| 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. |