Google kills two-year “Pixel Pass” subscription after just 22 months

I never considered it because the game streaming is still pretty new and I’ve never forgiven Google for killing the news reader.

I knew it was doomed when they announced the business model. Subscription + buying the games was never going to fly. If they had gone with a Game Pass style subscription, it would have had a chance.

I will never move to GCP because of this. The reputation damage with Reader, Stadia, Hangouts, etc has made me not want to invest moving my companies services to their cloud. I doubt they are factoring this in when they shutter a service, but it is costing them millions. Google has shown it can't commit to supporting their products and services, so why bother spending time integrating with them and get locked in, just for it to be depreciated or discontinued immediately.

Both are also in heavily regulated industries with oversight from state utility commissions and the FCC, where simply trying to exit a market requires a whole proceeding before the agency/commission. They could announce that they'd be exiting the industry and selling its assets to a competitor, but that would have to clear antitrust hurdles and would take a while.

I think that means that effectively, they can't just "kill" these services but would have to sell to someone else, and the approval process itself could result in some concessions for the consumer, so that even Satan ISP would have limited power to really screw over the consumer.