© GOOGLE STADIA
IT’S FAIR TO SAY Google’s Stadia hasn’t been a roaring success. Game streaming is a sound idea, but Stadia has struggled to deliver the performance the top titles need. It’s still alive, but the push into the consumer market looks half-hearted at best. At the Game Developers’ Conference, Google renamed the white label version of Stadia to “Immersive Stream for Games”. This is open to third parties who can use all that development to provide their own streaming games without any Google branding. The first to benefit was AT&T, which is offering Batman: Arkham Knight to its customers. Google has a habit of dropping projects if they don’t work immediately. It killed its own Stadia game studio before that could produce an original game and the new free Stadia account, with a limited trial of selected games, is too little, too late. Google is probably right in its decision to supply a streaming games platform to others to sell, as its own effort appears to lack conviction. –CL