LogFAQs > #970924044

I feel bad for the people who bought into it. That being said, Stadia came out of nowhere one E3 and postured themselves as the future of gaming, and nothing about it felt organic or like as grand of a step forward as they were making it out to be. It was always confusing how much attention Stadia got right out of the gate.

They must have spent a significant chunk of change making that entire E3 about them, and then they delivered a subpar product they couldn't maintain - they bought the most visible ads, and they spent god knows how much putting Stadia on everything they could during the E3 it was announced at, before absolutely shitting the bed. The technology wasn't there yet, at least not on enough of a scale for Stadia to be "the next big thing" across the broader market - and frankly, I don't think the technology is there even now.

And what makes the Google hype stupider is that we already knew the tech wasn't up to par with PlayStation Now trying and failing around 2014; Google's strategy was to go "don't worry it just works", then flounder for years not only to make it functional, but to get games on the platform.

And of the small handful of like 200+ games they had, each one was being sold at full price. No-one is getting refunded for those games as far as I can tell. People paid full price for digital games with an extra step of separation, and now they're losing access to those games forever.

I will say that Stadia is only shutting down as a commercial business that interfaces with the public directly. Like how Google Glass vanished off the face of the earth and became more of a behind-the-scenes specialist piece of technology, Google is allegedly shopping the streaming service around to game publishers as like a middle-man - like rather than Capcom making a Cloud Version of the next Resident Evil game themselves, they would upload it to Google's servers and Google would handle the streaming side of things. But Stadia, as a platform and as its own unique service, is being shut down.

Google Stadia was a hollow corporate scheme that lived and died on lies, platitudes and money. They spent big to advertise a service they couldn't actually maintain, and in the span of a couple years their incompetence and unwillingness to change or improve the Stadia service showed how little they actually bought into their own hype. I feel bad for people who threw their money away on this horseshit, but Stadia always had that disingenuous, fraudulent vibe around it and I don't know why more people didn't recognise the warning signs and save themselves the trouble. It is absolutely baffling why anyone would buy into this, day one or otherwise.

In closing, rip in piss Google Stadia. You were even worse than PlayStation Now.