[amatriain]

There is a small but vibrant community that uses hangouts video conferencing to play tabletop roleplaying games, with the added bonus of having sessions automatically saved to youtube. There are also people with unmonetized youtube channels that consist of videopodcasts: hangouts video conferences between several people talking about whatever.

For these use cases restricting Hangouts Meet to gsuite customers means Hangouts is dead for them. I guess most people will switch to videoconferencing with Skype+OBS and streaming live to Twitch. It will work but it's harder to set up for non technical people.

Of course google does not owe me nothing and they can do as they like with their (until now) free product. But it's a pity that these common use cases that were possible with Hangouts are going to be discontinued.