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A new report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has been released detailing the current state of Google's Stadia streaming platform. The piece gives a short history on Stadia's troubled development, mainly focused on the decision to launch Stadia as a traditional console, immediately competing with Playstation and Xbox, rather than a slower rollout like streaming competitors xCloud and Luna. There were concerns among developers on the Stadia team that the hard Fall 2019 deadline would not give them enough time to deliver on all promised features, and they felt that Google should launch Stadia in beta, as they have for many of their other services. However, Phil Harrison, the head of the Stadia project, was more used to traditional console launches, having been President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios during the Playstation 3 launch and part of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Team during the Xbox One launch, and wanted to continue on the path with which he was more familiar.

Knowing he would need big titles to entice players to Stadia, Harrison's team reportedly spent more than the budget of some AAA games just to secure ports. While no exact numbers are given, according to several anonymous sources Schreier spoke to for the story, Google spent "tens of millions" of dollars for ports like Red Dead Redemption II or The Division 2 (Schreier clarified in a later Tweet that this was tens of millions of per port, not cumulative). Harrison also began building an in-house development team to create exclusive content for Stadia. Unfortunately, Stadia failed to catch on--according to Schreier's sources, it missed targets for controller sales and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands--which led to Google shutting down its internal game development studios on February 1st of this year.

NEW from me on the failure of Google Stadia:

- Missed initial sales targets by hundreds of thousands
- Tried to take on consoles rather than starting small
- To bring in games like Red Dead, Google spent astronomical sums (tens of millions *each*)

Story: https://t.co/po1Epj6NMj

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) February 26, 2021

Source (Bloomberg article behind a paywall)

 

[Worldblender]

Really? Autogenerating own certificates doesn't work?

I could do, but then I would have to make web browsers accept the auto-generated certificate. This could become a headache to do, in case I am unable to add more certificates, and especially if I let outside people access certain files in the future..

 

[Marc_LFD]

Google will most likely kill Stadia off because they can't compete with GamePass, for example.

Still, it sucks for people who paid $30 ~ $60 for a game on Stadia which they'll never own, 'cause it's a rental, but it's their stupidity. Irresponsible.