other Google projects like YouTube, Google Play, and even upcoming AR projects.
As the Internet's #1 Google Stadia Influencer on the internet, this is devastating news. Shacknews thanks the entire Google Stadia team for their tireless efforts to bring cloud-based video game streaming to the masses.
We will all get to celebrate Google Stadia's third anniversary on November 19, 2022. Let's all send off the platform with a Stadia-tastic celebration of the magic of cloud-gaming!
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replyAsif Khan posted a new article, Google to shut down Stadia cloud-based game streaming service
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Google is shutting down Stadia, because of course they are:
https://twitter.com/jaypeters/status/1575519579987902464
Not surprising, but kinda sad.-
STADIA IS DEAD. Damn, I was close. I think I said 5 years after launch.
https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/1575520541678587907?s=46&t=_V31tA-rbt2_6u8-ETsvlw -
Google shuts down Stadia
https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-streaming-strategy/
Refunds for all, at least-
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I didn't even know there was actual hardware involved from Google. Shows you how bad the marketing was. I thought it was mostly software only and no hardware at all.
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Hm.. so what was missing? Was it just too expensive and too bandwidth intensive or what?
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Right, right. I was thinking of a subscription model where you'd pay money each month and you'd be able to play games without actually buying the games. Ideally you wouldn't have to install the games either but I don't think that's feasible yet.
You'd rent the experience each month. Gamepass is pretty close to that concept.
I say this without actually using Gamepass.
Also is Gamepass one word or two words?-
Two words and yeah, that's essentially Game Pass's cloud part. Game Pass has X number of games and some of them can be done through cloud, others can't.
As anti-cloud gaming as I am, if anyone is going to make this work it's going to be Microsoft. Advertising and search engine companies are not just going to waltz in and own this space.-
I wonder if Valve could compete with Microsoft on that front.
SteamOS but it's completely remote? Probably not really feasible the way I'm imagining it.
Now that I think about it for a moment I don't think Valve can execute on that sort of thing.
Sever based SteamOS? That'd be an interesting thought experiment.-
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Yeah, I was trying to think of a way to do it where all of the installation process is on the server side but that might require too many other things aligning to that.
It would a require a massive, MASSIVE data center for sure.-
That’s what screwed GeForce Now. They didn’t want you to have to wait for the VM you’re using to have to download the game from the internet from Steam so they had a local server with all the install files cached. That’s what Bethesda and others were calling bullshit on, I forget why but it crossed some legal line for them.
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Oh that sucks.
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capitalism is the most efficient distribution of resources
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what does this even mean
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it means that it is ridiculous how much money google has spent on products that serve no real purpose, solve no goal, and they have later killed. probably billions of dollars.
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the soviets would've designed the perfect game streaming service the first time
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I'd respect capitalism more if companies would just stick to their core competencies. Especially large companies that practically have a natural monopoly.
M&A activity just makes it more confusing. Who's doing what? -
In Soviet Russia gaming service streams you!
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How many man years / dollars were just lost? I wonder what they learned from this business venture that actually added value to the company.
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It was paid hardware with a paid subscription and paid games priced at or above competitors that have nothing to do with ads. Come on.
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There was no world in which this product was going to have a userbase relevant to ads. Even if Stadia was fantastically successful out of the gate and had 50m-100m users (essentially all at once becoming equivalent to Xbox or Playstation userbase) that's an irrelevant scale for advertising. It also wouldn't generate any particularly meaning data over the top of what Google also collects on those people to serve more lucrative ads in more lucrative places (ie search). The idea that this product was ever about being ad driven and that's why it failed is nonsensical.
