Stadia Games and Entertainment open sources some of its development tools

Kyle Bradshaw | Mar 23 2021 - 1:14 pm PT

Last month, Google began the process of winding down Stadia Games and Entertainment, its division for first-party and second-party Stadia titles. As a parting gift, the team at Stadia Games and Entertainment has open sourced some of the tools that were created to assist development.

From what Google had publicly shared, Stadia Games and Entertainment had studios based out of Montreal, Quebec and Playa Vista, California. Before either studio was able to put out a first-party Google-made game for Stadia, the company announced that it would be shutting down the Stadia Games and Entertainment division. This week, as spotted by Cloudy With A Chance of Games, Google has created a new public code repository on GitHub, opening the source code of the tooling and infrastructure work of Stadia Games and Entertainment.

This project is a recopilation of the infrastructure work done by Google in Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E). That organization was shutdown on 2021 and further development has stopped. This open source project is delivered in an informative basis for any interested parties that might benefit from studying, installing or modifying this code.

Just as Google does all of its work in what’s been dubbed a “monorepo,” or a monolithic repository of all of Google’s code for its innumerable projects, the work being open sourced today is from a specialized Stadia Games and Entertainment “sge-monorepo.” Therefore, instead of each tool getting its own individual repo, they’re woven together into one folder that can feel a bit disorganized to those unfamiliar with its design.

Alongside the tools themselves, Google has included a folder full of documents explaining things like how Stadia Games and Entertainment’s most critical tool, “sgeb” (short for “Stadia Games and Entertainment build”), works, as well as some advice on how to get work done effectively.

Update 3/24: As has been pointed out to us, some of these tools had already been previously made open source separately, particularly the “p4” tools related to Perforce.

Unfortunately, Google is quite clear that this repository does not contain anything related to the game projects that were in-development at any of the Stadia Games and Entertainment studios. Similarly, none of the tools are specific to developing games for Stadia.

By making these projects and resources open source, the many developers who worked at Stadia Games and Entertainment will be able to bring the tools they’re familiar with — or perhaps even had a hand in developing — along with them to their next job. Similarly, other companies can see the way Google managed its code and potentially learn from it. To that end, the repository is licensed in such a way that it can be freely used and modified.