Google Shutting Down Stadia Cloud Gaming Platform

[Onelifenofear]

Yes yes I do…I don’t think the half a dozen users or so will be that upset.

Apple Music and Apple Arcade to Earn $8.2 Billion Annual Revenue by 2025, Says JP Morgan Analyst

Apple's revenue from its music and gaming subscription services is expected to jump 36% to $8.2 billion annually by 2025, according to JP...

www.macrumors.com

70 million x $5 a month = $4.2b a year. Ain't chump change.

 

[gmanist1000]

Oof, that’s rough. I loved Stadia. Not surprised though.

 

[theROZ]

Remind me to never invest in ANY google projects.

 

[contacos]

First time hearing about this service. The irony

 

[contacos]

First time hearing about this service. The irony

 

[Lazlow]

DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD!

Good riddance. Game streaming should be an option, not the only option. No one wants to spend $60 on streaming only that's objectively worse than just running a game natively.

playing Cyberpunk on Stadia was objectively better than any other platform it came out on

and sure, running on a PS 5 is nice... if you can find one.

Cloud gaming makes sense from a resource perspective, but gamers would rather pay thousands of dollars on hardware

 

[russell_314]

Google and trashed services. Name a better duo.

Yeah Google does this with everything it seems. I get not being afraid to know when to call it quits but they call it quits if they even think it’s going to rain on a Tuesday in San Diego 😂😂

 

[Kar98]

Shocking.

 

[9594864]

Apple, do yourself a favor and shutdown arcade…leave gaming to Xbox and PlayStation

Apple Arcade is one of the numerous examples of Apple not knowing a single thing about services.

Imagine paying a monthly subscription for mobile games lmao. That trash literally litters the App Store for free.

Apple could have made an Apple TV Pro or Apple TV Play with gaming capabilities and a controller and support for big AAA games, but instead they made a dead-on-arrival trash service.

Look at the M-series chips…if they slapped a powerful one of those tweaked for gaming in an Apple TV Play they could have things like COD and other big AAA games. But at the end of the day unless you make your own AAA games there’s no reason to get into that anyway.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I have a 500/500 fiber connection and used Stadia to play Destiny 2. I never did match play, but I did strikes all the time, and the experience was pretty good most of the time. That said, I had a feeling Google wasn’t all-in on it, so I never payed anything into the service (Destiny is free to play). I believe they promised to upgrade the host hardware over time and there is no evidence that ever happened. I believe it worked by you connecting to dedicated gaming hardware, an older Ryzen+Vega setup.

 

[darkslide29]

I have one of these collecting dust. I believe the reason for the fail being that they went the route of a monthly subscription AND buying games standalone at full price. You can't do both - only one or the other.

 

[XXPP]

They have balls to provide refunds though. Props to them!

Better than class action lawsuit.

 

[9594864]

Well yes and no. As a non-gamer, what was the problem that Stadia is trying to solve?
Compare
- people generally want to watch a stream of new movies. Streaming services (as opposed to owning a stack of DVDs) is a really good fit for that.

- people (as far as I can tell) want to listen to a combination of familiar favorites and new music. Streaming services seem to match that need.
(BUT *I* care much less about discovery and much more about control of my favorites, so I do not understand the appeal of music streaming at all.)

- OK, now games. Are games like movies (people constantly want to play new ones) or are they like me and music (people want to stick with their favorites forever)? Or something in between like most people and music (play favorite franchises, but every few months these get updated/modified in some way)?

I honestly don't know the emotional relationship people have with games, and so how this plays out.
I assume Google thought the relationship was like movies or music and so having access to a largish library was draw enough, whereas the relationship is more like self-curated music ("I *only* care about these seven games. If you don't have them all, then you're worthless to me; and if you have anything extra I don't care")?

Is this a correct analysis? Or was it even dumber things, like costing too much or terrible UI?

No. It’s much more simple.

A huge percentage of the population of the US does not have super fast and low-latency internet yet. Streaming video games even for those with the absolute fastest connections still made them highly compressed, and looking worse and lagging more.

People want graphics to keep improving, the new video game consoles are selling extremely well and that is a testament to people desiring better and better graphics and frame rates.

Streaming video games makes the entire experience far worse. The fact that google employees were stupid enough to invest in that is really sad.

 

[ackmondual]

Times like this make me glad I'm not an early adaptor of any tech really. Let the issues of the first few generations get sorted out, or don't bother if it's going to get canned.

 

[BuffaloTF]

YouTube TV shouldn’t be that far behind.

It’s… the most popular live tv streaming service in existence? Stadia was a bad service from the gate, poorly supported, and panned for its worse-than-xbox-one visuals that everyone said was a flop all along.

 

[kiensoy]

It was ahead of its time.

 

[mnsportsgeek]

It’s… the most popular live tv streaming service in existence?

