Google Stadia and all of its associated projects are dead, and that means it’s finally time for division leader Phil Harrison to move on. Business Insider reports that Harrison has left Google. The report states that he left in January, but Harrison’s Linkedin it was only updated in the last few days to say that he left Google in April. Harrison spent five years working on Stadia.
Google is not a gaming company, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai expelled the launch of Google’s gaming platform announcing to the crowd, “I’m not a big gamer.” However, as Stadia’s VP and GM, Harrison was supposed to bring gaming credibility to Google. Harrison is an industry veteran who previously worked at Microsoft and Sony for their game console launches, so his experience was supposed to help the company set up deals with game developers and deal with eh , enthusiastic gaming community
In the early days, Harrison was the face of Stadia. During the initial 2019 announcement, Harrison took the stage. after Pichai to announce Stadia to the world, detailing the basic premise and how Stadia would be “the future of gaming.” However, when things started to go wrong, Harrison stopped appearing in videos, stopped tweeting, and generally disappeared. Harrison made the news rounds in 2021 when Google dropped Stadia’s only game studio of its own, the Games & Entertainment division, after just 1.5 years. harrison reportedly he told the team that they were “making great progress” a week before they were fired, which Kotaku claimed was part of a pattern of leadership “that was not honest or forthright with the company’s developers.” He also announced the death of Stadia in a blog post.
It’s impossible to know how useful executives are outside of a company, but Harrison joined Google with a bad reputation among gamers. His previous top executive roles oversaw the launch of Sony’s Playstation 3 and the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox One and Kinect. Both happen to be the worst console releases by consensus from each company and preside over the life and death of Stadia. it’s not helping Harrison’s prodigious reputation.
With Harrison gone, Stadia dead, and the supposed cloud pivot also removed along with Stadia, there’s nothing left of Google’s ambitious gaming project.
