Google is a bag of d*cks - who knew?

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 02-10-2022
Online Games Bay

In accordance with their long and painful tradition, Google has just pushed developers and clients under the bus, when the company announced the shutdown of the Stadia. Who could imagine something like that?

While Google announced the closure of yet another of their revolutionary projects, Stadia, which, to be fair, would be a good idea, but not in the hands of Google, they... forgot to warn their employees. And their business partners. And their clients. You know, people who actually are involved in the project.

Just a day after the announcement, the employees of Google revealed that they were told about closure plans just 45 minutes before the rest of the world. I could say it is a despicable practice, but we talk about Google, despicable is their middle name.

And the employees were the lucky ones, as it turned out. The business partners of Stadia, f.e. game publishers and game developers, even day after know nothing about the future of their projects. Some of them were planning to publish their titles in November, and now they are not even sure if they gonna get the money for making Stadia port. It turns out developers and publishers are paid after the premiere of their game on the platform and... now who knows if they gonna premiere at all.

Among them are indie developers, who signed a deal to place their titles on Stadia just days before the shutdown announcement, which was super nice. Not to mention those, who spent some big money on their Stadia ports and now don’t even know if they will get the costs covered (it depends on details of their contract with Stadia, but I seriously doubt it).

And there are clients, like the one I mentioned yesterday, who possibly will lose 400 hours of progress in Cyberpunk 2077, or another one who spent about 5900 hours (yes, he spent over 8 months of his life just playing the game) in Red Dead Redemption 2 - how will they transfer their saves to another platform? Nobody knows. And Google certainly doesn’t care.

I said it before (like in Who can you trust? and Who can you trust, part 2) and I will say it again and again - if you can avoid having anything to do with Google, avoid it. They are the bag of dicks among big corporations, which says something - even among the worst companies in the world, they are still at the top of the heap. This will tell you everyone, who was screwed over by Google: youtubers (adpocalipse and shady changes in the monetization rules), users of Analytics (who lost access to most of their useful data), users of AdSense (who lost their incomes), users of Google+ (who lost their platform), website owners (screwed over by each and every change in their algorithm), users of Google Ads (who pay mostly for robot clicks).

And the list goes on and on. Who could have guessed that they will screw over the users and developers for Stadia? Certainly, not hundreds and thousands of people, who were saying from the beginning that Google will kill this project without warning, just like they have done with dozens before. But I guess developers and clients, who signed up for Stadia did not listen and now are surprised. Oh, no! Anyway...

06-09-2023