Risk of Rain 2 experiencing major performance and multiplayer issues on Google Stadia

Ben Schoon | Sep 7 2022 - 12:30 pm PT

Risk of Rain 2 is one of our favorite games on Google Stadia, but it’s been broken for the past few weeks. Here’s what’s going on.

The Stadia port of Risk of Rain 2 first debuted in 2020 with an exclusive level and, over time, has been one of the better-supported versions of the game. Earlier this year, it picked up the “Survivors of the Void” expansion just a little while after PC. That expansion still has yet to land on consoles and is scheduled for release on Xbox and PlayStation in Q4 2022.

But for the past few weeks, Risk of Rain 2 players on Stadia have encountered many issues with the game, ranging from performance to multiplayer problems.

The most significant problem seems to be with multiplayer support. Players have found that the game simply shows a blank screen when hosting a lobby or freezes on start without the ability to change your character or loadout. In a quick test, Kyle Bradshaw and I were able to replicate this issue quickly, though we were eventually able to start a round.

A Reddit thread earlier this week first brought the issue to our attention, but it appears the problem has been around since at least mid-August.

Beyond just multiplayer issues, Risk of Rain 2 on Stadia appears to be having some serious performance issues as well. We’ve noticed in our testing that the game takes almost a full minute to load at launch (after Stadia opens the game, waiting for the menu to appear), and menu freezes seem to be common as well.

As far as we can tell, Gearbox Publishing/Hoppo Games have not acknowledged these errors.

We reached out to Gearbox Publishing earlier this week regarding these Risk of Rain 2 issues on Stadia but received no response by the time of publishing.