Stadia is shutting down internal game development and Jade Raymond has left the company

Google has issued a very "everything's fine, no need to worry" press release about Stadia.

Basically while Stadia will continue and Google plans to continue adding features to it as a platform, there will no longer be internally developed games.

On the one hand this is definitely focusing on Google's strengths. As Amazon has also shown, these tech companies don't do internal game development very well for whatever reason. It seems like Microsoft is the only one big tech company that can actually manage a semi-functional suite of game studios (and some might argue against that) but of course Microsoft has been in the business for 20 years.

This doesn't mean that Stadia will be shut down but it's obviously not a good sign, and I personally would be extremely nervous about buying games for the service. At least Luna is a subscription so you're not investing a bunch of cash up front for games you might never get to play.

Maybe Stadia will thrive and last forever, and again Google makes much more sense as a platform manager than a game maker, but there aren't any examples of successful console makers without internal development and even streaming companies have all moved into internal content development of some kind as well. The integration of the two is just too powerful and makes too much sense.

It's also another big advantage to Xcloud in the eventual game streaming wars because all the platforms can pay third parties for exclusives (and they will) but Microsoft having internal development is a big advantage, especially with ownership of Bethesda (and the rumor that they're looking to buy another studio.)

I personally hope Stadia stays in business because competition is good for the consumer, but at this point I would bet on Xcloud as being in the best streaming position, with Playstation Now a close second (Sony has better content but less financial and technical resources.)

So you're telling me that launching a service with no exclusive games, a terrible pricing strategy, wonky tech, an undercooked business plan, and more smug overconfidence than Martin Shkreli isn't a recipe for success?

Anyone else have to look up when Stadia actually launched?

Next you'll tell that entering the field as a total newcomer and NOT immediately being as popular/successful as the companies with literal decades of experience, including ups and downs, is all the reason Google needs to completely abandon a project!

If you need me, I'll be trying to read this shocking new development on my Google Glass and checking in with my Google+Circles!

yeah- the tech seems more or less sound- but as a platform i'm not sure how they find footing. without strong IP and a pricing model that makes sense- the incumbents just seem to difficult to dislodge.

also i know this is real 'old man yells at cloud' energy- but the more i hear people talk about cloud gaming as an inevitability, more i doubt the certainty of that outcome. maybe microsoft finds the correct balance- but i'm feeling it might be a feature of their platform more than the new standard.

Not surprising at all.

Literally everyone called this.

I rarely do this and I’m sorry if this cost people their jobs. But; lol. Everything aside from the potential tech for Stadia has rubbed me the wrong way and I’m not at all surprised. Either they go subscription or they’ll eventually shut that stuff down, I just don’t see its viability otherwise.

Waiting for Navarro to send Hutchinson his regards

Truly the Enron of our times

The only shocking thing about this is that it took this long to happen, I was figuring we would have gotten an article like this 3 or 4 months ago.

Those cowards never even gave it a proper chance.

Sucks for all the people who are out of work. Google ramped up quite heavily for this, right?

But also? This is probably better for Stadia. In TV streaming there seems to be a lot of value in having a "killer show" like The Mandalorian but even that is very susceptible to "I'll subscribe for a month when it is over".

But in gaming? UPlay never got past "obnoxious DRM with some good sales" and has Ubi. Origin is basically just for The Sims and all five of us who like battlelog. Rockstar and Bethesda/Zenimax are some of the biggest and most successful studios in the industry and nobody remembers their launchers exist.

What gets platforms a foothold is a mix of functionality, discounts/monetization, and specific targeted acquisitions of games that are niche enough that they have no real competition. Which, for the most part, has nothing to do with in-house developer capabilities and all to do with keeping an eye on kickstarter, The Indies, and mid-tier developers with a history of getting dicked over by every publisher ever.

Google clearly didn't know what they were doing from the start on this. Just glad that the studio I work at has zero involvement with any Stadia production.

@mellotronrules: I don't think streaming will replace local storage gaming in the short term, but it already is and will continue to grow as an alternative for some people in some situations. It's going to be a big market even if it won't be the only market. Maybe not as big percentage wise as streaming video, but big.

