Google tried a way for cloud gaming that didn’t work. History shows what the future might look like. Stadia is about to be phased out as a consumer product. A recent report has shed a lot of light on what is probably going on behind the scenes at Stadia.
Minimal investment, departure of key and high-level employees and no further focus on Stadia as a product. Instead, Google wants to sell Stadia technology elsewhere, according to Business Insider.
Stadia: What remains at the end are only individual parts
The focus today is probably on corporate customers who buy the technology behind Stadia and use it as a so-called white label product for their own products.
You buy the Google technology, but Google is not mentioned anywhere visible to the customer. This should be the future of Stadia, to actually earn money in the long term with the developed streaming technology.
The history of Google+ was similar
If you look at other products, this strategy would not be new at all. It is happening at the same time as Google Currents, which as a business platform emerged from the former Google+ and will live on in individual parts as Spaces in the future. But here, too, Google has given up the platform for private customers (Google+) and left only the best components for business products.
Google now only maintains Stadia on a rudimentary basis. There are always new games, but they are usually trivial. A few new features here and there to keep Stadia from completely losing its appeal. But they don’t seem to be advertising for new customers anymore because the cloud resources probably cost more than these players would bring in. And at some point, Google will flip the switch.
So Google+ completely failed as a consumer service, and Google decided to pivot this failed service to a business product under a new brand, which is now also shutting down.
Hey Stadia…
— Ron Amadeo (@RonAmadeo) February 10, 2022