Good arguments. We'll have to see how serious they are about Stadia. I don't have a lot of faith in them. But I hope to be proven wrong.
The launch was a disaster in that there is no excitement about the platform. I like their statements on first-party development, but quality first-party games should have been at launch and ideally platform sellers.
Though I referenced Microsoft, Microsoft isn't doing a great job either. They have bungled the XboxOne launch and somehow ended up with almost no first-party games. They have certainly regressed since the Xbox360.
>For example, they sent engineers to Bungie for 6 months to help port Destiny 2.
Developer relations is something that Google is actually pretty good at. They make their engineering resources available to their partners (even outside of Stadia). I worked with them when we moved to GCP. That's not the issue. Their technology isn't the issue. Their engineering talent and technology is top-notch.
The issue is the commercial, marketing and business side. They also have a big problem with dealing with customers directly. Their natural inclination is to be a platform. That's great for search, cloud, YouTube (though they should be creating a catalogue of high-quality content), but not great for things like phones, and in this case, Stadia.
>Not many, if any, AAA companies are going to agree to put their new game on a subscription service
Agreed. Exclusivity is very expensive. You won't get RDR2 or MK11 at launch in your subscription service. Even having AAA publishers supporting a marginal platform at all will be a challenge (if they can't move units on your platform, why bother supporting it?). That's why you can't rely on those publishers. They need to be building their own library of first and second party games.