Google Stadia – Humble pie.

Google should issue refunds.

• Gaming on mobile phones remains a huge opportunity because outside of China, there is no dominant player but the way that Stadia is going it looks like Google will lose to someone else.
• Despite being one of the most important Digital Life services on smartphones and one of the highest earners for developers, no one has been able to dominate the segment.
• Search has Google, Social Networking has Facebook, Media Consumption has YouTube and so on but Gaming remains fragmented.
• This has largely because the owners of the three big gaming platforms (PC, Xbox and PlayStation) all made a complete mess of their mobile strategies.
• Consoles have been the home of dedicated games players and complex high -priced games while smartphones have been the realm of low priced or free games and casual players.
• That is until now as streaming the games rather than running them locally allows console-quality games to be properly played on smartphones.
• However, the usual requirements of a good user experience that lives up to expectations is as important as ever and this is where Google Stadia has come unstuck.
• When it launched in Q4 19 a lot of the promises that were originally made went unfulfilled and the service really struggled in the hands of reviewers.
• Expectations of very high-quality lag-free 60fps 4K gaming didn’t happen for most players and the gaming community has not warmed to the offering.
• Furthermore, a litany of problems including overheating Chromecast units, input lag, poor subscription options and a weak slate of games have really damaged its appeal.
• While the network requirements are pretty low given what is being streamed, it is still high enough that many millions of people in the US and more elsewhere will not get a good experience when using it at home.
• To be fair, when it works, it works really well and looks great, but the experience is so hit and miss that Stadia has ended up with an awful reputation.
• The problem for Google is that Microsoft and Nvidia are faring much better with their services largely because they did not ramp up expectations ahead of launch and have been much more realistic about what these services are really capable of.
• Google has attempted to shift a lot of the blame onto developers but it hasn’t worked as in many cases the same game running on a console looks and works better than the same game on Stadia under optimal conditions.
• Shifting the blame will not help Stadia’s popularity and may well make the situation worse.
• Consequently, Google needs to fix the service or (best option in my opinion) give everyone their money back, apologise and ask them to be beta testers while Google addresses these issues.
• Google is not used to having users as customers as for almost all of its business, users are the product with advertisers being the customers.
• Hence, customer service is not something it understands very well and I suspect that it is unlikely to realise that this is pretty much all that will save Stadia.
• Failure to do something of this order is likely to lead to Stadia failing to get any traction and ceding the market to Nvidia, Microsoft and Sony.
• Given the size of the gaming market and Google’s giant cash balance, this would be a worthwhile investment to make.
• Google can still turn this around, but I am doubtful whether Google is willing to eat the humble pie required.