When Stadia announced I think the general consensus was cautiously optimistic. They promised a lot, 4k game streaming on any device - seemingly anywhere in the

When Stadia announced I think the general consensus was cautiously optimistic. They promised a lot, 4k game streaming on any device - seemingly anywhere in the world. A lot of people familiar with the challenges were especially skeptical. But the marketing kept going with its promises. Now it comes out and many of these fears are validated - it only really works in tightly controlled situations with very specific types of games. The sticker price and ridiculous marketing remains. The current negative sentiment as seen on HN is about Google dropping products. But I think the negative sentiment outside of our bubble is due to Google blundering into this with dishonest marketing. Google tried to force this into a viral success on day 1 and that's not going to happen. This strategy also eroded trust that it will be fixed to the point it was originally promised either. Finally, it didn't help that they didn't vertically integrate the games themselves and are charging full price for the game on top of the service. Microsoft is a good example of how it may have been done, by investing heavily in studios and exclusives to get the people going. To be fair though, Microsoft has decades of experience with this with xbox alone. EDIT: Because of a sibling comment I just want to mention how I think this may end. I think Google is now between a rock and a hard place, they either dump immense resources to get it right, or they dump the product and face even worse consumer reputation decline (this time in an entirely new market segment!). I suppose there may be a third alternative of putting it on life support. Either way there is no clear win here, I do empathize with the team which probably has a lot of passionate members who just want to do a good job. It'll be a good PM lesson to watch how it shakes out.