Stadia looked desperate.
At the beginning of the month, a report are from Business Insider details ongoing issues with Google’s struggling streaming platform. Apparently, Google is putting consumer products first while trying to sell Stadia technology as a white-label service to power other companies’ cloud services.
A lot happened between the 2018 “Project Stream” beta, the official Stadia Released in 2019, and today. Arguably you could call Google the leader in the second wave of cloud gaming, following the early launch of services like PS Now and OnLive. However, nowadays, there is more competition and the market demand is crystallizing. Google tried to make a case that it could give cloud gaming a market advantage, but the company’s vision was unsuccessful. Today, Stadia is tired and has little prospect of success.
Of course, no company wants to call its project a failure. But now might be a good time to Google pause for a moment and ask, “What exactly are we doing here?” Why does it want to enter the cloud gaming market? What advantages does it have over its competitors, and how does it plan to maintain these advantages over time?
There are no good answers to these questions.
Stadia doesn’t have the scale that Google implies it will
Come back Stadia’s initial announcement at the Game Developers Conference 2019 and see how some of Google’s early statements went. Google’s GDC presentation highlighted the company’s cloud expertise, but it covered how that expertise will help win the cloud gaming space.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Stadia announcement by touting the global scale of Google’s cloud, saying:
Our custom server hardware and data centers can bring more computing power to more people on planet Earth than anyone else. Today, we are present in 19 regions and over 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables.
Google is a large cloud computing company with servers all over the world. So Stadia is already available worldwide, right?
Incorrect. Stadia is definitely not available in “over 200 countries”. It is only available in 22 countries, or about 10% of the scale that Pichai heavily implied that Google could work at.
Until recently, Stadia’s home inside Google was the hardware division, with project lead Phil Harrison reporting to Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh. Google is actually pretty bad at competing internationally, and every Google Hardware product is limited to about 20 countries. It To be Oddly enough, Stadia, a cloud service, is in the hardware division, but that’s where Google decided to put it. The company really wants people to use its game controllers and Chromecast media players, so Stadia is limited to a small list of countries where Google is willing to sell the hardware. (If you compare Hardware by Google destination country list The State of Stadia list, they are essentially the same.)
To be fair, doing business internationally is difficult. Are there any Google competitors that can match Stadia’s 22-country distribution list?
Nvidia’s GeForce Now is available in 82 countries. Xbox Cloud Gaming — still labeled as “beta” — is available in 26 countries. Google is in third place. PlayStation Now — the most neglected service on our list (even though it is reported to be due to for a major update) —works in 19 countries. Google has a good Amazon Luna beat, at least. That service remains in invite-only “early access” and is available in one country: the United States.
Google has no advantage in latency
So Google is very poor at international distribution—anyone outside the US will tell you this. However, Google is a big cloud company, and with all its experience from YouTube video streaming and other server technology, Google should have unmatched cloud expertise.
That is pitch advertising from Stadia’s head of engineering Majd Bakar during the reveal event:
