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Google Businesses Games

Google Stadia May Shut Down, Report Says 69

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Stadia hasn't been as successful as the Internet super-giant wanted it to be. While the game streaming service did end up getting its foot in the door for a little while, it hasn't been making waves since its release, and many have theorized that Google would end up scuttling the service entirely in the relatively near future. This idea isn't without precedent, either, as Google is known to shut down underperforming services in surprisingly short order, and Google Stadia, in particular, isn't doing all that well in the grand scheme of things. The latest rumors suggest that the plans to shut down Stadia may be further along than some would think, with Google aiming to close it down before the end of 2022.

Google Stadia was originally announced in 2019, and while it was presented as the next big thing for gaming, it barely made a splash in the end. According to Twitter account Killed by Google, which keeps track of all the services that Google closes down, it might not be long before Stadia's time is up. It's a "he said, she said" situation, to be fair, but according to the account holder's sources, Google may shut down Stadia "by the end of summer." The source also claims that there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down.
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Google Stadia May Shut Down, Report Says More

Google Stadia May Shut Down, Report Says

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  • haveing to rebuy / be locked in is bad (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:07AM (#62744464)

    haveing to rebuy / be locked in is bad if they would of let you use your keys that you own then maybe more people would use it

    • Agreed. It's too bad the gaming studios do that.

    • haveing to rebuy / be locked in is bad if they would of let you use your keys that you own then maybe more people would use it

      IMO, that was the 1-2 punch as to why Stadia had so much trouble getting adopted. Netflix wouldn't exist if you had to buy all the DVDs first; Stadia requiring games to be purchased in order to use the service wasn't a point in its favor. If the service fee included the actual games, it'd be easier to give it a go, but it didn't. There were still some people willing to roll the dice, but whenever asked, Google was extremely coy about what would happen to purchase. The company has a market cap of $1.5 Trilli

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by lexman098 ( 1983842 )

        Netflix wouldn't exist if you had to buy all the DVDs first

        Common misconception. Stadia wasn't supposed to be the Netflix of gaming (that's what Ubisoft+, EA PlayPro, etc are). Stadia was supposed to be the netflix of gaming *consoles*.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          Stadia wasn't a Netflix of *anything*. If I subscribe to Netflix I can stream any title in their catalogue (or back in the day rent any DVD). Stadia expected people to pay a "pro" 10 euro sub for a shit selection of 5 or 6 games (1 being a mainstream title) that only lasted for as long someone was subscribed. There was no catalogue, or a la carte menu, just a monthly garbage drop.

          In a world where other services this might have sounded like a great deal but you only have to go over to Prime Games or Humble

      • I dunno, if you already have the game, what point does Stadia have, except to make the game less enjoyable?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Yup their revenue model sucked. It was basically either:
        1. Pay a monthly sub for a handful of games that you lose access to if you cancel. This compared to PC subscription services like Humble Bundle, or Prime Gaming where you keep the games when the sub is over. Epic Store was and still continues to give away better games every week than Stadia charges money for.
        2. Pay full price for a game that only works through the service and cannot be accessed any other way. Who wants to buy a game on a shakey streaming p
    • That's how every gaming platform is run (playstation, xbox, steam). None of the games you buy can be transferred off the platform. You don't buy games anymore, only a license to run them on a specific platform.
      • Difference being that Sony can't decide that next month your PS5 will stop working (well, they can, and people will lose their damned minds, but when Google does this, since your "console" is largely a cloud device, people sort of shrug, are annoyed, and move on). Sony bricking PS5s would likely result in meaningful legal action.

    • It's not even keys or games staying around, it's about data caps. All those streaming game services are doomed until Internet data caps go away. 10-20+ GB per hour of gameplay. You'll be getting warnings from your home isp withing a week.

  • ...shock

  • Self fulfilling prophecies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fox171171 ( 1425329 ) on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:08AM (#62744470)
    It's hard to get interested in Google services in the first place when you know the plug will likely get pulled.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vinn ( 4370 )
      Yup - totally agree. Does anyone even remember the last time Google rolled out something that saw adoption? There was a point in time when every year they at least acquired something cool or developed it in house. Google Earth? Awesome. Youtube? We all use it. They had a decade where every year something cool came out. These days there seems to be no innovation. Yes, yes, I know, Google is a marketing and advertising company masquerading as a tech company, but still.
      • Even YouTube, Google bought as it was growing in popularity.

