Google Stadia has reportedly been demoted, but it might show up in your Peloton

theverge.com:

One year after Google revealed it now saw Google Stadia cloud gaming idea as a mere “technology platform for industry partners” rather than a true rival to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, Business Insider is reporting that some Stadia gamers’ fears have come true: the entire Stadia project has been demoted within Google, and its new priority is to power experiences from companies including Peloton, Bungie, and Capcom rather than attracting more games to Stadia itself.

In fact, Peloton bike owners might have already experienced the fruits of those labors — BI reports that Peloton’s very first video game, Lanebreak, was actually powered by Google’s cloud gaming technology, now dubbed Google Stream. (That’s one way to put a game inside your exercise machine!)

But if you were hoping that Google Stadia’s own cloud gaming platform would pull itself out of its current precarious situation (where only Ubisoft is continuing to contribute its latest and greatest games),BI’s sources suggest that’s not likely:

Current and former employees said the priority was now on proof-of-concept work for Google Stream and securing white-label deals. One estimated about 20% of the focus was on the consumer platform.

“There are plenty of people internally who would love to keep it going, so they are working really hard to make sure it doesn’t die,” they said. “But they’re not the ones writing the checks.”

Two sources told BI that Google Stadia boss Phil Harrison now reports to Jason Rosenthal, Google’s vice president of subscription services, instead of directly to Google hardware boss Rick Osterloh. That’s a demotion for the entire Stadia division, though that’s perhaps not too much of a surprise: Stadia wasn’t meeting Google’s internal