The “Big Three,” comprising Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, have had a vice grip on the console market for decades now, and despite some companies making a bid for their own spot, none ever seem to be able to hold break through. In 2019, Google entered the industry with its own video game streaming service, promising high-resolution, low lag gaming on a variety of devices. Just two years later, Stadia already seems like it could be heading for the chopping block. The main selling point of Stadia was the concept of streaming games. Rather than having to buy a copy of a game and install it onto your limited hard drive, you could instead simply play your game of choice off of a cloud server. There is definite appeal to this. The image of the game would be streamed to your computer, tablet, or phone, but since the processing is happening on cloud servers, these devices aren’t going to need amazing specs to keep up with a detailed game. While it’s hard to get a read on how many sales they’ve had since then, the launch was only met with 175,000 downloads of the dedicated app. Compared to the 2020 launch of Sony’s PS5, which was estimated to have sold just under 1.5 million units, and you can see that this might be considered an underperformance. But as we all know, a storm was brewing in November of 2019, a storm from which game companies could only benefit. After the pandemic caused lockdowns across the world, Nintendo’s profits tripled as people flocked to buy their time-filling products. If there was ever a time for a new gaming service to make an impact, it was during the early days of the pandemic. However, in March of 2020, data suggested that it had only sold 107,000 units in the previous two months. When a product fails like this, it’s always a game of finger-pointing trying to figure out why. Did the marketing fail? Was the game library not big enough? Or was the product simply not what was promised? It’s hard to nail down the answer, but it’s possible that the higher ups go Google were overly confident about their knowledge of the game industry. No one would doubt that Google (or, more correctly, their parent company Alphabet) is an absolute tech behemoth. But it may have been this size that allowed them to feel comfortable with stepping into what they perceived as a similar industry, when in reality, game development is a very different beast. 150 Stadia developers have thusly lost their employment, as Google says the device is shifting focus to third party developers. It would be nice to see a new console or method of play taking the gaming world by storm, but it seems that it won’t be Stadia. For now, Stadia might be taking a seat on the bench, nestled comfortably between Google Plus and Google Glass.
