Today Google announced it will shut down its in-house Stadia game development studios, with both offices in Montreal and Los Angeles to be closed. Also, Jade Raymond, ex-Ubisoft and EA who was the head of the studios, is set to leave Google completely too.
This does not mean that Stadia is a failure, however, Google is refocusing for Stadia to be a streaming service for games from other publishers only.
Here’s Google’s announcement piece:
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.
Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially. 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 for all Stadia gamers and fans, nothing is changing, all games remain intact and the company reiterates that it will continue to bring more titles to the service from 3rd-party publishers.
