The team behind the cloud-based Google Stadia recently made the announcement that they were closing their internal first-party studios, and apparently, Microsoft's "buying spree" and acquisition of ZeniMax Media were reasons for this.
According to a report from Kotaku, Google Stadia vice president Phil Harrison (and former corporate vice president of Microsoft), told employees that Xbox buying out Bethesda's parent company was a key factor:
"In his Thursday Q&A with staff, he pointed specifically to Microsoft’s buying spree and planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that had made Google decide to close the book on original game development."
The report goes on to state that the ongoing pandemic was also partly to blame, and suggests that Stadia employees were told a week before the announcement that internal first-party teams were making "great progress" on exclusives, which reportedly led to a "contentious Q&A" where Harrison later admitted the email was misleading.
What do you make of this? Give us your thoughts down in the comments below.
[source kotaku.com]
Comments (25)
Despite not liking Google for its culture of killing anything that isn't an ad product, like the Terraria Stadia controversy, it's always sad to see a studio close. Can't say I'm surprised, Xbox is hard to beat and I'm confident Sony will do great too. Add Amazon into the mix, plus smaller names, and it's a crowded scene. I pity Harrison, he's in a tough spot and Google's name has a bad reputation thanks to the indifference of other leaders in Google and their crappy decisions aren't his fault. It keeps the cycle continuing though, time will tell if Stadia as a whole will join the Google graveyard. I kinda hope it doesn't, but I know too well. I'll probably switch to Proton Mail and Mint Mobile to get away from Gmail and Fi even though the latter has been good to me.
I still find it disgusting the way Google handled this. They could had at least attempted to sell the studio instead of shutting it down virtually overnight.
Stadia is bad comedy
Microsoft buying Bethesda is bad for gaming (none of the massive 3rd parties should be bought by Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft) though if Google really did shut down Stadia 1st party support because of the Bethesda purchase it suggests if Microsoft didn't buy them then Google would've instead which is even worse.
What can I say. All fair in love and war. It's easy for me to say something like that when I'm team Xbox. The right thing to do is give some of that Google money so it employees can weather the pandemic.
Google buying Bethesda would have been horrible! Though blaming Microsoft sounds like a poor excuse tbh
Nope. This simply isn't true. Look at Sony, they have buttloads of first-party studios and they're a way smaller company than either MS or Google.
Microsoft buying Zenimax is just their way of producing first party games. It's just a different model (the 'heres a dump truck full of cash' model). For MS it's an excellent way of very quickly bolstering their, and let's be honest here, fairly lacklustre first party ips.
It doesn't mean first party or in-house development is dead.
Google really have arsed this up in every single way possible.
And for anybody who is about to jump on me for being anti-Stadia. Yes. I am. I have tried it, and it is terrible.
The whole Stadia model was set up to fail.
Who wants to actually buy a Cloud game at full price, and be limited to only playing it on that platform, that could get shut down at any point...
That's why I feel MS have figured it out nicely. I can play Game Pass games at no extra cost since I'm GPU anyway, and hopefully at some point, maybe play my digitally owned library through xCloud.
Sony also have potential with PS Now, but I think they need to merge that with PS+ and start offering a mobile app rather than limited to streaming on console or Windows PC. And obviously they need to push the content with newer first party games instead of older stuff.
@Grumblevolcano Google probably wouldn't have bought Bethesda, they just wanted to keep the partnership they already had with Doom Stadia. I imagine that while Xbox was probably more interested in boosting Game Pass than Xcloud, a side effect is it finishes burying Stadia. MS didn't need to buy Bethesda to bury Stadia though, Game Pass is their big play.
Stadia is doomed google is know for cancelling things that arent making them money...i have stadia(should say had) on a 1 gigabit connection online gaming lagged....this is googles first step to shutting the service down, I’d bet my house that by 2025 stadia is no more.
I actually quite like Stadia. I'm heavily in the Google ecosystem already (Pixel phone, Chromebook, Chromecast, Nests) and I generally find Stadia performs better than XCloud.
That said, closing their first party studio confirms my fears that this is just another Google project that they may or may not stick with, depending on sales.
If they ramp up their third party offerings, fine, but I can't see myself buying many games through their service for now.
