from the stop-stop-it’s-already-dead dept
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Google’s Stadia product. What was originally billed as a forthcoming world class cloud video game streaming platform launched terribly, never gained much traction, and eventually was announced to be pivoting to serving as the backend platform for other companies that actually knew what the hell they were doing with game streaming. While most of Stadia and its team had been fully sunsetted, it was only a few weeks ago that Google finally gave up entirely and shut down its plans to be even a backend service for anyone else to use.
When Google killed the service, the narrative from the company was that Stadia’s technology would live on in Google Cloud, but, according to Stephen Totilo of Axios, even Stadia’s white-label game-streaming service is now dead.
When Stadia’s shutdown was formally announced, Stadia VP and General Manager Phil Harrison made a big deal of the continuation of Stadia’s technology, with even the title being called “A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy.” The post read: “The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts—as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.”
Those comments from Harrison were made, literally, a couple of months ago. Two months later, the latest report regarding Stadia is not only that any pivoted-to plans have been shut down and killed, but that Harrison is absconding now that he has no more platforms at Google to murder.
Google Stadia and all its associated projects are dead, and that means it’s finally time for the division’s leader, Phil Harrison, to move on. Business Insider reports Harrison has left Google. The report claims he left in January, but Harrison’s Linkedin was only updated in the last few days to say he left Google in April. Harrison spent five years working on Stadia.
It’s impossible to know how useful executives are when we’re outside a company, but Harrison joined Google with a bad reputation with gamers. His previous major executive roles oversaw Sony’s Playstation 3 launch and Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox One and the Kinect. Those both happen to be the consensus worst console releases from each company and presiding over the life and death of Stadia is not helping Harrison’s prodigious reputation.
For critics of the way Google rolls out and then supports, or not, its high profile projects, this is red meat. Delicious, juicy red meat. The tech industry is absolutely lousy with failure, of course. Ambitious projects and ideas are entertained all the time. Hell, that’s why we get so much actual cool stuff that works coming out of the industry.
But for a company with the resources of Google to fail this hard, this fast, and this completely in an endeavor that really kinda should be at least partially in its wheelhouse is not a good look.
Filed Under: phil harrison, stadia, video game streaming, video games
Companies: google
