Just a few days before shutting down its first-party Google Stadia game studios in Montreal and Los Angeles, executives reportedly praised the developers for their hard work and progress the studio had made so far, leading to mass confusion within the company.
Google’s cloud gaming service Stadia got off to a rocky start in late 2019. Though many users were initially impressed that Stadia looked to stand up against PC gaming as an alternative, post-launch, gamers were disappointed with Google’s product. News outlets found that many games were not running at 4K as advertised, and many games failed to maintain 60 FPS. Other players were frustrated by the limited number of games available on Stadia. Overall, critics felt that they were handed a project in its beta state, and Stadia has since struggled to keep up with the competition.
Two Stadia studios never released any games, leading to those based in Montreal and Los Angeles to a closure impacting about 150 developers. This came simultaneously with the news of Assassin’s Creed’s Jade Raymond, vice president and head of stadia games, deciding to leave the company. “I am proud of the team we built at Stadia Games and Entertainment and the ground-breaking work on exclusive games for the platform,” Raymond tells Kotaku, “It was a difficult decision to take on a new opportunity, and I will be forever grateful to this team for everything we learned and achieved together.”
The news was sudden and unexpected for much of the Stadia games development team, partially because so many had upended their lives to join Google, but even more so because executives had so recently praised its studios. Just days before the February 1 layoffs, General Manager Phil Harrison sent an email to staff citing the “great progress” it had made so far, suggesting quite the opposite of two major studio shutdowns.
This led to confusion in the staff of whether or not Stadia’s executives knew about the upcoming decisions to shut down the Los Angeles and Montreal Stadia studios. But a later Q&A with Harrison revealed that the praise was, in fact, misleading: “we knew,” he said. But sources state that the laid-off development staff was unsuccessful with getting accountability from Stadia management.
While Harrison suggested that Covid-19 restrictions were a major cause of the studios’ closures, and also cited Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda as a challenge Stadia faced, other anonymous sources pointed fingers at Stadia’s poor management including lack of resources and difficulty securing the proper hardware and software for the blame. Now, many Stadia employees are struggling to trust leadership due to its lack of transparency.
Stadia Pro will still operate at its $9.99 monthly price model but it’s currently unclear if or how many Stadia exclusives will come to the platform.
Stadia is available now.
Source: Kotaku
