No, it died because it was mismanaged as a product. There were technical issues when it launched but more importantly, there never was a good strategy for content. So, the catalogue was a combination of expensive and lacking in titles. I tried it out briefly because on paper it wasn't a bad idea. Except the free games were mostly not worth the money and the paid games were the same price as actually buying the games. But without the option of actually installing and owning them. And the one game I tried disconnected after a few minutes. So, I pulled the plug on the free trial.
Google has had a long history of messing up on the content front. They've made a lot of false starts with Youtube to get into paid content and it just never took off. Netflix is raking in billions from paid subscriptions. Not so much with Youtube. Few people pay for the premium content because there hardly is any worth paying for.
Where Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix and others succeeded, Google failed repeatedly to get a compelling offering of content together. It's a blind spot they have; they seem unable to come up with a coherent plan. They can do the tech but not the content. I'm not sure what it is. On paper the tech is a lot harder and they do have deep pockets. But when it comes to content they are a combination of stupid and frugal and somehow refuse to spend money on good content to lure in customers.
With Stadia, they had the right idea and all they would have had to do was two things: fix the bugs and get some amazing games in there. They dropped the ball on both fronts. So, it failed because they never gave it a proper chance to begin with.
Which was ultimately a tech driven chicken and egg problem. I know someone who is the lead for a popular game. They said they'd need to drop DirectX and effectively port the game to Linux to get Stadia working, which wasn't worth it for the user base.
Google could have easily paid some game studios to produce content. MS and Sony would not dream of launching new hardware without some decent launch titles. And it's not like Sony uses directx or windows. Neither does Nintendo.
Google came empty handed to what is a very competitive space. It's all about the games. That's not a technical problem but a doomed product strategy. They failed to engage with game developers to develop for their platform.
And of course valve had the same issue and and actually fixed it. Many games run fine on Linux these days with Steam. That could have worked for Google as well.
They kill so many products because they mismanage them and they then fail to get a lot of users. A lot of the things they kill simply aren't very good. Trust has nothing to do with it.
Google has had a long history of messing up on the content front. They've made a lot of false starts with Youtube to get into paid content and it just never took off. Netflix is raking in billions from paid subscriptions. Not so much with Youtube. Few people pay for the premium content because there hardly is any worth paying for.
Where Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix and others succeeded, Google failed repeatedly to get a compelling offering of content together. It's a blind spot they have; they seem unable to come up with a coherent plan. They can do the tech but not the content. I'm not sure what it is. On paper the tech is a lot harder and they do have deep pockets. But when it comes to content they are a combination of stupid and frugal and somehow refuse to spend money on good content to lure in customers.
With Stadia, they had the right idea and all they would have had to do was two things: fix the bugs and get some amazing games in there. They dropped the ball on both fronts. So, it failed because they never gave it a proper chance to begin with.