Google Stadia shuts down after three years: How it all went wrong

Google Stadia is the most popular video game launch and return to Earth. This still-maturing industry has seen a lot of ambitious plans blow up on the pad in the past decade or two, but in 2019, Stadia’s unveiling at the Game Developers Conference had the air of history. It was another Google experiment, which failed to catch on a year later.

Thursday’s announcement wasn’t shocking for the fact Google was pulling the plug on its vegetative streaming games platform; it was remarkable because Google was offering refunds to anyone who spent money (other than the monthly subscription fee) on the service.

For some, the handwriting for Stadia’s demise was on the wall 18 months ago, when Google closed down first-party games development — for which Google acquired two studios and hired A-lister Jade Raymond. For many more, if not most, it was in Google’s anemic value proposition. Stadia Pro, the service’s premium subscription level, bought players access to an underwhelming library of unknown indie games, boutique racing sims, and THQ fire-sale IPs. It failed to live up to its promises of 4K streaming resolution.

When it was announced in 2019, Stadia was meant to shove aside the idea of dedicated equipment — $500 PlayStations or even more expensive PC gaming rigs — by giving you AAA gaming quality from anything capable of running its Chrome browser. What Google learned is that, even if you’re building a virtual console, that console still needs some headline-grabbing exclusive titles driving people to it.

Google instead paid eight figuresAccording to certain reports, the company will bring some of its most popular PC and console titles to it, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, The Division or the latest NBA 2K, to their platform — at full price. Sharp-eyed Google observers, and there are many, noted Stadia’s very un-Google like launch; typically, the company starts small — even acknowledging the beta state of their ideas — and expands. Stadia was advertised as a product right from its announcement at the GDC 2019.

Yet behind the scenes, Stadia’s managers seemed to spend the most money they could to make the most redundant platform of its day. At GDC 2019, Phil Harrison, Google’s vice president of product management, promised that there would be “distinctive features” but they never came to pass. “Innovations like distributed physics can be built into your games,” with Google servers handling all of the processing. He made the remarks on stage at Moscone Center. “Battle royale games can go from hundreds of players today to thousands of players tomorrow.”

This claim comes at a terrible time, as Embark Studios was founded by Battlefield Alumni just last week. FinaleA multiplayer shooter called “” whose complex and destruction-based physics engines are handled by the server side. The game’s creative director called that type of rendering “a holy grail” that the studio, founded in 2018, had been “chasing for a long time.” No less than Microsoft’s Crackdown 3 tried to pull it off in 2019, and it didn’t quite get there.

Harrison on Thursday said Google would apply the technology that the Stadia team developed across other parts of Google, “as well as make it available to our industry partners.” But it seems like studios are now capable of replicating one of Stadia’s original promises without its technology.

The only thing that Google is offering to video games in the long-term, however, will be the ability for people who have invested their money into the platform to get some cash back if it ceases functioning. Google will shut down Stadia for good on Jan. 18, 2023; anything other than Stadia Pro subscriptions will be refunded, though whether that’s automatic or needs to be claimed is unknown right now. Still, those who bought Google Stadia’s full-price games, expansions, or downloadable content will be compensated, Google said on Thursday.

But it’s doubtful Google’s gaming industry partners will be as grateful as Stadia’s customers. OnLive’s 2015 collapse left anyone who purchased a set-top box from them before February 2015 with a very expensive trivet. When Ouya’s vision of bringing Android mobile games to home theater setups imploded in the same year, none that crowdfunded console’s backers got anything back.

It is important to remember that games development can only be successful if it is a sustainable endeavor. HardPlatform development can be done in many ways It’s harderThis requires both vision and capital as well as a lot of force from the creators. Market, including GDC keynotes that are a delight, is responsible for zero.

You think back to the earliest days of another tech stock’s ill-advised console venture, how much they paid for exclusives, how much money it lost, how investors and rivals piled on that bad news — it seems like a miracle, 20 years later, that Xbox is even viable, much less the leader in video games streaming and subscriptions. Stadia, at Google, was just another expensive experiment.