The Death of Google Stadia

your loved ones are all safe and well. Uh. I was merely inconvenienced, but that inconvenience meant that I was actually a little behind on the tech news. And if you follow tech news, then you may have heard that Google is shutting down its online cloud streaming game service called Stadia. And I thought we could talk a little bit about what Stadio was and what went wrong and

what comes next. But first we'll talk about the cloud game streaming world in general, because Stadia is just one of several services they're really aimed to revolutionize gaming, and this one ultimately fell short. It's also yet another example of a Google project that the company would pull the plug on. And I've done entire episodes about this kind of stuff that you know, Google either launched or it

acquired and then subsequently killed it off. So we're not going to dwell on that too much here, but it does play a big part, I think, in why Stadia failed ultimately. Well, first, before we get to any of that, let's talk about cloud streaming video game content in general. Now, this is not a new idea like a lot of things that emerged as cloud computing matured. It is and as a service concept like I'm sure you've heard of lots of things as a service, you know, like software

as a service. In this case, it's games as a service and players pay a certain amount of money, typically a recurring subscription fee, and in return, they can access a library of games stored on the cloud, and they play the game on a home device. It could be really anything. It could be a handheld device, it could be a connected TV, it could be a video game console, it could be a PC or a smartphone, whatever it might be. Uh, we call this the client. It's the

user side of this system. And meanwhile, the actual game is running on a server, probably somewhere that's not too far away, and we call the server the server and a client server system. That one's easy so the reason you want to have your server fairly close to wherever the client is is to cut down on latency and lag because the greater the distance between the player and

the server, the more likely you will have latency. And that's particularly bad for Twitch based games, and by that I mean the games that rely on fast and accurate reflexes, not games streaming on the Twitch service. Now. Really the combination of cloud and edge computing is what has made these streaming services viable. But some services debuted before this

kind of infrastructure really became robust. In fact, if we really want to go overboard, we can talk about stuff like bulletin board systems or b B s. So ages ago, before most people even knew there was an Internet that was in development, you know, there were some computer hobbyists who began to create software that would let you turn

your computer into kind of a little host server. Other people could dial into your computer by using their own computers, which would be the clients, and a modem, so they would have their phone connected to this modem and they would literally type in a number that related to your computer's phone line and dial into your computer, so it was kind of like their computer was calling your computer on the phone, and what would happen later would be

a conversation between the two machines. Now again this was in the old landline phone days. Mind you you know your computer would answer this call. The other person would then be able to do stuff on your computer through this connection. Not just any stuff, right, They couldn't do everything. They couldn't get like administrative control of your machine assuming you were running the right software, but they could do stuff within the context of the BBS software you were using.

And a BBS host might allow users to leave messages for each other kind of like email, or maintain a forum that may or may not have a specific focus us to it, like there were bbs is that were really focused on things like sports, for example, or the computer calling in might even be able to play certain games that worked really well with bbs is, So typical things would be like dungeon crawling c RPGs, and this was a sort of peer to peer gaming and usually

limited folks to a single player experience, but it was a start. This is also a great topic in general because it makes it very easy to explain clients versus servers. So the client in this case is the device that the end user has, whether it's a computer or a game console, or a handled device or smartphone, smart TV,

web browser, whatever. The server is the machine on the other end that's actually running the processes, and the connection between client and server allows the client to access the servers capabilities, almost like the client was a natural extension

of the server itself. In many ways, it goes back to the time sharing model of having dumb terminals connecting to a central computer, where you have multiple people each uosing a terminal that doesn't really do anything on its own, It just acts as an input output device for a centralized computing system. This is like that, but it is

enabled via the Internet. Now, way back in two thousand, before the term cloud computing had even become a common phrase like that wouldn't happen until around two thousand six, but a company from Finland called g Cluster had a cloud computing concept and attended E three to show it off. Now, back then E three was a very big video game trade and industry show. And I say back then because well recently the conference has been struggling to remain relevant

and in fact has canceled. The last couple of E three events. I think it's going through a real identity crisis, trying to figure out like what role does E three play if any um, it's that I know that the the organization behind E three definitely wants it to remain a thing because it was a revenue generator. But from

the moment it's kind of in limbo. Well, anyway, back in two thousand and the three G Cluster, this company from Finland, showed off a client server gaming service, or at least a technology not really a service yet, but the technology that would enable that kind of thing. The following year, in two thousand, one G Cluster revealed that it was working on a system that would let gamers by say a handheld system that connected to a more

powerful back end through the Internet. And this would in theory, let layers access games that would normally be way too advanced and too demanding to play on a small handheld device.

