Ubisoft, Bungie Scrambling To Evacuate Players’ Games And Characters From A Capsizing Google Stadia

When it was announced that Google Stadia would be closing early next year, it wasn’t just a surprise to gamers. It also hadn’t been shared with long-time Stadia partners, big developers like Ubisoft and Bungie, and a host of indie developers, some of whom were literally on the verge of releasing a game on Stadia in a matter of days. But Google didn’t even say your own Stadia team until the day it was announced, so no one really knew anything.

Having zero notice of this has created many different problems across the board. In the case of Ubisoft, the company has gone out of its way 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 the case of Ubisoft, they have announced that they will find some way to transfer Stadia licenses so that players get a copy of the game on PC, meaning they can keep playing and still own the title even after Stadia is gone. turn off:

But there is no exact plan or process yet, because Ubisoft has to figure all this out on the fly with no real time to plan ahead of this announcement.

A similar thing is happening with Bungie, a tricky case given that they were both heavily supportive of Stadia at launch with Destiny 2 effectively being their flagship game, and they also use Stadia internally to test the game as their studio has dramatically ramped up their in-house development. .

But in the case of the game’s existence 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 does have crossplay, if she hasn’t turned it on, she presumably won’t be able to just jump to a new platform after it closes and retain access to her character. So this will require some sort of action on Bungie’s part to bring all the Stadia-focused Guardians together and make sure they don’t get lost in the shuffle. 5,000 players continue to play Destiny 2 on Stadia every day. A small fraction of the total, 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 shutdown of Stadia and have started conversations about next steps for our players,” Bungie said in a statement. blog post that went up almost instantly after the Stadia shutdown announcement. “We will announce and send information about Destiny 2 Stadia accounts once we have a plan of action.”

Again, unannounced, they can’t announce the actual next steps because they don’t even know about them yet. It turns out that when you shut down an entire gaming ecosystem, that leads to some problems, even if you think you’re taking proactive steps like refunding customers for all of their purchases. On the developer side this has been a total disaster and hopefully things can be resolved with the shutdown next January.

follow me On twitter, Youtube, Facebook Y Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content roundup newsletter, god wheel.

Pick up my sci-fi novels hero killer series Y The Earthborn Trilogy.