My guess is that they're gonna. Google is starting to get a reputation for this, and this would be an ESPECIALLY egregious example. Nobody would ever buy a digital good from them again if they didn't do some version of this (lots of people are skittish about it already, but this would make it so much worse).

I don't think it's "trivial" though. They probably have to do some negotiation with both Steam as well as each individual publisher of games on the service.

I think Google already has a reputation for shutting things down prematurely, not just on HN but with consumers more generally. And I think that reputation is a big part of the reason why Stadia flopped. People knew this would happen so they never bought in, causing this to happen. A sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, but this outcome was very obvious from the start.

Yeah, but they don't have to make it worse! If they do the right thing here and transfer the licenses somehow, it's way more likely that whatever their next thing is is going to go down smoother. If they don't do the right thing here, they're never going to be able to launch anything like it ever again. That must carry some weight. You'd hope, at least.

Yeah, if Google were to abandon the licenses then it would mean they'd just be giving up on gaming indefinitely. I don't see them doing that as all the big tech companies want to control the family room.

They're probably just going to rebrand it as "Chrome Games" and have people play in their browsers or any supported devices.

Bethesda did this when they shut down their own launcher - you could sign in with a steam account and all your purchases would be transferred there.

License transfer is the (relatively) trivial part. Porting stadia-exclusive games to another platform (PC) would be the slightly trickier part, whos effort would differ for each game.