earlier today, Google confirmed it’s shutting down Stadia, his short-lived cloud gaming service. While the company plans to refund all Stadia-related software and hardware purchases, the future of the service’s few remaining exclusives is less clear. And if they’re not ported to other platforms before Stadia rides into the sunset next year, they could disappear entirely and never be played again.
When Google Stadia launched in late 2019, the search engine company had big plans, promising exclusive games that would leverage features only possible through cloud streaming and offsite computing. In the years that followed, Google stopped focusing on Stadia exclusives and even closed its own game studio in the process. However, a few exclusive games fall by the wayside stages. And with today’s sudden news that Stadia is closing for good on January 18, 2023, we don’t know what’s going to happen to those games. Either a blog post Announcement of closure and a FAQ on the situationGoogle has failed to clarify the future of the few remaining Stadia exclusives.
my box contacted Google regarding these games and will update the post if they share new details or plans with us.
By our count, there are five games that can only be played through Google Stadia. Here is the list:
Hello engineer
Released in October 2021, this is the latest exclusive to the list. Hello engineer is described by the developers as a “multiplayer mechanical engineering game” and takes place in the same universe as the popular horror game, Hello Neighbor.
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Pixel Junk Raiders
This is a low-rated third-person roguelike action game by the folks at Q gamesthe same developers who made The morning children and the other PixelJunk games.) It has a nice feature where players can share a screenshot and others can jump into that game state with just that picture. But the rest of the game sounds kind of boring.
outcasts
Developed by Splash Damage, outcasts is an online multiplayer top down fighting game with characters that look like they fell out of one fall guys tee. While some players had good things to say outcastsit didn’t find the audience it needed even after it went free-to-play, and it sounds like it’s mostly a ghost town these days.
PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle
released in 2020, Mega tunnel battle combines the classic Pac Man Arcade game with a battle royale. Up to 64 players can play together and compete to become the last remaining Pac-Man while using a mix of new and returning power-ups on retro-inspired maps.
GOLD
GOLD is a third-person horror game starring a young girl and is considered by many Stadia fans to be possibly the best exclusive game released on the service. Developed by Tequilla Works, it’s around six hours long, packed with some decent jump scares, puzzles, and combat. Nothing fancy, but a solid game that will hopefully be ported to Steam or Switch so more people can enjoy it GOLD for years to come.
While some of these games aren’t incredible and I doubt many people would mind if they never got to play them again, it would still be a shame to lose them. Video game storage is important If we like Save the history of this art form and show how it has evolved and changed over decades of innovation and new technologies. Losing those games to the void, even if some of them aren’t that great, would suck.
Hopefully the developers and publishers involved can and will port them to other platforms. If that doesn’t happen, they will die forever when Google destroys the Stadia servers, since not even pirates were able to rip and share the games online. A sad ending for games that people have probably been working on for years.
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