Yes, but a) they were willing to keep investing billions and billions for years, and it appears Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let Google do that any more and b) they considered it a tactical must to do so.

As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told.

Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but they have a CFO who basically demands any project makes money in two years or gets canned (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not especially criticising this approach but it's clear most Googlers and their culture do not get it), and a generation of project managers who believe you can launch minimum viable products to consumers and fix it later. You can't make all three of those points work at the same time, and that's why literally anything they launch new at the moment is going to fail.

Ironically the "invest a decade of money" market is undertapped due to a myopic quarter on quarter focus of most businesses for ~50 years.

Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.

But the original xbox launched with great exclusives like halo. There have been no hyped, got to play it game, that launched on stadia.

I remember differently, it didn't do as well as PlayStation but original Xbox wasn't a failure...