They burned that bridge so hard with Stadia.

"Check out this unbelievably cool product. It's a walled garden though that only works as long as we maintain it."

That's cool, but we're not spending actual money on something you're gonna kill.

"No, we promise: this time, it's different. We're not going to kill Stadia."

Nice try, Google. We've read the Boy Who Cried Wolf. We're not buying it.

"No, really. We know we've fucked up repeatedly in the past, but we pinky-promise. This is for the long term."

Okay, we'll dip one toe in, but only one, because we still don't trust you.

"Well, they aren't buying enough games on our service. I guess we should kill it after all."

WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!

As much as Stadia was a gut punch, at least for consumers Google did pretty well at making us whole (Full refunds for all Stadia purchases across the board) [0]

Obviously that's not much recompense if you were a game developer lured into some exclusive publishing deal, or even just someone buying a Stadia Controller, but c'est la vie I suppose

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/google-refunding-thr...

People who badmouth Stadia's shutdown expose themselves qw non-buyers. I'm yet to hear of a better product wind-down than Stadia: every single buyer got full refunds for games and hardware (i.e Chromecast). The firmware to convert Stadia controllers to plain ol' Bluetooth was a nice parting gift.