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Google announces closure of in-house Stadia game dev studios

Google has revealed that rather than focus on making games, Stadia will instead be focused on being a platform for streaming games.

The firm’s in-house game development studios which fall under the SG&E banner will be shuttered according to vice president and general manager at Google Stadia, Phil Harrison.

“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,” Harrison said in an official announcement.

This simply means that there will be no new exclusive titles coming to Stadia and you will instead have to purchase games from third-parties to play on the platform.

This begs the question, why would you want to subscribe to Stadia?

Google has a long history of shuttering services it believes are no longer viable. While this is good business sense, it also means that many gamers are apprehensive about investing in full price games on a platform which has a very unclear future.

Case in point is this very announcement about SG&E shuttering.

There’s also the matter of game streaming services being a dime a dozen these days with many of the options available from long-standing gaming brands.

Xbox’s Project xCloud, for example, has been very well received in the regions it has launched. It’s also important to recognise that xCloud is an adhoc service and not Xbox’s main focus. It’s also bundled with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate which means that for gamers there’s a much lower risk of their platform of choice disappearing along with their games.

This announcement from Google is worrying and we’re not sure what the future of the Stadia platform is from here on out. We do wonder how third party developers will embrace Stadia moving forward now that Google won’t be developing games for its own platform.

[Source – Google]

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