BT are currently giving away a replica of the WWE Championship belt (I kid you not) and prior to that was an Xbox One S Digital Edition or 4K television from LG. In terms of value (£119) the Google Stadia is actually one of the worst propositions they've ever done.
Doesn't appear you get the loaded Mastercard with this offer either?
I think Google thought people would buy this purely because of the Google branding. Considering how much money they have available to try and make this a success they really haven't put any effort in at all.
Microsoft have spent billions on new studios and are likely to spend another shitload of cash advertising the Series X and yet Google look to be spending almost strawberry float all trying to get into the market. I'm unsure who advised them on this approach but whoever it was should be fired as it's just terrible. If they wanted to get into gaming they needed to secure way more content, have a much more compelling hardware price offering and then market it like Crazy in the year they have before the next gen consoles steal all the limelight.
It does appear to have been an extremely weak launch for the service. The actual performance seems to be really good in most cases; but the range of content and supporting publicity / messaging has been so poor. The offering feels a bit half-finished at the moment and Google has to quickly turn this around if they're to register a decent number of customers before Sony and MS launch their new consoles.
jawa4 wrote:It does appear to have been an extremely weak launch for the service. The actual performance seems to be really good in most cases; but the range of content and supporting publicity / messaging has been so poor. The offering feels a bit half-finished at the moment and Google has to quickly turn this around if they're to register a decent number of customers before Sony and MS launch their new consoles.
This is the crux of it. They came to market too early before they had a product to try and get a head of the competition and now they are in a situation where they have no relevance at all.
There are several issues, but my main post mortem is as follows:
Stadia launched with no games, and as a result, by trying to reach a broad audience, didn't help themselves. They opened with 12 games. 1/4, iirc, were Tomb Raider, which crippled their diversity already. And let's not even get started on Samurai Shodown.
Following that, they brought in Mortal Kombat, because they decided fighting games were the best choice for a system with native, built in latency. They picked the worst genre and gave it a fair share of the market. Pushing the stadia to the FGC shouldn't have been on the cards considering how niche they are and how blatantly inferior the system is for their needs.
And relatively recently I heard The Elder Scrolls Online is coming to the system.
Now, I have not played TESO like I've played SamSho, or looked into MK, but I have played a LOT of Final Fantasy XIV. Listening to people describe this game there is a somewhat similar system of skill weaving: having instant skills to cast during the cool down of your general filler skills. Talking to a few people,they say this is mandatory for effective DPS: similar to FFXIV.
Now, FFXIV has a class called Machinist which relied more heavily than others on ping. Ninja also suffered due to the OGCD. This led to a specific 'High Ping Rotation' to compensate for server ticks and lag and the like.
My understanding is that TESO is open to this issue, and can very likely lead to a dichotomy between players on different systems. Should Stadia players be unable to perform the optimal rotation by mere virtue of playing on Stadia, I can see them being excluded from parties. Unless cross platform play isn't a thing, idk.
Either way, they can't afford to give slots to problematic games like this, even if they want to diversify their audience. They need to go for slam dunks. They need to push single player games, preferably those that don't require frame perfect inputs like DMC5.
So tl;dr- they completely focused on the wrong aspects for launch. They didn't diversify where they needed to, and gave a terrible first impression elsewhere. It's no wonder people aren't interested and publishers don't care.
I’ve got to admit. Outside of games forums I’ve never seen Stadia advertised. Like I don’t believe without being really interested in the field or Google you’d even know it existed.
Initially I thought it was an interesting concept but all the reviews have been horrific, and the lack of any games just makes me wonder what the point is signing up
Met wrote:Following that, they brought in Mortal Kombat, because they decided fighting games were the best choice for a system with native, built in latency.
And relatively recently I heard The Elder Scrolls Online is coming to the system.
If you're playing online (or playing an MMO) then it being streamed shouldn't be a problem, providing the server streaming the game is also what's hosting it. If you're just jumping through Stadia's servers then yeah, it adds an extra step, but I'd have thought they'd be smarter than that.
gaminglegend wrote:I’ve got to admit. Outside of games forums I’ve never seen Stadia advertised. Like I don’t believe without being really interested in the field or Google you’d even know it existed
I follow games every day and I forget Stadia exists.