Google has a history of kicking off ambitious new ideas, services, and initiatives with a lot of bombast and bluster, only to drop them unexpectedly in their infancy. While that’s not what they’re quite doing with Stadia, a service that hasn’t ever really managed to get off the ground the way they may have hoped it would, it seems they’re de-emphasizing their efforts as makers of video games. 

In a recent update, Stadia boss Phil Harrison confirmed that Google will now be focusing its efforts on the service more “as a platform”, and that while Google will continue to invest in Stadia’s technology, their first party game development studios under the Stadia Games and Entertainment banner will be shutting down. 

“We launched Stadia with the goal of making your favorite games instantly available wherever you want to play them,” Harrison writes. “With the recent successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia, gameplay on all types of devices, including iOS, growing our slate of YouTube integrations, and our global expansions, it’s clear that Stadia’s technology has been proven and works at scale. Having games streamed to any screen is the future of this industry, and we’ll continue to invest in Stadia and its underlying platform to provide the best cloud gaming experience for our partners and the gaming community. This has been the vision of Stadia since the beginning.

“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.”

This means that while first party games close to completion or those that are due out in 2021, anything beyond that is a no-go. Kotaku states in a report that according to several sources familiar with this transition, Google has scrapped and cancelled a number of upcoming projects internally (and based on previous statements, they certainly had plans for plenty of upcoming projects).

Phil Harrison also confirms that Jade Raymond, who was the head of Stadia Games and Services, will be leaving Google.

“Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially,” Harrison says. “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. With the increased focus on using our technology platform for industry partners, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Google to pursue other opportunities. We greatly appreciate Jade’s contribution to Stadia and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors. Over the coming months, most of the SG&E team will be moving on to new roles. We’re committed to working with this talented team to find new roles and support them.”

Harrison goes on to provide assurances in his update that Stadia owners will continue to receive content from third party developers and publishers, and that Google will continue to invest in Stadia as a platform.

“You can continue playing all your games on Stadia and Stadia Pro, and we’ll continue to bring new titles from third parties to the platform,” he writes. “We’re committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward. Our goal remains focused on creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for our partners, bringing these experiences to life for people everywhere.”

Last year, Google opened up a new first party game development studio under the leadership of former God of War developer SIE Santa Monica boss Shannon Studstill. That studio, too, meets with an untimely closure. 

Google Stadia has a lot of issues, and the biggest among them is a lack of games- more specifically, a lack of exclusives. While Google have a temporary fix for that in the form of timed third party exclusives, what they really need is first party content. They already have one studio for that, led by Jade Raymond, and now, they’ve added another first party studio to their Stadia Games and Entertainment umbrella.

As they recently announced, the second studio, based in Playa Vista, California, will be led by Shannon Studstill. For those who know, Studstill, who has been at PlayStation for many years, was the head of SIE Santa Monica up until her new position at Google. She served as an executive producer on God of War (2018), and had a huge role to play in the franchise’s revival.

“The new Playa Vista studio will focus on delivering exclusive games, using new gameplay mechanics, creative ways to play together and unique interaction models that we’re just starting to explore,” writes Raymond, VP and Head of Stadia Games and Entertainment. “While we’re not ready to share specific game plans yet, rest assured we are listening to what gamers want and adding our own Stadia twists to create new IP and experiences.”

While it’s going to take a long while for the studio to be fully set up and staffed, and then for them to create something entirely new from scratch, this is what Google needs to be doing to turn the Stadia ship around, so it’s good to see them taking the right steps.

Not too long ago, Raymond claimed that down the line, Stadia will be receiving new first party exclusives every year. Read more on that through here.

Plenty of people are skeptical about the upcoming launch of Stadia, Google’s cloud streaming service, with things such as its not-so-wireless controller and its weird first-come-first-serve shipments attracting some criticism, but Google clearly has big plans for Stadia. And while a lot of that has to do with the benefits a properly implemented cloud gaming ecosystem could provide, they’re focusing on the actual games themselves as well.

Third party support for the service is already looking pretty solid, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM Eternal, Marvel’s Avengers, and many more confirmed to be launching on the service, but Google is also working on building its own first party portfolio.

“We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners,” Jade Raymond, VP at Google and head of Stadia Games and Services said recently while speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry. We have, in fact, already seen a glimpse of exclusive content by third parties, with Orcs Must Die! 3 having been announced as a timed exclusive for Stadia.

