Google is turning off its Stadia cloud game streaming service on January 18th, 2023, but it’s giving the wireless Stadia controller a second chance as a Bluetooth controller that can be connected to PCs, Macs, phones, and presumably other devices, too. The change won’t happen automatically; it’s a manual process that can’t be reversed. What’s more, you only have until December 31st, 2023, to do the switch to enable Bluetooth wireless. After that date, any unconverted Stadia controller will still work as a wired USB gamepad, but it’ll be locked out of playing games wirelessly.
I’m going to walk you through the process for converting your Stadia controller by using Google’s browser-based tool.
- Make sure your controller is charged above the 10 percent level. (It won’t let you proceed until it has enough charge.)
- Open Google’s Stadia controller update tool in Chrome or Microsoft Edge. (Signing in to your Google account isn’t necessary or even possible to complete this process.)
- Click the start button in the Switch to Bluetooth mode section. You’ll be prompted to agree to Google’s terms of service. (Agreeing is the only option that lets you proceed.)
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- Next, you’ll need to allow your browser to verify the controller. Click the Allow Chrome to verify button.
- This will cause a small drop-down window to appear in the top-left corner of your browser. Your Stadia controller should be visible. Choose the Connect option.
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At this point, the tool will show you a set of button commands that are necessary to press in order to allow the Wi-Fi to Bluetooth conversion to transpire. Here are the button prompts in order:
- First, unplug your controller. In the instructions, Google notes that if it turns on again, you should hold the Stadia button for four seconds to force it to shut down.
- Hold the options button (it looks like an ellipsis with three horizontal dots) while plugging in the controller. The instructions note that the status light underneath the main Stadia button should remain unlit and that you should try the process again if it turns on.
- Finally, press the same options button, plus the Google Assistant button (featuring four differently sized circles) just beneath it along with A and Y. That’s four buttons in total. (The instructions say there won’t be a rumble or any kind of controller feedback.)
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In order to install the update, you’ll have to once again select your controller, following a similar process from earlier.
- Hit Allow Chrome to download.
- Select Connect within the drop-down window in your browser. This time, it may be listed as SP Blank RT Family, Stadia Controller, or USB COMPOSITE DEVICE.
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Once again, the next step has you allowing the browser to install the update. Select the controller (it could go by any of the names listed in the previous step) for the final step that enables Bluetooth.
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To connect your Stadia controller wirelessly to devices over Bluetooth, hold the Y and Stadia buttons simultaneously for two seconds, and the status light will flash orange to indicate that it’s in pairing mode. Google notes that, once it’s paired to a device, it’ll auto-connect to the last paired device when turned on.
Correction January 17th, 4:42PM ET: A previous version of this article incorrectly mentioned that Stadia controllers that miss the December 31st, 2023 update window will be useless. However, they will still work as wired USB controllers.
Google Stadia celebrates shutdown with controller update, new game
Aurich Lawson / Getty Images
Google Stadia is scheduled for execution this week. The service dies on January 18, and while there will be tons of spurned developers and hours of lost game progress in its wake, the shutdown of Stadia is going about as smoothly as it can go. After refunding every game purchase made on the service, Google is now responding to calls to open up the service’s controller so that it can function as a generic Bluetooth device after Stadia dies. In a post on the Official Stadia forums, a community manager wrote on Friday: “Next week we’ll be releasing a self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller. We’ll share details next week on how to enable this feature.”
Having the controller live a second life is one of the last things people were asking for from Stadia’s shutdown. As a Stadia product, the controller took the unique approach of connecting directly to the Internet over Wi-Fi, rather than the usual route of connecting to whatever device you’re playing from and then to the Internet. Supposedly, this was a way to shave a few milliseconds off the lag inherent in game streaming. Nothing else in the world uses a Wi-Fi video game controller, so once the Stadia servers shut down, the controller was going to turn into e-waste. It was technically useable as a generic controller if you plugged it into a computer via USB, but nobody wants a wired controller anymore.
