Stadia was dead-on-arrival (regardless of any technical merits), the uncertainty, money and amount of work required on games leaves developers skittish about unreliable platforms (or companies). Especially with something as a new techonology like with streaming games where people were more or less rightfully concerned about latency.
All their product killings had already gotten someone to register the killedbygoogle.com domain on 2018-09-12 , that's a month before Google Stadia was even in closed beta. People were already joking about when they'd close Stadia when it was released.
Adding insult to injury, everyone saw the absolute fuckup with the Terraria developer. You have an indie developer (that iirc was _featured_ in the Stadia promotions) who loses his work Google accounts making it impossible to work and in frustration announces that the game is dead (apparently his account and the game were re-instated but after a month people had lost track and the image damage was done).
And yes, Google had some big-name contracts outside of just indies, but viability of a platform is always evaluated by it's entire scope (and iirc EA wasn't on board from day 1).
Google has a huge image issue with being humanly unreachable, we accepted with when Google was a cool perky upstart with a do-no-evil creed that hadn't messed up enough yet, but it's far harder to swallow from a big company that we know are only doing it's automated account management to save money (and is so insulated that it takes a _month_ to unfreeze an account of someone that is even supposed to be your partner!).
Idiocy was expecting game developers would blindly jump into GNU/Linux, Vulkan, with a stone age development experience versus what game console devkits and Windows look like.
I wasn't surprised given how bad Google Android talks at game conferences tend to be, so they put up with Google's lack of game development bones.
Android is only different because game developers don't have a option if they want to cover both top mobile platforms.
Android GDK is still a joke versus what Apple puts out, let alone Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
simply not true. Stadia had full integration into MSVS in build and debug flows. Even 'lets show a build to management' flows there were better than Windows (i was in shock myself). And for long time during Covid Stadia builds were the easiest way to get playtests up and running at home.
But I agree with your other point that investing into porting and Vulkan renderers was a huge waste of dev resources.
I found the Stadia developer experience to be pretty solid. The visual studio integration was top notch and worked, with a few minor exceptions, without a hitch. Having worked with all major gaming platforms to come out in the last two decades, Stadia was certainly not the worst.
Shortly before Stadia was ramped down, there was a talk about Stadia team starting the Stadia Porting Toolkit, as they weren't getting enough studios interested in porting their XBox/Windows engines into Stadia, versus what they would get out of GeForce Now and Cloud Game Pass.
While it certainly has helped to spread the spectrum of managed languages used across an OS stack, something that Microsoft failed at with Longhorn due to internal politics between DevDiv and WinDev, it has definitly plenty of warts, starting by the expectation to wait for the first set of bug fixes afer each "stable" SDK/IDE release, somehow all the previews, canary and beta are never enough.
Imho the thing that killed stadia was the pricing model. Buying games but not owning them outright* is a recipe for failure, especially for a company known for killing off services (and I say that as a xoogler with very mixed feelings). Stadia should have just had a monthly subscription fee.
*Yes, with DRM, copy protection, online only, etc, it's debatable whether anyone owns any game. But conventional game ownership or even steam style is still _more_ ownership than the stadia case.
They killed the user-facing product because by all accounts it was a flop. The tech is still there but they're pivoting to a game-streaming SaaS/middleware thing for B2B.
