Stadia’s Shutdown: The History of Google’s Doomed Project, From Those Inside and Out

Internally on Google Stadia’s team, that impression was echoed. One former Google Stadia employee I spoke with for this article told me that they initially felt like they had joined a “winning project” thanks to the talent that had been brought on board and the impressive tech. Another employee still with the company described Stadia as “ambitious” but “shockingly effective” as a product, especially for reaching people who didn’t necessarily self-describe as “gamers” or keep up with console lingo and specifics. Its early days were characterized too by sizable budgets, especially for content acquisition, and Google made plenty of promises internally that it was in it for the long haul.

But around the launch of the service, that impression began to sour internally, as some felt Google was ignoring crucial problems – particularly the need for a stable connection, the lack of compelling, unique game libraries, and a launch pricing structure that, in the words of one source “probably undercut” Google’s early promises of accessibility for all. These problems were apparently regularly raised by those within Google Stadia’s team who had come from gaming backgrounds, only to have them dismissed by some on the tech-focused side. According to multiple former and current employees, as well as those who spoke to IGN for this piece, the latter group didn’t always understand the criticisms or know to trust the expertise of those who did.

“We [on the gaming side] basically were ignored,” a former employee said. “I think there was very much a ‘Google way of doing things’ that the gaming side understood but didn’t see as applicable to [what we were doing on Stadia]. We wanted to meet in the middle, but often the Google side and what felt like an unnecessarily flat hierarchy got in the way… whenever we made a decision, so many people got to leap in, often people who weren’t subject matter experts, but just had opinions based on their work on… other products.”

Our source added their team specifically began to feel stress building as it became clear Stadia may not deliver on the promises it had made to audiences. Though those concerns were raised, they said, leadership at the director level and above didn’t seem willing to fight to make them heard in a meaningful way.

Developers In, Developers Out

Concerns escalated in early 2021, where our sources said missed user acquisition targets in the previous year were one key factor in its shift to a white label tech product. Though Google had previously had a culture of taking big swings at unrealistic targets without consequence, recent internal shifts away from that culture unfortunately timed with Stadia’s misses specifically. Tragically, the consequence of this shift was the shuttering of Stadia’s internal studios barely a year after it had first properly set them up. That meant significant layoffs of around 150 employees, developers who had been drawn in by the exciting tech and promises of enough resources and runway to make games that would make meaningful use of it, only to have those promises shattered in less time than most AAA games take to prototype. Numerous unannounced, in-progress games were canceled. Some, mercifully, found homes elsewhere.

It’s due in no small part to these struggles that in 2021, we saw a major voluntary exodus of key Google Stadia talent as well. Aside from Assassin’s Creed co-creator Jade Raymond, Stadia also lost John Justice that year, and then Raymond’s new studio, Haven Entertainment, poached six other staff members. The departures prompted understandable concern for the health of Google’s gaming arm but, by May last year, Google was making public reassurances that Stadia was “alive and well.” Indeed, Google released over 100 games on Stadia in 2021, roughly the same amount it had released the previous year.

Stadia’s tech was still good, and its external developer relationships had remained so, too. In fact, through all the criticism Stadia received over the years, one group that Google Stadia was always incredibly popular with was its third-party development partners. Gwen Frey, developer of Kine, told me way back in 2019 that not only was the money for exclusives good, but game development with cloud technology was an unexpected benefit for her distributed team. Gylt creative director Raul Rubio told GamesIndustry.biz early the following year that under Google, Gylt had the “smoothest production for a Tequila Works game ever” in no small part thanks to the tech. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged later in 2020, Bungie COO Patrick O’Kelley said in an IGN interview that Stadia had been an “amazing solution” for running playtests while working remotely. Those are just a few examples.

That positive relationship with third-party partners continued through the shuttering of Stadia’s internal studios, all the way to the bitter end. Dylan Cuthbert, founder and CEO of Q-Games, called the team at Stadia “great” when I asked for his thoughts in the wake of Stadia’s shutdown, saying they were open both to offering ideas for Pixeljunk Raiders as well as inviting the Q-Games team to brainstorm ideas for Stadia more generally. No More Robots CEO Mike Rose, though initially hesitant to embrace the platform, ultimately signed on because of how good the financial deals were, saying the money was “worth a roll of the dice.”

