We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable
This failure was more political in nature though, the technical solution is there