The developers of the game studios recently formed by Google were shocked on February 1 when they were notified that the studios would be closed, according to four sources with knowledge of what happened. The week before, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent an email to the team praising the “great progress” his studios had made so far.
Mass layoffs were announced a few days later, part of Stadia’s apparent leadership pattern of not being honest and open with the company’s developers, many of whom changed their lives and careers to join the team.
“[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great progress by building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong line of games exclusive to Stadia, ”said Harrison’s email of January 27, according to sources. “We will confirm the SG&E investment envelope soon, which, in turn, will inform the SG&E and 2021 strategy [objectives and key results]. “
Google declined to comment.
Five days later, Harrison seemed to reverse the course completely, advertise in a public blog post that the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Jade Raymond, left the company, and Google “would no longer be investing in bringing exclusive content from our internal SG&E development team”.
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The developers of Stadia heard the news, first reported by Kotaku, almost at the same time as everyone via an internal email and a conference call with Harrison. The complicated implementation came after an exhausting year of work with the pandemic. It was reminiscent of Launch of Stadia, who seemed in a hurry and left out many features promoted during the service’s unveiling, only to be added months later. In this case, however, Stadia’s own developers were the ones affected by the unsuccessful planning.
Launched in November 2019, Stadia had initial difficulties due to its monetization model and lack of games. The technology was good, but as a content platform it was lacking. Perhaps strong early games could have changed that. Google announced in 2019 the formation of game studios based in Montreal and Los Angeles, as well as the hiring of celebrities Assassin’s Creed EA Motive Studios’ producer and eventual general manager, Jade Raymond, to oversee its development. It felt like Google was in it for a long time, until it wasn’t.
“I am proud of the team we built at Stadia Games and Entertainment and the innovative work on games exclusive to the platform,” said Raymond Kotaku in a statement shortly after the closings were announced. “It was a difficult decision to accept a new opportunity and I will be forever grateful to this team for everything we have learned and achieved together.”
The developers had to wait three days after receiving the news to directly share their confusion and frustration with Harrison on a second conference call on February 4, which suggested anything but a total closure of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret at the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what has changed from the previous week, Harrison admitted that nothing had changed and said to the callers, “We knew”
One source described the questions and answers as an unsuccessful attempt to extract some form of responsibility from Stadia’s management.
“I think people really just wanted the truth about what happened,” said the source. “They just want an explanation from the leadership. If you started this studio and hired about a hundred of those people, no one starts it just to leave in a year or so, right? You can’t make a game in that time period … We had a warranty for several years, and now we don’t. “
The source added that the questions and answers “were not pretty”.
It is not yet clear why Google decided to abandon the first studios it started building less than two years earlier. In his blog post, Harrison mentioned the rising costs of game development as a factor.
“Creating the best games from scratch takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is rising exponentially,” he wrote.
In his questions and answers Thursday with the team, he specifically pointed to Microsoft’s buying spree and the planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that made Google decide to close the book on game development originals. Google’s parent company Alphabet is a nearly trillion dollar company and almost on par with Microsoft when it comes to revenue and profit, according to a 2020 survey by Forbes.
During the question and answer session, Harrison seemed to suggest that the ongoing pandemic was partly to blame, according to a source. The effects of Covid-19 were devastating, including nearly half a million deaths in the US alone. But it has also led many to find relief in games as they distance themselves and boosted the financial results of many major gaming companies as a result.
For some, the closure of the studio and how they were communicated to the team was emblematic of the way game development at Stadia was poorly managed, said three sources Kotaku. This included a severe lack of resources, difficulty securing the necessary hardware and software, and a frozen workforce throughout 2020 after the pandemic began, despite the goal of eventually shipping several unique original products in the coming years.
As of now, sources said, Google is looking for work for employees displaced elsewhere in the company. However, it is having trouble doing this because Google traditionally hires generalists, and game development requires a very specialized set of skills.
The developers expected Stadia’s game studios to survive their problems, at least because Google, at least in theory, could spend hundreds of millions trying to start a new game platform with exclusive content. Instead, it ended up burning the confidence of some of the roughly 150 developers affected by the abrupt change of direction. Now, the remaining Stadia employees need to start over while wondering how they can trust leadership and how someone can trust Stadia.