> Nobody was going to pay full price for games that evaporate the moment the servers shut down

Eh that's true for Steam, Epic, GoG, et al. If anything, regular people trust Google way more than those other companies since they use the browser/search engine/mail/youtube every single day

I do think it was doomed from the start, but only because the subset of people that have high speed internet, disposable income, like gaming and DON'T already own a PC or console is a very very small market