Here’s how the games industry is reacting to the news that Stadia is forced to close.
The news that Stadia is having to close is unusual, but no one’s cleaning spit takes the coffee off of their screen. The Stadia offer never sounded especially attractive: here are some games you appreciate, but with video compression, extra input lag, and other internet concerns, and they cost full price, plus a subscription fee if you want 4K streaming. There were some lovely features, and Stadia started working as well as any game streaming platform can right now. Even so, Google totally Leeroy Jenkins’d the whole thing by launching it before it was ready, hurriedly launching an in-house game studio and then axing it after a year, and creating a ludicrous ad that failed to communicate why anyone should take a chance on the service.
It’s classic Google: a website dedicated to recalling products that the search and advertising monstrosity has buried. Possibly Google’s bold willingness to fail is why it has a market cap of much more than one trillion dollars, and I don’t, but it’s not great for the public who trusted the company’s commitment to Stadia. Stadia users will lose access to their games, but while refunds will indeed be issued, many save files might very well fall out of the sky. Meanwhile, game developers who were starting to work on Stadia versions of their games seem so to be wasting their time, and making judgments by the reactions we’re seeing, they found Stadia’s downfall at the same time we did.
Here’s how the games industry is responding to the news, from disappointment to I told you so.
Joe Blackburn, a director of Destiny 2,
Aadit Doshi, senior gameplay programmer at Rocksteady
Brandon Sheffield, a director of Necrosoft Games
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games
Tom Vian, co-founder of SFB Games
Rami Ismail is a game developer and consultant.
Steve Saylor is indeed the creator, host, and availability advocate.
Mike Rose, this same director of The no More Robots,
PC Gamer has managed to reach out to Google for comment on what its closure means for studios that had deals with Google for Stadia games, such as Mike Rose, or who were working on Stadia versions of their games independently.
Stadia users will be able to use the service until January 18, 2023. Regarding save games, Google says that this may be possible to save progress in “some games that support cross-progression play on other platforms,” assumedly games like Destiny 2.
