I think by far the biggest factor was a lack of actual commitment. As the article says, Google has extremely deep pockets but, when evaluating how effective the

I think by far the biggest factor was a lack of actual commitment. As the article says, Google has extremely deep pockets but, when evaluating how effective they are, you must also consider that they do not open them widely or for long for anything. Breaking into this space, even if games required no porting whatsoever, would require a long period of putting up with large losses on the project before it became widely used (see epic game store, which had 10x the commitment from epic that google had on stadia, had basically zero porting effort required, and is still yet to make a profit), and google is just not capable of that, it seems (the perception that google does this is of course a partly self-fulfilling prophecy).