Posted Sep 30, 2022, 1:04 PM
Almost three years of operation, tens and tens of millions of dollars swallowed up and then gone… Google has just announced that it will close, on January 18, 2023, Stadia, its cloud-gaming offer giving access to a (limited) volume of video games for a monthly subscription of 10 euros. The group has undertaken to reimburse the accessories – mainly the controllers allowing access and use of the service – purchased from the Google Store as well as the titles acquired on Stadia, which also offered fee-for-service sales.
Stadia “didn’t attract the audience we expected”, justified Phil Harrison, executive director of Stadia in a blog post, while Google was aiming for an audience of 1 million monthly active users by the end of 2020. The reason ? If Stadia has often been praised for its technical and technological quality, the content remains king. However, Google has never succeeded in presenting an offer dense enough to attract “gamers” whether in terms of “back catalog” (old titles) – for which the group has sometimes spent a fortune in order to be able to offer titles such as “Red Dead Redemption 2”, “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey”, or “Destiny 2” -, or novelties.
To top it off, these were sold individually, at full price, on Stadia. This has created confusion in terms of communication because this type of offer is often presented as a kind of “Netflix of video games”. As a result, gamers didn’t expect to have to checkout on top of their monthly subscription and favored offers like Microsoft’s Game Pass, giving unlimited access to a slew of games on Xbox, including top franchises available. from the day of launch, at no additional cost. Not to mention that other cloud gaming offers have also emerged in recent years, whether Amazon’s Luna or Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
Google had reduced the sails from 2021
Fierce and ever-increasing competition, even though cloud-gaming is still only a tiny part of the video game industry, even if its growth is among the strongest. Last year, it generated nearly $1.5 billion in revenue, an increase of more than 100% over one year, according to Newzoo estimates which predicts that cloud-gaming will weigh 6.3 billion by 2024.
But Google preferred to take its losses first. At the start of 2021, Google Stadia had already begun to fold its wings. At the time, the group had drawn the curtain on its Stadia Games and Entertainment studio then piloted by Jade Raymond – previously worked for Ubisoft and Electronic Arts – who then launched Haven Studios (specializing in high-end video games) which has since been bought by Sony.
Employing nearly 150 employees, Stadia Games and Entertainment was to supply house titles to the Mountain View giant’s “cloud-gaming” service. “Creating the best quality games from scratch takes many years and significant investment. And the costs are rising exponentially, the American group said at the time, saying it was focusing on “Stadia technology”. A refocusing which will have proved in vain and will not have enabled Google to avoid the fiasco.
