The Death that was never Stranded

From Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For Hate's sake; I spit my last breath at thee!

As the immolation of Google Stadia for all the world to see has gone underway, information about the truly disastrous state of the service has begun to permeate throughout the industry. Some of it is reiterations upon points we already knew well as the service was choking itself out, some it is is new contextualisation from partner studios who find themselves no longer bound by the rope called 'professional courtesy'. And from that I have been struck with a small sense of 'Well what did you expect' after the clapback of many smaller studios who have grumpily lambasted a jeering public for not thinking about the monetary deals they were relying on before all this took place. Now I respect and sympathise with the financially affected; but you were literally feeding off a volatile dung heap that was burning up publicly for all the world to see. They shuttered their in-house studios, announced they were stepping away from active development on the platform and then started lagging behind on new release lists. If after all of that you, as a company, were still putting all your eggs into their basket; there's a point at which you have to accept a bit of the blame for your own misfortunes.

But not all of the new information coming out has been about the present deals being scrapped, or the fact that employees were, as I speculated in the moment, told of this shut down mere moments before the rest of the world. (Business partners were informed with the rest of the world.) We've also heard about companies with exclusive Stadia products, now scrambling to get a port together before their game becomes lost media. (Which I hope they do. I heard good things about that Gylt, I'd be interested to check it out.) And also projects that were proposed to be developed and owned exclusively by Stadia which never came to fruition. Not only do these serve as interesting and curious 'what could have been', but some even stretch into revealing exactly what sort of crazy power trip that Stadia was on leading them directly off the cliff they ended up crashing down.

I'm talking, of course, about their collaboration with Kojima. Now we all knew that Google Stadia's team had met with Kojima and there was absolutely nothing weird or questionable about that state of affairs. Stadia represented a very noticeable technological step forward with streaming technology and Kojima has always prided himself with working close to that expanding forefront; so of course he would pop into the studio at least once in it's short life. What we didn't know until now was how that trip was not just a social call with a tour stitched onto the side. Apparently Kojima came with a proposition, one that Google were initially receptive to. He, in the wind-down after the Death Stranding development, was proposing some sort of Stadia exclusive follow-up game that would have been a single-player-only title. Talk about a system pusher! A Kojima exclusive title? That must have been a godsend to these executives... right?

What you've got to always bear in mind with Stadia, is that even though everything is coming out right now about their trials and tribulations, little is true about their performance now which wasn't true at launch. Stadia isn't one of those ideas that sporadically picked up momentum a few years into their life, they launched with low download numbers that all the world could follow and laugh at them for due to their partner Stadia App which was a requirement to use the software. It wasn't long at all before the Stadia team were confronting themselves with the fact that they didn't have the numbers to subsidise the investment that daddy Google was putting into them, so even whilst they were making big moves of bringing in development talent to work on in-house games, those prospects were founded on borrowed time. We only realised how much time that was in the past week. As such, this initial deal with Kojima was just as tenuous.

Still, a deal was made, and Kojima went off to build some early development mock-ups of what this Death Stranding follow-up would look like. As far we can tell from very early reports, it would have been an interesting departure from an already vividly surreal game at least in raw concept, for the signature Strand-type interconnected world-building system would have been absent from the game. A stark omission given conceptually central to the themes of reaching out and connecting with others to become stronger and more capable, which informs so much of the design decisions and lore of Death Stranding. Honestly, I'm interested to see what side of Death Stranding's fallen America would be explored in a game devoid of the interconnectivity aspect; perhaps another overall theme would take hold?

Whatever the case, we'll never find out because the second that Kojima productions put together their first mock-up and displayed it for Stadia, the fools cancelled it. Why? Because the game was single player and, you guessed it: They didn't think that single player games have a market anymore. (You really can't make this up.) And the kicker? The big final word on canning the product came from Phil Harrison himself; the worm at the centre of the company who has been failing upwards his entire career. An absolute leech on society emblematic of everything wrong with the corporate mentality and advancement through connection instead of merit and passion. People like Phil are the kind who'll serve their world best once they reach retirement age and get the hell out of everyone's way, because he's been worse than useless in every single position he's ever held in his career.

Let me try and convey how annoying this is. Stadia was missing so many things which ultimately led to their downfall, chief of which was any sort of commitment to what they were doing.  The money they threw around was never theirs, but over-investments from their parent company which these idiots squandered on overpricing ports; creating a platform with only a handful of exclusives, all of which were indie games. They created a platform powerful enough to run games stronger than anything else on the market today, and they did precisely bugger all with that potential. And here was Kojima, willing to give them an exclusive that they didn't even need to build a team to create. A legendary name, with a die hard audience, and they let him slip between their fingers because his game wasn't a Fortnite or a Warzone or a New Worlds; something online that they could monetise. This man would have bought them a mass in adoption rate by his mere presence on their line-up; and instead they shed themselves of that visionary like he was a plague. Again; the company was run by idiots.

This was before Stadia would go ahead to purchase a bunch of small studios that they'd keep on payroll for less than a year before dissolving them and then trying to fold those employees into weird positions across Google that none of them signed up for. All of those developers and artists had no place in a company like Google, but Stadia didn't care because they didn't understand the medium they were muscling into and absolutely never would. Maybe the better future is the one were Kojima never made his Death Stranding title, because the absolute incompetence of Stadia would killed the platform anyway and then his game would have just become lost media until tech powerful enough to run it on home computers became publicly accessible; in about 2035. And maybe this is just another reason why Google are hands-down the worst innovators on the Internet that they practically run. Oh, and some suit needs to retire Phil Harrison from this industry; for everyone's sake.