Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?
Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.
Something like Stadia requires customers to believe that it won't go away. Google, given their long history of mediocre commitment to projects, already had considerable skepticism for Stadia from Day 1. Shuttering their internal studios is just one more signal to skeptical customers that Google really doesn't know what they are doing and doesn't care.
There are real costs to supporting yet another platform and if you don't believe the platform will generate sales for you, you're not going to expand the effort.
... and most publishers didn't even bother with Stadia, so what does that tell you about how publishers view Stadia?
>because zero customers got Stadia because of some hypothetical Google games that might come out for it at some point in the future.
And how many customers does Stadia actually have? It seems like Stadia was ignored by customers as well.
Third-party publishers don't care about sales of First-party games. They care about sales of their titles. This means they care about the viability of the platform. So First-party games are ultimately there to drive platform adoption. They do so, by 1) demonstrating the strengths of the platform to consumers and publishers (think WiiSport showing off how Wii controllers can be used), and 2) Providing a reason for consumers to actually adopt the platform. The audience for Stadia are gamers who probably have a console or are into PC gaming. If you're only offering a (tiny) library of games that are already out on other platforms, there isn't really an incentive to get Stadia and play the games you already own or can get ... but this time from the cloud! On the other hand, if I like Mario or Zelda, I have to get the Switch.
And by the way, for all the talk about all those partnerships Stadia will form - how is it that Microsoft was able to secure rights to hundreds of titles for their subscription-based Netflix-type gaming service (GamePass), and Stadia couldn't even muster more than a handful of games you have to buy individually? And speaking of Netflix, it's not surprise they have pivoted to creating original content to supplement their licensed library - care to guess why?
Stadia is a full fail.
FWIW, most people I know using Stadia are not the core gamers, but people who do not want to invest in a gaming PC or console (or worse, a gaming PC/console for each of the kids!). And they seem really happy with it, specifically because its a streaming thing, so I'm not as negative about it. (For myself, yeah, Gamepass would win if I'd get any of these things)
So I'm not sure what we're arguing about here. That publishers are clueless and don't realize that Stadia is a goldmine waiting to be tapped? That consumer don't know what they are missing by not buying into the platform? The platform is clearly failing.
Recently Ubisoft came on board and all of their recent titles are available on Stadia. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly great to play on Stadia, and i've read about a lot of people that got Stadia for it ( there was a promo, pre-order Cyberpunk and get a free Stadia controller and Chromecast Ultra). Those are not pretty significant growth points.
Good luck with that.
Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that.
Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market.
Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.
The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.
On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but:
https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/
“ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”
“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.
It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.
What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.
Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.
Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.