Google Stadia’s salvaged future as a back-end cloud service is here

Enlarge

Quick Google Stadia recap: Things have not been great.

Google's AAA cloud gaming service launched in 2019 to middling reviews and since then has severely undershot Google's sales and usage estimates by hundreds of thousands of users. The company shut down its first-party studio, "Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E)," before it could ever develop a game, and it did so one week after lead executive Phil Harrison gave the division a positive progress report. Several key executives have left the struggling division, like Assassin's Creed co-creator and SG&E leader Jade Raymond, Stadia's VP and head of product, John Justice, and Engineering Lead Justin Uberti.

When Google killed the game division at the beginning of the year, an accompanying blog post hinted that big changes were coming to Google's strategy: "In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Tech – Ars Technica https://ift.tt/3E2uiJN