Google didn’t tell developers it was shutting down Stadia

metro.co.uk:

While most of the Internet points and laughs at Stadia’s demise, game developers are left confused and upset at the sudden news.

It’s easy to treat the shutdown of Google Stadia as a predictable outcome. Many will even proudly proclaim that they knew it’d be short-lived since it released.

However, there is a certain group of people (aside from Stadia’s core audience) that have truly been blindsided by Google’s decision, and that’s the developers who were making games for the streaming platform.

Since Google gave up on making its own Stadia exclusives last year, it needed third party developers to create Stadia versions of their games. With Stadia itself to become no more by the end of January, those who had Stadia games planned for release in the coming months have been left in the lurch.

Tom Vian of SFB Games says that his studio’s point ‘n’ click game Tangle Tower was scheduled to release on Stadia this very week. Yet he didn’t learn about Stadia’s closure until news stories about it popped up.

Near enough the same thing happened to Olde Sküül CEO Rebecca Heineman, who says her studio had a Stadia release planned for November 1.

The Twitter account for W.R.K.S Games adds that they had signed a publishing agreement only last week. Although they believe that Stadia’s internal teams, who they spoke with, were as oblivious to Google’s intentions as developers were.

The lack of communication is hardly a good look for Google, especially since some studios were relying on Stadia revenue. Necrosoft Games, for example, had plans to launch multiplayer title Hyper Gunsport on Stadia this November, to recoup development costs.

‘I know everybody is having a great time laughing at this but Stadia had the best dev revenue of any streaming