Google’s Stadia Shutdown Has Caught Stadia Developers Totally Off Guard

While it’s a great (and necessary) move that Google has decided to reimburse all players who have made hardware and software purchases through Google Stadia prior to the cloud gaming service ceasing operations, one thing they do not seem to have considered is the impact it has on developers who, up until this very moment, were still producing games for the platform.

In order to prevent leaks, it appears that Google did not inform any developers about the impending shutdown of Stadia. However, this has left many developers, both large and small, in the dark.

Many independent developers who lack the resources to create for other platforms that are suddenly going away are the main group this has impacted.
They could have saved a significant amount of time, effort, and money if they had known this was going to happen.

There are also larger developers.
While the Stadia shutdown announcement seems to indicate Bungie may still work with partners on uses of the technology, it’s unclear when that may take shape, and what immediate plans may have to change due to the impending shutdown. Bungie, the developer of Destiny, which was recently acquired by Sony, has been using Stadia to help with its widespread work-from-home development on the game.
Additionally, there is the player base itself, with 5,000 people regularly playing the Stadia game Destiny, which was formerly one of the service’s advertised flagship titles.

Another option is Ubisoft, which has never met a platform it didn’t like and has invested a significant amount of money over the years in Stadia support.
We’ll have more details to discuss about our games on Stadia at a later time. That’s all they had to say to Axios about their Stadia games. Even they don’t seem to have been warned about this.
Basically nothing, then.
They had time to consider…nothing regarding their Stadia library at this time.

The second annoying aspect of this is that Google was vehemently disputing rumours of Stadia’s impending death literally just two months ago.

Even though Mr. Google Stadia Social Media Manager may not have been aware of this information at the time, it illustrates a larger trend in which Google consistently insisted that they had the utmost confidence in Google Stadia and that, despite reducing its scope and stopping first-party development, it would continue to exist.
That wasn’t always the case; all of these developers had to read The Verge’s Breaking News post on Twitter to learn the truth.

It currently feels a little disorganized, but Google has stated that it hopes to keep using Stadia streaming technology in various ways.
Consumers only benefit as they receive a full refund, but what about developers?
That’s a different tale.

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