The stadium is alive and well," Google

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The stadium is alive and well," Google

Google's cloud gaming platform Stadia is not doing so well. After a rough start (especially on PC) and an unimpressive selection of games, things seem to be even more dire these days: earlier this year, the company closed its in-house studio and said goodbye to high-profile studio head Jade Raymond, and in April, Stadia's vice president and product head John Justice also left, along with six other members of the Stadia team.

However, in an interview with GamesIndustry, developer marketing chief Nate Ahearn said Stadia is "alive and well" and has plans to release over 100 new games on the platform this year.

"We continue to make Stadia a great place to play games on the devices you already own," Ahearn said.

"Notice how we continue to put our words into action by growing the Stadia Makers program and partnering with AAA studios like Capcom, EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft.

Stadia is currently led by Dov Zimring, described by a Google representative as "a senior leader in product development for both Project Stream and Stadia. He will lead the team toward the goal of creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for partners"

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Also, the wheels are still turning on the Stadia Makers program, which was announced last year as a program aimed at helping indie developers self-publish; they lost Stadia Games and Entertainment, which produced Despite losing Stadia Games and Entertainment and the exclusive titles they were expected to produce, Ahearn said Stadia is not looking to the indie developers participating in the program to fill the void: "The whole point of the program is to help them add Stadia as a launch platform for their games. The point of the program is to help them add Stadia as a launch platform for their games, not to put pressure on them or make anything harder.

"An important distinction to emphasize about Stadia Makers is that by design, no studio is expected to exclusively launch their games on Stadia. Rather, the program is designed to help studios launch Unity-based games on Stadia in addition to other platforms."

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According to Ahearn, indie studios are still enrolling in the program, and Google has recently made changes to allow partner engineering teams to "work more closely with developers as needed." Five indie games have already been released for Stadia through the program, and more than 20 others are currently in development.

But while Stadia is expanding its game library to include new titles like "Resident Evil: The Village" and "Outriders," it is not going entirely smoothly. For example, patches for the Stadia version of "Outriders" have lagged considerably behind updates for the PC and console versions, and the company has also struggled with issues such as the crash bug in "Journey to the Savage Planet," which took several weeks to fix due to the closure of its in-house studio. The most recent update to Stadia itself was the addition of a search bar, which appeared at the end of April, more than a year after the platform's launch, and was predictably met with derision.

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