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.
I would have tried it if I could trust Google to maintain a commitment to something for longer than a couple years (at best).
It was doomed from the start for that very reason. Why would people spend $60 on games if they didn’t think they would be able to play them in a year?
Because the TOS stated, from the platform’s launch, that they’d refund all your purchases in the event of a service shutdown. Which they did.
Stadia ended up being a savings account for my PS5, which I bought with my Stadia refunds.
what about people’s save files though?
Oh those are lost to time lol
Nope, you could still same them via Google Takeout.
I pulled them all from Google Takeout. Most of them are unusable unless I figure out how to convert them to a state that can be read by other platforms, but at least I still have them, for such a day.
After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.
Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.
I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.
The subscription fee was for a gamepass-like access to a catalog of free games, so they didn’t refund that. The subscription fee also wasn’t required for playing purchased games (although it was required for 4K quality).
I mostly used keyboard and mouse with the service, since the games I like to play tend to work better with keyboard and mouse. I had a dinky underpowered laptop but was playing AAA PC-oriented games through the browser interface. It was great.
I’m on GeForce Now these days but I find that it doesn’t work quite as seamlessly as Stadia did.
It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.
I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.