It's a funny joke, but imo Stadia shutting down has very little to do with the viability of cloud gaming as a business and a lot more to do with how google (mis)managed it.
I've seen it mentioned on here a lot that promotions/career stability inside google are heavily based around launching new products, and maintaining existing ones is kind of a dead end. Seems like the outcome reflects the incentives.
I don't think it's because they're not putting enough effort into it.
Like most large organisation they tend to approximate a small government and they're inherently incapable of using their resources efficiently. Every once and then they will acquire a start-up that works to give new blood to the behemot.
It's so frustrating to me from the perspective of a consumer because all someone needs to do is ship "Netflix, but for games" and they'll fucking kill. Charge a reasonable subscription fee but make the games free, and make sure everyone is aware of what it is and what it does.
Stuff like GEForce Now is already great for that "core" gamer market that wants to be able to use their existing steam library but play them on their phone on the go or whatever, but that's a pretty small market because most "core" gamers would never use a streaming service as their primary system so the market is fairly small (latency, resolution, quality etc is poor compared to native).
But nobody has properly targeted that more general "I want to play games with zero up front effort or knowledge" case yet. And I suspect that's a pretty big market.
I think part of the problem is the game studios and publishers have enjoyed immense profits, that have continued to grow. Nintendo just upped their base price to $70. I don't think they will let that level of profit go easily.
