“In his Thursday Q&A with staff, he pointed specifically to Microsoft’s buying spree and planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that had made Google decide to close the book on original game development.”
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I would really like to know how much they bid for Bethesda.
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Microsoft finally splurged to defend its market share.
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Don’t think it was that angle so much as MS making it crystal clear what kinda investment would be required to compete with them. I think they realized their window for making huge bets on buyouts was coming up and would not last long and MS made that investment risk all too real for them.
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This is kinda amusing, I wonder if MS and Google would work together in the gaming space. If Stadia just goes away maybe MS can make a deal with Google to link up YouTube and xCloud, that would be pretty big.
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Phil Harrison strikes again
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Pretty sure it wasn’t Harrison’s call to shut down their first party studios though. Amazon/Google think they can just jump right in and dominate but that’s obviously not going to happen.
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It would be a brave person who boarded a ship on its maiden voyage if they saw Phil Harrison boarding too.
Though if you stayed close enough he would be certain to find a lifeboat when the inevitable happened.
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Phil Harrison has the fastest hands in the west. The great illusionist with excellent distract and switch techniques.
PH: “Look over there. MS is buying Bethesda…”
(Signals to his assistant to close first party studios, while people are distracted.)
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Yea new world releases in August
Yes, now that they have surrendered there are possibilities for cooperation.
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My biggest takeaway from that article is that Google is actually a subsidiary 
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Just look at Microsoft. 20 years in the market and people are still skeptical about them (in part due to the American big corpo stigma).
??? You didnt know?
Google is so big that I always thought that it was the parent company
Well to be fair, Alphabet has only existed since 2015. Google was the parent company until that point. It was all part of a strategic restructuring.
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Yeah that’s just corpo-mumbo jumbo.
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True and they’ve never ever been #1 for any console generation that they’ve been in for the last 20 years so it’s hilarious that Amazon/Google/Whoever thinks that they can just swoop right in and dominate. It’s simply not going to happen.
I’m still baffled at Google shutting down its studios this quickly. SG&E was only formed in 2019! There’s no way that there was any expectation for them to have produced a AAA game by now. They barely had a chance to get started. What could the thought process have possibly been, to pour so much money into founding a games studio and hiring so much talent, then changing their mind and quitting before the ink was even dry.
I’m not baffled at all. I always said that they would be done in two years and it barely lasted 15 months. Google shuts down whatever doesn’t “take off” immediately. They’re simply not going to put the money, time and resources needed to be successful. I’m also expecting them to shutdown Stadia completely in due time because without your own first party exclusives, what’s the point of even having a platform? At this point, I would just dump the entire platform if it was up to me.
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