I know, this is a throwback, right? Talking about arguably one of Google’s best dead products. I still find it hard to believe that Stadia has been dead for over three years, going on four, but it was arguably some of the most fun I’ve had gaming. The problem is that it was probably right to disappear, given the current state of the market.

The idea that you could play high-end games on almost any device with little to no hardware and just an internet connection felt like witchcraft. Stadia was not a new or novel concept; OnLive had tried in the early 2010s, and Gaikai even earlier, albeit on a smaller scale. The problem was always that we didn’t have the infrastructure and internet connections to handle megabytes of data back and forth to our devices without massive latency, and that is a killer in games.

GeForce Now is the only similar product out there still pulling in paying customers. Sony and Microsoft have also jumped into game streaming for console games. There is a market for game streaming, so long as you have a good library of games, people can play.

For me, I had fun playing games in places I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. A wall-mounted TV with no space for my Xbox, a hotel room while traveling, right there on my phone while I’m in the garden. I think I experience lag 10-15 times while playing on 5G. Never once at home on a Gigabit connection – which is to be expected given the bandwidth power.

A wonky launch experience…for some

When Stadia launched, I honestly preferred my GTX 1080-powered PC, which wasn’t a million miles behind the RX Vega 56-powered Stadia server blades. I could get into games anywhere. Switch from my desktop to my phone and back again instantaneously. It felt like the future.

I played through countless titles with little to no friction. Red Dead Redemption 2, while staying at my parents’ over Christmas, Cyberpunk at a friend’s the day after release, when his PC parts still hadn’t arrived (I was building it for him). I even played through SpongeBob Battle for Bikini Bottom every night before bed on an old iPad. I still covet these experiences some years later.

GeForce Now was and still is great for true PC level gaming, but, honestly, Stadia worked better.

It didn’t need a frustrating and time-limited account linking. No silly launchers ruined the immersion. Nor did you need technical know-how to get into games. As a Linux gaming convert, I’m putting it down to the power of the platform .

For all the problems, all the various pitfalls, and all the blowback, Stadia was the best way to play many games in the cloud. The downside was that the game library was limited.

I have a few theories on why it didn’t take off. A lot probably goes down to the initial presentation at GDC 2019. It was a mess. Google overpromised on what it would be capable of at launch, and having Sundar come on stage and openly admit he wasn’t a gamer, then fail to give us a price for this “system” with no firm release date felt like a silly mistake at a gaming conference.

The launch was a very strange time, too.

Tons of reviews where network restrictions showed unoptimized real-world performance. Issues getting connected or lag when playing on mobile networks. I get it, a cloud gaming system lives and dies by that first bad experience or outage. There were so many people who hated the idea from the get-go.

Maybe I was in the minority. I had fun from the jump. Playing through the admittedly small library wasn’t a problem. I had skipped the previous console generation, so most of the titles were new to me. It was a blast playing through Destiny and Red Dead Redemption 2.

In general, gamers want exclusive games. We casuals don’t really care. I’ll play any game so long as it takes my fancy.

The early phases of Stadia felt like a beta until more games and more functions were added. That said, I did worry when Google couldn’t capitalize when the world was locked down at home. Alarm bells were ringing in my head, and it was a pivotal moment. This always felt like the death knell for the platform in my mind. You can throw money at developers and game studios, but you can’t always attract an audience by doing so.

So many other projects and gaming systems have failed by virtue of having no audience. We could be here all day reeling failed consoles and projects off one by one if we wanted to, but there’s no time here.

With the benefit of hindsight, even if Stadia limped on, I do feel that AI would have probably killed it anyway.

Then factor in how different the gaming landscape has become in just a few short years.

People lamented the “rent not own” model. Heck, I still think Google could have tried a Netflix model, and that would have saved the platform or at least allowed it to chug on a little bit longer.

The optics of game ownership have really shifted with Sony and Microsoft flat-out reversing earlier decisions to support physical media from 2028. What would this have meant for cloud gaming services? In 2026, I feel that this might be the biggest reason why Stadia’s disappearance was, at least in the long term, a good thing.

Yes, the gaming landscape has become a very different place, some seven years on from the GDC announcement of Google’s cloud gaming system. Selling a “system” (because it was never a system, it was game access) without any physical component would be really tough for people to stomach.

Then again, when lots of gamers are still playing live service games en masse, maybe that’s overblown.

Regardless, you have to give Google credit for honoring the initial promise to refund all hardware and software if the service were shuttered. I basically paid zero to play through a whole host of games.

Ultimately, Stadia was a weird success story that failed. Successful in that it actually worked well and let you seamlessly game across devices with little to no friction – provided you had the internet connection to keep up.

I do believe that if Google had kept the platform alive, it would have been sacrificed at the altar of AI, as the datacenters and server blades could be repurposed now that RAM and storage prices are at an all-time high. The writing was on the wall with developers and publishers just avoiding Stadia without massive financial incentives. Gemini is much easier to sell to the general public, despite not being as “fun.”

You can see that Nvidia has pumped the brakes on GeForce Now in recent years as AI datacenters have become the firm’s biggest customer. Gamers have taken a backseat to LLMs and the latest AI models. AI is killing more game consoles and causing PC gamers major headaches today. Case in point, the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine. Bigger players in the space have been hit hard, and it means that older hardware has a longer shelf life.

I’ll always have the amazing experiences of Cyberpunk working flawlessly on launch night, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, when my PC was in pieces awaiting a new GPU, and diving into a backlog of games I missed the first time around. At least I have my converted controllers to continue keeping the Stadia dream alive.