Google announced Stadia is shutting down despite receiving a new UI update and having games on its release calendar. While that won’t surprise gaming enthusiasts, it did shock developers that had games slated to launch on the platform.
Stadia shutdown announcement surprises devs (and possibly the Google team)
I know everybody is having a great time laughing at this but stadia had the best dev revenue of any streaming service, and launching Hyper Gunsport there was going to recoup our dev costs. We were launching there in November and are now in a much tougher situation. https://t.co/ZM8MfKrc5A
— brandon sheffield / @brandon.insertcredit.com bsky (@necrosofty) September 29, 2022
Multiple developers have expressed confusion at the Stadia shutdown announcement. Necrosoft Games, Wired Productions, and Coatsink are among the studios that either already had games available on the service’s catalog or had impending releases who said they had no idea it was shutting down.
We are so sad to hear this news. At this time we are unsure how this impacts our titles & will of course keep everyone updated when we have more information. In the meantime we wish everyone impacted by this news the best and thank Stadia for allowing us to be part of it. 🎮❤ https://t.co/BCRYajIkeT
— Coatsink (@Coatsink) September 29, 2022
We’ve yet to hear from Ubisoft, one of the few large studios that continued to partner with Stadia. Both Skulls and Bones and Avatar Frontiers of Pandora were planned to be released on the platform, and we can assume that’s no longer the case.
erm… yeah. So something happened after we tweeted this. Obviously, we didn't know / unsure on the impact to our planned releases. But know that we love you #Stadians and our thoughts go out to any of our friends at Google that may be impacted 🙁 https://t.co/AFCeJUVQ12
— Wired Productions (@WiredP) September 29, 2022
The new Stadia UI changes have a card-style layout, making it easier to jump back into games. The Stadia community manager commented about it on Reddit less than 24 hours before Google announced the end of service, requesting feedback about the changes. While we don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, this seems to indicate that at least part of the team didn’t know about the announcement ahead of time.
However, in a corporation as large as Google, one hand frequently doesn’t know what the other is doing. Shortly after the UI reveal, the company announced it would shut down the service on January 18, 2023. All hardware and software purchases will be refunded, and games will be unplayable after that date.
