At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year. My bet is that Google is learning this mistake faster, no doubt with MSFT as an example.

Perhaps we will reach some sort of google launch singularity where projects are launched and abandoned instantly.

Imagine the money they'd save!

> At least they are winding things down faster. Google announced the studio in mid 2019 and shutting it down in early 2021. Microsoft decided retail stores were a good idea in 2011, and only closed them off last year.

You're really selling me on using Microsoft over Google here: If I'm using a product/service, I'd prefer that it stay around as long as possible even if the company decides that it's a failure. Bonus points for being a "cloud" company so that users are totally screwed the moment the company pulls support.

What do you think would happen? You wake up one day and everything is gone? As much as I am not selling Google vs. MSFT, give Goog some credit. They would make customers whole financially and find a home for the platform.

> What do you think would happen? You wake up one day and everything is gone?

Yes, actually that's about what I expect. Not literally in a day, but fully do expect that in another year or two Google will announce that Stadia is going away and that in a few months it'll be gone. Games were rentals, not leased/sold, so they'll stop charging but you'll hardly be able to take your games with you. Saves might be Takout-able, so if you go re-buy the games you can keep playing... probably... if you even have hardware to game on...

In contrast, I've known people who ran MS software locally for months-to-years after it was obsolete/discontinued, and non-Microsoft software even longer (cue the classical story of the business that held on to their DOS software until Windows XP finally made it too painful to use).

More like it’s going to drag its feet being dead for 2-3 years past the point that anyone cares about the platform. Then when usage plummets enough, it’ll get killed during some big event to mask it.

I find it funny this spun out of a contrast from Google vs. Microsoft and what you are describing is literally how Microsoft Stores died. It got dragged past the point of anyone caring. Covid happened (big event) and then it got killed fairly quietly. This is how all things get killed. Not unique to Google here. My point with Google is they are learning faster what works and what doesn't. In the limit, maybe they will stop starting things that get killed to begin with.

Making a new game takes at a minimum a year for a simple game, more likely 2-4 years. So no, that is terrible planning on their part once again.

Obviously the planning was bad. This is about what you do when you’ve made bad plans. We’ve all made bad plans and we generally stick with them longer than we really should. I know I have.

The sunk cost fallacy only applies when it hurts.

I am not sure what you are implying?

Yeah, but Microsoft also shutdown retail stores in part because of the global pandemic, a few other companies followed.

And, those retail stores gave people an opportunity to play with and become comfortable with their surface form factor.

I was sad to see them go because it was a quick way to get a Surface replacement, but you can demo Surface at Best Buy. Most of their stores have Microsoft kiosks that accomplish near the same thing in terms of demoing and it costs Microsoft virtually nothing.

Expensive way to achieve that goal, IMO.

This has been true for a decade. Gmail had nothing to do with management for example. Google has some really smart engineers but their management has never been better than mediocre.