A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).
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“However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia,” Zimring says.
According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia’s Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google’s eyes, this wasn’t enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
It still seems like a tough sell. GeForce Now seems to work because the games you play on it are games that you own. I.E. your existing Steam/EA/Ubisoft account connects to NVIDIA GFN and you don’t purchase anything. You buy the NVIDIA Shield and you can just play your games.
Getting a service started is hard. Epic Games gave away hundreds of games to indoctrinate children to their platform (mostly kidding but their internal metrics basically support it - an EG survey showed 68% of respondents that use Epic don’t use Steam), so to me the idea of Google giving you a subscription option for quality and still having to purchase games to play them on the platform seems like a large miss overall, especially because a better option already exists with NVIDIA.
It just seems like the overlap of people who: don’t have a preexisting account and own a game already, don’t already have different hardware for gaming, and do have the internet capability for game streaming is very small.
Free tier or not, I just don’t see how gamers would (potentially re)purchase an internet limited edition of a game. I paid for GeForce Now for a very short amount of time because I had the founders discount and was going through different computers, so using my gaming phone setup was awesome. All the ROG phone accessories, the dock plugged into my monitor, the kunai controllers, all I was missing was actual games on my phone to use it with. Worked well for mouse and keyboard play too. So, for some phone setups, laptops, cloud gaming does make sense and isn’t an abhorrent way to game. But… buying something like that specifically exclusive for games? Thank goodness the players got a refund for their games, although I’m still mad the subs weren’t refunded as well.