Focusing on Stadia’s future as a platform, and winding down SG&E

Google announces that it will close SG&E, a studio dedicated to creating exclusive platform games.

According to them,

the creation of quality games takes many years, money and exponential costs (which can negatively influence the development of the platform itself).

But what does this mean for the future of the cloud console?

Absolutely nothing!

It will continue to function normally as if nothing had happened, or probably better, since it will now have a dedicated focus on the giant.

My opinion on this:

Google is new to the game market and has created a huge hype, raising expectations to the maximum before launch, many promises and etc..., but the truth is that it is still a newcomer in this market and has a lot to learn.

Creating exclusive games for such a new platform, in my opinion, has always been a crazy strategy, after all.

• What kind of exclusive games to create?
• Will it be successful?
• Who is the target audience?
• What is the profile of Stadia players?

All of these questions are very difficult and perhaps impossible to answer at the moment, the base of Stadia is still being built and the company still has a lot to learn before investing millions in the production of its own games.

Sony's exclusives games: Last of Us, God of War & Uncharted, are a good example of this, they are games with a much more dense and adult theme and state-of-the-art graphics, while Nintendo bet on the more childish audience, with a lot of fun adventure and strong colors.

Where would Stadia be at? Nobody knows, if they make games very similar to Nintendo, Xbox or Playstation there is the possibility of not only not captivating his player base but generating a negative comparison for their games, they need to be exclusive and have an identity something that at the moment is simply too soon.

With all that said, I see this decision with great eyes, it seems to me that the company is beginning to understand its place in all of this and having the maturity to step back a little in its ambition and take more certain steps instead of shooting at all sides, putting the entire business at risk.

We will probably see from now on the platform consolidate better and create more interesting features for users and who knows in the future, when they are more confident, they can end up betting on exclusives.

Source: google blog