Is Stadia resurrecting?

 The grave stirs

It doesn't seem all that long ago since we pushed off that raft out to the dark waters and watched Google Stadia float into the sea of forgotten stars, never to be revived. A decent enough idea to utilise the power of streaming technology to deliver top quality gaming experiences to the masses in as affordable a manner as possible, truly a revolutionary step in the accessibility of gaming. There was only one hang up- everything. Stadia seemed like one of those ideas that really pops in the boardroom but somehow manages to totally fall apart before you're done on the commute home. The marketing, the budgeting, the system set-up, the payment model, the partnerships and the break-up: Google could not have made any more mistakes unless they somehow accidentally created actual Titans from Attack to Titan to torment the earth. (And you know what? I actually wouldn't put it past them after this.)

Whereas Xbox was asking for a subscription in order to welcome people into a library of instantly accessible games, Stadia was asking you to pay a subscription, then buy the games and then pay a premium if you wanted them in a modern resolution quality and framerate. The 'move fast and break things' mentality of modern tech start-ups typically lends itself to the idea that loss-leading is the way to become established. Google and Youtube got their starts with this exact philosophy. But I guess somewhere in the past few years these companies must have grown far too comfortable with the safety net of an actual profit because they simply refused to eat any costs for Stadia and expect the consumer base to buy the equipment, pay for server costs and volunteer to drive around the offices on the weekends to help scrub the floors. They failed to make themselves appealing.

And part of that might have been down to the fact that the promising features which were announced, a large portion of the more ambitious ones, never made it to functionality! The biggest missed opportunity in my opinion being the sync-up system in which Youtube videos could link directly to Stadia games so that people could see a game they liked and load up that exact level in the blink of an eye. Of course, conceptually that doesn't really make any sense as few games in existence allow for a fresh player to jump half-way through the game to a specific level- and that Youtube's detection algorithms seem to fall apart whenever detecting a game that hasn't been released in the past five years- but close your mind to the obvious and bask in the optimism of murky possibility! That was the future in which Google lived!

But alas the system was too pure for this world. Early this year in January the Stadia systems found themselves being wound back, the severs were discontinued and people got their refunds shipped directly to their accounts. The framework was still maintained for a little while for third party partners to make use of for their exploratory forays into cloud streaming, but I hear that even those efforts have been mostly abolished. Yet another multimillion dollar project by Google shaping up as a total waste of funds with nothing to show for it. The life cycle of every Google peripheral. Well, actually I guess that isn't the whole life cycle, is it? There's always the point down the line where Google tries to pick through the bones of their murdered project and piece together a more streamlined version of it to try and make a buck with a different approach. Good thing we don't have to- oh wait. That's exactly what's happening, isn't it?

According to Wall Street Journal (Democracy dies behind a webpage paywall) Youtube have begun some preliminary testing on a service that sounds suspiciously like a Stadia successor. It is called Youtube 'Playables' and seems to be a way to instantly play online games with the Youtube website or app, which is the dream of what a Cloud Service was supposed to offer the world. If only we had more universal accessible high delivery internet, the Stadia proposition might have had a high enough potential customer pool to weather it's storms. But alas, now we have Youtube giving their go at things. Which may be more in their wheelhouse to be fair, what with the incalculable amounts of data they stream back on forth on an hourly basis. Maybe these 'Playables' have the potential to succeed in a world where others couldn't.

Oh wait, for the moment it would appear that the only game currently playable through this system is called 'Stack Bounce', which appears to be a wipeout clone. Basically a game so simple they could probably just tack it onto an update for the app and literally no one would know. Yeah, I wouldn't go losing my mind over the potential of this new service just yet- For all we know this could literally just be Youtube's version of one of the free online game websites everyone plays when they should be studying at school. (Do people still do that?) But we know what kind of infrastructure is running back in the offices at Google so it would seem insane not to get a little more ambitious with things. Besides, a little more competition can't ever be a bad thing. Unless Google starts getting game exclusives, then it will be the worst thing.

Now the absolute king of industry disasters himself, head of Stadia and Microsoft Kinect in his time, Phil Harrison, did go so far as to foreshadow these events. He mentioned the permeability of this technology and how it might be implemented across the company, which strengthens the possibility that the Stadia framework that so many people lost their jobs to create isn't just gathering dust underneath some dingy server room in downtown 'Frisco. And to be honest, even if Playables does have designs to pick up where Stadia left off and become a high-quality AAA steaming platform, who's going to partner with them? Everyone was vindicated for thinking that a Stadia partnership would end in disappointment and those that bucked the trend were punished when Google pulled the plug without telling anyone beforehand. Now Youtube is technically a different division of Google but the perception bleeds. Youtube wears Google's sins, no developer is going to debase themselves like that again.

It is a shame that Google never managed it's ambitions. Cloud gaming sounds like a worthy addendum to the styles of games that we enjoy, provided we never lose sight of locally owned and stored games as well. Microsoft and Nvidia and probably Sony at some point- have all proved that there is some water in the cloud gaming well, and it may take a lot of rope to get all the way down there but that just means competition ain't too fierce just of yet. Those with the compunction and infrastructure could really disrupt the status quo of the industry by digging themselves out a niche in that sector, just as long as they're in-touch enough with the world to know how to develop such a community, in all the ways that Google plainly wasn't/