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Google Stadia Is Just as Underbaked as Android Was in 2008
The game streaming service is promising something bigger than it can deliver — a strategy that has worked for Google before
Google’s game streaming platform Stadia launched today to what can charitably be called mixed reviews. Stadia’s critics complain that it’s missing key features, that some Founder’s Edition sets are shipping late, and that despite doubling its library a day before launch, it still only has 22 games, most of which already exist on other platforms.
For anyone who spent $130 on a Stadia Founder’s Edition kit — which includes myself — any of these flaws could be deal breakers. All of them at once are enough to make the gaming community skeptical of Stadia for the foreseeable future.
But none of this really matters to Google’s video-game streaming service over the long term.
Depending on how quickly Google can iterate Stadia, the company might be able to save face and turn the product into a viable platform. And even if the entire experiment results in catastrophic failure — as some are already predicting, and which happened to past game streaming services — the writing is already on the wall for the gaming industry. Whether by Google’s hand or some other company’s, the wheel is eventually going to break.
Android’s potential in 2008 came from the same service that Stadia is promising now: the cloud.
The Long Game
To understand Google’s approach to Stadia, it’s helpful to take a look at its approach to Android. The first phone running Google’s Android, manufactured by HTC, was launched in 2008. Called the T-Mobile G1, it was by all accounts an unremarkable and ugly phone that could barely rival the then-new iPhone, much less dominant competitors like Blackberry or Symbian OS. At launch, Android lacked basic smartphone features such as an on-screen keyboard, multitouch, or even a decent web browser, and it took several years before Google made it competitively functional. But by 2011, Google’s operating system left every smartphone platform besides the iPhone in the dust. Today, it’s on the vast majority of…