@gundato: I'm not sure how you can say "what gets streaming platforms footholds" right now. Who even has a foothold right now? Playstation Now and xCloud? Neither fits your description. GeForce Now and Shadow also exist, but don't seem to be nearly as big (and GeForce is kind of a different thing.)

This is a very young market still and we don't know what will work and what won't.

A modern AAA game takes 200+ people 3 to 4 years to make, and you need a steady supply of 1 to 3 of them per year. And the cost to employ that staff is north of $100,000 p.a. per person. AND they were still 2+ years away from shipping even the very first one.

Did someone finally do the back of the envelope maths and realise "ha lol, fuck that!"?

That said, I think this was the real Stadia business model all along. To build a turnkey streaming service for the likes of EA or Activision to run streaming-FIFA or streaming-CoD.

I was not aware they were internally developing games? I always just assumed this was primarily a platform for them and they 100% concentrated on acquiring third party games. I mean as long as they keep bringing new games to the library then it doesn't seem all that bad. Amazon learned the hard way that games take a ton of money and talent to make. Hopefully if/when Stadia does shutter they will give people some way to redeem those full price games they purchased for it? I don't know how that would work because as far as I know, no digital storefront of this kind has closed it's doors as of yet. GoG doesn't require DRM after purchasing games and that leaves Steam and Epic as two big storefronts that you buy the license to play games on.

@bigsocrates: I was putting things more in the context of a distribution platform (hence Ubi and EA). If some of the biggest studios on the planet making some of the most critically acclaimed isn't enough to make people install a second launcher then what hope does a full streaming platform?

My understanding is that the big ones are PS Now and Geforce Now (?) right now. The latter because it has been around for ages and the former because it is the only way to play PS3 games on modern platforms.

@kingloo: I don't think there was some grand plan or much strategic thinking. I think it pretty much went "there's money in gaming, we should get some of that money. How do we do it? Streaming seems to be the future" and they kind of went from there. They have just made too many obvious and massive errors to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

@humanity: It is primarily a platform but they did intend to do some internal development. They hired Jade Raymond and started a studio and I don't think it ever shipped anything.

I also think they have no exit plan. I think if Stadia shutters they'll just close it down and everyone who bought games on it is screwed. There's no license to keep the games locally as far as I know so unless every Stadia contract has a license permitting that if the service closes down then they can't let people download and keep them. And of course many Stadia users don't have the hardware to run the games locally anyway. That's why they're Stadia users! Good luck running your Stadia version of Hitman 3 off your Chromebook!

So much for the promise of games that go beyond what's possible on other platforms due to the power of the cloud. Who else to create the ultimate showpiece of Stadia's cloud if not for their own studio after all?

I bet the game streaming part will chug on for a bit longer. If (big if) they manage to get to the stage where every youtube gaming vid has a stadia button right underneath, that could attract quite an audience.

@gundato: I don't think the launchers are exactly equivalent to the streaming platforms for a number of reasons. But regardless, those launchers didn't have exclusive games. Sometimes they were the exclusive way to get those games on PC, but all the games were on other platforms.

GeForce Now is a different beast (because you need the hardware to run the stuff anyway and you buy the games from other stores) but PlayStation Now, by your own description, runs a lot on exclusive first party content. It's not just Sony stuff, but a lot of it is Sony stuff, and it doesn't do the stuff you were describing in terms of acquiring exclusives from developers etc... It runs based on a pre-existing catalog of games and gets a lot of mileage out of...first party content from the Sony back catalog (many but not all of the third party games on the service are available elsewhere.)

I'm not saying you're wrong in your assessment so much as saying that we don't know what works yet, and we don't know whether first party exclusives will matter.

It can always start going their way in the future you never know how the market's going to swing, but boy did they fail at generating any kind of excitement for it.
The games were going to be huge and revolutionary... ok, what were they going to be exactly? How can you promise that with precisely zero track record? Technical limitations and budgets lead to clever design choices and innovation, with the limitless power of server racks and Google budgets what would we end up with? Something big but would it be fun? If CD Project ended up at Cyberpunk i have very little faith Google could come up with something remarkable enough to really sell people on the promise of Stadia.
From the beginning it just seemed like a project with no vision behind it, they came up with a technology and packaged it up, but had no plan where to take it, again the market could start leaning in their favour some day and with the right creative director they could make something that proves the concept, but until then it's still just a concept.

