Google Stadia statistics (historical): users, revenue, and shutdown

Google Stadia was a cloud gaming service that launched on November 19, 2019 and shut down permanently on January 18, 2023. This page covers historical Google Stadia statistics — user counts, market share, and platform data from when the service was live — not current operations. Stadia promised console-quality games streamed to browsers and TVs without local installs; Google refunded hardware and game purchases after announcing the closure in September 2022. For how cloud gaming evolved after Stadia, see our cloud gaming statistics and video game industry statistics.

Google Stadia key stats

This section summarizes Stadia from launch through shutdown. Figures reflect the last credible reporting before and shortly after Google announced the end of the service.

Google Stadia had 235,000 total active users.

The platform had 160,000 paying Pro users.
In February 2022, Stadia was estimated to have over 2 million active users.
In comparison, Xbox Live services had 100 million users in 2020, and PlayStation Network services had 114 million users in 2022.

How many Stadia users were there? This data was gathered in July 2022, before the shutdown in January 2023. Stadia still saw meaningful user counts at its peak (over 2 million active users in early 2022), but growth stalled long before Google ended the product.

Stadia had 750,000 monthly active users in 2020, missing its target.
Stadia held 5 to 10 percent of the cloud gaming market in 2021 but lost ground in 2022 to competitors.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) revealed that Stadia had a smaller presence compared to competitors like Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming.

The CMA’s findings are based on global information provided by each company, but actual figures are not included. Insider reports suggest that Stadia had around 750,000 monthly active users in 2020, falling short of its target of 1 million.

The CMA’s findings indicate that Stadia held a 5 to 10 percent share of the cloud gaming market in 2021 but lost ground in 2022 and was dominated by Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, and PlayStation cloud.

Google Stadia’s estimated annual revenue was just $62 million.

The platform had 279 employees.
The average revenue per employee was $222,200.

Google Stadia was a very ambitious cloud gaming platform that acquired a solid total revenue since it was established in 2019, but you can’t justify this sort of revenue in comparison with what Google is as a company. A company that earns hundreds of billions of dollars each year is hardly going to be improved by the numbers Stadia brings to the table.

Google Stadia platform stats

Now it’s time for us to take a look at some of the general platform stats surrounding Google Stadia to see what the features of the platform are, as well as some more reasons why it might have failed as a cloud gaming service. On the surface, everything is great — you have a lot of games, relatively good servers, and seemingly good customer service. When you look at it a bit deeper into the matter, things aren’t as great.

Ubisoft’s game stake in Google Stadia was 14% of Stadia’s total game count.

Google Stadia offered over 300 games.
Ubisoft was Google Stadia’s largest game supplier, with 40 titles on the platform.
To include these games, Google had to pay $20 million to Ubisoft alone.
The platform only took a 15% cut from games that make over $3 million. This was done to pull in more investors.

Despite the controversy surrounding Google Stadia, the platform still offered a wide array of games, with the most notable contribution made by Ubisoft, with 40 games added to the platform. In the same line of stats, we can also see that desperation set in for the cloud gaming platform when it decided to cut its takings from games that made over $3 million in an attempt to draw in more investors to work with them. This did not work.

Google Stadia was effectively available in only 23 countries.

Of those 200 countries, only about half could run the service with their average Internet speeds.

Too much ambition is another thing that drove Google Stadia to the ground. They offered their services in over 200 countries, but many of them could not handle the required 10MB/s for streaming the games from the cloud. Also, many of the countries were simply not supported, leading to Google Stadia only being available in 23 countries.

68% of Stadia users were Pro users.

31.96% of Stadia users were not Pro users.
Based on the Stadium Connect North poll, 82.35% of Stadia users were Pro users.
17.65% of Stadia users were not pro users in the same poll.

Although the general business model was a bit off, a very large portion of the Google Stadia user base belonged to the Pro group. We cannot be sure why this is the case, as many users might have opted to jump on the hype train and see what the possibilities of cloud gaming are.