With a sudden, but still expected, release, Google announced that by the end of 2022 it will officially close Stadia, its own cloud gaming service opened with great fanfare in 2019.
What will happen to games and subscriptions? According to the company, all the games purchased or as part of a subscription will be available until January 18, 2013, but any progress or achievements unlocked cannot be transferred to other platforms. Google has also pledged to return the money for all purchases of Stadia hardware, including controllers, kits from the Founders and Premiere Editions, and the Play and Watch packages included with Google TV. Purchases of any games will also be refunded. How this will all happen has not yet been disclosed, but the process is expected to be completed by mid-January 2023.
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With this announcement (which was now in the air) Google’s dream of cloud gaming ends, a dream that Mountain View never really believed and to which he applied his usual strategy: if something does not work in a short time, it is better to close it. Except that the world of video games cannot be treated as a secondary project.
Yet in 2019 Stadia was unveiled with high expectations and good ideas: the ability to play wherever there was a connection and without depending on the hardware, watching someone stream and join them at the push of a button seemed interesting to rock the industry, and more importantly, the service seemed to work well technically. Furthermore, Google seemed poised to fight on the gaming front toowith the opening of dedicated studios run by people like Jade Raymond, an industry veteran with titles like Assassin’s Creed.
But all this is not enough, if technology and money are not accompanied by an adequate service: who expected a kind of video game Netflix, was then faced with a modest service, with few games available included in the subscription, while most of the features advertised at launch were absent. To persuade a public used to physically owning the gamesor at least the hardware where they are installed, needed a lot more, and the numbers never went up.
The only one Stadia’s moment of revenge came with Cyberpunk 2077: the game had many problems on consoles and required high-end computers to be enjoyed at its best, but on Stadia it worked very well, and this led many to take advantage of an offer created ad hoc (an offer for which everyone will soon ask for a refund) . Even because the shortage of PS5 and Xbox Xcombined with the pandemic, seemed perfect for taking advantage of cloud gaming, even if there are still many obstacles, both in terms of supply and infrastructure, to make this solution more attractive than everything else.
The bells for Stadia started ringing for death in February 2021, when Google closed all internal development studios and announced that would leave Stadia as a third-party service interested in building their cloud platforms. A striking example of how much it was not understood how and with what timing to approach the video game sector, a complex and stratified world in which a product, especially if new and with blockbuster aspirations, it can take years of work. And if Google itself didn’t seem interested in investing in video games, why should other developers do it?
The most absurd thing about this goodbye concerns them, since apparently Google has given the announcement without informing them of the details of this. which will happen later, as reported by a developer of Destiny 2, one of the titles that accompanied the launch. Apparently, even those who worked at Stadia knew about it last moment.
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Google has probably never really taken an interest in the project, or at least it seems to have sensationally underestimated the effort necessary to subvert the rules of a sector in which even companies with years and years of experience behind them move with caution.
Il is cloud gaming dead? Absolutely no: Microsoft and Sony offer such services with many games to try and GeForce Now has an equally large catalog for those with a great lineup but modest hardware. Logitech recently announced a totally cloud-based portable console, which, as singular as it may seem, shows that the giants of the sector are still interested in this technology. Today is a bit early to understand when, but it is very likely that cloud technology will be the future (or at least one of the future) for the use of video games. A future that Stadia will watch from the now famous Google Cemetery.