Lot 2
Bungie
When it was announced that Google Stadia would be discontinued early next year, it wasn’t just a surprise to players. Nor was it shared with longtime Stadia partners, major developers like Ubisoft and Bungie, and a slew of indie developers, some of whom were literally about to release a game on Stadia within days. But Google didn’t even tell their own Stadia team until the day it was announced, so really, nobody knew.
The fact that you don’t notice this has caused many different problems across the board. In the case of Ubisoft, the company has made it a point to bring a large collection of its games to Stadia. And while Google is refunding players for their Stadia game purchases prior to the shutdown, Ubisoft doesn’t want to suddenly lose all those existing players.
So, in the case of Ubisoft, they announced that they are going to come up with a way to transfer the Stadia licenses to give players a PC copy of the game instead, meaning they can keep playing and still own the title even after Stadia is closed:
But there’s no exact plan or process yet, as Ubisoft has to figure this all out on the spot and there’s no time to plan ahead for this announcement.
There’s something similar going on with Bungie, a complicated matter, as they both heavily supported Stadia at launch, with Destiny 2 basically being the flagship game, and they’re also using Stadia internally to test the game as the studio continues development. of it has increased dramatically from home.
stadiums
But in the case of the game’s existence on Stadia, questions arise about what happens when you say you’re a Stadia player, and that’s the only place your Guardian exists. Even if Destiny has crossplay, if you didn’t activate that, presumably you wouldn’t be able to just jump onto a new platform after exiting and keep access to your character. So this requires some sort of action at the end of Bungie to collect all the Stadia-focused Guardians and make sure they don’t get lost in the shuffle. 5,000 players still play 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 just learned that Stadia has been shut down and talks have begun about the next steps for our players,” Bungie said in a blog post released almost immediately after the announcement of Stadia’s shutdown. “We will announce and send information about Destiny 2 Stadia accounts as soon as we have a plan of action.”
Again, without warning, they can’t announce actual next steps because they don’t even know them yet. Turns out that when you shut down an entire gaming ecosystem, that creates some problems, even if you think you’re taking proactive steps like refunding all their purchases to calling customers. On the developer side, this was a total mess and hopefully things can be sorted out by shutting down in January.
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