destiny 2
When news broke that Google Stadia would be discontinued early next year, it wasn’t just a surprise for gamers. It also wasn’t shared with long-time Stadia partners, big developers like Ubisoft and Bungie, and a number of indie developers, some of whom were literally on the verge of releasing a game on Stadia within days. But Google didn’t even say it their own Stadia team Until the day it was announced, nobody really knew.
Not taking notice of this has created many different problems across the board. In the case of Ubisoft, 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 before the shutdown, Ubisoft doesn’t want to suddenly lose all those existing players.
So in the case of Ubisoft, they have announced that they will find a way to transfer the Stadia licenses to players receiving a PC copy of the game instead, meaning they will continue playing and enjoying the title even after shutting down Stadia can own:
But there is none I agree plan or process as Ubisoft needs to figure all of this out on the fly with no real time to plan this announcement ahead of time.
Something similar is happening with Bungie, a complicated case as both heavily supported Stadia at launch, with Destiny 2 practically being its flagship game, and they also use Stadia internally to test the game as its studio has dramatically ramped up its development Hometown.
stages
But in the case of the game’s existence on Stadia, questions are raised about what happens when you say you’re a pure Stadia player, and that’s the only place your Guardian exists. Even if Destiny has crossplay, if you didn’t have that enabled, you probably wouldn’t be able to just hop to a new platform and retain access to your character after shutting down. So this requires some sort of action on Bungie’s part to round up all the Stadia-centric Guardians and make sure they don’t get lost in the mix. 5,000 players are still playing Destiny 2 on Stadia every day. A tiny fraction of the whole, but still a part of the player base that Bungie doesn’t want to see fall through the cracks.
“We just found out about the closure of Stadia and have started discussions about the next steps for our players,” Bungie said in one blog entry that went up almost immediately after the Stadia shutdown announcement. “We will be announcing and sending information about Destiny 2 Stadia accounts once we have a plan of action.”
Again, without warning, they are unable to announce actual next steps because they don’t even know them yet. Turns out, even if you think you’re taking proactive steps, like shutting down an entire gaming ecosystem, it does lead to some issues. B. Reimbursement of all call customer purchases. On the developer side this has been a total mess and hopefully next January’s shutdown can resolve things.
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