Google Stadia’s announcement back in 2019 was full of big promises for what the tech company – then largely an outsider to the business – called the “future of gaming.” It was to be a streaming platform that would span multiple devices, allowing players to access games across hardware they already had in their homes without buying expensive console boxes. It would integrate with YouTube, allowing capture, streaming, and sharing as well as the ability to jump straight from a YouTube video of a game into an instance of that same game. It was promised to be more powerful than the PS4 and Xbox One combined, with the word “teraflops” tossed around gleefully demonstrating its supposed power. These promises were massive ones for a company with hardly a gaming credit to its name, but they were backed not just by money and power and tech prowess, but also by storied developers like Jade Raymond, major studios like Bethesda, indie darlings like Tequila Works and Typhoon Studios (via acquisition), and engine creators like Unreal and Unity.
Now, not even three years after launch, the “future of gaming” dream is dead, and numerous projects, jobs, partnerships, and promises with it. What happened here? How did the ambitious promises of a company with plenty of money to spend, superb technology, skillful developer talent, and everything to gain come crashing down so quickly and so dramatically? We spoke to a number of employees and developers who worked with Stadia to find out.
Grasping for Clouds
The initial announcement of Google Stadia invited a healthy mixture of praise and criticism, but upon the reveal of the business model later in 2019, public perception of Stadia took its first (perhaps ominous) negative turn. At Stadia’s launch in November of 2019, Google Stadia would only be available through a pricey founder’s edition bundle and a Pro subscription, almost immediately gutting its promises of accessibility. Games, meanwhile, would largely sell for full price alongside the subscription fee. The fears that these announcements evoked remained through Stadia’s launch, where the critical consensus more or less boiled down to the technology being revolutionary but the business model a disaster.
Internally on Google Stadia’s team, that impression was echoed. One former Google Stadia employee I spoke with for this article told me that they initially felt like they had joined a “winning project” thanks to the talent that had been brought on board and the impressive tech. Another employee still with the company described Stadia as “ambitious” but “shockingly effective” as a product, especially for reaching people who didn’t necessarily self-describe as “gamers” or keep up with console lingo and specifics. Its early days were characterized too by sizable budgets, especially for content acquisition, and Google made plenty of promises internally that it was in it for the long haul.
But around the launch of the service, that impression began to sour internally, as some felt Google was ignoring crucial problems – particularly the need for a stable connection, the lack of compelling, unique game libraries, and a launch pricing structure that, in the words of one source “probably undercut” Google’s early promises of accessibility for all. These problems were apparently regularly raised by those within Google Stadia’s team who had come from gaming backgrounds, only to have them dismissed by some on the tech-focused side. According to multiple former and current employees, as well as those who spoke to IGN for this piece, the latter group didn’t always understand the criticisms or know to trust the expertise of those who did.
“We [on the gaming side] basically were ignored,” a former employee said. “I think there was very much a ‘Google way of doing things’ that the gaming side understood but didn't see as applicable to [what we were doing on Stadia]. We wanted to meet in the middle, but often the Google side and what felt like an unnecessarily flat hierarchy got in the way… whenever we made a decision, so many people got to leap in, often people who weren’t subject matter experts, but just had opinions based on their work on… other products.”
Our source added their team specifically began to feel stress building as it became clear Stadia may not deliver on the promises it had made to audiences. Though those concerns were raised, they said, leadership at the director level and above didn’t seem willing to fight to make them heard in a meaningful way.
Developers In, Developers Out
Concerns escalated in early 2021, where our sources said missed user acquisition targets in the previous year were one key factor in its shift to a white label tech product. Though Google had previously had a culture of taking big swings at unrealistic targets without consequence, recent internal shifts away from that culture unfortunately timed with Stadia’s misses specifically. Tragically, the consequence of this shift was the shuttering of Stadia’s internal studios barely a year after it had first properly set them up. That meant significant layoffs of around 150 employees, developers who had been drawn in by the exciting tech and promises of enough resources and runway to make games that would make meaningful use of it, only to have those promises shattered in less time than most AAA games take to prototype. Numerous unannounced, in-progress games were canceled. Some, mercifully, found homes elsewhere.
It’s due in no small part to these struggles that in 2021, we saw a major voluntary exodus of key Google Stadia talent as well. Aside from Assassin’s Creed co-creator Jade Raymond, Stadia also lost John Justice that year, and then Raymond’s new studio, Haven Entertainment, poached six other staff members. The departures prompted understandable concern for the health of Google’s gaming arm but, by May last year, Google was making public reassurances that Stadia was “alive and well.” Indeed, Google released over 100 games on Stadia in 2021, roughly the same amount it had released the previous year.
Stadia’s tech was still good, and its external developer relationships had remained so, too. In fact, through all the criticism Stadia received over the years, one group that Google Stadia was always incredibly popular with was its third-party development partners. Gwen Frey, developer of Kine, told me way back in 2019 that not only was the money for exclusives good, but game development with cloud technology was an unexpected benefit for her distributed team. Gylt creative director Raul Rubio told GamesIndustry.biz early the following year that under Google, Gylt had the “smoothest production for a Tequila Works game ever” in no small part thanks to the tech. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged later in 2020, Bungie COO Patrick O’Kelley said in an IGN interview that Stadia had been an “amazing solution” for running playtests while working remotely. Those are just a few examples.