The games at risk now Stadia is shutting down

With the news of Google shutting down Stadia comes a major question: what games might we lose?

There weren’t many exclusive games available on the streaming service, but with game preservation continuing to be a hot topic, there are a number of games at risk unless they’re ported to other platforms.

Yesterday Google announced the end of Stadia, its cloud-based streaming service. Despite ambitions of creating exclusive games, in 2021 its internal studios were closed leaving third-party developers to provide the games.

Here are the games now at risk as Stadia shuts down.

PixelJunk Raiders

This is an addition to the renowned PixelJunk series released exclusively for Stadia and makes use of a feature to jump into the game via the screenshots of other players. We described it as “a colourful roguelike that falls disappointingly flat” in our PixelJunk Raiders review.

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle

There are plenty of other versions of Pac-Man around, but this Stadia game was a battle royale take on the classic for up to 64 players, with maze invasions and fun power ups. It followed Super Bomberman R as another battle royale exclusive that was later ported to PC and consoles.

Hello Engineer

Like PixelJunk Raiders, Hello Engineer is a new spin on an existing universe – that of stealth game Hello Neighbor. Here, instead, players construct their own racing machines. The game was used to test time-limited demos.

Outcasters

A top-down party battle game from Splash Damage, Outcasters never quite made it as the next Fall Guys. It was meant to be accessible and quickfire, but struggled to find a wide enough audience.

GYLT

From Tequila Works, the studio behind The Sexy Brutale, GYLT is a third-person horror shooter featuring a young girl and some intriguingly creative combat. We described it as a “genuinely unsettling lite horror” in our GYLT review.

Earlier today, we reported on Cyberpunk 2077 fans who are trying to get their cloud saves transferred for use elsewhere. Others are now asking for the Stadia controller to be updated for wider use.

Stadia developers still working on projects have also been expressing their shock at the news – which they were not told about ahead of time.