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CMA report reveals Stadia held less than 10 percent of cloud gaming market share

In its investigation of Microsoft and the Activision Blizzard deal, the UK's antitrust authority incidentally revealed Google Stadia's abysmal reach in 2021 and 2022.

TJ Denzer

February 9, 2023 12:45 PM

Image via Google

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Even with the curtain drawn on Google Stadia’s services, its tragedy continues thanks to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA and their investigation of Microsoft’s deal to acquire Activision Blizzard. The CMA published provisional findings of its investigation into Microsoft’s hand in the overall gaming and tech market. Incidentally, this revealed the break up of major cloud gaming services in which it was revealed that Google Stadia had under 10% of the market share in cloud gaming in 2021 and 2022.

The CMA published this provisional report on its website on February 8, 2023. Said report is mostly focused on illustrating the current dominance Microsoft has in the gaming industry as part of its effort to determine whether the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard deal would constitute an anti-competitive threat. However, in a set of stats related to that, the CMA broke down the market share of cloud gaming customers by percentage across 2022 and 2021. While there are no specific numbers on people playing, it puts out a stark number for Stadia.

According to the stats, Google Stadia reached 10 percent of the market share of cloud gaming in 2021. In 2022, that market share shrank to an even smaller 5 percent at best. You can see the full breakdown posted by the CMA below:

Cloud gaming market share in 2021

• xCloud: 20-30%
• PlayStation Cloud Gaming: 30-40%
• Nvidia GFN: 20-30%
• Google Stadia 5-10%

Cloud gaming market share in 2022

• xCloud: 60-70%
• PlayStation Cloud Gaming: 10-20%
• NVIDIA GFN: 10-20%
• Google Stadia: 0-5%
• Amazon Luna: 0-5%

Google Stadia officially ended service in January 2023, and stats like what the CMA shows are a pretty good indicator of why. It’s unfortunate that the cloud-based gaming platform couldn’t get a foothold against giants like Xbox, but even PlayStation and NVIDIA seemed to perform better in their own cloud-based services. With Google turning its attention towards other matters such as its somewhat floundering Apprentice Bard AI tech, what could have been with Stadia will always remain a question unanswered.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.