Tag: Google Stadia

Google Stadia’s closure has left developers unsure of what to do next

Google Stadia is shutting down, which is bad for gamers, but worse for indie developers who were depending on a Stadia launch.

When Google Stadia launched it was alongside a display of video game history consisting of just three items: a Dreamcast, a PowerGlove, and a copy of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial on the Atari. Respectively, those are a console that shuttered the hardware division of Sega, a peripheral that was infamously poor for playing games, and the game that crashed the video game industry in the early ‘80s. What, exactly, Google intended to confer with this display is lost to time, as is Stadia itself. 

Many fans and industry analysts felt that the writing had been on the wall for a while regarding Google Stadia. The Stadia logo may have featured at the end of game trailers, but consumers had pretty much forgotten about the platform, and even PR hired by Google would email video game journalists and ask that they mention Stadia as a platform in coverage of games. But no one has felt the sting of Stadia’s closure more than the developers working on games for it.

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“No one, not even Stadia employees know. They found out when the blog post went live,” Rebecca Heineman told GLHF. She was working with developer Olde Sküül on a modern port of Luxor Evolved, a 2012 match-3 game available on Steam. Heineman claims “about four man-months” were put into the Stadia port, which “for a tiny dev like Olde Sküül, it’s a lot.”

Though it doesn’t seem as though Stadia has totally left developers out in the cold, with Heineman tweeting: “At least Google reached out to us and are working to lessen the pain due to our title for Stadia [being] canceled. At least it will be on other platforms, but still. Ouch.”

Olde Sküül also tweeted about the cancellation, saying: “Yes, we had a title in development for Stadia. #rip #stadia we are bummed out.” Despite that, the developer has confirmed that the game is still releasing on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation, so you can still support Luxor Evolved.

Shortly after the announcement of Stadia’s closure, Mike Rose of publisher No More Robots tweeted: “Hours later and I still have no email from Stadia, and no clarity on what’s happening with our games, deals, anything. Really would have been nice if they’d told partners, or even got in contact with us by now?” No More Robots has published many well-received indie titles, and in response to those who had been requesting Stadia ports, Rose simply stated: “this is why we didn’t haha.”

While triple-A publishers have been quiet on Stadia’s closure, indies have been hit hardest, and have therefore been the most vocal. Developer Simon Roth tweeted shortly after the announcement, saying: “OH BOY VERY HAPPY TO SEE MONTHS OF MY WORK GOING IN THE BIN AGAIN. I SURE DO LOVE GAME DEVELOPMENT.”

Roth also brought back an old picture of a Stadia development kit propping open a door, saying: “At least I got a nice doorstop out of it.”

Stadia’s closure has come as a shock to all developers that were working on titles for Google’s streaming platform, even if its lack of mainstream appeal and success has been seemingly evident within the community for quite some time. Still, Google’s lack of warning for developers has likely damaged future relationships should the company venture into the mainstream gaming space again in the future.

Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.

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Google Stadia cloud gaming servers will shut down in 2023

Google Stadia is coming to an end, after Google’s cloud streaming platform failed to catch on like the search engine giant hoped for

Google Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming platform, is shutting its servers down on Jan. 18, 2023, the search engine giant announced in a statement, as the service failed to catch on like Google hoped it would. The news comes a few months after reports emerged that said Google was making Stadia less of a priority in 2022.

Users will lose access to their game libraries, but Google said the company will issue refunds for games, game add-ons, and Stadia hardware purchased through Google.

“While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Phil Harrison, Google’s vice president and general manager, said in the statement. “We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start.”

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Stadia games may disappear, but the technology and workers that made Stadia possible will find new life elsewhere in the company. Harrison said Google will repurpose Stadia technology for areas such as Google AR and YouTube, and Stadia’s engineers and other workers will be moved to other parts of the business.

Google’s foray into gaming might not end with Stadia either. Harrison closed the statement by saying Google remains committed to gaming and will continue investing in its gaming infrastructure to help development partners and creators.

Stadia may be going away, but Amazon Luna, Amazon’s game streaming platform, and Xbox Cloud Gaming are still working to make cloud gaming a viable option in the industry, while tech companies such as Logitech are releasing their own cloud gaming consoles to compete with the likes of Nintendo Switch.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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Stadia reportedly ‘deprioritized’ at Google

The shift comes a year after Google closed its internal first-party studios.

It seems like Stadia, Google’s streaming video game console, is leaving us almost as quickly as it stormed into our lives.

According to reporting from Business Insider, Google is salvaging the low-latency streaming technology that powers Stadia in order to shop it around as “Google Stream,” separating the tech from the console it was built for. Apparently, this means that Stadia is “deprioritized within Google,” making for yet another blow in the system’s relatively short lifetime. 

Last year, after hardly more than a year on the market, Google announced it was shuttering the studios it built in order to make first-party games for Stadia. This move made for a shift in priorities for the Stadia platform, which became a place for low-cost deals that secured a comfortable amount of indie games for Google’s waning console, saving the company money on “AAA blockbusters” while leadership shifted gears on what to make of their streaming technology.

Though a spokesperson from Google reaffirmed to Business Insider that the company will continue supporting Stadia in 2022, it seems as if internally things are a bit more dire for the system itself.

In the year since this abrupt shift, Google has prioritized selling their cloud technology around, manifesting in pitches to multiple gaming companies including Capcom and Bungie, who was recently acquired by Sony for $3.6 billion to build live service games. It’s unknown how far these talks have gone and the state of them given the recent acquisition, and further consolidation, of big publishers and developers in the games industry, which seems like an inevitability, is likely threatening the livelihood of Stadia.

Written by Moises Taveras on behalf of GLHF.

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