Only A Matter Of Time

Google Stadia in denial, on borrowed time anyway

The cloud gaming service had its chance and wasted it, now its fate all but inevitable

Google’s biggest event of the year, Google I/O, is happening next week but Stadia won’t feature in it at all. Things have not been looking good for the service recently on a number of fronts. (Image: Moises Gonzalez, Unsplash)

In the tech world and the digital entertainment world, success stories are many and varied, especially during the last two decades that they converged to offer products and services to consumers the world over. Spectacular failures are not uncommon, though and, by the look of things, we are all standing witness to one such failure in the making during the last 14 months or so. Worrying signs about Google Stadia came fairly early on, as early as within the service’s launch window in winter 2019 in fact. With nothing but such signs during the last few months or so, though, it feels not at all early to claim that Google has fundamentally failed to put Stadia on the map.

So it’s difficult to expect from a non-starter to do anything else than fade away.

This is an impression only reinforced by the announcement of Google I/O’s schedule for next week: the biggest event of the year for the Americans will host conferences, presentations and workshops for anything Google, from hardware, Android and AI to Assistant, ChromeOS and smart homes. Not a single mention of Stadia anywhere, though. Just last week John Justice…