It seems like Stadia, Google’s streaming video game console, is leaving us almost as quickly as it stormed into our lives.
According to reporting from Business Insider, Google is salvaging the low-latency streaming technology that powers Stadia in order to shop it around as “Google Stream,” separating the tech from the console it was built for. Apparently, this means that Stadia is “deprioritized within Google,” making for yet another blow in the system’s relatively short lifetime.
Last year, after hardly more than a year on the market, Google announced it was shuttering the studios it built in order to make first-party games for Stadia. This move made for a shift in priorities for the Stadia platform, which became a place for low-cost deals that secured a comfortable amount of indie games for Google’s waning console, saving the company money on “AAA blockbusters” while leadership shifted gears on what to make of their streaming technology.
We can’t fit 50 games into a single tweet (we tried) – but we can fit 50 games into Stadia Pro!
Your backlog just got even bigger. Time to check out Stadia Pro, if you haven’t already: https://t.co/I5whBHqwrq pic.twitter.com/p39csnSSXB
— Stadia ☁️🎮 (@GoogleStadia) February 2, 2022
Though a spokesperson from Google reaffirmed to Business Insider that the company will continue supporting Stadia in 2022, it seems as if internally things are a bit more dire for the system itself.
In the year since this abrupt shift, Google has prioritized selling their cloud technology around, manifesting in pitches to multiple gaming companies including Capcom and Bungie, who was recently acquired by Sony for $3.6 billion to build live service games. It’s unknown how far these talks have gone and the state of them given the recent acquisition, and further consolidation, of big publishers and developers in the games industry, which seems like an inevitability, is likely threatening the livelihood of Stadia.
Written by Moises Taveras on behalf of GLHF.
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