While the gamer's device would be relatively small and thus not able to pack in big old components like in a beefy GPU, the hardware that was actually running the games on the server side would not have those size restrictions, right, You don't have to worry about how big or small your server is assuming you've got, you know, the physical space to house it, and that meant that you could have a very simple end device for the user to

to take advantage of. We call this kind of model a thin client because the end user device, the client doesn't have to be particularly powerful. It just has to be able to receive the signal and to be able to display things and have the input output structure so that you can interact with whatever the software is. Well. With a fast Internet connection, this kind of model can

work great. It can bring down the price of the hardware because the handheld device doesn't have to be packed to the gills with all these components, so it could be relatively inexpensive. The company g Cluster was still developing this technolog Gester wasn't anything for gamers to buy. At this point. There was no commercial use of it. It was more like, here's the the technology that would enable

this to happen. In two thousand four, Soft Bank, the enormous Japanese company, acquired g Cluster, and g Cluster did provide the back end technology for several online gaming services, primarily in Europe and then later almost exclusively in Japan. UM and Eventually, another Japanese company called broad Media Group would acquire a majority steak in g cluster that would be in t S, but we're gonna move on. That was just one early example of the idea for cloud

based gaming. Now. According to at least some sources, the first actual commercial cloud gaming service was on Life. Actually remember when that launched. That was the summer of now the company on Life, I've been around for several years before that working on the project. But they did that kind of in secret, not revealing it till they offered up a fifteen dollar per month subscription service. The company

would later then drop the subscription service entirely. So instead what Online looked to make money on was to h to rent games to players, so players would be able to use the service for free, but to access games that would need to pay a certain amount per month depending upon the title. This model did not work out so well because within two years, on Life executives laid off the entire staff. They essentially cut all ties with shareholders.

They made all shares null and void. They went through a court process to do that, so they didn't just declare it. It was actually a legal process they had to follow. They closed up shop, and they sold on Live's assets to at the time a secret buyer, who then opened up a brand new business called on Live Real Bold Move. The buyer was Louder Partners, and it was rumored that the original on Live executive teams sold the company way way below its actual value based on

the technology it had developed and the patents that it owned. Anyway, on Live limped on for a couple more years until in Sony Computer Entertainment bought on Live's assets and it effectively ceased to be Now it's possible that Online could have made it, you know, and survived as a business with just a few different choices, but it's really hard to say because before the service launched, journalists expressed a lot of skepticism about whether the company would be able

to provide a good experience to users. Some were doubting that Online would have the processing equipment needed to handle the extreme demands of high end performance gaming, and there was more skepticism that broadband access in general wasn't nearly robust enough to support this kind of service in the first place, that users would not get high resolution games that had low latency because the Internet connections just weren't

there yet. That was the fear. Whether that was true or not, the press coverage definitely hurt on Live's chances, and not a lot of people bought into it. Certainly, there were reviews that found that if you had really bad internet connection, that would lead to poor performance. But you know, that seems pretty obvious to me. If you know you've got allows the internet connection, it should come as no surprise when you experience issues with a cloud

based gaming service. That kind of goes hand in hand. Anyway, Sony absorbed on Live's assets, or at least most of them. Around the same time that on Live debut, a company called gei Kai announced its own cloud game streaming technology. Like on Life, this was a technology that the team at Geikai had been working on for several years before there was ever a public announcement. Geikai initially focused on creating embedded gaming services for other platforms such as Facebook.

In Sony would gobble up gey Kai, just as it would later do for on Lie, and Sony would use guy Kais technology to build out its share Play, remote play, and PlayStation now offerings. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back I'll talk about another streaming service or two, and then we'll really focus on Stadia. Okay, let's talk about another cloud streaming service that appeared not long after these. This one appeared in and spoiler it's

still around. That would be in Vidio's g force Now. When it first launched, it was known as Grid. It was part of in Vidia's Shield platform. The Nvidia Shield is essentially a set top box type of device that you connect to a television and it allows you to stream uh computer content to a TV. So, like other services I've mentioned, this one offered gamers the chance to access a huge library of titles in return for a recurring monthly subscription. It was in beta from all the

way to twenty finally launched in February. Some would argue that was the perfect time to launch because it was just before we were all locked down due to the COVID pandemic. In Video created clients not just for the Shield streaming device, but also for Windows, Mac computers, and

Android devices. It's even incorporated into some television's directly, so that some TVs have the g force now service built into them, and Video offers different tiers of subscriptions to g Force Now they escalate in price as they offer better performance. There's a free tier that lets you play games on what amounts to a quote unquote basic rig, and your session can last up to one hour apiece.

