Google Stadia Shutting Down Operations January 18th, 2023

The cloud gaming service that had promise for platform agnostic gaming is shutting down after nearly three years. Could the lack of popular games be the cause for Google Stadia's demise?

 

 Once popular now defunct, what went wrong?

 

The What

The Stadia service will be shut down on January 18, 2023. Users who held an active Stadia Pro subscription as of September 29, 2022 will not be charged for access to their Pro library or other subscription entitlements during the shut-down period. Google is offering a refund to Stadia users for Stadia hardware purchases (Stadia Controller, Stadia Founder’s Edition) or Stadia Premiere Edition, or Play and Watch with Google TV Package) made on the Google Store.

My Analysis

As a long time member of the Stadia service, I have been (and still am) all for cloud gaming and breaking away from platform specific hardware. In order to achieve success in this market you need to cater to the games that are popular and in demand. Unfortunately, Google's Stadia failed on that aspect. The library of games were "OK" at best. There were far more Indy and outdated games than latest trend games. Quality was very decent on high speed connections, but was really dependent more on several other factors, including, but not limited to, resource allocation on that client side, jitter and latency on the network side, and GPU consumption on the server side. Google is in this to make money, so the $9.99 monthly fee with the limited amount of users made it hard to be profitable. I don't think even if they raised it to $19.99 per month it would have not made a difference, since they would have lost subscribers as well. It is therefore that the Stadia division be sent to the Google graveyard along with Google Plus and its failed associates. 

What next?

If other cloud gaming providers are to step up to the plate, they need not follow the faults that led to Stadia's demise. Amazon Luna, I'm looking at you specifically as you're next. Amazon Luna is exactly a mirror image of what Stadia is/used to be. Major players in the game (so to speak) like Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation Plus, and GeForce Now, all may stay in the game considering they can keep their cloud GPU costs running low. Fortunately for Xbox Cloud gaming, Microsoft has Azure to host these services, so they can run "at cost", PlayStation pays its premium to host on AWS and GeForce runs its own private cloud.