Kyle Bradshaw, writing for 9to5 Google:

In new statistics shared by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), we’ve learned that Google Stadia had significantly fewer active users than most other cloud gaming services.

Following Microsoft’s announcement of its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard, regulatory bodies around the world have taken action to investigate how such a merger would affect competition in the video game industry. Because Microsoft is responsible for Xbox Game Pass Streaming, the merger’s effect on cloud gaming has been a key point of contention.

The CMA has released its provisional findings (h/t Duncan), explaining in great detail the ways that a merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard would have a negative impact on competition. In one section of the findings, the CMA offers statistics on how many active users each of the major cloud gaming platforms had in 2021 and 2022.

While the CMA does not provide the raw numbers for each service in the public version of its report, the regulator does show a percentage range (0-5%, 5-10%, etc) of market share that each had, based on the number of monthly average users (MAUs). In an appendix, it’s explained that these charts were created based on information provided directly by each company and reflect global usage, not just players in the UK.

Publicly, Google has remained silent about how many users Stadia had, but these new statistics show that Google’s streaming option failed to make a sizeable dent in the market. While 2021 saw Stadia maintain somewhere between 5-10% of the cloud gaming market, Google’s market share dropped to between 0-5% in 2022.

Importantly, the 2022 statistics for Google Stadia only represent from January to July, which means the drop in market share was not caused by the announcement of Stadia’s shutdown.