Google’s Stadia service, an cloud gaming service quickly destined to fail when consumer of premium package release receive their package but cannot use the service due to not receiving the activation code. With Google previously bad refund reputation [ 1, 2, 3]. Aside from the activation code arrival issue (likely because google wants to control the compute resource usage), there’s still some lesson we should learn from their mistake.

1. Setup process for a product should we as simple as possible, with little to no hassel

What google did with stadia is that it requires a Pixel to activate for a premium package that was suppose to atract early adopters. What this premium package contain is a chromecast ultra with two controller which all buyers are absolutely sure to own.

The least hassel way, which google already did with their “unify” google acccount is simply bundle the activation process by signing in with the gmail account buyers used to buy the premium package. Simple and easy.

1. Focus only to the core feature users are most excited about

While in Stadia, this would be the cloud streaming service google offers. If google only focus in fully solving all the problems of stream gaming ( latency, ghosting), .Heck, even Call of Duty (which is a client of google cloud[4]) has a detailed video (it seems already taken down) on how they improve multiplayer experience using movement prediction, client side correction, latency detection. Call of Duty also mentioned these “tuning” is possible because of the statistic from their beta test (which is free for a few days).

1. Do not release unless you already tested on a wide range of user. (Maybe not if you are a small startup)

While I understand Google wants to do everything quick with all the resource they have. However, when you already make a huge announcement about how good your service is going to be with, people expect you deliver these promises. Even some of previous startup (Shadow, Gamefly etc) which has working on cracking the issues of cloud gaming for years didn’t even try to make a worldwide annoucement.

Well if you are a small startup, just release it since people has less expectation from you anyway.

1. Entice early adopters with a good product not product segregation!

What stadia include in their premium package aside from the gaming controllers, chromecast, early receive and the core service (given a 130 USD price tag), is the luxury to name their account with no numbers at the end. Discount on games shouldn’t be a perk when buying new graphics card and game console annual pass (Microsoft Xbox) already gave out games for free.

I believe the above mentioned issues should already known when programmers are developing Stadia, however, likely due to the complex team structure, these issues are failed to be prioritized and solved [6]. While the PR and sales team overestimate their product and decided to make an earning and data collection first, cause the inevitable fail of Stadia (which the core idea is to provide smooth stream).

Stadia currently create the negative impression that cloud gaming is impossible even by company with its own global cloud infra and the best programmers. Causing game developers and consumer to stay away other cloud gaming services as well.

Stadia included a following text inside the premium package saying:

The promise of one place for all the ways we play is a long held dream.
Today we are proud to see that dream becoming a reality.

While I believe google will solve current issues in the future, and make that “dream” possible. Scaling the service up would still be a challenging task, as we seen Stadia experience can be so polarizing the service can be ( either playable or not ).

Reference

[4] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/gaming/cloud-game-infrastructure

[5] https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/12/20862465/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-open-beta-release-date

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e0mm7b/psa_you_cant_really_play_stadia_when_traveling/