Stadia executives praised development studios for ‘great progress’ just a week before ditching them

Developers at Google’s newly created game studios were shocked on February 1 when they were told they were shutting down the studios, according to four sources familiar with what happened. The previous week, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison emailed staff to hail the “great strides” his studios have made so far.

Massive layoffs were announced days later, as part of an apparent model of Stadia leadership that is not honest and frank with the company’s developers, many of whom had turned their lives and careers upside down to join the ‘team.

“[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great strides in building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong lineup of games exclusive to Stadia, ”according to sources in Harrison’s Jan. 27 email. “We will soon confirm the SG&E investment envelope, which, in turn, will inform the SG&E strategy and 2021 [objectives and key results]. “

Google declined to comment.

Five days later, Harrison appeared to completely reverse course, announcement in a public blog post that the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Jade Raymond, has left the company, and that Google “would not invest more in bringing exclusive content from our internal SG&E development team”.

Stadia developers have heard the news, first reported by Kotaku, almost at the same time as everyone via an internal email and conference call with Harrison. The messy deployment came after an already grueling year of going through the pandemic. It reminded Launch of Stadia, which seemed rushed and left out many features that were promoted when the service was revealed, only to be added months later. In this case, however, it was Stadia’s own developers who were affected by the botched planning.

Released in November 2019, Stadia initially struggled due to its monetization model and a lack of games. The technology was solid, but as a content platform it was lacking. Maybe some powerful top tier games could have changed that. Google announced in 2019 the creation of game studios based in Montreal and Los Angeles as well as the hiring of famous Assassin’s Creed producer and possibly managing director of EA Motive Studios Jade Raymond to oversee their development. It seemed like Google was in there for the long haul, until it wasn’t.

“I am proud of the team we have created at Stadia Games and Entertainment and the groundbreaking work on exclusive games for the platform,” said Raymond. Kotaku in a statement shortly after the announcement of the closures. “It was a difficult decision to seize a new opportunity, and I will be forever grateful to this team for all we have learned and achieved together.

The developers had to wait three days after receiving the news to directly share their confusion and frustration with Harrison on a second conference call on February 4. This call was followed by a controversial question and answer where the Stadia boss was confronted with his email from the previous week. which suggested anything but a total closure of the studios. Harrison expressed regret for the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources familiar with the call. When asked what had changed from the previous week, Harrison admitted nothing had been done and told those called, ‘We knew’.

A source described the Q&A as an unsuccessful attempt to extract some sort of responsibility from Stadia management.

“I think people really wanted the truth about what happened,” the source said. “They just want an explanation from management. If you started this studio and hired a hundred of these people, nobody’s going to start this just to be gone in a year or two, right? You can’t make a game in that time … We’ve been reassured over several years, and now we’re not.

The source added that the Q&A “wasn’t pretty.”

It’s still unclear exactly why Google decided to ditch the proprietary studios it had started building less than two years earlier. In his blog post, Harrison referred to the rising costs of game development as a factor.

“Creating top-notch games from scratch takes many years and a lot of investment, and the cost is growing exponentially,” he wrote.

In his Thursday Q&A with staff, he specifically highlighted Microsoft’s buying frenzy and the planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that made Google decide to close the book. on the development of original games. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is a nearly trillion dollar company and roughly on par with Microsoft in terms of both revenue and profit, according to a 2020 survey conducted by Forbes.

Elsewhere during question period, Harrison appeared to suggest that the ongoing pandemic was partly to blame, according to a source. The effects of Covid-19 have been devastating, including nearly half a million deaths in the United States alone. But it has also led many people to find relief in gambling due to their social distancing and boosted the results of many large gaming companies Therefore.

For some, the studio closures and the way they were communicated to staff were emblematic of game development mismanagement at Stadia, three sources said. Kotaku. This included a severe lack of resources, difficulties securing necessary hardware and software, and a workforce frozen throughout 2020 after the pandemic began, despite the goal of eventually shipping several original exclusives in the years to come. .

As of now, according to sources, Google is looking to find work for employees displaced elsewhere in the company. However, it struggles to do so because Google has traditionally hired generalists, and game development requires a very specialized skill set.

The developers were hoping that Stadia’s game studios would survive its troubles, if for no other reason than that Google, at least in theory, could afford to burn hundreds of millions of people trying to relaunch a new platform. game with exclusive content. Instead, it ended up burning the trust of some of the roughly 150 developers affected by the sudden change in leadership. Now, the remaining Stadia employees must pick up the pieces while wondering how they can trust leadership and how anyone can trust Stadia.