When Google first announced its Stadia cloud gaming platform, it took a huge risk that would change the way people play games. It initially planned to release original games developed by Stadia’s in-house studio called SG&E (Stadia Games and Entertainment). Google’s latest blog post announces the company’s closing of the same studio.
Creating top-notch games from scratch takes many years and a lot of investment, and the cost is growing exponentially. Given our desire to build on Stadia’s proven technology and deepen our business partnerships, we have decided not to invest further in bringing exclusive content from our internal SG&E development team, beyond the games planned in the short term.
Google decides that its goal with Stadia is not to make the games, but rather the platform that allows people to play them. Google says most of SG&E’s teams will move to new roles within the company and Jade Raymond, a game industry veteran who will lead Google studios, has left the company.
Maybe Google didn’t expect to resort to dropping lucrative promotions around the time the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft were released. Or maybe Google didn’t realize how much time, effort, resources, and capital it takes to develop a video game to AAA level.
Google Stadia is not going anywhere, players can still play all games on both levels of Stadia and it will continue to bring third-party games to the cloud platform. Games that were slated for release in the “short term” will still arrive, but Google won’t invest beyond that.
We are committed to the future of cloud gaming and will continue to do our part to move this industry forward. Our focus remains on creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for our partners, bringing those experiences to life for people around the world.
Stadia was first launched without competition, but now over a year later the platform faces rivals from Microsoft with Game Pass and xCloud, GeForce Now from Nvidia, and Luna from Amazon. Stadia has had great success with the launch of Cyberpunk 20177 and even gave free controllers to those who pre-ordered the game. While still with bugs, it performed great on PC and Stadia, while it had more serious issues on consoles.
Source
