Abandon Ship
Last week’s Google Stadia shutdown announcement is both a surprise and not at all a surprise. Given that it had virtually no exclusive games, it was kind of doomed. It seems that developers looking to release their games on the platform were not warned or consulted in anyway. Several came out to say so.
On the bright side, not ALL of your games will be lost forever. There are a few developers that are sending proverbial life preservers to Stadia owners. IO Interactive, Bungie, and Ubisoft have each announced plans to bail out those who have purchased games on the platform.
While Bungie and IO Interactive have said that they are working on some options, they do no have a detailed plan to share. Fortunately, Ubisoft already has their games on a hub in Ubisoft Connect. According to their announcement, this is how they plan to migrate customer purchases from Stadia to PC.
While Stadia will shut down on January 18, 2023, we’re happy to share that we’re working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect. We’ll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.
— Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) September 30, 2022
Bungie and IO Interactive do have their own accounts that players can sign up for. Similar to Ubisoft Connect, this could be the way they migrate their games to PC or other platforms. Hopefully, other developers are able to take action like these and save their players from oblivion.
Google Stadia will be active until January 18th. After that, the platform will be a paperweight.
Did you ever use Google’s cloud gaming platform? Let us know in the comments below.