Google is shutting down Stadia

Story time. I left Google in 2017 after Fiber (which I worked on) was unceremoniously mothballed. I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode.

Before leaving one of the teams some of us considered joining was the then unlaunched Stadia team. This was an effort out of Cloud I guess to create value added GCP services. Ultimately it never went anywhere because the team didn't want a presence in NYC.

Anyway, as soon as I heard about the project I said there's only two words you need to kill this project.

"Input lag"

The conversation should've ended there as the games where this isn't a factor are so niche it doesn't justify an entire product and engineering team.

I really don't understand how projects like this get signed off. Well, I do actually. It's a pet project for someone who doesn't really understand the domain they're operating in (ie games).

This should've never been greenlit.

Well, you can also keep the promise if there are lots of buyers and business goes well.

This is baffling. Stadia was launched with a lot of fanfare and it got a lot of attention too. This feels like Google giving up on something that everyone wants to succeed. In other words it would have been a great success if it's with anyone but google.

It’s not just Google, but the cause for embarrassment at other formerly prestigious places is different and not relevant.

I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.

Unfortunately there's a reason teams and people get put on "Double Secret Probation". If consumers find out the team might get shut down they start relying on them less, at which point the probation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise.

They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover.

That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.