I tried it. It worked reasonably well when wired and pretty terribly wireless, which isn’t that surprising. The free starter kits they gave out came with a Chromecast Ultra for a reason: it had Ethernet on the power brick.

On the other hand, I hated it ideologically from the start. You bought games that were only available on their service and could only play with an active Internet connection. That’s also to be expected. Not ideal, but not a big deal in itself so long as you know what you’re getting into. What isn’t okay is that you could lose access to the service permanently and there was no guarantee you would be compensated in any way whatsoever. At most they gave vague “don’t worry about it wink wink” answers when asked in Reddit AMAs. Fortunately they did refund everyone when they shut it down, but they were under no legal obligation to do so. People who bought in were lucky. I wish I could say it was purely out of goodwill, but it’s more likely that a bean counter at Google decided it was cheaper to refund everyone than to shoulder the bad press from not doing so.

Thank goodness there were also no notable exclusives on the service. The idea of games just completely disappearing from history just because Google got bored with a product like they always do is nauseating. It’s bad enough that they bought out Typhoon Studios only to pretty much immediately shut them down. Again, thank goodness they were able to rise from the ashes and reform the studio under a new name.