The sums that Google is said to have spent on individual top games “shocked” industry insiders.
Cloud gaming should be the big hit in 2019. Games are streamed and therefore run on any hardware with good internet access – whether smartphone or high-end PC. Google's cloud gaming service Stadia (here in the futurezone test) only started in Austria in December 2020. A few weeks later, all in-house game studios that were supposed to develop exclusive titles for the platform were closed.
The game journalist Jason Schreier has now written a report for Bloomberg in which he analyzes why the great success did not materialize, even though Stadia looked promising. One reason he named was the enormous sums that Google paid for certain games.
“Shocking” buzz
For example, Red Dead Redemption 2 ended up in the Stadia catalog, two-digit million amounts should have flowed. The high sums were “shocking” even for industry insiders.
Schreier also identified problems launching the service. Above all, the lack of subscription model, which, like that, offers an entire catalog of games for a monthly fee, is said to have dampened interest. In addition, only 80 games were available at the launch. The target for monthly users and sales of the associated controller was missed by hundreds of thousands.
Dozens of projects canceled
According to Schreier, employees had warned of a disappointing 2019 launch and suggested communicating it for beta testing. Those responsible decided against it.
Some industry insiders already expect the service to be discontinued in the near future. As VGC reports, the development of dozens of exclusive projects has been canceled.
