Is Google giving up on Stadia? Sort of, but it lives on in Peloton
(Pocket-lint) — Google is reportedly lowering expectations for Google Stadia, to the point where it's now demoted the entire project within the company and pivoting priorities and expectations.
According to Business Insider, Google no longer considers Stadia a potential PS5, Switch, and Xbox contender. Rather than bring more games to Stadia, it is now actively using the cloud gaming platform to power new experiences for partner companies such as Peloton, Bungie, and Capcom. In fact, it's doubled-down on securing different deals to prove this new business model.
If you're wondering what this will look like for consumers, the report claimed Peloton's first video game, Lanebreak, is actually powered by Stadia technology, which is now internally called Google Stream. AT&T's free browser-based access to Batman: Arkham Knight last autumn also ran on Stadia. Meanwhile, Capcom is exploring doing the same with web-based demos of its games.
Even Destiny developer Bungie, which Sony is now buying for $3.6 billion, was trying to build its own streaming platform based on Google Stream.
Apparently, there are people at Google who would love to keep Stadia going and are working hard to ensure the gaming platform doesn't end up in Google's famed graveyard of abandoned projects.
«But they’re not the ones writing the checks», as Business Insider pointed out.
As it stands, Google Stadia boss Phil Harrison now reports to Jason Rosenthal, Google’s vice president of subscription services. So, he doesn't report to Google hardware boss Rick Osterloh, signaling the entire Stadia division is no longer a hardware project but purely a software one at the company.
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