Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

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DukenukemX

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So it seems cloud gaming is not the future. Who would have known?

"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."

https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/...//gamerant.com/rumor-google-stadia-shut-down/

https://gamerant.com/rumor-google-stadia-shut-down/
 
DukenukemX said:
So it seems cloud gaming is not the future. Who would have known?

"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."

https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/1552658225207693312?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1552658225207693312|twgr^|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://gamerant.com/rumor-google-stadia-shut-down/

https://gamerant.com/rumor-google-stadia-shut-down/
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Good riddance but it still will be the future. I wonder how they will handle the games people purchased? I would assume they will be shit out of luck and lose access to them.
 
vegeta535 said:
Good riddance but it still will be the future. I wonder how they will handle the games people purchased? I would assume they will be shit out of luck and lose access to them.
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I've never used it. Did people actually purchase games or just subscribe to them?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I've never used it. Did people actually purchase games or just subscribe to them?
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You had to purchase the some of games at full retail price. They had some that were free with the sun I believe. That is how it was at first at least.
 
Those giants often learn and turn those failure into future success, Amazon Dash Buttons failed but the idea turned out in auto reorder type of purchassing on the site and AmazonBasic hardware coming with the ability to order stuff.

Google stadia failed but like many things of the 90s that failed it does not mean that it will not day work and would not have been responsable for the Netflix-Google-Amazon-Microsoft-Nvidia of the world to not try to be up to date in it.

Innovating company tend to have a long list of failure in their background.

https://www.failory.com/blog/amazon-failures

They work in sector with such ROI on what work that they do not need to bat that high (and can learn what will work and gain expertise during those failures)
 
I dunno about dismissing cloud gaming entirely based upon Google. They're clearly willing to try almost anything for shits and gigs only axe everything without a second thought.
IMO, the infrastructure isn't right now, but it could be in a few years. There have been a whole lot of "this will NEVER fly" claims tossed around in the tech world that got upended in 5-10 years.
 
Having tried both SolidWorks and Resident Evils via "streaming", I would not bet against any of it and it could happen extremely fast (before 2040)
 
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LukeTbk said:
Having try both Solidwords and Resident Evils via "streaming", I would not bet against any of it and it could happen extremely fast (before 2040)
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Lol. I had to read that twice, because the first time my brain saw "SolidWorks", and I thought "Interesting..."
 
I doubt Google ever thought the idea was that practical but rather they thought they could get away selling enough gullible people on it. I mean, it worked for pay to win phone games. It's no surprise they threw the dice on this.
 
Cloud gaming is clever and might well be the future, but I still don't think the technology is there yet. You need to have very little lag or image degradation, and a reliably fast connection wherever you go. Services also need to either offer a ton of good games for the monthly fee (Game Pass, maybe PS Plus Premium, are getting there) or make it free/cheap enough that you won't balk at buying games. It's as much about the state of internet technology as it is the cloud gaming services themselves.

I look at it this way: if OnLive and Gaikai were crude a decade ago, and modern services Game Pass are closer but still a bit rough, I wouldn't be shocked if a service 10 years from now is pretty much what people are asking for. With that said, I'm prepared to accept the possibility that streaming doesn't take off until much later, if it does at all.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Lol. I had to read that twice, because the first time my brain saw "SolidWorks", and I thought "Interesting..."
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Yes that was a typo, SolidWorks let you try the latest version running on AWS and it is quite impressive.

For very expensive program, hard to run on laptop on the road with complicated licensing and/or quite strict security on the data that is working on, it is really tempting (and quite common now). Number of millisecond lag being usually less an issue than for most game here.
 
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jfreund said:
Now Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft.


Nobody has been asking for this. It's being pushed on the market by corporations that want to sell everything as a "service".
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NVidia will gladly sell cards to anybody for anything but I doubt they were rooting for this to take over as a thing. Nvidia has doubled down on getting their GPU's integrated with a number of cheaper ARM cores for the Asian markets and I expect them to do some cool things there for cheap mobile gaming.
 
I tried a few of the cloud gaming services, just because I was curious. The input lag was abysmal on every service. It's just completely unplayable for most types of games. If they can fix the input lag (i'm confident it can be fixed) it will be the future.
 
jfreund said:
Nobody has been asking for this. It's being pushed on the market by corporations that want to sell everything as a "service".
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This right here. Keep in mind cloud gaming has been attempted many times before, but has failed. Google is the first... second... 3rd big corporation that tried to make it work, and they failed. What about Nvidia? What about Sony's cloud gaming service? Look at Netflix and even Xbox Game Pass is losing people. Nobody likes the subscription model. Stadia had a subscription model, and the need to buy the games.
 
Nvidia and AMD at least allow you to roll your own with GameStream and I'm sure AMD has the word fire in their version probably whatever

Problem is still with digital games, even from Steam. We walked into the you will own nothing and will be happy with a smile on that one.

It was inevitable though. Digital delivery was obviously more efficient and allowed for more options and open source always loses to closed source just because it simply allows for more control.

