Just two weeks ago, Google made the surprise announcement that it was abandoning all first-party development plans and completely transitioning its Stadia business plan. Along with the departure of Jade Raymond, who had joined Google as head of the development studio, all of the company's internal Stadia development studios were closed. Job losses were estimated at around 150.

According to a new report by Kotaku's Nathan Grayson, just five days before the announcement, Phil Harrison, head of Stadia, had reassured his in-house team that nothing was amiss: on January 27, the following email was circulated by Harrison: [3 was:

"[Stadia Games & Entertainment] has made great strides in building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong lineup of Stadia exclusive games. We will shortly be confirming SG&E's investment framework and will be incorporating it into SG&E's strategy."

Five days after this email, Harrison announces a change in policy: "Because of our focus on deepening our business partnerships based on Stadia's proven technology, beyond the games planned for the near future, we will be looking beyond SG&E, our in-house development team We have decided not to invest any further in providing exclusive content.

The developers learned of this news shortly before the official announcement on February 1, but were unable to question Harrison until the February 4 conference call. During this Q&A, Harrison was asked directly about the internal email that was used to reassure him in advance, and as several sources told Kotaku, he said he regretted that email and admitted, "We knew."

To say the least, Phil Harrison doesn't smell a rose from this. But the failure of Stadia, and Alphabet's decision to cut back on first-party studios, is one man's footnote: Stadia's announced plans for the future are that the platform will remain as it has always been, with a free basic service and a subscription-based Stadia Pro, but the focus will be on helping outside developers and publishers take advantage of the technology.

In the context of Amazon's struggles in trying to break into gaming, Stadia is part of an ongoing story of note. The story is about these two large companies with little to no experience in the gaming field trying to build an in-house studio capable of developing AAA-quality titles from the ground up. So far, it hasn't worked, and the casualties here have been developers who believed in Google's commitment to Stadia and lost their jobs less than two years later.

"We are committed to the future of cloud gaming," Harrison wrote on February 1. But when we check back next week, he may be saying something different.