IN AN UNEXPECTED move Google has closed its Stadia games developers studio, the internal team for exclusive Stadia games. From now on games will all be thirdparty titles. The move was particularly unexpected by the studio staff. Just five days before the closure an email from Stadia’s vice president, Phil Harrison, had praised the developers on the “great progress” they had made. Google’s announcement claims that Stadia’s technology works at scale, but that creating top games from scratch is a “significant investment.”
Google promises to continue “building on the proven technology of Stadia”, but that it “will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games.” The huge multiplayer game worlds Google talked about at Stadia’s launch won’t be appearing any time soon, then.