Google Stadia shuts down its first-party development studios

Google Stadia has now shifted to being a third party streaming platform with the closure of their internal studios. A report by Kotaku and an announcement on the Stadia blog broke the news that both their studios in Montreal and Los Angeles will shuts down with unfortunately no games to show for. It affects the 150 developers it had under its wing, including veteran producer Jade Raymond of Assassin’s Creed fame, who is exiting the company. Other developers will reportedly find new roles in Google.

According to Kotaku, it had heard of multiple project cancellations prior to the official news, but the official news sheds new light on the proceedings.

Stadia will continue with its operations, along with the monthly $10 subscription service for Stadia Pro, and head of operations Phil Harrison will instead focus on forging new partnerships to pitch Stadia technology to other companies.

Don’t count on them to close shop just yet as it is in the works to appear in LG TVs with at least the webOS 5.0 firmware. It is also currently one of the best places to play Cyberpunk 2077 right now apart from a decked out PC.

With future releases such as Disco Elysium: Final Cut and the upcoming Civilization-like game for the PC, Humankind, it may continue to thrive as a platform ready to release PC-exclusive games without a console launch.

Leave a comment

Tooltip Text