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Google Stadia (opens in new tab) over promised what it could do at launch and suffered for it, according to the head of Rockstar and 2K’s parent company.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about the early struggles of Google’s game streaming service during a talk at the Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, as reported by GameSpot (opens in new tab). While Zelnick says “streaming technology is upon us,” he noted that the Stadia’s launch has been slow: “I think there was some overpromising on what the technology could deliver and some consumer disappointment as a result.”
The company made three of its titles available on Google Stadia in the service’s early months: Red Dead Redemption 2 (opens in new tab), Borderlands 3 (opens in new tab), and NBA 2K20 (opens in new tab). It hasn’t added any more since then, but Zelnick isn’t ruling out further support for Stadia or other streaming services.
“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,” Zelnick said. “Over time I believe streaming will work.”
“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.”
There’s still plenty of time for Google Stadia to reverse its fortunes, especially since it only opened up its service to non-subscribers back in April (opens in new tab). We’ll have to wait and see if it can win Strauss Zelnick back over.
We know that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (opens in new tab) is heading to Stadia and it’s already one of our most-anticipated titles.
