Google’s ill-fatedStadiacloud gaming platform first got the ax in January this year, with the nail in the coffin coming just a couple of weeks ago whenGoogle shut down the Stadia-based cloud services it was planning to offer to companies like AT&T.Stadia was widely predicted to hurtle towards doom from its inception; Google’s software body count is too long to list, and its Stadia marketing was so incompetent (such as pointing out how Stadia would save space given the lack of a physical console, something most gamers aren’t generally too concerned about) that you could be forgiven for not knowing the core conceit of the cloud-based gaming platform. Then there’s the fact that the service launched bereft of features and with a truly piecemeal library that had few exclusives. Frankly, it’s shocking that it lasted as long as it did.
However, despite Google having form for getting an idea, giving up on it, and moving on in record time, it seems that they’re not willing to throw in the towel on gaming just yet. According toAxios, Google Cloud’s director of game industry solutions, Jack Buser, says that the company is still ‘absolutely committed to games.’ Looking through Buser’s statement and Google’s history however, there’s a panoply of problems with what he said.
Whilst we’re looking at why Google should, for the good of us all, probably be a bitlesscommitted to gaming, it’s worth remembering that any allusion to ‘commitment’ by Google comes with a truckload of asterisks. According toGoogle Graveyard, a site that tracks Google’s habit of culling its projects, the tech oligopolist has killed 283 of its own released schemes since it was founded in 1998 — that’s 11 projects a year. Moreover, the word ‘commitment’ itself has a bit of history with Stadia specifically. According to theVerge, Google restated its ‘commitment’ to Stadia on 10 different occasions throughout its lifetime.
So what does Google’s ‘commitment to gaming’ even look like? Well, according to that Axios article, it’d be through selling a three-part cloud tech bundle (including a ‘game-centric server platform, cloud storage data management and a searchable player and game analytics through BigQuery’) with a ‘strict focus’ on live service games. Looking atGoogle’s synopsis for the package, they offer an ‘ecosystem for live service games’ as well as tools to ‘Harness, secure, and scale all your data across regions and games’ — items that will minimize the risk of running a live service whilst offering more tools to extract and use data from players.Now I’m heavily skeptical of live services, which have saturated the market with titles full of more predatory monetization than content, but what worries me about this focus is how Google’s plan to propagate live service and cloud gaming works hand-in-hand against the concept of game ownership.
The AAA industry has always been against game ownership since its war on second-hand game copies in the 2000s, not to mention the steady digitization of all games and tying their use to specific launchers and platforms. Cloud gaming and live services show a renewed attack on the concept of ownership — demonstrated by how purchases within services or purchases of games on the cloud can be ripped away should those services/games go offline. This has been seen with the shutdown of games such asApex Legends Mobile, where purchases made in the game have not been refunded — meaning anything bought within the game is lost.
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Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that money was wasted; if a game lasts long enough the customer might still have gotten plenty of value out of their purchase, and the fact that Google’s cloud tech aims to ‘minimize risk’ could lead to services lasting longer and thus give consumers more time with their purchases. However, even if Google’s tech makes the upfront cost of live services far lower, the biggest issue with live services is getting enough players and keeping them around, something few have achieved due to the level of commitment required.
Google’s cloud bundle is designed to support a type of game that we have more than enough of. Add this to the fact that Google’s commitment is as shaky as they come, and we can’t even necessarily guarantee that they won’t lose interest in their tech bundle plans — they may just boost the amount of live services in the market before leaving without offering their bundle long-term, something that would make the fallout of live services even more rapid.
Google’s ‘commitment’ is worth about as much as Stadia itself — a poorly marketed collection of very few games that served to divide up libraries only to be dropped as unceremoniously as the rest of Google’s software graveyard. Cloud gaming and service games aren’t inherently bad (hell, despite my critiques, there are some excellent games out there), but there’s no good reason to trust a data-harvesting company like Google to somehow ‘get the best’ out of games. It’s far more likely to ‘get the best data out of consumers,’ which serve the company’s end goals of profits and power, and most definitelynotthe interests of gamers.
