Google CEO Sundar Pichai himself introduced Stadia back in March 2019 at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. However, four months after Stadia's launch, the service is still extremely light on games: Just 28 titles are available as of this week.

"We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it."

It's a statement we heard echoed by several prominent indie developers and two publishing executives we spoke with for this piece.

"It's that there isn't enough money there," one of the publishing executives we spoke with said. The offer was apparently "so low that it wasn't even part of the conversation."

But Stadia doesn't have a large audience to reach — at least not yet -- so Google must create that incentive for developers. And the people we spoke with said, outside of money, there wasn't much reason to put their games on Stadia.

"If you could see yourself getting into a long term relationship with Google?" one developer said. "But with Google's history, I don't even know if they're working on Stadia in a year. That wouldn't be something crazy that Google does. It's within their track record."

This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.