Stadia failed because it was a horrible business model for the the consumers. The Zenimax deal likely just opened their eyes into how much money needs to be spent to get them up to speed with the industry and they just said F that. As it usually happens, poor decision making by higher ups cost these people their jobs. It wasn't MS expending their business.
@Deadcow I was with you and you had my like... till the final line. "Yes. I am (anti-Stadia). I have tried it, and it is terrible."
Honestly everyone's experience on this may vary based on the reliability (not speed) of their internet. But...
Stadia as a tech product is great, it works well. Look at Digital Foundry's and others posts on the tech, it's good. The technology worked well enough 10 years ago with OnLive where I played Batman Arkham Asylum on high PC settings, way above the 360/PS3 versions of the time, and had no major issues. It's even better now.
There is a reason Microsoft is putting so much into XCloud, it works. (That doesn't mean it's as good as having a native console btw, but there also isn't a $500 investment)
Stadia as a service on the other hand is awful. Pay full price for a game and have a monthly subscription to get > 1080p gaming at a reasonable framerate. NO thank you. Doomed from the start.
@themightyant sorry, but no. It doesn't. It works sometimes, and when it works, it works... reasonably well is about the best I can say for it. Even during smooth play instances I've had occasional sound hitches and frame drops, but nothing I couldn't live with.
However, the killer issue is that for every time I've had a decent play session, I've had another session that's been utterly unplayable, constant hitching, stuttering, lag, and resolution drops.
If it doesn't work consistently ALL THE TIME, it doesn't work, period.
Whose fault that is isn't relevant. Whether it's my internet or Google's infrastructure doesn't matter.
It doesn't work properly for everybody, every time, and it never will.
If I'm paying full price for a game, it shouldn't be a Crap Shoot whether or not I can actually play it.
Combine that with its awful game library, it's horrific licensing model, and it's terrible value for money, Stadia deserves to die a hideous, fiery death.
Can you imagine if Google acquired Bethesda, The Horror..
Not surprising at all. In my experience Stadia actually worked better than Xcloud but the games/business model surrounding it was a disaster from the jump. I give it another year before they shut it down completely as Google loves to do.
Stadia if it worked properly could well be a good option but for many it simply doesn't work as it should. Not sure why they would look to Xbox as to how to handle creating their own games though. I like Xbox but would struggle to name one major franchise outside of Forza that they have created
@Deadcow pretty much this, I've never got Stadia to work consistently well and that's the big drawback with streaming games as a whole. It's the same with Xcloud, I can never have one lag or stutter free experience so I really don't view it as an option for gaming at the moment.
I've still got an Atari 2600 and it's a much better platform then Stadia because it just works and always has since I got it over 30 years ago. I've yet to have an hour where Stadia worked the whole time
@Deadcow That's interesting that this is your experience with game streaming. It's not mine at all.
Do you really think Microsoft (and Google, Amazon etc.) would be investing billions upon billions if the tech didn't work?
I'm not saying it's perfect, but I've played whole several whole games with few issues. While it's generally not as good as a native console (except CyberPunk 2077 which is better) there are some benefits, particularly for the casual players who don't want to drop X hundred quid on a console.
I completely agree the Stadia business model is awful, and doomed, as I said in my prior post.
The buy-in for a game streaming service is very low. All you need is a smart TV and a fast internet connection — which many have anyway — and a gamepad or two along with a subscription to a game streaming service. But this isn't practical or even desirable for everyone. For example a lot of people live in areas with relatively slow internet or a fast internet service that is unreasonably expensive, and Google didn't have a gaming service that could be marketted to this demographic. I think that hurt Google's foray into gaming a lot more than they had anticipated.
Honestly Stadia was just the wrong concept at the wrong time with the wrong execution. It's existence got totally overshadowed by the launch of the Xbox Series consoles and PS5, and no casuals would want to deal with Stadia when they could just get an Xbox and Game Pass.
That and video games as a streaming service just isn't a good idea in this day and age unless you are one of the few people who has some truly ideal internet access.
