Google Stadia

Cause of death

Killed by indifference

Made by

Google

Nobody would buy a games library from a company with a reputation for switching things off.

Stadia worked. The streaming technology was genuinely good, and reviewers said so. What it could not overcome was the reasonable suspicion that Google would lose interest, which made buying full-price games on the platform feel like a bet rather than a purchase. That suspicion proved correct in three years and two months, and Google refunded every game and every piece of hardware on the way out.