Stadia is dead because no one trusts Google

There's a lot of talk 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 Google knows next to nothing about gaming, the main problem - as with most of its products these days - is that no one trusted them to keep him alive longer than a year or two.

It's as simple as that: no one trusts Google. He has shown such a poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point people are hesitant to invest in even his most popular products.

The technical implementation was certainly nothing to complain about. I admit to being skeptical when they said they could achieve the frame rates and response times advertised, but by Jove they did. At its best, Stadia was better than its competition and almost magical in the way it delivered on the promise of going from zero to gaming in a second.

The business aspect has never been so inspiring. There's now a big memory of Stadia's much-mocked pre-launch display: the doomed Dreamcast, the useless Power Glove, and E.T. for Atari, the game was so bad they buried it in a shallow grave , followed by an empty pedestal that Stadia would soon sit on.

While it's clear that this was a hilarious misunderstanding about...pretty much everything, it turned out to be very much on point. Stadia was doomed, useless, and destined for an undignified death.

The last prime; just two months ago, Stadia's Twitter account assured a concerned user that the service was in fact not shut down.

Image credits: Google / Twitter

Actually, the wheels were probably already in motion, but the uppers just hadn't told their social team, or the developers, or pretty much anyone yet that this was the plan. It has been reported that many people close to the service were taken aback by the decision - and who wouldn't be, after the company publicly declared that all was well?

For some, the writing was on the wall earlier, when the internal development team that Google built to create exclusive games was shut down before they had a chance to do just about anything . The company may have miscalculated the time it takes to develop a game from scratch. At least as long as a Google Doodle.

Yet it could have succeeded even without exclusives if it offered a compelling product. Unfortunately, Google Stadia was as useless and flashy as the Power Glove. "It's so bad" as the meme goes.

As impressive as her execution was, I couldn't figure out who she was addressing. A huge, huge proportion of gamers who want to play the latest hit, say Deathloop, will already have either a console or a gaming PC, or both. Why would I buy Deathloop for Stadia rather than for my PS5 or on Steam? It will play and look better natively (although Stadia looks surprisingly good), and of course they've already invested hundreds in these platforms.

Of course, you can play on the go, or on your laptop or whatever. But… not only do the services to do this already exist, but the experience isn't exactly great. These days, full-price games are major, immersive affairs where you sit for an hour or two on the couch and walk into it with the surround sound system cranked up. Sure, I wouldn't mind doing a bit of inventory management on my laptop during a coffee break at the office, but beyond that, having constant access to AAA games isn't much of an advantage.

Meanwhile, games like Genshin Impact reach AAA levels and are natively portable; they are played by millions of people on phones. Again, why was Stadia a better deal?

It might have made sense if the proposition was that you pay $20 a month and some Google sorcery lets you play your PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, or PC games wherever you want. Are...