Struggling game developers: Google Stadia shutdown came as a complete surprise

With the shutdown of Google Stadia, some game developers seem to be in trouble. Google reimburses all of its customers, but to what extent production costs are reimbursed is not yet clear.

Developer Olde Skuul informed Axios that in their case it is already refers to “a five-digit amount”. They were planning to announce their new game Luxor Evolved for Stadia next week, but so it doesn’t happen. Google would be busy “doing things right”.

Tweeter by Olde Skuul.

Luxor Evolved is also coming to Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation, but games like PixelJunk Raiders were released exclusively on Stadiameaning developer Q-Games could soon be completely without income.

Tweets from SFB Games and Necrosoft Games.

It looks like the shutdown came as a complete surprise to game companies. Indie developers love SFB Games and Necrosoft Gamesbut also great players like Bungie let us know on Twitter “just found it”.

Mail to Stadia’s “core” team.

The Stadia team itself also seems to have only been informed at the very last minute. Assuming a tweet from @system32eth Employees received an email the same day at 7:08 a.m. that an online “important updates” meeting was scheduled for 8:30 a.m.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft is trying games purchased on Stadia port to their Ubisoft Connect platformand also IO Interactive is “look for ways”. You can do more via Google Takeout export game savesbut getting it to work again on another platform is going to be a challenge.

Overall, shutting down Stadia is a lot of hassle. While it’s certainly nice for customers to be fully compensated, it’s hard not to feel a little bitter about the fact that this the umpteenth time that Google is just shutting down a service.

Sources:
axios, Twitter (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (seven)