Google never publicly demonstrated much in terms of its internally developed content, but it did seem financially serious in its efforts up until now. It picked up Jade Raymond, the veteran producer who helped build Assassin’s Creed, and placed her in charge of developing games for Stadia. It’s unknown what the teams were up to over the past couple of years, but it obviously didn’t pan out. Likely due to a plurality of reasons. As part of today’s announcement, Raymond has left the company. Overall, the closure of Google’s game development companies is going to affect about 150 employees (via Kotaku).
What’s next for Stadia
While cloud gaming still seems far off due to a number of technical reasons, it likely is an inevitability once bandwidth connections and data caps improve. After all, we thought the notion of just downloading our games was absurd some years ago, yet here we are.
