In the last few moments, Google hasannouncedit will be shuttering its internal development team for their streaming platform Stadia – less than a year after the new studio had beeninitially unveiled. The closure of SG&E, which spans two studios based in Montreal and California, affects more than 150 employees, though Google have iterated they will offer assistance in finding new positions, or at least places of employment, for those affected. Google’s main reason behind this move, it describes, stems from the increased time and monetary investment needed to make what it hopes would be “best-in-class games”.
“Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially.“Phil Harrison, Stadia’s Vice President and GM explained in the accompanying statement. “Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games.” As stated, though projects close to release at this given time may still see the light of day, they will be the only kind Stadia owners will likely see so far as first-party exclusivity. Jade Raymond, who was VP and Head of SG&E, is to step down from her role as a result.
The company’s business plan will now solely revolve around publishing third-party games on its streaming platform alone. Needless to say, Stadia has not had the best year-or-so since its original release back in November 2019. What started as a fairly lacklustre line-up of games made available on the platform, Stadia’s real potential as a streaming platform – and the alleged, marketed capabilities of 4K/60FPS streaming – were made bare very quickly after launch. Despite it being afairly-impressive piece of kiton a technical level, it was not withoutsome caveatsalong the way. And this is without talking about its competitors, with such services like Microsoft’s xCloud (on top of Xbox Game Pass' subscription service) and Nvidia’s GeForce Now releasing shortly thereafter – providing arguably better results in much the same market.
