I didn’t expect to be reading and re-reporting about Stadia, the first and evidently Google’s only foray to the gaming industry that failed because Google could not think OUTSIDE GOOGLE regarding it’s approach to gamers.
To no recount a known story, during its final days, Stadia was delegated as a second priority when Google entered the Immersive Stream offering within the Google Cloud catalog and despite the effort, it did not save Stadia.
Last week, Axios reported that Google quietly has also shuttered Immersive Stream although not as publicly as it was the Stadia closure.
Immersive Stream was the B2B variant of Stadia managed through Google Cloud and later, was billed as being the “project itself” and Stadia just a big case-study in the heydays.
Basically it was Stadia with a link with corporate clients for Google that needed to showcase content like games or high fidelity graphical and/or video without labeling Stadia or a concept known as White-Label.
Two known customer where AT&T, that offered their subscriber an never-released-on-Stadia version of Batman: Arkham Knight (it was obviously ready for Stadia but never was made available) and Control Ultimate Edition, meanwhile, CApcom opened a temporary cloud gaming demo of Resident Evil Village (game was already released on Stadia).
Reportedly, Google was looking at Bungie as a big partner for Immersive Stream and adding more support for the live services aspect of Destiny.
With this, Axios also reported that Google is having a different concept on its future in the gaming industry with tech can ameliorate risk for live-service games, which are lucrative but prone to numerous technical problems, including being potentially overloaded by surges in popularity.
The concept is being lead by former Stadia executive Jack Buser, who has been identified as the 10th Stadia employee and now, he is serving as Google Cloud’s director of Game Industry solutions NOT reporting to VP and Stadia leader Phil Harrison (reportedly still working on Google but it is not know what he is doing now at the moment).
For now, it is a three-part Google Cloud bundle and some services are already in existence with Immersive Stream.
These include a game-centric server platform, cloud storage data management and a searchable player and game analytics through BigQuery.
Google has already signed Ubisoft, Niantic and Unity as active customers and reportedly, they are actively looking for more customers and it is not known if Bungie is still one of them as Bungie is now a Playstation Studios subsidiary.