The announcement seems sudden but actually it's with about three months notice. It does seem a little short, but how much would it help to drag it out further? How much time do you want to spend on a project that's shutting down?
There were games preparing to launch on November 1st.
Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.
Big companies are quite paranoid about leaking shutdowns even internally, because they don't want the press to know, customers to start asking questions, team members leaving, etc etc.
I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
That's true... But when you act as a publisher, then you're required to take the risk of leaking something's final days.
When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.
I honestly don't know. But every developer I've seen talking about publishing on Stadia, also talked about working with the team, so there were definite considerations that they needed to take into account.
There's stories like this [0] which suggests that the performance for Stadia was different than other platforms you might deploy for. The threading behaviour is a little bit different than just a VM, which is to be expected, but can come out surprising. So there's probably Stadia-specific patching for different games.
