Every company has a certain threshold revenue size for new BU initiatives -- for a company Google's size it's going to be measured in the billions, which probab

Every company has a certain threshold revenue size for new BU initiatives -- for a company Google's size it's going to be measured in the billions, which probably didn't seem unreasonable if they assumed game streaming would be a $5bn+ market by 2024 and they'd have a major piece of that. Instead, looks like Stadia was earning a bit south of $100mm/year (with likely unfavorable marginal economics), so well below where they would have wanted this to land. The problem, of course, is that doing this is going to have downstream impacts if Google wants to stay in the gaming tech market (and some ancillary impacts on the perception of their stability as a tech partner in general). Whether that's worth the burn rate on the BU is a question that presumably was asked and answered, and led to this shutdown. By contrast, of course, AWS is willing to keep solutions going essentially forever, even if they're on life support; while players like Microsoft or Intel are a lot more cautious about new BU initiatives in the first place. Google seems to be in a questionable middle ground of aggressively greenlighting new initiatives, but being unwilling to take the financial hit of sustaining them even if they don't pan out as desired.