I was gone but now am here again to join my co-hosts on this week's Electronic Wireless Show podcast, much like the hundreds and hundreds of of hours of interviews, press briefings and old presentations salvaged by Noclip and heaved onto YouTube. We were going to talk about children's games this week, but given the game for children I was going to talk about was once Stadia exclusive Gylt it seemed a time to talk about the precariousness of digital media a bit (and also make James explain Stadia).
We've all been playing a few games here and there, and most of them are current, with Nate still very enthusiastic about being a dinosaur. James comes with more beans to the hardware altar, and we all have some slightly weird suggestions for your recommendations. Plus, because Liam is actually away this week, I made a special effort to pay attention to audio levels and reduce background noise because I've seen ye all complaining about when I have to edit the podcast and I'm sick of it.
]]>Google Stadia will close its doors on January 18th. As a parting gift, Google have released the game they built to test the streaming service before the streaming service launched. "Worm Game" is a version of Snake with plenty of levels and modes to try and, of course, it's playable within your browser.
]]>Google have started issuing refunds for their recently canned game streaming service, Stadia. Those who'd bought any games, hardware or add-ons have already been told they'll get their money back by January 18th, which is when the lights go out and all access to Stadia games shuts off.
The situation sucks for the Stadia team, and the numerous developers who were caught short by Google's failure to communicate Stadia's imminent demise. If you've spent the past three years mostly buying games through Stadia though then crikey, that's a nice windfall.
]]>Since Google announced they were giving up on Stadia last week, some developers and publishers are taking steps to ensure players don’t lose their progress when the platform shuts down in January. So far, Bungie, IO Interactive and Ubisoft have issued statements to reassure Stadia users that they’re investigating ways to salvage their saves. It’s a welcome development following Google’s sudden shutdown revelation.
]]>Developers working on games for Stadia have expressed surprise and frustration that Google still haven't made contact with them, almost 24 hours after the search giant announced they were shutting down their cloud gaming service yesterday afternoon. Many of the devs I spoke with have had no communication from Google at all since the announcement, with only one saying the company had been in touch. It's not just devs who have been left in the dark, though. Through a leaked internal email sent to Google’s Stadia team, even Google's own staff weren’t briefed until around the same time the public were made aware of the forthcoming shutdown.
]]>Google have announced that they intend to begin "winding down" their game streaming service Stadia. The service launched in 2019 but struggled to find an audience. Google say that they'll refund hardware, game and add-on purchases made through the Google and Stadia stores, and that players will continue to have access to their games library until January 18th.
]]>The latest weekly giveaway on the Epic Games Store is a nice one, with Cities: Skylines free for keepsies if you grab it by next Thursday. First released in 2015, it's a city-building game that's quite nice to play around with, putting your utopian visions and public transport dreams into practice or simply seeing if you can do better than your local planners (council? more like clowncil, eh? right? eh? that's them told).
]]>Silly tower defense series sequel Orcs Must Die! 3 launched last summer on Stadia but it's now broken into a bunch of other platforms. It's hitting Steam today with all the post-launch upates that have been made to the game over the last year. Robot Entertainment show off all their Orc flinging traps, co-op, and flashy magical battles in their new launch trailer.
]]>Back in March, Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond started up Haven Studios, an independent Canadian developer with plans to make a new PlayStation game. She had previously been the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, but left after Google started shutting down its development studios earlier this year. Now it seems Raymond has tempted some other Google alums over for her new project, who also all happen to be former Ubisoft developers too.
]]>Earlier this month, developer Andrew Spinks said that he was cancelling Terraria's release on Google Stadia because his Google account had been deactivated with no stated reason, and he'd been unable to recover it for weeks. "I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little," he tweeted, concluding that "Doing business with [Google] is a liability."
Now it seems that the issue has been resolved, and Terraria is again on route to Google's beleaguered cloud gaming platform.
]]>Update: Google have now issued an update that should resolve a major bug affecting Journey To The Savage Planet. More below.
Journey To The Savage Planet landed on Google Stadia last month, but unfortunately it arrived with a game-breaking bug that makes it unplayable. It's a pretty serious issue that you'd think the developers would be working on ASAP. However, Google are in the process of moving those developers to new roles within the company after shutting down their studios earlier this month, and now nobody seems to know who's supposed to be working on a fix.
]]>The CEO of Terraria developers ReLogic says they're binning the planned Stadia release, after Google disabled his account without explanation and he's been unable to get it back. Andrew Spinks is sick of 'em, and publicly said "I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little." Goodness me.
