When Google launched Stadia, it put gaming industry veteran Phil Harrison at the lead. Now, it’s been confirmed Harrison has left the company.
As reported by Business Insider, Phil Harrison has quietly departed Google, apparently around the time of Stadia’s shutdown earlier this year. His LinkedIn profile says he ended his time at Google just this month.
Related: This is what the death of Google Stadia actually looked like [Video]
Harrison was hired as a vice president at Google in 2018 and put in charge of Stadia through the platform’s all-too-short lifetime. Harrison was on board during Google’s now infamous Stadia announcement at GDC 2019.
In Stadia’s first year, Harrison was vocal about the platform, making announcements and hosting Stadia’s two “Connect” announcement videos (which were formatted similarly to Nintendo Direct). But as Stadia’s struggles became more clear, Harrison became incredibly quiet, rarely surfacing in the public eye or addressing the Stadia community in any capacity.
He authored a post on Google’s blog, The Keyword, in early 2021 regarding the closure of Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E), as well as the post for Stadia’s closure as a whole last year. In both cases, Harrison was also responsible for communicating those developments to Stadia employees, and in both cases, it caught employees off guard. A leaked email from 2021 from Phil Harrison saw the Stadia VP commending the SG&E team just a couple of days before the public announcement of the studio closure. Stadia employees later learned of the platform’s closure just minutes before the public.
It’s unclear where Phil Harrison will be headed next.
More on Stadia:
- Google will shut down the official Stadia Discord server on March 31
- Stadia had less than 10% market share among cloud gaming services
- Google Cloud’s ‘Immersive Stream for Games’ was shut down alongside Stadia
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments