As google is due to kill Stadia forever in a couple of weeks, I thought I would revisit it as a service and technology for the last time. I have previously written about my experience as a Stadia user a couple of times.
I actually gave up on Stadia myself over a year ago and replaced it with an Xbox series X and game pass. This wasn’t due to the fact that I thought Stadia was not any good, on the contrary I always found Stadia worked very well. The difference is that Stadia never really offered enough games, or enough value to compete with the home consoles. The fact that 4K and HDR were locked behind the Stadia pro paywall meant that casual gamers where likely stuck with 1080p or even 720p resolutions at a time when the home consoles where aiming for higher resolutions. The need for high-speed internet also limited Stadia when compared to a home console. Although modern consoles require an internet connection for proper use, they do not need to stream the games from the internet so are less reliant on it. The way many games were set up meant that despite the Stadia hardware being quite powerful, the graphical fidelity of games on Stadia was not up to the standard of modern home consoles or even mid-range gaming PCs.
As mentioned in one of my previous posts on Stadia, I really think that long-term, the game streaming technology that it was built on is really strong. I can see game streaming being the future if some of the issues are worked out. It is also likely to need a big player in the gaming market to really make it work. Given a company the size of Google has not been able to really make a dent in the gaming industry, despite offering a moderately cheap way in, shows how much power the established players have.
Stadia’s inability to entice a large user base is ultimately what killed it off. A lack of users led to a lack of games being made available on the service, leading to even less growth in the user base. Despite this, I think what Google managed to achieve with Stadia shows just how far technology has come. The future of this sort of tech is certainly exciting.
Google Stadia, its logo and all associated content is owned by Google.
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