Google Stream is what Stadia should have been from the start

digitaltrends.com:

One year after Google shuttered the internal game development studio for its struggling cloud gaming service Google Stadia, a report from Business Insider gives a clear idea of what’s next for the tech giant’s gaming efforts. It’s reportedly moving away from making a cloud gaming platform where subscribers buy and play games. Instead, Google will use the technology in partnerships with major third-party companies under the moniker Google Stream.

As someone who has actively played Stadia since its November 2019 launch, the slow downfall of the platform has been painful. Still, Google executives never had their heart in Stadia’s potential as a commercial platform. Google Stream is what Stadia should’ve been from the start if Google wasn’t going to commit to gaming fully and, hopefully, it will play a part in cloud gaming’s bright future.

In retrospect, this endpoint for Google Stadia was inevitable. According to Business Insider, Google is pitching Google Stream to businesses as a backend cloud gaming technology that doesn’t necessarily need to be tied to the Stadia storefront. It already partnered with the exercise company Peleton and AT&T last year on different projects. Instead of putting effort into getting more exclusives or AAA games on Stadia, it’s getting more companies to white-label Google Stream. (That’s where a product or service produced by one company is rebranded by other companies to make it appear as if they had made it.)

It apparently pitched Google Stream to Bungie, which released Destiny 2 as a flagship Stadia title and was interested in making a streaming platform of its own. While the status of that deal is now in question due to Sony’s acquisition of Bungie, Google is also reportedly in negotiations