The interesting thing to me is how <i>magical</i> Stadia is, it just works. Regular 4K uninterrupted streaming at peak hours ($19 discounted cyberpunk playthrough). Could pipe 80gb down my device’s gullet in a few hours without a sweat.<p>Xbox cloud feels like something from 2009 in comparison, ~720p/1080 max, long queues. Blurry, cloudy, artifacty rendering (and millions more users).<p>And yet, since finishing cyberpunk I barely touch Stadia. I can’t justify paying another discount, let alone full price and there’s 0 selection aside from Destiny 2 (which also looks and feels magnificent).<p>It’s like if Netflix had no catalog, didn’t invest in its own production, and ended up white labeling it’s shit out to the Hulus and Paramounts of the world. It’s all about the content.
Shocker, this is why I didn't invest anything in that platform as a consumer user, Google is so so prone to killing off projects. It was a cool idea but it obviously was one among many and wasn't going to get the attention/time/resources needed to build something meaningful.
This is written like a death knell for stadia, but is it really?<p>If the tech can be white labeled and used elsewhere then it seems like the tech is less likely to be killed off, not more. Nothing about this necessitates killing the gaming service.
As expected, good luck competing against either Azure PlayFab or Amazon GameLift for game development cloud infrastructure, specially with all the disappointment it has already made.<p>One year more, tops.