What Happened To Google Stadia?

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Remember Google Stadia? It was Google’s attempt at entering the cloud gaming market. Google has since shut down Stadia but not for the reasons that you might think. It’s not that Stadia was not liked by its users or that Stadia was too expensive to run or any fundamental issue with the service itself. Rather, Google’s biggest concern was simply that Stadia was not successful enough. You see, going into Stadia, Google was hoping that they could easily market to and capture the entire Google audience of billions of people. But to their disappointment, they were only able to appeal to millions of people. This had little to do with Stadia and mostly to do with the fact that the cloud gaming market is still a new industry that is only now starting to grow and evolve. It’s very possible that Google could’ve stuck it out with Stadia and seen it become a massive success within 10 or 15 years, but given the lackluster launch, they would have decided to prematurely pull the plug. This video explains the story of Stadia and the time that Google killed a product simply because it wasn’t successful enough.

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Timestamps:
0:00 - Google Stadia
2:27 - Promising Beginnings
5:43 - Just Not Enough
9:23 - Being Early Is Hard

Thumbnail Credit:
Alex Wong - Getty

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Disclaimer:
This video is not a solicitation or personal financial advice. All investing involves risk. Please do your own research.

[mariokarter]

Google is proof that one successful product can bankroll literal dozens of failures.

[rorysparshott]

Managing to screw up a cheaper alternative to console gaming that you launch during a once in a lifetime crisis that forced everyone to remain at home is honestly such a spectacular failure thay its amazing to me that anyone thinks that meritocracy is even slightly a thing

[DeadDog]

Great video. One correction though. You did not need a subscription to play on stadia. You could simply buy a game and play for free with no wait time or time limit. Stadia confused everyone because of how it launched (exclusive to paying "founders" for the beta period) and how it continued after that (required a credit card to start an account and included a free pro trial). The fact that most people didn't understand that stadia was actually free shows how bad the marketing for stadia was.

[DannerBanks]

Cloud gaming is a tough market. Most people who love gaming already have a console or two. If you are making a new device or service, you are basically targeting "new customers" like the casual market who doesn't have a console or PC, or you are targeting hard core gamers who haven't owned a console in a couple years due to going to college or having young kids. The former market will not spend money/time on an expensive platform or service, and the latter is a small market. Like consoles, you need exclusives to get a cut of the current market

[juniorabigail]

They probably just wanted to dedicate all the graphic cards to AI

[marufbepary]

Google launched a new UI for Stadia the day it was shutdown. Honestly, it was trash at the start but it because quite reliable and it way smoother than its cloud competitors. Google did an awful job at marketing it.

[chrimony]

What really matters is how much Google was spending on Stadia. It was a new product in active development -- it couldn't have been cheap. Google is actually pretty good at killing products that don't perform -- the exceptions are pretty rare. I also imagine that after initial interest, the user base was flatlining. The whole thing was somewhat of a joke in the gaming community, and it probably hurt their feelings.

[themore-you-know]

This video is wrong.
1) they weren't "first to market". They were the newest among 20+ other platforms for gaming, and their offering was 5% of the existing alternatives.
2) the gaming market is already very established and mature: coming into the environment, you have to move people away from their existing habits AND investments to get the spenders to even care.
a) how do you compete with people's existing backlogs of games? My Steam and Epic Games accounts have a total of nearly 500 games.
b) how do you transition people's friends lists?
c) how do you get exciting, upcoming games to launch their extremely expensive to produce and promising game on your platform, instead of the market leaders (Consoles + Mobile + Steam)
d) how do you minimize risk for the developers who do launch with you? people who launch new IPs with you are at risk of wasting their efforts. People who exclusively launch sequels to loved franchises are at risk of tanking their mature franchises. People who exclusively launch sequels to awful franchises will cement gamer negative perception of your new platform.

3) the most addictive games are commonly multiplayer games, which require minimized input delay. How do you fight the buyer perspective that Stadia will not delay inputs?

[rrenard]

Google Stage III Cloud Engineer here, pretty much all of Stadia's resources were diverted to Bard then Gemini. The higher ups assured everyone that we were all safe and employed until one day we just got news of stadia being cut fully. It's insane like the tesla cuts. Luckily I got transferred to the Bard team. Management was desperately trying to beat OpenAI at their own game but we saw how Sundar handled this one... guy is a ego maniac behind the scenes.

