Stadia looks doomed.
At the beginning of the month, a report from Bloomberg detailed ongoing issues with Google’s troubled streaming platform. Apparently, Google is putting the consumer product on the back burner while it tries to sell the Stadia technology as a white-label service to power other companies’ cloud offerings.
Much has happened between the 2018 “Project Stream” beta, the official Stadia launch in 2019, and today. You could arguably call Google a leader in the second wave of cloud gaming, after the early debuts of services like PS Now and OnLive. Now, though, there is more competition, and the demands of the market are crystallizing. Google tried to make a case that it could bring market advantages to cloud gaming, but the company’s vision has not borne fruit. Today, Stadia is languishing and has few prospects of success.