I warned people not to buy games on Stadia. I specifically told them this was going to happen. Nobody should trust Google for anything long term at this point, ever.
I got a full refund for the Stadia games and hardware - which I got to keep (free 4k Chromecast and Bluetooth controller!). The shutdown of Stadia could not have been handled better - if Google handled all their other service sunsets like they did with Stadia, I'd be more inclined to take a risk with Google.
Packing a controller and a Chromecast was the epitome of traveling light, and served me very well when I had to travel a lot for work. I could resume my games on hotel room TVs, or even on an underpowered laptop. Stadia's UX was frictionless - the couple of times I tried Nvidia's streaming, it felt a lot clunkier
I think it was either here or Reddit that left a comment predicting that Stadia would eventually be canned - my boyfriend wanted to play a game that was only being released on the platform so I ended up getting it for his birthday when it came with a Chromecast.
Well - life got in the way so he never actually got to play the game much but Google did refund our Stadia/Chromecast purchase so we got a Chromecast out of it at least.
I remember reading a comment from a dev of one of the Stadia exclusives here who was very upset to learn that their work moot after it was announced here; can't imagine how deflating that must have felt for them.
I have a friend who ported his game to Stadia. They got as far as having a release date published on the Stadia store before they encountered a final check - Stadia requires games to be playable only with controller, and his game needed a keyboard. All of the testing was done on their web client, everything worked, but because it wasn't pure controller compatible, it was canned at the last minute.
Literally months of effort and a six figure advance sum, and Google didn't even bother with an extremely obvious checkbox.
Google's willingness to abandon so many of its projects may be disappointing but to me it's a positive signal regarding their ability to avoid sunk-cost thinking, which is the #1 killer of mammoth companies.
