Earlier this month, a report from Business Insider detailed the ongoing issues with Google’s troubled streaming platform. Google appears to be sidelining the consumer product as it attempts to market Stadia’s technology as a white-label service to support other companies’ cloud offerings.
A lot has happened between the 2018 Project Stream beta, the official launch of Stadia in 2019, and today. It’s safe to say that Google is leading the second wave of cloud gaming after the early debut of services like PS Now and OnLive. Now, however, the competition has intensified and the demands of the market have crystallized. Google tried to prove that it could bring market advantages to cloud gaming, but the company’s vision didn’t work. Today, Stadia is languishing and has little chance of success.
No company, of course, wants to call their own project a failure. But now is the time for Google to pause and ask, “What exactly are we doing here?” Why does she want to be in the cloud gaming market? What advantages does it have over the competition, and how does it plan to maintain those advantages over time?
There are no good answers to these questions.
Stadia doesn’t have the scale that Google intended.
Let’s go back to Stadia’s original announcement at the 2019 Game Developers Conference and see how some of Google’s initial claims panned out. Google’s presentation at the GDC highlighted the company’s experience in cloud computing, but did not mention how that experience would help conquer the cloud gaming space.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Stadia announcement by talking about the global scope of the Google cloud, saying:
Our dedicated server hardware and data centers can provide more computing power to more people on planet earth than anyone else. Today we are located in 19 regions and more than 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cables.
Google is a large cloud computing company that has servers all over the world. So, Stadia is available worldwide, right?
Not really. Stadia is definitely not available in “over 200 countries”. It’s only available in 22 countries, or about 10 percent of the scale Pichai thought Google could handle.
Until recently, Stadia’s home within Google was the hardware division, with project lead Phil Harrison reporting to Google’s senior vice president of hardware, Rick Osterloh. Google actually competes quite poorly internationally, with each Google Hardware product limited to around 20 countries. It’s strange that Stadia, a cloud service, ended up in the hardware division, but that’s where Google decided to put it. The company really wants people to use its game controller and Chromecast media players, which is why Stadia is limited to a small list of countries where Google is willing to sell the hardware. essentially the same)
To be fair, international business is hard. Can any of Google’s competitors match Stadia’s distribution list of 22 countries?
GeForce Now by Nvidia is available in 82 countries. Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is still labeled “Beta”, is available in 26 countries. Google is in third place. PlayStation Now is the most launched service on our list (although it’s reportedly in for a big update) – operating in 19 countries. At least Google has Amazon Luna. This service is still in “Early Access”by invitation only and is available in one country, the United States.
Google doesn’t have a latency advantage
So Google is bad at international distribution – anyone outside the US will tell you that. However, Google is a big cloud company, and with all this YouTube video streaming experience and other back-end technologies, Google should have an unrivaled cloud experience.
This was a sales pitch from Stadia Chief Engineer Maid Bakar during the presentation:
We built the Stadia architecture around the Google data center network, the same network that has been delivering search results in milliseconds for over 20 years. The network consists of fiber optic links and submarine cables between hundreds of points of presence and more than 7,500 peripheral nodes around the world, all connected to our network backbone. Stadia is built on infrastructure that no one else has. The more edge nodes, the closer the computing resources to the players, which improves performance.
This is the delay argument. Google has more servers in more locations, and since one of them is likely to be near you, there will be less latency. This should be a competitive advantage for Google. This?
You won’t find much consensus among current cloud gaming options. Ars testing gives GeForce Now a slight latency advantage over Stadia. Digital Foundry’s GeForce Now beats Stadia in every latency test and points out that GeForce’s 120fps mode is something Stadia can’t touch. In PC Gamer’s latency tests, GeForce Now far outperformed Stadia; the post even ran into an in-game rubber band due to a delay between Google and the game server. Nexus gamers gave Stadia a slight lead over GeForce Now, but by just 12ms (less than one frame at 60fps).
Google has no real competitive advantage here. No one will find Stadia’s lag to be acceptable if the lag from other services is unacceptable. The advantage of the cloud has been one of the main pillars on which Stadia’s business has been built, and there is no evidence that this theoretical advantage works to Google’s advantage in real life. Nvidia isn’t even a cloud company, and at least it can match Google.