The product was priced to be profitable. The entire problem was it was overpriced to this end ($60 games on top of subscriptions). It just didn't actually find enough customers to continue and Google didn't have the appetite for the spending required to bootstrap it properly.-
To me this only makes sense to me as a Google product if you consider Google as a company that has to do everything over the Internet and Web. That was the original deal with ChromeOS and Chromebooks, they were basically just web browsers in laptop form, because Google thinks everything should be done through the Internet and Web (or at least they did think this way). It's why you make a web browser - if you think everything should be done via web pages you need to have some level of control over web rendering technology and not be beholden entirely to third parties (and this is wildly successful seeing as how other browser vendors including Microsoft just said fuck it and use Chrome's rendering engine). And it's why they did the boondoggle that was Google+, they saw Facebook becoming what people thought the Internet was so let's make our own version of that and be in control again.
And so one of the things that will tether people to hardware and client-side installs and Windows as a platform is games so figure out how to do that over the Internet and Web, too. Cloud gaming makes perfect sense from this angle.
Google just doesn't have, for better or worse. Microsoft's determination to tough it out in the market. Famously the Xbox division lost money for many years, heck the hit they took on the RROD stuff probably dwarfs what this entire Stadia project cost, but they were determined. They even arguably have the inferior hardware offerings for this and the previous generation but they do crazy shit like Game Pass which makes them less money than just selling four first party exclusive games per year but it makes it a compelling offering.-
Right. Just look at how much Sony and MS are spending lately on M&A of developers even on top of their existing set of first party developers and exclusives. Google must've imagined they were going to do some magical 'if you build it they will come thing' and somehow avoid having to spend billions (more likely 10s of billions). Otherwise how else do they pull the plug this fast? You had to know you were going to need to make a massive investment to become a player in this space. The same story we saw as they cancelled first party Stadia game development after 2-3 years. Like did you really not know how long it takes to make a videogame when you launched this product?
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You can look at their recent product catalog and deduce it might not actually be a problem specific to ads at all.
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It's an impressive tech demo is what it is to me. But terrible marketing and confusing the way it was packaged.
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I’ve always heard anecdotally that the primary market for these is Japan where there’s better ISP bandwidth. Granted the first Cloud game on Switch was Control, a western title.
But yeah it’s always seemed odd to me that you never hear of anyone buying or playing these, though there must be people doing it or else they wouldn’t keep releasing them.-
The concept is great, the execution (from a tech part of view) is good but the marketing is both confusing and terrible.
Gamepass is the closest we've got to doing it right. I'm not sure if the next step is cloud gaming where you don't have to install anything at all. Pay a monthly fee and play games without thinking about installing anything at all.
That might require too many pieces sliding into place just right. At the very least it would be a controlled environment much like an Nintendo.
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If it needed "tens of millions" per game to make it work, I doubt anyone else would want to take the engineering burden on as a third party user of the service.
Imagine someone offering you a Bugatti Veyron for $5 per day rental but told you you need to pay for your own tires (at 100,000 each, so 400,000 for 4 tyres) and gas, at 2 mpg, would you want to support this?
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I feel like with places like Microsoft and Sony working on their own cloud gaming thing that will be seamless and obvious to gamers they didn't really have a chance unless they got one of them to license their tech.
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They didn't have a chance anyway. Very few people (in the US anyway) have network situations where choosing cloud gaming would make sense at all beyond it being a nice extra, a way to play or do minor stuff when traveling or on the go.
It totally makes sense in other territories - cloud gaming on the Switch makes a ton of sense as an option in Japan, for instance.-
That's a good point. If more people who couldn't afford a nice computer/console had fast internet this could have been a lot bigger with phone gaming, etc.
I played Cyberpunk on my phone/laptop with it and it mostly worked well. -
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Even earlier than I thought, lmao. Who the hell is in charge over there, and do I want to know how much money they make?
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Someone find the Stadia Launch thread with our predictions. Who won?
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waxthirteen, I think:
https://www.shacknews.com/chatty/38431900-
Woo hoo! What do I win? A Stadia subscription?
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YouTube Gaming
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Their marketing and monetization teams really suck. The engineers are good. The product itself worked really well. Everyone on day 1 said how expensive it was, but they still went ahead. Dead on arrival, honestly.
