Stadia

About

Stadia is a service by Google which runs and streams video games to player's computers through the Chrome web browser.

History

In October 2018, Google announced the development of a service called Project Stream, which had invited a select few beta testers to stream the game Assassin's Creed Odyssey through a Chrome browser.^[1]

GDC Presentation

On March 19th, 2019, Google announced Project Stream would be released as Stadia sometime in 2019 in a keynote presentation at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, California.

During the keynote, Google revealed that Stadia would allow players to move gameplay seamlessly between various devices, and presented a new controller (shown below). At launch, Google claimed the service will stream games up to a resolution of 4K with 60fps. That day, posts about the keynote reached the front page of /r/games^[3] and /r/Android.^[4]

Pre-E3 Presentation

On June 6th, 2019, Google presented detailed information about the upcoming Google Stadia game streaming platform, also revealing the initial list of supported games. The list of the announced games included Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Baldur's Gate 3, Borderlands 3, Destiny 2, DOOM Eternal, Metro Exodus, Mortal Kombat 11, Rage 2 and other titles. The platform will launch in November 2019 in 14 countries, including the United States, Canada and the United Kindom.

Shift To "Google Stream"

On February 4th, 2022, Business Insider reported that Google was quietly attempting to salvage the flagging Stadia by making it a "white label" service, meaning it would provide its technology to other companies to make games under the name "Google Stream." Some such work had already been done, as AT&T and Peloton had created games using Google's Stadia technology. Google publically stated that they were still hosting games, but internal reports suggested that Stadia had drastically missed sales targets, prompting Google executives to demote the project.

Shut Down of Stadia

On September 29th, 2022, Google announced it was shutting down Stadia effective January 18th, 2023. Vice President and Stadia GM Phil Harrison lamented that the service hadn't gotten the traction Google execs had anticipated. All purchases for the Stadia, including hardware, games and DLC, would be refunded.

Search Interest

External References