Stadia game developers had no idea Google was killing Stadia

The news that Stadia is shutting down is a little surprising, but no one’s cleaning spit take coffee off of their screen. The Stadia offer just never sounded very good: Here are some games you like, but with video compression, extra input lag, and other internet problems, and they cost full price, plus a subscription fee if you want 4K streaming. There were some good features, and Stadia did work as well as any game streaming can work right now, but Google really Leeroy Jenkins’d the whole thing by launching it before it was ready, cavalierly starting an in-house game studio and then axing it after a year, and making a ludicrous ad that failed to communicate why anyone should take a chance on the service.

It’s classic Google: There’s a website dedicated to memorializing products the search and advertising giant has buried. Maybe that bold willingness to fail is why Google has a market cap of over a trillion dollars and I don’t, but it’s not great for the people who trusted the company’s commitment to Stadia. Stadia users are going to lose access to their games, and although they’re getting refunds, a lot of save files are going to disappear into the void. Meanwhile, game developers who were making Stadia versions of their games have apparently been wasting their time, and based on the reactions we’re seeing, they found out that Stadia’s a goner at the same time we did.