To be specific: Google could have deployed large games to large cloud services with a large number of GPUs attached. Such a system could support a world with a working set of 128GB or more and draw all the graphics for all the players with everything closely coupled (like very big couch multiplayer with multiple screens!)

Wargaming it though there is no such thing as a "128GB world" from the player's perspective and for a long time high-end games have used many tricks to shoehorn huge worlds into small boxes such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_San_Andreas

which was released for the PS2 with just 36MB of RAM! A "128GB world" that is cheaply developed could probably be crunched into a 8GB world that looks good enough with an expensive development process (you need much more out of your systems programmers and artists.) To make something that's truly a different experience you need a "2TB world" shoehorned into a 128GB world which would be an expensive proposition.

I don't think Google could have talked any game dev shop capable of that sort of thing into doing it, it was something Google was going to have to do itself. They could have afforded it. And they could have entirely changed people's expectations about games.

Are you saying Stadia can allow the largest theoretical online game world ever (largest mmo)?

Imagine you could use one of these

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/accelerator-optimized-...

A system with, say, 8 large GPUs could easily generate graphics for 24 or more players and support a complex world as in: something like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

where you can walk through all the doors. A single SMP computer (kinda like couch multiplayer but with multiple screens attached) would run the whole thing which would put a limit on the player count, I can't see it exceeding 100 but the selling point would be the complexity of the world. If anybody could build a gaming cluster that could scale up to more players it would be Google.

Not to beat a dead horse, but looking at Microsoft or Sony, when they come up with rare or exclusive mechanisms they'll straight pay the game devs to specifically develop for it, to bridge the financial gap. Not just offer reduced store fees.

And Google was already pouring money into Stadia on the infra side, hell they could have bought a whole studio to make games tailored for Stadia.

Then they didn't.

As a bystander, Stadia looked to me as the most egregious dropping of the ball, in a field where reputation is worth so much.

They did have a games studio.

and shut it down

They spent a really large amount of money getting studios to port, and then proceeded to be the worst partners ever, so nobody continued when the incentives went away.

> Stadia was just another boring game streaming service

Only it actually worked (unlike Microsoft's poor excuse of an attempt at the time, it's finally decent), and it was cheaper and with better UX than GeForce Now. For a few years it was unquestionably the best.