To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI, etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is, which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for their own development. It was dead before it ever launched.
The whole point was to diversify their business model.
The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K.
Stadia integrated into YouTube could have been a Twitch competitor.
With Covid it could have been the perfect time to really launch the product when no one could buy a PS5/XBOX.
Google didn't invest in games, closed down their own game studio.
It's reminiscent of Windows Phone having no apps.
Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically over the past year and a half. Average fixed line download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9 percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.
It's not just throughput, but also latency. I'm getting 20-30 ms ping to google, which is 2 frames latency. For something like an RPG, or among us, that's probably fine. But for an FPS or a fighting game, that's a huge difference. And I live in a city center with good internet.
Honestly they just didn't have any content due to their technology choices, I use GFN all the time because it has most of the games I want to play already
they put themselves in a position where they were stuck acting like a psudo-console-platform thing needing to get developers to support thier platform
It seems to be strongly synergistic with a lot of their existing product offerings.
Getting the technology done even better means that Chromebooks and Androids (or even the browser) could be heavyweight gaming machines -- and thereby increasing those audiences.
As those audiences grow (and they're already big), having better hardware streamlined into Stadia means they immediately have insane distribution power. If you consider mobile gaming dominance in Asia, and the ability to release triple-A games immediately to a billion devices worldwide, that creates huge leverage over iOS.
Then as you said, GCP. I think someone with an idea and roadmap was there, but FAANG incentive programs don't reward people focused on the long game.
