Google Stadia, the game streaming platform which launched less than three years ago, will officially go offline on January 18, 2023. All software and hardware purchases made through the Google and Stadia stores will be refunded. Google lacked exclusive content, and presented an unusual business model which ultimately thwarted the flexibility inherent to game streaming – typically a key selling point for such a service.

Stadia: A hybrid offering that fell flat

The news of Stadia’s consumer-facing demise is unsurprising and was telegraphed when Google disbanded its in-house games studios, thus abandoning its original strategy to compete with the traditional console platforms as a new ‘games platform in the cloud’. Its product positioning, while unique, has always been problematic. The Stadia service was an attempt to carve out a unique offering somewhere between Nvidia’s GeForce Now ‘bring your own games’ proposition and the cloud-enabled content services of PlayStation Now and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. The Stadia platform also aimed to be an alternative to the incumbent consoles, but this attempt at a ‘best of both worlds’ strategy was also its weakness and led to a confusing hybrid product. 

While it offered a free tier as well as the premium Stadia Pro subscription, all users wanting the latest games needed to buy them through the Stadia store. From the consumer perspective this meant it compared poorly to GeForce Now, which also offers a free tier but supports most PC game storefronts and offers access to the player’s existing collection of PC games. Additionally, the proprietary nature of the Stadia platform meant publishers and developers had to port their games, rendering the Stadia store selection less compelling versus other, existing storefronts. 

It also compared poorly to competing content subscription services. The games included with Stadia Pro were an attempt to convert free users to the premier tier of the service, but were also a way to differentiate from GeForce Now and compete more effectively with the console platforms. The limited nature of this catalogue did not have the desired impact, and appeared to be poor value in a landscape of relatively low-cost subscription services which offer access to bigger catalogues of content for a low monthly fee. Providing a catalogue of games allowed Stadia to be compared with competing cloud gaming offerings like PlayStation Now (relaunched as PS Plus Premium) and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and these comparisons were mostly unfavourable. 

A key factor in the success of Xbox Game Pass as a games subscription service is its constant supply of exclusive and launch-day content. This is another hurdle faced by Google, which lacked any established first-party games studio, seeking to create its own, and also failed to secure any high-profile, exclusive content.

Cloud gaming battles a disconnect between product and audience

Cloud streaming offerings are arguably best-suited to casual gamers who lack either the funds or the will to purchase dedicated gaming devices. However, those who are buying into the technology are typically core gamers and enthusiasts with high quality Internet connections capable of delivering an adequate experience. 

The need to purchase full-price premium games at $60+ in order to stream them on Stadia fails to align with that target audience of casual gamers who cannot or will not invest in a console or gaming-capable PC. What’s more, cloud gaming itself remains somewhat unestablished and unproven in the mainstream, so getting consumers to pay premium prices for content delivered in this way is a challenge.

Player dismay as save data for online games set to vanish

An enduring issue with cloud gaming is the inherent lack of content ownership; if a service is taken down, players lose access to their data, which is exactly the dilemma faced by many Stadia users now. Single player save data can be salvaged through transferring the file to a PC, but online titles which lack local saves are not supported. One affected player sunk almost 6,000 hours into Red Dead Redemption 2 – most of which was online – and it remains to be seen whether the game's developer Rockstar will offer a solution. As cloud gaming grows and increases its share of the games industry, this is a fundamental aspect of its delivery which will need to be addressed by platforms and developers alike.