Edit: see everything the world over as a service
 
Good riddance.

I have a hard time believing that streaming games will ever be good enough for most people even compared to consoles. With fast enough internet the graphic fidelity wouldn't be an issue but I don't see a feasible way to reduce latency enough. I also hate the loss of control, inability to mod, and complete reliance on the internet to play but I realize that most people don't care about those things and they're related to some of the reasons corporations would love to have that system.

Stadia itself despite being backed by a company with tons of resources seemed to fall into this small little niche category that was never going to be sustainable. I stumbled across the Stadia forums once and it had this weird cult like vibe that was about equal parts love and hate, often in the same post.
 
jfreund said:
Nobody has been asking for this. It's being pushed on the market by corporations that want to sell everything as a "service".
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A lot by corporation that are not able to sell you game not has a service (like Google), usually those kind of things are pushed hard by those entity.

The big music industry player never pushed/wanted to transition out of the CD they were force by napster/itunes and co. Studios love DVDs and would have love to stay on them foverer, forced by Netflix and piracy.

This will be the same, until someone make a killer app, the people able to sell hardware to play games and make people pay full price for a games will continue to sell them to people.

Flogger23m said:
2) They'll make more money from subscriptions than selling games.
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Not sure Nvidia sales games, the recorded music industry has yet to make 1999 money adjusted for inflation they are making about 37% less,
30-years-of-music-sales-2.png


Last time a checked the movie industry was quite far from their DVD peak 2004-2006 holy grail, it tends to be disruptor forcing them into those models and them once forced trying to not lose too much revenue doing the transition and survive.

Imagine how much money a Sony make by direct selling you a full price Sony video game now (sometime while still selling you some monthly service) on a sold to you and you pay for the electricity machine, not obvious they would win into streaming the game on your IPhone plugged on your tv instead (or your smarttv apps directly), they need to be ready if Netflix/Amazon/Google force them into, but not necessarily something they would want
 
LukeTbk said:
Not sure Nvidia sales games, the recorded music industry has yet to make 1999 money adjusted for inflation they are making about 37% less,
View attachment 496351

Last time a checked the movie industry was quite far from their DVD peak 2004-2006 holy grail, it tends to be disruptor forcing them into those models and them once forced trying to not lose too much revenue doing the transition and survive.

Imagine how much money a Sony make by direct selling you a full price Sony video game now (sometime while still selling you some monthly service) on a sold to you and you pay for the electricity machine, not obvious they would win into streaming the game on your IPhone plugged on your tv instead (or your smarttv apps directly), they need to be ready if Netflix/Amazon/Google force them into, but not necessarily something they would want
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Well, music has moistly sucked since then so.............that is kind of their own fault. And that is not an opinion, that is just a sales data statistic.
 
[Spectre] said:
Well, music has moistly sucked since then so.............that is kind of their own fault. And that is not an opinion, that is just a sales data statistic.
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You could also argue that the music industry lost control of the market because people now had choice. People rejected the top 40/100 choices the industry foisted on them for decades. The price fixing lawsuit of the 80s (or early 90s) certainly didn't make me sympathetic to them or artists during the dawn of the mp3 era.
 
While this is unlikely to happen I feel like google should make a deal with the publishers so that the customers may receive steam keys or keys for other platforms..
 
I find the streaming services to be good enough for kids and old people. Most don't know any better.

I think the competition killed off Stadia. Once the other well established names got their subscription and streaming services up and running, there was no reason to go out and get Stadia if cloud gaming was your thing. The same games and the same experience is on consoles most people already have like PlayStation and Xbox
 
LukeTbk said:
The big music industry player never pushed/wanted to transition out of the CD they were force by napster/itunes and co. Studios love DVDs and would have love to stay on them foverer, forced by Netflix and piracy.
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People forget how powerful piracy is when it comes to pushing the market into a direction. DIVX started the death of DVDs and BluRay, along with MP3 killing off CD's. Going from 100MB off a CD to a few megabytes when compressed into a MP3 is a huge difference when you're on 56k. Nintendo emulation and piracy is so huge it's a wonder why Nintendo hasn't given in and started selling their games on PC.
This will be the same, until someone make a killer app, the people able to sell hardware to play games and make people pay full price for a games will continue to sell them to people.
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This was Xbox GamePass but there's a lot of complaints of the lack of AAA games on it. To make a successful cloud gaming service, one must offer an impeccable deal with flexibility. A person who plays Minecraft on the cloud will miss out on mods and customization. A person on the cloud playing Elden Ring would still be playing the game after 5 months and end up paying more than just buying the game. Not to forget that cloud gaming is inferior in terms of input lag and image quality. Cloud gaming has to be cheap, and flexible enough to allow players to download mods, while offering every game available for play on your service. The failure of Sony's cloud gaming service is that it doesn't offer new games. The failure of Nvidia's service is that you need to bring your own games. The failure of Stadia is that you need to buy the games from their limited selection of choices, at their pricing, with 4k being an optional monthly fee.
 
