Honestly you’re right there’s gaming specific reasons for the failure, but that itself is symptomatic of Google’s entry and exit of many markets: never really bothering to figure out what the market actually wanted and just hoping that high quality engineering will solve that.

Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)