A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).
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“However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia,” Zimring says.
According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia’s Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google’s eyes, this wasn’t enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
It’s been how long now? TIL that was false. 🤷
From everything I can see, you did have to buy games on Stadia. They would give you a free game a month, but if that wasn’t the game you wanted to play, you had to buy it. The base version of Stadia was free, but the Pro version gave you a discount on games - it did not make them free.
This is the official support forum and there are many Q&A’s about purchasing games:
https://community.stadia.com/t5/Payments-Billing/Can-t-buy-games-in-the-Store-OR-HDT-01/m-p/52482
So it wasn’t bullshit? Well in the end the environment was confusing, as thus it died
The “wrong” part was that you could theoretically play games you owned without the subscription active.
But it was downgraded heavily enough that it wasn’t really worth doing.
I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with one without paying the subscription. The interface was horrible and clearly designed to force you into subscribing before you could even use the thing.
I know, right? Service has been down almost an entire year.
The “pay for sub then buy games on top of that” was 100% how I heard it worked and NEVER heard anything different from anywhere.
That’s kinda nuts.
It was basically true.
There was a bad experience version you could use without a subscription to games you purchased outright, and they included “free” games with your subscription, but to get a reasonable experience you had to pay for both.
The subscription was only necessary if you wanted to play in 4K or wanted “free” monthly games. Everything else worked just fine without the sub, with no change to performance.
The subscription was absolutely required for performance not to be a complete dumpster fire.
The free tier wasn’t mediocre. It was unplayable.