Stadia was awesome. The only flop involved was in Google's handling of it.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Sounds like a lot of Google products.
Facts.
They had such a good moment with the Cyberpunk release and did nothing with it
People wouldn’t give stadia a chance since they knew of Google’s reputation to kill services. Google, of course, proved them right.
It was a shame really. I liked Stadia and ran a game tracking site for it. But I won’t trust another Google product again.
Stadia was the last straw for me. I kept my pixel phone but I replaced and ripped so much Google out of my life.
I replaced my nest cameras, and my Google wifi router. I ditched my Google home speakers and displays. Migrated everything from gmail except for Google related garbage. Unsubscribed from Google one. And no more books Google play. No movies or TV's on Google play either.
And lastly I use duck duck go as my primary search.
A lot of time and money but my spite knows no bounds apparently.
I'd still be gaming on Stadia if it was around. Absolutely fantastic experience.
The biggest problem with Stadia was not the technical implementation but the business model: you had to pay for both a subscription to use the service and additionally a license to play particular games on the service (though there were also some free games). And of all the companies to even attempt such a business model, it is harder to think of a company that had the least chance of making it work than Google because almost no one believed that the licenses they paid for would be good for anything in a couple of years. In fairness, Google did refund these purchases when it shut down Stadia, and this was absolutely the right call, but it is also befuddling because, if they had been planning on doing this anyway, they could have told everyone at the beginning and made people a lot less wary of spending money on Stadia!
Edit: The above was my understanding at the time, but the responses below, which I appreciate, would seem to indicate that this understanding was incorrect.
you had to pay for both a subscription to use the service and additionally a license to play particular games on the service
The subscription was optional. If you bought a game on Stadia, you could play that game whenever you wanted.
Google did refund these purchases when it shut down Stadia, and this was absolutely the right call, but it is also befuddling because, if they had been planning on doing this anyway, they could have told everyone at the beginning and made people a lot less wary of spending money on Stadia!
They did say that early on. It was in the ToS from Day 1 that in the event of a shutdown, Google would either distribute offline versions of the games to you, or that they would refund you.
Huh, that was not my understanding at the time, but if so then I obviously stand corrected! Thank you for the clarification.
Yeah, Google was really bad about making these things clear to people. It's insane to me how an advertising company could be so terrible about advertising the benefits of their own product. Phil Harrison is a fuckin' gaming Grim Reaper.
What? I had access to games I owned without a subscription...
In that case, I clearly stand corrected! Thank you for the reply.
Obviously it was always going to fail, the more you abstract away ownership the less people will be interested in buying.
Especially when you're a company with a history of shutting down products people liked.
The Google graveyard is a website that will repair any urge to rely on a Google ecosystem.
I used to play destiny 2 on it in the browser . it was a great experience despite destiny being a cash grab (I didn't put any money into it 😉)