Google Stadia Closes It’s Internal Game Studio….To The Surprise Of No One.

The Stadia’s sedate and beleaguered demise is a result most of us could have predicted. It certainly doesn’t require any prophetic intuition or any inherent clairvoyance to divine that Googles anti-consumer directive simply isn’t a viable alternative to the industries more accomplished contemporaries. And with Google announcing that all of their internal game development will cease operation, leaving a specially curated team of talent sourced (poached) from more distinguished developer’s without employment, this potentially signals the end to the Stadia, given Googles notorious record for the precipitating termination of its products.

This announcement doesn’t directly indicate that the Stadia’s service is ending, but at this point it seems more like a formality than just speculative assumptions. Witnessing the Stadia’s timely expiration should solicit a glimmer of satisfaction from me. Since it’s announcement back at the tail end of 2019 I was severely critical of the streaming only games console, especially one designed, developed and promoted by a committee that has little understanding of gaming. But the manner in which Google fumbled not only the console itself, but in the way it secured a specifically assembled group of individuals, derived from other established studio’s, to a newly funded division, with the express purpose of creating new, exclusive content for their system, whose talented expertise were probably heavily committed to many developing projects, now forced into redundancy before they’d even had a chance to accomplish anything just makes the whole sordid affair immensely asinine!

The trouble with Stadia was its guiding principle that downloading games is an anachronistic method of playing game’s. That a Netflix style streaming service is the future, and that the Stadia is pioneering that philosophy. But offering a subscription service that provides entry into a market where you still have to purchase the games, when the Xbox and even PlayStation offer a more comprehensive amenity, with the added incentive of being able to download your content if you don’t have access to a stable Internet connection is simply inept. The Stadia’s functionality is wholly determined by the reliability of connectivity, which is not a ubiquitous compliance for most.

Google has ultimately blamed the economy, citing the exponential cost of investment in game development. This however coincides with Nintendo publishing record profits on both its hardware and software. Which speaks more about Googles failures than it does about Nintendo’s success. So as sad as the redundancies are, I don’t reserve any commiserations for a company that doesn’t respect the very industry its trying to undermine.