Google staff have fixed a game-breaking bug in Journey to the Savage Planet on Google Stadia; after users made outcry over the lack of help.
“Lordubuntu” of the Google Stadia subreddit made a post on 21st February entitled “[Rant] Google I’m disappointed – Journey to savage planet edition.” The user refereed back to an issue they had brought up 18 days prior where Journey to the Savage Planet would freeze on the main menu. At least 12 other users reported the same issue.
Speaking to Google support on numerous platforms, 505 Games (the game’s publisher on other platforms), and developer Typhoon Studios came to no avail [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Google recommended Lordubuntu speak to 505 Games, who said they could do nothing as “all of the game code and data on Stadia is owned by Google.”
Asking again if this meant the game would never be fixed, 505 games replied again, stating again they should contact Stadia Games and Entertainment. They also note the developer was acquired by Google Stadia in 2019.
While that email had come on February 18th, Google had announced they shut down Stadia Games and Entertainment on February 1st.
Lordubuntu stated that “things are totally blown up. It’s a sick joke. They have no clue of what they are doing,” and that he was disappointed not only for owning the Founder Edition (one of the first Google Stadia owners), but that “a well known company like Google” would operate as such.
“Making mistakes is human, but this time we have nothing to forgive nor understand.
We are paying for a service to play games, and right now this service it’s not working(at least for us with the bug), even if it is only 1 game. I (as client of a product/service) don’t care if Google has decided to shut down their divisions, I care only to play the games I have paid for! At this point, without even ONE official update regarding the situation I feel scammed.
This is my last post about this issue, I’m tired and there are far more real problems than this in life right now…but i had to denounce that at least.
Shame on you Google, shame.”
On February 23rd; after several outlets reported on the story, the Stadia subreddit community manager replied. “Hi folks, I understand how frustrating this situation is, and I’m sorry for the delayed update. We’re actively working with our partners to identify a fix, and I will do my best to pass updates along.”
Later that day, the community manager made their own post on the subreddit, to ensure updates on the matter could be seen while Reddit was having technical issues. A patch went live later that day, which fixed the following issues:
Addresses the issue causing save game corruption which were crashing the game when loading them at the main menu
The ability to detect corrupted saves in the main menu without crashing. If the player does have a corrupted save, it will now show as “corrupted” in the menu. By deleting the corrupted save, your game will look for other saves that can be loaded to recover some progress.
Fix to prevent co-op disconnects when suspending or switching devices
While some were grateful for the fix, others lamented over lost danger, or were still upset it took complaints on social media and media reports to “make” Google address the issue.
Curiously, even after the issue was address, moderators of the subreddit removed posts linking to articles discussing the problem; all for “misleading or clickbait titles” [1, 2, 3]. This included Kotaku, PC Gamer, and The Verge.
A moderator replied to the user who highlighted the removal. “Aside from the very clear biased the author of the kotaku article has towards Stadia (which is perfectly valid, we accept criticism),” the moderator explained, “we removed it based on the very clear inaccuracies.”
These included the claim that the Stadia Games and Entertainment staff were fired (the moderator states they were “moving on to new roles”), that there was no one to fix the game (the moderator states there was no citation for that claim).
The moderator also claims other inaccuracies included that “publishers can’t fix problems with Stadia the way they could a normal game,” and referencing to a lawsuit regarding the Google Stadia’s claims of 4K graphics that had nothing to do with the aforementioned issue.
The moderator concluded, encouraging users to voice their dissatisfaction (something the moderator indicated others already had done) and to seek out the source of information to avoid biased reports.
“We as mods on this subreddit encourage you voicing your discomfort and dissatisfaction. However, no one benefits from reading blatant misleading and biased articles that not only misinform those happy with the service but also those that are not happy.
If you want some examples of us allowing negativity then by all means sort this subreddit by top posts of all time and you’ll see plenty of criticism.
All these articles are also quoting a thread on this subreddit. If you’re wanting to contribute then visit the thread that all these articles are quoting, or better yet voice your opinions on the stickied thread on this subreddit that is addressing it. We don’t need 50 misleading articles that are quoting a thread on the subreddit when you can simply visit the thread yourself“
This is not the first piece of bad PR this month for Google Stadia. The Google Stadia version of Terraria was cancelled, after Re-Logic’s founder Andrew Spinks stated his Google account was disabled with no warning. He had attempted to resolve the issue for three weeks straight, to no avail.
Image: Steam
