My personal problem with Stadia was the lock-in. You were required to buy a game at full price on Stadia and were only allowed to play it on Stadia, a service for which you would've eventually had to pay a subscription fee.
One can tell people that a PC is much more expensive upfront and that you could play for years on Stadia for the same money but the risk of it being shut down and losing access to all the full price games just wasn't worth it. Plus real-time multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible to play competitively, so you needed a PC anyways if you played even only one of such games.
Yeah, and people will shout about Steam being the same level of vendor lockin but they're ignoring the trust factor. Steam has been around for decades and rightly or wrongly people mostly consider it a given that their Steam games will never disappear. Google needed to acknowledge that and actually provide an appealing alternative.
Instead they tried to charge full retail price on games from a tiny library on a product that nobody believed they weren't going to sunset in a couple of years time. I suspect if they'd gone with a subscription cost only model they probably would have been a lot more successful.
real-time multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible to play competitively
I understand that everyone has different tolerances, but I can’t stand even slightest lags (ms range), irregularities and visual bugs in games. Had to fight my way through hardware settings on a real PC at last update, now it’s smooth and immersive.
I don’t play multiplayer games at all, but have a hard time understanding why someone would think “ah, I’m playing single player anyway, so enormous input lags are okay”. How do you play parrying (witcher, souls), shooting 2+ targets quickly (hitman, ghost recon), tight racing with such delays?
One can tell people that a PC is much more expensive upfront and that you could play for years on Stadia for the same money but the risk of it being shut down and losing access to all the full price games just wasn't worth it. Plus real-time multiplayer games like shooters and MOBAs were just impossible to play competitively, so you needed a PC anyways if you played even only one of such games.