    • The place is weird. Everything is done as a moonshot. And when they realize all remaining paths to the moon are gone they end the mission.

      disclaimer: I'm biased. I couldn't adapt to the various problematic things in their "culture" and left in less than a year.

    • This is what killed it in the first place.

      Developers aren't going to burn resources on a maybe. Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation are a sure thing. Steam and Epic are a sure thing. Google is a maybe at absolute best, especially with Google's notorious habit of Graveyarding projects.

      On day one, they should have announced a 5 to 7 year minimum commitment to Stadia. At least it could have quelled those fears and got developers more interested in Stadia.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Epic is only a sure thing because Epic paid devs a lot of money to port their products, luring them in with a better cut of revenues. In addition they secured users by giving away free games.

        But they recognized what Stadia didn't - users and games are a chicken and egg problem and you have to money hat everyone to get a foot in the door. Stadia entered the world practically dead and has done little since to incentivize users or devs to take it seriously.

    • Check out that Slashdot comment section [slashdot.org] from when Stadia launched. Lots of comments like

      Since it's a Google service, anyone care to start a friendly death pool for Stadia?

      and

      Google will abandon this in less than a year after its bean counters discover no one on earth cares.

      The predictions were mostly right on. Google has really undermined themselves. Everyone assumes their new products will get canceled, so they don't use them, which increases the chances of the products failing and getting canceled.

      Companies like Microsoft and Facebook understand it's ok if a product isn't successful right away. They're in it for the long term. If the first version flops, they keep investing in it

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Especially one so obviously destined to fail as Stadia.

  • Who would have guessed that Google would cancel something?

  • It's going to take a pretty awesome service.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:19AM (#62744510) Homepage Journal

    .. to replace my Steam library.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Nvidia realised this with Geforce Now - you can stream most of your Steam / Epic / EA / Ubisoft collections plus some free to play titles. The integration with these services is awful (having to go through login / 2FA / captchas every single time) but at least you can do it. I think this is a far better model for streaming than Stadia expecting people to buy all their games all over again.

  • I just got a six month free trial and my kids have loved playing it on my Nvidia Shield TV.

    Now, I have 1GB AT&T Fiber so it works great, I think Google and AT&T have a deal with each other to make sure it works great. I'm using Ethernet cables, not WiFi, so it's awesome. I'm not sure I would want to attempt it on less than that setup.

  • XBox, Playstation, NVidia all have some sort of "streaming" game service now and with their revenue model for Stadia it just can't compete, especially when people are likely to have a console or PC already they can pay for one of those other services for.

    It's too bad, the concept is nice in theory but paying full price for a game I can only stream on this one service just isn't an enticing proposition unless for some reason it would be my one and only gaming system and it's just not practical for that yet,

    • nvida beet the others to this table.
      Unfortunally, when they left the free beta trial, a lot of publishers used that to pull out

    • Amazon has their service too, and Amazon tends to prop services up a little longer.

      It might be worth sticking around just to show them up.

  • This article is pure speculation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rta ( 559125 ) on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:24AM (#62744530)

    Thin even for internet rumors.

    This all runs on Google Cloud anyway so the machines and infrastructure aren't going anywhere.

    Offering a "virtual desktop" system (like Azure VDI) with high end workstations would be fine but doesn't require shutting down Stadia.

    killing Google play music wasn't great, but they have YT music. idk that Google would want to quit the field entirely either in gaming or remote "desktop" / thin client spaces.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      Google has already refuted the claims [twitter.com] that they're going to be shutting down.

      The thing is, with Google these days - do you believe them?

      Well, I believe that Google won't be shutting Stadia down this summer. There are a number of upcoming games which have Stadia releases. So it seems safe to assume they'll continue running the service past the release of those games.

      But the thing with the rumor is: thanks to Google's behavior with other services, it's entirely believable.

      • Hasn't google also refuted claims of things shutting down in the past, only for those things to get shut down anyways?
  • I'm surprised it has lasted this long, honestly.

  • I just had zero interest in services of this type. More and more, I feel like the solution hawked for everything digital is "stream the whole thing over broadband from some central cloud server".

    There are good reasons people got excited when the first personal computers went on sale. It ended the tyranny of having a dumb terminal tethered to somebody else's mainframe "server" you had to share time on with everyone else wanting to use it.

