A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).
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“However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia,” Zimring says.
According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia’s Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google’s eyes, this wasn’t enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
It’s interesting that this comes out during the FTC vs Microsoft case.
As much as Google shot itself in the foot, as usual, this also shows the anti-competitive landscape in gaming. One of the biggest issues Google had was convincing AAA studios to develop games for their “console”. Meanwhile, Microsoft is solving that by buying studios like Zenimax, Mojang, and soon Actiblizz. If you own the studio, they’re guaranteed to develop for your console, and they may choose not to develop for any competitor’s consoles.
Big air quotes on “choose.”
But it has always been that way, with first party titles and exclusives , even purchasing studios like Rare or Psygnosis, its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia.
If Google had done even any research, I would have started by looking at the PS1 launch and how Sony broke into a market then dominated by Nintendo and Sega with their exclusives, they would have secured a multi year pipeline of AAA titles before launch.
This is a mess Google could have completely avoided with some basic research and discussion with the remaining independent studios. Instead they launched and assumed that they could fix this shit later, rather than making an informed decision on if they actually had a real chance.
No, but it’s telling that one of the world’s richest companies ran into this problem. It’s pretty typical of Google to be arrogant and not understand the market they were trying to break into. Also typical of them to give up when it turned out to be a hard problem to solve. But, still, they chose to give up rather than make what (for them) would have been a reasonably small investment to buy a few AAA studios.
It seems to me that to have been successful in this attempt they would have either had to become a major console manufacturer with their own exclusives (maybe not a market they wanted to be in) or to be the junior partner working with another console manufacturer, where they controlled the server side and the other company controlled the client-facing and studio-facing side. But, Google rarely does partnerships like that. You’re right that it really seems like they didn’t go into it with their eyes open. They seemed to just arrogantly assume that their technological superiority would be enough to disrupt consoles without having to do what everybody else did.
But this is a situation of their own making, anybody even remotely cognizant of how Sony and Microsoft entered the market, even Steam has lessons to share, would have been aware that they needed that pipeline of AAAs, and exactly how expensive AAA titles are to make. Its usually public record how much one of the manufacturers paid to buy studios as well, the order of magnitude of cash needed to properly enter the market are hardly secret.
Either they thought they could bully their way into getting them or they thought they didn’t need them, which is even worse, way way worse. They could have spent the money the others are in this space but didn’t, this is the main reason this fell on its arse. They can moan all they like about the price of admission but they could have afforded to pay it if they wanted or lobbied to change it before hand rather than wasting a few billions on this.
It will be very interesting at the level Apple pitch their new gaming service if the rumors are true. Do they go after the mobile lite eco system that Netflix is cobbling together or do they go all in?