If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia closing and closing shop next week. But before the never-successful game streaming service ended, it provided a neat (and free) little giveaway that you could only play for a few days before going completely offline.
Launched in 2019, Google Stadia was a costly and massive investment by Google in the world of video games. Powered by the cloud, a set of servers and offsite computers, Stadia’s big promise was instant gaming on the go. No more updates or expensive consoles. And although it works sometimesThe high cost of games, lack of features, small library and internet costs ruined the service. Make sure, some superfans logged thousands of hours into itbut for many, that wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game platform.
So, in September of last year, Google announces the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so close, it seemed highly unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Still, Google released a final game. But don’t expect a massive open world RPG or remake. Instead, the last Stadia game Worm GameAn internally developed title used for testing long before Stadia became a public service.
We were probably never meant to see or play this Snake-like test game, as it has rather primitive graphics and somewhat ugly menus. But in the final days of Stadia, it looks like the developers working on the project were able to give their community one last treat. Even better, anyone can play Worm Game because it’s free. (This makes sense considering Stadia store has already stopped working.)
The game’s store page includes this nice and touching explanation of the game and what it’s used for:
Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia was born. “Worm Game” is a humble game that we’ve been using to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our general launch in 2019 and through to 2022. It won’t win the Game of the Year award, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it. , and we thought of sharing it with you. Thanks for playing and for everything.
dir-dir Worm Game something incredibly important or surprising? Not really. However, it’s still great to get a behind-the-scenes look, and thanks to the videos Worm Gamethis little piece of test software will somehow be preserved for people to look back on years from now.
In other great End of Stadia news, Google will let players know starting next week. Functionally unlock Bluetooth on Stadia controller.
This is a nice way to make the controller with one of my favorite modern D-pads on it more useful and easier to connect to more devices. I doubt the developers who worked on Stadia for years planned to have the controller as the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.
