Journey to the Savage Planet developer says Google only wanted 'monstrous' games with major licenses for Stadia: 'They were very strange'

There have been few more spectacular flameouts in the videogame industry than that of Stadia. After a promise-the-world buildup that included the hiring of industry luminaries Phil Harrison and Jade Raymond, the whole thing fell apart just three years after it went live, leaving owners with nothing but a Bluetooth controller and some cautionary memories.

The cause of the shutdown has been widely attributed to a lack of big-name content that prevented Stadia from claiming a meaningful share of the market, but in a new interview with Eurogamer, Raccoon Logic co-founder and creative director Alex Hutchinson put a somewhat finer point on it: Google really didn't know what it was getting itself into.

Raccoon Logic was founded in 2021 by veterans of Journey to the Savage Planet developer Typhoon Studios. Stadia acquired Typhoon Studios in December 2019, but closed it down in February 2021, right as Savage Planet launched on Stadia—ironically, leaving no one to fix some pretty nasty bugs in the Stadia version of the game. 

As you might imagine, that experience did not leave many happy memories. One big issue, according to Hutchinson, is that Google wanted Typhoon to pitch games using major licenses like Marvel and Star Wars, even though the studio was quite small. Google apparently reckoned that Typhoon could work on them as-is, and then hire more people if the games were a hit.

«No one was talking the same language… it was very difficult,» Hutchinson said. «We would ask these questions, and we would get the confused puppy look.»

Google also wanted the studio to make games that could only be played on the cloud. «It was like saying, 'Here at Netflix, we only make TV shows that couldn't be on any other form of TV', and you're like, I don't know what that is. They were very strange.»

The timing of the studio closure was particularly brutal. It came not only on the day Journey to the Savage Planet launched on Stadia, but also at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which