Google’s announcement yesterday that it would shutter Stadia completely in January 2023 came as a complete surprise, all have said - even those with upcoming projects set to arrive in November. What will happen to those games is now unclear, as Google has already moved to close the Stadia store - making new releases unsellable. “OH BOY VERY HAPPY TO SEE MONTHS OF MY WORK GOING IN THE BIN AGAIN,” indie developer Simon Roth, creator of Maia, wrote on Twitter last night. “I SURE DO LOVE GAME DEVELOPMENT.” “Every time something bad happens in games,” he continued, “the people affected, sometimes having their lives turned upside down, learn from the press or Twitter. No emails, phone calls, no heads up, no note on the website.” “I know everybody is having a great time laughing at this but Stadia had the best dev revenue of any streaming service,” Necrosoft Games’ Brandon Sheffield wrote. “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.” “Tangle Tower was due to launch on Stadia in two days time, and this article was the first I heard about it shutting down,” wrote developer Tom Vian. “We have a title coming out 1st November,” wrote Bard’s Tale 3 developer Rebecca Heineman. “Now we hear about this.” “Oh my god,” wrote No More Robots’ Mike Rose. “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.” We’ll update if we hear more from these developers on their future plans - and if there are any other ways for fans to support them. Earlier today, we reported on Cyberpunk 2077 fans who are trying to get their cloud saves transferred for use elsewhere.
