Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
I know it&#x27;s cool to hate on Stadia still (but less so than it used to be, now that everyone seems to just use it as a Cyberpunk console...) but this move makes sense to me.<p>1. First-party AAA games are a huge investment (in time and money), especially for a company without any experience in building them. Starting a first-party game studio is a huge risk (financial and planning) that I&#x27;m not surprised didn&#x27;t pan out.<p>2. Stadia has a reputation as the &quot;indie game streamer&quot; platform in a lot of circles after such a large % of their first games were older and from smaller dev cos. The unpolished first-party AAA game (if it ever came out) wouldn&#x27;t do much to help this reputation; focusing on partnerships and getting new releases on the platform seems like it&#x27;d do far more for the service&#x27;s future.<p>3. Unpopular opinion but I don&#x27;t think exclusives should exist for any platform. It may be good for business but it&#x27;s bad for most gamers.<p>4. Politically, it feels like we&#x27;re about to move into a period where companies need to be way more careful with monopolistic moves into new markets. &quot;Owning the platform and the content&quot; seems to be a wedge-prone position that a lot of companies are worried about (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc) and this kind of just clears Stadia&#x2F;Google from having to worry about that on &quot;their console&quot;.<p>FWIW I have almost 100 hours on Stadia and 49 friends online in Stadia at the time of writing this comment, but YMMV, I am most definitely in some kind of Stadia-bubble, I probably have some confirmation bias, and this may also be wishful thinking based on the fact that I want Stadia (and cloud gaming as a whole) to succeed.