"Killed" (can't use it anymore), vs. "Discontinued" (might stop working on new operating systems at some point in the future).
People who never got rid of their NES can still play their games. If it breaks, they could buy another one, or maybe even try to fix it themselves.
Once a service shuts down, you don't really have anything to keep or to revisit. If there was a Stadia-only game in the future, could you somehow get a copy and run it on local hardware to keep playing if Stadia shut down? Could you do it easily.
Super Mario Bros, Classic Tetris, etc. they still have active communities of speed-runners, tournaments, etc. It's kind of weird that something with the level of cultural impact a videogame can have could all of a sudden disappear because it doesn't exist anywhere but in a centralized space outside the control of the people who experienced it.
Services have been profitable partially because it eliminates volatility in the amount of demand.
I play Super Mario brothers on my old Nintendo every couple of years. No revenue has been realized since 1986 or whatever. Just a payment for the NES and game.
Today, you can get unlimited access to virtually all music made in the last century or every show made by Disney ever for less than a subscription to some goofy text editor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
If you have an hour, I'd highly recommend giving this a watch. It is really sad to see any form of media die forever at the whim of a corporation. Games are especially prone to this unfortunately
Satellaview [1] was a "game streaming" service for SNES games in Japan way back when. Sure, it was more like the "game passes" of today, in that you paid a subscription to be able to access games for limited time.
Back then the games were actually sent and stored to the user's device, and played from there, with additional content in the form of high-quality music and audio streamed if you played in the correct times of day.
Now, since the games themselves have been backed-up by conscious individuals, the streamed data was inaccessible, which renders a bunch of the games practically unplayable since the company shut the service down.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
Not saying its like that with all the products on there, but one would have to make two entirely new lists to make a fair comparison.
Windows 95 -> 98 -> XP -> ...
Microsoft Works -> Office
COBOL -> ... -> Visual Studio
Unlike Google, where, for example, Reader is gone and they don't have any alternatives.
Works and Office were completely different product lines, and Works was free for the vast majority of its users, while Office was obviously not. It's not apples to apples.
COBOL was not in Visual Studio for ~20 years. Someone in 1996 couldn't have just fired up Visual Studio for Cobol after it was deprecated back then.