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I think they're fine with failing fast. These ventures don't really seem to dent the core business success very much.
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Dude, it's not like they have infinite moneybags & engineering talent to draw upon. /s
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I feel like Stadia was a solution looking for a problem. What market did it really it compete in?
It wasn't really competing with XBox or Nintendo or Sony's playstations.
Google should've just made a console based on this technology instead of looking for people to provide their own take on it.
I feel like Google wanted it to be like Microsoft's Game pass and it just wasn't like Microsoft's Game pass.
I say this without using Game pass or Stadia.-
Did it have anything like a subscription/GamePass model?
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No it was more like Games with Gold or PSN+ where there were different games offered free on a schedule, but no full access type.
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Ah yeah that's right. So you essentially had to buy a bunch of games you owned again. I just don't understand who thought that would work.
"Netflix of games / instantly play shit" I still think is a pretty good idea. They should just do that IMHO.-
"Essentially had to buy a bunch of games you owned again."
Ugh. You'd think Google managers would have seen that before committing to this. Definitely not their smartest moment.
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https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1575524344859545602?s=46&t=_V31tA-rbt2_6u8-ETsvlw
Oof. The losses have to be close to 1 billion,
Considering salaries, hardware costs, R&D and game acquisitions I’m betting.-
I expect games like Red Dead and Assassin's Creed don't just show up on a platform with users in the thousands without full moneyhats all around.
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only being willing to spend that little is part of the reason for failure
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It feels like the most obviously Google engineering thing ever: the tech was absolutely fucking solid, Google just didn't know how to build revenue from it properly and half-assed internal development, subscription models, and third party licensing simultaneously.
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I didn't pay a cent towards it but I'm still pissed it didn't work. I got it free with my Pixel 5, with a Pro sub for 6 months, and then let the subscription lapse because frankly I'm not the ideal customer for it.
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Aw man, so close,
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=38595932#item_38595932-
Did better than me, they lasted twice as long as I predicted
https://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=38993025#item_38993025 -
Play the lotto for me.
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How does a failing product fail?
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It has significant competition at lower prices with more functionality
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How do I not know about any of them? Why do I feel like Stadia was announced like 5-6 years ago, it came out, and google never talked about it after they released it? And why do i ' not know' about any of its competitors? I know more about Apple Arcade than I know about Stadia - and I am in the market for something like Stadia and not for Apple Arcade
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Xbox Game Pass offers game streaming as well as local execution of PC and Xbox games for $15/mo without having to buy individual games like Stadia.
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You make a good point - cloud gaming is legendary for being awfully or barely advertised.
Like PlayStation Now. No one ever really understood it, and even now as I look at the Wikipedia page and see it got rolled into PlayStation Plus I still don't quite see what it is. Amazon has their own service called Luna, I know fuckall about it. GeForce Now has its fans but unless you're also a hardcore gamer you likely haven't heard of it. Game Pass Cloud is probably the best known and it's completely optional.
The cynical side of me thinks that there's a concern that if they advertise it far and wide so many people will hop on and try and use it at the same time that the servers will crash and everyone will think it's crap. That's why Stadia forced you to buy some sort of controller thing before you could play. I know the reality is probably way more complicated than that but you do have to wonder. -
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Yeah, I tried NBA 2K on it one time and the latency was so bad that I canceled my sub immediately.
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[deleted]
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Remember how at GDC 2019 they had this display for it that compared it to the Sega Dreamcast, the Power Glove and ET for the Atari 2600?
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/b3wflx/googles_reveal_for_stadia_was_built_up_by_the/
So,
- A game console whose lack of success led to the company bailing from the hardware market
- A game controller legendary for being awful to use, and
- A game that's famous for being awful and sold so poorly that it's more having its excess copies buried in a landfill
That's what they wanted to compare themselves to.
