> Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten
Assuming that the industry would do all of their work for them, and that 99.99999% of the responsibility lied anywhere other than Google themselves seems like a very Google thing to do. It is, predictably, the kind of arrogance that begets a (perceived to be) floundering product like this.
The system launched with a pitiful fraction of the features they advertised that it could and would do. It launched with many important questions unanswered - often purposely, because everyone already knows the answers and those answers are bad and answering them could only hurt Google further.
It still lacks many of those features, too.
The story of how their reveal event's gaming history display case came to be - the one that showcased several great failures and blunders in gaming history, with Stadia as the next in line - is an excellent microcosm of the kind of decision making that went into the Stadia project as whole.
EDIT:
> But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution.
There have been many games on streaming services that did not make their way to early Stadia. Many that may still not be on Stadia - I haven't done the research lately, so I can't say.
Moving to a pure streaming solution - one where they don't have to provision and manage the hardware and all that sticky ugliness - is an absolute dream for many game publishers. Console hardware control is a small part of that dream, and it's less important than the rest. Stadia very well could have been the mass-accepted vehicle that delivered on the rest of that dream, had Google executed well.
To this day, I'm still astonished that they've dropped the ball, the slam dunk, this hard. They're limping along when they very well could have had their revolution, had they done a better job.