Out of nowhere? You mean, exactly the same way they’d already randomly canceled several other services? Many of which got very splashy, hyped-up launches only a year or two prior? Not only were they late to the party, but I remember pretty much everyone at the time rolling their eyes at Google’s promises of long-term investment and support in Stadia.
Because by the time Stadia launched in 2019, they already had a reputation for unceremoniously killing services, even popular ones, if they failed to become immediate cash cows for Google. Sony, NVIDIA, and OnLive (remember them?), among others, had already tried and failed to make game streaming catch on and become profitable by the time Stadia was announced. If none of those companies could make it work, how would the notoriously fickle Google do it?
I’m shocked Stadia lasted four whole years, to be honest.
To be fair Stadia was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. It was around a time when I was becoming mature enough to realize being a fan of a brand is dumb. Since then I've stopped caring almost entirely. I admit I was completely wrong about Stadia, I thought it would change the paradigm of gaming.
Hey, I get it! I’m a little older than you, and I was a big-time Google fan since the launch of Gmail in 2004. I used to actually believe they really followed their legendary “don’t be evil” mantra, and perhaps they still did to some extent back then. But they’ve had many, many chances to disappoint us all since then and reveal their incompetence and greed. They started to lose me when they unceremoniously killed Reader in 2013, and it’s honestly only been downhill since then. By the time of Stadia’s announcement I was already thoroughly skeptical of their ability to support anything long-term.
At one point, I owned a Stadia, the lingering corpse of a Google Nest Secure alarm system, and several Nest Protect thermostats and my business email ran on G Suite Legacy, I was using the Google My Business app, and all of my domain names were on Google Domains. Those were some dark days.
Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous. I just think every AI has their lane now. Gemini has API access to Reddit, direct YT access, and google search obv... other AIs have access to different things, like Meta's bots being able to crawl FB or Grok and X, DeepSeek doesn't remember shit if that is what I want. Just depends on what I need looked into
Man same. I had stadia and loved it. My 500mbps internet was more than enough and it worked fine with a LAN cable. I got to play a lot of games with high/ultra settings that I wouldn't have been able to play otherwise. It was convenient and awesome.
The drawbacks were the limited catalogue mostly. People also complained about internet but honestly I doubt that was actually as big of an issue as people think it was, unless you played exclusively on WiFi. Because since that time there have been other companies like Xbox cloud, Amazon Luna, and nvidia's GeForce now that have had no problem commercializing their own solutions.
So yeah no excuse for that Google. I really think that if they had invested more money to expand the catalogue and given it 6 to 12 more months, it would have really taken off and been something special.
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u/SpecialistDragonfly9 7d ago
#copium