Google recently closed its only internal Stadia game development studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment (SG&E), after building the studio for just two years. In an industry where even established game studios take several years to launch a product, that was an incredibly fast pace for building and destroying a game development studio. Kotaku contacted some of the more than 150 employees who were fired from the Google studio, and they painted a picture of a dysfunctional work environment, plagued by dishonest communication and poor management.
According to the report, the studio’s developers were “shocked” by the sudden shutdown, as just a week earlier, Stadia’s chief executive, games industry veteran Phil Harrison told the group, “[SG&E] made great progress by building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong line of games exclusive to Stadia. “The week-long flip-flop was” part of Stadia’s apparent leadership pattern of not being honest and open with the company’s developers, “according to Kotaku, adding that many developers” have changed their lives and careers to become join the team “.
The report says that the developers of Stadia found out about the studio closing “almost at the same time as everyone else”. Stadia’s developers had to wait three days before Harrison was available for a question and answer conference call, which the report describes as “contentious”. The scariest line in the report details Harrison’s response to a question that asked why the studio was “making great progress” in one week and then fired the next: “When asked what changed over the previous week, Harrison he admitted that nothing had happened and said to the callers, ‘We knew.’ “
Who runs a game studio for just two years?
A quote from the Kotaku source asks the same question we’re asking ourselves: why did Google start a game studio without a solid plan to keep it running long enough to make a game? “If you started this studio and hired about a hundred of those people, nobody starts just to make it disappear in a year or more, right?” asked a source. “You can’t make a game in that time … We had a multi-year warranty and now we don’t.”
In his official post announcing the closure of SG&E, Harrison cited cost as the main reason for killing the studio, saying “Creating the best games from scratch takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is rising exponentially.” the army of Google executives not correctly calculating the cost of a development team, so the most volatile entry here is the amount of money Stadia is pulling in month by month.
Google does not publicly disclose how well Stadia is doing (or doing poorly), but this blog post mentions that Google is looking for “the best way to turn Stadia into a long-term sustainable business”, strongly suggesting that Stadia does not it’s a sustainable business. The post details what appears to be a very strong change in strategy, starting from the “gaming console” business directly to the consumer and more to being a technology supplier to gaming companies.
If Stadia was ever going to be successful, it looks like it should have happened in the past few months. The pandemic is making games more popular than ever, and everyone else’s sales are on the rise. Stadia was also one of the best systems to play the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 connected, especially considering that the other best options were the next generation consoles that were always sold out. If Google is not succeeding now, it is difficult to imagine a better opportunity for the service.
As a streaming service, if Stadia closes, customers will lose access to all of their games. Therefore, buying a game on Stadia requires a certain level of confidence that the service will remain there. Stories of mismanagement like this, Google’s extensive history of killing services and other negative press constant make the service hard to believe.