@bigsocrates: Obviously we have no conclusive arguments and just have to look at similar situations. All we can do is make conjectures based upon available data. If we actually knew what worked and what didn't then there would be no failures.

Large libraries are probably the big factor. PS Now has a few exclusives (which generally, but not exclusively, are Sony exclusives). But there is also very much the argument of whether back catalogs even matter outside of this really weird console generation launch (the Ars writeup is still very much worth reading). Maybe it really just is that Sony, MS, and nVidia are the biggest names in gaming and Google is not. Which is another reason I pointed to the Epic model as being a particularly successful approach, given the landscape.

And, if we can look a bit backwards, that is more or less what Sony did. They have a long history of getting moderately successful "niche" games as exclusives because they know that is a cost effective way to get a userbase. Because people will go toward where a tacked on exclusive map or two is in COD but there are alternatives to even frigging COD. But, back in the day, Demon Souls, Uncharted (before ND became a behemoth), ICO, etc? Those are the kinds of games where everyone has that one friend who insists on buying a console because MAYBE there will be a Kojima game for it.

And, as shitty as it is, there is no reason to have your own internal studios for that anymore. You can pay for years of development. Or you can see a popular indie game and say "Hey, want a sack of cash for only being on our platform for a year?"

Is Jade Raymond cursed?

@gundato: That is a very selective view of Sony's strategy. Yes Sony does have some niche games as exclusives, though many of those they have just because they are the dominant platform and especially the dominant platform in Japan, but Sony has the strongest suite of first party developers in gaming. You can say that their strategy is to lock up quirky games like Journey, but they just purchased Insomniac because they wanted to lock up the studio that makes their huge Spider-Man games, so clearly they do not think that first party doesn't matter.

Ico was a first party game, by the way. And so was Uncharted.

Indie games that are at the level of the games you named are actually still very rare because of the amount of money it takes to make them. First party development is still key for all the console makers, and they've been buying more studios recently, expanding that.

I'm not saying that it's impossible for a streaming service to survive without it but PlayStation Now is definitely not evidence for that.

@brian_: Cursed to make a lot of money running high profile projects?

I don't think she's necessarily to blame for Motive or Stadia's internal studio issues but it's at least possible that she's not a very good manager. Her recent track record is not good, though in both cases the issues may have been beyond her control. We just don't know.

@bigsocrates: I imagine it'll probably get harder for her to make that money and get those positions if she goes a whole decade without shipping a game though.

@bigsocrates: If it does come to that, them closing and people just losing all their digital goods with no way of retrieving them, I wonder if it will set some sort of precedent going forward through a potential action class lawsuit.

@brian_: Maybe? She's still high profile and she's been working in games this time so I'd imagine she'll land on her feet somewhere. Maybe not in a position quite as high but some good job. Not too worried about her.

But regardless it's hard to see someone who gets hired for high profile jobs and doesn't produce anything as "cursed." She might be unlucky, she might not be a good manager. None of us know.

@humanity: I'd imagine Google's EULAed up the ying yang here and has made no promises it can't keep. I bet that the user agreement spells out very clearly that Google can shut down the service without compensation at any point.

It's also possible that they just shutter the Stadia store but leave the servers up for a while because they're Google and they have unlimited server space (and those older virtual machines get cheaper over time as server tech improves, and as fewer people use the service to play older and older games) and if people get an additional 5 years or whatever after they bought their last game they probably won't be too upset.

If I were them and I made the decision to shut it down I'd try to avoid any PR nightmares, though. But it's possible that instead it just soldiers on as a minor oddity in their business portfolio indefinitely. Maybe it's actually profitable as is and they're under no pressure to shut it down but they don't think it will actually turn into anything significant so they don't want to invest further in it? Who knows?

Stalledia.

Nailed it.

