I think they really failed to deliver on the core promise of Stadia: making games a part of the internet the way YouTube videos are.

If they really made it the case that AAA gaming was just another type of content you might bump into in a pre-roll ad, or in one of your social media content streams, I have a hard time imagining how that would not be a massive success.

It's an incredibly rich form of content, and they would have been competitive in so many ways. Think about all the kids and teenagers out there who would love to play games and for whatever reason can't get access to gaming hardware.

If they could somehow get a free taste of AAA games on their phones, it seems like you would be able to find some way to make that profitable over time.

Instead it ended up being a worse console which nobody knew existed.

I never heard that was the ambition for Stadia, but it’s a very powerful idea to make gaming more “ambient”.

It was part of the initial announcement. They talked about for instance being able to watch a streamer on YouTube, and press a button to pick up in the game right where they are.

Stadia definitely had software engineering related issues. The latency and stream reliability might have been better than competing services, but I found the UI and store to be quite lame. Features that were promised at launch (e.g. YouTube integration) took years to show up and weren't as good as advertised. Launching a game took too many clicks and way too much waiting. It should have been instant and that alone would have been huge. Porting games to Stadia was too hard leading to an anemic catalog; meanwhile Valve knows that the catalog is everything and engineered Steam Deck to run unmodified Windows game binaries on Linux! Google ultimately failed to take advantage of the unique advantages that streaming should have given them, and without any compelling unique features Stadia was just a worse version of consoles with a subscription fee.

The pricing model was probably the biggest single issue, but I believe better engineering could have made a difference.

The YouTube integration launched after one year. The games were a single click, had direct links and could be launched by voice assistant on any compatible cast device. It was also as easy to port games too as any Linux port would be. Online play was free, subscription unnecessary unless you needed 4K and more than 50 games in the subscription on sign-up.

Launching a Stadia game was never truly one click for me. It always required several, and then you'd have to endure the same old load screens and splash screens and menus as any other platform. The load times should have been faster, and they should have had platform requirements to make it faster to jump into gameplay without nagivating menus after load. I heard them talk about deep links directly into gameplay but I never saw it, it must not have been implemented in many games. But I did see a bunch of Stadia account related clickthrough BS that added more clicks and more load time (and sometimes bugs) when all I wanted to do was play.

> It was also as easy to port games too as any Linux port would be

And nobody bothers to port to Linux either. It isn't trivial in many cases. And I believe Stadia wasn't just as easy because of a Vulkan requirement along with other platform integration and certification stuff. An unhappy medium of too many platform requirements to be trivial to port to, but not enough to actually make Stadia a better experience than other platforms.

> Online play was free

Only if you bought games at full price, trusting Google to run the service forever (clearly a risky bet which was obvious to everybody at the time and not just in hindsight).

> more than 50 games in the subscription

The selection was not compelling compared to other platforms' subscriptions. If they had had a larger catalog to draw from, that might have helped.

In theorie, I was interested in Stadia, but a subscription but I still have to buy the game WTF. So of course I did not even try.

Yeah, that's high on the list of things that harmed the platform.

Hypothetically, if they'd wanted to go a totally different direction, the could have courted game developers willing to create games for them that would have been offerable at a pure-subscription rate. But they chased AAA games and hit a major market issue: there was no way AAA publishers were going to under-cut their per-unit sales in other channels by offering with-subscription access to their product and trusting Google would pay them enough to make that worth their while.

See, that's why I think Stadia is an example of their failure in marketing.

You didn't actually need both the subscription and the game. Subscription is just for > 1080p streaming and other 'pro' features. You could just buy a game without any subscription.

I think this is really interesting.

Stadia didn't require a subscription. You could just buy games and play them. But loads of people came to the conclusion that you needed a subscription. My going hypothesis is that this was caused by the free trial of the subscription service (higher resolution, cheaper games) that everybody got when they launched. So since people couldn't access the games without getting the free trial they assumed that this meant that they couldn't access the games without a subscription.

>Most problems Google is trying to solve now outside their core competency and existing offerings are not, fundamentally, software engineering problems.

Their problems are mixed bag problems. First of their problems is lack of vision. No clear backlog/roadmap and UX vision of their products.

Second set of problems are software related problems as of technical debt, maintaining codebase of their software products and lack of understanding of how their algorithms actually work e.g ranking algorithms, recommendation algorithms etc.