Author | Jesse
Edit | Jingyu
Google is once again swinging a knife at its own product, this time slashed by the Stadia cloud gaming project.
According to The Verge, Google's cloud gaming platform, Stadia, was "internally downgraded." Stadia chief Phil Harrison reported from Rick Ostello, a former senior vice president of hardware, to another lower-ranking executive in charge of "subscription services."
"Downgrading" is not the most critical, Google has reportedly adjusted Stadia's positioning, so that it is no longer aimed at ordinary players, but to B transformation, to help companies develop some similar "cloud games", but less complex interactive products, such as fitness classes.
This is almost a "death sentence" for Stadia. In the history of Google's attempts at new business, there has never been a project that has bottomed out after undergoing downgrades and adjustments. Without exception, they have all walked into the grave of history.
Three years ago, when Stadia was first announced, it was expected to have high hopes. As a leader in the Field of Internet, Google has sufficient financial strength, technical reserves, and a broad user base. By all angles, it is one of the companies most likely to revolutionize "cloud gaming.".
"From entry to abandonment", is Google's failure a case? Or is it the inevitable dead end of all cloud gaming projects?
Fantastic start
In March 2019, Google announced that it had found the technical password to unlock the "cloud game".
Cloud gaming is not a new concept. Back in 2009, cloud gaming company OnLive demonstrated a cloud-game version of Crysis. Six years later, Sony acquired OnLive and integrated the technology into its cloud-like streaming service, PlayStation Now.
Cloud gaming promises players a wonderful vision. Players no longer need to consider "download", "installation", "picture quality settings" and other issues, pick up the controller, you can play in one second, and the game screen is not limited by the performance of the device.
Logically, cloud gaming also paints a more efficient future. If the traditional game console is a high-performance gaming computer, the cloud gaming platform is like an "Internet café". It centralizes computing power and distributes it to users on demand.
In the mode of traditional game consoles, 10,000 players need 10,000 machines, but this 10,000 players cannot play games at the same time, and may only have a thousand people online at the same time, so cloud gaming only needs to prepare a thousand machines in the "Internet café" to satisfy all players. When hardware costs are no longer the threshold, cloud gaming can attract more players.
Dreams are sexy, but the problem is that cloud gaming requires extremely high network quality, requiring not only high bandwidth, but also low latency. In contrast, streaming video also requires high bandwidth, but the latency requirements are not high; online games have high latency requirements, but the bandwidth requirements are relatively low.
Behind Stadia is Google's powerful cloud room| Stadia
Google thinks it can solve this conundrum. On the one hand, Google's strong underlying technical team has developed an excellent compression algorithm for Stadia to reduce the bandwidth required to push the stream; on the other hand, Google has deployed a large number of data centers around the world, huge computing power resources, and players connecting to the nearest data center can greatly reduce latency. At the press conference, Google announced that players only need 25Mbps network to get 4K60 frame level game screen.
Finally, Google has three important killers: YouTube, Chrome, and Android.
As the world's most mainstream video website, browser and mobile operating system, these three products have allowed Stadia to cover almost all computing devices on the planet, from PCs and televisions to mobile phones and tablets. Stadia has the possibility to reach everyone.
At the press conference, Google defined Stadia as "a gaming platform for all."
At the Stadia conference, Google defined Stadia as a "game platform for all" | Stadia
Bone-like reality
Six months after the announcement, in November 2019, Stadia was officially launched, and it encountered Waterloo on the same day.
On the day of the launch, the Washington Post reporter released a video of "playing Stadia in the office by myself". The screen shows that from the reporter pressing the space bar to the character jumping up, there is a visible delay in the middle, making this shooter almost "unplayable". The reporter also specifically mentioned that the Washington Post office lays a 1Gbps gigabit network, far exceeding the 25Mbps rate requirement mentioned by Google at the press conference.
At the beginning of the release, the media evaluation of Stadia was mixed. But almost only technology media like The Verge, which has an office in the Los Angeles Bay Area and adjacent to Google's headquarters, has a good play experience. This has led many people to question Google's technical prowess of "claiming to solve the problem of cloud gaming network latency".
Because of the flaws in the experience, Stadia's user scale has not improved. According to Bloomberg, citing insiders, Stadia spent tens of millions of dollars to buy a series of AAA masterpieces, including "Red Dead Redemption 2", but the final scale of users attracted was still hundreds of thousands of dollars away from the internal sales target.