]]>Google have announced today that they are shutting down both of their Google Stadia game studios. They will focus on Stadia as a tech platform and making partnerships with third party studios to expand the service's library of available games.
]]>I don’t think I’ll write anything more peak games than this, but Immortals Fenyx Rising’s demo, which was exclusive to cloud gaming service Google Stadia, can now be downloaded properly on PC. If your internet wasn’t up to the task of turning Google’s streaming service’s bits and bytes into a coherent Greek romp, you can now grab it without worrying about your connect-
]]>Cyberpunk 2077 has finally arrived, but as several members of the RPS Treehouse have been finding out today, some of our creaking PCs just aren't up to playing CD Projekt Red's latest particularly smoothly. It's the kind of game that might make you consider playing it through the cloud instead (especially while we wait for new hardware prices to calm down a bit), so how about this for a silver lining? If you buy Cyberpunk 2077 on Google Stadia before December 18th, then Google will give you a Stadia Premiere Edition absolutely free.
]]>Everyone just wants to be involved with cloud gaming at the moment, don't they? Ubisoft have announced they're rebranding their UPlay+ subscription service to Ubisoft+, and they're whacking it on Amazon Luna on November 10th, then Google Stadia later in the year.
For PC folks the service isn't changing much from what you might've been used to with UPlay+. It costs £13/$15, you'll have access to a library of loads of Ubi games, and be able to play upcoming new stuff like Watch Dogs: Legion, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising.
]]>Google have now made their cloud gaming service, Stadia, completely free to anyone who has a Gmail account. That means you no longer have to buy their pricey Premiere Edition to get started, all you have to do is sign up online.
On top of that, to help keep people entertained in isolation they've made their premium subscription service, Stadia Pro, free for two months. It's basically a free trial that gives you full access to nine games, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
]]>Google Stadia might still be struggling to find its place in people's living rooms. But for one studio's home offices, it's becoming an invaluable piece of tech. After Covid-19 hit their home state of Washington pretty hard, Destiny 2 developers Bungie have explained the beefy laptops and cloud streaming workarounds that aim to keep Guardians fighting while working from home.
]]>When Google Stadia was first announced at GDC last year, id boss Marty Stratton promised that Doom Eternal would run at "true 4K" when it launched on the search giant's cloud streaming service. However, according to id's updated specs for the game, this is no longer going to be the case. Instead, the Stadia version of Doom Eternal will now run at 1800p when played on a 4K display (that's 3200x1800), with some sneaky up-sampling pushing it the rest of the way to proper 4K (3840x2160). The news will no doubt come as a blow for die-hard Stadia fans, but when you take a closer look at id's official 4K PC requirements for Doom Eternal, it's actually not entirely surprising.
]]>If there's been one constant in Google Stadia's time on Earth, it's a notion that it's not really delivered the games. If I were Google, kicking about with more money than God and wondering how to pack more games onto my streaming platform's catalogue, I would simply develop my own. To that end, Google are setting up a new studio in Los Angeles, nabbing established local talent by putting long time God Of War studio head Shannon Studstill in charge of the development house.
]]>Google Stadia has had a bit of a rocky launch so far. The free version of Google's cloud gaming service still isn't available yet, and the number of games available to play on Stadia has been wanting to say the least. However, the tide might finally be turning for Stadia, as Google have just struck a new deal with UK phone and internet giant BT that will see customers get a free Stadia Premiere Edition (worth £120) when they take out one of BT's high speed internet packages.
]]>Oh, Google Stadia. I'd feel bad for the thing, if it wasn't an absolutely naff concept from a data-hungry megacorp. In the latest in a long line of launch blunders, some users are now reporting that playing games on the dang thing is burning up their Chromecast Ultras, running the plug-in devices hot enough to shut down during play. Finding and keeping a stable connection doesn't matter so much if the thing you're streaming on can't keep it cool under pressure.
]]>Football Manager 2020 came out today, and look. I'm not gonna pretend like I'm the best person to give you a point-by-point breakdown on why this soccer spreadsheet is better than the last. Sports Interactive have been putting these things out annually for years, improving the nitty-gritty of managing a team of fit football lads every 12 months. This year's edition is once again missing Mr Football Manager's faceless figure from the cover, in exchange for a game that wants to inject a bit more personality into your teams and players.
]]>Good news for Google Stadia fans this morning, as the number of launch games planned for the cloud gaming service has almost doubled overnight. Originally set to launch with just 12 games tomorrow, Google's Phil Harrison took to Twitter in the early hours of this morning to announce that Stadia's launch line-up would now total 22 games instead.