@themightyant I don't know what you're trying to say, unless you believe I'm being dishonest. You're arguing against what is my actual experience of actually using the actual product. . I breeze past the minimum requirements for Stadia, currently I'm at a rock solid 60Mbs, and about half of the time it's completely unusable. That's not hyperbole, that's my consistent Stadia experience, and it rings true with stories I hear time after time.
For some people, it works great, for others it doesn't.
It might work great for you, all the time, and that's wonderful. Maybe your house has less noisy wiring. Maybe you're closer to the exchange than I am. Maybe your router is better.
It doesn't matter. If you're selling something that is supposed to be a replacement for the home console it hadsto work all the time exactly the same for everybody who buys it or there's literally no point to it.
Why would anybody invest in buying games that that they might or might not be able to play, depending on whether the conditions are exactly right and the stars are in alignment?
It also doesn't compare to Xcloud, at all, which is a completely different proposition with a totally different mindset and services.
For me stadia may well die far, they don't really care for the customers.
Let's see, they launched in Portugal in December, no controller available to buy since then, Chromecast ultra was never sold here too, and in some country's you buy a game and they offer both!
How can they be serious with this platform?
@Deadcow “I don't know what you're trying to say, unless you believe I'm being dishonest.”
No, absolutely not, apologies if it came across that way - that was not the intent. I 100% believe this is your experience and you are understandably frustrated by it.
My points were three fold
1) trying to right many misconceptions about the streaming tech itself
2) giving another perspective on streaming from someone who it works for (I still far prefer console/pc for what it’s worth)
3) separating the tech of Stadia (plus xcloud, Luna etc), which is great, and the business model of Stadia which is hot garbage.
On the tech
Your post seemed to suggest the technology fundamentally doesn’t work, I hear this all too frequently against game streaming services and see many misconceptions in the general narrative around it. I was trying to defend the tech itself which absolutely does work for many. This has been borne out by both respected tech reviewers, and many players alike. The tech fundamentally worked a decade ago with OnLive and is much better now. If it didn’t why would ALL the big tech companies be investing billions and billions in it?
I accept that there can be issues fine tuning the network setup and many people, yourself included, seem to have issues with reliability. Unless you can figure out what the gremlins are in your setup it isn’t viable, understood. (For me I have to turn off other heavy services like torrents on the network for best results, and LAN is better than WiFi but not required, it also worked for me in other houses/worse WiFi conditions but was less reliable ymmv)
Digital Foundry did a test and had 140 dropped frames in a 2 hour game session, which is frankly astonishingly good and better than a lot of last gen consoles.
They also did a test on latency, which many people seem to think is “unplayable” or laggy. In fact as most Stadia games play at 60fps the latency is often LESS at 60fps than last gen consoles at 30fps. E.g.
shadow of the tomb raider was
Yes it is slower like for like, but crucially not unplayable. DF said “Nothing I played could be considered 'unplayable' or very laggy” with one possible 30fps exception.
Still I fully accept that if you can’t get it to work for you reliably it isn’t viable
Despite all the above I don’t personally see this as a “console replacement” for most enthusiasts like us. I think the box tech will outpace the streaming tech (including internet) and on the whole we like our consoles and the best possible experience.
But there’s room for both
There’s an estimated 2.5 billion people who play mobile games globally yet only a few hundred million console and PC gamers. Streaming could bridge the gap.
Where I do see game streaming being big is for the masses who maybe don’t want to drop hundreds of pounds on a console and don’t care about 4K/60/120 just playing a game.
Or for the Switch only or mobile gamer that wants to play other games or games in higher quality.
Lastly It can be useful for enthusiasts like us as a support system to our consoles/pc, this is where xcloud is cleverly placed.
I don’t see it as a console or PC replacement yet.
@101Force It's the same Google that all but abandoned their own fiber rollout as an ISP after they realized how expensive and difficult it is politically to actually run quality internet everywhere. You'd think at an internet giant that failed to roll out actual internet service themselves, they'd be acutely aware that excellent internet everywhere isn't a thing. But somehow the left hand has been talking to the left foot this whole time.
@blinx01 "The whole Stadia model was set up to fail.
Who wants to actually buy a Cloud game at full price, and be limited to only playing it on that platform, that could get shut down at any point..."
Switch customers, apparently. (Hitman 3, Control...)
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