Google eliminates Stadia’s internal development team

Google announced it will no longer invest in its internal development team to keep creating first-party games for Stadia. 

Jade Raymond, the executive in charge of Stadia, has also left the company. Raymond is best known for her founding of Ubisoft Toronto and EA’s Motive Studios. She announced her role as a vice president at Google at GDC 2019. 

This isn’t the end of Stadia, but it does mean the platform won’t be seeing first-party or exclusive titles any time soon. Instead, the platform is focusing solely on third-party titles and partnerships to continue bringing games to the streaming service.

“In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players,” Google’s Phil Harrison said in a press release. “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 move will close the two development studios Stadia has in LA and Montreal, but Google claims the devs are going to be moving to “new roles” in the coming months. The statement does voice support for these employees, but it does not say if these new roles are within the company.