Google’s product listing was always upfront about the controller having a Bluetooth chip in it, though it noted that “no Bluetooth Classic functionality is enabled at this time.” All the parts are there to save the controller from the trash heap, and now Google is promising a firmware update to do just that.
In our Stadia review, Ars’ Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland called the controller “one of the highlights of the Stadia launch package,” saying it “boasts a solid, well-balanced weight; comfortable, clicky face buttons and analog sticks; quality ergonomic design on the d-pad and shoulder triggers; and strong, distinct rumble motors.” Stadia sales were far below expectations, and these controllers have been piling up in warehouses for years—all Stadia controllers show the date of manufacture on the back, and all known models were made in 2019 during the initial manufacturing run. The controllers were originally pulled from stores after the shutdown announcement, but now that they are getting a second lease on life, we’ll be looking for a fire sale.
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Stadia’s last game, Worm Game. Look at how blurry and ugly this looks.
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Oh… I just hit 600mb/s on a speed test, so I don’t think this is me, but whatever.
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Snaking around. The lag is awful.
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The menu text is another example of how blurry and ugly this looks. It doesn’t really go away ever.
Google announced not only that the controller would be getting an update, but also… a new game? Yes, on Friday, with about four days left to live, Stadia got a new game. It’s called Worm Game, and it was used as a test platform to develop Stadia. You can play it right now for free! Here’s how Google describes the game:
Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. Worm Game is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.
Worm Game is just a clone of the classic game Snake. It’s a top-down view of a snake that can move in four directions, you grow each time you eat an apple, and the goal is to not hit anything. Worm Game is actually a great reminder of why Stadia was such a bad service. I gave the game a shot, and it immediately told me my 600mb/s connection was “not stable.” The game was also blurry the entire time, like a low-resolution YouTube video. The lag inherent in game streaming makes a quick-reaction game like Snake feel awful, and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how early you have to press a button to execute a tight turn. This simple 2D game is probably only a few MB, and any device could install it in under a minute or run it directly in a browser with no install at all. Instead, streaming it over the Internet will use up gigabytes of data. Just compare Stadia’s Worm Game to the version embedded in Google Search, and the “native” search version is so much nicer.
As for a few other Stadia odds and ends: If you have any data on the service, some games let you move your game data to other platforms. 9to5Google has a great rundown on which games support data export. Phil Harrison, the former Microsoft and Sony executive who joined Google as “VP of Stadia” is still technically employed at Google. Unless Google has some other gaming project he could take on, you have to wonder what his future is at the company. Maybe we’ll see an announcement about that Wednesday.
Google Stadia Has Released One Final Game Ahead of Its Shutdown On January 18
Google Stadia is officially shutting down on January 18, and the team behind the video game streaming service has gifted the world Worm Game, the final title that will be released for the platform and one that was used to test many of Stadia’s features before it launched.
Worm Game can be played now by anyone with a Google Chrome browser, and it is very much inspired by the classic game Snake. It’s not the most advanced game graphically, but it does have multiple levels, the ability to change the color of your worm, and four modes – Campaign, Arcade, Multiplayer, and Build.
It’s also important to note that, if you’d like to try Worm Game, you need to do so by January 18 as it will become unplayable when Google Stadia is officially shut down.
It’s a rare glimpse behind the curtain of game development, and it is a fascinating look at how the team helped bring Stadia to life.
“Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world,” The Stadia Platform Content team wrote. “‘Worm Game’ is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”
Alongside Worm Game, the Stadia team has one other surprise in store for those who invested in the failed platform, as it will be releasing a “self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller” next week. We don’t have the exact details as to how it will work as of yet, but those will come “on release.”
Google Stadia launched in 2019 and is a cloud gaming service that allows users to stream video games, including such AAA titles as Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, to devices that have Google Chrome. It doesn’t matter how powerful the device is either, as everything is run on Google’s cloud service.
Google announced in September 2022 that Stadia would be shutting down in January 2023, but it made the generous gesture of refunding “all Stadia hardware purchases made though the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.”
