Google Stadia Likely Has Way Less Than 1 Million Users

Gamers are getting disgruntled about Stadia, Google's game streaming service, but a more relevant question for me is: Just how many gamers are even trying Stadia out? We can make an educated guess:

• Google Stadia has less than 500,000 installs on Google Play. It's currently showing between 100,000 and 500,000 installs.
• Google Stadia (probably) has less than 40,000 installs on iOS. It's currently showing 385 reviews on iOS' App Store. A pretty decent rule of thumb is to assume that there are 100 users per 1 posted review, i.e. 38,500 total; round that up to say under 40,000.

Assume similar install numbers for compatible PC and Mac devices, and less than 1 million total installs (let alone active users, which will be less) is an educated guess. Unless I am missing something?

If I'm close on this estimate, I don't know if that counts as a win or loss from Google's point of view. They did invest quite a lot of Stadia marketing to gamers, even sponsoring a huge announcement at GDC 2019. Then again, streaming is still not a very well-known technology to gamers.

And yet then again, the Playstation 4 sold nearly 3 million units is just a single three month period last year. So whatever the number of Stadia users currently is, Stadia clearly isn't shifting the market interest away from the classic hardware model for gaming.

Comments

[Bryan]

Stadia is not available in Japan, so I can't even try it. I would imagine the region-locks are preventing more people from trying it, which explains the low number of installs in the app stores.

[panda]

that's right Stadia is Google’s first deep foray into the world of gaming. It’s part game console, part streaming service—like Netflix but for videogames.