Holy wow, did you know that developing video games is expensive and takes some time? It turns out that Google might not have known this when it started investing in first-party development in Stadia, according to former Typhoon Studios developers Reid Schneider and Alex Hutchinson. Both of them paint a picture of a company that was prepared to push forward with first-party exclusives but had no real comprehension of the investment and time required for the operation to reach scale compared.
To a certain extent this makes sense; Google is first and foremost a company of platforms rather than first-party software development and publishing. On the other hand, it also makes the abortive effort for Stadia exclusives look even more absurd considering the time allotted for this project to come together. Hutchinson and Schneider both state that they’re interested in Stadia as a platform, but it seems obvious that Google wasn’t ready for the reality of, well… game development.
