They did produce something of value, Stadia, but instead of investing in it further with some exclusive games to show off its capabilities and lure more people and developers in … or just outright signing a deal to paying for the development cost to port some hits or Call of Duty to Stadia, they wrote it off, refunded everything, and shut it down.
It’s a major fail, they tried next to nothing to fix their messaging issues, failed to invest in areas that would’ve made a difference, and didn’t stick with it to challenge people’s beliefs that Stadia was going to be shut down.
They should’ve:
Made a guarantee that if they shut down within the next 10 years, every game you play will be refunded in full.
Did a hardware upgrade to bring Stadia past consoles.
Never shut down their in house studios and invested even more into bringing other studios in.
Really upsold the cheat free experience (with no client side anticheat spyware necessary) and the ability for the platform to make even the games with the worst netcode stable multiplayer experiences.
Made something like steam workshop for Stadia and worked with at least one developer to prove that it works (they said they were open to mods, but they needed developers to take interest)
Potentially resolved the “you have to buy all your games again” concern by offering to buy everything on the platform in your steam, xbox, or PlayStation library 1 time (so you couldn’t “import” multiple times or buy new games on another platform and then import them for free).
Imagine if people literally just pressed a few buttons on their old gaming computer and suddenly could play a bunch of their steam library in the cloud with better graphics for free on any device they wanted. I can’t imagine folks wouldn’t have stuck around with that kind of a deal.