> Because of course they will. I mean, it might cost them $10 annually to keep it up?
For large tech companies, it's most likely due to organizational reasons. Someone (likely some team) has to own any component/subsystem and be responsible for its maintenance. This obviously comes at a cost of the teams' other projects (read bonus OKRs), a direct consequence is that it becomes hard to permanently rehome a dead-end project like the Stadia controller, best you can hope is a temporary reprieve from a sympathetic team.
OT1H, I hear you and that was my suspicion too: they tossed the site into some nginx pod on some k8s cluster and those things don't live forever
But, for a discontinued product, isn't the information static and thus the GCS "turn this bucket into a webserver and don't bother me anymore" ( https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/static-website#example... ) seems like even less than the cited $10/yr. If the next question is "to which Project does the GCS bucket get billed?" then I'm pretty sure GCP gives away tiny storage to anyone with an email
I wonder why companies don’t just donate dead projects “to the community” more often: find a volunteer maintainer willing to take the project on; get them set up with ownership rights over a clone of the project on a non-corp-internal SCM; ensure all branding and IP is stripped from the project; and then just walk away. Link to this “third party” effort when anyone asks for support, mentioning that it is unsupported.
if the update was just an executable, it wouldn't require maintenance, just hosting. They chose to have the update use a webservice. That's on them.
I'm not mad about it. I use Linux, so I was able to update my controller on Chrome/Linux. I expected to need to borrow a Windows computer.
1. Google probably uses IP owned by the chip manufacturer (nxp).
2. Google, famously, uses a “monorepo”. One of the perks of this is that it allows a significant amount of code-reuse. They may not want to commit to sharing all the internal libraries they’ve built.
There’s also something awfully meta about Google discontinuing a support-page for their discontinued product…