Stadia didn’t JUST die, it’s been dead since day one

With Google’s Stadia completely out of the cloud gaming picture now, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has shared a statistic that reveals that Stadia had a market share much smaller than competing services.

The report, titled “Microsoft — Activision deal could harm UK gamers,” goes over how Microsoft acquiring Activision could affect Xbox Game Pass streaming. “The evidence available to the CMA currently indicates that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own cloud gaming service,” reads the report.

In one part of the report, the CMA goes over statistics regarding each cloud gaming service’s user count in 2021 and 2022.

Remember that people where pushing that Stadia was margins bigger than GeForce NOW well pic.twitter.com/q3BuJYn2iI

— Duncan (@one2escape) February 8, 2023

Based on the monthly average users (MAUs) from information provided directly by each cloud gaming company, it’s revealed that Stadia never captured more than 10 percent of the cloud gaming market share.

In 2021, Stadia’s market share is estimated to be between five and ten percent, whereas, in 2022, it fell to between zero and five percent. In both years, PlayStation Cloud Gaming, Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Xbox’s xCloud far outpaced Stadia in terms of MAUs and market share.

Further, while we don’t know the exact user count Stadia boasted before its untimely death, PlayStore downloads for the Stadia app offer a good idea. “The Android app for Stadia was downloaded between 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 times, while the Android TV app was only downloaded between 100,000 and 500,000 times,” according to 9to5Google.

The CMA points to the fact that Google, being the industry giant that it is, was unable to drive Stadia to success, and because of this, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision could make it difficult for other cloud gaming services, likely the ones that don’t have an industry giant like Google backing it up, to grow and offer a competitive game library.

An excerpt from the report is below:

“We consider that Google’s recent decision to shut down its own cloud gaming service, Stadia, shows that merely having some strengths relevant to cloud gaming is not enough to guarantee a platform’s success.

We provisionally believe that content is particularly important to the success of a cloud gaming service, particularly considering Google’s failure with Stadia, which our evidence suggests was caused at least in part by a lack of gaming content, which was connected to its use of a Linux OS.”

Read the CMA’s report here.