Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Google is getting out of the game development business, but is it getting out of the

Stadia business or is this just a pivot to infrastructure?

Apple acknowledges that COVID has basically hobbled face ID, Uber gets into the liquor delivery business, and

Amazon's plans for its HQ2 architecture shows at least somebody in Silicon Valley is not

buying the remote work hype. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

This is not me piling on, but as you can see, this will play almost directly off of what we talked about yesterday.

Google has announced that it will close two Stadia Game Studios, one in LA and one in Montreal, and that Stadia Head Jade Raymond is leaving.

This means about 150 game developers will be laid off, I believe, but what everyone is wondering about is what this means for the

Stadia Project overall, quoting Kattaku. Kattaku began to hear rumblings from sources close to Stadia last week that Google's

service was heading for a major change.

One games industry source told Kataku that Google was canceling multiple projects.

Basically any games slated for release beyond a specific 2021 window,

though they believed games close to release would still come out.

Today brings some clarification.

Google will continue to operate the Stadia Gaming Service

and its $10 monthly Stadia Pro service, but it's unclear how many, if any, exclusive games

will still come to the service, though the company has indicated

that it can still sign new games and will bring more third-party releases to the platform.

It nevertheless will look to many like a drawdown of the plan to have Stadia run as a bona fide competitor to console platforms.

The company plans to begin offering its Stadia tech to publishers, opening up the possibility for Stadia to become the

streaming tech for other video game companies.

...