The Google team announced that it will close Stadia Games and Entertainment, its studio for the development of games exclusively for the platform.
Google will no longer develop its own games for Stadia
This is part of the new strategy that Google will implement in Stadia in 2021. From the beginning, Google bet on developing its own games for Stadia with the creation of Stadia Games and Entertainment. However, the company is now changing its strategy.
The focus for Stadia this year is to help game developers and partners leverage the potential and tools offered by the platform:
“Given our focus on developing Stadia’s proven technology, as well as deepening our business partnerships, we have decided that we will no longer invest in bringing exclusive content from our in-house SG&E development team.”
Yes, from now on, the games added to Stadia will be third party titles, no more in-house content. A strategy whose main objective is to make the platform sustainable in the long term. Not only because of its new collaborations with commercial partners but also because it will save the long and costly process of developing video games from scratch.
As for the team that made up Stadia Games and Entertainment, most of them will move on to work on other projects. And others have left Google, such as Jade Raymond. On the other hand, they mention that they will continue betting and investing in Stadia exclusively as a gaming platform to continue offering the best gaming experience to users.
And as part of this step, as mentioned in the press release, they will invest in their commercial partners to launch their games on the platform, although they have not mentioned if there will be exclusive titles. And of course, users will continue to rely on the catalog of games they already know from Stadia. They may still see some additions of games that belong to SG&E, as they will finalize the ones they had planned in the short term.