Google Says That Stadia Is 'Alive And Well' Despite Staff Departures
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Google has a bit of a reputation for picking up new toys and then dropping them when they're not as successful as the tech giant wants them to be. Remember the Google Glass? No? Well, that's because Google has pivoted away from marketing the AR-capable glasses to you and me, and is now selling them for other purposes, like manufacturing, directly to businesses. A cool idea, that has not reached its full potential, put on the back burner out of public sight when they weren't an instant hit. Oh and how about Google+, the "Facebook killer" as some hailed it back in 2011? Shut down in 2019 after no one used the social media platform.
Now, some fear Google Stadia will meet the same sad end: retired, for not meeting the potential its makers have in mind. The video game streaming platform launched at the tail end of 2019 to a mixed reception - and then, after a little over a year of work, Google shut down the company component Stadia Games and Entertainment, which was working on bringing exclusives to the platform. It hadn't even made a single game that was released on Stadia.
The is the way that Stadia was originally marketed to audiences all the way back in 2019. Today's project size is apparently much smaller...
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Despite all this, Google is adamant that Stadia is here to stay. In a conversation with GamesIndustry.Biz, developer marketing lead Nate Ahearn says that Stadia is "alive and well", despite Jade Raymond's departure along with other developers. He says that "over 100 new games" are launching on Stadia this year, and the team is focused on making sure Stadia is a "great place to play games on devices you already own".
And, as it turns out, Epic Games' boss Tim Sweeney has recently backed this claim up, suggesting that Stadia really is continuing work, despite a regression in project size. A report from VGC has recently noted that Sweeney said, during the Epic Games versus Apple lawsuit, that although Stadia has been "very significantly scaled back," it is not shutting any time soon.
So, Google's confidence that the platform will eventually thrive may still be on the cards, despite its tendency to put its name to a number of notoriously failed products. Do you have any faith in the streaming platform, though? It'll be interesting to see how games consumer's vote with their wallets, compared to the more positive talk coming from the industry itself.
Topics: epic games, Stadia, News