While Stadia may not live to see another month, the tech behind it will live on as Google has already began offering it as a white-label product. This means other companies can use the technology without saying, “hey, this is run by Google Stadia!” AT&T has already taken advantage of this when it offered Batman: Arkham Knight to its users for free.
To learn much more about the rise and fall of Google Stadia, be sure to check out our in-depth look at what happened to a platform that Google promised would be the “future of gaming.”
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Google Stadia Has Released One Final Game Ahead of Its Shut Down On January 18
Google Stadia is officially shutting down on January 18, and the team behind the video game streaming service has gifted the world Worm Game, the final title that will be released for the platform and one that was used to test many of Stadia’s features before it launched.
Worm Game can be played now by anyone with a Google Chrome browser, and it is very much inspired by the classic game Snake. It’s not the most advanced game graphically, but it does have multiple levels, the ability to change the color of your worm, and four modes – Campaign, Arcade, Multiplayer, and Build.
It’s also important to note that, if you’d like to try Worm Game, you need to do so by January 18 as it will become unplayable when Google Stadia is officially shut down.
It’s a rare glimpse behind the curtain of game development, and it is a fascinating look at how the team helped bring Stadia to life.
“Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world,” The Stadia Platform Content team wrote. “‘Worm Game’ is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”
Alongside Worm Game, the Stadia team has one other surprise in store for those who invested in the failed platform, as it will be releasing a “self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller” next week. We don’t have the exact details as to how it will work as of yet, but those will come “on release.”
Google Stadia launched in 2019 and is a cloud gaming service that allows users to stream video games, including such AAA titles as Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, to devices that have Google Chrome. It doesn’t matter how powerful the device is either, as everything is run on Google’s cloud service.
Google announced in September 2022 that Stadia would be shutting down in January 2023, but it made the generous gesture of refunding “all Stadia hardware purchases made though the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.”
While Stadia may not live to see another month, the tech behind it will live on as Google has already began offering it as a white-label product. This means other companies can use the technology without saying, “hey, this is run by Google Stadia!” AT&T has already taken advantage of this when it offered Batman: Arkham Knight to its users for free.
To learn much more about the rise and fall of Google Stadia, be sure to check out our in-depth look at what happened to a platform that Google promised would be the “future of gaming.”
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Final Google Stadia Game, Released Today, Is A Piece Of History
If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia is shutting down and closing shop next week. But before the never-quite-successful game streaming service dies, it has provided one neat (and free) little gift you can only play for a few days before it all goes offline.
Launched back in 2019, Google Stadia was a costly and massive investment from Google into the world of video games. Powered by the cloud aka a bunch of servers and off-site computers, Stadia’s big promise was instantaneous gaming on the go. No more updates or expensive consoles. And while it sometimes worked, the high cost of games, lack of features, small library, and internet costs ended up dooming the service. Sure, some superfans logged thousands of hours into it, but for most, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game platform.
So it wasn’t surprising that in September of last year, Google announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so near, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Yet, Google has published one final game. But don’t expect some big open-world RPG or remake. Instead, the final Stadia game is Worm Game, an internally developed title used to test Stadia long before it became a public service.
We probably were never meant to see or play this Snake-like test game as it sports fairly rudimentary graphics and kinda ugly menus. But in the final days of Stadia, it appears the devs working on the project were able to provide its community one final treat. Even better, anyone can play Worm Game as it’s free. (Which makes sense considering the Stadia store stopped working already.)
The game’s store page features this nice and touching description of the game and what it was used for:
Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.
Is Worm Game some incredibly important or amazing thing? Not really. However, it’s still really cool to get a peek behind the scenes, and thanks to videos of Worm Game, this little piece of test software will be somewhat preserved for folks to look back at years from now.
In other cool End Of Stadia news, Google has confirmed that starting next week, it will start allowing players to unlock the Bluetooth functionally of its Stadia controller.
