“Deprioritized” Google Stadia to pivot to “Google Stream” white-label service

Article note: Well, that's going exactly as expected. The controller I got as a freebie will be a fun bit of ephemera one day in the not-too-distant future.

Enlarge / How much longer can Stadia stay aloft? (credit: Google / Aurich Lawson)

As Stadia continues to cling to life inside Google, a new report from Business Insider's Hugh Langley sheds light on what the cloud gaming division has been up to for the past few months. As usual, the report is not promising.

According to the BI report, the "Stadia consumer platform" has been "deprioritized" inside Google and now only takes up an estimated 20 percent of the Stadia division's time. After Google closed its only first-party studio last year (before it had ever produced a game!), a blog post hinted that a white-label service would be Stadia's future. We saw a bit of what that would look like in October when AT&T released a cloud version of Batman: Arkham Knight that was secretly powered by Google Stadia. BI reports that service will be called "Google Stream" and that "the focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream."

The white-label Stadia service would work a lot like the way Google Cloud Platform works—companies that don't want to run their own cloud gaming service could just use Google's back end and distribute their games however they want. Like with Batman, presumably there are no branding requirements necessary and no need to plug into the Stadia store or the rest of the Stadia ecosystem.