So that means the server you're connected to isn't going to have all the fancy bells and whistles, so it can't deliver a high end experience, but it means you don't have to buy, you know, a better PC to run current games. You can use this basic rig and

log into it as if it were your computer. Now, for nine dollars nine cents a month, you could connect to a premium rig and you could stay connected for up to six hours per session with a resolution of up to ten a d P at sixty frames per second, which is decent, but like pro gamers look at sixty frames per second, they're like, I can't play at that. I need much faster. For most people, how of her, sixty phrase per second is more than sufficient. It's really

if you're talking about like elite levels of play. So if you go all the way up to nineteen dollars nine cents a month, you can connect to a rig with a g Force r T x processing card. Now, this used to be one of the flagship graphics processors from in Video, right the thirty eight and the thirty nine were the two top of the line graphics processors

from the company. However, in Video recently announced a new forty lines who would get forty eight and the thirty eight is no longer like at the top of the heap anymore. This subscription tier would let you play up to eight hours percession, and you could get up to four K resolution and hundred twenty frames per second. Though I'd be shocked if you could do both at the same time for sustained lengths of time, because your Internet connection is a need to be pretty strong in order

to do that. I mean, if you live somewhere where you've got a fiber connection or something like that, then yes, you could probably take advantage of that. I think for myself, considering the let's say mercurial nature of my Internet connection, I'd be lucky to be able to sustain a hundred twenty frames per second at four a K for any real length of time. Anyway, this is an example of a cloud based gaming service that's stuck around. It exists today.

It provides something that a lot of gamers want that it provides access to a gaming rig that has a killer graphics card in it, and sure that machine happens to be in a warehouse somewhere. But considering how difficult it was to even find a new graphics card for the last couple of years, it's still a popular choice for a lot of gamers now. Recently, the availability of graphics cards has been improving and their prices started to come down from the insane markups that we were seeing.

You know, back when Ethereum was both more valuable and dependent upon proof of work system, it is now a proof of steak system, so the demand for for high end graphics cards for things like crypto mining has drastically declined recently. So that gives gamers a better chance of making a gaming rig that has one of these cards in it for themselves, which means they wouldn't need to

use this kind of service. But it's not like they are available everywhere, and they are still pretty darn expensive, So for a lot of people it may make more sense to pay say twenty bucks a month to get access to a system capable of those levels of performance, rather than you know, having to save up a couple of grand to build a rig and hunt around to find all the components you want all and now. There

are a few other cloud gaming services out there. Shadow PC is one, though it tends to be marketed more as a cloud based Windows PC service rather than as a gaming rig service. EA has Project Atlas in development, which is both a cloud gaming platform for gamers as well as a development platform for game creators, so this isn't just games as a service, but game development tools as a service, including access to stuff like game engines. In two thousand nineteen, Microsoft launched a beta test for

its cloud based gaming service, formally known as Xbox Cloud Gaming. However, it's pretty common for folks to refer to it as x Cloud Gamers who subscribe to the company's Xbox Game Pass ultimate automatically have access to this cloud gaming service. It's part of that subscription deal. The company first hinted about this service back in ten and officially launched it in late and at that point had more than a hundred games supported in the service. And then we have

Google Stadium. Actually, to be clear, there are other services out there too. I don't mean to suggest that I've covered all of them. I haven't, but it is high time we talk about stadium. Google first announced Stadia in twenty nineteen at the Games Developer Conference or g d C, which is, you know, an even more industry focused gaming event. E three is is largely used for like PR and marketing and networking as in, you know, business to business networking,

not like computer networking. The Games Developer Conference is a little bit more focused on, you know, actual developers talking about their work. Google held a keynote during the twenty nineteen conference to show off the Stadia concept from the get go. Google's goal was to create a service that could be accessible across a wide range of devices, from computers to smartphones, to web browsers, to televisions and beyond.

