Google Stadia is discontinued, and the funeral will take place on January 18, 2023. For now, it’s a corpse on foot that users can keep playing on to finish their games… and then it’ll be gone. forever. Users will find little solace in the fact that they will at least get back all the money they spent on games and hardware. If it’s the best way to relax in the evening and play some games, this type of gesture is trivial. What makes it worse is that the fear of Google killing the service is finally exactly What killed her?
Stadia was pronounced dead before she had a chance
The fear of killing Google Stadia is exactly what killed Stadia
Since its inception, naysayers have been trying to figure out that Stadia’s days are numbered. After all, Google has a somewhat overcrowded graveyard of messaging apps, an entire social media network that’s integrated into YouTube, and as many hardware rounds as Google Glass. There is even a website dedicated to reading about all the services Google has been wasting – it’s called “Google killed himFor Stadia, this meant that many people turned away from her and did not take her seriously, believing that her days were already numbered, which in itself became a fulfilling prophecy of doom.
All of this points to a broader problem – Google wants to be taken seriously, but users can’t trust the new products it launches anymore. If Google plans to launch a new service, people will immediately Skip to pessimism. Even in our article covering the launch of Google Stadia, one of the most important comments simply states “You can’t wait for this to be sent to the Google Graveyard in a year and a half”. It lasted about twice as long, but the point remains – people just assume that new Google services are doomed from the start.
Changing Google’s brand perception on ambitious projects
The biggest problem Google has is that its branding is now associated with killing services that don’t start on the right foot. If people were afraid to invest in Stadia (for fear of closing it down), it would just be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously, people don’t want to invest in a service that everyone sees as doomed. Google clearly needs to find a way to bypass this perception. The problem is: how?
One of the best and most consumer-friendly measures Google has taken in this entire disaster is to take back all the games that users have paid for in the service, even if they played through it. On top of that, all devices will also be recovered – this includes packages that have included the likes of Chromecast. In other words, you can still continue to use some things, and you basically got them for free.
While I’ll leave it to the marketing teams to decide how to get this kind of message across, I think a commitment to consumers by saying that if everything doesn’t work out, they’ll get their money back, is a good first step. Stadia was seen as a gamble at launch, and I think users would have understood and had less fear if Google had done both of the following:
- I acknowledge that sometimes business decisions don’t work.
- You are obligated to refund users if this business decision does not work out.
There is a common thread of fear that I’ve seen intertwined in the discussion of doubt about the now-expired cloud streaming service that specifically pertains to the games that users have paid for. We now have our answer for what these users are getting into, but I can’t help but feel that committing early on (while acknowledging that some companies are a risk) would have done less harm than people who were already expecting canceled projects to be part of the core of Google. While a money-back guarantee as an exit strategy is not always possible and certainly not the right message for any bullish business, Google needs to be aware of the unique negative situation it finds itself in. Showing its hand to exit strategy may actually have invoked confidence in consumers rather than suspicion, as when it’s rock bottom, reputation-wise, the only way left is to climb.
As for what the company could have done as well, I think the closing of SG&E, the first party game studio, has sounded the death knell for many. It was a big part of the company’s push into cloud broadcasting, though Google acknowledged at the time that the white label service it provided to companies like Capcom and AT&T for display purposes was important to its operation. The optics were never good once their game developer shut down, no matter how many commitments they made to gamers.
Only Google could fail to create an online gaming service that can play AAA titles and indie favorites during a global pandemic that is forcing people to use online forms of entertainment, all while silicon shortages have worsened over the years and prevented gamers from building high-end PCs.
Looking to the future
The most pressing issue for Google is damage control. Projects sometimes don’t work out, and companies around the world have had to cancel them in order to protect themselves financially. Despite this, for some reason Google has managed to earn its reputation as one of the worst, and it’s getting worse. Microsoft ownsKilled by Microsoft‘, but no one is assuming that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is currently making the long trip to the morgue.
Somehow, somehow, Google needs to put an end to the perception that it’s happily killing services left and right if it wants to do anything mildly ambitious. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be ambitious — if Google tried to build another messaging app, it would be dead when it arrived. content. That’s how terrible the Google brand is for messaging apps, and that reputation won’t spread to its other divisions unless the company allows it.
Where can Google go from here? The company seems damned if you try anything new and damned to stagnate if you don’t even try.
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