Stadia No More

This past weekend, Google announced that they would be shutting down the Game Development branch of Stadia.

They will no longer be focusing on games and now plan to work with third-party developers to deliver their games to gamers around the world via Stadia.

The Stadia service has been changing ever since launch due to the backlash from gaming communities about the poor service that was offered. This push has led to many changes in the online service and this major change to the Stadia company will impact how gamers experience the online service in the future.

Looking into reviews by gaming sites and personal reports, they all outlined a shared negative experience with Stadia. A student at Champlain that was interviewed said that they got the service to see all of the new game titles Google had released. However, they soon realized that there was a lot of stuttering with the games that bogged down the gameplay, especially with multiplayer games. Even those games that were mostly story-driven were affected by the slow load times and stuttering.

Google has improved Stadia over the years. They added controller compatibility back to PC, introduced a new and improved UI, and fixed some of the stuttering and bet codings. This has caused Stadia to rise even after their disastrous launch.

But this sudden news of the closing of Stadia’s game development branch may have a greater impact on the system's success, for better or for worse.

Stadia’s vice president, Phil Harrison, commented on this development. He stated, “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.”

Google decided to cut back on developing games as developing the technology of Stadia and working with other game developers would be more beneficial for the future of Stadia as an online gaming service.

Harrison also commented that Google will still support Stadia as a company in developing the online service further to make it the best it can be. They will continue to push Stadia as the future of gaming, a platform for gamers and developers everywhere.

By Cam Chrin

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