Ubisoft, Bungie Scrambling To Evacuate Players’ Games And Characters From A Capsizing Google Stadia

Games Ubisoft, Bungie Scrambling To Evacuate Players’ Games And Characters From A Capsizing Google Stadia Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Oct 2, 2022, 09:52am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Destiny 2 Bungie When it was announced that Google Stadia would be shutting down early next year, it wasn’t just a surprise to players. It had also not been shared with longtime Stadia partners, big devs like Ubisoft and Bungie, and a raft of indie developers, some of whom were literally on the verge of releasing a game on Stadia within days. But Google didn’t even tell their own Stadia team until the day it was announced, so really, no one knew at all.

Having zero notice of this has created a lot of different problems across the board. In Ubisoft’s case, the company has made a point of bringing a large collection of its games to Stadia. And while Google is refunding players for their Stadia game purchases ahead of the shutdown, Ubisoft does not want to suddenly lose all those existing players.

So, in Ubisoft’s case, they have announced they are going to figure out some way to transfer the Stadia licenses into getting players a PC copy of the game instead, meaning they can keep playing and still own the title even after Stadia shuts down: But there is no exact plan or process yet, because Ubisoft is having to figure all this out on the fly with no actual time to plan ahead of this announcement. Something somewhat similar is going on with Bungie, a complicated case, given that they both heavily supported Stadia at launch with Destiny 2 being effectively its flagship game, and they also use Stadia internally to test the game as its studio has dramatically increased its development from home. MORE FOR YOU ‘Demon Slayer’ Season 2 Finally Has An Actual 2021 Release Date Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Not A Sure Thing, Says Director ‘Genshin Impact’ Still Refuses To Increase Anniversary Rewards, Despite Fan Outcry Stadia Google But in the case of the game’s existence on Stadia, questions are raised about what happens if you say, were a Stadia-only player, and that’s the only place your Guardian exists.

Even if Destiny does have crossplay, if you have not activated that, you presumably would not be able to just hop on a new platform after the shutdown and retain access to your character. So this will require some sort of action on Bungie’s end to round up all Stadia-centric Guardians and make sure they’re not lost in the shuffle. 5,000 players are still playing Destiny 2 on Stadia daily.

A tiny fraction of the whole, but still a portion of the playerbase Bungie doesn’t want to see fall through the cracks. “We just learned about Stadia shutting down and have begun conversations about next steps for our players,” said Bungie in a blog post that went up almost instantly after the Stadia shutdown announcement. “We will announce and send out information regarding Destiny 2 Stadia accounts once we have a plan of action.

” Again, with no warning, they aren’t able to announce actual next steps because they don’t even know them yet. Turns out when you shut down an entire gaming ecosystem, that yields some problems, even if you think you’re taking proactive steps like refunding call customers all their purchases. On the developer side, this has been an utter mess, and hopefully things can be resolved by shutdown this coming January.

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