It’s been on the cards for some time now, but Google have finally admitted defeat and cancelled their game streaming platform Stadia after three years.
Sony already proved online game streaming wasn’t the most viable approach to the market when they closed their PlayStation Now app on most devices in 2017. They had already acquired the first two high-profile game-streaming services – Gaikai and OnLive – after they failed.
Sony still offer game streaming, but it’s limited to their most expensive PS Plus tier.
Still, Google threw caution to the wind and forged ahead with Stadia anyway. Their Project Stream entered closed beta in late 2018. Then Stadia arrived on the scene in November 2019 as a standalone service. Game-streaming customers were asked to buy their games individually, though they sometimes got bonus games with a subscription plan that also gave them a few bonus games as well as access to higher quality video streams.
In hindsight, the writing was on the wall from the start, with Stadia’s launch haunted by limitations and other issues, though it’s said by many in the industry that it was the business model of having to buy individual games that was the problem.
When it all boils down, though, why stream a game over the internet to a device you can run a local copy on, such as a PC or console, which has a far wider selection of titles on Steam or the console’s store.
Google also failed to provide a download option. They did, however, focus on Chromecast Ultra, but missed the chance to hit millions of smart TVs in the process, where Stadia had a chance to enable top-level gaming on relatively slow hardware, which could have let users save money by not having to buy an actual console.
Plus, it wasn’t until June 2021 that Stadia came to Android TV – a massive oversight seeing as it’s Google’s own platform.
Many say Apple also played a part in Stadia’s failure, by not allowing game streaming services onto their app store at first. Even after they revised their policy, Stadia never appeared as a functional app to stream games – it had to be used through a web browser, a less than ideal situation.
Either way, Stadia has gone the way of the dodo. Even one of its most popular games, Destiny 2, only managed 900,000 accounts – which is 1.5 per cent of all Destiny 2 accounts.