Developers working on Stadia games were not warned ahead of time about its closure

stadia_logo_and_text_v1.jpg

Two days ago, Google shuttered its Stadia streaming service. While there were reasons to believe it was underperforming, Google's PR had insisted that it would remain running, until the sudden announcement came.

While many in the gaming community weren't surprised to hear Stadia had failed, developers who were working on Stadia games certainly were, as they found out through the press at the same time as everyone else. After the story spread on Thursday, a number of game developers flooded Twitter to express shock and disappointment at their wasted time and money spent on porting games to Google's now dead platform. (Stadia games will be available to play until January 2023, but the store was shuttered immediately after the announcement, preventing the sales of any games.)

Mike Rose, head of publisher No More Robots, noted "We have a game coming to Stadia in November. Who wants to guess that Google will refuse to pay us the money they owe us for it." Several hours after the announcement, he said he still had not heard anything from Google, and has still not said otherwise publicly.

Perhaps the worst timing was for Tangle Tower dev SFBGames, who were set to launch a port on the system in just two days.

Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games pointed out that Stadia had the "best dev revenue of any streaming service," elaborating that "Google paid by percentage of time played by Stadia Pro users, which was great, and they were the only company that did it, so it was a guaranteed return." Necrosoft was apparently "counting on" Stadia to help them recoup their dev costs when Hyper Gunsport launches in November. Sheffield ends his thread with a plea to wishlist their game on Steam, as they "need all the help [they] can get now!!!"

It wasn't only indie developers that were surprised by the news. Bungie posted on their support forums yesterday that they "just learned" of Stadia's shutdown and are working on solutions for helping Stadia players transfer content. IO Interactive similarly Tweeted out that they are looking for ways to help Hitman players.

Furthermore, some of Google's own employees were blindsided. A senior software engineer at Google, Peter Elst, Tweeted "It's a weird experience starting your work day and realizing the feature you've been working on for 6+ months and were launching soon is no longer relevant."
 

Xzi

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Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games pointed out that Stadia had the "best dev revenue of any streaming service," elaborating that "Google paid by percentage of time played by Stadia Pro users, which was great, and they were the only company that did it, so it was a guaranteed return."
I mean yeah, they're freaking Google. Of course they can pay out more than what Stadia was bringing in for profit, but it should've been obvious to all they weren't going to want to for any extended period of time. We see the same thing happening even with non-streaming platforms like EGS, where their free game giveaways are trending more and more toward low-budget indies.
 

relauby

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Everyone knew Stadia was gonna shut down sooner or later. Those devs seem inexperienced in not having a backup plan. 😐
To be fair, most of them seem like (or have said) they're gonna be alright. Obviously the big devs like Bungie and IO Interactive will be fine, and the No More Robots guy seems more just frustrated at throwing money down the toilet. (He's also probably mad at the timing seeing as he Tweeted "To all the people who kept begging us 'PLEASE BRING YOUR GAMES TO STADIA' — this is why we didn’t haha.") The Tower Tangle dude said he'd be fine in another Tweet since this was just a port of an old game he'd already released on everything a few years ago. I think basically all of these projects were ports or multiplatform games. Obviously I don't know if that's the case for everything as it seems like there were a lot of indies on Twitter talking about this, but I'm hoping most of them were either low-investment ports or contract work for publishers that'll end up footing the bill. It sucks if that publisher is a little one like No More Robots, but it's more palatable than everything falling on the head of a solo dev.

The only one that's concerning is the Necrosoft guys. Even then, I have a hard time blaming them. I feel like if I had a big company like Google offering me enough money to work on a passion project, I might trust that they'd stick around long enough to see it through, or at least be professional enough to give me a heads up that they were gonna shut down before I invested too much. In retrospect, yeah, it's Google, obviously they're gonna shut it down, but I really can't feel anything but bad for the guy.
 

CoolMe

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Why not release these games (when they're finished) on current-gen systems, with Google being the publisher? I think it could be done if they really want to..
 

Bladexdsl

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they should have expected this from the very start because
1. it's google they will drop any product/service that isn't making them billions more than they already have within the first year! just look at their track record it speaks for itself
2. it's cloud gaming every single cloud gaming device before stadia has failed not one has been successful did they think because they are the mighty google it would all of a sudden work fore them?! :lol:

you work with google you roll the dice that's how it works.

is Logitech going to be the one that succeeds in this?
family-guy-peter-griffin.gif
 
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pedro702

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Why not release these games (when they're finished) on current-gen systems, with Google being the publisher? I think it could be done if they really want to..
all this games already had previous pc ports or console ports, afaik there is only one stadia exclusive game that cant be played at all now. gylt or something like that, do remember google shut down all stadia exclusive studios like 6 months ago or so so they never had any exclusives since that launch title since they didnt give time to finish any other stadia exclusive game,
 
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CoolMe

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all this games already had previous pc ports or console ports, afaik there is only one stadia exclusive game that cant be played at all now. gylt or something like that, do remember google shut down all stadia exclusive studios like 6 months ago or so so they never had any exclusives since that launch title since they didnt give time to finish any other stadia exclusive game,
I was talking about games that were in development for Stadia specifically, and not PC/console ports..
 

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Standard Google/Alphabet behavior. Nothing to see here. This company prides itself on only employing "the best engineers" and yet accumulates a string of failures so vast that it would put any other company in bankrupcy many times over. They are very lucky to have their ad empire... otherwise they would have gone the way of Kodak a long time ago.
 
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Marc_LFD

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Standard Google/Alphabet behavior. Nothing to see here. This company prides itself on only employing "the best engineers" and yet accumulates a string of failures so vast that it would put any other company in bankrupcy many times over. They are very lucky to have their ad empire... otherwise they would have gone the way of Kodak a long time ago.
YouTube Originals has also been canceled.

Admittedly, the only good thing on there was Cobra Kai which was transferred to Netflix, and probably to another streaming service.

Nothing of value was lost.
 
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The Real Jdbye

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To be fair, they should've seen the writing on the wall a long time ago. We all knew Stadia was doomed from the very beginning, and they already did a soft-closure of sorts not long after its launch, which despite Google saying at the time that Stadia would continue to provide services, did not inspire confidence in the future of the platform.
 

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It's fucking Google, most people seen this coming even before the service was announced. Once Microsoft announced their cloud streaming, I knew it was over for Stadia.

Who would have thought that Comcast was saving us from a cloud gaming future?
 
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