Google has, once again, dropped a major project not long after it has launched. No, Stadia isn’t being killed off, but don’t expect to see any first party games at any point soon.
Google Closes Stadia Gaming & Entertainment Studios
If you signed up to Stadia based on the promise that you’d be getting some great first-party gaming content, you will be sorely disappointed.
Why? Because a post on The Keyword states it is closing Stadia Gaming & Entertainment (SG&E) Studios. You know, the ones who were actually developing the games themselves? This means that there will only be third-party games available on Stadia going forward.
Why Is Google Closing SG&E?
Phil Harrison is the Vice President (VP) and General Manager (GM) of Google Stadia. The reason he gives for closing SG&E is:
Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially.
So, it would seem that the VP and GM of a major gaming platform hadn’t realized how expensive it is to develop and publish AAA titles. This strikes us as a slight oversight, to say the least.
Harrison continues:
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.
Well, there you have it. If you subscribe to Google Stadia, then you won’t get any first party titles from its in-house development team.
What Happens to Stadia, Now?
According to the Google blog post, not much. The service will remain as it is. Hopefully, with significant improvements, now that Google has diverted the cash it thinks it was wasting on making games for its own gaming platform.
It isn’t like users are going to notice the deficit of SG&E’s absence really, though, is it? There isn’t a single first party title on the entire service.
Not only that, but what are these “near-term planned games” Harrison is talking about? We don’t have titles, we don’t have genres, we don’t have release dates. So it remains for us to see whether these games even arrive.
Going forward, it just looks like we’ll be comparing Google Stadia with Nvidia GeForce Now and other similar cloud gaming platforms.
The End for Google Stadia?
Who knows how this is going to affect Google Stadia in the long-term. We can make assumptions, but this might actually be the change Stadia needs.
As we say, there are no first party titles on the service, so it isn’t like subscribers have anything to miss, they’re just left with a handful of Google’s broken promises instead. Let’s just hope this doesn’t spell the end for Google Stadia altogether.