Storytelling could have saved Google Stadia

Yesterday, Google announced that they were shutting down Google Stadia. While I was a big fan of the service, the announcement didn’t surprise me very much, as Stadia just never really caught on. If you’re asking “What was Stadia?”, that pretty much explains what happened.

If you saw Google’s official Stadia launch trailer a few years ago, seen here, it probably didn’t help your understanding at all:

After watching that video, you probably have very little idea what Stadia really did. Rather than that two-minute bit of craziness, a simple message would have done much better. Something like:

“Not that long ago, if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you needed a DVD or Blu-ray player, but then Netflix streaming came along and let you just use whatever device you had to stream the movies directly to you.

Similarly, most video games systems like PlayStation and Xbox need a console next to your TV to power the games. Stadia is more like Netflix for video games. As you’re playing the game, Google handles the hard work and just streams…