Also, the game lineup has become a major flaw for Stadia. At the beginning of the release, Stadia announced that there were already 100 game studios creating content for the Stadia platform, but in fact, the last games to land on Stadia were almost only cross-platform works from third-party manufacturers such as Ubisoft and EA, and there were no exclusive masterpieces. In the history of the game field, there has not been a single "platform" that can achieve development without exclusive ownership.
At the press conference, Stadia Games and Entertainment, a game studio announced by Google, did not even make an original game in the end, and it was stillborn. In 2021, Google announced that it would no longer continue to invest in Stadia to make games, shutting down two of its game studios.
Stadia covers almost all of Google's platforms| Stadia
Looking back at Stadia's three years, its peak moment was at the launch conference three years ago. At that time, Stadia, backed by Google, had almost all the "raw materials" needed to do a good cloud game. But the "cooking method" needed to create a great gaming experience, Stadia does not seem to have mastered.
Since that day, Stadia has hardly gone a long way that has not gone downhill, and to this day, it has gone into a desperate situation.
A Stadia insider told Business Insider, "There are a lot of people inside Stadia who want it to continue, and they're all working very hard to make sure Stadia doesn't die." But these people don't have the power to keep writing checks for Stadia."
Cloud gaming, a dead end?
Strictly speaking, Stadia is not yet completely dead.
Google is reportedly repackaging Stadia into a product called Google Stream, targeting the commercial market and providing enterprises with the underlying technology solutions to help them create "interactive content" similar to cloud games.
One of Google Stream's main customers is Peleton, a well-known fitness service in the United States. Peleton sells a "spinning bike" with a screen where users can train alongside a "fitness teacher" on the screen. If you can combine cloud gaming technology with "fitness classes", you can really make the whole experience more interactive.
Moreover, the most critical thing is that "fitness classes" have much lower requirements for bandwidth and latency than "cloud games". The difficulty of development is certainly much lower than that of cloud games.
But Peleton's scene is too vertical, and it's hard to say how big the market is behind it. Continuing in this direction, Google Stream will most likely become part of Google's cloud computing business.
But in any case, Google and Gaming have completely parted ways.
In fact, not only Google, but all major cloud gaming platforms have experienced the same "high open low walk" in the past few years.
Microsoft's cloud gaming service Project xCloud, backed by Xbox's powerful game resources and industry-leading Azure cloud service facilities, has also been tepid, with slow testing progress and mediocre user response. Another industry giant, Nvidia's GeForce Now, is in a similar situation.
Looking back at the development of cloud games in the past few years, it is not difficult to find that there is a pair of huge "contradictions" in the underlying logic of cloud games.
All cloud gaming platforms advertise that they can play "anytime, anywhere", and users will no longer be limited by time, place, and device performance. But in fact, users still need to have a high-speed, stable network to get a relatively better experience.
In today's 5G and optical fiber broadband has been relatively popular, high-speed networks seem to be everywhere, but in fact, whether it is a mobile base station or home Wi-Fi, there are many "dead ends" that cannot be covered, and various "network failure" scenarios still exist. Network fluctuations in any one scenario will ruin the cloud gaming experience.
Cloud gaming is a wonderful ideal, and as technology evolves, we are indeed getting closer to that "ultimate goal." Whether it's Google's Stadia or Microsoft's xCloud, they've advanced a lot at the technical level compared to the original OnLive.
But at the heart of the matter is not technology. How to turn technology into experiences and meet the needs of players is the most important. Stadia's failure may not have been due to a lack of effort on the part of the team. This process of "transformation" is longer than everyone thinks.
Like hundreds of projects Google has cut, Stadia wasn't born in its time, and Google has lost patience. The wave of technology eventually turns into a bubble lapping on the beach.
Finally, we must also ask, do players really need to "play games anytime, anywhere"?
Most AAA games are created as an "immersive experience." To achieve "immersion", you need to eliminate all kinds of distractions around you, sit in front of the TV and computer with peace of mind, hold the controller, and enjoy a gaming experience. It does not need to be "anytime, anywhere", but needs to get the ultimate good experience in a certain scene, even if the scene has a certain threshold. The ultimate vision of cloud gaming, mixed with the wishful thinking of too many vendors.
Below the video of Microsoft's xCloud release, a comment that satirized Microsoft was topped, saying, "I can't wait to play xCloud on my Samsung refrigerator."
The implication is obvious that today's manufacturers only want to use technology to expand the service infinitely, but they have forgotten the original intention of "making a good game".