Google Stadia and all associated projects are dead, which means it’s finally time for divisional leader Phil Harrison to move on. Business Insider reports that Harrison has left Google. The report claims he left in January, but Harrison’s Linkedin has only been updated in recent days to say he left Google in April. Harrison worked on Stadia for five years.
Google is not a gaming company, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the launch of Google’s gaming platform by announcing to the public, “I’m not a big gamer.” However, as VP and General Manager of Stadia, Harrison had to bring gaming credibility to Google. Harrison is an industry veteran who previously worked at Microsoft and Sony for the launch of their game consoles, so his experience was supposed to help the company make deals with game developers and deal with the uh, enthusiastic gaming community.
In the early days, Harrison was the face of Stadia. During the initial announcement of 2019, Harrison took the stage after Pichai to announce Stadia to the world, detailing the premise and how Stadia would be “the future of games”. However, when things went wrong, Harrison stopped appearing in videos, stopped tweeting, and generally disappeared. Harrison made headlines in 2021 when Google killed Stadia’s only first-party game studio, the Games & Entertainment division, after just 1.5 years. Harrison reportedly told the team they were “making great progress” a week before they were fired, which Kotaku said was part of a pattern of leadership “not being honest and upfront with the company’s developers.” He also announced Stadia’s death in a blog post.
It’s impossible to know how useful executives are outside of a company, but Harrison came to Google with a bad reputation among gamers. His previous key executive roles oversaw the launch of Sony’s Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox One and the Kinect. Those are both the consensus worst console releases from any company and are the life and death of Stadia does not help Harrison’s prodigious reputation.
With Harrison gone, Stadia dead, and the supposed cloud hub next to Stadia dead, there’s nothing left of the once-ambitious gaming project at Google.