In fact, Brandon Sheffield, creative director at Necrosoft Games said that, if anything, Google Stadia improved for developers like him over time, especially in the last year. Though the certification process was “really hardcore,” he said that the bright side was that developers could get through certification on other platforms very easily as a result. Plus, Stadia had free certification QA, meaning that in an ideal scenario (though it didn’t always work perfectly), Google would tell developers what they had failed and how, with guidance on how to get it sorted out.

“Another interesting thing about Stadia in recent years is that they’d become really receptive to developer feedback, to the extent they could change things,” Sheffield continued. “We came up with the idea to do a ‘Steam connect’ style same-screen online multiplayer implementation using Stadia, which amazingly nobody had ever asked about before. We thought it was possible and had some back and forth with them, during which they wrote a whitepaper to prove out the latency, and whether it’d be good enough for us to get a four player action game going. It was going to work, and we were going to be the first to implement it. After that, any dev would’ve been able to do a similar implementation, and any dev with same-screen multiplayer would’ve been able to have online, essentially for free.”

So throughout 2021 and into 2022, while Stadia wasn’t exactly the blossoming “future of gaming” that had been promised, it was cultivating a positive reputation as a technology and B2B platform. What, then, happened to cause its closure?

Future Imperfect

Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound as though even Stadia employees internally have a clear answer, at least not outside the top level. Though the shutdown was speculated about internally leading up to the announcement, nothing official came through until the morning when VP Phil Harrison sent an email (leaked via an anonymous Redditor and verified by IGN) to the team early on the morning of September 29, informing them of an 8:30 AM PT meeting where they were then told of the situation – less than a full hour before the public announcement.

Google itself has cited low customer demand as the reasons for Stadia’s end, and that’s certainly a reasonable enough answer. However, another theory, put forward by a current employee we spoke to, ties it to the recent spree of games industry acquisitions popping up over the last few years. As Stadia moved to a B2B model, our source suggested, it necessitated a thriving industry of independent publishers that weren’t explicitly tied to individual platform holders like Xbox or Sony. With so many smaller and mid-sized companies gobbled up by the likes of Microsoft, Embracer, and other giants with big console exclusivity deals either inherent or imminent, as they put it, “Who is there left to sell the dream to?”

For the handful of developers who did buy into the dream, Stadia’s closure came as an unexpected and unpleasant surprise. Just that morning, a new game – Hot Wheels Unleashed Game of the Year Edition – had launched on Stadia, free for Pro Members. Cuthbert, Rose, and Sheffield all told me they learned about Stadia’s closure via news articles or social media, rather than Google itself – a story that seems universal among all Stadia partners who have spoken publicly about it.

Rose told me that his impression was that most people bringing games to Stadia knew it wouldn’t last forever due to a lack of audience interest, even though the timing of the shutdown itself caught him as off-guard as it did everyone else. Cuthbert recalled that he was similarly blindsided when Google shut down its Stadia game studios – at the time, Q-Games had been actively developing Pixeljunk Raiders, and was concerned that the 2021 studio shutdown “didn’t bode well.” Even so, the recent full shuttering still came as a shock.

“We’d worked with the Stadia team as recently as last month to enable Click-to-Play trials,” Cuthbert said. “So we were still exploring new opportunities and welcoming new players to the game.”

Sheffield was in a similar spot with his company’s Hyper Gunsport. “I don’t get the sense that folks at Stadia knew this was happening,” he said. “We were having marketing conversations [the week before], and we got a new SDK update two days before the shutdown announcement. I think everybody got blindsided by it, and they just weren’t doing the numbers the parent company wanted, fast enough. It’s a shame because they were on a real upward trajectory.”

This means that all three of the developer/publishers we spoke to have been forced to scramble to figure out what will become of their Stadia-entangled games. Cuthbert said he’s still waiting for more information from Google about what will happen to the Stadia-exclusive Pixeljunk Raiders. Though Q-Games owns the IP, he said there’s a “royalty encumberment” he hopes Google will waive, which would make it easier for him to release it elsewhere and prevent its total disappearance.

Google Stadia Screenshots