The death of Google Stadia was not inevitable

gamedeveloper.com:

Google Stadia, the cloud game platform introduced by Google at GDC 2019, is shutting down. Its sunsetting in January 2023 will put an end to about four years of speculation on if the tech industry giant could become a major power player in the video game space. 

The answer: it couldn't. 

If you listened to the critics over the last few years, today's news was inevitable. Google has a history of spinning up interesting products, only to shut them down a few years later. When you look at the company's track record, it's been a long time since it launched a major new product (remember when Google was going to be a major player in virtual reality?).

With Stadia, Google had every opportunity to break tradition, but instead history just repeated itself. You might think this is the free market at work—I'd just call it old-fashioned mismanagement. Google has no one but itself to blame for misfiring this badly.

There were reasons to be optimistic about Google Stadia after it was unveiled. First, it was impressive enough that the product worked (even if it wasn't always perfect). We now know that cloud computing-based game platforms have consumer appeal, and Google making it possible to play games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey or 2016's Doom on low-end devices was a major technical achievement.

It's obviously not fair to judge Stadia's founders based on information clear to us in 2022, but we can praise them for getting two ideas correct:

Stadia made two big mistakes based on these facts.

Xbox Cloud Gaming on Xbox Game Pass gives us a pretty clear indication of what players are willing to put up with: they're fine dealing with the latency if it's not the primary way they access their games, and they're fine paying for a subscription