At 9 a.m. Wednesday, January 19, Stadia will shut down. 3 years after its launch, Google’s cloud gaming service is about to join the graveyard of tech’s biggest mess. Numerama will be live on Twitch.
Stadia’s hours are numbered. At 9 a.m. on January 19 (for France), the gaming service in the clouds will stop transmitting. Blame it on the disengagement of Google which, after having launched into the world of video games with full ambition in 2019, quickly realized that it did not want to take care of it. For 3 years, Google kept repeating with every rumor that, no, Stadia was not going to be abandoned.
Stadia’s total lack of new features and flawed marketing hadn’t fooled anyone, until Google confirmed the service was dead on September 29. Since then, Google has reimbursed all the euros spent by players who believed in it, digging a little more into Stadia’s debt. How not to see a huge mess?
Numerama will play Stadia until it dies
Within Numerama, Stadia will be missed. Practical, especially on vacation to play on your smartphone or tablet, the service will remain a good memory. If Google didn’t want it, Google would surely have done better to resell it.
So we decided to pay tribute to him.
When ? Thursday morning at 8 a.m., Numerama gives you an appointment
Where ? On our Twitch channel for an ultimate live, until the black screen!
On the program, from Fifa and Golf with your friendsas well as anecdotes from 3 years of cloud gaming.
Stadia will be missed
Stadia wasn’t a disservice. On the contrary, it was arguably the most compelling cloud gaming implementation on the market. Shadow, Nvidia and Xbox also have offers, but Google’s was the closest to what we could hope for the future of video games. Why ? For its simplicity.
Available on almost all devices on the market (even if Google hasn’t taken connected TVs seriously enough), Stadia made it possible to play games without a console. It was enough to go to a site, choose a game and launch it. The loading time was quite short, while the fluidity of the game was often far superior to what the competition offers. Technically, Stadia was an impressive service. It is at the level of the rest that Google has not been up to par.
Google lacked seriousness. After promising that Stadia would be a platform with exclusive games, the web giant quickly changed its mind. Without leaving any chance for Stadia to make itself known to the general public.
The business model was also bad. Initially, Stadia was just selling games. Fairly quickly, Google evolved it into a catalog model. A subscription allowed access to a hundred unlimited games… but Google never took the time to communicate on it. At the time of Stadia’s death, how many people know about this subtlety? We can also deplore the unavailability of certain functions promised at launch, such as game assistance with Google Assistant.
Do you like our media? Tell us in this survey!
