I presume that they came out of the gate with the sensible perspective that if you build it, and there aren't any games on it, the players won't come. My guess is what changed is that the infrastructure is now viable as infrastructure, they don't need to prop it up with their own game releases.

Likely it’s the other way around and Stadia isn’t doing well enough to think that first party titles released in a few years time will pay development costs or necessarily have a platform to launch on.

IMO, it would be better to take the Nintendo approach and build out a couple generic games that highlight the best features of the system. Wii tennis and wii bowling ended up being my favorite Wii games.

It seems a generic game to demonstrate new hardware is more difficult than we might assume... anyone for Kinect Sports?

That... is very interesting. I didn't realize the timeline was that short; I was assuming the game studio had started around the same time Stadia had (multiple years ago).

First thought: it's probably pretty hard to start a new game studio during COVID? That article is dated March 4, oof.

But yeah, that's weird.