Google Play Music has evolved over the years, but Google is putting the nail in its coffin with YouTube Music. We’re seeing some (but not all) of Play Music’s features make their way into Google’s new and improved YouTube Music app, and that means eventually some old GPM features are going to be shut down.
That’s happening at the end of this month, too, according to an email Google has sent out to some smaller artists. They’ll be shuttering the artist hub, which means smaller musicians won’t be able to upload music to the service anymore. Existing music will no longer appear in the app, either. But you know what? That’s not surprising for a Google product.
In fact, axing great features and killing off excellent apps in favor of worse successors seems to be par the course for Google. Sometimes good apps just go by the wayside even without replacements.
Inbox is gone in favor of Gmail, despite many of Inbox’s best features still missing from Google’s main email app, and Allo flailed around for a couple years without ever gaining traction, even though that won’t actually stop Google from burying Hangouts.
Google has a legitimately terrible record with cool apps and services, and that casts a pretty dark shadow over their upcoming Stadia streaming service. And Stadia is more like Google Play Music than you might think.
Whether or not Google plans to make Stadia a subscription pass service or a storefront, it has the potential to see the same problems that Google Play Music is facing. If the service allows you to stream games from a catalog without buying them individually, what evidence do you have that Google’s going to fight to keep enough games on its service? That’s a problem all subscription services have, and that’s a massive hurdle Google will have to face.
And if it’s not a subscription service, but instead you do have to buy your games individually, what happens in three years when Google gets bored of Stadia and shutters the service? You only bought those games on Stadia instead of a long-term platform like Steam or on a disc for your PlayStation. When Stadia goes belly up, so does your collection of games worth hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars. We’re still not sure if that’s not going to happen with purchased Play Music songs. And if anyone’s going to struggle with backwards compatibility when/if Stadia 2 is a thing, it’s Google.
The platform is also unique in that developers won’t be able to port their games directly over from Windows or other game consoles, and that’s yet another layer of complexity if Google gets distracted and doesn’t pay attention to the service for months at a time, as Google is known to do.
Stadia is a technological marvel, and there’s no arguing that. If a different company was in charge of it, I’d say it’d be worth jumping in early just to be a part of that. But with Google? You’re just asking to get burned. Sit this one out.