Most popular cable tv equivalent. Not most popular live tv streaming service.

And it’s a measly 5 million subscribers. After 5 years. lol

 

[giebe]

Maybe Google should think about their business. Of course nobody invests time and money in a service of a company, which is famous for shutting them down quite fast.

 

[dba415]

Apple Music and Apple Arcade to Earn $8.2 Billion Annual Revenue by 2025, Says JP Morgan Analyst

Apple's revenue from its music and gaming subscription services is expected to jump 36% to $8.2 billion annually by 2025, according to JP...

www.macrumors.com

70 million x $5 a month = $4.2b a year. Ain't chump change.

That's 99.99% Apple Music, and .001% Apple Arcade. There is a reason why apple does not breakout by service category when it reports.

 

[BuffaloTF]

Most popular cable tv equivalent. Not most popular live tv streaming service.

And it’s a measly 5 million subscribers. After 5 years. lol

Yes. 5 million. That’s a huge number of households in the market. Directv and Dish have 14 each. Charter has 15 million tv subs. Comcast has 18 million.

5 ain’t so bad now is it? Those companies have been at it for 28, 42, 60 and 59 years. Soooo…. Your point?

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

playing Cyberpunk on Stadia was objectively better than any other platform it came out on

Good joke.

 

[Zest28]

Xcloud from Microsoft is pretty cool. I can play games without having to instal it.

Only for AAA Xbox Series X titles, I play it locally on the console.

 

[no_idea]

Apple Music and Apple Arcade to Earn $8.2 Billion Annual Revenue by 2025, Says JP Morgan Analyst

Apple's revenue from its music and gaming subscription services is expected to jump 36% to $8.2 billion annually by 2025, according to JP...

www.macrumors.com

70 million x $5 a month = $4.2b a year. Ain't chump change.

Lol…you are citing a blended number. If I were to guess, 99% of that figure is for music and less than 1% for arcade…good try though 😄

 

[BuffaloTF]

Well yes and no. As a non-gamer, what was the problem that Stadia is trying to solve?
Compare
- people generally want to watch a stream of new movies. Streaming services (as opposed to owning a stack of DVDs) is a really good fit for that.

- people (as far as I can tell) want to listen to a combination of familiar favorites and new music. Streaming services seem to match that need.
(BUT *I* care much less about discovery and much more about control of my favorites, so I do not understand the appeal of music streaming at all.)

- OK, now games. Are games like movies (people constantly want to play new ones) or are they like me and music (people want to stick with their favorites forever)? Or something in between like most people and music (play favorite franchises, but every few months these get updated/modified in some way)?

I honestly don't know the emotional relationship people have with games, and so how this plays out.
I assume Google thought the relationship was like movies or music and so having access to a largish library was draw enough, whereas the relationship is more like self-curated music ("I *only* care about these seven games. If you don't have them all, then you're worthless to me; and if you have anything extra I don't care")?

Is this a correct analysis? Or was it even dumber things, like costing too much or terrible UI?

I think the more correct problem they were looking to solve was barriers of entry. Hardware purchases. They were the hardware, and you could get it for free. It worked with any controller, or you could buy theirs if you wanted. You could also subscribe to the service for a promised, never delivered, 4K stream. And some free games… but games were all full retail price. The notion of low barriers of entry are eliminated when you are asked to buy a game for 60 bucks that you can’t do anything with should you like the game and hate the service. And this also came at a time when GeForce Now was beta and offered up for free access to said beta - with the big selling point of all the games you already own on Steam or Epic Games being there for you to play.

Oh, and then it launched with no games (well, Destiny 2). And then it added very old, aged games. And they wanted full price for them. And the visual quality was poor. The stream would seem fine then it would freeze for a moment, then play everything in fast forward as it caught back up. It’s bad, in spite of those that refuse to admit it.

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

Imagine my shock!
Now it's Luna's time.

Microsoft and Nvidia seem to be the only ones having a moderate success.

And you know why? Because Xbox Cloud and GeforceNow are an option, not the only option. Both can tap into your existing libraries of games you own and you can instantly stream them to your phone other other applicable device. Alternatively they have a small subscription you can buy to get access to a massive library of over 400 titles to stream, Xbox Game Pass especially since it's the best deal in gaming.

Versus Stadia, where you had to buy every single game for full price as streaming only. Why would you pay $60 for Assassin's Creed Valhalla on Stadia when you could just pay $60 or less for it on Xbox and not only get a native version you could play on your Xbox but also a streaming version you could play on your phone?

And these were all issues brought up to Google that they just ignored. They were banking on the phone crowd to jump on board, despite the fact the service was only available on Google Pixel phones and Chromecasts, while Xbox Game Pass for Cloud is pretty much available everywhere (except iOS because Apple sucks and hate fun. Xbox Game Pass on iOS would kill the joke known as Apple Arcade.)