Google today announced that the internal Stadia game studio is shutting down. Google’s own gaming studio called Stadia Games and Entertainment (SG&E) was launched last year to develop games that would take full advantage of Stadia’s potential.
The studio was run by Jade Raymond, a games industry veteran who previously worked at Ubisoft and Electronic Arts. “Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games”, said Google in a statement.
Google also informed that Jade Raymond is also leaving the company to ‘pursue other opportunities” while over the coming months, most of the SG&E team will be moving on to new roles.
This move comes as a part of Google’s shift in strategy that relates to Stadia. The company wrote, “we see an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia’s advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools. We believe this is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry.”
This means that Google doesn’t want to make it a single platform anymore with exclusive games that will draw in more players, instead it wants to license Stadia’s technology to other studios which are interested in creating their own streaming products.
With the recent successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia that was also one of the most playable versions across all the variants that were launched, Google is looking forward to adding more games to its catalog for a better cloud gaming experience.
The company conveys that you can continue playing all your games on Stadia and Stadia Pro, and it’ll continue to bring new titles from third parties to the platform. “We’re committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward”, Google said.