Google is the new IBM::Years of being one-upped on AI and cracking down on innovation turned the poster child for Silicon Valley cool into a dinosaur.
Stadia’s shutdown reallly pissed me off. The problem it had was the monitisation, not the actual thing it did. Stadia worked in places with crappy wifi, like the 2.4ghz only I had at my Mam’s house, when GeForce Now, XBox Cloud and Amazon’s Luna, all shit the bed. Really well optimised, it also worked at higher quality than everything else when you actually had a good connection.
If they’d actually built out the infrastructure properly, had all the features, like being able to play a game via youtube after watching a video on it, and the quasi split screen thing, it would’ve done a lot better. It also needed a bit of time, which Google seems hesitant to actually give any of it’s projects.
All true. The monetization wasn’t even that bad, it was more so the marketing. Lots of people didn’t know about Stadia or were against it because of the bad launch they had.
I think the service would’ve done far better had Google made some guarantees like “all your purchases will be refunded if we shutdown in the next 10 years” and then ran a new ad campaign for it.
I ended up getting a Stadia Premiere Edition (Controller and a Chromecast Ultra) for £20 down from £70 and tried it for essentially free (Stadia Pro 12 months free).
The got £20 refunded when they wound down - announced 3/4 of the way through my Stadia trial.
So all free and got a long cabled USB-C charger, a newer Chromecast than my old one, which ended up on the 2nd TV, and a controller I can repurpose.
Wild.
The main reason stadia failed is because they have cancelled so many projects before stadia that people were taking bets on when stadia would close before it even started.
No one wanted to buy into a service that was going to shut down and they created a self fulfilling prophecy.
Essentially all new Google projects wikl forever be doomed to this fate.
