Hardware is literally scaled by customer demand, and was one of the reasons gmail went with the invite only launch.

Network PoPs are less an issue when you are already piggybacking off of Goog / GCP infrastructure, and you can mitigate the remaining costs by per country launches. And they did exactly that. It's still not supported in Hawaii. https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852?hl=en

> I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not have mattered.

Stadia was too late to market, in a field where content is rare enough relative to the number of competitors to have bargaining power. And they have no vertical integration to lean on. Nvidia has GPUs in house, MS/Sony/Nintendo have game devs in house for exclusives. Amazon _might_ be able to parley Twitch into a profitable Luna, but its a long shot.

Hardware manufacturing is, but design is most certainly not. It takes as much work to design a controller that you build one of as it does a controller you build a million of.

Obviously less viable for the set-top boxes, but still a valid strategy if you can do it.

They do have a client-side console/controller, and to be fair I had to look up why they did their own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Stadia#Hardware).

> While Stadia can use any HID-class USB controller, Google developed its own controller which connects via Wi-Fi directly to the Google data center in which the game is running, to reduce input latency.[8] Google is also exploring further ways to reduce latency, using an idea called "negative latency" which involves prediction of user input through various means so that any apparent network lag between controller and game response is minimized.[12] During its GDC 2019 keynote reveal, Google confirmed that the controller would also feature Google Assistant, which will automatically search YouTube for relevant, helpful videos related to the game they are currently playing at the touch of a key.[13]

I don't think any of Google's manufacturing capex is recoupable here; it's specific to making that thing, and if you don't want to make any more of that thing it's trash. (I'm not a hardware guru though, so that's not a statement made with high certainty. There might be bits that are reusable.)

A coworker and I were chatting about it, what happens if/when Apple drops and Mx SoC in the AppleTV? There are the obvious apps, you create a camera add on and add FaceTime to the living room. Things like that but you also have a very serious machine that can go head to head with PS5 and Xbox, legitimately. I wouldn't be shocked if something like that were to happen.

That's… kind of the problem? They have a reputation for abandoning products after making a huge splash. The only way around it is to stop looking for big splashes and start building products slowly instead. Pixel phones were notoriously only available in selected countries. Google Fibre is even more limited.