A 300-400 dollar console that's out of stock is a barrier. I still can't go to Amazon and easily buy a PS5, and until recently couldn't have easily bought a high-end GPU, but I could have gone to Stadia and bought any of the (admittedly lacking) selection of games and played immediately, without even waiting to download anything, and on any of several devices I own.

I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.

Any gamer actually looking for a console would have found one through a discord bot in a decent amount of time. No one was about to abandon console gaming because they had to wait a month. Something to also keep in mind is people have friends on these consoles and accounts with achievements they care about.

Alternatively, that same gamer could have just bought the game they want on Stadia and not have any of that hassle to deal with.

Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.

No one cares if you care. That's completely besides the point.

My point is not that I don't care, or that nobody cares about achievements, it's that not everybody cares about achievements. My point is that Stadia and its equivalents have a place in the market for at least some people.

When I buy a console I usually wait until it’s had some price drops and then there’s really only a few games I want to play. And because I waited so long these too are at a steep discount. These days, that means there’s so much content with DLCs and the base game that it could take me over a year to finish a AAA title.

If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.

Now that I think about it, Stadia launched into an extremely favourable market where both GPUs and next-gen consoles were unobtainium and 'price drops' are a thing of legend, but they still couldn't make it work. Any other time without that advantage and they'd have failed even harder.

They barely tried though. Did they expect to rival Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo in 2 years with their shitty reputation and without a AAA exclusive game? Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?

> Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?

They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.

Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.

This mindset is pretty outdated, the most popular games now are all free-to-play. I suggest checking out Fortnite (although I personally don’t suggest actually playing it), CoD Warzone, or Overwatch 2. For pre-teens (or almost anyone else for that matter) wanting to try out the free games their friends are playing, a $300+ console is a huge barrier. That’s why they play on their phones.