[invader]

It died because it solved the problem nobody really had. It's Startup 101.

Who said hardware is the problem? Modern consoles are relatively cheap, especially considering modern $60 price tags on games. So why Stadia tried to solve that?

I'm sure Google has a lot of brilliant engineers who can build a state-of-the-art streaming platform that can leverage existing Google cloud infrastructure. But that's all it is - a brilliant piece of technology nobody really needs. And not that innovative as well - I've met a bunch of game streaming startups back at Jan 2016 CES, something like two years prior the launch of Stadia, so the idea has been around for quite a while.

Hardcore gamers are buying a lot of overpriced gaming gear all the time. I can't see how people spending thousands of $ on tuned hardware suddenly would want to change all that on a faceless streaming platform. Ownership and belonging is a big part of that subculture.

Stadia could make sense for a casual gamer who doesn't want to invest into expensive hardware. But games a casual player plays are not GPU-heavy and work fine on any relatively modern platform.

Too basic for a hardcore gamer, too powerful and demanding for a casual one. The Stadia's fate was sealed.

[ktzar]

Sporadic gamers who don't have the space or money to have a $400 console permanently using space in their living rooms. I played RDR2 on Stadia for 2 months. Then didn't use it again until I got my next game, a few months later.

I rather pay a bit more for games without the burden of having a console, or a gaming pc to be honest.

It solved a problem for me. Until my kids are not old enough to have a PS (whatever the number is in 6 years) I won't have a console able to run top tier games

[hedora]

My cloud gaming vm costs < $10 a month, runs any windows compatible game, and can also run realtime raytracing cad software, etc.

Stadia had none of those properties.

[ddorian43]

> Sporadic gamers who don't have the space or money to have a $400 console permanently

Do you not have a computer/laptop? That's supposed to also play games. Maybe you chose the wrong computer (apple).

[Version467]

The idea has been around for even longer. The first service I remember (and afaik they were actually the first) was onlive. Launched in 2010.

They had already nailed the tech then. Latency was acceptable and so were compression artifacts. But they eventually failed and so did every other subsequent service that tried to do the same thing.

Not only does it solve a problem that barely anyone has, it’s also insanely expensive to run. I don’t think any of these services ever had a clear path to profitability.

[invader]

Yep, it all comes down to have enough gamers to afford expensive cloud infrastructure. And a regular geo-distribution of computing resources is not working well in this case.

Let's assume the usage peaks on Friday eve in LA area. The LA resource pool must have enough capacity for the peak. And on Saturday early morning that usage drops almost to zero. Now we might want to reuse freed resources to serve another currently active user pool, maybe in Tokyo. But we are dealing with highly specialized cloud resources not that easily reusable. You can't use LA servers to serve users in Tokyo - the latency will be too high.

Now we need to deploy our resources near all big urban population centres for all target markets. And these resources would stay mostly unused because of the latency and usage patterns (unless we're going to mine crypto with unused GPUs). And once we move out of densely populated areas, the problem becomes bigger.

So it is really hard to see how that can be economically feasible.