Not quite hardware/software sales, but a lot of people pegged Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the beginning of the year. It's also unclear how many of those break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-game-once-and-play-it-now users.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that "lot of gamers" in my experience is the type to flame Stadia without playing or buying it anyway. I highly doubt the overlap of the population of /v/ and Stadia owners was that large, but maybe I'm wrong.
I think it isn't the technical part of Stadia that will determine its success, but its business model. Without the pricing information, not much can be said about it. I'm a little surprised that Google hasn't been more up-front about how much it's going to cost.
PS Now accounts for about half of all game subscription service revenue, so half of 273 million (quarterly).
Doing the math, that leaves you with somewhere in the realm of 2.38 million active subscribers (273 million *.52 / $60).
The PS4 installed base is about 86 million consoles. That means only about 2 or 3 percent are active PS Now subscribers.
If Stadia comes out with a massive Steam or PS Store type of catalog where you can access any game, I think it'll be a runaway success.
If it's just PS Now (along with a similarly small catalog) without the need to spend as much on hardware, I don't see it being anything more than a ~2-5 million user subscription service.
It's a nice pile of revenue, but it's not "overtake the rest of the market as the preferred way to play games" type of numbers.
There's no official numbers, but probably - it has gotten lots of new releases, including heavy hitters like Ubisoft and EA's catalogues, including their latest games. Coupled with the unavailability of some latest gen consoles ( PS5), the slow arrival and subpar experience on some competing cloud gaming platforms (Xcloud), it would make sense.
On the other hand, Google's recent changes for better revenue sharing imply that things aren't going that great / great enough.
In any case, Stadia is by far the best in terms of UX and lag among the competitors I've tried ( GeForce Now and Xcloud). If it weren't for Google's terrible reputation for abandoning stuff ( even if it isn't directly applicable here because Google rarely, if ever, kill paid services) they'd be doing much better IMHO.
The addressable market for stadia right now is vanishingly small compared to the market for every other platform. What proportion of gamers live in an area where it's available? Is it even a double digit percentage? I doubt it.
Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.
The author used one game as the indicator of the success of the whole platform. Doesn't seem to me as a good reasoning.
However the Stadia platform doesn't seem to be gaining a lot of traction, mostly because of -- I guess -- the network bandwidth requirement, and the limited library?
Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones, IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don't recall), and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they drastically overestimate how many people would buy their hardware.
It's like a chicken and egg problem. Stadia isn't getting many users cause it doesn't have many games and studios aren't porting games cause of too few users
I saw far more people saying 'I don't think stadia will be around in 5 years' than I saw people buying into it. I don't think people are very suprised by this, google has basically destroyed people's faith in the staying power of their products outside of a small core.
The engineering side did a great job on a complex technical task. It's satisfactory, kind of works, not great, not terrible.
What boggles the mind is that nobody is able to formulate who is Stadia even meant for. Who are the target customers?
Draw a Venn diagram of people who:
- care about gaming
- are OK paying full price for their games
- are OK paying 10 euros a month subscription
- are OK buying an extra controller
- have top-notch, 100% reliable internet connection
- are willing to accept occasional technical glitches
- are OK with Google's mercurial approach to product lifecycles
but do not:
- have a computer
- have a console
- have a Steam library
- mod their games
- subscribe to Nvidia's cloud gaming service
Just giving some off-hand estimates, my estimate is 0.00015% of the world's population meets these criteria. The only reasonable business model must be "people will want to try it out and then forget to cancel their subscription".
Why do you think that all users of Stadia would also subscribe to the Stadia subreddit and keep being a subscriber after it shut down? It'd be some miniscule percentage. Stadia also wasn't the most popular cloud gaming service, GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming are.
Only Xbox Cloud Gaming reportedly had 10+ million users in 2022; meanwhile GeForce Now reportedly had 20+ million in 2022.
I do not get the hate/dismissiveness coming out of a position of total lack of even the faintest idea about cloud gaming.
Even if it wasn’t massively popular as a gaming platform, I thought it could be pretty profitable as marketing for games, where you can actually demo the game from a web browser and try it before buying it. This could be either directly on e-commerce sites or ads on Google.com. I’m surprised that they didn’t do more with that before killing it. If you could show having a Stadia demo increases conversion rates and sales, it would be really useful even if gamers don’t acquire Stadia gaming libraries.
I wonder if they could’ve sold it off to Netflix or something instead of killing it.
I have a Stadia and actually liked it even though I thought the go to market execution was bad. Also the latency made it problematic for multiplayer games, so I just played single player content.
Here's one that showed their work: https://allstadia.com/how-many-users-does-google-stadia-have
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