As Stadia continues to desperately cling to life inside Google, a new report from Business Insider ‘s Hugh Langley sheds light on what the cloud gaming division has been up to over the past few months. As usual, nothing is promised.
According to the report, the “Stadia consumer platform”has been “deprioritized”within Google and now only takes up about 20 percent of the Stadia division’s time. After Google shut down its one and only in-house studio last year (before it released the game!), a blog post hinted that Stadia’s future would be white label service. We saw what that would look like in October when AT&T released a cloud version of Batman: Arkham Knight that was secretly running Google Stadia. BI says the service will be called “Google Stream”and that “management’s focus right now is on closing deals for Stream.”
The white-labeled Stadia service will work just like the Google Cloud Platform – companies that don’t want to run their own cloud gaming service can simply use Google’s back end and distribute the game however they want. As with Batman, there appears to be no need for branding requirements and no need to connect to the Stadia store or the rest of the Stadia ecosystem.
Bungie’s inclusion on the list raises a lot of questions. Destiny 2 is likely Google Stadia’s flagship game – it was one of the first games on the platform and is free to play. However, Bungie has just been the subject of Sony’s blockbuster $3.6 billion acquisition, and now no one knows if the company will continue with its previous plans.
Following the acquisition, Bungie promised that Destiny 2 and future games would not become PlayStation exclusives, leaving the door open for a deal with Stadia. Sony’s game streaming service, PlayStation Now, has been very run down for years and doesn’t offer much competition today, but Sony is reportedly planning an upgrade to compete with Xbox Cloud Gaming. Assuming the new PSNow isn’t exclusive to the PlayStation, Bungie could switch to a Sony service.
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Stadia has been laying off management and key employees for some time now. Assassin’s Creed co-creator and SG&E executive Jade Raymond left in February 2021 when the game development studio closed. Stadia Vice President and Head of Product John Justice and Stadia Lead Engineer Justin Uberti both retired in May 2021. Middle East and Africa.
Google isn’t killing the consumer platform (yet), but one source told Business Insider that people are “working really hard to make sure it doesn’t die.”