Stadia

Stadia moves to bi-weekly news cadence, adds exclusive features to Doom Eternal and Serious Sam 4

Kyle Bradshaw | Oct 26 2021 - 10:00 am PT

Google is shifting “This Week on Stadia” to a slower release cadence, while also adding some Stadia-exclusive features to Doom Eternal and Serious Sam 4.

For well over a year now, Google has fairly regularly offered a recap of what’s new and happening on Stadia each week, with “This Week on Stadia” every Tuesday. Some weeks have offered massive surprises like new game announcements or new features for the platform, while other weeks have basically only been a recap of in-game events and Stadia store discounts, with little in the way of substance.

To try and offer more meaningful updates, Google is shifting their “This Week on Stadia” news posts to a bi-weekly schedule, according to a post on the Stadia subreddit. Meanwhile, to ensure Stadia players don’t feel left out on the off-weeks, Google is going to focus on community engagement. It remains to be seen what form this engagement will take, but we’ll certainly find out next week.

The shift in the news schedule comes at a tumultuous time for Stadia as a platform, with many in the community expressing frustration about Stadia’s present and future. Things have especially come to a head now that Stadia’s technology has begun to be adopted by other companies like AT&T in a way that has not yet benefited players of the core Stadia platform.

Meanwhile, Google is continuing to push the things that can only be done on Stadia, with a recap of all of Stadia’s exclusive in-game features — like State Share, Stream Connect, and Crowd Play — and where to find them. These features are now available in over 20 games on the Stadia store, thanks to the addition of State Share to Doom Eternal and Crowd Play to Serious Sam 4.

In working with Bethesda Game Studios, Doom Eternal’s new Horde Mode has been enhanced with Stadia’s State Share. It works similarly to Hitman’s usage of State Share, in that players are able to share particular loadouts in order to challenge friends to beat a particular score. Bethesda themselves even offered their own State Share link to challenge players.

Serious Sam 4, on the other hand, has already had a Stadia exclusive feature, launching with State Share from day one, as it was developed with the now-defunct Stadia Games and Entertainment. As of today, Serious Sam 4 has gained Crowd Play, which gives streamers a way to let viewers join their sessions and play side by side with their favorite content creators.

To help make these Stadia exclusive features, new and old, more apparent to players, Stadia has revamped their store today. As spotted by GemBearGaming, the Stadia store now has a dedicated page for games with exclusive features, which lists each of the features and shows what games include them.

It’s undoubtedly exciting to see developers continue to work with Google on introducing exclusive features to games, at times making Stadia the best place to play a particular title.