[alm1]

I'm surprised at all the negative comments equating closure of the _game stuido_ to Stadia not doing well. Google is not known for good content production. Only example I can think of are Youtube Originals which hardly stand out.

I read the announcement as Google doubling down on title acquisition which probably worked out well. Cyberpunk was the largest game release last year (last 5 years?) and seemingly very popular on Stadia. Other titles they have (RDR2, Doom, Odyssey) are also among the best games of the last few years.

Personally, I never played any of the non-AAA titles on Stadia and would imagine most users are in a similar boat. Just doesn't make much sense to use a streaming service for low-key games I can play on my laptop directly. This is a big difference from early Netflix model, where they went for quantity.

My guess is that the internal studio failed to pitch any competitive titles and was disbanded. Makes sense to focus on the plumbing, while leaving titles to external studios who know how to do it well.

[athrowaway23524]

My read is that Google has soured on Stadia but needs to wind it down slowly to manage their image, and because Gamers are notorious for taking bad news badly.

The studio goes now. Hedged with a commitment to bringing you yesterday's games next year, from a skeleton crew of portfolio managers.

Next, the GPU clusters will track GCP usage, not the PC hardware hype cycle. Cloud GPU users only need commodity compute; Gamers want ray tracing cores, AI processors, the latest DirectX features, yadda yadda. The enthusiast hardware market is a well-oiled marketing machine. Stadia, by virtue of running on a platform that only buys workhorse cores, will become increasingly hostile towards gaming use-cases. Studios won't waste time porting an unreleased game to oddball hardware. Stadia probably doesn't have the subscriber numbers to make the juice worth the squeeze.

Last comes the email that your Stadia games will be accessible until June 202X.

Alternatively, they might actually think they have a chance to succeed from the publisher & platform angle. Everything will look fine internally until the fund dries up because publisher bets are multi-year affairs and exclusivity is expensive.

Best case, they have a hit and people subscribe long enough to play it. Now find another hit, no big deal. Most likely case, they don't find a hit in time. These kinds of publisher funds only get funded once.