I always want to cheer for new technology and be super duper excited whenever I hear about a new gaming platform being launched. I have also been working professionally in the games industry long enough that I get a pretty good sense when something is not going to make it.
This week Google announced that they are shutting down Stadia. The vast majority of people I have spoken to were completely unsurprised by this. They were also unsurprised by similar outcomes for OUYA and Magic Leap (as a consumer platform).
I do not want to turn this into an “I told you so” moment. In fact, I am quite sad at the outcome for all of these. I do like to sit down and ask myself “What would I do differently?”
I am going to presume I have spoken previously about the “genre defining hit”—every platform needs one. If you look at impressive technologies that catapulted technology forward, most of them were accompanied by a must-have game.
For the SoundBlaster 16, it was Wing Commander.
For the CDRom, it was Myst.
For the XBox, it was Halo.
You get the idea.
I had the great fortune of being a part of a strategic consulting project for a large hardware manufacturer. They brought a large number of their executives together and made the statement “we sell more pixels than just about any other company, and yet we make the fewest dollars per pixel after the sale than any other company”. I bring this up because one of the things they did was set up a roundtable with a large number of game industry luminaries. The people who spoke were responsible for significant Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo platform launches. Tim Sweeney was also in attendance, and a lot of what he said so long ago is now clearly manifested in the Epic Game Store. To this day I can still feel his presence when I open the application to see what I can buy with a 12% tax vs the 30% platform tax of his competitors. If there is a better candidate for repeat “Game Industry Person of the Year” year over year than Tim Sweeney, I am honestly not seeing it.
I digress.
Just about every single platform presenter, there and elsewhere, all had two magic words that they repeated.
Content Strategy.
Each platform manager had a particular thesis for what kinds of games they wanted to include in their launch slate. They had a mix of branded content, new mechanics, and evergreen games. Each platform manager must make an educated guess on what people will play. I was briefly part of the portfolio management for an emerging platform, and we sat down and made a laundry list of games we needed to put live to support our players. I recall being a game developer and asking my platform partners “what kinds of content do you need for your content strategy” and getting told “we like to leave that up to you, the developer”. I understand why they said it, and I completely disagree with it.
When people were asking me about our portfolio, I would flat out tell them “I need an aquarium game because it is popular. I don’t want any more social farming games. If you have some cool casual online card games, I would like to see them because that is also a gap in our portfolio”.
I am bringing this up for a reason.
I watched the Stadia launch and I have heard people praise the technology. I wanted to bring this up because at no point did I understand the Stadia content strategy.
Don’t get me wrong—I am sure they had one. They went and hired an impressive line-up of game industry executives to come and work there. You can go and Google them if you like—even if that is sort of dark, considering it is the company that just canceled the very Stadia we are talking about.
So I am going to ask the question: At the end of the day, who was the Stadia customer?
I honestly am not sure.
It was not me because I have all of the games I want to play on existing consoles. I have to buy an XBox for sweet, sweet Halo loot, and if I was into car games, the Forza. I have to buy a PS5 for the God of War, and the Horizon, and the Ghosts of Fukushima. I would have to buy a Nintendo Switch if I wanted to say “itsa me, Mario!” alongside my kids, or get me some Pikachu thunderbolt action.
Each of these platforms has a genre-defining hit, or in some cases multiple hits, that make the device an expensive dongle for some sort of must-have content.
What was the thing you needed to play that you could only get from Stadia?
There were a few hires announced early on that suggested they were chasing this. If I look at Jade Raymond for example, her title at Google is now “not working at Google anymore”. In fact, if you do decide to creep on her Linkedin, you might find posts saying stuff like “Congrats to Jade Raymond on the PlayStation acquisition of Haven Studios Inc.”.
I think that was a really big problem with their title slate, and as much as I was curious, watching a former coworker play a few rounds of online games with their controller was about as much energy as I could exert for cloud gaming as a genre.
So what are the takeaways from this?
If you are going to build a gaming platform, you need to have a compelling strategy. “Can we go get the Catan license” may be a part of that strategy, or “let’s make a cool single-screen four-player action game” may be a part of it, but it has to have some amount of everything you could possibly want to buy, including some anchors that are only available to people who bought your particular platform-as-a-product.
You might also take away the understanding that if you are going to build a new platform, the compelling strategy will involve spending a significant amount of money building that must-have content.
And finally if you are me, you can take away a sense of gratitude that Google hired so many big names in the games industry who go through revolving doors between EA-Microsoft-Sony-Activision, that they created an opportunity for at least two or three new people to join that limited set of players of people who keep going through the revolving doors between these companies as executives.
No, I am not bitter at all.
Thank you again for reading along. I continue to underserve you as an Amazon Affiliate marketer, but I am going to keep trying. None of you purchased sensibly priced Asus monitors, the unofficial sponsor of last week’s blog, so I am going to link you to my preferred brand of wired gaming mouse for all of your pc gaming needs: The Razer Deathadder V2. If you love having a connected mouse so you do not die horribly when you run out of batteries, or if you want to have a mouse that your children won’t steal because the crappy LUA implementation of the mouse driver in Roblox makes it unusable due to its high DPI, then this is the gaming mouse for you, my fellow boomer. When you think “I am still a gamer”, think Razer DeathAdder.
