Stadia died because no one trusts Google

If you stand in line to buy a Playstation 5, you're part of an exclusive club of PS5-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform.

If you buy an Xbox you're part of an exclusive club of Xbox-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform.

If you buy a Nintendo Switch, you're part of a (not-so) exclusive club of Switch-owners and you can play exclusive games for that platform.

If you buy a gaming PC, you're part of the "PCMR" and you can play exclusive games for that platform (and brag about how much RAM you have or whatever).

If you buy a Stadia, you can play some games that already exist on other platforms.

This whole situation isn't surprising. Big tech has a particular disease where they think that other industries are trivial and they can just muscle their way in with their superior intellect and size. Just look at how every MAANGA company is trying to disrupt healthcare right now, has a self-driving car division, etc. (There's some business antipattern, or psychological effect, but I can't remember the term right now).

This is why YCombinator exists, because startups do a deeper dive into their markets and don't usually fall for ego traps like this.

Stadia was dead on arrival for me. I live in a 3rd world country so they didn't ever bothered trying to sell the hardware over here. The internet also probably wouldn't be able to handle the needed downstream of a high quality gameplay footage, and even if it could it would have a ridiculous lag without servers in the region. Even if they managed to solve all of those problems, they were literally asking me to buy games that not only I wouldn't own but couldn't install or mod in my own way and trust that enough people would do the same so they wouldn't cancel the entire thing and run with the money? It's too much to ask.

Heck, is the promised refund actual money back into the bank account or "gift cards" to spend on Google services? Wouldn't surprise me if it's the latter.

I don't think Google was ever all that much successfull with products that only attend certain small regions. For Stadia to have a better chance, it would need at least be coupled with a service similar to Steam or Epic Games, where bought games are ran on client machines and that could be operated worldwide. A simple game store would make the service much more reliable.

I think the biggest problem of Google now is how much they try to *control* their users. Google+ was really annoying to use because they kept making demands like real name and surname, not giving proper API so people could automatize posts with little effort, etc. They literally killed Google Reader just so people would stop using feeds and use their proprietary stuff instead. Stadia demanded the user not just to relinquish the ownership of the game but also the machine where it ran and how it was installed, so you couldn't modify games or manipulate saves. They also demanded people to use Chrome even though they could make it run on any web browser. It's all about control, control, control.

I'm at a point where I don't even use Google Chrome. I know they will fuck it up somehow by being too "controlley". Oh wait, they're already trying to get rid of Ad Blockers, aren't they? That will surely work and in no way make people just use other browsers like Firefox, I'm sure... /s