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orchid_sprout t1_jc1gaia wrote

Stadia was doomed from the start. Most people lost interest as soon as they were told that games had to be purchased separately. Even xCloud and the other services, which are Stadia's "Netflix for gaming," aren't used by the majority of players.

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Chinabotv2 t1_jc2h50r wrote

I saw one dude with 100 hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia begging for their help with this whole thing

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mccannr1 t1_jc26n52 wrote

I don't agree with this. If you marketed it as a console you don't have to buy, then it makes sense to have its own store to buy games from.

Their fuckup was twofold:

First, marketing, or lack thereof. It launched at a PERFECT time. PS5 and Series X had just come out but you could not get one. It was also the beginning of the pandemic so everyone was stuck at home anyway.

So, of course, you'd do an advertising blitz telling people "Next Gen Gaming without the wait", right? Nope. They barely advertised it at all. I know very few people that ever knew Stadia existed.

Second, hardware support or, again, the lack thereof. It's a cloud service, so of course you'd want it on every device imaginable that people are have, right? Nope. You had to buy a Chromecast Ultra. It wouldn't even work on Google's own Google TV stuff until over a year later. Let alone Roku, Fire TV, etc... It made no sense. The whole point was supposed to be "just jump right on and play" but instead you had to go buy a niche hardware dongle that was in the middle of being phased out by Google already.

These were the two things that doomed Stadia. The service itself worked incredibly well. I played Cyberpunk on it at launch and it was awesome. Zero issues. But they made massive mistakes in actually understanding how to sell it as a consumer product. A complete failure in that regard.

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Omegalazarus t1_jc3nsja wrote

Yeah I did a focus group for it in like 2016 or 2017. It was pretty cool. They came to my house and checked out my gaming setup and wanted to check out kind of other stuff that I personally like outside of gaming. Probably trying to understand the demographic and paid me pretty handsomely for the task. Of course they didn't tell me what it was, but they did ask me who I thought would bring this type of console list. Streaming video game tomorrow and I said Netflix or Google.

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schmaydog82 t1_jc34q0i wrote

I disagree, I think Stadia could have done pretty alright if they just marketed it better. It was truly amazing how well it worked especially compared to other cloud gaming services, and this is coming from someone with a 3080 and a PS5.

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