It's only been a failure because of the lack of games. The tech (at least to me) feels fine. Which is honestly the worst part—it _could_ be a success but the business side is broken.
Which, to be frank, is the one reason someone would use Stadia - to play games.
But a lot of people expected it would fail due to network issues, lag/delay, etc. If the tech was terrible, the good games wouldn't have been enough to save the project.
Compare to Sony PlayStation 1 (which was a phenomenal success):
Since Sony had no experience in game development, the company turned to third-party game developers. Recently released consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered underwhelming sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers.[22] With initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment,[41] as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone, the company secured the launch of influential new games such as Ridge Racer and Mortal Kombat 3.[22][5]
The project hasn't gotten far enough to tell yet. Presumably shutting down their internal studio will help them focus on the platform rather than on making games. Much like Sony, it seems like this would have been the better strategy to start with.
Did they expect to make money instantly without massive investment? Seems very shortsighted.
In top of that, after seeing Cyberpunk 2077 get the closest thing to an exclusive launch they could possibly hope for, I imagine they looked at the results decided that the problem is not going to be solved by one or two great games that only work on Stadia. They need many games and for that they need third party.
... said no one about any Google side project before, ever.
Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.
I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.
Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.
That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.
But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.
Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.
To me, that put Stadia in an odd place where only the more casual players without a gaming device would sign up, or those with enough money to pay twice because they spend a lot of time away (but with good internet).
Publishers changed their licence agreement to exclude streaming or cloud.
Since you are free to change the licence at anytime you like, they did. My bet is we will see white labelled streaming services from Blizzard and co.
We will have dozens of gaming streaming services, much like film streaming services...
And any way, NVIDIA is in no position to challenge the games industry on such things - they are very much in bed with them and would lose enormously if games suddenly all went for a big 'best on AMD' logo.
... which makes shutting down gaming studio part of it even weirder.
They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.
Still, nobody ports to Stadium unless they're paid upfront.
Yes, they do some OSS work; some of it is even good quality; most of it is not, and is open sourced only to increase market grab (looking at you, Android). They are just a mess. We can all cherry pick counter examples, because of how messy they are.
There are many reasons Android and Switch games don't get ported to Linux; having to rewrite the game from scratch is not one of them.
Except they misteriously stop releasing Linux versions of their games.