First OnLive, now Stadia: Cloud Gaming has been rejected by the market twice

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It’s an odd full-circle moment for me that the least surprising bombshell news of all time – Stadia’s unceremonious cancellation – lands just a week out from EGX. The Eurogamer Expo (as it was still called back then) of 2011 was more or less the start of my career in games coverage, and it started when I managed to get an interview with OnLive’s Senior Vice President John Spinale, a smooth-talking American businessman of the kind I had up to that point only encountered via the medium of television. And always as a villain, even in shows produced by smooth-talking American businessmen.

Spinale, though, was extremely nice. He could tell I’d never interviewed anyone before, and knew how to set people at ease. Within seconds, it felt like a normal chat with someone you met down the pub. The sheer gulf of wealth disparity between us didn’t seem to matter. John was excited to tell me about OnLive, this strange new concept that was going to disrupt the gaming business, and I was excited to hear about it.

It was, and is, a brilliant concept, and the basic pitch for OnLive pretty much applies to the Stadia platform which died a decade later: imagine never having to buy new hardware. That was the first thing that appealed to me, a potless call centre worker at the time, who saw the looming new generation of consoles as less of an exciting new future and more of a £400 tax on joy.

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