Really it was the first signal that Google had too many cooks on this thing that they couldn't even communicate correctly with the team designing the stupid display (eventually one of them chimed in and said yeah, this is what they came up with based on the conflicting messages coming from Google)-
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The most charitable explanation I can think of is a misguided attempt to point out that these were all unusual new ideas - the Dreamcast with its VMU, the Power Glove being a tiptoe into VR types of things… not sure what ET is doing there.
But it was a complete lack of foresight to pick a bunch of literal market failures to prove your point. It’s like comparing your strength to John Henry, the American Folklore character that beat the machine but his heart exploded in the process.
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Somewhere on a private 767 the two founders looked up from their unicycles and felt a disturbance of .0000000000001% of their net worth
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Almost lasted as long as the confederacy.
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Who's going to get to keep all of the games??? Oh.
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Sorry for your loss, Briefcaseman. I hope you can become a #1 influencer for an equally dynamic product someday.
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Holy shit, talk about out of left field!
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Going to keep it sealed. Got it for free a year ago since I was a Youtube premium subscriber.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/98845287@N00/52393807998/in/dateposted/ -
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I tried it with control, they cycle through free games for prime members. Honestly it worked really well.
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GeForce Now and and Xbox Cloud Gaming still exist.
Not everyone can afford a four figure gaming PC. I have a colleague who is perfectly happy playing stuff via GeForce Now primarily.
It's not going anywhere and really I don't see how it's a detriment to us gamers who prefer to run them locally. It's not going to completely take over any time soon, much as publishers would love that as a way to finally kill PC game piracy.-
Back when OnLive was announced a lot of folks, including folks on here, were saying things to the effect of “phew, I almost built a new gaming rig, once this comes out I can just use anything and never have to upgrade again!”
So yeah, there were a lot of technology prognosticating hypochondriacs predicting that cloud gaming would replace regular gaming and be a real threat to regular gaming. Especially since it might encourage things like “we need to tone that explosion down, it’s too detailed and it won’t stream well”
None of that has ever happened though and I’m increasingly convinced it never will even if cloud gaming does hang on.-
Both things can and will continue to exist.
You're probably right that cloud gaming won't be the primary use case for everyone but I already use it more than ever before.
I use it on my Xbox via XCloud to play games that aren't latency sensitive and I don't feel like downloading locally.
I use it on my laptop via GeForce Now to play games that I can't play locally when I don't want to sit in front of my PC.
It's definitely not the optimal way to play a game, but it can get the job done and it is a viable alternative if you don't want to or can't spend thousands on hardware if you set your expectations within the limits of physics
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Why?
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Pretty simple reasons as to why I don't want cloud gaming to ever take over what we have now:
* note - if a law was passed that any cloud game had to have a physical or digital version of that game available, I would stop talking about right now. *
- #1 reason art preservation, cloud gaming will literally destroy video game preservation, when X game is not profitable or not popular and removed from the service it is gone forever. There is a reason why you can still go see Rembrandt's painting "The Night Watch", with a video game you can't screen shot it or record the audio in terms of a music streaming service or record a video that you streamed on Prime or Netflix. When it is gone it is gone and I have a serious problem with that as someone that loves art and is an indie video game developer + gamer.
- You can't change any graphic settings other than stream quality like YouTube or Twitch. Enough said, this is horrible, you don't like DOF, AA, motion blur, FOV etc etc your out of luck, they serve the game the way they want to you not the way you want to.
- If Google would of been successful I am sure both Sony and MS would of made the next consoles cloud only and that would of been the apocalypse and an end of a era, so I thank the gaming gods it failed.
- Look at what happened to EVGA and GPUs over the 4000 series. If cloud gaming took off it literally be the death of building computers and all industries tied to it would die as well.
- If cloud gaming took over there would be a massive stop in tech progress since everyone would stream off the servers current hardware(no push for progress). There would be zero push for AMD, Intel, Nvidia etc to push GPUs and CPUs since no one would build computers or hardware advanced consoles anymore. There would be no need to have mid, to high end tech to play new games or older anymore.
