If you haven’t heard Google Stadia will shut down and Closing time next week. But before the never-quite-successful game-streaming service dies, it’s provided a nice (and free) little gift that you can play for just a few days before it all goes offline.
Launched in 2019, Google Stadia was a costly and massive investment by Google into the world of video games. Powered by the cloud, aka a suite of servers and external computers, Stadia’s big promise was instant gaming on the go. No more updates or expensive consoles. And although sometimes it worked, the high cost of games, lack of features, small library and internet costs doomed the service. Secure, Some superfans have spent thousands of hours on itbut for most, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game platform.
So it was not surprising that last September Google has announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18th, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so near, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Nevertheless, Google has released one last game. But don’t expect a big open-world RPG or remake. Instead, the final Stadia game worm gamean in-house developed title that Stadia was tested with long before it became a public service.
We should probably never see or play this Snake-like test game as it comes with pretty rudimentary graphics and kinda ugly menus. But in Stadia’s final days, the developers working on the project seem to be able to offer the community one last treat. Even better, anyone can play worm game since it is free. (Which makes sense, considering that The Stadia Store has already stopped working.)
The game’s store page has this beautiful and touching description of the game and what it was used for:
Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia was born. Worm Game is a modest title that we’ve used to test many features of Stadia, starting well before our public launch in 2019 and continuing into 2022. It may not win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team did spent a lot of time playing it and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing and for everything.
is worm game something incredibly important or amazing? Not really. Still, it’s really cool to get a behind-the-scenes look, and thanks to videos from worm gamethis little piece of test software will be around for a bit so people can look back on years.
In other cool End Of Stadia news, Google has confirmed that starting next week it will allow players to do so Unlock your Stadia Controller’s Bluetooth functionality.
It’s a neat way to make the controller – which houses one of my favorite modern day d-pads – more useful and easier to connect to more devices. I doubt the developers who worked on Stadia for years planned for the 2023 controller to be the only thing left of Stadia, but here we are.
