Still, without offering an all-you-can-play service nor offering killer exclusive games, Stadia struggled to get its footing. Meanwhile, Microsoft ramped up its xCloud cloud gaming service as part of its Game Pass Ultimate bundle, and Stadia became less and less alluring to the kind of hardcore gamer who can build buzz for a new gaming service.
Google seemingly built for the future with the creation of first-party studios and a leadership team consisting of accomplished studio heads and creative directors, but those efforts weren’t enough to stave off the fate many people feared when hearing about this Google initiative: that it would lose support from within before it got ample time to realize its potential.
Stadia isn’t quite done. The Stadia tech could still succeed. By many accounts, Stadia runs games great. But as a game-maker, Google appears to have packed it in. Said one source familiar with Stadia’s first-party operations, citing another tech giant’s widely publicized failure to create video games:
Stephen TotiloGoogle was a terrible place to make games. Imagine Amazon, but under-resourced.
Less than two years after launch, Google is restructuring Stadia, abandoning exclusive gaming content from the internal development team SG&E and closing its two game studios. Among tech giants, Google seems the poster child of the internet era: interested in a wide variety of things, but quickly loosing focus, lacking the patience to iron out details and develop projects for the long term. But I guess it is less complicated and more lucrative to milk the ad market through backroom deals with Facebook.
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