When Google announced that Stadia would be shut down in January, you might have thought the devs and game studios working on Stadia games would be the first to know. But you would be wrong about that assumption, apparently, as there are lots of developers who claim they didn’t know and only heard about the sunset at the same time as everyone else, if not very shortly before.
This revelation first broke when an internal memo from Phil Harrison called for a team meeting and apologized for the short notice. The letter was confirmed by a supposed Stadia engineer on Reddit, while other game devs and studios started checking in on Twitter with their own surprise at the announcement. “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,” reads one tweet. “OH BOY VERY HAPPY TO SEE MONTHS OF MY WORK GOING IN THE BIN AGAIN. I SURE DO LOVE GAME DEVELOPMENT,” reads another.
There is one studio that is claiming they were given some kind of notice about the matter: Rebecca Heineman, one of the founders of Olde Skuul, is reporting that she broke the news of Stadia’s shutdown to her contact at Google, who apparently didn’t know about it; she was later contacted by the company that same day to “[open] the idea of reimbursement” and personally reach out to game devs about the shuttering.
Behind the scenes here at MassivelyOP, we know of another studio that sent press releases involving a Stadia launch the day before the announcement. A corrected memo wasn’t dispatched until after the sunset news dropped.
Meanwhile, game studios are scrambling to move Stadia players’ game saves to PC. Ubisoft, Bungie, and IO Interactive are all taking different approaches or planning on taking next steps to ensure Stadia users can keep their save data and progress to PC.
