A few months later, Harrison is
standing at a high, white desk in his
office at Google’s headquarters in
Mountain View, California. The Stadia
team is housed in a two-storey office
block towards the edge of the campus,
which stretches 3km by 3km – meaning
you could fit the City of London into it
three times over. The whole complex
feels less like a collection of high-rise
company buildings than a Hollywood
studio that has bought an entire town,
giving each movie or TV show its own
house. There are around 30 staff
restaurants, including Indian, sushi,
pizza, burrito and noodle eateries; plus
a hospital, sports fields and gyms.
Employees like to say the company
doesn’t mind if you go home at the end of
the day, but does make it easier to stay.
Harrison, tall with closely cropped
hair and a light Hertfordshire accent,
joined Google in 2018, after a multi-
decade career in the gaming industry.
Having initially built a reputation as a
games designer in the UK in the late
1980s, he was one of the first people to
be approached by Sony to launch the
PlayStation in 1992. He went on to run
Xbox in Europe for Microsoft, before
leaving to invest in gaming startups
and regain a little work-life balance.
Then came the call from Google.UNDAR PICHAI, THE GOOGLE CEO,
strode on to the stage at the 31st
Game Developers Conference in San
Francisco during March 2019, to deliver
a keynote product launch for Stadia:
a console-free, cloud-based gaming
platform. This was an intriguing propo-
sition from the tech giant, which has
no real experience in gaming. Pichai
even started his speech by confessing
that he wasn’t a big gamer, aside from
playing FIFA 19 “quite a bit”.
It was left to Phil Harrison, the
company’s vice-president in charge
of the project, to sell the vision. He
told the developers, designers and
producers who had assembled for
the conference that Stadia would be
“a new-generation game platform
purpose-built for the 21st century” –
one where “the worlds of watching and
playing games converge”.
With Stadia, Harrison explained,
gamers could play high-resolution,
AAA titles in real time, with no need
to purchase a console. All you would
need is a Google Chrome browser and
an internet connection, and you could
play the same games on any screen –
whether a desktop, laptop, television,
tablet or mobile phone. Say you’re
playing Assassin’s Creed on your TV, but
you suddenly need to leave the houseRight: Phil Harrison was sitting round a
campfire at Stonehenge when Google called- and put him in charge of the Stadia project
“I was sitting round a campfire near
Stonehenge with my family back in
2017,” he recalls. “Suddenly, up popped
a Facebook message saying ‘Hey, I
want to connect you to somebody at
Google’. Pretty much the first thing I said
to Google was ‘No, I’m not interested
in working for you’.” But in the end he
flew out to Mountain View, where he was
convinced that Google’s ambition could
provide the kind of gaming experience
he’d been working towards for years.
Having invested in Gaikai, a high-end
video game streaming service that
was bought by Sony in 2012 to build
its PlayStation Now platform, Harrison
knew that cloud gaming wasn’t just an
R&D problem. “It’s a scale problem, and
if you try to count them on both hands,
you run out of companies that could
do this on a global scale before you run
out of fingers,” he says. “I looked at
Google’s network infrastructure, data
centres, YouTube, engineering culture
and long-term investment horizon
and I thought – even if we’re only 50
per cent successful in lining up all of
those planets, that’s going to be a pretty
amazing constellation.”
He also knew that Google’s technology
alone would not be enough to make
Stadia a success. This is why the
company chose to announce the new
launch at the San Francisco conference- a full eight months before Stadia was
scheduled to become available to
consumers in November 2019.
“The reason is simple,” Harrison
says, spreading his fingers on the
tabletop. “We have to excite one
crucial stakeholder first, which is the
game developers. We need to get them
tuned into the opportunity of creating
for Stadia. We’d been speaking to some
developers for three or four years,
because of the lead times in creating
games, but we needed the developers
onside before the consumers, or we
wouldn’t have a platform.”
The company didn’t announce details
of how the platform was going to work
for consumers until early June 2019. The
important details are that it will operate
a subscription model, with an initial
offer of a starter pack for £119, which
includes a dark blue Stadia controller,
a Chromecast Ultra stick (needed to
play games on a TV) and a three-month
subscription to Stadia Pro, which will
give access to an assortment of free, - you could carry on gaming from
exactly the same point on your mobile.
The new service would support cross-
platform play and, given its ability to
scale, would allow developers to expand
games – “so that 100-person games like
Fortnite could turn into 1,000-player
battles royale”. And it would be fully
integrated with YouTube, so you could
watch a streamer playing, click on a
link, and immediately be transported
into the game world yourself, with no
download, no updates and no install.
A “share” button on Stadia’s Wi-Fi-
enabled controller – the only new
piece of hardware – would let you start
live-streaming your own session for
others to watch or join in with.
Gaming, Harrison said, is now the
biggest form of entertainment on
the planet, with more than two billion
players globally and hundreds of
millions of people watching gaming
content every day on YouTube alone.
“Our vision is to bring those worlds
closer together – to connect game
developers with players and YouTube
creators in a way that only Google can.”
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