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The Google Graveyard is a myth. Well, it’s not a myth, myth. It’s right there. But the way it’s been used as a harbinger of Google Stadia’s inevitable doom is wrong. I’m going to tell you why.
Ever since Google announced their game streaming initiative, called Stadia, large pockets of the gaming world have doubted its potential to succeed, and some outright hate Stadia for even existing. Now, believe it or not, I don’t necessarily blame them. Antagonism towards the unknown can be a natural reaction. I get it. Here’s this mega corporation, Google, trying to buy it’s way into the living rooms of gamers who have already aligned themselves to companies and platforms that have had to work hard for years to earn that alignment. Stadia’s existence, to those devoted Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and PC fans probably feels disingenuous and pompous.
But sometimes the justification of that antagonism is flawed. Such is the case with the Google Graveyard.
The Google Graveyard is an online repository of over 200 apps, services, and hardware that Google has launched and later killed since Google’s creation in 1998. By contrast, Google currently has 224 active apps, services, tools, and pieces of hardware, many of which are so ubiquitous you probably forgot about them. You’re probably watching this video on YouTube, from a link maybe sent by Gmail, or you discovered this video in a Google search while listening to YouTube Music by way of your Google Fiber internet connection. Maybe you took notes while watching this video using Google Keep or a Google Doc on Google Drive, but then realized you liked writing in notebooks more, so you clicked an ad, served by Google, to buy some notebooks. But the notebooks came back damaged, so you called up customer service on your Pixel phone, using Google Fi phone service.
I understand that this series of events is absurd. Nobody loves a single company that much. But my point is that when criticizing Google for killing off products, you’ve also got to keep in mind the many important things Google has maintained.
But me simply stating that observation isn’t enough. Rather than simply reflecting on those numbers, we have to ask why a company, any company, would stop maintaining certain products. The short answer is, because those products don’t generate revenue.
A for-profit company like Google exists to make a profit. Historically, Google’s main revenue source comes from their Ads service, which relies on users. The more users Google has, the more people they can sell ads to. There’s a trend with these cancelled services: they don’t generate revenue in-and-of-themselves. Rather, they aim to increase users, to then increase ad revenue.
Of the 204 products currently in the Google Graveyard (as of 7/22/2020), 163 are services with ambitions to increase the number of users. If these services don’t increase user counts enough to increase ad revenue then shareholders are upset and Google has no choice but to kill the services.
Simply put, if a product isn’t contributing to increased revenue, then it should be killed. This isn’t just a Google decision. This is a good business decision.If Stadia doesn’t contribute to increased revenue, either by way of game sales, hardware sales, service sales, or more engaged users that can be advertised to, then Stadia should be killed. Microsoft would make the same decision. Sony and Nintendo would as well. In fact, these big players in the gaming world have been doing it for years and to a much more aggressive extent than Google. Let’s talk about the Xbox Crypt, the Playstation Cemetery, and the Nintendo…another word for Graveyard. The Nintendo Necropolis.
Google has canceled about 50% of its products in its 22 years of existence. Keep in mind, this 50% rate isn’t limited to just gaming hardware, which is another problem with citing the Google Graveyard as evidence of Stadia’s impending doom, but I won’t parse that because I’m going to show you that it doesn’t even matter. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are much more egregious with killing products.
I’m going to focus on first party consoles specifically. If I were to expand to services, apps, console accessories, and software, each of these gaming platforms would have a much higher kill rate. Imagine all of the controller and console stands, charging stations, and of course, games that are no longer available. How many games in all the various form factors are no longer produced? It’s important to realize that each game and each delivery mechanism–physical and digital–is a different SKU, and therefore a different product and should be factored into the respective company’s graveyard, if this graveyard debate is one you want to have. Which, again, the entire point of this video is that the graveyard argument doesn’t make sense.
Xbox has released 10 consoles since 2001, with 8 of those either killed or in the process of being killed. That’s an 80% kill rate with an average of 0.42 consoles killed per year.
Playstation has released 21 consoles since 1994, with 15 of those either killed or in the process of being killed. That’s a 71% kill rate with an average of 0.58 consoles killed per year.
And then there’s Nintendo. Oh boy. It’s impossible for me to track down every official sku for every Nintendo console and handheld, so I stuck to the main ones. Nintendo has released 32 consoles over the years since 1977, with 29 of those either killed or in the process of being killed. That’s a crazy 91% kill rate with an average of 0.67 consoles killed per year.
Stadia, on the other hand, has had one console/service since 2019, with 0 of those killed. I understand this is an absurd data-point, but that’s partly my point. If the graveyard argument must be honored, then we cannot look at just Xbox, we have to look at all of Microsoft. We cannot look just at Playstation, we have to look at all of Sony. And I’m way too lazy to continue beating this dead horse.
History shows that major video game platform companies kill a console roughly every two years. As streaming services become more popular, I estimate we’ll start to see things adapt, and we’ll see a major iteration of each streaming platform once every two years.
You may be thinking, “but Caleb, many of the consoles you mention are iterations and evolutions of previous consoles. Why continue selling an Xbox One when there’s an Xbox series X?” I promise you, if the Xbox One, or the Playstation 4 could continue to drive profit, Xbox and Playstation would continue selling them. But competition with other platforms means consoles become obsolete, so those consoles get sent to their respective graveyards. If these companies could get by with selling the exact same console for 20 or 30 years, they absolutely would. But us consumers don’t let them. Therefore, products get killed. If anyone is to blame–or get credit for–the product graveyards, it’s us. Us consumers are the grim reapers.
But if we are going to entertain that logic, as flawed as it may be, then you must also allow Google the benefit of iteration and evolution. One example is Google Play Music, which is slated to be sent to the graveyard at the end of 2020. Antagonists toward Stadia will claim this is yet another killed service without accepting that Google Play Music’s functionality is being absorbed into YouTube Music, which isn’t dead. Google Hangouts is becoming Duo. YouTube Leanback became obsolete as Smart TVs got smarter. Of course there are several examples of products that have been killed entirely without being absorbed into other products, but to ignore those that don’t follow such a path to death is irresponsible.
Lastly, consider that the video game industry is a known entity. Google has a history of innovating with new products that aren’t aligned to such established frameworks. Often, Google is iterating upon the very search service that it helped pioneer in 1998. With such innovation comes great risk. I’m surprised only 50% of Google’s products have been killed, honestly. Because video games have an audience and a stable history, I don’t see Stadia getting tossed into the Graveyard anytime soon.
Now, I’m not going to suggest that Google will never kill Stadia. I don’t know that any more than the haters themselves. But I can say that citing the Google graveyard as evidence of such an argument either way is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst. I don’t blame any of these companies for canceling products. That’s part of running a smart business.
