Google is shutting down Stadia

Really unfortunate, and I think Google is making a long term mistake here. Stadia worked extremely well for me and some friends who all basically didn't want to invest in a gaming tower.

I had a theory though, that if you were a serious gamer, you probably stream or do a bunch of other things on your computer. As the serious gamer would need a reasonable GPU either way to accomplish this, the benefits of Stadia didn't make sense for them. Google should have implemented the missing pieces as part of the stadia experience, thus only requiring a laptop to be a mildly successful streamer.

In my head they should have worked on something that could stream directly to youtube gaming, and they should have paid $$$$ to get some streamers to use Stadia exclusively for their streams.

Mainly because of wasted potential, in my case. They revolutionized the internet (repeatedly) with a great product and found a reasonably unobtrusive method to monetize it, then moved into creating replacements for Microsoft products (browser, calendar, email, documents) and I thought they would then pivot into cloud as a good competitor to AWS, whilst also spending their copious profits on long-term scientific research projects and helping bring ML advances to the larger community.

It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's products worse. What's really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.

Lets just say I would only play Iron Banner, and do above average. Its NOT for competitors looking for 4k @ 144hz .

> My library of games on Steam, Epic, EA are obviously not accessible with Stadia

This is what convinced me to jump into streaming gaming with an NVidia Shield and GeForce Now.

You buy the games on standard game store platforms: Steam, Epic and Ubisoft. So I knew when I was buying the games that if GFN folded or I didn't like it anymore I could still play my entire library on a PC.

Not every game available on Steam is available to play through GFN. For example, you can't play GTAV. But you can play Destiny, Cyberpunk, Saint's Row, Assassin's Creed, etc. It's a credible if not complete selection.

The service was cheap (very cheap when I signed up with the Founder's lifetime rate at < $5/mo.) and I needed a new streaming device for my TV anyway (the Shield is a perfectly capable Android TV based streaming device), so I could dip my toe in it easily and see how it worked (basically the cost of the controller, which aren't very expensive). I've liked it so much I left console gaming behind and got two more Shields for two other TVs. It's very nice to be able to play the same game from different terminals, including my phone if need be (phone's not great for Cyberpunk 2077 but it does Powerwash Simulator just fine).

Go projects are also usually biased towards being very simple with few dependencies. A lot of projects that are well suited for go would be easy to rewrite to another language if Google did ever decide to abandon it.