And I think of that as the Netflix strategy. I just I think of that as this is what Netflix does. You know. When Netflix was first branching out into becoming a streaming service, back when it was primarily a DVD rental business, one thing Netflix really focused on was getting a client out there for pretty much every platform you can think of. That included devices like the Roku, included smartphone operating systems like iOS and Android. It included apps,

for Windows PCs. It included in browsers streaming capabilities for your various browsers. It included video game consoles and more. I mean, I'm pretty sure there are refrigerators out there that have Netflix clients built into them. So essentially, Netflix wanted to be where the people are walking around on those what do you call him, oh feet and it

totally worked. This was one of the many things Netflix did early on that helped it get an early head start on other premium video streaming services, you know, making sure it was available wherever people were turning their attention. If there's a screen, Netflix wanted to be on it, and that really paid off. So Google's approach with Stadia was set to try and follow this model, and it was already shown to be successful for videos, so maybe

it could work for games as well. Moreover, Google demonstrated that the service would let players start a game on one device, they could pause their game, they could switch to a totally differ and device, and they could keep going in the game. So you could, for example, play a game on your phone and then pause the game, switch to your PC and then play a little bit more. Maybe pose its switched to your smart TV pick up right where you left off on your PC and keep

on going. And it was a cool idea of this persistent game session that could exist across any platform you got your hands on. As long as you were logged in, you could continue the game experience. So think of it as a game in play and it just depends on how you want to play it at any given time. That was a cool idea, and the game was wherever you went, no matter what device you used to access it.

That was kind of the pitch now. At the announcement, Google reps said the service could already support games of up to four K resolution and at sixty frames per second, and that they planned to build on that so that they would eventually have support for eight K resolution and one twenty frames per second, which really is an incredible

amount of performance. Google also introduced a Stadia controller, which, if we're all being honest, looks a lot like an Xbox controller, complete with dual sticks and shoulder buttons and four face buttons. It also has a button that allows it to connect to things like Google Assistant as well as YouTube, and it connects to the Stadia service via WiFi.

So the controller is a WiFi connected controller. The pricing for Google Stadia was a bit on the steep side initially anyway, So to get started playing on say a television, Let's say that you just wanted you wanted to play on your TV like it was a video game console. Well, assuming you didn't already have something that would work with Stadiu, it meant that you would need to purchase a hardware kit, and originally that would cost you a hundred thirty bucks.

The hardware kit consisted of a controller and a chrome Cast Ultra device, so you could plug your chrome Cast into your television and this would allow you to stream content from a computer to your TV or just essentially make your television and Internet connected TV that would interact with these services. Both of these, by the way, would come with cables and and plugs so you could charge your controller and keep your chrome Cast plugged into power.

It the chrome Cast if you if you've used a Roku or something like that, or an Amazon fire Stick, it's very similar to that. It just connects to your home network and allows you to stream content from the Internet to a television or similar device. That was the start a hundred thirty bucks. Now if you had a PC with the Chrome web browser and you had a compatible controller that you could connect either wirelessly or wired

to your PC, you were already good to go. You didn't need the hardware kit if you just planned on playing on the PC. If you have already had a Chrome Cast Ultra and you had a compatible controller. There are only a few of them, but if you had one of them, then you could even play on the television. Now, it usually meant that you had to use your phone as a kind of liaison between your controller and the

Chrome Cast Ultra. So it wasn't an ideal solution. Uh. And in fact, if you look at the different ways to connect various pieces of equipment together in order to access Stadia, Google provided an extensive and incredibly confusing array, Like it all just depends on where are you accessing Stadia, Like what kind of platform? Is it a TV? Is it a computer? Is it a smartphone? Why kind of controller do you want to use? And is their support

for that kind of controller on that platform? Uh? And, like I said, it is a pretty confusing group of of specifications. It almost looks like a Bingo card And um, yeah, I don't want to go through all of it because

it wouldn't matter anyway. Stadium is not going to be around much longer, so there's not much point in talking about other than to say, I think it's another very typical Google thing in that Google tends to make products that work really well for engineers and less well for everybody else, And if you're not an engineer, the system will not seem intuitive or simple or easy to set up or follow. If you are an engineer, you're like, well,

of course this all makes sense. That's not to say that you know, your average person couldn't figure it out. It just I feel like there's a steeper learning curve with Google products in general. All Right, we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about the Stadia service as it was intended, uh, some of the pricing that was involved with the actual service, and what ultimately led to Google deciding to say bye

bye to Stadia. But first, let's take this quick break. Okay, Let's assume that you wanted to play Stadia on your television and you didn't currently have a Chrome Cast, Ultra or any other platform that was compatible with Stadia. On top of the initial hardware kit purchase of a hundred thirty bucks you then had a monthly subscription to contend with.