Also, hope the devs land better, more stable jobs. Google gonna Google.

@brian_: Clint Hocking went over a decade without shipping a game, and he landed on his feet okay.

I'm starting to be concerned about Jade Raymond's ability to lead/manage a whole studio, given the last couple of roles in that lane have gone poorly for the studio as a whole. But not in her ability to land a job.

In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players.

This line in their statement is interesting and makes me wonder if they're targeting companies like Ubitus, who offer cloud gaming infrastructure directly to publishers.

For a consumer buying a "cloud version" of a game, such as Control on the Switch, I think the lack of faith in Google becomes less of an concern than when buying the game to run exclusively on Stadia.

As for the shutdown itself, not a surprise at all. I hope everyone who took jobs there knew they were on borrowed time and planned accordingly.

@lapsariangiraff: In her defense, it's quite possible that the closures had nothing to do with her management and everything to do with the business directions of the companies she worked for. She joined google in 2019 so it's not like anyone should have expected her to ship a big AAA project by early 2021, and Stadia's failure had nothing to do with her. EA is murkier, but EA shuts down studios all the time so that might also have had nothing to do with her.

I'm sure she'll get another shot somewhere and maybe she'll do something interesting there. Microsoft has been aggressively expanding its development so I could imagine her ending up somewhere like that. And despite all its problems (and studio closures) Microsoft has shipped actual games on Xbox and PC. Not recently, but it will probably happen again at some point!

Another addition to https://killedbygoogle.com/ soon. Well the sky is still blue after all.

Who looks at Game Pass and PS Now and says "screw those two options, im paying a monthly subscription and $60 a game to stream my games on Stadia!"? No one. Stadia doesn't need first party games, they need games. And a business model that can compete with a $60-$180 a year with a similar amount of games in there catalog. Game Pass looks like it has about ~520 games, and PS Now is advertising over ~800. Stadia has about ~130, and it looks like most of those you still have to buy separately. And presumably little to no effort goes into making games work on PS Now or Game Pass, because developers are already making games for the PlayStation and Xbox hardware already, what incentive do developers have to use Stadia? Its one advantage would have been "here is a game that can only be played on a server", but that's also never going to happen now with first party studios being shut down.

Based on how people talk about Game Pass as one of the best deals in gaming and for the most part the only exclusive Microsoft had was Halo shows to me first party isn't necessary right now, but in the long run will. Its how many good games can you get me for the cheapest price right now, you can get your Netflix exclusive shows down the road later when you actually have the customers to see it.

And like some have said, who knows how well PS Now or Game Pass are really doing off there business models, let alone if you only counted the people who %100 stream games and don't download them.

I was just beginning to wonder how Stadia's looming and inevitable hardware refresh would get impacted by the global chip manufacturing shortages and also whether or not they would try to make the jump from GCN/CDNA to RDNA.

If they're at the state of winding down internal studio efforts then I'm not holding out hope for them bankrolling another iteration of hardware, and that's going to make the prospect of porting future AAA third-party titles to Stadia increasingly annoying as developers transition beyond cross-generation content.

@hughj: In terms of streaming box it was kind of weird but the real value add was the controller, right? On a PC you just use chrome and xinput?

In that case, I would think this makes things easier. The hardware people have doesn't matter. So google can release the next chromecast (and they are trying to make android tv a thing again?) and developers just target xinput and rely on google to give them that environment.

I've definitely considered the ongoing chip shortages and tariffs and they kind of all favor streaming. Centralize the hardware needs and it greatly reduces the need to upgrade regularly on a consumer standpoint. Which sucks but... I know I settled for a 3070 because I could get one. Could very easily see folk settling for less as things get worse. And, if you aren't insane like me, it might even be a better experience.

@gundato: Tellingly, the most recent Google Chromecast did not launch with Stadia support and I don't think it has been patched in though I have not followed it.

@gundato: By hardware I was talking about their cloud infrastructure, not the consumer-facing streaming boxes. What they've got right now is basically a half-generation behind the new consoles, and it's using the old Vega GCN architecture, which puts them in a bit of a no-mans-land as the consoles and PC have moved to RDNA.

