Google is pulling its own game studios for Stadia

Google has announced on its blog that it no longer wants to make exclusive, proprietary games for Stadia. The company says it will continue to invest in the platform and Stadia continues to attract new games.

Stadia Games & Entertainment

In its weekly news update on Tuesday, the Stadia team announced that development of first-party games for the platform is coming to an end. There are still uncertainties regarding Stadia’s further strategy around games.

“It takes years of time and significant investment to develop the very best games from scratch, and the costs for them continue to rise exponentially. Our focus is on building the proven technology behind Stadia and broadening business partnerships. That’s why we’ve decided that we will not invest any further in bringing exclusive content from our in-house developer team Stadia games & Entertainment beyond the games scheduled for short notice, ”Google said.

Focus on the platform

So Google is pulling the plug from its own game studio before the first game is released. Furthermore, Google says that Jade Raymond, the head of Stadia Games & Entertainment, is already pursuing other opportunities. In November of 2020, Google stated that the first exclusive games were expected from 2023. Our sister site PlayStadia knows that.

Google, on the other hand, continues to invest in the development of Stadia as a platform. The company will also enter into more in-depth partnerships with game partners. What that exactly means is not yet clear.

Second-party exclusives?

The Stadia team may want to mean that Google wants to attract more games from third parties or that Google wants to invest in so-called second-party exclusives. These are exclusive Stadia games made by other game studios for Google’s platform. One such game is the game GYLT, which was the first exclusive title at the launch of Stadia.

We already know that Google is currently working with five game studios to release exclusive second-party games for Stadia. It seems that strategy is now being pushed to the forefront when it comes to exclusive titles.

You can discover the latest news, reviews and live streams from Stadia on our sister site PlayStadia.nl. What do you think of Google’s move to stop releasing its own titles? Do you think second-party exclusives could play a similar role for Stadia? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.