Developers at Google’s newly formed game studios were shocked on Feb. 1 when it was announced that the studios would be closed, according to four sources who knew what had happened. Just a week before, Google Stadium vice president and CEO Phil Harrison sent an e-mail to staff praising the “great progress” his studios have made so far.
Mass layoffs were announced a few days later, part of an apparent pattern of the Stadia management that was not honest and sincere with the company’s developers, many of whom turned their lives and careers upside down to join the team.
“[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great strides in forming a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong range of exclusive Stadia games, ”Harrison’s January 27 email read, according to sources. “We will shortly confirm the SG&E investment package, 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 reverse course, announcing in a public blog post that the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Jade Raymond, has left the company, and Google “will no longer invest in bringing content exclusively from our internal SG&E development team.”
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Stadia developers found out the news, first reported by Kotaku, almost at the same time as anyone else via an internal email and a conference call with Harrison. The messy launch came after an already grueling pandemic year. He remembered Launch of Stadia, which quickly appeared and left out many features promoted during the service’s unveiling, to be added months later. In this case, however, Stadia’s own developers were the ones affected by the wrong planning.
Launched in November 2019, Stadia initially fought due to its monetization model and lack of games. The technology was solid, but as a content platform, it was missing. Maybe the strong games in the first half could have changed that. Google announced in 2019 the formation of gaming studios in Montreal and Los Angeles, as well as the hiring of celebrities assassin’s Creed producer and possibly general manager of EA Motive Studios, Jade Raymond, to oversee their development. It seemed like Google was around this time, until it wasn’t.
“I’m proud of the team we built at the Games and Entertainment Stadium and the innovative work on platform-exclusive games,” said Raymond. Kotaku in a statement shortly after the closure was announced. “It was a difficult decision to take a new opportunity and I will be forever grateful to this team for everything we have learned and accomplished together.”
The developers had to wait three days after receiving the news to directly share their confusion and frustration with Harrison in a second conference call on February 4th. This call was followed by a controversial question and question in which the head of Stadia confronted his e-mail just a week before. which suggests anything but the wholesale closure of the studios. Harrison expressed regret over the misleading statements made in the previous e-mail, according to four sources with knowledge about the call. When asked what had changed from the previous week, Harrison admitted that he had nothing and told the callers, “I knew.”
A source described the questions and answers as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to extract some sort of responsibility from the Stadia leadership.
“I think people really wanted the truth of what happened,” the source said. “They just want an explanation from the management. If you set up this studio and hired a hundred or so of these people, no one starts this just to disappear in a year or so, right? You can’t play a game at that time … I had reinsurance for several years, and not now. ”
The source added that the questions and answers “were not beautiful”.
It’s still unclear why Google decided to give up the primary studios it started building less than two years earlier. In his blog post, Harrison referred to the rising costs of game development as a factor.
“Creating the best games in the class from the start requires many years and significant investment, and the cost increases exponentially,” he wrote.
In Thursday’s questions and answers with staff, he specifically pointed to Microsoft’s purchases and the planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that led Google to close the book on the original development of the games. The parent company Google, Alphabet, is a company of almost trillions of dollars and roughly on par with Microsoft when it comes to revenue and profit, according to a 2020 survey conducted by Forbes.
Elsewhere, during questions and answers, Harrison seemed to suggest that the ongoing pandemic was partly to blame, according to a source. The effects of Covid-19 were devastating, including nearly half a million deaths in the United States alone. But it has also led many to find relief in games because of social distance and stimulated the core results of many large gaming companies as a result.
For some, the closures of the studio and the way they were communicated to the staff were emblematic of the way the development of the game at the Stadium was mismanaged, said three sources Kotaku. This included a severe shortage of resources, difficulties in providing the necessary hardware and software, and a frozen number throughout 2020 after the pandemic began, despite the goal of eventually delivering more original exclusives in the coming years. years.
Currently, sources said, Google is looking to find work for employees relocated to another part of the company. However, it has trouble doing this because Google traditionally hires generalists, and game development requires a highly specialized set of skills.
The developers hoped that Stadia game studios would survive its problems if, for other reasons, Google could, at least in theory, afford to throw hundreds of millions trying to launch a new gaming platform with exclusive content. Instead, it came to burn with the trust of some of the approximately 150 developers affected by the sudden change of direction. Now, the remaining Stadia employees need to pick up the pieces while wondering how they can trust leadership and how anyone can trust Stadia.