fate 2
Bungie
When it was announced that Google Stadia would be shutting down early next year, it wasn’t just a surprise to gamers. It also wasn’t shared with longtime Stadia partners, big developers like Ubisoft and Bungie, and a whole bunch of indie developers, some of whom were literally on the verge of releasing a game on Stadia within days. But Google didn’t even tell its own Stadia team until the day it was announced, so really no one knew at all.
Not noticing this has created many different problems all over the place. In Ubisoft’s case, the company has set out to bring a large collection of its games to Stadia. And while Google is refunding players for their Stadia game purchases before the shutdown, Ubisoft doesn’t want to suddenly lose all those existing players.
So, in Ubisoft’s case, they’ve announced that they’ll figure out some way to transfer the Stadia licenses to give players a PC copy of the game instead, meaning they can continue to play and still own the title even after Stadia shuts down:
But there isn’t an exact plan or process yet, because Ubisoft has to figure this all out on the fly, with no real time to plan ahead of this announcement.
Something somewhat similar is happening with Bungie, a complicated case given that both heavily supported Stadia at launch, with Destiny 2 effectively its flagship game, and also use Stadia internally to test the game as the studio dramatically increased his development from Home.
Stages
But in the case of the game existing on Stadia, it raises questions about what happens if you say you’re a Stadia-only player, and that’s the only place your Guardian exists. Even if Destiny has cross-play, if you haven’t enabled it, you probably won’t be able to just jump to a new platform after the shutdown and keep access to your character. So it’s going to take some action on Bungie’s part to bring all the Stadia-centric Guardians together and make sure they don’t get lost in the shuffle. 5,000 players are still playing Destiny 2 on Stadia every day. A small part of the whole, but still a part of the player base that Bungie doesn’t want to see fall through the cracks.
“We have just learned of the closure of Stadia and have begun conversations about the next steps for our players,” Bungie said in a blog post that appeared almost immediately after the announcement of Stadia’s shutdown. “We will announce and send information regarding Destiny 2 Stadia accounts once we have a plan of action.”
Again, without warning, they can’t announce the actual next steps because they don’t even know them yet. It turns out that when you shut down an entire gaming ecosystem, it leads to some problems, even if you think you’re taking proactive steps like refunding all of their purchases to call customers. It was a complete mess on the part of the developers and hopefully things can be resolved by shutting down next January.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content summary newsletter, God Rolls.
Take my science fiction novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Add Comment