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

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.

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.

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.