So the purchase of a hardware kit would give you three months of service, and after that you would have to spend nine dollars and ninety nine cents per month to stay connected to the Stadia service. And you could demo some games for free, like get a like a demo level of a game, or a demo amount of time with a game, and a few titles were included as free on the service. Um later on you would have a free tier and a Premium tier. Premium tier

had access to more titles than Free did. But either way, if you wanted to have a game in your collection permanently, you had to buy a copy of the game on Stadia. That often meant buying a game at full price, so like up to sixty bucks for the Triple A titles at the time, and buying a title did not mean you were downloading it. All it meant was that you would have access to that game for as long as Stadia was a thing. You can kind of see where

that's gonna go later on in this episode. So if you purchased let's say Assassin's Creed, one of the Assassin's Creed games on Stadia, you would be able to play Assassin's Creed. Even if you let your premium subscription laps and you went to a free subscription. You would still be able to play Assassin's Creed. You would not be able to play at the highest resolution or frame rates,

but you'd still be able to access it. Now, if you didn't buy any games on Stadia and you were just relying on the free titles that were available to you, well, if you let your premium subscription laps, that selection would get much smaller because free tiered subscribers got only a handful of games. Premium got a little bit more, but you wouldn't have access to all the games. You would have to purchase them. Now, even with that model, it's

still cheaper than a full game console. Right, It's still less expensive than going out and buying the latest Xbox or the latest PlayStation, particularly if you also subscribe to Sony or Microsoft's online subscription services. Right. If you do those, then you have an ongoing cost with those those game companies. So Stadia was cheaper than Microsoft or Sony's approach. If

you also we're subscribing to their online offerings. If your internet connection is good, then it could mean you would be able to play games at incredible resolution and great frame rates. But even despite the fact that the technology was solid, Stadia really struggled to find a strong customer base. Like I said, Google did introduce a free version of the service. In this is where you really would think this service would take off. You have a free version

where you can access this cloud game service. You've got a world that ends up going into lockdown, so you have people who are stuck at home with very little to do. It seems like it's the ideal time for this kind of thing to really catch on, and yet it didn't. Now, the free version was a little throttled compared to the premium one, so you know, you didn't have as high resolution, you didn't have as good of a frame rate as you would if you had the

premium subscription, but you could still use it. Uh you know. That was the big tradeoff, right, was that you had a slightly less uh powerful experience, and you didn't have access to as many free games on the platform. You would have to pay for more of the games, but the actual monthly service would be free, So yeah, that

was the tradeoff. Now, a big reason that Stadia failed might have been the fact that there were already other products on the market that we're competing with Stadius model, or that at least partially overlapped with what Stadia was trying to do. There were a lot of gamers out there already who had a console, or they had a gaming PC or both, so they were already set, right.

They already had a device that played games. Uh, the digital model has been around for a long time, so people were already used to buying games digitally and downloading them to these devices. You had Microsoft it was already offering the x cloud service, so that was already very similar to what Stadia was doing. But on top of all of this, on top of the fact that there was already serious competition out there, is the fact that Google's reputation for killing off its services is widely known.

As I said earlier, the company is absolutely infamous for launching stuff and then abandoning it later. Though to be fair, Google many times will strip old products for parts essentially, and then use those those components to build into other services. So while a fully formed product might go away aspects of that product can be worked into other Google services down the line. So gradually certain Google services get more

robust and full of features, and others just disappear. Anyway, one sign of trouble early on was that Google would often hold promotions in which the company would give out free hardware to people. You know, so they were selling this hardware kit for a hundred thirty bucks, right, But multiple times over the past couple of years, Google would hand out these hardware kits. There was a point where people who were subscribed to YouTube Premium, we're able to

get a free hardware kit. They just had to sign up. And so that's how I got my Stadia controller. I was already subscribed to YouTube Premium. Actually, funny story, I was not originally subscribed to YouTube Premium. I was subscribed to a different Google service that you guessed it. Google ultimately killed off, and then they rolled over the people who had subscribed to that older service into YouTube Premium, and I just kept it because I turned out I

liked being able to watch YouTube without commercials. Anyway, That's how I ended up owning a Stadia controller. It's actually upstairs in my living room collecting dust. This was just one example of Google handing out this hardware. Google also held promotions in which it would give away the controllers to people who purchased a specific game on the Stadia service.

