Stadia died because no one trusts Google

techcrunch.com:

There’s a lot of chatter right now about the “surprise” shutdown of Stadia, Google’s game-streaming service. While it’s true that rivals like Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming presented entrenched competition, and that Google knows next to nothing about gaming, the main trouble — as with most of its products these days — is that no one trusted them to keep it alive longer than a year or two.

It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need, and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

The technical implementation certainly wasn’t to be faulted. I will admit to being a skeptic when they said they could hit the framerates and response times they advertised, but by Jove they did it. At its best, Stadia was better than its competitors and almost magical in how it fulfilled the promise of going from zero to in-game in one second.

The business side of things was never quite so inspiring. There is now a great remembering of the much-mocked pre-launch hype display for Stadia: the doomed Dreamcast, pointless Power Glove, and E.T. for Atari, the game so bad they buried it in a shallow grave, followed by an empty pedestal on which Stadia would soon sit.

A useless peripheral that was more successful as a meme than as a product

And a game that was so badly received that truckloads of unsold copies were buried in a desert

No clue where this is going but I'm intrigued #GoogleGDC19 pic.twitter.com/HOSKJNMXbb

— Nibel (@Nibellion) March 19, 2019

Though it’s clear this was a hilarious misunderstanding of… just about everything, it turned out to