Stadia Shutdown Could Come At A Severe Cost For Game Developers

Yesterday, Google made the announcement that Stadia would be shutting down for good. The service will remain available for customers until 18 January, 2023. All Stadia hardware purchased via the Google Store will be refunded, in addition to all games and add-on content purchased through Stadia. These refunds are expected to be processed by mid-January. Although consumers are being compensated, it looks as though game developers will be hit hard by the decision to shut the service down.

A number of developers have taken to Twitter to announce just how the news will affect their own projects. No More Robots’ Mike Rose announced, “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,” and he’s not alone in sharing this particular concern.

SFB Games’ Tom Vian added, “Tangle Tower was due to launch on Stadia in two days time, and this article was the first I heard about it shutting down,” with indie developer Rebecca Heineman sharing a similar experience, “We have a title coming out 1 November. Now we hear about this.”

Necrosoft Games’ Brandon Sheffield wrote, “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.” He went on to add, “I'll find out soon what's going on with our launch, but I was counting on at least a several-month tail of players with which to recoup - I also wanted to reward the faithful Stadia players for sticking with us, because they supported the original game a lot.”

The decision to shut down Stadia couldn’t have been taken lightly yet as Gene Park points out, Stadia had just spent time on overhauling their UI which is an odd decision if you’ve known that the platform is doomed for quite some time. This is another great reminder to support your favourite indie developers.