Developers at Google’s newly founded game studios were shocked on Feb. 1 when they were told the studios would be closing, according to four sources with knowledge of what happened. The week before, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent staff an email praising the “great strides” the studios had made so far.
Mass layoffs were announced a few days later, as part of a clear pattern of Stadia leadership that was unfair and outspoken with the company’s developers, many of whom had shaken their lives and careers to join the team.
[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great strides in building a diverse and talented team and building a strong lineup of exclusive Stadia games, ”said Harrison’s email on January 27, according to sources. “We will confirm the VA&E investment envelope shortly, which will in turn inform the SG&E strategy and 2021 [objectives and key results]
Google declined to comment.
Five days later, Harrison seemed to turn his course completely, announce in a public blog post that the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Jade Raymond, left the company, and Google would “not invest further in bringing exclusive content from our in-house development team SG&E.”
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Stadia developers heard the news, first reported by Kotaku, at almost the same time as everyone else via an internal email and conference call with Harrison. The messy rollout came through the pandemic after an already grueling year. It was reminiscent of Stadia’s own launch, which seemed rushed, leaving out many of the features promoted during the service’s unveiling but wasn’t added until months later. In this case, however, Stadia’s own developers were the ones affected by the failed schedule.
Released in November 2019, Stadia initially struggled due to its revenue model and a lack of gamesThe technology was solid, but as a content platform it was lacking. Maybe strong first-party games could have changed that. Google announced in 2019 the creation of game studios in Montreal and Los Angeles and the hiring of famous ones Assassin’s Creed producer and eventually EA Motive Studios general manager Jade Raymond to oversee their development. It seemed like Google was on it in the long run, until it wasn’t.
“I’m proud of the team we’ve built at Stadia Games and Entertainment and the groundbreaking work on exclusive games for the platform,” said Raymond. Kotaku in a statement shortly after the closings were announced. “It was a difficult decision to seize another opportunity, and I will be forever grateful to this team for everything we have learned and achieved together.”
Developers had to wait three days after receiving the news to share their confusion and frustration directly with Harrison during a second conference call on Feb. 4. This call was followed by a controversial Q&A that confronted the Stadia boss with his email from the week before. which suggested anything but a complete shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed regret at the misleading statements in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what had changed from the week before, Harrison admitted that nothing had happened and told those in attendance, “We knew.”
One source described the Q&A as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to evade some form of accountability from Stadia management.
“I think people just wanted to know the truth of what happened,” the source said. “They just want an explanation of the leadership. If you started this studio and hired a hundred of these people, then no one is going to start making it go away in a year or so, right? You can’t make a game back then … We had multi-year reassurance, and now you can’t. “
The source added that the Q&A was “not pretty”.
It’s still not clear exactly why Google decided to leave the first-party studios it started building less than two years earlier. In his blog post, Harrison cited the rising cost of game development as a factor.
“It takes many years and significant investment to get the best games from scratch, and costs are increasing exponentially,” he wrote.
In his Thursday Q&A with staff, he specifically pointed out Microsoft’s shopping spree and the planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that led Google to close the book on original game development. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is a nearly trillion-dollar company and roughly equates to Microsoft when it comes to revenue and profit. according to a 2020 study of Forbes
Elsewhere during the Q&A, Harrison seemed to suggest that the ongoing pandemic was partly to blame, a source said. The effects of Covid-19 are devastating, including nearly half a million deaths in the US aloneBut it has also led many to find relief in gaming for having social distance and boosted the results of many major gaming companies as a result.
For some, the studio’s closures and the way they were communicated to staff were a sign of how game development at Stadia had been mismanaged, three sources said. KotakuThis included a serious lack of resources, problems securing the necessary hardware and software, and a frozen workforce throughout 2020 after the onset of the pandemic, despite the goal of eventually shipping several original exclusive products in the coming years.
According to sources, Google is now looking for work for displaced workers elsewhere in the company. However, it struggles to do this as Google traditionally hires generalists and game development requires a highly specialized set of skills.
The developers hoped that Stadia’s game studios would survive the problems, if only because Google could, in theory at least, afford to burn hundreds of millions to launch a new gaming platform with exclusive content. Instead, it burned with the confidence of some of the roughly 150 developers affected by the abrupt change of direction. Now the remaining Stadia employees have to pick up the puzzle pieces while wondering how to trust leadership and how anyone can trust Stadia.