On September 29, Google announced that it was shutting down Stadia, its cloud-based video game streaming service launched in 2019. “And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” the company stated in a blog post. Nobody gasped in surprise.

The gaming community believed Stadia’s fate was pretty much sealed after Google shut down its Stadia studios in Montreal and Los Angeles in February last year and started looking for companies to licence Stadia’s tech to. Jade Raymond, an industry veteran and co-creator of ‘Assassin’s Creed’ who had been chosen to lead Google’s gaming development division quit around the same time. 

Google’s long list of product launches and failures

This wasn’t Google’s first rodeo. Stadia joined the long list of products and services that Google had launched and abandoned. Such is the size of the list of discontinued products and services (234 to be precise), that there are entire sites devoted to them like killedbygoogle.com and The Google Cemetery. While some of them like Stadia have been transitioned (the tech will continue to live in other Google products like YouTube, Google Play), some are shut down unceremoniously deserting the user base. 

The famed culture of innovation that Google breeds may have ironically led to a flawed process in testing. A few leaked notes of insiders from within the company that are making rounds on Twitter since Stadia shut down certainly seem to point towards this. The company allegedly favours product managers for promotions if they are involved with the launch of a product or service regardless of the maintenance involved with them.

Culture of innovation or waste?

A discussion on Y Combinator around the subject also mentioned how this was encouraging engineers to chase promotions. “The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III and above, explicitly talks about impact on the organisation and the business. This has consequences on the kind of teams people try to join and the kind of work they choose to do. Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it’s become an inside joke. Any team that isn’t launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that isn’t going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that doesn’t “demonstrate technical complexity” will be either rejected or trumped up,” a user mentioned. 

This seems especially true in hindsight when considering products like Google Glass which created a giant buzz at launch but was eventually dropped. While the smart glasses at first glance appeared revolutionary, there were glaring hiccups with the product — it retailed for USD 1,500 and emitted carcinogenic radiation close to the head. 

Insiders believe that this could be due to the company’s ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach which gives developers total freedom. The logic behind this was simply that developers were initially allowed to “throw stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn’t, it kills it immediately”.

Reputation of mistrust among consumers

This is a marked difference from the way of working in other tech conglomerates. Some commenters mentioned how companies like Amazon have rarely had any such anomalies due to a strong operational culture. “At Amazon, a disproportionate number of the most senior engineers work on very low-level things, and are quite hands-on involved in maintenance and fixes. This comes from a primarily operational culture. Amazon has a very operational culture, which means they do reward running things well,” a commenter stated. 

More serious consequences of this scarring of their reputation were felt during Stadia’s launch. Stadia was inherently a very cool idea – a game streaming platform for gamers without any hardware from one of the world’s biggest tech companies should be exciting for the gaming community. Instead, there was a whole lot of scepticism. 

The general belief in Stadia’s resilience was such that at an interview with Kotaku, Phil Harrison, the former head of Stadia and Google VP was asked whether Stadia will even stay around for more than two years given its history at the launch for the platform. Harrison, on his part, was honest while responding, “I understand the concern,” he said. He added that Google had spent big money on Stadia already and it was in no way a “trivial product”. While nobody said it out aloud, we know what everyone was thinking – the company had spent generously on several other past projects with some being as crucial as Google+. And they had all ended the same way Stadia had.