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Stadia's death spiral, according to the Google employee in charge of mopping up after its murder (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.

"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).

...

"However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia," Zimring says.

According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia's Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google's eyes, this wasn't enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia's GeForce Now.

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[+] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia

No, but it's telling that one of the world's richest companies ran into this problem. It's pretty typical of Google to be arrogant and not understand the market they were trying to break into. Also typical of them to give up when it turned out to be a hard problem to solve. But, still, they chose to give up rather than make what (for them) would have been a reasonably small investment to buy a few AAA studios.

It seems to me that to have been successful in this attempt they would have either had to become a major console manufacturer with their own exclusives (maybe not a market they wanted to be in) or to be the junior partner working with another console manufacturer, where they controlled the server side and the other company controlled the client-facing and studio-facing side. But, Google rarely does partnerships like that. You're right that it really seems like they didn't go into it with their eyes open. They seemed to just arrogantly assume that their technological superiority would be enough to disrupt consoles without having to do what everybody else did.