When Google first announced its Stadia cloud gaming platform, it took a huge risk that would change the way people play games. It originally planned to release original games developed by Stadia’s in-house studio called SG&E (Stadia Games and Entertainment). The latest blog post from Google announces the company’s shutting down of this very same studio due to the high costs involved in developing games that attract users.
“Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially. Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games. With the increased focus on using our technology platform for industry partners, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Google to pursue other opportunities. We greatly appreciate Jade’s contribution to Stadia and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors. Over the coming months, most of the SG&E team will be moving on to new roles. We’re committed to working with this talented team to find new roles and support them, ” Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison, said on an official blogpost.
Google Stadia isn’t going anywhere, players can still play all games on both tiers of Stadia and it will continue to bring third party games to the cloud platform. Those games that were planned for release in the “near-term” will still be coming, but Google won’t invest beyond this.
Stadia first launched with no competition, but now more than a year later the platform faces rivals from Microsoft with Game Pass and xCloud, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, and Amazon’s Luna and so the brand felt it will be wiser to dismiss game creation part
