Stadia proves that Google and Microsoft don’t understand games – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader is unsurprised that Google is shutting down Stadia and tries to draw a parallel between Amazon and Microsoft’s video game plans.

I’m sure we’ve all had a good laugh this week, at the failure of Stadia – something so obvious that every gamer with a heartbeat predicted it three years ago. Nothing of value has been lost, but to me it’s an interesting thing because the whole concept was done so incompetently, and with so little enthusiasm or insight by Google as a company.

Google are famous for shutting down services prematurely, which is why this was all so obvious to many people. You can see from the size of the Google Graveyard that most of those predictions were based on nothing more than that, but if you know games it was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing.

Everyone thought it was going to be the ‘Netflix of gaming’ but it took ages for Google to explain that it wasn’t really a subscription service at all. You couldn’t just pick a game and play it, like Game Pass, you had to buy each of them individually at full price. Except you never owned anything at the end of the day. If the service shut down, which it is, you’re left with nothing (although to be fair Google is refunding everyone).

That’s just a fundamentally bad idea and it’s no shock that so few people bought into it. The writing was on the wall though, when Google shut down its developers and gave up on the idea of making its own games, thereby showing that it didn’t understand what is the main appeal of any service or format.

Execs at these giant corporations love to talk about games being the future of interactive entertainment and all the other buzzwords but it’s always obvious they don’t really believe it. They’re interested in games