Alas, game-streaming service Google Stadia is no more. Two years and 11 months after its launch, it will wind down in January, marking the end, for now, of the tech company’s aspirations in video games. At least that one guy who used to tweet at me every time we published a review to point out that the game in question was also available on Stadia can finally stand down.
Customers, meanwhile, are being looked after: Google is refunding every purchase made through Stadia, from controllers to subscriptions to the games themselves. And the writing had been on the wall for a while: Google started shutting the game studios it had established to make Stadia games early last year, and in February it was reported that it had begun attempts to sell the streaming tech that powers it to other companies. But the Verge revealed last week that developers who were working on games for the service only discovered that their projects were being cancelled when the news started proliferating across Twitter. People at Pixel Games had just finalised a contract to distribute their games on Stadia the day before.
So why did it fail? Stadia’s tech was actually good: using Google’s cloud servers, it let you play its games on any screen, from a phone to a web browser, as long as you had a controller to hand. It liberated games from expensive consoles and PCs, something that has been predicted as the next big thing in the video games industry for at least a decade, since OnLive launched with similar promises. And yet, Stadia could not attract an audience. Cloud gaming is one of those ideas that’s great in theory, but has yet to find a practical application. (OnLive failed, too; Sony eventually acquired its tech to help power its PlayStation cloud gaming efforts.)
I am forced to conclude that people actually like consoles and PCs – and hundreds of millions already have one. There appears to be almost nobody who wants to play games such as Assassin’s Creed and Destiny and doesn’t already have a console at home, making Stadia a luxury that would allow you to, say, get a few quests in on your lunch break. In theory, cloud gaming frees us from console updates and patches and other inconveniences, but it requires a good, stable internet connection to work, so it’s not as if you can use it while travelling, which is the only time I don’t have access to my consoles.
People also clearly don’t want to pay the same price to stream a game as they would to own it. Stadia dispensed with troublesome retail and distribution expenses, but charged customers the same price anyway. We expect streaming to cost less, and that’s the model established for music, film and TV. But given the enormous development costs involved in video games, itis impossible to offer a game streaming service at a cheaper price and turn a profit.
There was, fundamentally, no significant need for Stadia to serve. And it had the same perennial problem as any new entrant in the games world: it didn’t have its own good titles. It had nothing to compete with Mario and Zelda, Forza Horizon or The Last of Us. And it had no prospect of establishing its own development culture, because that takes years – you can’t just magic great games and studios out of thin air.
I’ve talked before in Pushing Buttons about how difficult it is for giant companies to succeed in the video game industry. They come in and throw cash around, realise it’s a lot more difficult than it seems to make the new Fortnite or World of Warcraft, and then sod off. The sole – but obviously notable, exception this century is Microsoft – which nonetheless emptied endless millions down a money pit in the process of establishing the Xbox.
There is a small amount of satisfaction in seeing yet another deep-pocketed tech giant having to retreat with its tail between its legs. But every time this happens, it hits hundreds of hard-working developers who have often uprooted their lives and moved cities or countries to work at the studios that these behemoths capriciously fund. Being a Stadia customer right now is annoying, but that disruption is nothing compared to the people who will now once again be searching for new jobs or new distribution deals in a notoriously unpredictable industry. I wish them the best of luck.
What to play
From the creators of Monument Valley, the equally gorgeous Desta: The Memories Between explores identity and memory through the medium of turn-based dodgeball. You play a young adult returning home for the first time in a while, trying to repair the relationships you’ve left to deteriorate since your last fraught visit. You do this by playing catch in your dreams, moving Des and their friends around pastel-coloured levels and throwing balls at figments of their imagination. It’s a game of angles and rebounds and DMCs (deep, meaningful chats) that recently got me through a painfully long train journey. This is a Netflix game, so you need to be a subscriber to play it.
Available on: iPhone, Android
Approximate playtime: five hours
What to click
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What to read
I wrote about music discovery and games, starting with hearing the Chemical Brothers for the first time while hurtling down a track in Wipeout and running through to Guitar Hero, Fifa and Fortnite. It’s had one of the loveliest responses of anything I’ve written all year. It seems that everybody has songs they fondly associate with a beloved game and wouldn’t ever have heard otherwise.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 has now officially been in development even longer than Duke Nukem Forever, which spent 14 years in development hell. I have been waiting for this to be officially cancelled since I saw an interesting but unsalvageable demo of it at E3 in 2018. Speaking of games that have been delayed forever, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones has been delayed at the last minute by four months. To give you an idea of how long this pirate warfare game has been in development, it appeared on our list of games to look forward to in 2019.
“I make video games – I won’t let my daughter play them,” announced William Siu, founder of the mobile gaming developer Storm8, in this New York Times op-ed. Siu proceeded to make no distinction between the kind of purposefully addictive, data-harvesting, exploitative smartphone games that the author works on and every other kind of video game. Much of the mainstream media still treats video games as a homogenous mass of vaguely dangerous nonsense, rather than an artform with wildly varying corporate and artistic aims. Siu’s essay doesn’t help.
Question block
A head-scratcher this week from reader Jeanne: What exactly makes an RPG, well, an RPG? I always thought it meant you were playing a role in a story, but apparently this isn’t the case – and somehow Dark Souls is an RPG despite the lack of playing any role. Help a girl out, please?
I love and hate video game terminology like this. At its worst, it’s gatekeeping jargon; at its best, it’s useful shorthand and linguistically fascinating. Being able to say “metroidvania”, and have a reader understand what that means (a game in which you explore a branching world that’s gated off and slowly revealed by acquiring different cool abilities), is kinda magic. But these terms also make journalists lazy: instead of reaching for an interesting description, we can just reach for some jargon.
I reckon an RPG is any game in which you get to shape your character by customising their skills (and, optionally, their appearance). So that would be any game in which you can play a warrior, mage or bandit, and any game that has you allocating points to charisma or strength or in Disco Elysium’s inimitable example, Motorics. That would mean that Disco Elysium, Fallout 4 and Skyrim are all RPGs, but branching narrative games are not; Monster Hunter straddles genres, because you can’t really customise your skills but you can customise your appearance and, like, pick a weapon.
Do you agree? What do you think makes an RPG? Tell me by replying to this email, and please send me more questions for future issues.
