Google is absolutely awful at marketing. Strada was really impressive tech that let me play AAA games almost seamlessly on my old Thinkpad, and none of my friends knew what Strada was because of how it was marketed.
Do you mean Stadia? Is it ironic you got the name wrong.
It wasn’t good enough. It purported to be great, but it had random connection issues. Given that destiny, a 1st person shooter, was their flagship game these flaws really jumped out.
You also really needed good internet. Like really good. Mine performed well sometimes when it was hardwired, but lagged regularly over WiFi.
I think these things were fixable, but that thing was dead within a month of launch. Google didn’t get fully behind it, so all the people that launched it got their promos, saw the writing on the wall, and transferred out.
> Given that destiny, a 1st person shooter, was their flagship game these flaws really jumped out.
In the earliest days of the internal dogfood, there was one game available: Doom (2016). This was very much intentional to make sure the streaming team focused on the twitchy latency-sensitive gaming segment.
> You also really needed good internet. Like really good.
What was more important than really good internet was stable bandwidth -- even a 4k session could work with a 25Mbps downlink, but very few providers will actually give you that guaranteed bandwidth. Similarly, having gigabit speeds from Comcast doesn't matter if you randomly see spikes of bufferbloat where your latency to the server jumps from 10ms to 100 (congrats, you've now dropped several frames).
WiFi similarly struggles to give you predictable delivery (apparently 20ms is a good number for wifi jitter, but that's pretty much the entire latency budget we had allotted for networking).
> all the people that launched it got their promos, saw the writing on the wall, and transferred out.
This is untrue. The shutdown announcement took the whole org by surprise (other than senior leadership). There were hundreds of engineers who were effectively told "you have X months to find a new position in the company, or leave".
It is true that Google didn't get fully behind it, senior leadership was worse than ineffective, marketing was terrible, and our reputation of killing off products meant it never reached the level of market adoption needed to sustain the product. But we had absolutely done our research to figure out the size of the addressable market and what levels of stable bandwidth users could sustain in practice, well before launch.
