Google is moving away from its plans to build its own games for Stadia, halting project development and closing its studios in Montreal and Los Angeles.
A little more than a year after it started platforms Stadia, n Google is starting to limit its activities to games. The company closes the two game development studios and cancels its work.
The Stadia is a streaming platform which is cloud-based and launched on November 19, 2019. Google launched the Stadia Games and Entertainment division in March of the same year, assigning its direction to former Assassin's Creed game producer Jade Raymond.
Raymond is now leaving Google. At the same time, the closure of the Montreal and Los Angeles studios will affect 150 developers. Google has said it will try to find new roles for these employees.
Google will continue to operate Stadia as a gaming service, for Stadia Pro, at a price of $ 10 per month.
Big tech companies like Google and Amazon have made ambitious efforts in recent years to get into game development, but with little or no results. Nothing at all worth the effort and investment. Amazon released the online shooter Crucible in May. It stopped growing in October. Amazon's New World MMO will be released this year.
Stadia is probably a victim of bad timing and poor planning. The launch of Stadia in 2019 became a difficult time, as that year the Switch entered the market strongly. Also several players have been waiting patiently for their releases PlayStation 5 και Xbox Series X / S. Και, επιπλέον, υπάρχει ανταγωνισμός εντός του ίδιου του χώρου cloud-streaming, which was re-heated when Microsoft made the xCloud service part of the Game Pass Ultimate package.
Google of course has the money to take risks with businesses like gaming, but knowing that it doesn't depend on the success of Stadia to remain profitable, the company is able to very quickly and easily abandon (or downsize) the venture.