This happened a few times. So instead of paying a hundred thirty dollars for the hardware kit and then up to sixty dollars to purchase a title on the service, you could just spend the sixty bucks. You could buy the game on the Stadia service, and then Google would ship you a hardware kit for free. The company held that kind of offer a couple of times over the last two years, with different titles. Now until recently, the official stance from Google was that Stadium was sticking around

for the long haul. In fact, as recently as July twenty nine, two thousand twenty two, a Twitter user with the handle blue Fire demon forty four sent Google a message, and it was a prescient message. The message read quote incredible that I really have to ask this, Are you closing down soon? End quote? And the response from the

Stadia team was that Stadium was not shutting down. Flash forward to September nine, and that story had changed, and we're going to get there Momentarily before that, though, Google also briefly had a department that was dedicated to developing games for stadium, so they weren't just going to be a distributor for games, they were going to develop games for their own platform. Ultimately, however, Google decided to dissolve

that department. Perhaps they discovered that the production process for video games is really intense and a ton of work and money has to go into creating a high profile video game. But whatever the cause, the press picked up on how leaders within this games division and Google were transferring to other departments, which was kind of signaling that

Google was abandoning this whole game development idea. Still, that could have meant that Google would just simply be a distributor for games, right maybe they decide, oh, you know what, this is too hard, we don't want to we don't want to dedicate resources to it. Let's do it for other stuff. We'll just distribute games through Stadia. That just ultimately wasn't enough either. Google also cut back on the

personage it demanded from developers for revenue share. You're likely aware that Android and iOS both take a cut from developers. It's a healthy source of revenue for these companies. Um. Google had a certain revenue share percentage when it first launched Stadia, but then reduced that percentage so that developers wouldn't have to share as much of the money that they were making on Stadia. This was an effort to

try and foster a stronger developer community on Stadium. Didn't really work because again, for developers to commit to a platform, they need to see that there's an audience there, and if there's no audience, then it makes no sense to make that investment. Right if you were to make a lemonade stand, You're not gonna put your lemonade stand in the middle of a forest, away from any trails, because you're not going to see any customers. You'll get eaten by bears. What you do is you set up your

lemonade stand. You know at the end of like the course for a marathon. You're gonna get a killer business that way, So you know, you pick your moments. So this was, you know, one of the things that developers were doing. They saw like, well, Stadius just doesn't have enough people there, doesn't make sense for us to devote our resources toward developing for Stadia. Some developers did they

were working on. In fact, some of them were working on it up until the announcement that Google was closing down the service. Uh, and that also ends up being a cautionary tale that not only are our customers affected by this, but developers are affected by it too, And it almost feels like, you know, it's Google being Google

shutting down something all over again. Now, on the technical side, Google build out data centers around the world, and that meant that most gamers were not that far away from the closest Stadius servers. So the actual experience of using Stadia from a technical perspective was pretty darn good. Like the latency issues were mostly eliminated, and reviews of Stadia praised the technical performance of the platform and said, now,

this is impressively effective. But ultimately Stadia just didn't gather enough customers. So again September two, Phil Harrison, the general manager for Stadia, posts a blog post that says that it just hadn't gained enough quote traction with users end quote, and so ultimately they had to make the decision to sunset Google Stadia. And you know, this really seems to be an area where Google struggles frequently. Maybe it just has a real marketing issue when it comes to reaching

a broad audience. There are Google devotees who will follow events like I O, which is Google's big developer conference each year. There are fans who will follow that stuff closely. They will await each auduct launch eagerly with anticipation. But beyond that small group of fans, I don't think there's as much interest in the general market, which is pretty surprising given that the Android operating system is the dominant

operating system in the smartphone market around the world. There are way more Android phones than there are iOS phones. But Google is not really able to tap into that base. Again and again, We've seen it many times. The fact that the company has this long track record of abandoning projects might very well have something to do with they're not being enough people using Stadium. I think a lot

