The tech giant plans to focus on working with third-party game studios instead.
When Google announced the launch of its gaming streaming platform Stadia in 2019, CEO Sundar Pichai pitched it as a service that would revolutionise the way people play games. The idea was that Stadia would let gamers play top-tier without needing to buy and own expensive computers or dedicated gaming consoles. Instead, all games would run on cloud servers in Google’s data centres, and a video feed of the game would be broadcast to the user’s device of choice — such as a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or smart TV. While it plans to still deliver on that, Google will do it without its in-house Stadia Games and Entertainment (SG&E) development team, which it announced on late Monday would be no more. « 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, » Google Stadia VP and general manager Phil Harrison announced in a blog post.
