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