Last week, we had our first example of white-label Stadia streaming go live. When Google first announced that it was shutting down Stadia studios and opening the platform up to this sort of thing, I didn’t really know what to expect. White-label reselling is always a bit disgusting because, ultimately it comes down to two companies pushing for your cash rather than just one, so everything seems like a worse deal. I can confirm that this is exactly how it feels now that we have our first example, and I sort of hope that it kills Stadia. That hurts me to write, because I actually enjoy how convenient the service is in general.
The game that’s been published is Batman: Arkham Knight, the crowning jewel on the Batman Arkham series. It’s a great title, but it’s now linked up. with US provider AT&T. The game doesn’t make any mention of Stadia, and instead it’s an AT&T page that customers can visit to play the game by using their registered number. So what does this mean? Well, it shows how any company can lock a game and access to streaming it behind a paywall. If you’re not a customer, then this game, which is very clearly on Stadia, isn’t available to you. It’s as simple as that.
Unfortunately, this is a good example of a huge company like Google locking free access to games behind paywalls and profiting from it. It didn’t do a good enough job with Stadia, attempting to compete with Game Pass by offering a worse deal, and now it’s just making awful little deals that are meant to tempt you into getting a new mobile deal. I hate how scummy this feels, because you see it all the time with exclusive cosmetics for games. In the UK, Virgin Media customers got exclusive skins for Marvel’s Avengers, and we all know how well the cosmetics worked for that game.
Google needs to change tact now and start offering something closer to Game Pass. If it doesn’t, then Stadia will cease to exist and we’ll just have scummy systems like this that use it as an engine to power greed.
