Stadia's Penultimate act

 Lifesupport: Activate

I have put this off for as long I need to in order to expunge that vile sense of smug satisfaction I've gotten from this news, because one should never celebrate the downturn and slow death of a project people believed and trusted in; but after years of trying to advise an audience that vitriolically condemns you at every step, the smugness feels somewhat fair. That being said I want to be respectful, because I know that there are people out there who really did invest their time and money until this, and unlike with those who dropped thousands on Star Citizen never once caring about how blatantly they were feeding a nepotistic engine of cannibalistic feature-creep gone wild, I can understand and sympathise with adopters. Google Stadia made sense in it's premise, it can from a company with the sort of size to make it work, and there's no sensible reason why it wouldn't be a flagship service that Google sticks behind and champions far into the future until the infrastructure of the world is ready to maintain such a trailblazing concept. But we don't always live in a world of fairness, now do we?

Over the past few days we've been hearing word, mostly derived from industry sources because Google is nothing if not incessantly reticent to be openly communicative with it's users, that Stadia is quietly being scaled back in prospects from being the new frontier of gaming to settling into just an infrastructure that other, more established, game companies use to get into the whole 'cloud gaming' market. So not the worst news in the world: it's not like Stadia is planning to shut down overnight and take all the hundreds of games people have purchased with them, but not the glowing endorsement of health that the community has been longing for so long now. These are people who were promised dedication by Google to creating an infrastructure that wouldn't just rival, but would be set to succeed the big companies of today, shirking the physical aspects of gaming altogether to prove how much more promise cloud gaming would hold. This meant exclusivities, building a huge library of games and even the creation of endlessly ambitious first party titles that would dwarf the ambitions of traditional media software. Stadia was meant to be the future.

Of course the problems with this concept were clearly sprawled on the wall for anyone with the mind to see it; Google maintains a terrible track record for keeping up with it's ancillary ideas and has killed a stupid number off completely unless they become immediate successes. Stadia didn't seem to have any plan for tackling real infrastructure issues that were destined to limit growth, such as 5G coverage and strict ISP data limits. (Not that I can really say I know what Google could have done about either of this massive issues, but choosing "Do nothing and see what happens" isn't typically seen as setting oneself up for success.)  I mean you have to know things aren't heading for a meteoric rise when the biggest story of last year is about how they finally got around to adding a search bar to the store after a year. (To be fair, they didn't exactly need a search bar for the thirty or so games they launched with, but Google took way to long to catch up with that.)

Developers have left the company or been reassigned to other sectors within Google, all first party development methods have ceased, Stadia hasn't had an exclusive on it practically since launch, and to this day, amazingly, they haven't even hinted at the possibility of working on that Youtube crossover functionality they showed off working in the announcement stream. Possibly the single best way they could have marketed this platform, by piggybacking off the (now second) largest video streaming platform on the internet, and they never once got around to it. Sometimes it's hard to tell if Google ever took it's own platform seriously what with how lacklustre everything ended up being. I mean, the only thing worse would be if people actually took this seriously and got burned in the process.

One of the most headscratcher subreddits on the platform, the Stadia Reddit has been very divided on the news that the platform which was meant to be the future of gaming is quietly being relegated to a third-party stepladder. On one hand, for the first time since it's inception, we're seeing people finally blink the gunk from their eyes and see the world for what it is- realising that Google lacks the love and care to stick by a game's platform long enough for it to become a contender, let alone a competitor. And the others? Well you remember what the first stage of grief is, right? I'll let you quickly play through Majora's Mask in your head again to remember. Yes, the rest of the Reddit is deeply entrenched in denial syndrome to a near-terminal degree. I'd question how anyone could delude themselves so fully, but after the past few years we've had that's no longer some grand mystery to all of us, now is it?

"This was part of the plan all along!" Many posts seem to say "This leak is a bunch of propaganda nonsense, nothing is being scaled down whatsoever!" And I suppose that as we currently stand in a state of 'their word versus ours', it can be easy to buy into that belief and remain in the comforting dream-world where Google is your best friend gently caressing it's valuable tiny community who doesn't even come close to paying the bills for them. You know, just 'cause. But then think about what these defenders are actually saying. They're claiming that all of these journalists and reports are sacrificing their reputations to coordinated a false narrative in order to attack a long-disgraced video game platform that no one of the outside even thinks of more than once a year. And their evidence? Because Google Stadia's Twitter said so. Kinda.

Yes, Stadia recently rallied on their Twitter about how they're still dedicated to making games and keeping the greatness of the platform growing, and we know they're trustworthy because of how honest and open they've been throughout every step of this process. Right? And then there's the news of trademark filings in new countries that Stadia supporters take as a vote of confidence towards the platform's imminent expansion. Or it's just an expansion of coverage that will further fit their plans to convert this games platform into a tool for paying developers, as those developers would probably want to reach as far across the globe as they can. But what's a thing like 'logic' worth to those that have spent the past year crying about the perfection of gaming's latest platform being treated like a laughing stock? They've been mocked past the point of rational reasoning; they're running Chaos logic now, baby! 

And so we're left with a state where the Google Stadia team have quietly abandoned it's lofty dreams in favour of this holding pattern which will make it easier for them to sneak some profits out of the infrastructure, even if it won't exactly further the team to the original goal of changing the gaming landscape. I've called this 'Stadia's Penultimate act' because this reprioritisation is indicative of an impending hibernation state for Stadia, regardless to what the ill-informed interns running the Twitter seem to think, that will likely either be feasibly endless or will last about a year or two with no update before Google pulls the plug and hopes no one notices. Still, at least those who've followed Stadia up until now can look forward to enjoying their games for however long that lasts. It's such a shame too. Maybe Stadia would have been able to run an actually good version of Crackdown 3...