Comment: Google Stadia is drowning in a sea of ambiguity

Google Stadia launched with high hopes and big promises, but three years later, the service is full of more unknowns than actual games.

How many games are coming this year?

For its first two full years, Google Stadia made a promise to bring at least 100 new games to the platform per year. In 2020 and 2021, that’s a goal Google did meet. And at this point, there are nearly 300 games on Stadia.

But in 2022, that goal has been quietly pulled away. Earlier in the year, Google publicly committed to launching 100 new games on its platform, but it’s abundantly clear at this point that we won’t see that goal met.

In our weekly Stadia Changelog column, we track new games added to Stadia each week. So far this year, fewer than 50 games have been released, and there are fewer than 20 more confirmed to be in the pipeline right now. At this point, it seems like 75 to 80 new games will be coming at maximum, and 100 is almost completely out of the question unless there are at least several new releases each week through the end of the year.

And really, it’s obvious that even Google knows this. Months ago, the company quietly dropped the mention of bringing 100 titles to the platform from its various blog posts after including it just once or twice on both “This Week on Stadia” and in “Stadia Savepoint” series. Google was clearly also careful with the wording of “expected” to arrive.

These are just a few of the 100+ games expected to arrive on Stadia this year from publishers big and small.

Where are the big releases?

Another huge point of contention is the quality of games being released on Stadia.

Indie titles are often excellent, can be incredibly fun, and are a great way to fill out your library on a budget. But these are rarely the games that draw a crowd.

So far this year, Google Stadia has had only a handful of new games that can be considered “major” releases. Rainbow Six Extraction, Saints Row, and the upcoming release of FIFA 23 are really all that come to mind for “major” releases so far in 2022. One of those is still yet to be released, and the other two have been critically panned. Meanwhile, the year’s biggest games such as Elden Ring, Spiderman: Remastered, Dying Light 2, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and Stray, as just a few examples, show absolutely no signs of coming to Stadia.

On top of that, Google gave up what have become some exciting games for 2022. The horror game The Quarry released over the summer to great reviews and was originally supposed to be a Stadia exclusive before the shut down of Stadia Games & Entertainment. Another game that was in talks to be exclusive, High on Life, is coming this December with virtually no chance of a Stadia release – but plenty of excitement from players over on Microsoft’s platform.

Big releases aren’t necessarily what make a platform great, but they are central to getting players excited for a platform. And ultimately, they are what sells that platform. People will often buy an entire console for a single game. That includes previously loyal Stadia players who are now being forced to leave for other platforms in order to access major new games.

Keep in mind, too, that this is just talking about new franchises, and publishers that haven’t yet ported games to Stadia.

Where are the sequels?

Equally as crucial as the lack of new games on Stadia is the lack of sequels to existing games.

Stadia launched with big franchises such as NBA 2K, Borderlands, and Football Manager. And over the next couple of years, more arrived. EA brought Madden and FIFA to Stadia and also its hit Star Wars game, Jedi: Fallen Order.

In the time since, Take-Two has skipped Stadia for further NBA 2K releases, the Borderlands franchise doesn’t seem to be returning, Football Manager released only a single game on Stadia, EA skipped the latest Madden installment, and Jedi: Fallen Order’s sequel shows no signs of coming to the platform either. What’s the point of buying a game on Stadia if you’ll need to switch platforms for its sequel?

And now, as if to cement this point, even Ubisoft is skipping a major release on Stadia.

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is not a direct sequel to Valhalla, but it is the latest entry in the franchise that quite literally started Stadia. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was the game used as a test bed for the technology that became Stadia, and now just a few years later, the franchise is skipping the platform. Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is confirmed to skip Stadia.

That’s bad!

Where are the bug fixes?

Another thing that makes it incredibly frustrating to be a Stadia player in 2022 is the lack of attention that games actively on Stadia tend to get. You don’t have to look far to find a game that’s missing features, expansions, or riddled with bugs.

To be clear, bugs happen on all platforms, and they’ve become increasingly common in the gaming industry as a whole. But on Stadia, the problem is exacerbated.

Risk of Rain 2 has had broken multiplayer for weeks. Humankind was promised expansions months ago, and hasn’t seen anything delivered. Golf With Your Friends and Human Fall Flat are both missing all of the expansions that other platforms offer. World War Z was promised cross-play months ago, and it’s still not here. Games on Stadia can often be a shell of what they’re supposed to be or remain broken for weeks or even months with silence from developers. While that’s not a problem that Google can directly be blamed for, it is a problem that affects players constantly.

We’ve started tracking games with broken features or other problems in our weekly Stadia Changelog column, so if you’re a Stadia player seeing problems, get in touch!

What does the future hold?

Google Stadia was once an incredibly promising product. It did and continues to perform well, it made big promises, and while it stumbled on many occasions, it has remained a great place to play the games that it does actually offer.

But at this point, the only question about Stadia that really matters is “What’s next?” And that’s a question that’s slowly losing all of its optimism.

Stadia keeps losing anything and everything “good.” It launched with the power that consoles didn’t match and made that a whole lot cheaper to access. But three years later, it’s behind on features, despite somewhat holding on to its “next-gen” status. It signed on some big players in Take-Two, Ubisoft, and EA, but new games from those names are starting to fade away bit by bit. And Stadia’s promises of big, platform-exclusive features have either been far under-used or have failed to materialize entirely.

Will Stadia die off? Honestly, it’s still hard to say. There’s certainly no product set to replace Stadia, making a firm shutdown especially devastating for players, as well as being out of Google’s usual pattern – it’s really not normal for Google to “kill” products unless there’s some form of replacement, despite what the meme says. As our Kyle Bradshaw has pointed out, Immersive Stream for Games definitely gives Stadia more potential going forward, but really, we don’t even know what’s next for that product either.

The future for Stadia is murky, to say the least.

More on Stadia:

• Assassin’s Creed Mirage will not be coming to Stadia, Ubisoft confirms
• Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach adds ‘Crowd Choice’ audience feedback on Stadia
• Cyberpunk 2077 DLC ‘Phantom Liberty’ is coming to Stadia, but not last-gen consoles

Update: This post was edited after publication to correct a possible error regarding Google’s promise of 100+ games in 2022. While we’re reasonably confident that Google may have removed some mentions of this statistic, it is still in place in multiple blog posts. The erroneous mention has been removed of our own accord.