Google plans to shut down yet another venture. Why?
Three years, tens of millions of dollars, and one of the world’s biggest tech companies – the perfect foundation for any new venture looking into gaming. As it stands, it simply wasn’t the case for Google’s cloud gaming service Stadia.
The company decided, earlier this week, to shut down Stadia permanently starting January 2023. Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai, cited this recent decision as part of an effort to make the company more efficient. Reddit users got the news early as it was leaked out earlier this year that it was closing down by the end of the summer.
Google spent tens of millions of dollars in their efforts to convince established game publishers to push out content on their platform – many developer studios working with Stadia were left shocked with Stadia being shut down given that they weren’t informed earlier on.
These reports are painting a disastrous image of Google – once at the forefront of innovation. As a consequence of the turbulence during the entire Stadia development process, Google has developed a poor reputation when it comes to being a credible partner – one of many reasons Stadia was condemned to be shut down. If the company wants to find footing in the gaming niche again, it needs to spend a good amount of time reconstructing its image.
One of the fundamental driving factors behind users adopting a gaming platform is being able to play exceptional games exclusive to the platform. A good example of this is Sony’s Spiderman games, exclusive to the Playstation consoles. Without proper exclusives, the motivation simply isn’t as great.
Inefficient pricing, lack of exclusives, trouble with developers, and a lack of credibility as a partner – these built the shaky foundations upon which Stadia once stood.
