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Tag: Stadia

  • Dead Stadia Game Lives On Through Sneaky Steam Update

    Dead Stadia Game Lives On Through Sneaky Steam Update

    Image: Necrosoft

    As Google prepares to kill off its Stadia streaming service for good, there have been a few parting gifts to emerge from its demise. Users got a final game, along with the ability to unlock the Bluetooth capabilities of their controllers (even if that was something they should have been able to do from day one), but one of the last surprises can be enjoyed by all of us. Especially those of us who never paid for Stadia in the first place.

    Back in 2020 Necrosoft (finally) released Gunsport, a sci-fi take on 2D volleyball, as a Stadia exclusive. It was pretty cool! It was also, as a Stadia exclusive, a game that most of us never got to enjoy. In June 2022 it was followed by a sequel, Hyper Gunsport, which was much more widely available, since it came out on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation.

    Gunsport Stadia Teaser

    While two completely separate games, they’ve now been brought a lot closer, with Necrosoft saying in a tweet earlier today “Since we care about game preservation we’ve made an offline version of Gunsport available in the Steam version of Hyper Gunsport, through the beta channel.”

    You can see a video of this game-smuggling move (done by Necrosoft’s Lotte May) in action below:

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    If you’ve never had to use a Steam game’s beta channel system before, the video above will give you a quick rundown on how to activate the original game, then be able to easily switch between playing it and the sequel.

    This is a very cool move! Not just because people are getting essentially a free video game, but because this is a super interesting way to implement a form of game preservation, one that thinks way outside the box but which, thanks to the way Steam is structured, also seems to work pretty damn well!

    Luke Plunkett

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  • Released Today, The Last Google Stadia Game Is A Piece Of History

    Released Today, The Last Google Stadia Game Is A Piece Of History

    Image: Google

    If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia is shutting down and closing shop next week. But before the never-quite-successful game streaming service dies, it has provided one neat (and free) little gift you can only play for a few days before it all goes offline.

    Launched back in 2019, Google Stadia was a costly and massive investment from Google into the world of video games. Powered by the cloud aka a bunch of servers and off-site computers, Stadia’s big promise was instantaneous gaming on the go. No more updates or expensive consoles. And while it sometimes worked, the high cost of games, lack of features, small library, and internet costs ended up dooming the service. Sure, some superfans logged thousands of hours into it, but for most, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game platform.

    So it wasn’t surprising that in September of last year, Google announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so near, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Yet, Google has published one final game. But don’t expect some big open-world RPG or remake. Instead, the final Stadia game is Worm Game, an internally developed title used to test Stadia long before it became a public service.

    We probably were never meant to see or play this Snake-like test game as it sports fairly rudimentary graphics and kinda ugly menus. But in the final days of Stadia, it appears the devs working on the project were able to provide its community one final treat. Even better, anyone can play Worm Game as it’s free. (Which makes sense considering the Stadia store stopped working already.)

    The game’s store page features this nice and touching description of the game and what it was used for:

    Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team 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 some incredibly important or amazing thing? Not really. However, it’s still really cool to get a peek behind the scenes, and thanks to videos of Worm Game, this little piece of test software will be somewhat preserved for folks to look back at years from now.

    In other cool End Of Stadia news, Google has confirmed that starting next week, it will start allowing players to unlock the Bluetooth functionally of its Stadia controller.

    This is a nice way to make the controller—which has one of my favorite modern D-pads on it—more useful and easier to hook up to more devices. I doubt the devs who worked on Stadia for years were planning for the controller to be the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.

    Zack Zwiezen

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