This is a nice way to make the controller—which has one of my favorite modern D-pads on it—more useful and easier to hook up to more devices. I doubt the devs who worked on Stadia for years were planning for the controller to be the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.
“So much screaming inside me“—Google Stadia shutdown stuns indie developers
Aurich Lawson / Getty Images
Source Byte Studios Chairman of the Board Nikodem Swider had just put in one final late-night bug-squashing session. After four long months of porting work, his small Polish studio was finally ready to submit a near-final build addressing all of the “must fix” errors Google had identified before the game Jump Challenge could finally launch on Stadia.
Then, scrolling through the news on his train ride home, Swider saw what he called a “horror message” on his phone. Stadia was closing down. All his porting work would be for naught.
“I [thought] it was some rumor… it cannot be true,” Swider said in a YouTube video in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown. “[Then] I saw [it was an] official statement about Stadia.”
“I start shaking a little bit,” Swider recalled. “We put so much effort, so much effort to make it done… But everything [is] gone, all work has gone.”
The blindside
Swider wasn’t the only Stadia developer blindsided by Google’s late September announcement that the streaming gaming service would be shutting down next January. Game makers who talked to Ars (and some who shared their surprise on social media), all said they had no indication of Google’s shutdown plans before the public announcement.
“During correspondence [with Google], we are exchanging emails—nothing showed us it could be the end of Stadia,” Swider said.
Source Byte’s Nikodem Swider shares thoughts on his experience working on an unshipped Stadia port.
Olde Sküül Games CEO Rebecca Heineman told Ars her team was still working on a planned Stadia port of casual color-matching game Luxor Evolved the morning of Google’s shutdown announcement. Heineman said she was preparing for a marketing meeting with her Google rep, scheduled for the next day, when an employee saw the news on Google’s official blog.
Heineman said she immediately reached out to her contact at Google to find out what was going on. “A couple of hours later, I got a response saying, ‘WTF?… Well, now I know what the all-hands meeting is going to be about,’” Heineman recalled. “That was a Stadia employee!… So even they didn’t know.”
“People talked about it shutting down since day one… I just hoped it wouldn’t happen before we could put the game out!”
Necrosoft Games’ Brandon Sheffield
Necrosoft Games Director Brandon Sheffield said he had been discussing Stadia Software Development Kit updates and marketing plans just days before Stadia’s shutdown killed the studio’s planned port of Hyper Gunsport. That said, Sheffield added that he always knew this outcome was a distinct possibility.
“I mean, people talked about it shutting down since day one,” Sheffield told Ars. “I knew it was a risk because Google is a big company, and if they’re not seeing big numbers, either of dollars or users or some other mystery number, they have a reputation for shutting stuff down. I just hoped it wouldn’t happen before we could put the game out!”
Google Stadia Will Shut Down in 2023, All Purchases to Be Refunded
Cloud gaming service Google Stadia will shut down on Jan. 18, the search giant said in blog post Thursday. Google will refund all Stadia hardware purchased through its Google Store, along with all games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store.
The tech giant aims to have all the refunds completed by mid-January.
People using Stadia will still to be able to access to their game libraries, including Pro games if you had an active Pro subscription as of Thursday. In an email sent to players, Google warned that publisher support for games may vary, and it’s possible that your gameplay experience may be affected during the shut-down period (suggesting that some games could vanish or lose features early).
It appears that Google didn’t tell many developers about the shut-down prior to the public blog post. Destiny 2 makers Bungie tweeted on Thursday about coming up with “a plan of action” in the wake of the announcement. Assassin’s Creed developer Ubisoft intends to allow players who’ve bought its games on Stadia to bring them to PC through its Ubisoft Connect digital distribution service, it said Friday.
While Stadia will shut down on January 18, 2023, we’re happy to share that we’re working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect. We’ll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.
— Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) September 30, 2022
Google talked to at least one studio (Luxor Evolved developer Olde Skuul) about reimbursement for lost revenue as a result of the abrupt change, Axios reported Friday.
