6 Stadia Staff Join Haven Studios

Do I take joy in Stadia’s fall? No, because it is hard to fall when you are already on the floor and are entirely useless, a bit like the Labour party after last Thursday. I make it no secret that I don’t like Stadia, as the infrastructure isn’t there for it. Additionally, Google doesn’t have a desire to keep things long-term, and it was only 10-days ago they added a search bar. A search bar! They felt they didn’t need a search bar? Google didn’t need a search bar for their gaming platform? You couldn’t make that up!

However, that’s not all as after just a handful of middling first-party games, Google pulled the plug on in-house development for the platform, making it dependant on third-party releases. This led to the departure of Jade Raymond, the best thing Stadia had going for it, and she has now gone on to start her own studio. Now, following the crumbling sandcastle that was Stadia’s first-party game development teams, a further six staff formerly of Stadia have joined Haven Studios, according to a post on Resetera (thank you GameIndustry.biz).

Of course, with all of them previously working with Raymond at Google, you know there is that connection. However, all of the team that has jumped ship from Google all once worked at Ubisoft too, where Raymond made her name with the Assassin’s Creed series. Among the ranks are Assassin’s Creed II‘s writer Corey May and producer Sebastien Puel, along with less noticeable staff on those early games. Also joining is Rainbow Six Siege designer Erwann Le Rouzic. It is a stacked team taking up major positions at the Montreal-based studio, with Puel listed as co-founder.

There is still no word on what Haven Studios is working on, though they did only announce themselves to the world last month. With the announcement came a bit of investment from Sony for the debut game, which as far as we know will be an original IP.