With first party games though, Google is looking to ensure that the content it puts out on its service is built to leverage its unique advantages, and cannot be found elsewhere.

“It’s very important for first-party games, in my opinion, to be games that wouldn’t be possible on any other platform,” Raymond said. “I think that’s what’s really exciting and why we’re building out the first-party teams.”

According to Raymond, in fact, it won’t be too long before we begin seeing exclusive first party content on Stadia. She says there will be a number of new exclusives released for the service each year, and that number will only grow with every year as time passes.

“It is a long term view that Google is taking,” she said. “For a big bet and a huge new IP that’s going to fully leverage the cloud, it may be several years. But we do have quite a few exclusive games in the works that will demonstrate some of the exciting things about the platform all along the path. It won’t be four years before gamers get to see the new exclusive, exciting content. There will be some coming out every year, and more and more each year.”

Google’s said plenty about the power of the cloud and what it could do for games, from its impact on multiplayer titles to the responsiveness on games in general, and while that stuff is theoretically exciting, what things are ultimately going to boil down to when people make a decision on whether to invest in Stadia is if the service has enough quality content. If Google can deliver on Raymond’s promises, the future might look bright.

Stadia is launching – in some parts of the world, at least – on November 19.

Streaming across a variety of devices in 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with HDR! 8K support…eventually (even though the technology has very little market presence, especially compared to 4K TVs)! Seamlessly play on multiple devices, whether it’s your phone, web browser, tablet or TV!

"It was a venerable who’s who of impressive features, especially when you consider that Google Stadia is launching this year."

Low latency and integration with current services like YouTube Gaming, where someone could join a streamer’s game instantly! Heck, you could watch a trailer for a game and immediately hit “Play Now” to experience it for yourself in your browser.

Hardware that uses an x86 CPU, a custom AMD GPU with 10.7 TFLOPs of power and 56 compute units, 16 GB of RAM, up to 484 GB/s in bandwidth and SSD support!

Local co-op play! Full cross-platform play! The support of Unreal Engine and Unity! Google Assistant Integration for looking up walkthroughs and guides (you know who you are) without leaving your game! A first party games studio headed by former Assassin’s Creed executive producer Jade Raymond! Real-time cloud-based destruction! DOOM Eternal running at 4K/60 FPS?!

It was a venerable who’s who of impressive features, especially when you consider that Google Stadia is launching this year. Though it will have a limited roll-out in the United States, UK, Europe and Canada, that still translates to hundreds of millions of consumers out of the gate. It also allows for Google to have a sufficient audience to stress-test the platform before it rolls out to the rest of the world.

"For all of Google’s assurances and testing, we won’t know the real world performance of Stadia until the platform is actually out running in the real world."

However, through all the hype and intriguing features with names like State Share and Style Transfer, one can’t help but feel skepticism at what Google is trying to accomplish. I personally felt that a lot more time was needed simply to flesh out and demonstrate each individual feature (cross-platform play alone is a massive deal). But throughout it all, more pressing questions began to emerge.

First off, even for a company as large as Google, infrastructure will be a serious issue. We’ve seen games under major companies like Rockstar, Activision and EA struggle with hundreds of thousands to millions of players logging in at once. Stadia will be built on top of the current Google data center infrastructure but you’re still talking about hundreds of millions of players logging in, streaming and sharing games, that too in just a handful of countries.

How will Stadia fare in regions like Australia which are notorious for their internet woes? Or India which has comparatively less data centers available than the United States or United Kingdom but significantly higher population than both combined? Of course, if we’re talking about making low latency streaming a reality, then services like 4G have to be taken into account. How does Stadia fare in that regard, especially when its requirements are “a streaming rate of 15Mbps, latency below 40ms, and data loss below 5%” as per Tech Radar?

For all of Google’s assurances and testing, we won’t know the real world performance of Stadia until the platform is actually out running in the real world. Servers going down or chugging under excessive load is one thing. Glitches and bugs are another. Even if we assume the best possible scenario, there’s no denying that Stadia will launch with its fair share of hiccups and take a while to properly stabilize. GameSpot’s Michael Higham already reported noticeable input lag for DOOM Eternal on Stadia at GDC so even in a controlled environment, there are things that need to be worked out.