[PpVolto]

The only problem what i have with Streaming services is there do not look into the Timed renting of Games/Videos. I pay 5$ for a 60$ game for a Week to test the game or play it one time. Give me the good old Game/Movie renting in a Streaming service and i am back to be a Netflix and Co user.

[PhilippBlum]

It's not the first time they did this. TPU and TensorFlow always have been promising products, but practically speaking Google killed it.

[MobiusGT]

What Google didn't realize is that Phil Harrison has constantly approved decisions that nearly ruined each company

[TimHunold]

I was asked to go to Google to work on UX/UI for the control panels for the CDN that powered Stadia. During my interview I mentioned I use the Nvidia Shield daily to game and as my primary set top box. They shut down before the third round interview. I had hope since Nintendull took all the Shield tech for their device and left us Shield users begging for a third gen

[TriglycerideBeware]

There are quite a few issues with your financial analysis in the "Just Not Enough" section, and the corrected numbers may dramatically weaken your argument (or maybe it wouldn't change the resulting insight, who knows, I'm not going to work it out).
The report you referenced on the cloud gaming market (which had a base year of 2021 and included the annual forecasts to 2030) was clearly talking about total market "value", which is a sum of market capitalization of the companies they included, not a sum of revenues. For example, Microsoft's and Apple's market caps are both just under $3 trillion, even though their annual revenues are only $200-400 billion. It's not correct to directly compare revenues and capitalization because it's trivially easy for companies, especially new companies, to artificially boost their revenue without actually profiting or increasing investor confidence (market cap), and vice versa. Not to mention that you were using a mere estimate of their revenue and assumed that it would scale the same as some random market cap forecast a decade into the future that doesn't even list a confidence rating or interval. On top of that, you speculated that they may grow their market share 5x over the next decade (I'm not using the percentages you said, because as I mentioned, you cannot directly compare revenue and market cap), and assumed that their revenue would also 5x in the same period. That is insanely optimistic growth, even for Google, and I don't think any figure derived from so many layers of estimates and speculations should be taken seriously at all.
Then you say if they did all that and had a revenue of $10B and became "worth" (market cap) "tens of billions", then they would be a Fortune 500 company. You're oddly correct in that step, because the Fortune 500 currently ends with a company with a little over $7B in revenue today. But that's just for… current year. Not 2030. Obviously all of the other companies will also grow over the next decade and there is no way $10B in annual revenue will be on the Fortune 500 in 2030. And then the weirdest part… the visual aid/slide. That's obviously not the Fortune 500. The Fortune 500 is for US companies only, so the fact that the row you highlighted says "Switzerland" is a pretty dead giveaway. I thought you accidentally used the Global 500 at first, but the values shown are actually market caps, not revenues! Fortune 500 ranks companies by revenue, not market cap, so I have no idea what list you cropped to make that slide. Certainly not the one you suggested in the script.
I noticed one little error, and the more I dug, the more issues I found. I'm all for hating Google's cut-throat product strategy, but this video did not make a case against it at all. I'm worried about your other analyses if something this severe was able to slip through, and I encourage all readers of this to be skeptical of the arguments and data presented.

[saviordream]

One of the issues people had with Stadia was that it wasn't actually a streaming service like Netflix, or more appropriately Microsoft's Gamepass. You didn't just pay one monthly fee and stream from a catalog of games. I believe you actually had to purchase the games you wanted, just like any other digital game from the other consoles. And so you would pay full retail price to have a game which you didn't even have on your own machine to play whenever you wanted, and had to rely entirely on a good internet connection. I think if Google had made it more like all the other streaming services they could have had a lot more traction in the market. A single monthly fee to be able to play any game from a large library makes a lot more sense to people, especially for a new market like game streaming was at the time.

[AntiFreak]

Dude this Phil has a part in every failed company ever

[chaptap]

title: A Successful Product
video narration: A Promising Product

yeah okay buddy

[PhilippBlum]

The root issue is: Google isn't capable of doing anything outside of advertising. They had so many good chances to make great products.
The whole AI revolution is thanks to Google, but they didn't capitalize on TPUs and TensorFlow. Kubernetes is originally from Google as well, but they didn't capitalize on it.

[beJT]

I can't believe they got rid of their Domain registrar business.

[robustrodent]

Another problem was that Google had not been in the gaming market before Stadia.

Microsoft, Nvidia, PlayStation, and even Amazon to some extent had exposure to the gaming industry before they started creating their cloud gaming solutions.