Back in early 2019, I wrote this OpEd about Google’s (then highly hyped) Stadia game streaming platform; in a nutshell, I didn’t believe it would go anywhere due to Google itself (a lousy consumer oriented company that acquires tech, throws out product with a beta label, loses any vision it had along the way, and eventual shuts down those projects) along with the mentioned tech limitations they would end up having to overcome (no amount of PR is going to change this fact). After that, I filed this thing into the out of sight, out of mind department.
2+ years later, I see various news about Google shuttering the game development division for Stadia along with key executives and designers moving on from platform. We’ve seen this dance before with Google+ and some of their other acquired properties that they ended up closing after years of trying. Google is obviously going to try to salvage pieces of the tech to use elsewhere in businesses they are more aligned with while they string along paying customers for the time being.
Google learned a hard lesson about trying to get into the game development business; especially one dedicated to being deployed on a streaming cloud services platform that wanted to target various screen sizes and device types. As I noted in my original OpEd, native control I/O is going to always be a challenge; how do you design (as an example) an MMORPG that scales from desktop PC (with a 4K monitor and ability to use both keyboard/mouse and controller) down to an touch input smartphone with a 6″ screen? Abstraction is only one issue; you also end up running into things like dealing with pathing, precision, how the backend combat AI works, mob aggro, etc. You also need to design proper UI’s for all of this. So what sounds simple on the surface, is actually an exploding parts problem. This is something that anyone should’ve learned by Java’s write once, deploy anywhere motto. It may mean the app works, but doesn’t mean it works well at the user usability level.
Until the “last mile” has actual “large pipes” to the customers point of presence (or the premise of wide bandwidth/low latency 5G home connectivity becomes a ubiquitous option), platforms like this will remain a niche. Stadia’s objective for all screen sizes and device types makes it an even larger challenge (the closure of their internal game studio division says it all). Let’s see where Stadia is two years from now (I’ll be surprised if it hasn’t been renamed/rebranded and is still in service).
