If you had to define one characteristic of Google, it is "they just don't listen". I think it comes from a viewpoint of social status in which "high status people talk and low status people listen" and they think they can maintain high status if they only never listen. (Wouldn't want to become a low-status company like Microsoft that listens sometimes)

I'd contrast that to Meta which has been through various waves of scathing criticism and often comes across as responsive, for instance they've listened a lot to devs about weaknesses in the Quest platform.

Steve Yegge had an interesting perspective that Google as a company is incredibly arrogant, but is staffed with humble individuals. I can't see how that persists though, without their people getting cocky, or at least ignorant and out of touch. None of these scenarios ends with a responsive company that listens to stakeholders and acts in their best interests.

Blame OKRs.

Systems of standardized evaluation inevitably get captured by the masters of self-presentation who, in our culture, are narcissists and psychopaths.

The person who is stuck at the bottom will be humble but as you go up systems like that filter for morally worse people. You might as well try summoning demons.

> Definitely, imagine coming to game studios talking them into rewriting into Linux/Vulkan, using command line and gdb, when the culture is using Windows and Visual Studio, including the devkits plugins for Sony and Nintendo consoles.

And yet towards the end Stadia had a plethora of games from multiple big name studios (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar) and a ton of indie games.

Where Google screwed up with Stadia was expecting it to hit big immediately, being a bit slow with games, not talking enough about it and the games that were actually on it, not advertising what their shutdown plan is.

The vast vast vast majority of Stadia negative commentary was about how Google will shut it down, and "there are no games". The second point wasn't true for the majority of the platform's existence, but nobody bothered to check because they were afraid of Google killing it. If everyone knew Google will reimburse all game purchases, and they advertised stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, EA's latest hits, and they managed to bring in the big studios a bit earlier (when I started using it about a year in, RDR2 was the only big game I cared about; GTA V would have been massive to have too), it would have been a massive hit. A lot of people would game casually on a basically-no-hardware-required platform.

To this day Xbox Cloud Gaming isn't close, performance and UX wise. GeForce Now is good performance wise, but UX is meh. Stadia was a golden opportunity for Google but they just blew it.

I really don't remember a plethora, rather some games.

Go search for last edition of Stadia developer conference, where something like Proton for Stadia was announced, alongside the acknowledgement it wasn't working as expected.

> I really don't remember a plethora, rather some games

Ubisoft's whole catalogue going all the way back to Black Flag, RDR2, EA's latest titles (FIFA, Star Wars), Cyberpunk, and tons of indie games (I had Premium, every month I got ~2 new indie games; by the end I had something like 50+ games).