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See ya, Stadia
The fall of Google's streaming project..
Hello!
Taking a bit of a steer away from web3 and talking about Stadia - Google’s gaming project.
Last week we hear the project that Google pinned its gaming hopes on was being shuttered, nearly three years after its launch.
Let’s dive in!
See ya, Stadia
Let’s start at the beginning - Stadia was launched in November 2019 as the ‘Netflix for games’, allowing players to stream games online without owning a console.
They built a stellar team, poured in tons of investment, and developed partnerships that would provide a platform to launch some of the latest games on its platform.
But it failed - and has promised to refund players who purchased its Stadia controller, as well as any games or add-on content. Yikes.
What was its edge?
Stadia runs its games on servers at Google data centers - some of the most powerful servers in the world.
It believed its technology edge would be enough to attract users and develop next-gen games.
Why didn’t it work out?
Probably down to a few reasons:
Traction - they said it themselves in their announcement post, they just simply haven’t gained traction aka enough users to make it worth their while.
It arrived too early & too half-baked - cracking into the gaming sector is tough, especially when the service itself didn’t quite meet the expectations they came in with.
Restrictive technology - While they had a killer technology edge, they forced users to pay full cost for software that worked only on its platform, compared to other cloud gaming platforms that use a variety of business models and allow users to either play games they already own.
Lack of prioritization - While a clearly talented team, they didn’t release warranted features like: a promised free tier and exclusive first-party games until much later.
Competition - With Xbox and Playstation cornering the console market, you can see why people are reluctant to change. A new product or gaming platform needs to deliver a 10x, or even a 100x solution (and I don’t mean just having a ‘better product’) to even have users considering something else - see the chart below for just how lucrative this market is ($130bn+):
The writing was on the wall for quite some time.
Google had a rough time trying to attract new users, but it just couldn’t deliver on its lofty promises.
By February 2021, the situation had grown dire. Without much warning, Google shut down its internal game development division, which included two studios employing around 150 developers. The division had yet to even ship a single game.
Throughout the remainder of 2021 and into 2022, Google made very little mention of Stadia, though the division did launch in new markets, kept adding games, and chipped away at its feature wishlist.
Even as recent as July of this year, the Stadia Twitter account wrote on July 29, “Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro.”
Now, two months later, the inevitable has in fact happened.
What could it have done differently?
I’m no expert in gaming so I won’t try to sound like I am, but there would be a few things they could’ve done differently:
Community-first: Forget the fancy tech and find out what the community actually wants. Users don’t want fancy software, they want (I think) a superior experience they can enjoy and have fun with.
Ruthlessly prioritized: Following on from the buzz of the initial launch announcement, they could’ve focused on the elements their community was most excited about and developed those areas first, rather than sticking to a more rigid product roadmap.
Developed constraints: One of the challenges of innovation at Big Tech, is that a huge amount of resources are thrown at projects, sometimes too much. This can lead to a lack of the critical survivor’s instinct when starting something new. Maybe constraints would’ve developed more innovation.
Some say it was doomed to fail simply because it was coming from the big G, while others say it didn’t stand a chance vs Microsoft or Nvidia. I think they simply saw this as an experiment but didn’t fully commit. Either way, I think cloud gaming has a future, and maybe Google will enter the fold again sooner than we think.
🔗 Links Of The Week
A firsthand account from one of the founders of Monzo - lots of good lessons like the focus on building an MVP, doing things that don’t scale (hand-delivering cards because they hadn’t built the functionality to mail them), building the marketing engine around attracting a certain type of user and many more.
I ran a training session on the weekend and came across this great concept called “The Wheel of Life” - this is where you split your life into different categories and rank each area from a scale of 1-10. You then devise strategies on how to improve the areas you want to improve on. Check it out and let me know if you tried it.
Until next time
I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.
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Fahim