Well, this didn’t last very long. Google has announced that it is shutting down its gaming cloud service, Stadia, as Google’s CEO said that he wants Google to run ‘20% more efficiently’ without the burdens of failed endeavors like Stadia.
What a shock this news is, right? It’s not like everyone and their grandmother saw this coming after Google announced that it had closed all of Stadia’s first-party game development studios and was failing to attract popular games to its platform.
Or how about when Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, opened up the Stadia reveal press conference by saying that he ‘isn’t much of a gamer’. It’s not like you’d want someone with knowledge and passion about video games and the arduous development and labor that goes into a single title to run a multi-billion cloud gaming service, right?
No, it’s better to have someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about unveiling what was supposed to be the most significant competition to Steam on PC, tablets, smart phones, etc. to date.
Okay, I’ll stop with the sarcasm and get right into it. Google shutting down Stadia was an obvious move as the cloud streaming service has completely failed to make any headway in the video game hosting/service market.
Like I said, this was supposed to be Google’s ‘Grand Entry’ into the video game market as it had seen its chief competitors, Microsoft and Sony, undergo tremendous financial and critical success with the inventions of the Xbox and PlayStation, respectively.
And, like most Fortune 500 companies, Google just had to get a piece of that video game money pie.
Yet, Google really jumped the gun on Stadia’s business model as cloud service gaming may be neat in concept, but the execution is just a real pain in the neck for most video game developers. Not only would developers have to port their titles onto a brand-new hosting/cloud service, but they also had to do so with the knowledge that Google wasn’t going to pay them enough for it.
Yup, you read that right, supposedly (according to prominent Indie developer who spoke to Business Insider two years ago) Google’s revenue split share was so insulting that indie developers and Triple AAA developers alike stayed away from Stadia.
Now, not only is low-balling the developers just a dumb idea on Google’s part, but it is also just plain greedy. How much money was Google looking to squeeze out of these hardworking, low-paid indie developer studios? An 60-40 split? A 70-30 split?
In general, Steam already has 70-30 split IN FAVOR OF THE DEVELOPERS. So, in other words, Steam only receives 30% of all profits from a video game being sold off its platform while the developer would receive the other 70% directly.
Google must have been asking for something like 50-50, 60-40, or even 70-30 in favor of themselves as those are the only logical splits that I could see developers taking an extreme offense with.
Anyway, when the vast majority of indie and Triple AAA developers refused to port their titles onto Stadia, it obviously created a gaming shortage on a platform that needed a lot of games to grow its audience. Therefore, when Stadia launched with only 28 games on the platform, the gaming audience dried up quicker than grape in the hot sun.
And that has led us to this news today as Google was unable to attract its audience back after that terrible launch.
So, Google, I hope you have taken an important lesson from this mess: don’t be greedy! You’re Google for goodness’ sake! You have more than enough money to share with these small developers.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Wikimedia Creative Commons License/Author: Google) (Google, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
