Developers at Google’s newly created game studios were shocked on Feb. 1 when they were notified that the studios would be closed, according to four sources who knew what happened. Just the previous week, Google Stadia vice president and CEO Phil Harrison sent an email to staff praising the “great progress” his studies had made so far.
A few days later massive layoffs were announced, which were part of an apparent leadership pattern of Stadia that was not honest and frank with the company’s developers, many of whom had revalidated their lives and careers to join the team.
“[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great strides in forming a diverse and talented team and establishing a broad lineup of Stadia-exclusive games, ”Harrison’s January 27 email said, according to sources. “We will soon confirm the SG&E investment package, which in turn will report on the SG&E strategy and 2021 [objectives and key results]”.
Google declined to comment.
Five days later, Harrison seemed to be completely reversing course, advertising in a public blog post that Stadia Games and Entertainment chief Jade Raymond left the company and Google “would no longer invest in providing exclusive content from our SG&E internal development team.”
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The developers of Stadia heard the news, first informed by Kotaku, almost at the same time as everyone via an internal email and a phone conference with Harrison. The messy release came after an exhausting year working on the pandemic. It was reminiscent of Stadia’s own launch, which quickly appeared and set aside many of the features promoted during the service’s unveiling, to add months later. In this case, however, the developers of Stadia were the ones affected by the wrong planning.
Launched in November 2019, Stadia initially had problems due to its monetization model and lack of games. The technology was solid, but as a content platform, it was lacking. Maybe first-person strong games 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 eventual CEO of EA Motive Studios, Jade Raymond, to oversee its development. It looked like Google was on the long haul, until it wasn’t.
“I’m proud of the team we’ve created at Stadia Games and Entertainment and the innovative work in platform-exclusive games,” Raymond said. Kotaku in a statement shortly after the closures were announced. “It was a difficult decision to take a new chance and I will always be grateful to this team for everything 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 at a second conference call on Feb. 4. This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where Stadia’s boss confronted his email just the week before. which suggested anything but a wholesale 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 changed the week before, Harrison admitted there was nothing and told those on the call, “We knew.”
One source described the questions and answers as a ultimately unsuccessful attempt to extract some sort of responsibility from Stadia’s management.
“I think people really just wanted the truth of what happened,” the source said. “They just want an explanation of leadership. If you started this study and hired a hundred of these people, no one starts it just to make it go away in a year or so, right? You can’t play a game in this period of time … We had multi-year peace of mind, and not now ”.
The source added that the questions and answers “were not pretty”.
It’s still unclear why Google decided to abandon the first-hand studios it began building less than two years earlier. In his blog post, Harrison referred to rising game development costs as a factor.
“Creating the best games in its class from scratch requires many years and a significant investment, and the cost increases exponentially,” he wrote.
In his questions and answers on Thursday with staff, he specifically noted the purchase of Microsoft and the planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that led Google to decide to close the book on the original development of the game. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is a nearly trillion-dollar company and roughly up to Microsoft when it comes to revenue and profits. according to a 2020 survey of Forbes.
Elsewhere during the questions and answers, Harrison seemed 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 U.S. alone. But it has also led many to find relief in games as they distance themselves and distance themselves boosted the results of many large gaming companies as a result.
For some, the closures of the studios and how they communicated to staff were emblematic of the way the development of the game had been mismanaged at Stadia, according to three sources. Kotaku. This included a severe lack of resources, difficulties in obtaining the necessary hardware and software and a number of people frozen throughout 2020 after the start of the pandemic, despite the goal of finally sending several original exclusives in the coming years. .
Right now, according to sources, Google is looking to find work for displaced employees anywhere else in the company. Still, it has trouble doing so as Google traditionally hires generalists and game development requires a very specialized skill set.
The developers hoped Stadia’s gaming studios would survive their troubles, if for no other reason than Google, at least in theory, could afford to burn hundreds of millions trying to launch a new gaming platform with exclusive content. Instead, it ended up burning by the confidence of some of the approximately 150 developers affected by the sudden change of direction. Now, the remaining Stadia employees have to pick up the pieces while wondering how they can trust leadership and how anyone can trust Stadia.