http://java.dzone.com/articles/google-code-dead
Last year Google announced they would no longer provide a 'downloads' feature on google code hosting for new projects. Starting January 15th 2014, creating new downloads would also no longer be possible for existing projects.
It's been sort of obvious for a while that they've stopped caring about their code hosting. At the time, it was a refreshing way to do open source project hosting. All we really had was SourceForge, which at the time was already really starting to feel dated.
But with the advent of Github and others, google code pretty much dropped out of the race. The last new feature announcement was from 2011.