"Logic dictates that Google will partner with with the relevant storefronts for specific titles. So if you wanted to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it would be through Uplay and likewise for any games the Epic Games Store."

While Google will be showcasing its catalog of Stadia games in the Summer, there’s still the pressing issue of cost. Will Google offer a subscription service akin to Netflix for games? Will consumers be able to purchase games separately? How does ownership work, especially considering you’re not actually downloading and “keeping” the game per say? What kind of licenses are at play and how will they transfer between multiple devices? Will these games be available on the Play Store? If so, how does that affect storefronts like the Epic Games Store, Steam, GOG and so on? What will be Google’s cut if that happens?

After all, if you could just stream games like DOOM Eternal or potentially RAGE 2 on to your browser, why would you ever bother with the Bethesda Launcher? If you could play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on Chrome, then why would you bother heading to the Epic Games Store for, say, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 if that also becomes available? Logic dictates that Google will partner with with the relevant storefronts for specific titles. So if you wanted to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it would be through Uplay and likewise for any games the Epic Games Store.

Regarding Jade Raymond, who was named the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, one can appreciate her contributions to gaming. She helped bring about the Assassin’s Creed franchise and was also a factor in creating Watch Dogs. However, for all intents and purposes, Raymond’s recent track record is comparatively less impressive. She headed EA’s Motive Studio that developed the single-player campaign for Star Wars Battlefront 2 (which was heavily criticized for its writing and length). Motive was also involved with Visceral’s Ragtag, a Star Wars title helmed by Uncharted writer Amy Hennig. Motive would be taken off of the project to work on Battlefront 2 but Ragtag was eventually rebooted as an open world game under EA Vancouver. That open world title has since been canceled but Raymond would leave Motive several months before that.

To be fair, we don’t currently know how Stadia Games and Entertainment will function or what Raymond’s involvement in the creative direction of franchises will be. There are other pressing questions though. What is the extent of resources that the studio will have for development? Companies like Sony have a fairly large array of internal studios to churn out exclusives. Even Xbox Game Studios went on a spree of purchasing numerous third party studios to bolster its exclusives line-up after a barren stretch of Xbox One offerings. At the very least, it seems that Google is making headway with third party companies like Q-Games, Ubisoft, id Software, Tequila Works and so on but so much more must be done in the first party department if Google really wants to compete in that regard.

"One thing is for sure though – if successful, Google Stadia will have an impact on the way we perceive gaming (even if isn’t immediately apparent)."

I could go on, bringing up Google’s storied history of failures, from Google Plus and Google Buzz to Bump, Flock, Helpouts, Glass, Reader and so on. This is in no way discounting the massive success that applications like Hangouts, Drive, Gmail, Docs and YouTube (even with all of its monetization and ad-related hangups) have been for information technology as a whole. With an undertaking this large and so many unknown factors to contend with, it’s hard to say just how sustainable it will all be. There hasn’t been anything quite like Stadia and it will require significant collaboration between the various branches at Google.

One thing is for sure though – if successful, Google Stadia will have an impact on the way we perceive gaming (even if isn’t immediately apparent).

Ubisoft throwing in its lot with Stadia could mean a fulfillment of the studio’s wish for titles that persist over numerous years. How would that conflict with potential cloud-based solutions from Microsoft and Sony? How will the rumoured cloud-based Xbox console or whatever Sony is cooking up compete with Stadia? What about eSports which is accustomed to low latency, minimal input lag and frame rates that exceed 60 frames per second,? How will they benefit from Stadia? It’s not like they can be ignored either – just look at the esports popularity of Overwatch, Counter-Strike: GO, League of Legends, Apex Legends, Fortnite: Battle Royale and Dota 2.

The impact of Stadia on the current console wars is also interesting. Will it even need exclusives to compete with the likes of Halo Infinite or The Last of Us: Part 2? When the main appeal is playing something like DOOM Eternal on your TV seamlessly, Stadia could be a win-win for even the most dedicated console fan. Alternatively, most console players could just ignore it in favour of actually owning their games or leveraging existing services like the Microsoft Store and PlayStation Store.

How will games-as-a-service evolve, especially with major updates not requiring downloads? With a unified platform to leverage, will games see improvements in terms of optimization? Will they become even bigger as a result?

"Google may have touted the power of Stadia over current generation consoles but it will have more than enough competition on PC."

