Stadia’s pivot to a cloud service has also been shut down

Poor Google Stadia; the service seemed like a slow-motion trainwreck from the moment it started. The service's launch, life, and death played out exactly how the "nobody trusts Google" naysayers (your author included) would have predicted, but we were all forced to go through the motions anyway. When Google killed the service, the narrative from the company was that Stadia's technology would live on in Google Cloud, but, according to Stephen Totilo of Axios, even Stadia's white-label game-streaming service is now dead.

Stadia was supposed to be Google's big foray into AAA gaming, with a cloud-based game "console" that actually had no console—the console was the data center, and it streamed the video game to you, just like a YouTube video. The service launched in November 2019 to sales that were much lower than Google expected, and manufacturing dates on the boxes suggest the company never sold out of the initial run of controllers. The first signs that Google was getting sick of its gaming experiment came 14 months in, when it shut down Stadia's only first-party studio, relegating the service to third-party ports only.

Two years in, the news broke that Stadia would be "deprioritized" and pivot to a white-label streaming service. Later, Google confirmed it was salvaging the service as a new Google Cloud offering called "Immersive Stream for Games." This meant that Google would resell Stadia's technology to various companies, allowing them to offer game streaming on their own platforms without any Google branding. This is a normal thing for Google Cloud, which offers a ton of cloud services to companies like Apple, and you'll never see a Google logo. Immersive Games saw three main customers—AT&T offered Batman: Arkham Knight to its subscribers, Peloton launched a biking game called Lanebreak on its exercise bikes, and Capcom launched a Resident Evil Village demo on the web.