Report: Stadia undershot to the tune of “hundreds of thousands” of users

Article note: Well, that's pretty much exactly what everyone expected. The "Premire Bundle" or whatever I got free with my ...YouTube subscription that I had as a side-effect of my Play Music subscription which is also now a dead product... was neat hardware, and the technical accomplishment of making the whole convoluted thing work is impressive... but I used it for maybe 4 hours the week I got it and haven't touched it since. It's not compelling on it's own, and it's _especially_ not compelling knowing Google's erratic tendencies with their consumer facing products.

Enlarge / As we learn more about Stadia's inner workings, we've begun adding some "flair" to this Stadia-branded PUBG parachute. (credit: PUBG / Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

In the wake of Google shutting down its Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E) group, leaks about the underwhelming game-streaming service have started to emerge. A Friday Bloomberg report, citing unnamed Stadia sources, attaches a new number to the failures: "hundreds of thousands" fewer controllers sold and "monthly active users" (MAU) logging in than Google had anticipated.

The controller sales figure is central to the story told Friday by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier: that internally, Google was of two minds about how Stadia should launch. One idea looked back at some of the company's biggest successes, particularly Gmail, which launched softly in a public, momentum-building beta while watching how it was received over time. The other, championed by Stadia lead Phil Harrison, was to treat Stadia like a console, complete with some form of hardware that could be hyped and pre-sold. In Stadia's case, the latter won out, with Harrison bullishly selling a Stadia Founder's Bundle—and this worked out to be a $129.99 gate to the service. Without it, you couldn't access Stadia for its first few months.

As Schreier reports, Harrison and the Stadia leadership team "had come from the world of traditional console development and wanted to follow the route they knew."