"One of the reasons porting games to Stadia was slow was Google's decision to program games in Linux instead of C++, the language used by Sony and Microsoft."
#Stadia's ultimate demise may have been inevitable, but so were all the articles proclaming its myriad fatal flaws... from the perspective of a "gaming journalist" who thinks that Linux is a programming language.
@john_b Though I will say I got a chuckle out of this guy calling Linux a programming language :)
@lenaoflune Oh yeah, Google definitely had an uphill battle given their (rightfully-earned) reputation.
In a way, though, the popular media coverage of the service kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy, championed by loud voices who didn't understand the tech or even bother to give it a try.
The experience of playing games was (and continues to be) unrivaled among other cloud streaming services. The tech was sound.
Google just needed to stick with it, but that's not in their character.
@john_b Alas, "good tech, but dropped the second it doesn't generate massive growth" is the product story of Google. I'm not sure how they have any product owners left :)
This is one of the big problems Google has in the enterprise space, too (along with "GCP is so complex you need people with Ph.D.s to use it"). GCP is viewed as the "I hate Microsoft and won't pay my competitor, Amazon" solution, and they grudgingly lose customers to Azure and AWS when they "Google" (kill) key GCP components.