]]>There are just five days to go before Google Stadia launches on November 19th, but after answering a bunch of questions via a Reddit AMA yesterday, it would appear Google's cloud gaming platform will be launching without a number of key features. Chief among them is no streaming in 4K, HDR and 5.1 surround sound for those logging on via a PC, meaning the only way to make the most of what Stadia has to offer (which is the entire point of paying for a Stadia Pro subscription in the first place) is to hook one of Google's Chromecast Ultra devices up to a TV.
]]>The search wizards at Google have finally decreed the launch date for their new cloud gaming platform, Google Stadia. Arriving next month on November 19th, Stadia will begin its cloud gaming service at 9am PST, 5pm BST and 6pm CET. Or at least it will if you ordered one of Google's Stadia Founder's Edition bundles, as the regular 'Base' edition of Stadia (the one that doesn't involve signing up for a subscription) still isn't set to arrive until sometime next year. So what will you actually be able to do on November 19th? Read on for more details.
]]>Sports Interactive today announced their next annual Football Manager sequel, though they don't have much to say about it. What they do say is that as well as Windows and Mac, this year's kickabout management sim will launch on Stadia, Google's cloud gaming platform. SI make the unusual claim that all those processors Google have hanging from balloons in their clouds will actually make FM2020 quicker on Stadia than other platforms. Huh. But imagine having the cash to run thousands of kettles generating clouds yet not the cash to rehire Manager Man as the official chin, torso, and clenched fist of the box art. Shameful.
]]>Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you'll be playing in the "scary" cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.
To help keep track of them all, here's a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you'll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.
]]>Given that Google have a long history of shutting down their own products, platforms, and sites (I mourn Google Reader to this day), it's mighty hard for me to trust their upcoming cloud gaming platform, Google Stadia. I've been sceptical of cloud gaming, not just because I already have a gaming PC, and the idea of paying Google in particular for a game that's only useful as long as they're interested in keeping the platform going is... no thank you. I'm doubly discouraged after seeing Google's Stadia product director, Andrey Doronichev, recently make a real half-arsed attempt to deflect concerns about a hypothetical shutdown.
]]>Yesterday, Google's Phil Harrison teased that publisher subscriptions were coming to Stadia "in relatively short order", and he really wasn't kidding. Tonight, Ubisoft announced Uplay+, a $15 / 15€ per month subscription service that's coming to both PC this September and Stadia in 2020 - although if you sign up before August 15, you can try it for free for its first month.
]]>Google may have already done their big Stadia games and price reveal earlier this week, but Stadia top man Phil Harrison has just let slip another interesting nugget of info regarding Stadia's subscription structure. Speaking to Geoff Keighley during YouTube's E3 Live show this evening, Harrison said we'll also be seeing publisher-specific subscriptions making their way to the service in addition to their already-announced Stadia Pro subscription.
]]>Change is scary, I know, but now that the dust has started to settle on yesterday's big Google Stadia price and games reveal, I thought I'd take a bit of time to reflect, consolidate and put everything we currently know about Stadia into one, handy guide, answering all your biggest Stadia questions with the best information that's available to me. Here, I'll tell you exactly what you need to know about Google Stadia, whether the Founders Edition is really worth buying, who it's for, what kind of internet you need for it, how much it all costs, and whether it's the end of PC gaming as we know it. Spoilers: it's not.
]]>(Now updated with extra pricing clarification) There were a lot of things left unsaid during Google's Stadia announcement three months ago, but finally the search giant has given us some answers in today's Stadia Connect conference, confirming how much Stadia's going to cost, when we can get our hands on it and exactly what games we're going to be playing on it. So, err... Baldur's Gate 3, anyone?
]]>Eager to get ahead of the E3 news rush, Google announced last night that they'll be unveiling the price and games line-up for their upcoming Stadia cloud gaming service this Thursday on June 6 in a Nintendo Direct-like broadcast. Dubbed Stadia Connect, the livestream is due to take place at 9am PDT (that's 5pm in the UK), and promises to finally give us some details on how much this thing's going to cost (and hopefully answer whether it will be a subscription service or one-off costs per game), what games we'll be playing on it, and when we'll be able to get our hands on it. Here's a teaser trailer to whet your appetite.
]]>Google have finally lifted the lid on their cloud gaming platform, Google Stadia. Promising instant access to massive games including Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Doom Eternal simply by clicking a link in your Chrome browser, Google Stadia aims to make download times and hardware upgrades (and apparently my job) a thing of the past when it launches later this year. Here's everything we know so far.
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