The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.
The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.
Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.
They would only do that if the spinoff made them a noticeable amount of money. I suspect that is rarely the case.
Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here
Waymo is another spin off company.
The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.
They do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.
He may have real musical talent, but he'll never put in the blood, sweat & tears for the band to make it big.
Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.
Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.
You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.
Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.
Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.
For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.
The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.
Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.
1) Old-school Waterfall: evaluate, commit, and then build (Tesla, Apple, 2000s MSFT are examples)
2) Spray and Pray: build, evaluate, and then commit (Facebook, Amazon are examples)
Google is 2
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-so-few-games-on-goog...