Stadia is decomposing.

 And you're laughing!

You know who I haven't mercilessly picked o- I mean followed up on in a while? Google Stadia, that's who! And there's actually be a fairly decently existential reason for that, because I've found myself regularly confronting what exactly it is about the service that I just cannot stand on that deeply visceral level. 'Why am I such a hater?' 'Why can't I learn to love the gift that keeps on giving?' And then a piece of news forces me to confront Stadia and I'm reminded exactly why I can't stand the thing; because it was an anti-consumerist proposition that threatened to overthrow much more pro-consumer standards through sheer merit of being bigger than them. When Stadia first came around I remember bringing it up to my Uncle-in-law, who floats around these sorts of industries, and he just causally let slip that Microsoft would become the real players in this field in short order. Fast forward to today and, lo-and-behold, Microsoft's cloud service wipes the floor with Stadia in most sensible terms and Stadia fans are just starting to wake up and taste the disappointment we all felt when Google first announced the terms of the hostage situation it was attempting to impart upon the gaming world.

I first started hearing about Stadia again before the figurative faeces hit the tumble dryer; for this was a rather innocuous article of another agent within the cloud gaming space conducting an interview wherein they discussed their theory about where Stadia went wrong. From their reckoning, it was all in the business model that prospective buyers didn't see the value in. You know, the model wherein you would pay full price to access games that you then need to pay a subscription service in order to play. Like Netflix if you also had to buy all the movies and shows that you watch at retail. Whereas Xbox's cloud service can leverage the Xbox library for it's cloud streaming and Nvidia's GeForce Now service can piggy-back off of Steam; Google apparently never so much as considered reaching out to partner up with any of these services to leverage their position. No, they wanted to start something from the ground up that would convert non-gamers into subscribing to their bad offer; and to their credit, for the few that did take the plunge the gambit worked... those sorry saps on r/Stadia are as brainwashed as it gets. (That Sunk Cost Fallacy is a kicker.)

But then a simple headline came out and the rest of the world started talking about Stadia, which encouraged me to look in a little bit about what they're saying and... surprise, surprise; the service that killed off it's major in-house development studio over half a year ago isn't doing so hot! The inciting piece of news in question? That Assassin's Creed Mirage would not be coming to Stadia. They ripped that bandage off real early, didn't they? Ubisoft can't even be bothered to put a gameplay snippet together and are currently in the middle of batting off, apparently false, allegations of real world gambling in their upcoming game. But even amidst all of that the team found time to definitively say they won't even entertain the idea of a Stadia port. No 'will they, won't they' no 'silence that blossoms into nothingness'; just a flat refusal. Cold turkey. Really doesn't make it look like Stadia is on the wave of the future, does it?

That's what got me to look at Stadia; and then I ended up on the Reddit for Stadia wherein dissenters have to pre-label their threads 'constructive criticism' for fear of accidentally upsetting the paper-thin egos of Stadia enjoyers. That was how I learnt about the Stadia promise. A promise I already knew but forgot. The promise where Stadia would provide 100 new games on their service every year. Which is absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of gaming, but they wanted to do the 'Epic Games' thing and curate only the best 100 games so their service would be a hit. And those two full years of service went well enough with Stadia just managing to clear the bar of new games year in and year out. But we're nearly all the way done through year 3, and Stadia haven't hit 50 new games this year, and the missing games are all heavy hitters. They're going to break their promise and it wasn't even a massive one to begin with. 100 games a year should have been the beginning; not the waist high war they flop trying to jump!

Problems extend even further into games that have launched on Stadia and have trouble getting support after that fact. Some have bugs that go unfixed, others never see DLC that land on other platforms, and some are parts in series' that just go without any sort of follow-up. Tiny Tina's Wonderland has been out for months without hint of  a Stadia release, Elden Ring skipped right past Stadia, Final Fantasy VII finally got ported to PC but not Stadia (Although that might be a bit of blessing in disguise given how many issues that PC version of FF7R had which Stadia users would have been powerless to fix themselves) And Gotham Knights and Hogwarts Legacy both haven't announced any official Stadia capacity despite evidence of the 'Stadia' brand being found on their website. Indicating a situation of companies rethinking their porting strategy, probably after assessing the amount of money required for porting compared to the potential return from customers.

This years' 'Quarry' from Supermassive Games was originally slated as a Stadia exclusive before they shut down their development studios, meaning that Stadia missed out on a decently well received narrative slasher that lived up to it's Until Dawn heritage. They did however, get Rainbow Six Extraction, which I honestly didn't know launched. But there are a whole 9 people watching it be played on Twitch right now, so I'm sure that game is totally alive and healthy. They're also getting this year's Fifa, which makes sense I guess. Those Devs get paid all year to literally sit around and maybe change the digit after the 'two' on all the assets they can be bothered to look up, actually making them port the thing to Stadia is the least EA can ask of them. Oh, and they also got... Saints Row Reboot? Oh... my condolences.

The writing appears to very much be on the wall. Everyone outside of the Stadia world wrote the service off for dead once the in-house studios were folded, but the inner cult remained adamant that 'This is all according to plan, just you wait and see!' We've waited, and what we've seen is more companies figuring that Stadia is no longer worth their time for bug fixes, let alone future ports; the service doesn't appear to have any legs. Google, predictably, didn't want to sink any funds into giving it a fighting chance, and now it's shrunk so much that none of the content developers that Stadia relies on sees a profit to be made off them. This is the point where growth starts heading the other direction and the rest of the world soundly leaves the Stadia ecosystem to rot. Just like everyone said would happen because Google are a predictably non-committal company.

I'm not even all that sad for it, to be honest. I know there are a lot of outlets out there who cry about the lost potential of the service, and I can understand the vector they're coming from, but Stadia ultimately proposed a bad deal for the consumer. What we really need is for Xbox and Nvidia to start opening up their services more, and then there'll literally be no reason for Stadia to exist; because for all their tech backing them up, Google just couldn't figure out how to cut a decent deal for the buyer. If anyone is to blame for this death, it's the Google management who believed themselves too big to be fair to their customers and suffered for their expectation of instant heavy adoption and sustained success; a proposed victory story without any significant monetary sacrifice. A stupid and doomed dream that dragged a decently promising concept off a cliff and ruined yet another side-hustle for the big G. Great job, Google; you blew it, again.