In 1993, a video gamer was most likely a Sega or Nintendo fan. The two Japanese brands had dominated the fourth generation of video games with two consoles that eventually sold close to a 100 million units worldwide. As a 14 year-old Sega Mega Drive owner, I couldn’t imagine a world where I wasn’t Sega, and their mascot Sonic the Hedgehog, through and through. My friends at school all had one of these two brands hooked up to a TV at home, or if they were lucky, the more expensive Commodore Amiga, and it dominated our daily conversations. A year later I would be reading EDGE magazine and coveting the soon to be released Playstation 1. It was the pivotal moment where games grew up, luckily for me, just as I did too. Instead of leaving them behind as my older brother had, they evolved with me.

Sony Playstation marked the beginning of the fifth generation of video games and it was the first time there was a brand which wasn’t inherently aimed at children. It was then, and in my opinion still is now, the landmark gaming brand. Sony had entered the market and thought about who their gamer could be, and how to engage them in a much broader way than their competitors. All details were considered, right down to the design of the controller buttons. Gone were the ABC or brightly coloured dots of past consoles, replaced by four distinctive shapes which would go on to be widely used in their at times controversial advertising. From button up the Playstation had attitude. This was reflected in print and TV adverts throughout the 1990s which surprised, amused and scandalised, winning rafts of awards in the process. The brand poked fun at religion, sport and the world of boring adulthood with a rock’n’roll feeling never seen in the nerdy world of games. The Playstation took gaming mainstream and four generations of this console on, it and XBOX, which joined the party in 2001, are still slugging it out as the leading game brands.

Against this backdrop, 25 years after Playstation launched, Google has announced Stadia – its new gaming platform. At time of launch there isn’t much to go on beyond a name, two films, a controller and one game – Doom Eternal. The launch videos clearly give us the two part proposition. Firstly games are not just played, but also watched. We’ve watched games for millennia and video games are no different. This is hardly a wild pitch, Amazon-owned Twitch has 2.2 million gamers broadcasting their games every month and the game chat app Discord has 200 million users worldwide. Secondly, we’re at the end of the box. Gaming is finally moving to the cloud. Want to play the best games? No need for the £200 console anymore. This is a platform for the next generation of gaming where a Chrome browser or Android device is all you need. This is a simple evolution, closing the gap from light gaming on the Apple’s App Store and Google Play store to console-based hardcore gaming.

What’s clear is that games, whether being played or watched, are big business. Google is positioning Stadia at the centre of this. Protecting the 200 million signed-in users that watch gaming content on YouTube monthly, and in turn the advertising that surrounds it – where Google really makes its money. Why now and what is truly their intent? We can leave that to the internet, which has plenty of theories, but from a branding point of view it feels a little rushed and not fully baked to me. There’s a clever name, a decent pitch and then not much else. Visually it’s sporty, active and mainstream, but beyond an average logo there is no brand. No photography style, no physical brand, it’s just missing something. The videos are forgettable, under-produced affairs with cliché gamers of all ages featured, and as such you are left feeling a bit “so what?”. It has no sonic signature, the logo animation lacks punch. You don’t feel like you are looking at more than a pitch.

Last year’s rebrand of Riot Games’ successful esports brand League of Legends by DesignStudio betrays similar positioning, but it’s much more successfully deployed. By going to the same company that branded the Premier League, they have ended up with a similar style, I believe intentionally aligning esports more closely with traditional sports branding. Logo, photo style, strong sonics, this is the brand of something real and loved.

Having said all this, none of it is a massive surprise. Google’s history of brands and branding is a mixed affair. From a product innovation point of view all of their big hits, search aside, have been bought. Android, YouTube, Nest etc were all started elsewhere, DNA and personality created, and then have had their brands neatened and tidied under Google. Material design is Google’s big design hit and this reflects how they treat branding. Thoroughly considered, visually neat, pleasing and organised, but not much of a splash. Their brands operate like good software, iterative, invisible on a level, pleasant, but not very emotional. Twitch to me feels like a chaotic place, but its authenticity rings true. It’s by gamers for gamers and that’s what resonates.

Aged 40 and with an agency to run I am not much of a gamer anymore, but you can’t help feeling Stadia is missing a trick. In 2018, young Premier League footballers like Dele Alli brought hit game Fornite to the pitch after scoring in front of a global audience of millions. Gaming is mainstream and the best mainstream platforms have strong brands in themselves. Netflix, the Premier League or Xbox are premium affairs happy to advertise themselves and their strengths as much as the content which make them. My feeling is that just as Xbox had to break from the rest of Microsoft to make a brand of its own, so Stadia will need to from Google. Otherwise it could be another footnote in a sector where many great brands have tried and died.

James Greenfield is a regular CR columnist and the Founder and Creative Director of design and branding studio Koto