Firstly, if you have no idea who Strauss Zelnick is, he’s the CEO of Take-Two Interactive — the parent company of Rockstar Games. Recently, Zelnick spoke at the Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference and noted that Google “overpromised” what Stadia could do and ultimately led to “consumer disappointment as a result.”
Stadia’s fate wasn’t hard to predict and did not take a genius to see its demise coming when Google announced said “streaming service.” Confirming that very notion is Zelnick at a recent event , as per a report from gamingbolt.com, saying that Google attempting to over-promote Stadia left fans disappointed.
However, before explaining his plans to save the very thing that’s on life support, Zelnick goes on to detail one part that led to the current situation the “streaming service” is in right now:
“The launch of Stadia has been slow. I think there was some overpromising on what the technology could deliver and some consumer disappointment as a result.”
Zelnick went on to say how the people behind Stadia messed up believing that streaming was going to be “transformed” since the company thought that there were “loads of people” that wanted to game without a console using a streaming service:
“The belief that streaming was going to be transformative was based on a view that there were loads of people who really had an interest in interactive entertainment, really wanted to pay for it, but just didn’t want to have a console. I’m not sure that turned out to be the case.”
Instead of carrying on with his take on the dying service, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive moved on to how he’ll help the struggling thing known as Google Stadia. But, he’ll only help if the business plan behind the service continues to make sense:
“Anytime you broaden distribution you potentially broaden your audience, which is why we supported the release of Stadia with three titles initially and will continue to support high-quality streaming services as long as the business model makes sense. Over time I believe streaming will work…”
Lastly, Google Stadia launched back in late November 2019. We’ll see if it can reach its one-year anniversary without joining its 200 dead siblings on killedbygoogle.com.
