Google is promising to release more than 10 timed-exclusive games for Stadia, the company’s beleaguered cloud gaming service, by July of this year. There is only one timed exclusive on Stadia at the time of this writing, and that is Tequila Works’ Gylt, which Screen Rant didn’t think very highly of.
Prior to the launch of the service, Google spent months hyping up Stadia with claims of superior multiplayer and downplaying any concerns that consumers and journalists had. Once it released, the Stadia Founder’s Edition sold out everywhere, but that momentum didn’t last long. All of its undeniable issues with latency, data use, overheating and more meant that Stadia quickly started to lose even its biggest supporters. Since then, Google has tried to pick up some of the slack by buying out more third-party developers to make games for Stadia, including Journey to the Savage Planet developer Typhoon Studios. It seems Google has been putting those developers to work; the company has now told the press that it has quite a few games coming to Stadia in 2020.
Eurogamer reports that Google has just promised over 10 timed exclusive games coming to Stadia by July. However, the company did not actually name the games or give any other details about them. Google went on to say there are more than 120 titles arriving on its game streaming service in 2020, and that the company is “working with our partners to share more on those games soon.” If all this is true, then it would contrast reports that Stadia’s 2020 lineup is comparatively barren.
Google has also said that a number of features and updates will be added to Stadia within the next three months. Perhaps the biggest one is 4K gaming over the internet, but there will be other improvements made as well. Further assistant functionality when playing on the internet, support for additional Android phones, and wireless gameplay online through the Stadia controller are all listed. A free version of Stadia will also be made available at some point in 2020.
Google Stadia is still a fairly new product, and it has a lot of room to grow as a service. It sounds like Google is planning to do most of that growth in 2020. Still, the company has a lot of ground to make up if it wants Stadia to become appealing to a substantial audience since its numbers are just continuing to go down at present. It may take even more than that if Google wants to regain the faith of some of its early adopters, who were lured in by Stadia’s grand promises and almost immediately got burned.