Explaining the move, Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison noted Google’s investments in gaming through its Google Play digital distribution service, its cloud tech and YouTube streaming.
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” he said in the blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.”
Many employees on the Stadia team will be reassigned to other roles within Google, the blog post noted.
The cloud gaming service launched in November 2019, to a mixed reception.
“Stadia isn’t delivering new games [at the moment], it’s just trying to deliver a new way to play through streaming. One that you can already get from other providers,” CNET’s Scott Stein wrote at the time. “Until Google finds a way to loop in YouTube and develop truly unique competitive large-scale games, Stadia isn’t worth your time yet.”
Despite having some solid games in its library, Stadia failed to evolve. Google shuttered its in-house development studio in 2021, hinting that its gaming ambitions were shifting away from Stadia.
Stadia also had plenty of cloud gaming competition, with Xbox, PlayStation, Nvidia and Amazon all offering alternatives.
It hasn’t been a total bust for the company, with Harrison saying the tech can be applied to YouTube, Google Play and its augmented reality projects.
That tech will also be made available to Google’s industry partners. Sony gave its own streaming service a headstart in 2015 by buying the patents of OnLive — an early game streaming service — shortly before the once-promising startup shut down.
Google Stadia Will Shut Down Next Year, All Purchases to Be Refunded
Cloud gaming service Google Stadia will shut down on Jan. 18, the search giant said in blog post Thursday. Google will refund all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store, along with all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store.
The company aims to have all the refunds completed by mid-January.
People using Stadia will still to be able to access to their game libraries, including Pro games if you had an active Pro subscription as of Thursday. In an email sent to players, Google warned that publisher support for games may vary, and it’s possible that your gameplay experience may be affected during the shut-down period (suggesting that some games could vanish or lose features early).
It appears that Google didn’t tell many developers about the shut-down prior to the public blog post. Destiny 2 makers Bungie tweeted on Thursday about coming up with “a plan of action” in the wake of the announcement. Assassin’s Creed developer Ubisoft intends to allow players who’ve bought its games on Stadia to bring them to PC through its Ubisoft Connect digital distribution service, it said Friday.
While Stadia will shut down on January 18, 2023, we’re happy to share that we’re working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect. We’ll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.
— Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) September 30, 2022
Google talked to at least one studio (Luxor Evolved developer Olde Skuul) about reimbursement for lost revenue as a result of the abrupt change, Axios reported Friday.
Explaining the move, Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison noted Google’s investments in gaming through its Google Play digital distribution service, its cloud tech and YouTube streaming.
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” he said in the blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.”
Many employees on the Stadia team will be reassigned to other roles within Google, the blog post noted.
The cloud gaming service launched in November 2019 to a mixed reception.
“Stadia isn’t delivering new games [at the moment], it’s just trying to deliver a new way to play through streaming. One that you can already get from other providers,” CNET’s Scott Stein wrote at the time. “Until Google finds a way to loop in YouTube and develop truly unique competitive large-scale games, Stadia isn’t worth your time yet.”
Despite having some solid games in its library, Stadia failed to evolve. Google shuttered its in-house development studio in 2021, hinting that its gaming ambitions were shifting away from Stadia.
Stadia also had plenty of cloud gaming competition, with Xbox, PlayStation, Nvidia and Amazon all offering alternatives.
It hasn’t been a total bust for the company, with Harrison saying the tech can be applied to YouTube, Google Play and its augmented reality projects.
That tech will also be made available to Google’s industry partners. Sony gave its own streaming service a headstart in 2015 by buying the patents of OnLive — an early game streaming service — shortly before the once-promising startup shut down.
Stadia canceled exclusive Death Stranding follow-up from Kojima
Before Google closed down the division in 2021, Stadia Games and Entertainment turned down the opportunity to have an exclusive follow-up to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.
