Though it’s easy to forget after watching Google struggle for years to provide a game-streaming experience on-par with a traditional PC or console, the mega-corporation originally pitched its Stadia service with much broader ambitions. The vision outlined in Stadia’s 2019 announcement promised several features that actually could have been disruptive game-changers for the industry–if only any of them had been available at launch or gotten more widespread distribution once they did arrive.
Now to be clear, I’m not talking about laughably pie-in-the-sky promises like “negative latency.” Some of its tech promises were nothing more than smoke and mirrors, attempting to assuage reasonable concerns about streaming tech as the backbone of its video game offerings. Instead, I’m talking about synergistic goals that should have been perfectly achievable for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world that’s already operating a huge and successful video streaming site and server infrastructure network.
Features like State Share, Stream Connect, Crowd Play, and Crowd Choice had a chance to integrate video games and the popular advent of game streaming for an audience like never before. But each of those features were absent from launch and weren’t really integrated at a platform level–individual developers had to implement them piecemeal, making the experience of using the service inconsistent. As of late 2021, Google boasted that more than 20 games in total included one or more of these features. That was less than 10% of the total library, and even among those games, many of them only included one or two of the features, not all four.