Terje_P said:
While this is unlikely to happen I feel like google should make a deal with the publishers so that the customers may receive steam keys or keys for other platforms..
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Google had a well established notorious rep by then

You knew the risks going in

My opinion

Edit: I own Div2, 2013 Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider and I think Doom64 on Stadia, I used Google Play money from Google Surveys app, I was never paying Google real money for this
 
As others have said this was predictable, both from Google's rep of shutting down "underperforming" applications and from how they handled Stadia in the first place. Regrettably, a company as big as Google COULD have made Stadia into something useful to both Google themselves and the larger populace, something more akin to Android/AOSP. They could have invested in libre/open source, platform independent , secure and high performance streaming technologies that could be used in a variety of ways, from a single user wanting to set up game streaming between their main gaming rig at home and a variety of clients similar to what now can be done by Steam (and/or Parsec), to images for creating a streaming server/platform, to renting access to virtual gaming servers running on Google's hardware . There is opportunity for ethical monetization both from business-tier licensing for those who want to sell access to their own streaming/gaming hardware (similar to how many FOSS have professional license/management contracts even if the software itself is libre), as well as selling access to ready-made Google owned servers setup and ready to go. Of course, knowing Google they could likely find other ways to monetize through advertising and related data mining, but even without the shadier stuff it could have worked.

Of course, all the above was predicated on Google not making the colossal, easily avoidable mistake they did - thinking they needed to be yet another platform/service/store for purchasing games! It was always odd to me they went this way, demanding that Stadia be a separate platform where instead of buying from Steam , Itch, GOG, or many others you would buy the Stadia version - atop having various subscription items (ie Pro) for both higher quality streaming and apparently access to some sort of "game pass" equivalent. Had Google just focused on the streaming technology itself with Stadia and better yet made it libre/open source, they could have likely gotten ahead of many other competitors and made their platform the standard for streaming of games or other access to high performance components. Unfortunately because of their desire to control and get a whole "game store and platform" thing they missed out; the COVID19 pandemic especially during the earlier lockdown periods could have been a place to really show what mature and open Stadia branded streaming tech could do. The last time I thought about Stadia was frustration when the remake of Samurai Shodown that was planning to come to PC ended up coming to consoles and then Stadia before it arrived on Steam (before that it was irritatingly Epic store exclusive as well). There was no way I was going to buy a "Stadia copy" of any game as I owned a perfectly [H]ard gaming PC and streaming interested me on,y on my terms - something that Steam (among others like Parsec) is more than happy to offer. Its a pity that Stadia had such an ill advised development as there was real potential with Google's resources, but sadly squandered choosing an also-ran proprietary store platform . Streaming will continue with all of its promise and concerns alike, but perhaps its good that Stadia is coming to a close.
 
Another issue I think people overlook with Stadia was the extremely mediocre quality. Google promised maxed PC settings, they said they'd even have exclusives that used the amazin' power of the cloud to do things a computer couldn't... In actuality they delivered maybe Xbox One X level performance in most games, which then of course had video compression on top of it.

The idea of paying a subscription instead of buying a multi-thousand dollar PC is something that might have interest to some people. The idea of a subscription to get what a $300-400 console got you... that's a harder sell. That's an amount many people were simply willing to spend and then what use are you to them? The lower the cost in hardware to match the quality, the less people that really care about paying it.
 
Sycraft said:
Another issue I think people overlook with Stadia was the extremely mediocre quality. Google promised maxed PC settings, they said they'd even have exclusives that used the amazin' power of the cloud to do things a computer couldn't... In actuality they delivered maybe Xbox One X level performance in most games, which then of course had video compression on top of it.
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According to Linus Tech Tips, Stadia had pretty good image quality and input lag.


The idea of paying a subscription instead of buying a multi-thousand dollar PC is something that might have interest to some people. The idea of a subscription to get what a $300-400 console got you... that's a harder sell. That's an amount many people were simply willing to spend and then what use are you to them? The lower the cost in hardware to match the quality, the less people that really care about paying it.
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You don't need a multi-thousand dollar PC to play games. Stadia is running on a Vega 56, you know a GPU from 6 years ago. It works but as an owner of a Vega 56, I can tell you that that level of performance has been easily reached with $200 GPU's, even with the current market not yet fully crashed. With Sony bringing their games to PC, it makes PS Now even harder to get into. Geforce Now is probably the only cloud gaming service that actually offers something over a cheap PC, as RTX cards are still not yet affordable. As of writing this, an RTX 3060 is $350 off Ebay.

That being said, there's the problem of the subscription model. Netflix posted 1 million loss in subscribers for the 2nd quarter this year. We all know that if cloud gaming was actually popular, that everyone would have their own service. EA, Epic, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Ubisoft, and it just goes on. Like Netflix now thinking of adding ads for low tier subscriptions, I could easily see cloud gaming services punish you for unsubscribing by deleting your save game files. Turns out subscriptions are messy.
SUVkd7g.jpg
 
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