Quick answer
As of May 2021 Google does not publish official figures about Stadia subscriptions or number of active users.
However using different sources of data we estimate a total of 2 million users.
This is still a small portion of gamers if you compare it to other platforms like Playstation, Xbox or PC gamers.
But many people say cloud gaming services will rule the industry in the future, and Google is very well positioned to become the leader in a few years.
Estimating the number of users
Some months ago the Reddit user El_Dete made a great post estimating the number of Stadia users.
He compared the number of PlayStation and Xbox units sold with their Reddit communities and applied the same ratios to the Stadia Reddit community to estimate the Stadia users…
But El_Dete post is several months old, so if we want to know current figures we’ll need to re-do the math by using the latest data:
PlayStation 4 + PlayStation 5
119 million units sold and 5.2 million Reddit users (adding r/playstation + r/ps4 + r/ps5)
Xbox One + Xbox Series X
51 million units sold and 3.2 million Reddit users (adding r/xbox + r/xboxone + r/xboxseriesx)
Stadia
106,000 Reddit users (r/Stadia)
As of February 2020, applying the same logic a rough estimation of the total number of Stadia accounts is now between 1.6 million and 2.4 million users. Let’s simplify it to 2 million users.
Trends
Stadia was not a massive success after its launch.
Google had to do several technical improvements and fixes to reduce latency problems and ensure its users could enjoy a proper gaming experience.
A few months later the service was in much better shape and Google started to roll it out to more countries and launched aggressive deals to engage early adopters and ignite their community of gamers.
In addition, in December 2020 the launch of the very anticipated game Cyberpunk 2077 showed a lot of problems in traditional gaming consoles, but worked surprisingly well in Stadia.
This fact attracted a lot of international attention to the cloud gaming service, and Stadia gained a big number of users.
Considering all this, I personally believe the number of Stadia users is accelerating and it will be growing much faster in the next months.
If Google can keep up the pace by adding top-tier game titles at competitive prices I am sure in a few years it will be a mainstream platform with a huge number of users like Playstation, Xbox or PC gaming.
Conclusion
At this moment there are no official metrics from Google Stadia about the total number of users, active Stadia user or games sold.
Estimating a ball-park figure using information from PlayStation and Xbox units sold and the size of their Reddit communities, we infer a total number of Stadia users to be around 2 million users.
Note that the error margin is very high so don’t consider this an accurate or reliable figure, it’s just an estimation.
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I will continue to try and get my friends to make the change. The only thing is I find if your chromecast isn’t wired there is lag which is a tough sell. If Google continue to add aaa games then hopefully it will continue to grow.
Yeah do them a favour and don’t do that lmao. No one wants to mimic your bad purchasing habits.
I wondered about stadia if anyone was actually playing it, that why 8 ended up here and other sites. The logic applied to work out how many subscriptions is just stupid. And even if 2 million was the number, the adoption rate is incredibly low. I mean how quickly did it take to sell 2 million PS5’s. The demand of ps5 and series X plus the success of the switch clearly indicates that consoles are in a better state than ever before and it’ll be a long time before cloud gaming takes over and if it does, the big 3 will be the ones who lead the way. We’ve already heard that ms is already working on their next console, could just me a more powerful series X. There will be another console generation before cloud gaming. I can go on gamepass on my Xbox, pc and Android, I don’t need to invest in something new like stadia. However I still didn’t like the experience of cloud so the technology for me has a long way to go.
Trusted reviews believe the death of stadia is inevitable. If anyone believes stadia will have a future well Phil Spencer doesn’t think so when he left with many other executives and they closed down their own studio. Clearly not wanting to support their own platform. Imagine Sony studios closing all their studios down and ms doing the same with ms studios.
I think Stadia has beaten 100M downloads. Every actual user would have downloaded at least 5 devices. If you did a similar calculation to Twitter accounts, instead of Reddit. Stadia would be 800-1.38M.
Which would make sense even if you just calculate how many total players are online in Destiny 2, the still most played game daily on Stadia. That would include PC, making the calculations even better.
Stadia has a 6k per day Destiny 2 player base. The game itself gets 1M players per day. Stadia cuts a share of 0.006 of all Destiny 2 players in the world. With a baseline of 300M gamers (PS+Twitch+PC+Xbox+all) that would be 1.8M max player base on Stadia.
We can also make fixed estimates on how many people actually tried. I’d say something around 10% stick around. 9/10 drops (consider my personal friends estimates as a founder) with very occasional playing. 18 million actually tried Stadia.
That is great. But we do know Stadia does need troubleshooting of our own internet, device positioning in the house, and other small things that are strong barriers when all you want to do is plug and play. So, it is very easy to go back to your old consoles/PC, even though mathematically speaking, you waste more time on those, “it feels easy”.
What will decide what’s the most successful way to game in the future is the developer part of the industry. Users are easily manipulated by mass media pressure.