What about indie titles? How will they leverage Stadia’s Partners program? Will they receive adequate support and marketing? What about compensation? Not Tonight and Hypnospace Outlaw developer No More Robots was contacted by several different services over the past few months to have its games on their platforms. As founder Mike Rose revealed on Twitter, “None of these platforms want to pay anything upfront. Instead, they want to pay us ‘per number of hours’ that their users play our games, compared to how many hours their users are playing games overall. Which is obviously going to be *s**t* for indie devs.”

Will Google follow the same route? Or is it simply targeting audiences for triple-A titles instead of indie games?

None of this factors into the actual design of certain titles, by the way. You could potentially have, say, XCOM 2 on your web browser, tablet and mobile through Stadia in the future. However, their interfaces need to be optimized for each potential platform (that is, if Stadia is avoiding the current mobile ports for both). Support for a multitude of keyboard-and-mouse devices and controllers is only the start. How will the UI of past games be optimized to run on all potential platforms that Stadia will support? Will they be optimized at all?

You also have to keep in mind that a number of consumers have large digital libraries spread across Steam, Origin and Uplay. Will Stadia give them a way to access all of those games? How will it contend against companies like Valve and EA that will inevitably launch their own platforms for game streaming? Google may have touted the power of Stadia over current generation consoles but it will have more than enough competition on PC. That’s not even taking the mobile space into account which has a burgeoning market of millions of apps for players to access on the go.

"Google wants Stadia to be more than just the next big thing – it wants it to be everything, or at least everything to suit your gaming needs."

For all intents and purposes, cloud-based game streaming is a major step forward for video games. We’ve been inching ever closer to it ever since digital downloads and libraries began to overtake the world via Steam. It only makes sense that game streaming would be the next step. Even if Google Stadia falters out of the gate, it signals the first major foray into an uncertain future. Whether the result is a gold rush of enthusiasm from developers, publishers and middleware developers or it simply meanders about until closing down in favour of the next big thing, Google has its work cut out for it. It’s probably unreasonable to expect the company to answer all of these questions in one GDC presentation but the sheer size of the undertaking warrants a bit more than what we’ve seen.

We will give credit where it’s due though. Somehow, Google found a way to announce something that’s inviting more skepticism and concern for the future of gaming than a regular console reveal ever could. Whatever the outcome may be, it’s a brave new world for video games, one that continues to roll on and cater to current players while opening up new avenues for development, marketing and distribution. The most important step now is ensuring that it isn’t too good to be true.

Google wants Stadia to be more than just the next big thing – it wants it to be everything, or at least everything to suit your gaming needs. However, the gaming world is still turning. Games like Apex Legends and Overwatch continue to receive major updates. Players are still fawning over The Division 2 while desperately anticipating improvements for Anthem. The hype for FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is still palpable. In the midst of all this and more to come, Stadia certainly has its work cut out.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Google Stadia, the company’s ambitious game streaming platform, will be launching in 2019. It won’t be available worldwide though – the service will launch first for Europe, United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Even with a limited roll-out, this is still extremely ambitious for the company.

Other major announcements during the presentation include Jade Raymond’s appointment as the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Google’s first party game development studio. Along with bringing exclusives to the platform, Raymond also assured that the studio would work with external partners as well. Of course, there was also the announcement of id Software’s DOOM Eternal coming to Stadia.

More information on Stadia’s game catalogue will be provided in the Summer (potentially around E3 time?). In the meantime, a firm release date, more in-depth looks at the various features, and price points have yet to be confirmed. Stay tuned for more information.

So you know how we reported last week that Jade Raymond, who has previously worked with Ubisoft and EA, had joined Google, and speculated that this might be for their gaming initiative? We were all right. Today during their GDC keynote, where Google unveiled the Stadia streaming platform, Google also announced Stadia Games and Entertainment, a brand new first party games studio by Google, which is being headed by Jade Raymond.

Bemusingly enough, the games studio was announced without any games. None were teased either, and it seems like Google plans to keep it that way until this Summer. That said, I would hope that Google would want to debut a killer-app for their new platform to help catch the attention of even those who would otherwise be disinterested in it—if that is the long-term plan, then Google is not showing its hand on that front just yet.

For now, all we can do is speculate on what kinds of games Raymond and her team will build for Stadia with Google.