Google Stadia’s shutdown isn’t the end of cloud gaming

Google shutting down Stadia’s game-streaming services is an understandable reaction. No one wants it. You can now go with your laggy fuzzy and insubstantial server side gaming. No, the market is not.

It isn’t the first time that this has occurred. Cloud gaming service OnLive tried to steal a march on a nascent technology in 2010 — disastrously too early, it turned out. After Sony purchased it, the service was shut down in 2015. Stadia, which was launched by one of the world’s richest companies, boasted cutting-edge engineering, and was located at the physical heart of the internet — i.e., in Google’s data centers — lasted half as long. It seems that this suggests a decline in the technology, which many gamers with longstanding attachments to local gaming consoles and computers are skeptical of.

This assumption is a mistake. Still, cloud gaming faces many obstacles: in marketing, logistics, public perception, and technical. It also offers huge potential advantages in terms accessibility and ease-of-use. The truth is that Stadia’s failure is purely and solely down to Google. The wrong strategy was chosen at the wrong time, and the company then gave up despite unlimited resources.

Even though Stadia’s 2019 launch came nine long years after OnLive’s, and in the wake of other, similar services like PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s GeForce Now, back then it was early days for cloud gaming — and it still is now. Our readiness to use this technology is hindered by multiple factors.

They include the quality of the data network (wired or wireless). This is a huge factor in cloud gaming and can have a much greater impact than one-way streaming such as audio and video. In London, which is a large European capital, both 5G and fibre broadband aren’t always available. It is even worse in some other markets.

Cloud gaming also requires more faith than marketers may realize. Although there are many benefits, including the removal of long downloads, cloud gaming is a much bigger shift for customers than other media. For decades, music and movies have been delivered to our homes through radio and TV. We are used to seperating the two. Non-local gaming has never happened before, and divorcing the game from the hardware that plays it — accepting that the magic is happening Or, — is a subtle but powerful mental block. It’s also one with real, tangible disadvantages when it comes to quality, which is a compromise that users have come to accept for TV and movies, but not so much for games — at least, not yet.

Google was determined to capitalize on the cloud gaming trend while it was still in its early stages. This wasn’t necessarily a disastrous choice, and the moment was probably right for a soft launch — Stadia’s technology was already excellent, and Google was ready to change minds. Oddly, though, the company, known for its slow, methodical approach decided to launch a massive, well-marketed consumer product.

It was a horrible mistake. The consumers, not prepared for cloud gaming or unsure of how it would complement their gaming hardware, shrugged off the idea and moved on. Google added to this mistake with an erroneously misguided business model that focused solely on products: Stadia controller hardware and games, both of which were sold at full prices (often absurdly higher than on Steam).

It was impossible to adopt a retail model in order to sell an immaterial product. Customers asked the right questions and were very clear about what they were buying. As it turned out, nothing. Google did have the grace to issue a refund for customers who had made ill-informed purchases. Stadia didn’t sell because it was an unappealing deal.

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Google might have had more time to work these issues out if it launched softly. The soft launch might have given Google time to fix another major oversight. It put the platform above the software. Phil Harrison, platform boss, was formerly with both PlayStation 2 and Xbox. At launch, Harrison talked up the genuinely exciting possibilities of games developed natively for the cloud — things these games could do that no game depending on home computing power could manage — but Google had no software ready to demonstrate this.

Actually, the company had only begun to build studios for exclusive games. It was years off. Microsoft was aware it would need to acquire Bungie 20 years before. Halo Google ignored that precedent, and it was unable to take on established platforms. Google made this fatal mistake and decided not to persevere and wait for its investment to bear fruit. It closed down its Stadia internal development studios two years later than it announced.

Google must be fair. It entered this market with a huge disadvantage. There was no games marketplace to connect Stadia to (save for the very similar Google Play Marketplace on Android). This has been the ace in the hole of Stadia’s closest (though by no means only) competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Microsoft has the privilege of being able cloud gaming into its suite of products and services, which includes Xbox consoles, Windows gaming and Game Pass subscriptions. Microsoft has had the foresight to soft-launch the service, which is still in beta. It also used it to enhance Game Pass rather than selling it as its own product. It’s a perfect match; it is surely a no-brainer that cloud gaming should be sold as a subscription service, and conveniently, Microsoft already had one, and a library of games to match.

In this context, cloud gaming is presented as a useful, alternative way to enjoy your games, whether it’s playing a perennial favorite like Forza Horizon on an iPad while the TV is in use or using it to immediately sample a new release before committing to a download. Sony now positions PlayStation Now similarly in a PlayStation Plus subscription and it is a key gateway to access a new generation of PS3 games. It is not a paradigm shift, it’s just an added boon — but it worms its way into our lives. We get used to it; we learn what it gives us that our consoles can’t, and also how it complements them. We, alongside game developers, figure out when it works, and when it doesn’t. When the market, the networks, and players are ready for it, Xbox Cloud Gaming, among other services, will be available. We are waiting eagerly. Google won’t — for the pure and simple reason that it blew it.