The developers working on the game for Stadia have expressed surprise and disappointment that Google has yet to contact them, nearly 24 hours after the search giant announced that it had closed the game. turn off their cloud game service yesterday afternoon. Many of the developers I spoke to had not contacted Google since the announcement, only one said the company had been in contact. However, it’s not just developers who are left in the dark. Through a Internal email leaked sent to Google’s Stadia team, even Google employees were not briefed until the same time the public became aware of the impending shutdown.
Developers pixel.games told me that they spent weeks testing and making inquiries with the Stadia team and finally got the green light yesterday afternoon to publish three games, including the arcade-style platformer Donuts Dodos, on the platform. Two hours later, Google announced the shutdown of Stadia. “Clearly none of the people at Stadia involved in our rollout knew this was coming,” pixel.games told RPS. “We are currently waiting for official news from Google.”
Other developers with games coming to Stadia were similarly surprised:
Tangle Tower is coming to Stadia this Friday
– Tom Vian (@SFBTom) September 29, 2022
Oh my God https://t.co/3lX9ExEfKB
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?
– Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) September 29, 2022
OH BOY IS VERY HAPPY TO SEE MONTHLY MY WORK GOING IN BIN AGAIN.
I DEFINITELY DEVELOP THE LOVE GAME.https://t.co/DUpBtof8tp
– Simon Roth (@SimoRoth) September 29, 2022
I know people are happy about this but stadia has the best developer revenue of any streaming service and launching Hyper Gunsport there will offset the cost to developers our development. We launched there in November and are now in a much more difficult situation. https://t.co/ZM8MfKrc5A
– brandon sheffield (@necrosofty) September 29, 2022
Another developer I spoke to told me they heard from Google. Team of Rebecca Heineman Olde Skuul is developing a game for Stadia, although they are also making games for other consoles. Heineman told me that she actually brought the news of Stadia’s shutdown to her contacts at Google, and they were just as shocked as her team when they found out the platform was shutting down. January. Following that conversation, Google reached out to Heineman in an official capacity later in the day. “They were open to the idea of reimbursement,” Heineman told me. “I was informed that they will be busy for the next few days as they have to contact all the developers to share the news live.”
Who wouldn’t be shocked if they were working to sign new games only to be called to a meeting and told they were down? Stadia VP and general manager Phil Harrison reached out to the streaming platform’s team to arrange a virtual meeting at 4:30 p.m. BST yesterday, to coincide with the publication of Harrison’s blog post Stadia decommissioning details. A Stadia engineer has arrived Reddit to share an internal email that Harrison had sent about an hour earlier to hold the meeting. The contents of the email were later taken down, but they were also shared on Twitter.
they didn’t even tell their engineers until 3 hours ago pic.twitter.com/pEy45QPSOt
– #1 lil judd hates NA (@stopmrdomino) September 29, 2022
Although Google slowed down their game development efforts last year, they have answer speculated that the streaming platform would shut down by pledging to bring more games just a few months ago in July. By Google notification yesterday about Stadia’s shutdown left the developers, the public and the Stadia team unaware. It’s sad to see the people involved, both developers and Stadia employees, being treated with such disdain. There are at least some indications that Google may begin to compensate developers to some extent.
I’ve reached out to other developers affected by the outage, as well as Google, and will update you if they share anything.
