Uh-Oh or Predictable? Google Stadia Game Dev Studio Shutting Down

By Ana Dascalescu

Posted on February 3, 2021

Google spent a looot of time and money trying to convince the world that Stadia, their game streaming service, was the future of entertainment.

Now, after more than a year of hyping the project, the company announced that it’s closing the Stadia game development studio.

Even more, the major figurehead of the project, the renowned Jade Raymond (of Ubisoft fame) has also left the studio, who had around 150 employees. Those employees are now being helped to find new positions.

Basically, from the wording of the announcement, two things are clear:

Google will no longer develop in-house games for Stadia, which probably means the existing projects it made weren’t profitable

Google will continue Stadia for a little while longer as a “platform”, hoping other developers will create games for it.

Here’s the official explanation from Google’s own platform:

“In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players. We see an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia’s advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools. We believe this is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry.”

What does this mean for you, if you’re a Stadia user?

Google reassures people that the platform will go on and get more 3rd party games, just not Google-developed ones.

However, since the company itself says the investment in games didn’t exactly pay off, that doesn’t exactly spell reassurance for other game developers.

Google also says they’re “committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward”.

We’ll just have to wait and see what that means but, right now, it would be safe to not invest financially or emotionally in Stadia.

After all, the company is famous for experimenting with features and projects, then ruthlessly cancelling them when they’re not profitable enough (even loved services like Google Play Music!).