Underlying much of this is Microsoft's explosive growth in cloud gaming over the same period.
It doesn't look like Stadia got off to all that bad a start, but after that user numbers seem to have cratered. Notably, the 2022 Stadia figures only going up to July of that year means that the announcement of the service shutdown has no influence on these figures. 0-5% is rough.
It's somewhat cheerier for Nvidia and PlayStation, until we get to 2022 that is, and even though both retain significant market shares of 10-20% you can see why Microsoft's growth here has attracted the CMA's attention. One company owning 60-70% of a fairly nascent industry is already looking like monopoly territory.
However, there are many caveats to the figures, even though they're based on data from the companies concerned. The first is that these include services that have a cloud gaming element, such as Xbox Game Pass, but don't reflect whether users of those packages were using the cloud gaming element. The CMA also thinks it may have overestimated Sony's market share in 2021 and 2022 by double-counting people who were subscribed to both PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now.
But the key thing the CMA identifies as being relevant to the Activision Blizzard takeover is that, even with Google behind it, Stadia couldn't make a big enough impression in the cloud gaming market to stay viable. Indeed it even rather brutally identifies why, saying that the evidence suggests Google’s failure with Stadia"was caused at least in part by a lack of gaming content, which was connected to its use of a Linux OS.
These figures are coming from a reliable place but, even so, take them with a big ol' pinch of salt. The CMA spends many pages caveating its findings, and the difficulty of salami-slicing exactly what each service offers and what users may or may not be paying for. One thing's for sure, though. In the early years of cloud gaming, Microsoft's already looking like it will be number one for some time to come.
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