"Centralize the hardware needs and it greatly reduces the need to upgrade regularly on a consumer standpoint."

Also I would think that having centralized hardware may actually exacerbate the chip shortages, because you need to have a critical mass of hardware rolled out all at once in order to provide service for the new content you're selling. A PS5 shortage means that someone without a PS5 simply doesn't buy PS5 games, whereas a Stadia/cloud shortage it would mean having queues or region-dependent availability which is way uglier when the entire selling point of the platform is 'it just works'.

Not to mention whatever 3rd-party studio work that will be needed to port and QA test the existing catalog of games to whatever the new hardware would be.

@hughj: Fair enough, missed that bit.

But it also doesn't really matter at the level of a datacenter/"The Cloud". They go through a LOT of hardware and are buying in bulk often times (at the google or amazon scale) either from the manufacturers themselves or from the toppest tier distributors.

You and me consider have to consider shanking an old lady or asking Frank Reynolds if he'll manage us if we want a GPU. They just put another building worth in their shopping cart.

I'm far from convinced google will be the ones to provide the software. But they (and MS and Amazon) can very much provide the hardware and infrastructure.

I can't imagine having enough money to mess around and create a half-baked gaming platform and then basically giving up on it a little over a year later. Like I should be used to corporations' having more money than has ever been reasonable at this point and yet it's still astounding.

@gundato:

"But it also doesn't really matter at the level of a datacenter/"The Cloud". They go through a LOT of hardware and are buying in bulk often times (at the google or amazon scale) either from the manufacturers themselves or from the toppest tier distributors."

If we were just talking about generic blades of CPUs and DRAM sitting in rack, then sure, but Stadia's hardware is relatively unique (Vega/RadeonPro with HBM memory.) If they had newer Nvidia GPUs then they would at least have something they could lease time for Tensorflow, but that's not the case. I don't know if there's really a business case for having millions of GCN/CDNA GPUs other than to run Stadia gaming sessions.

@hughj: Game streaming is getting bigger and bigger every year and regardless of how much fun it is to clown on companies... those companies still think this is worth the risk.

And if this becomes something that even one of the major providers cares about... that is probably gonna be worth the R&D costs and shifting some of the factories to targeting those arches instead of the usual "High performance and downgraded with an HDMI port attached" options (simplifying, but not TOO much).

@hughj: Millions, heh. Stadia's max concurrent userbase can't be over the low six digits at this point. Wouldn't be surprised if it were 5.

Wouldn't the obvious path forward here be for Stadia's hardware refresh to use a more versatile design so that they can be more flexible, now that Stadia seems to be lower priority?

Well, they'd better liquidate those GPUs while they still hold some value. If Google floods ebay with a bunch of "Radeon Vega 56 - barely used!" at a good price, I might grab one!

What's the status of those Switch-only-streaming games? I keep forgetting they exist, sounds like an April Fools thing from GamePro. Just flat out selling the game full price but letting you stream it forever with no 3rd party service or monthly fee seems like the future of this concept. There's been no promotion of them, however, and no one's making this a big deal how Switch can compete with PS5/XSX this way.

I like that google went for it, but with the comcast monopoly, terrible internet pricing, non growing fiber connections and comcasts ridiculous data caps this stuff was dead anyway IMO. Also, this should have been a gaming netflix like service in the first place, why would anyone buy a game you can only stream? Maybe if you also got a physical copy that could be played on pc or something but otherwise it just doesn't make sense in any regard, at least not for me. I hear they have the best port of Cyberpunk though lol.

I think GFN, Luna, Xcloud, and PSNow are in a more comfortable position as those services get to piggyback off existing content ecosystems that would exist with or without game streaming. Stadia is a software+hardware stack and platform unto itself and their position doesn't seem to allow much room to pivot.

If we were to look at streaming services like Youtube and Netflix, I would argue that the primary reason for success was the content being free (user made), or ready-made (back catalog of a half-century of television and film). Stadia doesn't share either of these features, and now that they're backing away from developing their own content, they've put their fate in the hands of third-parties that have no vested interest in Stadia's long term success.