As much as I also like to show some schadenfreude for Google’s arrogance, I wonder if there isn’t a new interesting market effect at play. I mean, this was clearly not meant to replace your existing PC gaming rig (unless severely outdated), so most of the analysis looking at Stadia from an existing gamer’s perspective falls short. So why did this super low entry-barrier approach not attract any “new” gamers?
Speculating a bit, maybe what we really see is a saturated western “hardcore” gaming market. Being a streaming service, Google can’t just expand into China etc. where for example Steam’s user growth seems to be coming from. And looking at Steam’s user numbers (around 150millionish) it seems surprisingly low compared to the total population of the target markets (assuming a near monopoly in the PC market at least).
So what we might see here is that by now almost everyone in the western market who is even remotely interested in the content Steam / Stadia / tradtional consoles have to offer, does have a suitable hardware to run current games already. This makes Stadia uninteresting, except for a small number of newcomers (that don’t start out getting the used hardware of friends/family) and those existing gamers that want to quit the hardware upgrade circle. And the rest seems to have either settled into (mostly F2P) mobile “games” or shows no interests in gaming at all. And despite Stadia’s focus on breaking into this demographic and generally favorable conditions to do so (lockdown boredom), it seems to have failed.
If this analysis is correct, then Stadia might be the canary in the coal mine, with a massive upheaval of the gaming industry ahead. I think we are already seeing parts of that with companies from countries still showing strong growth indicators (China mostly) starting to take over established western game design companies.
short subscriber targets
hmm… it’s almost like people don’t want to buy games they already own just so they can play on stadia
Such a shame. Kojima can’t catch a break with horror games.
Can we get to the part where this goes to the Google Graveyard Google? It was funny at first but we are getting kinda bored you know?
Google didin’t probably have any self-awareness or they subliminally knew of Stadia failing; it was put next to Sega’s Dreamcast, Nintendo’s Power Glove and E.T for the Atari 2600 as a tease.
Hopefully this will be a hit to the trend of streaming games that companies would love to happen in order to gain a lot of control.
