Google Stadia's Salvaged Future as a Back-end Cloud Service is Here

Quick Google Stadia recap: Things have not been great. From a report: Google's AAA cloud gaming service launched in 2019 to middling reviews and since then has severely undershot Google's sales and usage estimates by hundreds of thousands of users. The company shut down its first-party studio, 'Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E),' before it could ever develop a game, and it did so one week after lead executive Phil Harrison gave the division a positive progress report. Several key executives have left the struggling division, like Assassin's Creed co-creator and SG&E leader Jade Raymond, Stadia's VP and head of product, John Justice, and Engineering Lead Justin Uberti.

When Google killed the game division at the beginning of the year, an accompanying blog post hinted that big changes were coming to Google's strategy: 'In 2021, we're expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players.' Rather than continuing to push Stadia as a consumer-facing, branded service, Google seems to want to pivot the service to what would essentially be 'Google Cloud Gaming Platform.' This would be a back-end, white-label service that could power other companies' products, just like a million other Google Cloud products, like database hosting and push messaging. Google said it believes a back-end service 'is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business.' This all brings us to this Batman game presented by AT&T Wireless.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.