As a founder and enthusiast of future tech, often stuff that's too early for its time, I'm disappointed but ultimately not surprised after watching things play out between launch, then Google giving ...
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As a founder and enthusiast of future tech, often stuff that's too early for its time, I'm disappointed but ultimately not surprised after watching things play out between launch, then Google giving up on a long term commitment to first party content with the closure of SG&E, and then seeing the amount of compelling AAA content dwindle over time. I usually get every platform/console and was even an OnLive subscriber and microconsole owner back in the day as well, so this isn't my first rodeo with a cloud game service shutting down, though never before at this scale. It's too bad that Google couldn't hang on to Stadia and work out a way to integrate it and transfer the available games into a successful future platform that caught on, like streaming Stadia games into a mixed reality environment with upcoming AR/XR headset platforms, or make Stadia accessible directly via YouTube instead of the isolated website. Stadia.com was too compartmentalized away from the rest of Google and easily ignored by people using other Google products. I'm told that Stadia didn't even come pre-installed on Pixel phones (I use iPhone, so I wouldn't know.) I was thinking of switching to Pixel 7 this year, but now I'm soured on buying any further into Google than I already am with my Nest/Home ecosystem and other things that everyone uses like YouTube and Gmail. Bundling a first party Backbone-style controller with Pixel phones and a 3-month trial of Stadia would've been nice, and most importantly reversing course and investing in first party content after February 2021 when the "vision" for what cloud gaming "could be" that traditional consoles couldn't deliver on basically died and it became a place for nothing other than ports. Most of the other founders I know that were excited about the future of gaming in the cloud left after SG&E closed. So many people around at launch were less excited about ports and more excited about the 3-5+ year vision of a killer app coming out that could deliver something that traditional consoles couldnt even deliver, like a game with so much unique content that it couldnt fit on local hard drives, or massive battles that couldnt be coordinated over home networks the way it could be set up in high power data centers. What a shame. Many of the people I tried recommending Stadia to were reluctant to try it because they thought Google had a reputation for shutting down services and they preferred to have more tangible or at least downloaded copies of their games for that reason. This shutdown has just further proved their suspicion and boldened this mark against Google's brand. This further drives down consumer trust in Google's brand in that respect, especially for new products or services that people might be skeptical of trying out of concern that it'll end up in the Google graveyard. Stadia still works so much better than the alternative cloud gaming options, but this doesn't mean that we're excited to see Google execs pivot the technology into some other application. Don't expect many people, consumer market at least, to care about trying anything Google applies this technology to unless it's in partnership with a separate company that has enough consumer trust in its brand to make up for the negative trust in Google's brand resulting from Stadia (among other things.) So many of us wanted to see Google make big investments for the long term/future and buy studios the way the competition was buying up talent, not merely paying big money for "mee too" ports of mostly older games. The vision at GDC 2019 was amazing. It's too bad that Google couldn't commit to that vision and see it through, integrating it into the future XR platforms or other parts of the Google ecosystem. A lot of people are going to feel more comfortable buying into the competition's AR/XR platforms and holding off on Google's offering after seeing how they handled Stadia. I've wanted Google's cloud gaming efforts to succeed from the days of Project Stream. I've been an enthusiast, but I generally avoid falling into the rose colored glasses groupthink that others do, so I'm ultimately not surprised, just very disappointed. As much as there are "go team" Google fans around here who are apologetic to every misstep, this is a valuable lesson in why it's important to listen to people who are reasonable in their criticisms. The supporter/fan vs hater/detractor dichotomy is a false one, there are also people who wanted to see this succeed and were optimistic, but who were reasonably concerned that this would inevitably happen with how things were managed. Thanks for trying. Hopefully Google's strategic management wakes up at some point in the future and realizes that they're biggest project/task ahead isn't AI, but is is going to be making up for the reputation brand-value/trust/image issue that they've cultivated by making these kinds of missteps. Full refunds for purchases and hardware is great, but losing save games that aren't transferrable to other platforms is a big loss. I didn't have pro active when the closure was announced so I'm also completely locked out of finishing up some games before January that I had partially played in the Pro library I'd collected, which is frustrating. Google needs a Phil Spencer type of attitude right now. He really did an amazing job digging Xbox out of the customer-perception hole it was in after the terrible launch era of the Xbox One with Kinect. When it comes to consumer perception Google's going to have to do some serious brand-salvaging work it ever hopes to bring any former Stadia enthusiasts into anything remotely resembling a "commitment to gaming" in possible future AR/XR platform. Otherwise, just like Stadia launched with many influencers and tech sites posting "It's probably going to fail and be shut down, don't bother" type of content, any future platform will be sprinting out of the gate with an even bigger anchor working against its attempt to build something moving forward. I can expect this will cast a shadow over this upcoming Thursday's Made by Google event as well. Thank you to the customer/community facing Stadia team and engineers for doing a great job. Strategic management, though, not so much. I'll be looking forward to reading the case study in business school marketing and strategic management textbooks about Google's missteps with Stadia.