Stadia will be shutting down early next year according to the company. Stadia didn't pose any real threat to established players like Sony and Microsoft. Stadia was never really a chance because of the lack of commitment to anything other than digital advertising.
Sky-high ambitions that looked disruptive were discussed when Stadia was first shown. It would be possible to stream games to all of your devices. It's possible to jump into a game from a video on the internet. Jade Raymond was going to head up the company's own game studio.
It was easy to imagine how great Stadia could be.
It wasn't hard to imagine along with the search engine. One of the biggest tech companies in the world might be able to succeed where others have failed. It worked when Stadia was launched. There were a lot of missing features but you could play a few video games with an internet connection.
From there, things fell apart. Six months after the launch of Stadia, the company added a free tier, but there weren't many people playing it. There weren't enough promotions to get Stadia into more people's hands.
The beginning of the end was announced by the company in February of 2020. Stadia will be a platform for other partners to build upon, and it shut down its in-house development studios. Stadia will be shut down after that news.
Stadia didn't make much of a difference. It probably started a fire under Amazon, which launched its Luna cloud gaming service about a year after Stadia and Microsoft began to roll out their own cloud gaming services. Cloud gaming hasn't turned the gaming industry upside down when it had the best chance. Stadia was supposed to be the perfect solution to let a lot of people easily play games from wherever they were because we were stuck at home.
Sean Hollister wrote that cloud gaming still has too muchfriction. Is my internet connection capable of running the game? Is the game I want to play available on a platform of my choice. I don't know if it is part of a subscription or not. Stadia was no exception. You can see why cloud gaming hasn't caught on because of my Nintendo Switch, which allows me to slot in a game and just start playing. Cloud gaming is an option for a few of the Switch games.
Why should anyone else be interested in investing in Stadia?
It's clear that Stadia didn't matter a lot to the company. Most big-budget video games take years to develop, but the company shuttered its own studios a little over a year after the launch of Stadia. Why should other developers invest in a platform that isn't owned by the company?
The developers that supported Stadia were surprised by the news. Stadia players will be given information once we have a plan of action, said Bungie on its forums. Hours later and I still have no email from Stadia, and no clarity on what's happening with our games, deals, anything Stadia employees didn't seem to have much notice.
Cloud gaming is still going strong. It is getting better for the XBOX. It is the same with the graphics card from the company. The most expensive tier of the console was folded in to the cloud. Amazon's Luna is growing as well. The handheld is a dedicated cloud gaming device. Stadia, the service that made one of the splashiest entries into cloud gaming, will be the next big, ambitious project that will be sent to the graveyard.
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