A week before Google announced it was shutting down Stadia Games and Entertainment, an original game development studio for Stadia, the executives praised the team for making “great progress” and “forming a diverse and talented team”.
According to a Kotaku, citing four sources with knowledge of the situation, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent the apparently optimistic email. Then there were massive layoffs about a week later, shocking the developers. The email, parts of it are in Kotaku’s report does not seem to indicate that a closure was imminent – far from it.
In a blog post about a week later, however, Harrison announced that Google would no longer be investing in the development of its own content for its video game streaming platform. Apparently, the SG&E developers learned of the news shortly before it went public.
“The complicated implementation came after an exhausting year of work with the pandemic,” Kotaku wrote. “It was reminiscent of the launch of Stadia itself, which seemed in a hurry and left out many features promoted during the promotion of the service, only to be added months later.”
After the announcement, the developers of Stadia allegedly confronted Harrison about his previous email, in which he praised the in-house studio. Harrison is said to have expressed his regret at the misleading statements, despite already knowing that the developers would be unemployed.
Anonymous developers said Kotaku they had “multi-year guarantees” that they would have the support and resources to deliver AAA bonds. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the developers have received much transparency about what happened. Harrison previously said it was the “significant investment” needed to make the best games that condemned the studios.
When Stadia was announced, part of the service’s big thing was the launch of exclusive titles made by in-house studios. The service is yet to release some titles that were almost finished, along with a lot of third party content. But the type of software that makes the service “mandatory” may never arrive now that the studio has closed.
“I think people really just wanted the truth about what happened,” said a source Kotaku. “They just want an explanation from the leadership.”