of people were just scared off. They just assumed, like, Oh, if I buy into this, Google is going to abandon it, and then I'm not gonna be able to use it anymore. So I'm not even gonna bother. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because of Google's history of dumping projects, and obviously stating is is not helping that reputation because it's another abandoned project and only is a self fulfilling prophecy. It continues to perpetuate that that view of Google products

in general. Now, Google said that it's going to start to shut down Stadius servers in January, and that leads us to talking about refunds. Now, remember when I said that you can purchase games on Stadia, but you don't download the games that you purchase like that, You don't save those to any local device. They live in the cloud, and you continue to have access to your purchase library as long as there is a service to use. But since the services going offline in January, what happens to

your games? Google is working on that now. One thing that the company is offering is refunds on hardware and software purchases that includes stuff like downloadable content a k a d l C. This is content that supp laments a game, it expands games in different ways. So you can get refunds for your purchases on Stadia. You can get a refund for your hardware kit, and you can get a refund for any of the games or DLC

that you purchased through the Google store. In some cases, Google is working with game companies in an effort to transfer game files from Stadium to other platforms, which means that players would then be able to continue to play their purchased titles elsewhere without losing any progress. So instead of just like, Okay, well you can't play Assassin's Creed on Stadia anymore, um, we're working with Ubisoft so you

can play Assassin's Creed through their surface. They're trying to go one step further than that and say, we're also making sure that you're in the exact same place in the game when you pick it up on Ubisoft as you were when you were on Stadium. This, by the way, is a case by case scenario. It may not apply to all titals across the board that we're supported on Stadia, but I think it's a pretty decent move on Google's part.

The premium users will not be refunded their subscription fees, so that nine dollars cents per month that's gone like that is not getting refunded, and the fate of Stadia really does bring into focus a huge issue with the as a service model in general, and that is, if the service platform fails, you can lose all your stuff on it. With Google, the company is at least giving players a chance to salvage their purchases, either by refund or by moving the data to another service, or both.

But sometimes companies just go under and that's it. Pof all that stuff that was on those servers can be gone. This is one of the big cons stacked against all the other pros that are part of cloud based services. So there are pros. I don't want to just dismiss cloud based services in general. I think there are real value to cloud based services. But the pros include things like you don't have to invest thousands of dollars in

equipment to run the software you depend upon. So if you wanted to access the latest games at really good settings, you didn't have to spend five thousand dollars to build a gaming rig um. You don't have to purchase maintain an upgrade storage for all your data using cloud based storage, right you know someone else is using computers to store

your information. You don't have to find space in your own home and transfer things and back up things if you don't want to, although you should always have a local backup if you can. But but you know you don't have to do all that. That's a huge benefit, right, not being responsible for maintaining these various devices for things like gaming rigs. That also includes not having to upgrade your graphics processing card every few years. So there's also

other benefits, right. With cloud based services, there's often a way to share work or material between users that makes things way easier. Like online photo albums are a great example of this. You don't have to get physical copies of photos produced and then put those photos into photo albums and then track down that friend of yours to inflict upon them every excruciating detail of your last vacation

to Myrtle Beach. You can just send them a link to an online photo album and then you can pestor them about whether or not they looked at the dang thing. But if the company that provides this hosting service goes under, if that photo album platform goes under, well, then your photos disappear too, and that's a big risk. You don't actually own anything tangible with these cloud based services. What you're really doing is purchasing access to the service. That's it.

You don't own music on streaming music services, you don't own videos on the streaming video services. You own a way to access that content, but if the platform goes away, your your access to that content goes away, and you can feel like you just sunk money into something that that was taken from you. And that's a real big problem with the as a service model. It's the big difference between owning physical media and using a streaming service,

one of the many big differences I should say. As for Google, I think that it's pretty likely Google is going to incorporate Stadia technology into other services. They've said as much that they're going to use some of the technologies they developed for Idea to do other things, which makes sense. This way, Google can still make use of the work that they put into building Stadium. It's just that it won't be for cloud based gaming anymore. Anyway.

That's the story of cloud gaming in general and Stadia in particular. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, reach out to me. You can reach out on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h s W, or you can download the I Heart Radio app and navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast. There you will find little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length.

Let me know what you would like to hear in future episodes, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Three