When Stadia was first announced in 2019, Google did so with aplomb, showcasing a grand vision for what cloud streaming technology could enable, with ideas like Stream Connect to instantly view your teammates’ gameplay. Rather than relying on third-party companies to see the merits of these ideas, Google formed Stadia Games & Entertainment — headed up by industry veteran Jade Raymond — to create experiences that could only be possible on Stadia.
A little over a year into Stadia’s existence, however, with the service reportedly missing user targets by “hundreds of thousands,” Google began winding down the Stadia Games and Entertainment division. Before that shutdown, Google was working with quite a few well known developers in the gaming industry to craft Stadia exclusive titles.
Some companies like Harmonix had been publicly confirmed to be working on Stadia titles while names like Yu Suzuki and Hideo Kojima were reported after the fact. These efforts were presumed to result in second-party titles published by Stadia Games & Entertainment, as opposed to the in-house games being developed by Shannon Studstill’s team and Google’s Star Labs.
A source has told 9to5Google that the game Kojima was working on was meant to be a Stadia-exclusive follow-up to Death Stranding, a game which initially launched as a PlayStation exclusive in 2019. Where the original Death Stranding was an asynchronous multiplayer game — where actions taken in your world can have an effect on other players, such as building signs to help others find their way — the proposed game would be strictly a single-player experience.
In fact, our source says it was that single-player nature of the game that led Google to cancel Stadia’s collaboration with Kojima, with the company believing there was no longer a market for solo experiences. Reportedly, the game had gotten initial approval from Google and had begun the early stages of development. However, shortly after the first mockups were shown in mid 2020, Google scrapped the project entirely.
Previous reporting on Kojima Productions’ intended Stadia efforts claimed it would be an “episodic horror game,” and that Kojima himself excited to work with the potential of the cloud. Ultimately, it was said to be Stadia’s General Manager, Phil Harrison, who made the final call to cancel the Death Stranding follow-up.
Since that cancelation, with its more recent PC re-releases, Death Stranding has grown to be a well-regarded game with a full sequel now said to be in the works. Beyond that, the enduring popularity of games like God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Control shows that single-player games continue to be a core market, especially for platform exclusives.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s impossible to know whether an exclusive game from Hideo Kojima would have made the difference for Stadia’s future as a platform. According to Kojima’s own timeline, the original Death Stranding entered development in 2015 and didn’t launch until 2019. If the follow-up required a similar timescale, it wouldn’t have even seen release before Google pulled the plug on Stadia.
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Red Dead Redemption 2 fan with nearly 6,000 hours on Stadia begs Rockstar for character transfer
A Red Dead Redemption player with almost 6,000 hours logged on Google Stadia is begging Rockstar to allow character transfers after the news of the service’s closure.
YouTuber @ItsColourTV (opens in new tab) took to Twitter shortly after the news that Google Stadia is shutting down broke out yesterday. “No, you don’t understand how seriously pissed off I am,” the tweet read, alongside a screenshot that shows that they’ve put 5,907 hours into Red Dead Redemption on Google’s gaming service.
No you don’t understand how seriously pissed off I am pic.twitter.com/UZ157WLmruSeptember 29, 2022
“For context: these hours are on Google Stadia and today Google announced they’ll be shutting down the platform,” a follow-up tweet (opens in new tab) reads, “@RockstarGames please let us do a one-time character transfer I am begging you.” If you aren’t aware, once Google shuts down its Stadia service on January 18, 2023, ItsColourTV’s progress will all be erased from existence, meaning they’ll need to start a new save file on another platform – with all 5,907 hours (approximately 246 days) going to waste.
It seems that fellow Red Dead Redemption players felt sympathetic towards ItsColourTV, with many replying to the tweet with suggestions as to how to save this player’s save. One suggested (opens in new tab) that ItsColourTV use Google Takeout – a data downloading service – to transfer their file to PC, to which they replied: “I don’t play story mode.” Rockstar, if you’re reading this, do our guy a favor and let them transfer their character just this once.
If you’re also about to lose your Stadia save data, why not take a look at our games like Red Dead Redemption list for inspiration on what game to move on to.