Everything Stadia Is Now Officially Dead, Project Head Exits Google
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
Comments on “Everything Stadia Is Now Officially Dead, Project Head Exits Google”
I really cannot understand why Google saw Phil Harrison, a man solidly 0 for 2 on launches, and said “yes, that is the man”
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Once you get to a certain level on the corporate ladder, you’re set for life. As long as you don’t stab a secretary or something, someone else will always give you another $$$$ position just based on your previous job titles alone.
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There’s this popular motivational trope that you can learn from failure and be a better person for it. It’s a technically logical inspirational cliche that is also hilariously out of touch with reality if you even spend a single solitary moment thinking about it. Learning from failure is technically possible – if the consequences of that failure don’t dog you for the rest of your life like a nasty remark on your permanent record.
Learning from failure is easy, even inspirational, if you have the resources to pursue every single possibility, and start over anew with minimal consequence. You might even fool some of the people into thinking that you’re a misunderstood visionary. Realistically, you’d have to be someone who already enjoys immense privilege, and has an entire army of grunt workers you can throw under the bus when your vanity project goes south. Consider how many workers Richard Branson has now effectively run out of a job, just so he could go up into space and give an inspirational speech all of one time.
lol
Do No Evil
Crap marketing.
I don’t think many people knew what Stadia even was at first. Originally sounded to me like it had something to do with live sports.
When it was launched, I already felt it was gonna go down just because of Google’s recent track record.
Petty obvious
Look: As soon as they made it clear that they expected you to pay full price for the game, it was never going to fly.
Currently the most successful video-game streaming services either offer a subscription, or sell the game at a discounted price. Or, more often, offer the games as a free perk.
Amazon Luna is probably the most successful videogame streaming service on PC that doesn’t actually preload the games, and it offers a subset of the games ‘free’ to Prime users.
Some things I miss
There are some google products that I genuinely miss and am sad about them going away.
For example, I honestly miss Google Hangouts and Apps for chrome.
I don’t miss Stadia.
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I miss Reader
At what point do Google realise that their constant shuttering of products dooms most future products to failure?
They could invent the next ipod but nobody’s going to buy it if they fear it’ll be useless in a year.
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That’s not a great example. As far as I know, most old iPods can keep working regardless of what Apple does (excepting the iPod Touch, which was basically an iPhone with no modem).
Of course, your example is not terrible either, because this is Google we’re talking about. They could find a way to make their product dependent on them, as they did with the Stadia controller’s Wi-Fi support (luckily, the controller was still usable over USB, and Google did some work after the shutdown to enable Bluetooth).
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Yeah, I probably should have picked an example that wasn’t stand-alone but as you say they’d still find a way to shoot it in the foot.
Here is what I don’t understand. How the hell is Google going to survive? They can’t keep going with thei current track record. If they keep doing things like this, in a decade nobody will take them seriously. “We’re announcing the next version of Android” “Yeah, right, you’ll just kill it”. I mean, seriously, Google, more and more, seems like a company that has absolutely no idea what to do. No goals, no driving force other than profits, and absolutely no desire to change that. It’s gonna doom them in the end. I can’t think of any other company — not even Microsoft — who is as trigger happy as Google is, willing to kill any product, regardless of whether it’ll make them lots of money, for absolutely no reason than “Oh it’s adoption was too slow”. Like how can you expect a product to be adopted in a day or even a couple months? Products that take off like that are ridiculously rare. Most of the time, a published product will take months to over a year before it really kicks off.
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They can survive the same way as any “legacy” company: keep doing the things they’ve been doing, just well enough to not die. Like IBM or the telephone companies (how often do you hear of them launching anything new that people might care about?).
There’s not even a real competitor to Android yet, so I don’t see that disappearing in the next decade. (Apple’s there, but the locked-down products and higher prices prevent them from competing across the whole market.)
There are probably hundreds of active Google products and services, but how many have people generally heard of? Android, Chrome, Search, Gmail, Maps, Docs… and maybe a few I’m forgetting. Those could mostly survive if Google wants them to, but the rest (including whatever their current soon-to-be-dead messaging program is), well, don’t become reliant on those…
In some areas, MS have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure backward-compatibility. Whereas Google, for example, broke the plus operator of their search engine to shoehorn in “Google Plus”, and never even restored it when they killed that product. We used to be able to require a certain word, or even an exact phrase, appear in the page. Now, I’ll try to search for a quote or a song lyric, and no matter how I punctuate it, Google’s gonna return a bunch of pages that do not include it as written.
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Same way banks do. I don’t believe anyone takes them seriously since 2008 and yet they still have world governments at their beck and call.
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