Once again Google has said to users of one of its services: “You screwed up. You trusted us. That’s on you.”
“Google Shutting Down Stadia Cloud Gaming Platform”
“Gasp!” – Nobody at all.
Well, at least it had a good long run that…
Google Stadia has only been around since 2019, having launched in November of that year.
Oh. Uh…
The service was designed to allow for cloud-based gaming across a range of devices, including PCs, Chromebooks, Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
Indeed, Stadia was touted by some as one of the things that gave Chromebooks and advantage over MacBooks. Oh, well.
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Turns out Google would rather spin up and shut down a thousand services than go to therapy. This has really turned into quite the pattern for the company and it’s not sitting well with everyone, particularly people who had a rather large investment of time in games played via
“Red Dead Redemption II Player Pleads With Rockstar to Save Their 6K Stadia Hours”
A desperate Red Dead Redemption II player has pleaded with Rockstar to allow data transfers between platforms after racking up thousands of hours on Google’s doomed Stadia service.
Also, that’s… a lot of hours. Of course, this is a YouTuber, so you could argue that it’s part of his job. You could also argue the moon landings were faked or that the pope is 12 small aliens in a white cape. You can say whatever you want on YouTube, Google doesn’t care as long as people watch the ads.
Now it’s up to Rockstar to deal with the fallout of Google pulling the rug out from under players? As one game developer dryly put it in a tweet:
Indeed.
Despite a seemingly advantageous market, why did Stadia fail? As TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey argues, we may be at the point where Google’s attempts at new services can’t get any traction because no one trusts Google to keep them open for more than a few years.
”Stadia died because no one trusts Google”
No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.
By most accounts the service itself worked very well. The problem was that it required you to buy games for Stadia alone and who would want to do that when you could buy it for Steam or a console, both of which you’d be sure would be around longer than it takes the average Google executive to get bored with it and run after another shiny object?
It cost you a bill to get in the door plus the monthly fee, then you had to buy games on top of that, full price.
But you could run them on your Chromebook and Google would be able to scour all your information!
Oh, wait, that’s a reason for Google to want you to get it, not a reason for you to want to. And that’s the problem with most of these Google services. The one they really service is, well, Google.
Coldewey adds:
For me (and dozens more of us) the turning point was the assassination of Google Reader — for which I will never forgive them, and try to regularly exert a small vengeance by mentioning it like so…
People love to blame the iPhone for the rise in social media which, not to put it too lightly, is going to kill us all. But Google effectively killing RSS was at least as instrumental.
Coldewey believes that no one will trust Google ever again and while the Macalope agrees the company certainly has a problem on its hands, there’s alway going to be someone who’s willing to try to build a YouTube channel about Google Flonx, the new service that lets you sell your precious bodily fluids to billionaires to help keep them young.
Dope springs eternal.
Author: The Macalope
In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.