Gaming history is filled with epic highs and soul-crushing lows. For every Atari system that helped “break the mold,” there is a “Video Game Crash of ‘83” to help bring things down again. Every major video game publisher in history has been part of either the highs, the lows, or both during their period of existence. That includes Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. However, you might recall that a few years ago, there was a “fourth entrant” into the console wars via the Google Stadia. Yes, Google got into the console game and made a splash…that soon turned into a belly flop because the Stadia didn’t last long at all.
The premise of the system was to do away with “physical and digital copies of gaming” and focus solely on Cloud Gaming. You’d just stream the game to your TV, phone, or other places where you would have Cloud Gaming access. In theory, it would be something huge, and that’s why on the Xbox Two + One podcast, Rand al Thor 19 had an interesting statement to make.
According to him, he and fellow insider Jez Corden heard that both Microsoft and Sony were “terrified” of the Stadia and, more specifically, of Google entering the gaming space. The podcast’s host backed up part of that rumor with his own knowledge, and the two noted that Sony and Microsoft feared that the user base for the Google Stadia could far outpace their systems. In fact, the Sony heads feared that people would subscribe to the Stadia in such numbers worldwide that it would quickly outpace the PlayStation in every way.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. For all its technological wonders, which were sound, to be fair, the Stadia didn’t last that long for several reasons. First, it was released during the pandemic, so its ability to “be played all over the place via the Cloud” wasn’t really put into practice that often. Second, most people weren’t really ready for Cloud Gaming, and that meant that many weren’t willing to try the system in any meaningful way.
It also didn’t help that the system had a weird set of prices depending on which version you got. Finally, and most importantly, the Stadia didn’t have any meaningful exclusives. All it offered were just games that were coming out on other systems, so there was no “draw” to try out this system for this “fresh title” when people had already bought other systems that they could play the games on.
Google could’ve been a powerful foe in the gaming space if they had stuck the landing.
