Google didn’t even notify its employees in advance that Stadia was shutting down.

Closing announcement stadium This did not cause much surprise to the general public, who sooner or later expected such a conclusion. However, the news has puzzled developers planning to launch their games on the platform in the coming months, and even Google employees themselves. Why? Because the company didn’t even notify them of the decision beforehand..

as assembled KotakuGoogle employees in charge of Stadia have learned about the end of the platform around the same time the news was made public. But the studios preparing titles for the cloud service were even worse, as they learned about the situation directly from the press, based on the publication of Phil Harrison on the company blog.

On Reddit, a Mountain View employee expressed anger at how they were informed of the decision. “There is a (now I think former) Stadia engineer working here. None of us knew this was coming and that’s how Phil [Harrison] He announced it to all of us this morning at 8:30 AM PT: “SORRY FOR THE SHORT NOTICE.” I will never again work on what he is associated with, ”he wrote in the official Stadia subreddit.

The same user shared a screenshot of a meeting invitation in which they were notified that Stadia was shutting down. It only stated that “important updates” to the cloud gaming platform would be released.

He also quickly gained fame tweet from Peter Elst, a Google software engineer from Ireland. “It’s a strange experience when you start your work day and realize that a feature that you’ve been working on for over 6 months and should be released soon is no longer relevant. ” He wrote.

Although he didn’t mention Stadia directly, timing publications were very eloquent. Apparently, Google was working on new developer tools that promised exciting news. Asked if it would ever be possible to see or know what it was about, he replied: “Unfortunately, [no era] nothing of interest to the community, but it would be nice for the developers.”

Stadia closure is a headache for video game studios

Studios working on games for Stadia learned about this decision from the press and the Google blog. The decision was bucket of ice watergiven that many releases are planned for the last months of 2022 as well as 2023. Games that will no longer see the light of day on the cloud gaming platform developed in Mountain View.

Please note that while the service will be available until January 18 next year, Google has already closed the Stadia store. This means players can no longer make new purchases and developers can no longer add their own video games to the catalog.

Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games was one of those who expressed concern about this. “I know it’s a lot of fun for everyone to laugh at this, but Stadia offered the best income for developers of any streaming service, and the launch Hyper Gunsport there I was going to recoup our development costs. We would have presented it in November, but now we have a more difficult situation,” he explained.

What Sheffield mentions makes sense given that Google paid developers based on the percentage of time Stadia Pro subscribers spent.. Quite a lucrative solution for studios that disrupted traditional revenue sharing patterns.

A platform that has become very useful for large developers

Kotaku collected some feedback and messages from developers who now see their plans affected by the situation. He even mentions the occasion Banguistudy after Fatewhich is now owned by PlayStation, which used Stadia as a tool to test its games directly from the cloud.. Something that has been vital to keeping things going during the COVID-19 lockdown that has pushed the industry towards remote work.

“Before we started using Stadia, we uploaded our internal builds, which are HUGE, to every workstation that people took home. Hundreds of transfers of a large set of files several times a week. Instead, with Stadia, it was one charge. ”, explained designer Max Nichols.

Disabling Stadia – Endpoint months of rumors around your future. A service that has long lost priority in Google, especially among its managers. “There are a lot of people inside that would love to see this go on, so they work really hard to make sure it doesn’t die. But they are not the ones who write the checks,” the company’s employees said earlier. year.