My thoughts when Stadia closed the doors on its first-party studio last February:
Google’s own studio didn’t even last two years.
Google hired former Head of Sony Santa Monica, Shannon Studstill, not even one year ago.
This is, unfortunately, not surprising. The clock is ticking for Stadia on the whole. Real glad I got a controller and Chromecast for free late last year. When Google is practically handing out hardware, you know the end is near.
Turns out the end was 19 months away.
[Stadia] hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service…
Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023.
Make sure to back-up those Stadia games!
Joking aside, I saw IO Interactive is trying to help their Stadia customers. Wonder what will come of it…
Interesting to see Jade Raymond fully with PlayStation now since Sony bought her studio Haven. Colin Moriarty and I discussed how Haven is playing into PlayStation’s development strategy. It sounds like that tech or the ideas behind it spawned from Stadia.
Ironic to see Jade at PlayStation and Shannon Studstill working at a blockchain company now.