The VP appears to have left following Stadia’s downturn

Phil Harrison, the previous head of Stadia at Google, has reportedly left the corporate.

A brand new report from Enterprise Insider mentioned that Harrison left Google across the time when it shut down the Stadia streaming service. Although no official assertion’s been made as of this writing, Harrison’s LinkedIn does replicate the change, along with his departure from Google marked at April 2023.

Harrison has been across the video games trade for fairly some time, working at each Sony and Microsoft over time. He joined Google in 2018, taking the lead on the corporate’s efforts to begin up the cloud streaming service Stadia. Harrison even took the stage at GDC 2019 to unveil this imaginative and prescient for a streaming future.

In fact, all of us keep in mind how Stadia turned out. In 2021, Google shut down its inside growth initiatives for Stadia, saying it could not be investing additional in bringing unique content material from its inside growth workforce. On the time, Harrison cited the “exponentially” rising prices of making “best-in-class video games from the bottom up.”

Then, a 12 months later, Google formally closed the curtain on Stadia. All {hardware} purchases made by way of the Google Retailer can be refunded, and in January of this 12 months, the service formally shuttered. Harrison wrote in a weblog put up that the expertise hadn’t “gained the traction with customers” that Google anticipated.

The clouds set

There’s been no formal announcement, and no indication of what could also be subsequent for Harrison. As for Stadia, nicely, that’s nearly by way of.

Google not too long ago informed Axios in an interview that it’s been promoting a bundle of providers to publishers, shifting into the function of tech companion for live-service publishers.