    Now, we're going backwards, to the point of even saying if you want to

  • As expected, its been 3 years (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pimpsoftcom ( 877143 ) on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:51AM (#62744660) Journal

    November 19, 2019 was when Stadia was released; November 19, 2022 is when I expected it to die, because Google kills projects once they reach 3 years of age.

    Add to this that everybody said this would not be good due to the bad choice of games ad the minimal investment they made into it. and this was very expected.

  • I never even got the chance.

    With this pattern, and a techies ability to remember things of this nature like an elephant, Google is going to find it harder and harder to be taken seriously in any new spaces. I imagine this reputation is why GCP hasn't been wildly successful.

  • Aging Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:56AM (#62744678)

    Business success aside, there's also another time bomb of sorts that will nudge Google to closing down Stadia: hardware.

    Because Stadia is a game streaming service, it requires relatively specialized hardware as opposed to traditional cloud compute servers in the form of high performance video cards.

    For the initial build-out, Google used a variant of AMD's Vega 56 (Vega 10 GPU) hardware. That hardware is turning 5 years old this year, and aside from performance, it also lacks a suite of features found in the latest generation of consoles and video cards (ray tracing, mesh shaders, etc).

    To remain competitive, the Stadia clusters will need hardware upgrades, and we're likely nearing that point.

    So Google will need to decide if they want to make the investment in hardware upgrades for Stadia, or if they want to begin to sunset the service with the current hardware. Given the lack of breakout success with Stadia, it wouldn't be too surprising to find out that the upgrades wouldn't pencil out for Google.

    • I think you've hit on one of the primary reasons that stadia never really took off. It was billed as an easy/fast/cheap way to get amazing graphics quality, but ray tracing was actually available in a number of games when stadia *launched* or very soon after (Control and Cyberpunk at least). They never added support for ray tracing. Stadia could/should have been the go-to for graphics demonstrations but they didn't invest in the correct hardware when the first round of investment money was available. Now t
    • Is it not just a device to display the image rendered on the cloud server? The hardware requirements are much more low end compared to a console or pc - isnt this why these streaming clients can run on phones? Anything with hardware accelerated streaming video playback support is capable of playing these cloud games.

  • Of course it will shut down...

    This is part of Google's mode of operation...

    Introduce a service, and then shut it down...

    Google products have a very short life...

  • I have one, and I like it. It can do Assassin's Creed Valhalla just fine. If it goes under, then I still have the ChromeCast Ultra it came with, as well as a controller that Steam can use as a generic USB-C controller, so I don't just have two paperweights.

    • I did the trial that got a chromecast ultra and controller as well. Forgot to cancel my sub, so I spent like $10 for the first month. But the chromecast ultra being wired ethernet and also getting a decent USB game controller were definitely worth milking.

      • Mine was the Black Friday special - I bought Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and got the bundle for free with that. Still a great deal, and I'm enjoying the game a lot.
  • "We understand this rumor is circulating and we would like to clarify that there is no announcement as such from Stadia. We would like to clarify that these sites that is announcing this is not affiliated with Google nor Stadia." "Please visit https://community.stadia.com/ [stadia.com] to see more announcements about promotions and new features. That is the only reliable gaming community site you can check with regards to Stadia." I do not work for Google, I am passing on what I was just told.
  • I can't say if Stadia is closing or not, but I can say they did everything in their power to deserve it. I've never seen such a lame, unimaginative streaming service with such obvious problems from its inception. Google could have offered games that could not possibly run on a PC with massive maps, destructible physics, thousands of concurrent players. They could have offered these games with a freemium plan that encouraged people to pay for more minutes or better resolution. But did they? Nope. Stadia got

  • I thought I might be shocked to see the headline "Google announces EOL for Google Search" but then I realized that they already put that product in the dumpster years ago when they swapped it for an ad auction site.

    The only Google products that don't get cancelled are the ones that can be turned into an advertising auction.

  • Because I knew they would shut it down the minute they announced the thing. Since that's what Google does with almost all its products and services within a few years. And why I never throw money away on them.
  • Someone asked a question on Quora before the consoles shipped if this would be an XBox killer. I laughed at them and said it would probably be dropped and killed completely by Google in a very few years. Then Google reinforces it by closing their game development studio. It never stood a chance of success, it was someone's ego project that somehow they got the board to throw money at.

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