Google Stadia and all projects associated with it have been discontinued, and that means it’s time for the division’s leader, Phil Harrison, to move on. Business interested Reports Harrison left Google. The report claims he left in January, however Linkedin Harrison Only updated in the last few days to say he left Google in April. Harrison spent five years working at Stadia.
Google is not a gaming company, Google CEO Sundar Pichai Launched Launching Google’s gaming platform by announcing to the public “I’m not a big gamer”. As vice president and general manager of Stadia, Harrison was supposed to bring gaming credibility to Google. Harrison is an industry veteran who previously worked at Microsoft and Sony for game console launches, so his experience should have helped the company set up deals with game developers and deal with, uh, excited gaming community.
In the early days, Harrison was the face of Stadia. During the 2019 initial announcement, Harrison took the stage after Pichai announces Stadia to the world, detailing the basic premise and how Stadia will be the “future of gaming”. When things started to go south, Harrison stopped appearing in videos, Stop tweeting, and generally disappeared. Harrison made the news rounds in 2021 when Google shut down Stadia’s only first-party game studio, its games and entertainment division, after just 1.5 years. Harrison It said He told the team that they were “making great progress” one week before their layoffs, which, according to Kotaku, was part of his “not being honest and forthright with the company’s developers” leadership style. He also announced Stadia’s death in a blog post.
It’s impossible to know how useful CEOs can be when we’re outside a company, but Harrison joined Google with a bad reputation with gamers. His previous key executive roles oversaw the Sony Playstation 3 launch and Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox One and Kinect. Both are the worst console releases from every company and preside over the life and death of Stadia does not help Harrison’s reputation.
With Harrison gone, Stadia dead, and the cloud hub supposedly also dead alongside Stadia, there’s nothing left of Google’s ambitious gaming project.