gamingbible.com wrote:

A Reddit post on r/Gaming has been reminding everyone that Google originally teased the announcement of the Stadia by comparing it to failed products. A pop-up display shows a progression of three old game relics often referred to as failures before teasing the release of the Stadia.

The first is the Dreamcast from Sega, which is perhaps the most successful out of the three. Released in 1998-1999 the Dreamcast seriously underperformed, partly because it was quickly in competition with the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube - all consoles that went on to become a different level of legendary. The Dreamcast only lasted a couple of years before being discontinued and was Sega's final attempt at being a big player in console hardware.

Next is the Power Glove from Nintendo. If you're familiar with current Nintendo products, you'd know the company often does gimmicky designs really well. The Wii was a bit of a gimmick, as well as the Switch. Both novelties in design, but have succeeded from unusual concepts that other brands can't pull off. However, the Power Glove didn't do as well. It's like a really bad PitBoy but for just two games on the NES. Notoriously hard to use and ridiculous looking, it's now only good for slapping an enemy across the face with to challenge them to a gaming duel.

And finally, there is the game ET. This title is legendary in how terrible it's rumoured to be. A rushed mess of a game that was so awful and unplayable, a lot of the stock was dumped in the desert to hide away from the world.

So why, oh why, did Google decide to compare the Stadia to these products? Was it foreshadowing? Was it perhaps a recognition that the platform looked unusual from the offset? Who knows. But now that the Stadia situation has become rather depressing, it seems to have completed the cycle of products on that display from all those years ago.

cmrdporcupine wrote:

cmrdporcupine 1 hour ago | parent | prev | next [–]

I worked with/beside the team that worked on the firmware for this controller, and they poured a lot of heart and soul into it, all good people working in a rather trying situation, and the engineering behind it is solid. I think a lot of them are working on Matter now (https://developers.home.google.com/matter/overview)
Stadia itself seemed doomed to me from day one, and I pushed back multiple times to avoid getting involved working on it because I didn't want to get dragged in. (I did work for a bit on the component that did the video receiving for Stadia streams inside the Chromecast; taking what another team did and heavily optimizing it and refactoring it etc.)

In any case, my cynicism was confirmed and the project killed -- but the worst thing is that in the round of layoffs last year they seemed to let go many (most?) of the people still working on it or heavily associated with it, instead of transferring them off to other teams like Google normally would. Kind of nasty.

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