Google Stadia’s salvaged future as a back-end cloud service is here

Quick Google Stadia recap: Things have not been great.

Google's AAA cloud gaming service launched in 2019 to middling reviews and since then has severely undershot Google's sales and usage estimates by hundreds of thousands of users. The company shut down its first-party studio, "Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E)," before it could ever develop a game, and it did so one week after lead executive Phil Harrison gave the division a positive progress report. Several key executives have left the struggling division, like Assassin's Creed co-creator and SG&E leader Jade Raymond, Stadia's VP and head of product, John Justice, and Engineering Lead Justin Uberti.

When Google killed the game division at the beginning of the year, an accompanying blog post hinted that big changes were coming to Google's strategy: "In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players."

Rather than continuing to push Stadia as a consumer-facing, branded service, Google seems to want to pivot the service to what would essentially be "Google Cloud Gaming Platform." This would be a back-end, white-label service that could power other companies' products, just like a million other Google Cloud products, like database hosting and push messaging. Google said it believes a back-end service "is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business."

This all brings us to this Batman game presented by AT&T Wireless. The site notes that "for the first time ever," you can now play the 2015 game Batman: Arkham Knight with "beta streaming on your computer. No downloads or waiting." AT&T's game-streaming service requires a Chrome-based browser and sounds a whole lot like Google Stadia. This is the same thought 9to5Google had when it investigated the game and found hints that it connects to Google's services and mentions of Stadia's "cloudcast" codename.

"Yes, this is being powered by the Stadia technology," AT&T confirmed to Ars. The company said that "AT&T is collaborating with gaming technologists like Google to help usher in the next era of gaming."

Streaming Batman requires an AT&T Wireless subscription, and it's unclear why a mobile ISP is licensing a game-streaming service. AT&T owns WarnerMedia, which owns DC Comics, which owns Batman, so you can see the corporate lineage here, but why the cellular tie-in? You can't even stream the game on a phone; you have to use a PC, which will likely not be running over AT&T's wireless network. So this looks like it's purely an experiment, with no monetization at all.

Stadia's future as a back-end provider makes the service invisible. The 9to5Google report mentions that the Stadia brand isn't visible anywhere on AT&T's product page. If you're still clinging to the Stadia-as-a-consumer-service model, this is the first time Arkham Knight has run on the service. So while you can't play the game on "Stadia," there is a chance it will be released to the consumer service (if it is still around by then) whenever AT&T decides its exclusive distribution is over.