- Emulation would be at an end, enough said.
- Video game development would not progress since you be at the mercy of what specs and hardware the Cloud servers would have. The progress of new tech would basically come to a halt, there is no way the Cloud servers would want to get new hardware every 6 months, or every year or even two years.
- The hobby of building gaming PC etc would be GG and prices would sky rocket and many after market AIBs would all peace out.
- The amount of web sites, YouTube channels and other industries would all crash from the above it would be a mega catastrophe, tech sites would be pointless basically if all the above would go down.
- Pimping out old games on new hardware would be at an end.
- Modding would be at end.
- Lag issues, competitive gaming and pro gaming would be GG. A huge industry would be gone.
- Playing PC games on different configs like ultra wide, multi screen, etc would all be a no can do.
I could go on but basically the idea of cloud gaming phasing out what we have now is the last thing we need. I hope that makes sense, again if there was a law that you had to offer a physical or digital version then I am ok with it as long as there will never be a all cloud gaming environment and you have no options. So yeah, it's the bigger picture I fear and if it where to go mainstream, what impact it have on everything else we have established now. I just don't think cloud gaming as a replacement of what we have now would be progress but actually the reverse.
Also I think the main issue too is that if ever cloud gaming where to take off everyone would try to have that as a replacement rather than another option. After reading what I think above I think it is clear to see why that future would be apocalypse for many industries, progress and things in video games. Unless I am crazy LOL :) .
That is my take and concerns for the extreme outcome, I don't think I will ever feel different unless that law is passed and even then, I be worried if the law would be voided down the line.
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I'll be okay with it if we figure out quantum entanglement for data transmission meaning latency isn't affected by transmission distance.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck , I cannot tell you how happy I am right now to read this news :) ... one more time -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck LOL :)
Awesome!!!!!!!!!! -
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Stadia is shutting down January 18th 2023...
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Fuck right after I post this I see a 5 hour old post about it. Please nuke from orbit.
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Why do you treat me this way.
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Wait, what? How did this get here? Anyone else seeing this?
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Mods have been merging same-topic posts for a while now.
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What? That's awesome! I approve this merger.
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Surprise guys! D:
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yeah but that launched almost 15 years ago now
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just my opinion:
- chromecast. good solution, although i've since migrated to dedicated streaming devices (nvidia shield). still a great budget option though.
- chrome os. pretty much the defacto computer given to kids these days (chromebooks).
- pixel. i say this as the current iteration of their line of phones. apple may be reliable, but at least google is trying new things with their phones.
- android tv. it's what the shield uses. i really like it. i hope they continue to develop it.
- gsuite. there's quite a few apps here, but the good ones are solid.
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I honestly can't believe how many shackers said this was going to be a success
Or maybe I am misremembering and everyone said Stadia would fail but that game streaming would be a thing. If the latter, I still don't believe it. -
Apparently, Google did not tell active Stadia devs they were shutting it down
https://www.pcgamer.com/stadia-game-developers-had-no-idea-google-was-killing-stadia/-
That's pretty standard practice, avoids any insider trading concerns if employees don't know Big Things before public announcement.
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Back in 2019 "Stadia Director of Product Andrey Doronichev said in July that Google's commitment to Stadia is comparable to services like Gmail, Docs, Music, Movies, and Photos." https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the-biggest-concern-with-stadia-is-that-it-might-not-exist/
Shortly after that, Music went away. And here we are.-
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Please no, it's the one service I rely on.
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You monster.
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And Google music was way better to be honest. I still use YouTube music, but I don't like it as much as I did Google music. At least I still get ad free YouTube with it...
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I've had entire playlists go to shit because they suddenly switched out the uncensored music for censored, even with the uncensored still available. So dumb.
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So dumb. So freaking dumb.
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