It was not even two years ago that Google announced their Stadia game streaming service in March of 2019 following about a year of collecting some of the best talent in the games industry to work at their new in-house studio dubbed Stadia Games & Entertainment or SG&E, which was headed by industry veteran Jade Raymond. Well that studio has now more or less been shuttered as today Google announced a refocus for their Stadia service and studio head Jade Raymond has been confirmed to have left the company to “pursue other opportunities." They describe the closing of SG&E as a “winding down" and while they won’t be investing further into the studio creating original content for Stadia there still may be some releases of “near-term planned games" that were already in the works.
As for the new focus of Stadia, Google says that since the launch of the service in November of 2019 their technology has been proven at scale to be able to deliver games to players instantly through the cloud, and that “Having games streamed to any screen is the future of this industry." So rather than continue investing into the very expensive and very volatile world of creating high-end gaming content, they’ll instead be focusing on investing in the Stadia platform itself and helping third party developers and publishers bring their content to Stadia.
Of course, Google has a history of shutting down their own services, even ...