I don't agree with this. If you marketed it as a console you don't have to buy, then it makes sense to have its own store to buy games from.

Their fuckup was twofold:

First, marketing, or lack thereof. It launched at a PERFECT time. PS5 and Series X had just come out but you could not get one. It was also the beginning of the pandemic so everyone was stuck at home anyway.

So, of course, you'd do an advertising blitz telling people "Next Gen Gaming without the wait", right? Nope. They barely advertised it at all. I know very few people that ever knew Stadia existed.

Second, hardware support or, again, the lack thereof. It's a cloud service, so of course you'd want it on every device imaginable that people are have, right? Nope. You had to buy a Chromecast Ultra. It wouldn't even work on Google's own Google TV stuff until over a year later. Let alone Roku, Fire TV, etc... It made no sense. The whole point was supposed to be "just jump right on and play" but instead you had to go buy a niche hardware dongle that was in the middle of being phased out by Google already.

These were the two things that doomed Stadia. The service itself worked incredibly well. I played Cyberpunk on it at launch and it was awesome. Zero issues. But they made massive mistakes in actually understanding how to sell it as a consumer product. A complete failure in that regard.