On February 1, after less than two years, Google ended its ambitious project to create video games on a large scale as part of its Google Stadia video game platform.
As a result, more than 150 game makers employed by Google in Los Angeles and Montreal have been laid off.
Now, some current and former Google employees are talking about what went wrong at Google’s short-lived game development studios. “I question how much the executives above Stadia’s leadership understand what they’ve gotten into,” a Stadia employee told Wired. “The commitments made and the excessive commitments and the inability to keep those commitments.”
It was difficult to hire employees, former employees said, and they faced obstacles with Google’s internal security teams when trying to access the technology needed to make state-of-the-art games.
Major video games usually take three to five years to produce, but Google would have started virtually from scratch in March 2019. When the majority of the team was hired, the pandemic allegedly caused Google to freeze most hires – with the exception of some “strategic areas”, according to an email from Google CEO Sundar Pichai to the team, seen by Wired.
“The studio was not yet fully formed and ready to produce games,” an official told the publication. “It hit the brakes and it was a statement. We interpreted it as Google’s lack of commitment to making content.”
Google Stadia leader Phil Harrison on stage at GDC 2019.
Google YouTube
Critically, Google did not have any original games ready for the launch of Google Stadia in November 2019. Without an exclusive main game and a line of lackluster games, critics and consumers had a legal response to the great Google gaming platform.
Sales figures reportedly reflected this response: Google’s target sales figures for controller Stadia and monthly active users were lost by “hundreds of thousands,” according to a report by Bloomberg.
Google has spent years developing video game streaming technology at the heart of its Stadia platform. In 2019, a group of Google executives at the Game Developers Conference 2019 outlined plans for the future of the platform, as well as the company’s intention to create internal games.
At the time, Stadia leader Phil Harrison called Stadia “Google’s vision for the future of gaming”. But last month, Harrison announced the closure of Google’s game development division. “Given our focus on developing Stadia’s proven technology, as well as deepening our business partnerships,” he said, “we have decided that we will no longer invest in bringing exclusive content from our in-house development team.”
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