Stadia's Just Pining for the Fjords

[Spalls Hurgenson]

Stadia - Google's game streaming service - isn't dead. Google says so.
Sure, it was ridiculed on announcement for making you buy the games
rather than allowing you to pull them from Steam (like nvidia's
offering) or offering a subscription model. Sure, it's user numbers
were pathetically low. Sure, publishers have publicly dropped out of
the service, as have many founding members of Stadia's own development
team. But Stadia's future is bright, Google insists... even as they
quietly shutter it's "Stadia Experience Room" in its New York stores.*

They have been hints that Google is trying to pivot Stadia from being
a stand-alone service sold directly to gamers to an underlying
technology it can license to developers who want to add streaming to
their games, but even this doesn't seem very successful.

Of course, one of the reasons people were so wary of Stadia was
Google's well-known tendency to shut down projects** that aren't
performing as well as expected. If it were just a subscription
service, it might have fared better but because it insisted that
gamers purchase (or re-purchase) individual games to use on Stadia,
there was a lot of wariness that this investment would be made
valueless in a year or three when Google inevitably killed the
project. So it's no wonder Google has been so cagey about Stadia's
ultimate fate.

Whether Google intends to go long-term with Stadia or not, its
messaging does little to inspire trust. Between the company's
reputation, the less-than-stellar performance of the software, its
limited library, its purchase requirements and now its closure of
store demos, it's no wonder most gamers are wary. If Google really
wants Stadia to take off, they're going to have to do a lot more to
promote Stadia; barring that, it's not likely to gain any traction in
the market and then Google will have to do what everyone expected it
to do from the start, and finally put a bullet in its head.








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* https://9to5google.com/2022/08/03/google-store-stadia-nyc/
** https://killedbygoogle.com/

[JAB]

On 04/08/2022 02:31, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
> Stadia - Google's game streaming service - isn't dead. Google says so.
> Sure, it was ridiculed on announcement for making you buy the games
> rather than allowing you to pull them from Steam (like nvidia's
> offering) or offering a subscription model. Sure, it's user numbers
> were pathetically low. Sure, publishers have publicly dropped out of
> the service, as have many founding members of Stadia's own development
> team. But Stadia's future is bright, Google insists... even as they
> quietly shutter it's "Stadia Experience Room" in its New York stores.*
>

I presumed it was dead already.

[Mike S.]

On Thu, 4 Aug 2022 12:01:41 +0100, JAB <no...@nochance.com> wrote:

>I presumed it was dead already.

I was going to post something very similar to this.

[Spalls Hurgenson]

On Thu, 04 Aug 2022 07:59:55 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>On Thu, 4 Aug 2022 12:01:41 +0100, JAB <no...@nochance.com> wrote:
>
>>I presumed it was dead already.

>I was going to post something very similar to this.

So, what you're saying is:

"It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This service is no more! It has
ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff!
Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't poured another
billion dollars into it, it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's user
counts are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It'ss kicked the bucket,
It's driven off all its users, run down the curtain and joined the
bleedin' choir invisible!! "

[Dimensional Traveler]

At some point in there you needed to bang your user agreement for the
service on the counter.


--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

[Justisaur]

It's just stunned.

- Justisaur