Early this morning, Google confirms that they will be shutting down Stadia, its short-lived cloud gaming service. While the company plans to refund all Stadia-related hardware and software purchases, the future of some of the remaining exclusivity on the service is less clear. And if they aren’t ported to other platforms before Stadia goes into sunset next year, they could disappear altogether, never to be played again.
When Google Stadia launches in late 2019, the search engine company had big plans, promising exclusive games that would utilize features only possible through cloud streaming and off-site computing. In the years that followed, Google would stop focusing on Stadia monopolies, even shutting down its own game studio in the process. However, some exclusive games are still stuck on Stadia. And with today’s unexpected news that Stadia will be shutting down permanently on January 18, 2023, we don’t know what will happen to these games. In both a blog post decommissioning notice and a frequently asked question about the situationGoogle hasn’t been able to clarify what the future holds for some of the remaining Stadia monopolies.
Kotaku We’ve reached out to Google about these games and will update the post if it shares any new details or plans with us.
According to our statistics, 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 on the list. Hello engineer Described by the developers as a “multiplayer machine building game” and set in the same universe as the popular horror game, Hello neighbors.
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PixelJunk Raiders
This is a poorly rated third person action game from the folks at Q-Gamesthe same developer created Tomorrow’s Children and other thing PixelJunk Game.) It has a neat feature where players can share screenshots and others can switch to that game state just by using that image. But the rest of the game sounds dull.
Outcasts
Developed by Splash Damage, Outcasts is a top-down online multiplayer fighting game there are characters that look like they fell out Autumn boys knock down. While some players have good things to talk about Outcastsit still hasn’t found the audience it needs, even after free-to-play, and it looks like it’s mostly a ghost town these days.
PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle
Released in 2020, Mega Tunnel Battle Classic mix Pac-Man arcade game with battle royale. Up to 64 players can play together, competing to be the last Pac-Man standing while using a combination of new and returning power-ups on classic-style-inspired maps.
GYLT
GYLT is a third-person horror game starring a young girl and is considered by many Stadia fans to be the best exclusive game released on the service. It was developed by Tequilla Works and is about six hours long, packed with some rich jump scares, puzzles, and combat. Nothing super special, but a game that’s definitely hoping to make it to Steam or Switch so more people can enjoy GYLT for many years to come.
While some of these games aren’t amazing and I doubt many people would care if they never played them again, losing them would still be a shame. Preserving video games is important if we want save the history of this art form and shows how it has evolved and changed through decades of innovation and new technology. Losing these games into the void, even if some of the games weren’t so great, would be bad.
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 kills the Stadia servers, because even pirates can’t split and share online games. A sad end to games that people could have spent years working on.
