Google Stadia, the tech giant’s ill-fated venture into the video game industry, is taking its final breath after a little over three years.
Available November 2019 The goal is to achieve long-term MicrosoftXbox, Sony game consoleand nintendoexecutives Seems to believe gamers will ditch their traditional consoles soon And take their hobbies to the cloud.
but although like Netflix, amazonand disney has seen us use streaming a lot for movies and TV, GoogleGamers’ hopes of doing the same never came close to being realized.
The report recommends an internal target of 1 million monthly active users (Netflix has 223 million) did not, and the 2020 figure peaked at around 750,000.
For a company of Google’s size, that’s never going to be enough.it’s off confirmed last yearto start the countdown clock that ends at 8am UK time on Thursday.
As Mike Rose, founder and developer of studio No More Robots, told Sky News after learning of Stadia’s collapse: “The writing has been on the wall for a while.”
Stadia’s Phil Harrison at the launch event in March 2019
When the closure was announced, No More Robots was still developing a game for the platform, but few games had been released by then.
While Google does attract the likes of Assassin’s Creed, Doom and FIFA In the first few years, no one was as successful as they were on traditional consoles.
Gamers are notoriously tribal groups, and it takes something extraordinary to happen to make them abandon their brand loyalty to their platform of choice.
While Stadia has never built a large library of tantalizingly exclusive games, those who made the service their only home will disappear from existence, raising concerns about game preservation.
Its closure was marked by the final version of Worm Game, which Google uses internally to test features.
But never mind the game, Stadia has other problems.
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Is this a watershed moment for gaming?
Stadia’s game library offers some big hits, but never comes close to its rivals
Streaming giants in the movie and TV space have gone global by leveraging the technology to make themselves accessible almost anywhere, with a business model to match.
Watch thousands of content anytime, anywhere for a monthly fee.
Stadia may be available on everything from smart TVs to smartphones, but its pricing strategy — certainly in the first 18 months of launch — never looked very compelling.
Its Pro subscription tier, required to stream games at the best possible quality, offers a relatively small selection of games, a far cry from the vast library that keeps people hooked elsewhere.
For everything else on the service, including the aforementioned blockbuster titles like FIFA and Assassin’s Creed, players pay the same full price as they would on other platforms.
It’s been a tough sell, as Stadia’s versions of popular games are often considered inferior to their console cousins, though Google has been offering refunds as part of its farewell tour.
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Will PlayStation’s subscription service win over fans?
Stadia promises to bring high-quality gaming to a range of devices over the internet
Do gamers even want to stream?
Without a doubt, the most real question facing Stadia is whether game streaming is viable.
The brief dips in picture quality or buffering moments in Amazon Movies are really annoying, but they’re nothing compared to the impact an unreliable connection can have on your game.
While an Xbox or PlayStation controller is connected directly to the console via a cable or Bluetooth, the Stadia controller is directing a game being played on a remote server hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Any delay between pressing a button and the action on the screen can be fatal.
Even Netflix knows this — it’s getting into gaming, but with a download rather than a streaming option.
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The future of streaming services
Xbox Game Pass has proven to be a more attractive subscription service than Stadia
“The Future of Video Games”
Stadia isn’t necessarily the death knell for cloud gaming, perhaps more like a case of trying to run before you can walk.
Despite the setback, No More Robots’ Mike Rose is optimistically declaring that cloud gaming is “the future of video games.”
until ultra-fast internet speeds become truly mainstreamIt is also hard to imagine that cloud games will do this.
But industry leaders Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all offer game streaming to varying degrees — they haven’t made the fatal mistake of basing their entire platforms on game streaming, but it’s an increasingly important issue.
Xbox Game Pass is the closest thing the industry has to a “Netflix of gaming,” increasingly offering its vast catalog for streaming on phones and tablets rather than just downloading on consoles — and Has over 25 million subscribers.
That may be over for Google Stadia, but don’t count on the cloud just yet.