There’s been a lot of talk as of late regarding Stadia shutting down and leaving its adoring, raving fans high and dry, but the company’s plans look oppose this entirely. At the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit yesterday, Google announced that Stadia would be officially rolling out something called “Immersive Stream for Games”, and yes, this is that white label offering you’ve been hearing about and no, Stadia for consumers has not exactly been “deprioritized” in place of this.
Basically, this is something we’ve seen already, but now, it’s being given an official name and being talked about instead of danced around or rather discovered much too early. Last October, AT&T began offering a free cloud gaming demo of Batman: Arkham Knight, and some users began noticing that it was, in fact, Google Stadia running it.
However, there was no mention of Stadia on the promotional page or elsewhere, meaning that Google had leased out its powerful technology to the phone company for the promo without really saying anything publicly or needing credit. That’s what white labeling is, after all – one company gives its services or tools to another and the latter can brand it with their own name, and in turn, the former company gets paid handsomely. You can think of this like ghost writing, but with software and architecture.
“Immersive Stream for Games” is basically “Google Stream for companies”, and allows them to do exactly that. Businesses that partner with Google Cloud for this technology will be able to run game trials, offer subscription bundles or entire storefronts filled with cloud games to serve their purposes.
“The core features we’re talking about today are benefitting both the development journey and player experience for Immersive Stream for Games customers, including Stadia. In partnership with Google Cloud, we’re working to build out the underlying cloud gaming technology that powers both Stadia and our customers’ offerings via Immersive Stream for Games. A rising tide for cloud gaming lifts Immersive Stream for Games as well as Stadia, and we’re excited for what’s to come in 2022 and beyond.”
Dov Zemring, Stadia Head of Product in an email to TechCrunch
This announcement lines up with Google’s plans to offer free “Click to Play Trials” for all of its games (different than demos) to users this year. This would allow anyone to get a taste of cloud gaming and the title itself with little to no commitment, especially since the Stadia Store will no longer require a login to browse or play free games over the next few weeks.
With the architecture now prepped for third-party businesses to offer game trials, demos, free gameplay, and more with one click on their own websites, you can start to see how all of this is lining up with Stadia’s consumer plans. Google actually found that gamers are 3% more likely to click to play one of these upcoming game trials than they are to buy or claim a game, so how this pans out for both Stadia and its B2B partners will be interesting. I imagine we’ll see a large influx of Stadia tech gamers entering into Google’s ecosystem over the next year. Maybe this is what Stadia Hailstorm was all along. Let me know what you think in the comments!
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