So, We Should Probably Have a Little Chat About Stadia (Premium)

When Google announced that it was halting internal efforts to develop Stadia games and rely instead on third-party titles, it set off a firestorm. On the one hand, we have the expected catcalls about Google killing services. And on the other, we have a small contingent of people who have actually tried Stadia, really like the service, and don’t understand what all the fuss is about.

I’m somewhere in the middle, I guess. Google has absolutely earned its reputation for killing off services unceremoniously over the years. And I have tried Stadia, have in fact played it quite a bit, and I really like the service. I wrote about my Stadia experiences twice so far, in Living with Game Streaming: Google Stadia (Premium) and Living with Game Streaming: Google Stadia + Chromebook (Premium).

Stadia has a lot to offer gamers. It’s broadly available on a variety of hardware devices. It has a reasonably good games library. And it supports Xbox and PlayStation controllers in addition to its own Wi-Fi-based controller. Stadia gamers can pretty much game anywhere they want, in whatever configurations they prefer.

Stadia also has some Google quirks. Unlike all-you-can-eat services such as Amazon Luna, which I also like, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with Cloud Gaming (currently in beta), Stadia only provides a small selection of “free” games to those who pay for a subscription. Instead, Google expects users to buy games on the service, just as they would on a PC or a console, and the prices those games command are no cheaper than they are elsewhere. The nice side bonus to this strategy, however, is that you can also game on Stadia for free: The paid subscription only gets you that handful of free games, plus 4K HDR and 5.1 surround sound support, neither of which I need anyway.

To put this in perspective, we might compare Stadia—and other cloud gaming services—to more familiar video services like Netflix, Hulu, and the like. With a service like Netflix, you don’t ever “own” any content. You simply pay a monthly fee and while that subscription is active, you can consume any of the content available on the service. The availability of content changes each month, too: Some new content is added, and some are removed.

Luna and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with Cloud Gaming both work that way. They each offer some library of game content, and subscribers can stream any of those titles at any time while their subscription is active. And each month, some new content is added, and some are removed. These things—Netflix and the two gaming services—are literally comparable.

Stadia is a bit harder to pin down, as there’s no video service that’s exactly like it. Because there’s no monthly fee (also Stadia has one as an option), and you buy content on Stadia—in the form of individual games— it’s more like iTunes or Microsoft’s Movies & TV service. And that means that those purchases have the same concerns. If Microsoft were to kill of Movies & TV, or Google were to kill Stadia, what would happen to the content we purchased there?

That’s an open question, but thinking through it logically, Microsoft/Google could provide at least partial refunds, most likely in the form of gift cards for their online stores. Or they might simply leave the back-end services online so that customers could enjoy their purchased content for the foreseeable future, most likely temporarily.

(Or, I suppose, there could be some deal with another service in which your purchased content is moved elsewhere. Microsoft took a half step in this direction when it killed Groove Music and Music Pass and recommended that customers move to Spotify: It provided them with a way to move their playlists and collections to the other service.)

Of course, videogames and movies and TV shows aren’t the same things. And while everyone does things differently, I think it’s fair to generalize and say that most people will likely play through a single-player game once and be done with it, much in the same way that most people will watch a TV show episode once and be done with that. Many people will likewise play a multiplayer game over perhaps a longer period of time, which suggests that those users would be better off buying those titles, not “renting” them via a subscription. (And I hope that most people who buy movies on whatever service do so because the price/rewatchability mix was right. I shudder to think about anyone buying a movie at $19.99 or whatever and just watching it once.)

To further generalize, different services speak to different needs. If you’re going to play a lot of different games over time, a service like Luna or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with Cloud Gaming makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to stick with a single title for some number of months, then maybe buying it makes more sense.

Stadia’s Achilles Heel, as I see it, is that it doesn’t land firmly in either camp. When you buy a game on console or PC, if its developer decides to give up and disappear, that game will still always work. But if you buy a game on Stadia, and Google kills Stadia, well, then we have the menu of choices I outlined above, coupled with the uncertainty of which option Google will choose. Couple that will Google’s propensity for killing services, and well, you can see the concern.

So here’s the thing. When I look at companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and I examine their potential for success in video game streaming, I see two things. One, only Microsoft has the decades of experience with videogame studios to make the shift it’s making from consoles to streaming services, and this transition nicely parallels what it did earlier in shifting from traditional Office software to Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And two, all three of these companies would see even more success if they simply created the back-end services needed for other gaming studios and then sold them those services instead of making them available directly to consumers.

And guess what? All three of these companies are pursuing that strategy. In addition to offering consumers services directly.

In Microsoft’s case, for example, the software giant has an effort called PlayFab that provides Azure-based backend services for game companies, and we know that it is working with Sony so that that firm can deliver its own next-generation game streaming services. As I noted at the time, those efforts may prove to be as lucrative, if not more son, than Microsoft’s in-house Xbox platform. But whatever, it’s another source of revenue.

In Google’s case, the online giant also offers back-end services for game publishers. But now that it has over a year of Stadia experience behind it, Google is also looking at those capabilities to third-parties as well. It hinted as such in its announcement yesterday about killing off the Stadia Games & Entertainment Team (SG&E).

“In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players,” Google vice president Phil Harrison noted. “We see an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia’s advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools. We believe this is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry.”

In other words, Google sees the success of Stadia, and thus the future of the service, as being contingent on its being able to sell this technology to third parties that will use that functionality in their own services, outside of Stadia. This makes sense. But it also confirms the fears of naysayers by implying that if these efforts fail, then yes, Google will kill Stadia.

As Harrison also explained, “creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially.” In other words, making successful videogames is hard—not so much a hard computer science problem, if you will, but rather a difficult business to kickstart from scratch—and even Google, with all its resources, can’t simply be successful by showing up.

Left unsaid in Harrison’s post, too, is the real impact of this change: Google had over 150 people working on new games in the SG&E, and all of those people, who just spent 1-2 years of their life plying away to help Stadia succeed, will now need to find new jobs, either within Google or not. I hear Apple may be hiring developers for its Arcade offering, folks. Just saying.

Anyway, with regards to what’s really happening at Stadia, I won’t assume the automatic panic mode, but will rather caution users to go into this relationship with open eyes. If your plan is to buy a game, play it for one to three months (or whatever) and then move on to another game without ever looking back (by revisiting and replaying that first game), then there’s no risk to buying it on Stadia, and you can take advantage of its broad hardware support and over a year of platform improvements to play that game wherever you want. If replayability over a long period of time is an issue, well. Maybe you should look elsewhere.

This isn’t rocket science. But it’s also no reason to freak out, unless of course you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on Stadia content. We’ll have to wait and see how Stadia evolves in 2021—both via new features and its expanding game catalog—before declaring this thing dead. Or not.