Apart from the dismissal of about 150 developers, the strangulation of Google Stadia has left a ton of early adopters really. The stage was malignant from the beginning, and if the last experience of Stadia users is an indication, it certainly does not leave a positive impression at the exit.
One of the few games that Google owns, though it was first released on consoles and PCs before debuting at Stadia. era Journey to the wild planet. Google acquired Typhon Studios before the end of 2019, and the deal meant that Journey to the wild planet was one of the few free games with the Stadia Pro subscription.
Typhon Studios was the first studio acquired by Google, but with the effective closure of Google’s gaming ambitions, it let developers go with the rest. However, for users who still play in Stadia – at least those who don’t sue Google – this has caused a bit of a problem, because there is no one around to fix their games.
Anyone who has tried to play Journey to the wild planet – which only arrived at Stadia Pro a few weeks ago – has encountered a number of bugs, including freezing in the main menu, it crashes, i hanging. And because it is located in Stadia, where game files are stored on a server farm far away from your PC, regular users have no competence to solve the problem themselves.
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You can’t play Journey in a single player or in co-op, a user contacted the game editor, 505 Games. After telling Stadia’s social team that they would work with the editor on a solution, the editor said: Actually, we can’t fix it at all.
“Unfortunately, we can’t do anything since our end, as all of the game’s code and data on Stadia is owned by Google,” 505 support staff said in an email.
In a follow-up a few days ago, another 505 Games support staff suggested to the user that they remind Google that they actually Google is responsible for publishing everything Google Stage.
As the original lordubuntu poster pointed out, the situation sucks completely. You can’t blame the original developers: Google fired them all, so it’s not their fault to fix the Google service. (I’m sure they’re not happy to leave their customers in fear, but at the same time, would you raise a finger to help Google after they fired you and all your co-workers?). the principle that traditional publishers cannot solve problems with Stadia the way they could for a normal game.
Of course, it’s not your fault of individual support staff. It’s just an absolute disaster, though many expected it given Google’s track record project cancellation. Plus, it’s worth remembering games are still coming to Stadia. “You can continue to play all your games on Stadia and Stadia Pro and we will continue to bring new third-party titles to the platform,” Phil Harrison of Stadia said in a blog post earlier this month.
But if this is the quality of service that users can expect when things go wrong, why would you invest more in your Stadia library, especially when better services exist?
This story originally appeared on Kotaku Australia.