Stadia was dead-on-arrival (regardless of any technical merits), the uncertainty, money and amount of work required on games leaves developers skittish about unreliable platforms (or companies). Especially with something as a new techonology like with streaming games where people were more or less rightfully concerned about latency.
All their product killings had already gotten someone to register the killedbygoogle.com domain on 2018-09-12 , that's a month before Google Stadia was even in closed beta. People were already joking about when they'd close Stadia when it was released.
Adding insult to injury, everyone saw the absolute fuckup with the Terraria developer. You have an indie developer (that iirc was _featured_ in the Stadia promotions) who loses his work Google accounts making it impossible to work and in frustration announces that the game is dead (apparently his account and the game were re-instated but after a month people had lost track and the image damage was done).
And yes, Google had some big-name contracts outside of just indies, but viability of a platform is always evaluated by it's entire scope (and iirc EA wasn't on board from day 1).
Google has a huge image issue with being humanly unreachable, we accepted with when Google was a cool perky upstart with a do-no-evil creed that hadn't messed up enough yet, but it's far harder to swallow from a big company that we know are only doing it's automated account management to save money (and is so insulated that it takes a _month_ to unfreeze an account of someone that is even supposed to be your partner!).
All their product killings had already gotten someone to register the killedbygoogle.com domain on 2018-09-12 , that's a month before Google Stadia was even in closed beta. People were already joking about when they'd close Stadia when it was released.
Adding insult to injury, everyone saw the absolute fuckup with the Terraria developer. You have an indie developer (that iirc was _featured_ in the Stadia promotions) who loses his work Google accounts making it impossible to work and in frustration announces that the game is dead (apparently his account and the game were re-instated but after a month people had lost track and the image damage was done).
And yes, Google had some big-name contracts outside of just indies, but viability of a platform is always evaluated by it's entire scope (and iirc EA wasn't on board from day 1).
Google has a huge image issue with being humanly unreachable, we accepted with when Google was a cool perky upstart with a do-no-evil creed that hadn't messed up enough yet, but it's far harder to swallow from a big company that we know are only doing it's automated account management to save money (and is so insulated that it takes a _month_ to unfreeze an account of someone that is even supposed to be your partner!).
https://www.polygon.com/2021/3/18/22338396/terraria-google-s...