I hated Google Stadia but I really hope others pick up where it left off

Last week, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, its cloud-based gaming platform, on January 18, 2023.

It was hardly a surprise to many. After all, Google has long had a reputation for killing several of its products and services, and its apparent lack of commitment to Stadia — including its decision to shut down its first-party game development division before it released a single game — certainly has. t help counts.

Stadia players can find an important update on Stadia here: https://t.co/IIFRYiIYUu

– Stadia ☁️🎮 (@GoogleStadia) September 29, 2022

Naturally, this made Stadia a big punching bag of the industry, especially since both Google and Stadia’s fanbase insisted that everything was fine. In fact, when I wrote about this in January, I received more inflammatory responses than anything else I’ve written, be it player eligibility, gatekeeking, criticism of PlayStation, or the whole controversy surrounding JK Rowling and Hogwarts legacy. While every platform has its venomous fans, I was surprised that it was Stadia of all people that disappointed me the most.

But I’m not here to say “I told you so” to all my haters, nor am I trying to celebrate Stadia’s death. On the contrary – I wish it were different. First and foremost, I’m certainly not happy with the staff and developers caught unawares by this news, especially those who were still making games and features for the platform. Some of them don’t even know if they’re getting paid and that’s terrible. I’m also all for giving consumers more choices, and Stadia has done just that.

“So, on Stadia: a technologically stunning, extremely mismanaged, and absolutely mesmerizing gaming platform.”

And while I was critical of the platform, I also recognized its strengths. The core tech is solid, the controller is solid, and the ability to play without dedicated hardware is handy. Also, I’ve always been a big supporter of streaming and have praised both Xbox and PlayStation for their measured approaches to the technology. But that was all let down by Stadia’s inherently flawed conceit as a platform focused on streaming games that you mostly had to buy a la carte. It relied on people being happy with a platform that only enabled you to stream in a market where streaming is still new. Xbox and PlayStation give you the ability to stream, download, or use physical discs. Even Nvidia GeForce Now, a cloud-only platform, allows you to stream games you’ve bought from other storefronts, expanding the catalog considerably beyond Stadia’s relatively meager library.

Google shutting down Stadia, shocking gamers who assumed they already didhttps://t.co/YLuxum52uH

— Hard Drive (@HardDriveMag) September 29, 2022

However, Stadia’s core foundation is something that I hope people will build upon. “We see clear opportunities to apply this technology to other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our augmented reality (AR) efforts – and make it available to our industry partners, adapting to where we see the future of gaming.” directed,” Stadia CEO Phil Harrison — a stunning man who continues to fail at every company he’s worked for — wrote in a blog post about Stadia’s demise. I don’t have much faith in how Google could salvage some of Stadia’s tech under Harrison, but I’d be happy to be wrong. Anyway the potential Is there. I’ve said it before, but I always think back to hypothetical Stadia use cases suggested by Canadian game producer and former Stadia executive Jade Raymond, including interactive YouTube documentaries with Stadia support or duplex-enhanced NPC dialogue. It’s this kind of unconventional, cross-platform thinking that could really be innovative.

But while Google doesn’t want to do anything with Stadia itself, I hope it continues to use the technology to help other companies. It’s already sold Stadia technology to companies like Capcom, which have used it quite cleverly to let people stream a Resident Evil Village Demo from their browsers. Not to mention developers like Bungie found that Stadia’s infrastructure was an advantage during remote development amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, Stadia itself doesn’t have to be a gaming platform to actually achieve success. Google makes a lot more sense in focusing its Stadia efforts on licensing and other partnerships rather than selling games itself. A big reason why events like the Game Developers Conference are so important is that they give game makers the opportunity to share knowledge and in turn help the wider industry, and hopefully Google can do something similar with Stadia. A rising tide, as they say, lifts all boats.

Again, all this only for the foreseeable future, mind you. As more companies embrace streaming and technology continues to improve, it’s easy to imagine cloud-based platforms seeing strong adoption. In fact, we are already seeing this happening. Newzoo, a renowned analytics firm, just released a report detailing how the gaming industry will generate approximately $2.4 billion (approx. CA$3.3 billion) in cloud revenue this year.

On the one hand, that’s not a lot considering it was an estimated $200 billion this year (approx. But it’s also a 74 percent year-over-year increase and represents about 31.7 million consumers who chose cloud -Pay for gaming, so it’s in companies’ best interest to continue investing in this space, and learning from Stadia’s mistakes and leveraging its formidable technology will only help.

So, here’s Stadia: a technologically stunning, extremely mismanaged, and utterly mesmerizing gaming platform. Nothing like it has ever happened before, for better or worse, and hopefully it can help pave the way for better deals.