Google Stadia: Challenges Scaling a Cloud Gaming Service

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Yes, when they launched the service, they must have had an idea of the business potential and the necessary strategy. I presume there was a hypothesis behind it, a reason why it was worth investing in. What was the thinking behind that at that point in time?

If you consider what Stadia and cloud gaming represent, it's the ability to stream GPU intensive applications. The technology enabling this requires significant R&D. Google was invested in this underlying technology because gaming is just one application of streaming GPU intensive applications. In the current world of AI and GPU intensive applications like ChatGPT and Gemini, Google has always been interested in solving this technological challenge. Gaming allows for significant R&D commitment to this problem, while also providing a commercial aspect. Strategically, this was a key reason why launching Stadia made sense.

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Latency is one aspect, as you mentioned, but there are other technological factors at play. What are the variables that truly determine the performance of such a service?

That's an excellent question. I wasn't directly involved with latency or the streaming stack, so I may not be the best person to answer that. However, you're absolutely right. There are other factors. What we learned, which may seem obvious in hindsight, is that what truly matters to gamers are the games themselves. Yes, performance is important, but the game selection is paramount. At launch, we had 22 games, all of which were relatively old. For instance, if you hadn't played Red Dead Redemption in 2019, you were unlikely to start playing it on Stadia.

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Latency is one aspect, as you mentioned, but there are other technological factors at play. What are the variables that truly determine the performance of such a service?

Therefore, I believe one of the main reasons for Stadia's failure was the lack of content. There were several decisions made by Stadia that, while made for good reasons, may not have been the right trade-offs.

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