/me pours one out for Stadia

Google made Ingress and Pokémon go (Niantic was part of google before it was spun off).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.

As someone who has firsthand experience:

A. The same reason Amazon had/has such a hard time.

B. Google lacking the same persistence of Amazon (Consider all the products that are killed)

C. Google's hiring process. (They organizationlly do not know how to hire specialists)

>B. Google lacking the same persistence of Amazon (Consider all the products that are killed)

Yah, like the Stadia, Google's streaming gaming console thing. They even had a first party game development division for it. So exactly what OP was wondering about.

Google has a really hard time grokking the games industry, to the point they can hire people from it and just almost totally ignore them. Their ideas on how Android game development should be done were utterly hilarious, and it's only because of a couple of their dev relations people going to ludicrous lengths that it is actually viable at all.

Fundamentally, and ironically, Google likes to offload complexity on to everyone else in their ecosystems, and they got so used to people being willing to jump through hoops to do this for search ads/SEO they are very confused when faced with a more competitive environment.

One reason Google can't make games is they can't conceive of a simple enough platform on which to design and develop one. It would be a far too adventurous constantly moving target of wildly different specifications, and they would insist you support all possible permutations of everything from the start. There are reasons people like targeting games consoles, as it lets you focus on the important bits first.

> Google has a really hard time grokking the games industry

And Apple :)

The two mobile duopolists don't understand gaming.

Apple absolutely do get it, they might disagree with you about what that is. Google just can't. I worked in the games industry in exactly this area, and the difference between the two is just enormous, but in ways we cannot go into in this forum.