After the death of Stadia, Vice President Phil Harrison left Google

Google Stadia and all related projects are dead, which means it’s finally time for division 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 the past few days to reveal that he left Google in April. Harrison spent five years working on Stadia.

Google is not a gaming company, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the launch of the Google gaming platform by announcing to the crowd, “I’m not a big gamer.”Still, as VP and CEO of Stadia, Harrison had to instill confidence in games at Google. Harrison is an industry veteran who previously worked for Microsoft and Sony to launch their game consoles, so his experience should have helped the company close deals with game developers and deal with gaming enthusiasts.

In the early days, Harrison was the face of Stadia. During the initial announcement in 2019, Harrison took the stage after Pichai to announce Stadia to the world, detailing the core premise and how Stadia will be “the future of gaming”. However, when things got better, Harrison stopped appearing in the video, stopped tweeting, and disappeared altogether. Harrison hit the news in 2021 when Google killed off its only game studio, Stadia, a division of Games & Entertainment, just 1.5 years later. It is reported thatHarrison told the team that they “made a lot of progress”in the week before they were fired, which Kotaku said was part of the management’s model of “not being honest and forthright with the company’s developers.”He also announced the death of Stadia on his blog.

It’s impossible to know how helpful executives are when we’re outside the company, but Harrison joined Google with a bad reputation among gamers. His previous top management positions have overseen the launch of the Sony Playstation 3 and the launch of the Microsoft Xbox One and Kinect. Both have proven to be each company’s worst console release, and Stadia’s control of life and death doesn’t help Harrison’s terrific reputation.

With Harrison gone, Stadia dead, and the supposed cloud mainstay also killed along with Stadia, there was nothing left of the once-ambitious gaming project at Google.