Stadia has died

 The Stadia is dead, long live the rest of the Industry!

Oh, there it is! You know, I actually thought I had another twelve months ahead of me before I would have cause to talk about Google Stadia again but as it turns out the big G were just waiting to pull the plug for so long that they didn't even tell their internal teams. I'm being serious, Stadia literally just unveiled their brand new UI layout the very same day that management turned around and declared the service would be shutting down in January 2023. Although I'm assuming this decision had been made quite some time ago from the way that literally every triple A game that was announced this year just sort of forgot to include Stadia on their line-up of upcoming platforms. Of course, if you're one of the common sense gamers out in the world with any sort of knowledge in how Googles 'side projects' always end, you knew from the beginning that this was going to happen because despite being under the biggest conglomerate megacorp in the world right now, Google is the quintessential embodiment of the guy who starts things and never finishes them.

There's a whole website out there dedicated to detailing the graveyard of services started and killed off by Google because the implementation was poor, the idea was bad, and Google don't know how to turn their ideas around and make them good. If they hadn't managed to stumble into establishing the biggest Search Engine in the world, these executives and idea creators would be lucky to be flogging vintage vinyl's from the parking lot of a HMV. They're passionless, innovation dry, clueless, moronic simpletons without a glimmer of the effort and sacrifice requisite to establish oneself as a staple of an already defined industry. Epic Games, for every mistake they've made, know how to keep people coming back to them on a daily loop with their Free Games offer and agonisingly slow paced system improvements along with the odd, painful, game exclusive. Google thinks if they just throw money at their new studio it'll figure it out eventually. But not too much money; gotta keep 'em sweating!

Google is going to try and twist perceptions and declare themselves successful pioneers who revolutionised the world of streaming games before they fell upon their own sword, and in the team's defence they did popularise the concept to the world, as well as sour most of that world on the idea by presenting the least favourable customer service program ever. But Microsoft and Nvidia had already been making their own streaming systems before Google, and theirs are going to continue after Stadia is buried and in the ground, so who's the real trailblazers here and who is the lighting thief, stumbling into the party that was already starting up and declaring themselves the host? Make no mistake at any point of this, not only did Google change nothing in the industry's trajectory, they also achieved nothing to carve out a place for themselves. Don't listen to their silver-tongued backwards speak they're already cooking up for investors: this was a failure.

And the team have all but admitted it in the most backhanded and disowning manner possible. Apparently the adoption of the console hasn't been quite what they expected, but they also claim that the current global financial downturn is responsible for the shuttering of doors. Oh, is that the case? Now how does that make sense when Stadia launched in November 2019; before the pandemic? That was an entire year and some generous change that their platform existed as a route for people staying at home to play games, which so many of them did, and yet through all of that Stadia couldn't secure a reliable enough user base to subsidise the first economic hiccup? Sounds like the company had no legs to stand on even if you do believe their misdirection and don't just conclude that their business model lacked the wide spread appeal they like to pretend it had.

Oh, and if we're talking about causes of the platform's failure; how about the absolute idiocy of the people buying game ports? These absolute gibbering morons were going around paying tens of millions per game, presumably under the stipulation of streaming exclusivity but what exactly is that worth? Stadia themselves knew the streaming landscape was sparse as it was, there wasn't much of a competitive audience to steal from with such deals. But game's companies would certainly be more than willing to happily take advantage of vastly over-estimated deals offered by the rubes of this equation, because why not? Get that bag from people who own so much money it's value is meaningless to them. It's a victimless heist! 

How about the failure of Stadia to provide the minimum 100 games per year that they promised, probably because they were too busy overspending on years old triple A games instead of spending wisely were it would have mattered? Or, as Eurogamer deftly put it, proposing ownership prices in a platform that didn't feel like ownership? (Nicely phrased; I guess that's why they're the professionals) Maybe, at some point, their failure to accrue a sustainable audience was more down to any of those factors instead of the phantoms they went to set up in order to pretend that their conduct was entirely blameless in this mess-up. But I'm just spit-balling here; who could possible say why yet another Google start-up has winded up in the graveyard.

Everyone said that this would happen, which is why investing money, or time, was a fools game that we wanted to stay away from. Google are committing to refunding games, but the form that will take is unclear for the moment. The Stadia Reddit (as gloomy as you would except) seem to have proposed the dystopian ending where those refunds come in Google store credit. A truly depressing and insulting conclusion if it does go that way, but oh-so fitting for the comedy of errors that is Stadia. But even with those refunds, there's no getting back that lost time investment for save games and Stadia-only online accounts. There's potential for a fix around getting back save data for single player games to be ported over to a more normal version of that same game, but online games are a wash. Oh, and the Stadia controller doesn't work on anything other than Stadia for the moment. A firmware update really needs to free that up.

Google Stadia is the disaster that all the world saw coming and no one should really be surprised by. And if there's anyone I feel the least sorry for in all of this, even if they're the most negatively effected, it's the bloody mindless Stadia stans. For years they shoved their arses up at the world and declared us backwards haters with no idea what we're talking about, pointing to the infrastructure of Stadia and asking how any company could screw that up. And we would just point to every other thing Google has screwed up and said "Don't let them do that to you." Now they've lost their avenue to the gaming world and we're supposed to feel sorry for them? Well I don't. All my emotion is wrapped feeling exasperated at Google for wasting everyone's time again and Phil Harrison for screwing up PS3, Xbox One and now Stadia with his mismanagement. This guy can't keep failing upwards; he can't keep getting away with it!