Google has decided to end the Stadia game. The big bet for a streaming platform has ended up failing and will say goodbye in 2023. A statement from the company itself yesterday announced what seemed inevitable, but there is an important part of this matter that still does not have things clear.
And it is that the very studios that have signed agreements to launch their games on Stadia had no idea of the situation. Several developers have shown their confusion on Twitter, alleging doubts about whether what they signed will be respected or if they will be able to publish the works on other platforms.
Mike Rose, developer of No More Robots
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 for it
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) September 29, 2022
Hours later and I still have no email from Stadia, and no clarity on what’s happening with our games, deals, anything
Really would have been nice if they’d told partners, or even got in contact with us by now?
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) September 29, 2022
Oh my God. We have a game coming to Stadia in November. Who wants to guess that Google will refuse to pay us the money it owes us for it
To all the people who kept begging us to “PLEASE LAUNCH YOUR GAMES ON STADIA”, this is why we didn’t haha.
Hours later and I still don’t have an email from Stadia, and I’m not clear on what’s going on with our games, deals, anything. Would it really have been good if they had told the partners, or even contacted us now?
Tom Vian, developer of Tangle Tower
Tangle Tower was due to launch on Stadia in 2 days time, and this article was the first I heard about it shutting down 😢 https://t.co/Pu0UPTQlRn
— Tom Vian (@SFBTom) September 29, 2022
Tangle Tower was due to launch on Stadia in 2 days, and this article was the first I heard about the closure
Rebecca Heinman
We have a title coming out November 1st. Now we hear about this.
— Rebecca Heineman (@burgerbecky) September 29, 2022
We have a title coming out on November 1st. Now we know about this.
Pretty much. All release plans for the Stadia game are effectively cancelled. Reassigning resources to other games/platforms
— Rebecca Heineman (@burgerbecky) September 30, 2022
Surely. All release plans for the game on Stadia are effectively cancelled. Reallocation of resources to other games/platforms
Olde Skuul, study of industry veterans
Yes, we had a title in development for Stadia. #rip #stadia we are bummed out.
— Olde Skuul (@OldeSkuul) September 30, 2022
Yes, we had a title in development for Stadia. RIP Stadia, we’re bummed.
Brando Sheffield, director of Necrosoft Games
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 (@necrosofty) September 29, 2022
I know everyone is having a lot of fun laughing at this, but Stadia had the best development revenue of any streaming service, and the release of Hyper Gunsport was going to recoup our development costs. We were going to launch in November and now we are in a much more difficult situation.
I actually don’t know what’s going to happen with our Stadia launch yet (we’re still going to launch on other platforms), but Google paid for the 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.
I’ll find out soon what’s going on with our launch, but I had a queue of players of at least several months to catch up with. I also wanted to reward loyal Stadia players for sticking with us, because they supported the original game so much.