The narrative about Stadia failing was both stupid and wrong. The platform was already growing slowly and steady all the time.
The hate towards cloud gaming and Stadia from certain noisy gamer groups, was perhaps some of the reasons for this wrong perception?
The problematic CP2077 incident on last gen consoles certainly helped a lot of people discover Stadia this month, but eventually it would happen sooner or later anyway with other games as well.
Stadia certainly did not live up to insane hype some people and media had before launch, that is for sure. But those expectations were also highly unrealistic.
Google is a totally new player in the gaming industry. They are building a whole new platform, and had only around twenty games ready at launch, and no big exclusive AAA titles at all.
No new gaming platform regardless of technology behind it, cloud or otherwise, will be a instant big hit with so few games available at launch. It’s always about the games, and it takes time to build up such a library and a new platform. Just ask MS about this, when they started with Xbox twenty years ago!
So Google clearly build Stadia for the future of gaming, and they are just starting to build it up slowly from the ground up. It needs to really shine in around 5-10 years, when the internet infrastructure and 5g is more reedy for it.
I would assume that Stadia has lived up to Google’s own expectations? Any sane person would not expect more from a new platform, with out any current gamer base, and with so few games.
Google’s just recently bought some game studios, to build new exclusive AAA titles for the Stadia platform. It will still take years before we see any of them.
But Stadia is currently the most impressive cloud gaming platform, from a technical perspective. It has the lowest input latency of all the cloud platforms and the best image quality (up to 4K). And it’s available on phones, TV and in the browser.
Google only need to build up the game library for Stadia, and that will happen over time.
