Earlier this week, Google announced in a blog post that it would be shutting down Stadia, its consumer gaming service:
A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service. We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start. We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center.
Google has a history of closing services and this has spawned several community projects like Killed by Google and Google’s Cemetery that track all the products and services that Google has shut down over the years. One product that is often referenced is Google Reader, a highly popular and feature rich RSS reader was shut down in 2013.
Making games for the Stadia platform is a significant investment for game developers as it only supported Vulkan and not other industry standards like GOG. Developers had to target Stadia as a separate platform which increases developer time and costs. Google re-iterated several times that they were serious about Stadia. They even put out a tweet a few weeks ago which has aged like milk stating that they will not be shutting down. Several game developers who had planned game releases for Stadia first found out about the closure via the media.
From Devin Coldewey at Techcrunch:
There’s a lot of chatter right now about the “surprise” shutdown of Stadia, Google’s game-streaming service. While it’s true that rivals like Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming presented entrenched competition and that Google knows next to nothing about gaming, the main trouble — as with most of its products these days — is that no one trusted them to keep it alive longer than a year or two.
It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.
Several Googlers have pointed that the incentive program at Google for promotion especially at the higher levels is to launch new projects. Once the project has been launched the person behind the project typically will move to another team or position and with this happening frequently, teams are unable to sustain cadence with fixing bugs and releasing new features. What then happens is that projects go through a series of Launch, Promo and Abandon steps.
This reputation is going to hurt Google significantly in the long term, whenever they launch a new service, even a ground breaking service, people are also going to ask themselves, how long it will be before Google abandons and shuts down services or products that they may like.
